“It’s working!” I shouted gleefully, gently swirling the test tube over the kitchen stove burner. The yellowish liquid was starting to bubble fiendishly. “Woah, what a stink!” said my sidekick, Westen, plugging his nostrils. “Just like the smell of rotten eggs,” said the manual to my new Gilbert Chemistry Set which I’d saved up seven dollars to buy from Jimmy Williams, my neighbor on Longfellow Avenue in south Minneapolis. “Put some sulfur in a test tube and some candle wax, gently heat over a flame and you get hydrogen sulfide.” Now my life had changed. As a seven-year-old boy, small for his age, I suddenly had POWER (and a career in chemistry).
My mother stormed into the kitchen and shrieked, “What is that god-awful smell?” “It’s hydrogen sulfide,” I said proudly. She was not impressed. “I’ve got people coming over in an hour, and you better get rid of that stench right away.” We opened all the doors and windows, and brought in a fan. But it took weeks to get that smell out of our kitchen — quite a conversation piece I’d created. I soon made gunpowder and all the other interesting things you could do with a children’s chemistry set (augmented with a pint of concentrated sulfuric acid). My knowledge of chemistry made it an easy career choice later on.
The only time I saw my mother more hysterical was when she had to call the furnace repairman to take apart our furnace. It seems that one of my hamsters had escaped, crawled down a heating duct, and was heard in the basement scratching around inside the furnace. Another of my get rich quick schemes was unraveling. “Make money raising Hamsters. Start with one pair and soon you’ll be selling dozens for medical research,” was the sales pitch I’d heard somewhere. With litters of 8 or 10 babies and a gestation period of only 16 days, they weren’t kidding. I built my own cages from orange crates cast off behind the local grocery store, and pretty soon I couldn’t build the cages fast enough. Nor did I realize that hamsters need to chew on something just to keep their teeth sharp, and they went through my orange crates like a hot knife through butter.
Getting started as a hamster breeder was not easy. I bought a pair from a pet shop for 50 cents apiece, with separate cages for the male and female. From the public library I borrowed a book on how to raise hamsters. It said to put the male and female together when they are in heat. So I put them into the same cage and placed them atop a radiator and got ready to watch the action. All they did was fight. My mother fell apart laughing (as does the whole family even today).
When I figured out that “in heat” refers to the female sticking her little butt in the air and wiggling it around enticingly, the breeding and the problems began in earnest. Within a couple months, the house was lousy with escaped hamsters — upstairs, downstairs, and in the basement — they were dripping from the rafters. One had moved into a downstairs freezer and got killed when the fan came on. I tried to sell them, but nobody was buying. I think I gave them all away.
Then I took up stamp collecting. This idea came from my second cousin Mary Alleman from Luck, WI. I bought an album that covered the entire world and subscribed to a newspaper called Western Stamp Collector. I was told that stamps increased in value with each passing year. When new stamps were announced, I sent in for First Day Covers. Not having much money, I sent in for collections of hundreds of more or less worthless stamps still attached to the paper ripped out of the envelope. I soaked off the paper, bought a few stamps, and carefully mounted them in the album with delicate hinges. I started a stamp club using my most pliable friends, Westen, Butchie, and Jerry. As President I also arranged a tour of the gigantic Minneapolis Post Office. We all took the streetcar to the Great Northern train station and saw how the mail came in by rail and was sorted and delivered.
We planned to have regular meetings at various club members’ houses on a rotating basis. The main item on the agenda was to swap duplicates. The host was only expected to provide refreshments. However, the last meeting in Westen’s basement degenerated into a Coke fight, leaving a sticky residue on everything. Nobody ever volunteered to host another meeting, signaling the end of my stamp club. I read that today interest in stamp collecting is dying out.
I’m not sure why we were so fascinated by shaking Coke bottles with a thumb over the mouth of the bottle, pointing it at someone else, and letting it fly. A Coke fight which erupted in the hallway of Corcoran school out of boredom during a Boy Scout meeting also got me and other friends expelled from the Boy Scouts. We wanted to get out of the city and go camping, build a campfire, stay overnight in pup tents in some cow pasture, and cook bacon and eggs the next morning. That happened only once in about three years of attending meetings in the Corcoran school gym, where the unimaginative scout leaders taught us endless knots and encouraged us to play “jump the beanbag” on a long rope. We loved camping out, not the endless, pointless meetings. The fact that I didn’t have the money for a boy scout shirt may also have curtailed my sense of belonging.
Another hobby was photography. I got a camera shooting black and white rolls of film with adjustable shutter and aperture, and soon wanted to develop my own pictures. I built a wooden box with a light bulb inside for making contact prints with the negatives I developed. Working inside a dark closet was impractical, so I decided to build my own darkroom in a corner of the basement. I framed it from floor to ceiling with 2″ by 4″s, including a hinged door, then walled it in with thin plywood from discarded piano crates I dragged home from the alley behind the piano store. I got set up with a red lamp and three plastic trays holding developer, stop bath, and fixer. For several years thereafter I learned how to shoot good black-and-white pictures and to develop them myself. A friend of mine had a darkroom and an enlarger, and I was spellbound when he allowed me to watch the magic of “dodging” and “burning.” For me enlarging was the mandatory next step. A cheap enlarger cost $65, and there was no way my mom could afford it. Thus my passion for photography died a natural death.
To earn money I mowed lawns in the summer using an old-fashioned push-reel hand mower and shoveled snow off sidewalks in the winter. I delivered papers. I worked at a sewing machine store sweeping floors and cleaning up greasy old machines, and as a stock boy in a grocery store. The worst part of dividing potatoes into five pound bags was handling the smelly, rotten ones often found in the bottom of the 50 pound gunny sack (and criticized for being too slow). I caddied at the Luck Golf course where I made 35 cents for nine holes (and sometimes a 10 cent tip). I also worked on a farm baling hay one August. The hardest, hottest, dirtiest work I ever did was stringing the oily steel wires through a never-ending assembly line of slotted wooden blocks on the baler while being engulfed by sweat, straw dust, and engine exhaust. All my income and expenditures were carefully entered in a ledger book, and by the end of the summer when I was about 11 years old I had saved a total of $20. Before school started in September we went to Montgomery Wards and used my money to buy jeans, T-shirts, and tennis shoes. My mom, a child of the Great Depression, thought it was important for us to learn the value of money.
Over the years I always loved building model planes, cars, and boats. The affordable model planes came in a kit containing balsa wood sticks, tissue paper, plans, and a wheel or propeller, etc. You had to lay out the plans covered with wax paper on a piece of wallboard, stick common pins in the pieces to hold them while you used Duco cement to fasten them together. When assembled, you covered the wooden frame with tissue paper, glued it on, then tightened it up by painting with “airplane dope.” It took weeks to make one model plane. They were painted in true colors with many decals supplied with the kits. I especially remember the P-57 “Thunderbolt” fighter-bomber, the B-17 bomber, and the German Red Baron triplane. Some of them could fly ten or twenty feet powered by a propeller tied to a twisted rubber band. This usually ended in a plane crash. Kids with more money bought the model airplane kits consisting of two plastic halves that you could snap and/or glue together. Much quicker, more professional-looking, and more durable.
These activities plus reading library books were necessary for my survival in a loveless house where I stood in judgment as a “problem child.” Getting deeply involved in, obsessed with, highly focused on some kind of challenging project served me well in my career of academic research and continues to be my modus operandi out of habit even today, though now I bask in the love shared with my beautiful wife, Jilly.
In 1990 a movie came out called “Problem Child.” It is said to be a black comedy by director Dennis Dugan, and it starred John Ritter as the dad and Michael Oliver as the boy. The little boy had a fog-horn voice, and he was so lovably normal that I couldn’t stop laughing. I highly recommend this outrageously funny film.
What I know today as truth: “There are no problem children, only problem parents.”
Jim Sudmeier Luck, WI Feb. 10, 2020