Chapter Fifteen - Adagio and Apache

Chapter Fifteen
Adagio and Apache

Memories don’t always come back in nice chronological order. I must first talk about the arrival of our sister, Ginger. In December of 1946 Ginger joined our family. I remember a few months before her birth that mom told Gary & I we were going to have a new brother or sister. Back then the only way you could tell ahead of time if the expected baby was going to be a boy or a girl was how a needle suspended on a thread would move over the pregnant mother’s abdomen. As I remember we were quite excited about having a new brother or sister and I must say she has never been a disappointment.

Let’s move back ahead to my junior year in high school. I believe that Ginger was about seven years old at the time. Mom wanted her to have ballet lessons, but there was no money for that. So, undaunted she made a deal with Dorothy Flory to give Ginger ballet lessons if I would dance exhibition for the Dorothy Flory Dance Studios. That of course meant that Dorothy would have to give me dance lessons as well for free. She paired me up with her best dancer Linda Larson who was a grade behind me in school. Linda was a great girl and I really enjoyed dancing with her. We did Adagio which was a kind of combination ballet with ballroom dancing including lifts. Fortunately Linda was a nice petite girl. We also did Apache which was more ballet with lifts but done in the costume and style of the Left Bank in Paris. Linda & I performed in several reviews for Dorothy Flory as well as appearing in shows at Topeka High School.

Another dancing experience I remember happened in my high school years also and brings to mind something Gladys Knight says in one of her CD albums about “dance parties in the basement with the blue lights". Several of our mothers arrange for a group of us teenagers to be given ballroom dance lessons in the basement of one of the mother’s home. It was a good experience and in those days as Gladys says “you danced with your partner – you didn’t have to go looking for her.” One of the songs that was popular to dance to was Rosemary Clooney’s “You Belong to Me”. She became George Clooney’s aunt.

Another thing that we would do for entertainment was to have parties on a sand bar in the middle of a small river or creek. It was the kind of activity you’d see in one of the old Annette Funicello and Frankie Avlon movies except they took place in Kansas and not at the beach in California. We went on hayrides too only as I remember they used a tractor to pull the hay wagon and not horses. I remember Gramps use to say that taking a girl home from a date in a horse drawn buggy was better than a car because you didn’t have to steer the buggy.

Another major activity I was involved in was being the editor of our Sr. Class yearbook. It was kind of a prediction book. All 500+ seniors were in the book with a little blurb on each and predicting what they would become. I basically had to coordinate all the research, writing, publishing, etc. It was an interesting challenge and I think we came up with a pretty good product. The “Sunflower” was our school yearbook and was a typical yearbook.

In my junior year I was involved with AFS, American Field Service. AFS would sponsor exchange students for a one school year program. Our exchange student for my junior year was Adele Berg from Norway. That was probably my first experience of knowing and having a friend from another country. The summer after her year with us a busload of exchange students from Norway came through Topeka and stayed over for a day or two. I believe AFS is still active and a great program.

I made a major decision during my senior year. I had been bitten by the drama bug and wanted to pursue a career in the movies but what could a young boy in Kansas do? I read a magazine article about a well known actor, Glenn Ford, who had attended the Pasadena Playhouse theatre school. I became convinced that was the route for me. But a major obstacle stood in my way – money. So, I decided I would go into the air force where after a four year hitch could get education money under the GI Bill of Rights. However, the government threw me a curve ball in the first part of 1955 the year I would graduate from THS. They were canceling the GI Bill of Rights. I would have to have enlisted before the school year was over to qualify for the existing bill. Well, I decided I needed to graduate and so, I enlisted in July after graduating hoping they would put the bill back in during my enlistment. They didn’t but I was able to save up the money during my enlistment period. Next chapter a slight chronological detour to Scouting before going on with my tour in the USAF.

Editor’s Note: In doing some research for this chapter I came across a photocopy of a little booklet on my relative William Carroll Means mentioned in “Chapter Eight – Gramps”, who was an itinerant preacher. I had stated that his circuit was in Kansas but I found out it was in southwest Iowa.