Mom Married Often, She Said

    After a family dinner Aunt Eleanor's motto for washing dishes was, "Let's don't do it and say we did." Mom seemed to feel the same about getting married.

When I was a boy my mother and I lived under the same roofs. But we lived separate lives.

She worked nights. I attended school during the day. We met in passing on weekends. She had many friends.

     Three different schools was a relatively settled year. My mother had no roots to put down.

Puzzles remain after so many years. All those marriages, for instance. Did they actually take place? Legally, I mean? And one wonders, too, about the requisite divorces.

I do have direct knowledge of the first three marriages, at least.

Mom's third wedding

I know Mom married her purported third husband, Ray Upton, because I was present at the ceremony. That was in 1945. I was eight. The trip from Casper Air Force Base to Phoenix, where Mom had been living with Ray, was my first airplane ride.

C-47 interior 

(Skytrain Images, 2005)

In the C-47 a round rubber gasket was mounted dead center in a window on each side of the aircraft. Every boy at the time would recognise what the gasket was for. That’s where a machine gun could shoot at Japanese Zeros!

How Mom and I happened to be enduring the hard benches of an Air Force C-47 (where the paratroops sat!) is uncertain.

I vaguely remember feeling our presence on the plane seemed clandestine, that somehow we might get the pilot in trouble. My mother, it must be remembered, was young, beautiful, and free-spirited. She often received favors from men she hardly knew.

My next flight came only a few days after we arrived in Phoenix. Ray chartered a small twin-engined plane to fly us and a pair of friends to Las Vegas. He and Mom were married there by a justice of the peace.

Six months later my Mother and I were on our way back to Wyoming. I had turned nine; could swim, having spent the days of summer alone at the public pool; had experienced ethnicity, having lived in an impoverished area of the city; and had had a harmless but startling encounter with a pederast. 

     I also understood the concept of domestic violence. Before Ray came into our lives he had been fired from the Los Angeles Police Department for excessive brutality, not an easy standard to meet even in those days.

     We travelled by Greyhound on the return trip.

Jackson, 1940 

(Wyoming Tales and Trails)

The second wedding

Before Ray, Mom married Keith Ricks, nicknamed "Gandhi" because he was so skinny. The ceremony was conducted in Jackson Hole by Gandhi's cousin, bishop of the LDS Stake.

I remember that wedding as well, though I was barely four.

My earliest memories come from that time in Jackson, not as recalled events but as momentary images heightened by emotion and tactility—sort of half-second, touchy-feely GIFs.

For instance, I've stored away as separate but twinned memories the experience of looking curiously into an empty light socket in a barn loft and feeling my first electrical shock on the tip of a forefinger.

I also remember sitting with other children on porch steps, flooded with the contentment of inclusion. Someone's mother was leading us as we sang "You Are My Sunshine."

In some cases these direct memories come embedded in a context I must have learned afterward from things Mom and Gandhi said.

For instance, I remember an instant of high excitement, intense, goose bumpy cold, and the bang of a windup toy gun with sparks shooting out its barrel. Mom and Gandhi used to tell of going to the bar on Christmas eve and leaving me asleep. The fire in the wood stove burned out. When they got home I was shivering, barefoot in my pajamas, and shouting "Santa Claus came."

Thirty feet of snow in Teton Pass, April 12, 1936 

(Wyoming Tales and Trails)

I also remember the cold steel feel of a real pistol when I slid my hand under a pillow. A friend of Gandhi's babysat me one night. He had tucked me into his bed at the bunk house where he lived with other workmen.

What I glimpse from the day of Mom and Gandhi’s wedding is this: several other children and I were chasing each other on a lawn, driving ourselves wild with excitement. We were all dressed in better clothes than usual and, as we played, knew we would soon be called into the house by the adults. Something important was about to happen there.

The first wedding

So I can attest to Mom's second marriage (to Gandhi) as well as her third (to Ray). But was there a first marriage? Mom and Max Crowe, my father, probably did get married, although that's not certain.

If a ceremony occurred I wasn’t present of course, although my twin sisters would have been . . . in uterus. (Later they were stillborn.)

Max’s name does appear on my birth certificate, which, at that time in Wyoming, required presentation of proof of marriage. But presumably Dr. Ashbaugh, like many small town family physicians, knew it was best sometimes to dispense with formalities.

Certainly a wedding announcement appeared in the local paper. A newspaper clipping turned up decades later, after Grandma died, among some old family photos and documents.

It reported that Max and Rhoda, to the total surprise of family and friends, had sneaked off to Idaho and gotten married, secretly. The wedding was said to have occurred on a certain date a certain number of months earlier (carefully counted, we can assume).

Riverton was a small town. However, a few people might not yet have heard that Rhoda Parker had been knocked up by one of the Crowe boys. But everyone knew then, Grandma having announced the fact in the paper.

C. mid 1930s. My father Max Crowe, mother Rhoda, aunt Eleanor, 
and an unnamed boyfriend. Riverton's Masonic Building is in the background. 

(Family album)

I Helped Build the Teton Theater in 1939

My earliest memories include a strong tactile image of sitting, legs crossed, in the dust in shorts and sandals, holding a hammer, and looking at stones with an intense sense of purpose.

Teton Theater 

(Kathy Walker)

Mom and my stepfather Gandhi used to talk about a friend, a stone mason who had been brought in from Idaho to construct the Teton Theater. The building opened in 1940 and is still a feature of downtown Jackson today.

 Mom and Gandhi said they were drinking with the stone mason the night he turned away from the bar and walked out the back door to pee.

Later he was found dead in the alley a few yards from the building he was working on. He had passed out face down, fly open, and drowned in a puddle of rain water.

They also talked about how he used to hire me as his helper, paying me a penny to hammer rock fragments. They didn't know about the shorts though, nor the sandals and dust, nor about the concentration my work required.

Welcome sign, 1930's 

(Wyoming Tales and Trails)

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Looking for Dad in World War II