I grew up in a big house on a large lot two blocks from Lake Michigan in Winnetka, Illinois. Our house was built on a hill with woods behind us. Off the terrace, another hill went down to the lawn below. A huge elm tree grew outside my window with a swing on a low branch that swung out over the hill above the lawn. I was master of our swing, going way up high and almost flipping over. The Pateras lived next door with five children in a huge old Victorian house. They had a swing that was even bigger – it swung out over the entire bluff. We spent hours taking turns on the swing. Hold on to the ropes. Lean way back and stick your feet out as you accelerate. Tuck in your feet on the return. That way, the swing went more than 30 feet off the ground. The speed, the wind through your hair and the height were exhilarating. As a kid, I had no fear of heights.
The Pateras were among the first in the neighborhood to have a TV in the early 1950s so I spent all my time at their house watching the Mickey Mouse Club, Little Rascals and cartoons. Despite my physical aggressiveness, I was very shy among adults and strangers. I was always worried that the Pateras were sick of me. I was sure that nobody really liked me. My mother wanted me to be the cute daughter of her dreams and dressed me up in little dresses, but I wanted to wear my shorts in the dirt and the mud. My father seemed to like me – we raked leaves together, walked up to the hardware store and fixed things – but I wasn’t the cute little girl my mother wanted (Figure 1.1).
Ironically, my mother was not exactly happy in the traditional role of housewife and mother that she was expected to play. She had earned her undergraduate degree in physics from Vassar College in 1940 and gave up a promising career in science to marry my father. In college, she wanted to go on to earn a PhD but was discouraged by the Dean of Students. Instead, she was hired to be a human computer at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. She was one of about five women (among 2,000 men) whose job it was to calculate the long division and multiplication problems for the men. At the time, the pocket calculator didn’t exist. She usually finished her assignments in the morning and could work on radar development in the afternoon – she had at least three patents on radar development. She was asked to work on the Manhattan Project (the development of the nuclear bomb) at Argonne Laboratories in Chicago but by then she was pregnant with my older brother and couldn’t work near radiation. As brilliant and beautiful as she was, she was not a warm mother, and I keenly felt her disappointment in me.
As a little kid, I had a terrible temper that often resulted in screaming tantrums. My parents sent me to my room. But the anger rose up in me as a physical sensation that I was not able to get rid of. After a while the anger eased. But if I got no attention, I stood at the top of the stairs, wailed away, then held my breath until I passed out and tumbled down to the bottom of the stairs.
My middle name is Buckingham and in school I was teased about being a ‘bucking Ham.’ I was skinny and small with a Buster Brown haircut, but my dad had taught me how to hold my fists and fight. “Haul back and hit them as hard as you can right between the eyes.”
I took his advice to heart and in first grade I distinguished myself by hanging out with Wicky and Ned – causing trouble, fighting on the playground and beating up anyone who tried to take my ball, bat or baseball mitt away from me. At the end of the year, Wicky, Ned and I conspired to frown instead of smile when the class picture was taken. Apparently, they lost their nerve because when the photograph came back, I was the only one frowning.
Only later did I learn to be proud to be descended from the Buckinghams – a spirited, enterprising family of pioneers who arrived from England in 1637. (The other families of my ancestors came from England in 1637 (the Chandlers), France in 1655 and Switzerland in 1710.) Five generations later, Ebenezer Buckingham, his wife and 10 of their 13 children moved to the Muskingum River in Ohio in 1799 just as the Northwest Territory was opening up. The large family became farmers and learned to hunt the local game. After the autumn harvest, the five Buckingham brothers cut down some of the abundant oaks and black walnut trees, fashioned them into a good-sized raft, loaded it up with local produce and floated down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers all the way to New Orleans. There, they sold the goods and walked back home along the Natchez Trace to their farm. The second year they did this, they bought letters of credit from New York banks in New Orleans. They then took a steamer to New York and cashed in the letters at a handsome profit. They walked home. Finally, in the third year they went to New York again, bought horses and rode home.
This group of brothers were entrepreneurs and explorers. The oldest brother, Ebenezer, started a trading post. In the 1840s, brothers Alvah and Ebenezer Buckingham walked to Chicago where they found commerce in the city from boats coming down Lake Michigan. Alvah and Ebenezer went home and persuaded the other brothers to come look at bustling Chicago – the population was still less than 10,000 but the Union Pacific Railroad was expected to come soon. Surely, it was an exciting place, an opportunity. The other brothers were not impressed. They thought Chicago was a swamp and not good for farming and went home to Ohio.
But Alvah and his brother-in-law, Solomon Sturges, went to Chicago and in 1855 they built the first grain elevator. They bought grain in late summer as it came in on trains from the west, stored up to 70,000 bushels in their huge grain elevator buildings over the winter and sold it in the spring at a huge profit. They built bigger grain storage elevators – enough to hold 700,000 bushels of grain – in the next few years. The Buckinghams became early leaders in Chicago. They used their wealth to build, among other things, the Buckingham fountain and donated many works of art to the Art Institute of Chicago.
Meanwhile, the Ohio side of the Buckinghams continued to farm. When I was born my mother suggested naming me after her grandmother, Anna Buckingham. My father piped up and said that his grandmother was Anna Buckingham! It turned out the women were not the same person. My father was a descendant of Alvah Buckingham and my mother was a descendant of Alvah’s brother, Milton. That was when my parents realized that they were fourth cousins.
I like to think I’ve inherited the curiosity and enterprising spirit of the Buckinghams. Maybe that was why I rebelled against many of the expectations of the upper-class society the family had embraced by the time I came along.
Much to my mother’s chagrin, I spent a lot of my childhood outside playing baseball, climbing trees, starting fires, building forts in the woods and damming up the brooks and gutters after big rains. There was a small park a few hundred feet from our house and the neighborhood kids played pickup baseball incessantly. I loved to play and was good at it. I had a strong throw, and I could hit well enough to get on base consistently.
Summers, my parents brought the family to visit my grandmother on her farm in Ohio, and when I was six I learned that cornsilk was good to smoke. My father smoked a pipe and he got me a corncob pipe and taught me how to pick the best silk off the ends of the ears of corn in the field. He puffed on his tobacco and I puffed on my corncob pipe. Before going home, I stashed away a bunch of cornsilk in a brown lunch bag to take back to Winnetka. I went up to the local grocery store, ‘Poulopoulos,’ and got a popsicle and then pulled out a cornsilk stogie and smoked it. The housewives from Winnetka were appalled. Even that young, I enjoyed shocking them.
In elementary school, I had difficulty reading. I could only read by saying the words in my mind. As school went on, I never gained speed. Words were patterns of black and white and had no meaning unless I said them aloud in my head. But I liked reading. I woke up early and could read in the mornings when it was quiet before anyone else was up. I loved Heidi about a little girl in Switzerland living high in the mountains with her grandfather during the summers. Maybe someday I could live in my own tiny cabin. I wanted to be like Pippi Longstocking who was marvelously scrappy and rebellious and did things on her own terms. I wanted to read faster, but I never exceeded more than about 20 pages an hour. Every year, there were standardized reading tests, and I could never get more than halfway through the test. My reading level was always a couple of grades behind. I did well in other subjects, so I never received any special help. Dyslexia only started being diagnosed clinically in the 1970s.
I excelled, however, in outdoor activities. The street we lived on was a dead end at the top of the bluff. Snake Hill. In the winter, the hill became the best sledding hill in town and people came from all over. We neighborhood kids iced it down to improve the sledding. I could go down the hill at top speed standing on my Flexible Flyer, drop down to a lying position and do a 360 turn. We built tunnels of snow to sled through. Once in a while, someone injured him/herself running into a telephone pole, but we were lucky enough to avoid injury.
In elementary school, most of my friends were boys. In fourth grade, the gym teacher declared that I had to play with the girls. After two innings and several home runs, he realized that I was better off with the boys, and I was allowed back with my friends. Even though I was small, all the boys learned I was not to be messed with as I hauled off and slugged them if they picked on me. Since I thought my life depended on it, I wouldn’t hold anything back. Perhaps this was why I was later unfazed by the male-dominated culture of medical school. I already knew how to beat them at their own game.
I didn’t feel like a typical girl, but I never doubted that I was one or wanted to be a boy. I felt like my own, singular self – like Pippi Longstocking. I was never comfortable joining the little groups of girls who seemed to be always gossiping about somebody or conspiring to do someone in. But I never had a fistfight with a girl. I was in the Brownies and the Girl Scouts but hated it – not only the cute little projects we were made to do but also most of the other little girls, whom I perceived as wimpy. That attitude too was something I carried with me as an adult. I could never identify with feminists who complained about unfair treatment when the obvious solution seemed to be to figure out a way to be treated fairly or at least get what you want. I had no intention to be one of the boys but I knew their game. I also didn’t want to be one of the girls. I was able to escape from the Girl Scouts with the help of one of the friends I’d managed to make there. One day when my friend had volunteered to bring in the Kool-Aid and cookies and walked by, I stuck out my foot. In an instant my friend, the Kool-Aid and the cookies were all over the floor. I was overjoyed when my mother received a call from the Scoutmaster kicking me out.
Despite or because of how active I was as a kid I was also aware from an early age of illness and how the body could have trouble moving. My aunt, my mother’s sister, was paralyzed from the waist down as the result of a car accident. Although I can’t remember ever seeing her, I could imagine her in a wheelchair. I always took care not to step on cracks because I thought it would break my mother’s back.
Then in the spring of 1951, when I was four, my mother came down with polio. Actually, our whole family got sick with polio, but we just got the ‘stomach flu’ while my mother developed excruciating muscle pain and weakness. The polio virus causes fever, nausea and vomiting. But in some people, it infects the muscle and from there the virus crosses into the nerves that control the muscles and travels up the motor nerves to the spinal cord where it kills the nerve cells. My mother was in bed quite a while and eventually weakness settled permanently into her right lower leg. She was able to walk but never again could she stand on her tiptoes on the right.
I also drew strength from the farming side of my family, and in particular my grandmother, Elsie Bishop Buckingham, who’d married a Buchwalter named Morris. The Buchwalters were Mennonites who’d emigrated to the US from Switzerland in 1710, migrated to central Ohio in about 1800 and farmed the land. The farm in Hallsville is 300 acres of land that stretches about a mile down to the ‘bottom’ land. The soil is dark and rich. When the family settled there, they planted an apple orchard and named the farm ‘Applethorpe Farm.’ When I was a kid, the farm had a herd of about twenty Herefords, six milk cows, ten to fifteen sows and fields of corn, wheat, oats, soybeans and hay. There were several barns. The farmhouse had a well with a pump for drinking water. An icehouse and smokehouse still existed when I was six or seven.
The summers we spent at my grandmother’s farm fed my curiosity and love of nature (Figure 1.2). My older brother, Peyton, my younger sister, Lisa, and I trapped snapping turtles, flew homemade four-foot-high box kites in the pasture and hunted arrowheads in the corn fields (Figure 1.3). Alice and Earl Fox lived on the farm and ran the day-to-day activities, and from them I learned to milk the cows before breakfast and ride on the running board of Earl’s pickup truck down to the field to feed corn to the pigs.
I rode on the tractors and the wagons as they plowed the corn or soybeans, harvested the wheat and cut the hay. The smells at the farm are settled into my memory – the old farmhouse and barn filled with hay, the milking shed below, the cows, the calves, the hogs and the piglets, manure, sitting in the wagons of wheat, oats and hay.
My grandmother, Ganny, had never learned to drive but had to after my grandfather’s death. I remember her taking us into Chillicothe, the nearest city about half an hour away, and weaving along the road. It was both scary and fun to ride with her as she drove up and down the hills in the middle of the road – almost like riding on a roller coaster. Ganny was easy to get along with and always seemed to have a smile on her face. She never got cross and called us ‘little creatures.’ Ganny was enterprising. During the Depression of the 1930s, she offered to take the daughters of rich Ohio families to study in Switzerland at the American School for two years and travel through Europe. Her compensation covered all costs for her own two daughters and herself. The trip provided a first-class education for my mother and my aunt.
At the farm, I spent a lot of time just watching what was happening before me. I spent hours inspecting the ants on the ivy growing across the screen on my bedroom window. The ants traveled up and down the vine and were shepherds tending to small round bugs I later learned were called aphids. The ants milked the aphids’ nectar and kept them safe by taking them back to the nest at night.
At other times, I wandered into the pasture where our herd of cattle was grazing. I squatted on the ground and waited quietly. The cows gradually approached and sniffed the grass near me. They were big and I was small. Their breath was warm and sweet-smelling, and I was only a little afraid. In the pig field, it was a different matter. The big sows were potentially dangerous, and I was told to stay behind the fence, where I watched intently. That was when I first developed what became a lifelong attachment and even identification with piglets. The little piglets were the most fun! They were born in litters of 8–10 and several litters ran around the field together. Not only were they incredibly cute but watching them I saw that they played tag! One little piglet ran at the group and singled out someone to butt. The whole group then split up, running in all directions, and the pig who’d been butted had to tag the next one. The games went on for a long time. All this fascinated me.
One night at the farm, as my parents came to bed, they checked on me as they did every night. As they approached the room, they heard a cry and a thud. They opened the door to find me on the floor with a large gash over my eye. I had been dreaming I was a dive-bomber airplane and had catapulted myself headfirst off the bed into the dresser. I was taken in the middle of the night into Chillicothe for my first stitches. I remember the bright white light and green color of the cloth curtains. The lidocaine stung but numbed the area. Then I felt a tug with each stitch. I had a large bandage covering my left eyebrow. The next day it hurt but it was worth it to show my friends my wound when I got back to Winnetka. Having stitches is one of the milestones of childhood and I had reached it without any serious damage.
Every grade, I was switched to a new class because I was a troublemaker. I talked too much in class, passed notes, kicked kids under the chair and started fights at recess. Each year, the school hoped I would behave better with a new set of friends. Unfortunately, I just made more friends in each class and didn’t improve my troublemaking.
Outside of school, I was made to go to dancing school, which I hated because I had to put on a dress and white socks and patent leather shoes. I did my best to sulk in a chair and avoid dancing with the little boys who also obviously didn’t want to be there either. I did like boys though and in fifth grade I spent many afternoons making out on the beach with Danny or Peter.
My brother taught me how to shoplift. We had jackets that had an elastic band around the waist and zipped up the front.
“Just be cool,” my brother said. “You have to show confidence – not nervousness or guilt. Browse through the comic books and slip one into your jacket. You can do the same with candy bars and gum.”
It was so simple, and we soon had a huge stash. We couldn’t eat it all. Then Halloween came and we had so much candy we didn’t know what to do, so we buried it in the woods.
Then there was the time a bunch of us, including my brother, Peyton, were playing in the woods at the top of the bluff and found an old steel wheel with the tire still on it. We decided to roll it down the bluff into the trees above our neighbor’s house to see how far it could go. We hadn’t counted on the weight of its hub, which increased its acceleration. We all stood there and watched as the wheel careened into the trees and then were amazed as it kept going across the flat roof of the neighbor’s garage and onto the roof of Mr. Webster’s antique model Roadster. The roof and hood of the car were crushed.
That night at dinner my parents told us how the poor Websters’ antique car had been destroyed by vandals rolling a wheel down the hill. My brother kicked me under the table, and I tried to keep a straight face. That night I couldn’t sleep. I was a shoplifter and now, as I lay awake, I felt hopelessly guilty and bad to think I was becoming a thief and a vandal! Finally, I cried out and my mother came into my room. I confessed everything – the shoplifting and the destruction of the car. I told her I was sorry and I’d try to work to make it up.
My brother was furious. What a worthless little tattletale I was. My mother took us up to the stores and made us confess to the management and pay for the estimated cost of the stolen goods out of our allowances going forward. We had to do volunteer work for the Websters, although we couldn’t possibly pay them back for the car. Fortunately, they had somewhat of a soft spot for us, perhaps because they had no children of their own. It was a defining moment for me. I vowed never to steal again or hurt people who didn’t deserve it.
In sixth grade, my parents decided to send me to private school. The Winnetka public schools were very good but huge and my parents were afraid I would be lost in the large classes. I was devastated to think of switching schools and leaving my old friends for what we called, ‘North Shore Country Day where all the fairies go and play.’ Ultimately, it was a good decision. In the public school system, I would not have been challenged academically because I always scored poorly on the standardized tests used to determine placement levels. Private school gave me more academic support.
Going to NSCD was pivotal too because that was where I made a new group of friends, boys and girls, including Les Moore, who became my best friend. Les had four older brothers and sisters who were all very popular in school – intellectuals, activists and athletes. Her mother continued to run her husband’s business after his death from alcohol-induced liver failure when Les was six. After school, Les and I walked the two miles to her house and went up to a room above the garage to play poker and smoke cigarettes. On the weekends, I hung out at Les’ house, along with her older siblings and their friends, and that was an education, too.
Middle school was relatively uneventful. I played field hockey, basketball and baseball. I got through my classes. I had several boyfriends, one of whom taught me how to whistle really loudly without using my fingers. I was still punching people who did me wrong. In sixth grade, when a boy grabbed the basketball from me one day in the gym, I slugged him right between the eyes so hard his nose bled. I got the ball back, but my hand was sore and throbbing and later it swelled up and turned black and blue.
That evening, I showed my swollen hand to my dad (Figure 1.4). Would my hand go back to normal? When my dad asked what had happened and I told him how I’d punched a boy bigger than me because he stole my basketball, I could see my dad’s eyes light up with pride. His ‘Tiger Annie’ had prevailed.
My dad liked to do watercolor and pen drawings of landscapes and I used to sit next to him and draw as well. He taught me about mixing colors, perspective, clouds, light and shadows. My skill later developed into the ability to doodle and draw cartoons. Cartoons depend on people’s postures and distinguishing characteristics. They are a wonderful way to express your feelings.
I have loved to ski ever since I learned in our backyard on the bluff using my mother’s wooden skis with bear-trap bindings. I loved the speed and throwing myself off jumps. Initially, I had no fear. I hated the poles, so I didn’t use them. In middle school, we traveled to the local ski areas in Wisconsin – an hour away. We held on to the rope tow going up the tiny hills and going down I made sure to speed. My classmates and I set up jumps. It was exhilarating to lift off the jump, hands in the air, and fly.
But the time we went skiing at Iron Mountain with Mr. Steele, our eighth-grade teacher, changed me. Mr. Steele also skied without poles. That day he came down the mountain and hit the dip of an access road with too much speed. He flipped up and over and landed on his head, crushing a cervical vertebra. He had to be in a ‘halo’ brace for months. After that, I began to fear skiing. I began using poles and never again had that exhilarating feeling of flying except in my dreams.
Everybody was maturing before I did. I was young for my class, but even so, I was a late bloomer. In the girls’ locker room, everybody was wearing bras, and I was still in my undershirt. I wanted to disappear. My mother was singularly unhelpful and in addition my pride was such that I never asked her what to expect. My friends taught me how to shave my legs and under my arms. I was a stinky little kid. My father was a strict believer in the beauty of sweat and BO and said anyone who used deodorant was some sort of fairy. And as far as I could tell, my mother didn’t sweat. She always smelled sweet and nice. She had naturally curly dark hair and wore a tiny amount of makeup and powder. She was actually rather beautiful (Figure 1.5).
I felt awkward and lumpy and ugly and tried to compensate by being tough. I was always being a wise-off in class. My grades weren’t particularly good either, so in my sophomore year of high school, my parents decided to start paying me for good grades. They later told me they felt very guilty about doing this, but they were worried I was just going to goof off and then not get into a good college. I loved the deal. An “A” was $25 bucks. My grades shot up and I got a lot of money.
I continued to excel in sports. I liked to run, play ball, ski, and ride the waves in Lake Michigan. I played fullback on the junior varsity and varsity field hockey teams. Even though I was 5′6″ and 115 pounds, I could scare the pants off a forward or halfback from any other team. I had sheer determination and had learned to never show any doubt. Our team finished high school unbeaten and unscored upon.
Basketball was the sport that obsessed me, though. From middle school on, I was the outside shooter and by high school I was captain of the varsity basketball team. When I was a freshman in high school, I played the position of “rover” – the player who could cross the centerline, cover the rover from the other team and set up the offense. Later all players played full court. Les Moore was a forward and was great one-on-one to the basket. We collaborated. I practiced the outside shots from the top of the key, but if there was any hope of a break, I passed the ball to her and she went to the basket. We won most of the games. I had a final year average of twenty points per game. My overhead shots swished from the top of the key. Les always beat me to the basket. I was the queen of the outside shot. I spent endless hours shooting, trying to perfect it.
In high school, I was interested in science and art. Two classmates and I were given the opportunity to visit the University of Chicago School of Medicine for a one-day introduction to medicine. I didn’t want to see actual surgery because I was frightened by blood, so I signed up to see a demonstration of immunity in mice. I figured I’d be fine with little mice. A group of us stood around the doctor and watched as he pulled out a live white mouse, bent it to the side and quickly shaved the hair off the abdomen. He pointed out the liver pressing against the skin. He then picked up a full 50 ml syringe (about the size of the mouse) with a large needle. As he brought the needle close to the mouse, my vision went yellow and the next thing I remember is the crowd of students and the doctor staring down at me lying flat on my back on the linoleum floor. I had fainted dead away. It took about half an hour to recover but I remember nothing of the rest of the day. It was clear to me, however, that I could lose consciousness quickly and unexpectedly at any time. I couldn’t imagine being a doctor.
My father had been a chemistry major in college and my mother had been a physics major. They were very interested in science and talked about issues like gravity and the origin of the universe at the dinner table. Together, they liked to design experiments at home. They made a self-maintaining terrarium and a new style of fluorescent Christmas tree decorations illuminated by a blacklight. They measured ozone levels with a contraption my father made to fit in the sunroof of our car and tried to produce cold fusion in our backyard.
Issues of Science, Scientific American, National Geographic and Natural History were always on the coffee table in our living room. I liked to flip through the magazines and look at the pictures and sometimes read the articles. I was fascinated by biological studies. One article on planaria particularly fascinated me. The scientists were able to show that the little planaria flatworms could learn to go through a maze to get a reward. This on its own was surprising but even more amazing was that if the trained planaria were ground up and fed to untrained planaria, the novice planaria learned the maze instantly. Could you really eat another animal’s memories and acquire them yourself? I wondered whether amphetamine or other drugs let the planaria learn even faster.
Our high school organized activities to raise social awareness. Some of us signed up to go to the Chicago State Mental Hospital on Tuesday nights to visit with and entertain the inpatients in the locked male ward. On the dreary winter evening bus rides, I often sat with my friend, Stetson Ames, as we rode in the dark down Irving Park Road. Stets had been the new boy in class in eighth grade. He was tall and cute. We shared classes in German and advanced mathematics – calculus. We danced at the parties and sat in class together. We were on-and-off boyfriend and girlfriend.
This was the first time I saw people with neuropsychiatric disorders. The ward was a dreary, colorless, smelly place – a building with one huge room and a domed ceiling and beds all around the periphery. There were tall windows on both sides. The floor was cement and patients walked the room, sometimes peeing in the corners, many with what I later learned was tardive dyskinesia – their tongues moving in and out, their lips smacking, their faces grimacing. They paced the floors. Wanting to lighten things up, we brought in a phonograph and played records with the latest popular songs – He’s So Fine by the Chiffons, Little Surfer Girl by the Beach Boys, My Boyfriend’s Back by the Angels. We could get some people to dance and others to talk. That human beings could suffer in this way made my suburban life feel complacent and coddled. When I went home, I scolded my parents for being uncaring hypocrites who squandered their lives away in business, social life and suburbia. Why didn’t they use their intellect to do something more positive for the world?
Whether I had any influence or not, I have no idea. In my sophomore year in high school, my mother started putting together a series of books for adult education on various aspects of the universe (Figure 1.6).
Then in my senior year, she began writing and publishing popular science books: Power Over People, Blue Planet, Earth’s Aura, The Unfinished Universe and Islands. She had finally found a way to channel her intellect to educate the public about the universe. She continued to write into her eighties. She wanted to be the Rachel Carson of physics.
Unlike my parents and their friends, Mrs. Moore was a staunch advocate of the civil rights movement and helped organize support for African Americans in Chicago. We often sat at her feet on the rug in her living room while she discussed politics and current events. Les and I were the youngest, but we liked to sit around and listen, as folk music by people like Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan played in the background. Les’ oldest brother Phil was a Freedom Marcher in Mississippi in 1963 and was arrested and beaten. Mrs. Moore also experienced violence when she went to Alabama for the famous march from Selma to Montgomery led by Martin Luther King to protest White Southerners’ resistance to the newly legislated voting rights for African Americans. In July of 1965, Mrs. Moore was one of several women who arranged for Martin Luther King to give a talk on the Village Green in Winnetka, Illinois. This was not a popular move at the time when Winnetka flagrantly discriminated against all minorities who tried to buy houses and move in.
In the summers, I often visited Les in Charlevoix, Michigan where the Moores had a summer house on Lake Charlevoix in the northern lower peninsula. It was a large, rustic place with screened sleeping porches on each side – one for the girls, the other for the boys. We water-skied, played card games like Bridge and War, rode horses and goofed off. One summer near the end of high school, Les and I and several friends took the horses overnight up to a back pasture. We set up camp and made a fire. Les pulled out several bottles of whiskey and rum and we drank until we were reeling around and unable to stand up. We finished off all the bottles and passed out. The next day we felt like shit, but eventually, having survived our first drunk, we rode the horses home.
