Here's a little of "The Early Years"
The early years
Being a breech birth baby, I backed into this world on March 22 1936 in Lansing, Michigan. The son of William and Edith LaClair. French Canadian and Native American on my fathers side, Scotch and Irish on my Mothers side.
My Dad was a broad shouldered barrel chested man about 5'9", dark complected with black hair. My Mother was tall and fair with blond hair. My Sister who is 10 years younger and my only sibling favors my dad's side of the family. She's tall but has the darker completion of our French and Indian blood. Both of my parents family's resided in northern Michigan and at various times worked in the lumber camps that were prevalent in Michigan in those days. My grandfather on my Mothers side was a big rawboned Irishman of great strength. One story of him was that he once won a bet in lumber camp by squatting under a horse and lifting it off the ground. My Dad was also a powerful man. He liked to frequent the "Beer Gardens" as he called them and would usually end up arm wrestling all comers for beers. He'd take them on one after another and I never saw him lose. Even though my dad liked his beer I never saw him inebriated.
The Woman in my family were also strong and aggressive. My Mother used to shoot pheasants off the back porch of the house when they got in her garden using my Dad's single shot 12ga that kicked like a mule. Her Mother, my grandma Flossie cooked in the lumber camps and she took no guff from the rough lumberjacks who feared her temper and the long wooden spoon she freely wielded. My Great Great Grandma Mary on my Dad's side once killed a bear that was trying to get one of their pigs. That exploit was written of in a book about the early settlers of Antrim County Michigan.
The years just before and just after my birth were tough times in America. The Great Depression began in 1929 with the Stock Market crash and lasted until 1941 with beginning of World War II. I was born right in the middle of those times. During the war years I remember the occasional Black Out's at night when absolutely no lights were allowed for short periods of time. The Black Out's were practice for Air Raids in case of enemy bombings. Most able bodied men enlisted in the service or were drafted. All of my Uncles went in the Army, my Dad was color blind so it kept him out of the regular Army but he was in the National Guard. Part of the Guards duty was to guard plants and warehouses at night against enemy saboteurs. People saved aluminum foil from their empty cigarette packs and rolled it into balls to turn in for the war effort. I remember my older cousin and I picked milkweed pods for their silky contents which were used to make parachutes for the war. We got a penny for an onion sack full.
One of my Aunts lived with us for awhile during the war. She had two small children a little younger than me. I remember one particular time when she was writing to my Uncle, my mothers brother who was fighting in the Philippines and she ask me if there was anything I wanted to say to him in her letter. I had heard somewhere about the Natives on the Islands making "Bolo" knives out of the propeller blades of crashed fighter planes, so I ask my Uncle if he would send me one of those Bolo knives. I remember being disappointed in my Uncle because he never did send me that knife.
From a very early age I had an adventurous spirit and a love for the outdoors . As a youngster I was always in the woods behind the house, building brush huts and playing Tarzan. I was the only five year old in the area that wore a home made loin cloth that my mother made from an old sheet and a wooden knife that my Dad made for me. At six or seven I was hunting frogs along the creek with a sharpened lance. When I proudly brought home several frogs one day my dad said, OK now you've got to clean them and eat them. I eagerly followed my dads direction, cutting off the plump rear legs, skinning them and putting them in a hot skillet. I remember being surprised when the frog legs twitched and jerked in the pan. I also remember how I felt when I ate the little bit of meat from those frog legs that I had killed and cooked....a feeling of satisfaction and pride that hunters for thousands of years before me must have felt. There have been hundreds maybe thousands of cook fires with pans and kettles of wild game since that time many years ago but I'll never forget that first hunters ritual that I shared with my dad. I cherish the times hunting with my dad. I didn't know that those times would be so limited, he died of lung cancer at the age of 53. Thirty five years of smoking a couple packs a day of unfiltered Camel cigarettes was his undoing. I was 23 years old when he died.
I had great parents who let me be the Wild Boy of the forest. They didn't discourage me in any way, they let me play out my youthful fantasies to my hearts content. If I wanted a loin cloth, a wooden knife a wooden gun or a wooden bow, my mom or dad would make it for me. Both of my parents had gone through the Great Depression so their thinking was that their son would not go without. Pretty much anything I wanted if it was within their means, I got it. Not to say I was totally spoiled and didn't get punished when I did something wrong. In that way they were old fashioned...spare the rod...spoil the child. My dad had a leather razor strap hanging behind the bathroom door (that was later after we got indoor pluming) and he wouldn't hesitate to use it if he thought it would help me see the error of my ways.
I think some of my love for the woods was inspired by the books my mother read to me. In the days before television people listened to the radio and read books. Every night at bedtime my mother would read to me, stories about the early settlers and pioneers. When she read the book of Robin Hood to me I was fascinated with the idea of the bow and arrow. That influence stayed with me all through my childhood and adult years. When I was about 6 or 7 years old I got a BB gun, probably because I wanted one but also probably because my dad thought it would be a good teaching aid . I was too young to be given BB's to shoot out of it but my dad showed me how the big wooden "kitchen matches" would propel with pretty good force at short ranges. We lived in the country where my dad was a part time farmer. He also worked in town at a GM car plant. My mother was a beauty operator who worked part time at a beauty shop in town. When my mother went in to work she sometimes had to take me along with her. I'd amuse myself playing in the alley behind the beauty shop. The shop was at the north end of town, a pretty rough side of Lansing that was noted for it's rough characters. One particular day when I was playing behind the shop shooting match sticks at rats with my BB gun and not being very successful at it. Someone hollered at me and I looked up to see a couple rough looking kids with their heads sticking up over the high board fence behind the alley. They taunted me with comments that made me mad and I flung insults back at them. I didn't realize that they were trying to distract me while another "bully" was sneaking around to jump me from behind with the idea of stealing my precious Red Ryder BB gun. I'd like to say it was my keen senses from my hours in the woods that alerted me to his presence behind me but he probably just made some kind of noise that made me turn around when he was about ten feet away. As I spun around I must have had the BB gun leveled at him and when he lunged towards me my instinct was to pull the trigger. At the range of just a few feet the match didn't do anything more than sting him but it made him turn and run thinking he'd been shot by a BB.
I went in the back door of the beauty shop and set my gun in the corner of the back room. It wasn't long before a big cop came in the front door of the shop. The gang of little thugs had gone to the cop on the beat to tell them of being shot. When my mother told the cop I had no BB's to shoot out of the gun, he left. When we got home that day my dad took my gun away for two weeks. I remember feeling that wasn't fair because I was only defending myself.
As a youngster I thought of school as a big waste of time. I would much rather be roaming the woods and fields with my BB gun or bow. The small 40 acre farm where we lived had a creek on the back side and a wonderful woods full of all kinds of critters of interest to a young boy. I had a pinto pony named Scout and a faithful little dog named lady. That was the beginning of my trapping experience. I set traps in the woods for any critter that might wander by. I found out how hard it was to kill a big fox squirrel in a steel trap with a BB gun. My dog Lady also found out that a trapped woodchuck can still deliver a pretty painful bite.
The school I went to at the time was a one room brick school house with one teacher and kids from 1st to 8th grade all in the same room. There was only one other kid in my 3rd grade class, a girl named Olive, and I hated her. She was always trying to make me look bad by outdoing me in our homework assignments. I remember one bad winter, I think it was the winter of 1945. We had a big snow storm that plugged the roads and no one could get to school. The farmers had to pour their milk on the ground because the milk trucks couldn't get in to pick up the milk. My mother helped me with my school work while we were snowed in and I got way ahead in my assigned work in my school books. When the roads finely opened up and we went back to school, I remember walking up to the teachers desk to turn in all the work I had done. Olive was ahead of me with her work and the teacher was telling her that she had done a good job and that she'd have to wait until Ron "me" got caught up. When I turned in my work the teacher was shocked that I'd done so much and she said to Olive that she now would have to catch up to me. The look on Olives face was priceless.That was one of the most satisfying experiences of my young life.
The school room had a big coal furnace in one side of the room, away from everyone and away from the windows. As I said earlier I thought school was a waste of time and I spent a lot of time staring out the windows longing to be outside. The teacher had my desk moved behind the furnace so I couldn't see out the windows. I thought she was awfully mean for doing that but if she hadn't I probably wouldn't have passed on to the 4th grade.
I wanted a .410 shotgun so bad in those days that I could taste it. A friend and I use to send coded messages to each other on our Captain Midnight badges with the secret code dial on them. All we could talk about was if we had a .410 shotgun we could kill just about anything in the world with it. My Dad in all his wisdom got me a shotgun but it was a 16gauge. I was pretty disappointed that it wasn't a .410 plus the little single shot 16 kicked like a mule for a 10 year old.
My Dad had a smart way to get me to buckle down and do my school work. Back in the 40's in Michigan the Ringneck Pheasant population was very high. Every field was full of them. We hunted them on our farm with our little Cocker Spaniels and they did a great job of putting the beautiful birds in the air in front of our shotguns. My Dad's way to get me to do my school work was I had to have all A's and B's on my report card or no Pheasant hunting in the fall. It was a cruel thing to do to a kid that loved hunting as much as I did but it worked beautifully. For a short time every fall I was one of the smartest hard working kids in school.
One of my more fond memories of that one room school was occasionally if I was running late and didn't have time to make it by walking to school I was allowed to ride Scout my pinto pony. When I got to school which was only a mile straight down the road, I'd turn Scout loose and he would head for home. That old brick school house is still standing and has been converted into a small house. I've talked to the occupants and promised to bring them a picture of all the kids including me standing against the side of the building in 1945
Another memorable experience was in 1947. when my folks decided to send me to summer camp in northern Michigan. Camp Fairwood on Torch Lake. It was where rich people sent their kids in the summer to get them out of their hair. My folks weren't rich by a long shot but they wanted me to have all the advantages they could afford. The Camp provided a curriculum of daily classes such as horse back riding, rifle shooting, archery, woodcraft, canoeing, swimming and so on. The regular time period to be at camp was eight weeks. My folks couldn't afford to send me for that long so they made a deal to send me for just four weeks. I think there was only one other kid that was signed up for the four week period. Of coarse the fact that my parents weren't rich enough to send me for the full eight weeks gave the rich snobby kids a reason to tease the poor kid. That only lasted until the teasing caused a couple of bloody noses...one of them being mine. After that the teasing slacked off.
My interest in archery at that time was at an all time high. I had received a lemon wood bow and arrow set from the Montgomery Wards catalog earlier in the year and I was bitten hard by the archery bug. The archery class at camp was taught by a man named Scott. As I remember he looked a lot like Howard Hill although I didn't know of Howard at the time. The targets we shot at were the big 48" round multiple colored matts which we shot at 20 yards. The classes were an hour long after which we were supposed to go on to the next class on our individual schedule. I enjoyed the archery class so much that after the hour was up I refused to leave for the next class. The instructors couldn't persuade me to go to the other classes so I stayed in the archery class all day and shot with each group as the came in. I didn't realize it at the time but the Camp Director called my Dad long distance, ( a big deal in those days) to tell him they were having trouble with his son. My Dad expected the worst but after he found out that I only wanted to stay in the archery class all day he told them, "If all the boy wants to do is shoot the bow and arrow, then let him shoot the bow and arrow"
I had a favorite bow that I used all of the time. I don't remember what poundage it was, probably somewhere in the 20# range. It was a long round English style of dark wood, maybe osage. I went on to become the Camp Archery Champion of Camp Fairwood that year in 1947, I was eleven years old. That was the beginning of my life long love affair with the bow and arrow.
When I was about 12 years old we moved off the farm into a quiet neighborhood in a nice part of town. That was a big transition for me. No more horse to ride through the fields and woods, no more being able to shoot my bow or gun at anything that looked like a good target. There was an empty lot on our street where we played ball. I got a new three fingered mitt and because I was left handed the position I played most of the time was first base. The city kids in the neighborhood called me a "hick" and I called them "city slickers". Thus began the next faze of my life.
Topic: Who else would like to read Ron La Clair's Autobiography? (Read 8973 times)
