Kelly (2 page)

It took several years before Peter could afford to send for
Christine. They were married and settled in the small mining town of Ishpeming, not far from Marquette. That is where I was born, on February 27, 1910.

I, Clarence Leonard Johnson, was the seventh in a family of nine children. We were very poor, and all of us learned early in life that as soon as we were able we had to help earn what we needed.

My earliest memories of my birthplace are of how beautiful it was. Even the long railroad trains, their cars piled with iron ore, going off both east and west seemed beautiful to me as I watched them from the bluffs above town. I’d go out into the woods, summer and winter, and always had a little hideaway camp where I could go with my dog, Putsie.

We lived in a succession of three large houses, all rented. I remember best the last of these, a big frame house painted green, on top of a hill, on Summit Street. It was bitter cold in the winter. To fuel our wood-burning stove, my father would pick a bright clear day to hitch our horse, Mac, to the cutter and drive four or five miles into the woods to cut birch. When I was about eight years old, I began to join him regularly. It was so cold that my mother put a jug of hot water by my feet, then wrapped me up to keep me warm. She packed our lunch in a dinner pail, too—some hot coffee and sandwiches. We would look for a fallen tree since that was easiest to cut up. We had a crosscut saw, and I would try to help by pulling one end. But my father generally did a lot of the cutting with an ax. Our day’s work done, we’d pile our wood in the back of the cutter—at least three wheelbarrows-full—and head home with a comfortable feeling of accomplishment. Our Christmas tree each year came from the woods, too. I never recall seeing anyone else on these forays. The area was not very widely settled.

We had both wood and coal-burning stoves for cooking and heating in that house, and we got our coal in another thrifty manner, picking it up from the railroad tracks. The train always dropped some coal, and one gunnysack-full was enough for our needs for a day. My sister Alice and I would take our sleds—we each had one—and gunnysacks and fill them up
after school. The engineers came to know us; and if there wasn’t a supply of coal that had fallen off the trains, they would throw some off.

The severe winter weather made it difficult for my father to work. Snow and ice would form on the bricks so that they could not be joined. But on relatively warm days, he would solve that problem with an old, empty 50-gallon oil drum. He knocked holes in the bottom to get a draft and built the biggest fire he could inside, having placed the frozen bricks around the outside. Then, before ice could refreeze on them, he would lay the bricks as quickly as possible. His work always was subject to weather; but when he worked, my father could lay 2,000 bricks in a day.

My mother worked, too, in addition to raising a family and running the house. She took in washing, from the wealthier people in the town. Each basket of clothes brought in a couple of dollars. Every day she washed, and not in a washing machine but on a scrub board. Our basement wasn’t large enough to hold a wash; so every day, summer and winter, she would hang it outside.

In winter, of course, it froze and had to be ironed dry. The older girls, Ida, Freda, and Agnes, helped with this work. I did, too. I picked up and delivered laundry at least a couple of times each week in my wagon, or on my sled in winter. I did not like to be seen doing this, and I remember particularly one time when there was a Saint George Day parade and the main streets were full of people. I took back alleys all the way home. I vowed then that one day I’d return to Ishpeming and not on the back streets but the best streets.

I loved the woods surrounding Ishpeming and always had a secret hideaway there in a place southeast of town that I called Surprise Valley, because it was pretty well hidden from view. I’ve gone out in winter when it was ten degrees above zero. I wouldn’t build a fire but would listen to the trees cracking in the cold, try to read fox and other animal tracks in the snow, and chase a few rabbits. I learned how to build a lean-to from reading a book on Indian explorers. I’d cut pine boughs, run a
sturdy limb two or three inches in diameter between two adjacent trees, then weave the boughs together stems up, so the branches would fall down like shingles. It made a shelter that was quite waterproof. The same technique of weaving boughs made a floor. I’d leave the front open so I could watch the animals. And I usually had a little food stored there—mostly just some bread and butter in a tin can. When Putsie was with me, we’d share it. I’d make a new lean-to every winter, because in summer it would be torn down or dried out. It took me only about a day to build one with a lath hatchet borrowed from my brother Emil.

School always was interesting to me. I was eager to go and would show up early to be first in line to enter the building. But there was one fellow who took to pushing me out of the way when he arrived later. And he made the mistake of calling me Clara for Clarence. His name was Cecil. Unfortunately for me, he was about a foot taller than I was, a long gawky kid; so when I realized that action had to be taken, I knew it would take some planning.

The occasion came during one recess in the schoolyard when words came finally to blows. The other kids pushed us together, and I knew there was only one way I could lick this guy. So I kicked him behind the knee to trip him, then jumped on him when he fell. There was a loud popping noise. I had broken his leg.

The principal, Mrs. Lacey, and my second grade teacher, Miss Hass, didn’t quite know what to do. There was Cecil with a broken leg, and I not only admitted doing it but on purpose. They spanked me over the knuckles so hard with a ruler that it broke. But I didn’t cry and that brought me favor with the other children.

Cecil was from one of the wealthier families in town and I expected his family to raise trouble with ours. I was somewhat afraid to go home. It was the only time I ever feared a whipping. Despite my mother’s assurances when I got there that she was not going to spank me, I announced that I wasn’t coming in, and I ran off to my hidden camp in the woods, where I spent
the night. It was late spring; so it wasn’t cold. Putsie and I shared the store of old bread and butter I had there. I returned about three o’clock the next afternoon, having missed school, but warmly welcomed at home.

When I returned to school, the kids had decided that I didn’t act like a Clarence and should have a good fighting Irish name. There was a song popular at that time, “Kelly from the Emerald Isle,” and they sang a verse about “Kelly with the green necktie.” They named me Kelly. It stuck.

We were really hard-pressed for money in the early years, and my mother not only took in washing but scrubbed floors. One day she got a job to scrub the floor of one of the big stores in town, Sellwood’s. It looked to me like almost an acre of floor area. But Alice and I joined my mother at the job and in one day we had the oak floors scrubbed clean.

We were so poor at that time that when we would take a can to buy kerosene for our lamps—for 15 or 20 cents—we would plug the spout with a potato, then when we had carried the kerosene home, cut away any part of the potato that had been sloshed with kerosene and save the rest to be eaten.

To help with finances, I spent one summer with an aunt in the farming community of Sands, less than 30 miles east and slightly south of Ishpeming. I earned my keep there, doing things like raising the gear ratio to 20-to-one on the cream separator to make that a lot easier to operate. I also earned $31 picking wild blueberries. I got $1.00 a peck, which took a whole day to collect. When I went home at the end of the season, I handed the entire $31 to my mother. There were tears in her eyes as she thanked me, she was so touched that I had not kept anything at all for myself. No contribution I have ever made since has made me feel happier; none has been more important to me.

The next summer Alice and I decided we both would like to make some more money that way. She and I were only three years apart in age and she was my closest companion in the family. Clifford and Helen, seven and eight years younger, were too young to keep up with us.

Alice and I packed our things in a single suitcase and headed for Sands on the train. It was a six or seven mile walk from the railroad station to our aunt’s house, on a hot June day, and when we got there we were told that we could not stay that summer. So, we picked up our suitcase, put a long branch through the handle so we each could carry one end, and trudged back to the train station for the return trip home.

Our parents were stern but not severe, serious in manner but considerate of us children. I never was struck by either of them. We children were expected to show responsibility. I had access to my father’s tools and a workshop from the time I was seven or eight years old. I could use any of his tools I could handle, so long as I didn’t break or lose them and always put them back in place.

Some of my earliest lessons in construction were in watching my father build toys for me. One winter day, in a very, very cold barn which housed his shop, he constructed a rocking horse from a piece of birchwood, half a dozen pieces of wood, and some rope. It was a fine, sturdy horse when finished—painted white, with the birch body section left in its natural state.

He also built me a wagon, painted green, with a remote control brake that I could operate with either knee or hand. The wheels were purchased, as was some hardware, but the rest was the product of his workmanship. It, too, was very sturdily constructed, and I used that wagon for many years.

My father was very mechanically inclined, too, as well as being a proficient carpenter and mason. An all-around craftsman. My respect for tools and machinery I learned early in life from his example. He worked throughout his life in the building business and taught me a great deal about construction. It was to be very useful to me.

My father’s hands were so gnarled and calloused from handling rough bricks under every sort of condition that he ceased to have much feeling in them. The hard life once caused even him to rebel. He spent one whole paycheck on drink. It was the only time.

Our parents instilled a love of learning in us children. They always encouraged us to study in school and to read on our own. Next to my father, I credit Andrew Carnegie with being the most important influence on my early life through the library he had donated to Ishpeming—as he had in many other small towns whose natural resources had helped build his fortune. In Ishpeming, of course, it was the iron ore. He returned an even richer resource.

I went to the library almost every day with Putsie. It opened a whole new world to me. I discovered Tom Swift and read not once but several times
Tom Swift and His Aeroplane, Tom Swift and His Electric Automobile, Tom Swift and His Submarine
, and on through the entire series. Tom Swift was a very highly skilled designer, engineer, pilot, and operator of many kinds of locomotion, and an adventurous young man. It became my goal to be just like Tom.

I read other books on aircraft—the Rover Boys, Collins’ book on model airplanes—and decided by the time I was 12 years old that I would be an aircraft designer. My whole life from that time was aimed at preparing for that goal. I put together my first book on aircraft, mostly from clippings, and designed my first plane—the Merlin battleplane—named for the magician of King Arthur’s court. I made hundreds of model airplanes.

The other kids resented my studious habits as well as the good marks I consistently got in school and would taunt me. I didn’t let it bother me. But it made me one of the fastest runners in Ishpeming. The kids would lie in wait for my daily return from the library and in winter would fire off snowballs stuffed with coal chunks.

There was a fearful period of two weeks, though, when my future was in serious doubt when I was hit in the left eye with an arrow fired by Helen while playing cowboys and Indians with her and Clifford. I was blinded.

My mother’s training and experience as a nurse helped her keep calm and take charge. She had served in the local hospital during the dreadful influenza epidemic that spread worldwide
after World War I. None of our family contracted the disease, and Mother worked long hours at the hospital while Agnes and Alice took care of the household.

She carefully removed the arrow, which had entered alongside the eyeball, mopped up the blood, and determined that the eyeball itself had not been hit. But I was in such a state of shock that I lost sight in both eyes. I was terrified. It was two long unforgettable weeks before my sight returned.

I continued to read everything I could get my hands on about aviation. The war had made the airplane a reality, and every now and then we actually could see one as a barnstormer came through selling rides for $3 apiece.

My enthusiasm for the subject spilled over into my more conventional studies. One day while I was expounding on current events—aviation, of course—the school principal, then Mr. Walter Griese, visited our classroom. He thought it was good that the kids were studying such subjects outside the routine curriculum, and he invited me to address a luncheon meeting of the local Lions Club on the future of aviation.

This was quite an honor for me, and my parents were so proud that they bought me my first pair of long pants for the event. In white shirt and tie, I made my debut as a speaker on aviation. I was still so short that they stood me on a chair to speak. I was pleased to receive quite a lot of applause.

When I was about ten years old, I saddled our horse, Mac, and rode out to western Ishpeming where Emil was working at lathing, and I learned that trade. He and my older brother Arthur already had married and moved on, as had the older girls, while I was growing up. There was quite a few years’ difference in our ages, and I hardly knew them.

The building business was picking up in Ishpeming, and at an early age I could work as a lather. Laths are wooden slats, four feet long, that are nailed on studding and two-by-fours in new construction as the base for the finished coat of plaster or wood siding. I became quite proficient. By the time I was 12 years old, I was contributing $7 every week for room and board. I had to make $10 to have a little left over for myself. I could put
on 40 bunches of laths a day at 25¢ per bunch. From then on I was self-supporting.