Life's Ride or Fall...You Make the Call

Successfully riding the twisting, turning, up-and-down trail of life is like riding a horse. Rough rides require you to slide deep in the saddle and take control so you don’t get bucked off. The fact is you can’t, at any time, allow the nature of the ride to lead to a premature trail’s end. Slide deep in the saddle . . . take control . . . keep riding. All will be well.

The Story

From my earliest thoughts about my life, I had a feeling I needed to learn to ride deep in the saddle very quickly and take control. My ride began on March 23, 1944, in Billings, Montana, at 4:18 in the afternoon. I was born to Cecil and Virginia Greenfield. Proud parents, I’m sure, but troubled as husband and wife.

Neither of my parents came from a background that was particularly nurturing. Their parents were hardscrabble people who fought every day of their relatively short lives just to survive. Wealth wasn’t an option. Poverty and the economic times demanded a fight for work and a roof over each large family. My mother had two brothers and three sisters. Dad’s siblings numbered three brothers and three sisters that lived. There were seven other siblings that died within a few days of birth.

The stresses of such an existence took their toll on my grandparents; so much so that three of the four were dead before I was born and my paternal grandmother died very shortly thereafter. The circumstances of each of their deaths would testify to the difficulties in their lives.

William Sylvester Greenfield, my paternal grandfather, killed himself with a gun. It was May 4, 1940, when the burdens of life became too much. He was 59 years old. The event left my father, at 16 years of age, to take care of his mother, Alta Frances, and little sister, Lucille. Suddenly, Cecil’s days were spent scratching out an existence as the assumed head of the household. Yes, life changed dramatically for my dad on that fateful day in 1940.

My paternal grandmother survived until 1944. The toll of her hard life as a poverty-stricken farmer’s wife was heavy. Those years of grinding out a miserable existence, as described to me by my dad, just wore her down. She died of a stroke when she, too, was 59.

On the maternal side, my grandmother, Belle Brendel, died when my mother was 15 years old. It was an unnecessary loss caused by the accidental choking on a chicken bone. It left my mother devastated and basically alone. If her self-image had not begun to spiral down before her mother’s death, it certainly did afterward.

My mother’s father, James Brendel, was alcoholic, abusive, jobless, and dirt poor. Family was not his priority . . . alcohol was. As a result, my mother was driven into an estrangement from him that was never reconciled.

His dependence on alcohol killed my grandfather when I was about 11 years old. I only met him once when he came to visit my mother shortly before his death. It was a tense meeting as I recall. My high-strung, nervous mother could barely be civil to her father. He gave me a small, furry toy. When he left, my mother threw it away because she said it would be infested with fleas.

No wonder my parents were troubled as a couple. Their childhood had not served as a great example of how families should live and grow together. It was more about each member of the family doing their share of work and if earning a penny meant missing school, then so be it. As a result, neither of my parents was able to graduate from high school.

At the time of their very youthful marriage—Mother was 18 and Dad was 19—they weren’t ignorant, but they were simply lacking in strong family values and teaching supported by a formal education. It seems to me my parents’ marriage was an escape from family miseries to family miseries. They really weren’t able to sink deep in the saddle and keep riding together. Rather, they were like two wild horses kicking and biting to be free of one another.

As I reflect on the above family background, I recall a few brief flashes of my early childhood. For example, I have a vague memory of the apartment we lived in and I don’t recall liking it. It seemed to me to be old and rundown. I remember it was on the second floor of a tenement-like building and there was a small corner grocery store in part of the first floor.

I recall one piece of furniture, and that was the coffee table. It was made of some kind of wood and had a piece of glass inset on the top. It was dark in color, kind of like mahogany but it wasn’t of that quality. It seemed to me to be rather flimsy looking. There were wooden stairs outside the back door of the apartment, which was on the alley end of the building. These stairs were primarily for fire escape purposes. They were weathered and looked as flimsy as the coffee table. Standing at the top gave me vertigo. I didn’t know at the time what the word was to describe my feelings of instability but I’ve since learned. Given my impression of the whole building being flimsy, I’m surprised we never used those stairs to escape from a fire!