In My Time - Dick Cheney [9]
My dad home on leave from the Navy during World War II with my mom, brother Bob and me in Sumner, Nebraska.
We had a fine time, chasing chickens, floating corncob ships in the horse tank, and following Elmer everywhere. The farm wasn’t mechanized, and Bob and I got to ride around on the horse-pulled wagon. Uncle Elmer took naps in the afternoon, and I would lie down beside him, hooking a finger in his belt loop so that I would know if he got up. Every afternoon I would wake to find he was gone, and I’d run out of the house looking for him. I’d find him someplace in the farmyard, wearing his big straw hat, smiling, and holding out his arms, ready to lift me into the air.
My mother loved San Diego. She got to see her husband and had a great adventure, traveling farther than she ever had, seeing the ocean for the first time, and watching the San Diego Padres play. Her scrapbook is full of red and white Padres programs in which she carefully kept score.
What had been planned as a two-week visit turned into a two-month stay, and wonderful as life at Mildred and Elmer’s was, Bob and I missed our mom. One hot August day we decided that she had been gone entirely too long, and we were going to hitchhike to California to see her. We made it to the highway, but were intercepted before we managed to catch a ride. In fact, our adventure was interrupted at just about the time she was starting home. While she was changing trains in Ogden, Utah, she heard the news that Japan had surrendered. The war was over, and the Cheney family would soon be reunited.
DEMOBILIZATION PROCEEDED ON A last in, last out basis, so my father wasn’t discharged until April 1946. When he got back to Lincoln, he found there was a severe postwar housing shortage, and we were lucky to have friends offer us their unfinished basement. My mother cooked on a hot plate, and we shared a single bathroom with the family upstairs until my folks found a five-room tract house that was going up in the suburb of College View. We would drive out in the ’37 Buick that Dad had inherited from an uncle and impatiently watch our new home being built.
Our street in College View dead-ended in a woods that had what we called a stream running through it. In fact, our “stream” was really a drainage ditch for storm sewers, but it provided some fine crawdad fishing for the many neighborhood kids. The woods also provided opportunities to explore and climb, and there were hours when we covered considerable distances by stepping or jumping from tree to tree without ever touching the ground. In the winter a long, wide, sloping street in College View provided a terrific hill for sledding.
Granddad Dickey visited, one time pushing a stray mutt he’d found into our living room and letting my mother get used to the idea before he came inside himself. We named the dog Butch, and his claim to fame was his ability to sit up in a variety of places, from a bicycle seat to the palm of your hand. Our neighbors gave us a cat that was nearly as big as Butch, and the two developed a wary relationship. There was a throw rug on the hall floor, and whenever Butch saw the cat positioned just right, he’d run for the throw rug, landing on it so that he would slide down the hall and smack into the cat.
I don’t remember much of my early schooling, but a kindergarten report card my mother saved notes that I seemed “a little self-conscious when speaking before the group.” As the year progressed, I was “speaking more confidently,” asking “worthwhile questions,” and, apparently, showing persistence. “Richard does not give up easily,” Miss Korbel wrote. She also noted that I had good health habits. “He always tries to sit and stand correctly and to use his handkerchief in the right way.” My third-grade teacher, Miss Duffield, gave me top-notch grades in English, arithmetic, reading, and social studies, and although she noted that my work in art and music wasn’t all it could be, she still concluded, “I have enjoyed working with Dicky this year. He has the qualifications for a good leader.”
All the kids in College