The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy

IN THOSE DIFFICULT YEARS, Studebaker’s declining years, Herb and Lorna had much to worry about, and worrying changed them. I didn’t notice the change; during those years I passed from childhood into adolescence, and I was far too interested in the ways that I was changing to notice what was happening to them. ... Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Pe...

     “I finished some pieces anyway,” said Lorna, “but they weren’t very good, and while I was working I began to see that there was another problem. I wasn’t going to be able to bring myself to sell them. My face would get flushed and my hands would start shaking whenever I even imagined selling them. Where on earth would I find people to buy them? Not ‘people.’ Women. It would have to be women....

THE ESSENCE of the Piper failing was a tendency to let the heart rule the mind. We all suffer from this disease at some times, to some degree. It has consequences other than bad investments. It makes some of us write books and compose music and paint pictures. It makes some of us try to restore two-hundred-year old wooden houses or twenty-year-old British sports cars. It makes some of us fall in l...

     When the Spotters bought, the price of Studebaker stock was low, Studebaker sales were low, and the company had debts of more than fifty million dollars. When the Lark was released, the picture began to change. Larks sold. Studebaker stock rose. The company moved into the black. The Spotters did well. They did so well that, secretly, each began buying more stock on his own. ... Get full acces...

     On one of the Club evenings, divorced from Lorna’s cautious skepticism, Herb succumbed to the Piper failing. He let himself be convinced that the Spotters’ buying a few shares of stock was an undertaking free of risk, since they would only invest money that they had already lost. That was the essence of the argument advanced by Bob Schoop, who proposed the venture. ... Get full access to The...

In Which Herb and Lorna Come to the Brink of Despair AFTER A POSTWAR SLUMP, the demand for slide rules began to pick up, and Edwin Berwick asked Lorna to return to work. At about the time when she began her new duties as supervisor of the cursor department at Hargrove Slide Rules, technology took another step toward the slide rule’s eventual obsolescence when the first programmable computer — that...

     Every fall, during those years when Bert and Ella and I had lived with Herb and Lorna, all five of us would drive upstate to buy firewood. Herb had constructed a small trailer just for hauling wood, and he and Bert, with the help and advice of Lorna and Ella, would get this hitched to the car the night before, so that we could leave before dawn the next day. ... Get full access to The Persona...

WHEN Bert and Ella and I were settled in a little house of our own, Herb and Lorna were alone at last, truly private for the first time ever. On their first night alone, Herb began bustling around as soon as he got home from work, laying a fire in the fireplace, plumping the pillows on the sofa, humming “Lake Serenity Serenade,” while he worked. Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures,...

     Herb sold what he had on hand, but he had no way at all to sell any new designs. His Uncle Ben had been dead for eleven years. Since Herb wasn’t about to risk trying to make a coarse-goods connection of his own in Chacallit, his new designs never went any further than sketches, and the sketches never went any farther than the bottom of the metal box that he kept under his workbench. ... Get f...

     Lorna returned to Chacallit and visited her Uncle Luther. She was able to sell him everything she had on hand, but Luther was seventy-three now, ill, and nearly blind. He hadn’t been active in the coarse-goods business for nearly thirteen years. He squinted through an enormous magnifying glass at the pieces Lorna had brought, and he told her that he didn’t consider these anywhere near the qua...

     Herb kept a metal box on the shelf under his workbench in the cellar. It was painted green, with a white skull and crossbones painted on the top. Once, he opened this box for me, and explained, with firm seriousness, that I must never open it myself because the jars and tins and bottles in it held acids and other chemicals that could burn me, even kill me. Get full access to The Personal Hist...

     Nor did I see that there was tension in the house. I was happy there. I supposed that everyone else was, and supposing it to be so, I saw it as so. I would never have imagined that, one night, Herb lay in bed, awake, imagining how Bert and Ella must feel, at night, lying in bed in the room down the hall, inhibited by the fact of their living in his house, forced to be so quiet, so contained,...

HERB BUILT ME A MODEL of Speedy’s Reliable Service. It was wonderfully complete. There were wooden cars, gas pumps with little rubber hoses, an air pump with a thinner red hose, cans of oil and antifreeze on the shelves inside, a grease rack, tires, tools, a trash heap of engine parts and old tires in the back, and best of all, miniatures of Mr. Nuts and Miss Gumball. Tiny pebbles that Lorna had c...

FOR THE NEXT FIVE YEARS, Bert and Ella and I lived with Herb and Lorna. The automobile business entered a boom period right after the war. Business was brisk at Babbington Studebaker, and Herb was able to get Bert a job there, in the service department. He and Bert left for work together every morning and came home together every night. My mother and grandmother stayed at home, kept house, and too...

ELLA AND BERT were married in a month. They had no money, and Bert had no job. They couldn’t afford a place of their own, so they were going to have to live either with Bert’s parents or with Ella’s. “Oh, Mother,” said Ella, “I couldn’t live there. I’d feel so funny if we did. I’d always be thinking about — about Buster. It is a nice place. They have lots of room — it’s a big house — three bedroom...

      My God, she thought, what if he’s fallen in love with Ella? When she had sent Ella to Dudley’s, she hadn’t fully considered what might result, she had just had an inspired idea for pulling Ella up from the dumps she was down in. Since then, she had begun to wonder whether she had done the right thing. ... Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Pete...

ONE AFTERNOON a couple of weeks later, while a team at the University of Pennsylvania was hard at work on the first electronic computer (the “electronic numerical integrator and calculator,” or ENIAC), thereby hastening the eventual obsolescence of the slide rule, Lorna was alone in the kitchen, whipping up a batch of potato salad and listening to The Loves of Ellen Burch on the radio. Dudley appe...

     “Ella,” said Lorna, “have you spoken to Dudley recently?” There was concern in her voice. “No,” said Ella. “I haven’t. Why do you ask?” “Oh, I don’t know,” said Lorna. She stepped into the room and walked to the window. She stood there a moment, looking across at Dudley’s living room window. She sighed. “He seems awfully down in the dumps to me. I wondered what you thought.” ... Get full acce...

LORNA WAS LESS SUCCESSFUL in cheering Ella up. She had been able to lead May to what she needed, the pleasure of society, but Ella needed Buster, and that was something no one could supply. Ella spent hours lying on her bed, her hands clasped behind her head, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. When she was up, she walked through the house in silence. ... Get full access to The Personal History, Advent...

THE NEXT NIGHT, at Whitey’s, Lorna told May about her soap carvings, and then she went on to tell her all the rest, the whole story of her work in coarse goods. They were facing each other, sitting in a wooden booth, one of several along the wall opposite the bar. They became more and more animated as Lorna’s story progressed and May consumed Manhattans. At last Lorna said, “I’ll bet you think I’m...

     May turned to look at her, just for a moment. Lorna put a smile on her face. “It is hopeless,” she said. She laughed. “It’s a hopeless situation, but you don’t have to feel miserable about it. Maybe we should feel miserable about it, but I don’t — not any more.” “Oh?” said May. “Did you meet a man in Baltimore?” “No!” said Lorna. She grinned in the dark. “I — found something to — keep me goin...

MAY CASTLE met Lorna’s train at the Babbington station. It was the last week of January. Snow was falling in fat, wet, heavy clumps. On the ground, the flakes turned to slush. May and Lorna greeted each other quickly, hugged briefly on the platform, and then rushed across the parking lot to May’s Chrysler, threw Lorna’s luggage onto the back seat, and climbed in.     “Whew!” said May. “What a nigh...

     Ella got out of bed and pulled her robe on. She stood in the hall for a moment, listening. She heard her father’s voice, but it seemed to come from farther away than the dining room, and he was saying very little, not much more than “yes” and “I understand.” He came back to the hall. “What is it, Daddy?” she whispered. ... Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Obs...

     Lorna was enjoying herself, seated at the center of a group of calculating women, working on a soap carving — it depicted the woman who had requested it in the passionate embrace of Gary Cooper — when Herb’s call came through. She and Herb decided that she should arrange to return home at once and that Herb should wake Ella and tell her the awful news. ... Get full access to The Personal Hist...

BUSTER LEROY DROWNED when his ship, a destroyer escort, was torpedoed in the North Atlantic. The news came one Wednesday evening, while Herb was in the dining room at home, playing Piper Poker with the Spotters Club, some spotters who had begun getting together every Wednesday evening. ... Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy....