Title: THROUGH DANGEROUS DOORS
Author: Robert Charles Lee
Pages: 212
Genre: Memoir
Amazon:
https://amzn.to/3qQ165E
In a life defined by risk, Robert Charles Lee experiences a poor and free-ranging childhood in the racist South of the 1960s. After his father dies, the family grows dysfunctional. As a result, teen-age Robert seeks sanity and solace by rock climbing solo and driving cars fast. He wins a scholarship and graduates from university, but still seeks to escape the South.
Moving to Alaska and the Western US, Robert works in a series of dangerous and brutal jobs. He meets and marries Linda, who enjoys climbing and skiing difficult mountains as much as he does.
Simultaneously, Robert trains in the science of risk to become a respected professional risk scientist.
Robert shares his remarkable story as he guides the reader through a series of dangerous but rewarding doors, culminating in a vivid journey of adventure and risk.
The horse gallops across our range of a few acres. I’m exhilarated and barely hanging on, but my father, Charles, is watching. I go hunting with him, and he guffaws when I’m almost knocked flat by the recoil of my first deafening discharge of a twelve-gauge. I explore the copperhead-snake, wasp, hornet, tick, chigger, and poison ivy infested hardwood forest on our property. My feet and legs are bare much of the year. However, I tread carefully. The door to the outdoors opens. I’m six or seven years old, but I eagerly enter.
I was serious about managing risk, even as a kid. Life began as a late Boomer and a Fallout Boy. A B-52 bomber broke up over my home state in 1961, releasing two nuclear bombs. Above-ground nuclear weapons tests were conducted in the United States West, creating radioactive dust clouds. These events perhaps foretold a career steeped in radiation.
My family is of working-class, British and Scots-Irish ancestry; the original hillbillies in the Appalachians and Piedmont. My birthplace and time were subject to systemic White racism, resulting in the designation “Klansville, USA.” We lived near Salisbury in rural Granite Quarry, North Carolina, about a mile from the gated compound of Bob Jones, a powerful Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon. Jones was kicked out of the Navy for refusing to salute a Black officer, proclaiming, “I won’t salute no nigger.” Jones helped expand the North Carolina KKK to over ten-thousand members. A friend and I once snuck over to watch a cross-burning near his property.
If the neighborhood White men weren’t pickin’ and grinnin’, drinking and playing guitars and banjos on their porches on a Saturday night, they were hanging out with their bros in the local men’s Klub. I don’t recall any lynchings, but harassment and violence were common. The county sheriff was a Klan member, and wore a Western cowboy hat on his bald head and a patch over one dead eye. Chain-gangs broke rocks in the steaming Southern heat under the squinty eyes of shotgun-toting overseers on horseback. Most of the Black people in the area lived in segregation in the equivalent of a shanty town. Schools, churches, and most activities were segregated.
My family is purported to be related to the slaveowner and traitor General Robert E. Lee, but I’ve not been able to verify this. If true, I’m appalled in a moral sense, but there’s nothing I can do about it aside from trying to be an anti-racist and a good citizen. At least I don’t have the same middle name. I do indeed have a red neck, but solely due to years of outdoor activity.
My father, Charles, was no stranger to risk. He served as a United States Marine drill sergeant and war dog trainer in World War II. He was a marksman, boxer, expert swimmer, hunter, hunting dog trainer, fisherman, and horseman. As far as I can tell, he was good at whatever he tackled. He was a so-called “good ol’ boy,” but he was intelligent and wasn’t racist, which was itself risky in a racist society. He was raised in rural North Carolina and loved the outdoors. His brothers were also intelligent and interested in the natural world. Charles was a small-time homebuilder by profession, which had its dangers. He was struck by lightning once while working on the roof of a house and tumbled off, breaking his leg.
My mother, Frances, was the flaming red-haired, seventh daughter of a quarryman and his wife from Leicestershire, England. This resulted in unusual speech patterns and word usage for a Southern boy. I loved going to her father Pop’s cottage to visit. It was a pat of working-class, Old Blighty butter in a sea of hick grits.
Frances wasn’t as risk-seeking as Charles, but she loved him and indulged his lifestyle. Charles was a strong advocate of what’s now called free-range parenting, but he made sure the kids applied some common sense. My free-range childhood was the start of a long and winding road to rational risk management.
The family likely lived below the federal poverty level, but we grew vegetables, and hunted and fished for meat. I’m not sure whether we were called “White trash” or not. We lived in a small frame house Charles built, so we weren’t trailer trash. Charles was the alpha over the other five humans, a couple of horses, a dozen or so hunting hounds, several pet dogs and cats, a cow, chickens, and various wild animals we kids caught and eventually released. All those kids and animals required food, so this contributed to our poverty. I didn’t inherit Charles’s horse addiction, but my older sister did, and horses became the focus of her life. All the kids loved and still love dogs, the noblest of beasts.
Being an ex-Marine and a natural teacher, Charles taught the kids how to fight and shoot as early as possible. Marines specialize in those skills and consider them important. Part of the reason may have been a practical risk management strategy, given our family didn’t belong to the Klan tribe. These were dangerous times for Blacks, and to a lesser degree, Whites who didn’t buy into the systemic and often violent racism extant in the South.
Hunting was another reason for early firearms training. Charles owned a half dozen or so hunting rifles and shotguns he kept unlocked in open racks in our home. He kept unlocked guns on a rack in his pickup truck, as did many men. We would never have considered touching Charles’s guns without his permission. He taught us how to hunt and take care of guns as soon as we could pick them up. I received a twenty-two caliber rifle and a twenty-gauge shotgun of my own around the age of seven.
Packs of feral dogs prowled the countryside. Many families let their dogs roam, and didn’t neuter them. Chickens and other small animals were at risk from these packs, and occasionally the neighborhood men went dog hunting. Dog- and cockfighting were common, but my parents disapproved.
Charles never used physical punishment on me, unlike Frances, who later in life didn’t spare the rod. He was a powerful man, but I don’t recall seeing him pissed, or even in a bad mood. According to older relatives, he was hilarious, although I was too young to fully appreciate it. He referred to me as an “odd liddle feller,” an assessment that was and still is, accurate.
I was born left-handed. Back then, southpaw-ness was considered a mental and physical defect. Schools encouraged right-handedness, and Frances proclaimed, “I won’t have any left-handers in my house.” The basis for this policy was unclear, as were many of her stances. The sinister implications of being a lefty were never clear to me. I was hampered as an athlete until I ignored Frances and switched to using my left hand for throwing and other boyish activities. I still have unreadable, right-handed penmanship, but using the left would be worse.
A rural Southern accent is often associated with sub-normal intellect, bigotry, and other negative attributes. Many years ago, a dear, sweet Yankee friend from the North commented, “I’m amazed you became an academician, having such an accent.” At the time, I hadn’t lived in the South for twenty years. She had no idea this observation might be insulting or condescending. I’ve known others from the South to tamp down or discard their Southern accents due to negative perceptions, which ain’t easy. I never cared enough to bother, but my yokel-ish accent may have hampered my life in subtle ways.
Our family always made a yearly trip to the Appalachian Mountains, often in the fall when the hardwood forest blazed with color. A surefire way to tell somebody ain’t from around there is if they pronounce Appalachia with a long a sound on the third vowel. Our activities were largely limited to driving around, in the spirit of the 1950s and early 1960s. However, there were high points for an odd liddle feller. I wore a favorite sweater which I imagined to be my special protective mountain parka. Charles gave me an old masonry hammer I employed as an ice ax in mountain climbing fantasies when we stopped for breaks. This foreshadowed the pursuits that have consumed much of my adult life.
Once, the family was in the middle of a sketchy suspension bridge with big air underneath, between the two peaks of Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina. Charles started to swing the bridge back and forth, to the kids’ glee and Frances’s terror. To this day, I try to swing my wife, Linda, on any swingable bridge, but she demands I go across first. I’m my father’s child in many ways.
I called my parents “Mommy” and “Daddy” when I was liddle, but for reasons unclear, I started using their first names as a youth. Perhaps I was trying to distance myself from my mother, for reasons that will become clear. She also suffered a number of silly and obscure nicknames, including Chewie, which I don’t think was short for Chewbacca. I may have called her Frances just to be different.
My father died when I was eight, the year the Civil Rights Act passed. He died in his forties, victim of a hereditary kidney disease called glomerulonephritis, which skipped his sons due to genetic luck. The loss of my father plunged me into a maelstrom of involuntary risk.
Frances was a fine mother and partner to Charles when he was alive, but after he died, she was forced to work. She’d never worked in a formal job but had taken secretarial training at a junior college. She sold off most of the animals, Charles’s guns, a rental house he’d built, and most possessions of value. I doubt the family had any savings. Frances was unprepared for working and single parenthood, in both temperament and practical matters, so she hired a Black woman named Annie to babysit us and run the household. She was “the help.”
My two oldest siblings started to grow wild, but Annie kept me and my younger brother under control. She was a hefty, strong, and competent woman, somebody you didn’t want to mess with. As long as she commanded our respect, we continued to live a similar lifestyle as before.
Annie influenced my musical brain in the form of gospel and soul music she listened to on Black radio stations. I thought it was cool, and I enjoyed seeing her sway to the grooves and hearing her sing along. Later, when I became a musician, I appreciated how rare it is for music to speak from the depths of the soul.
While Charles was alive, the family attended both Lutheran and Episcopal churches, according to the preferences of my parents. The existence of two different Christian denominations in one small, rural town was due to settlement by immigrant quarrymen of German and British descent. I found the churches and their teachings interesting. They represented two interpretations of the same mythology, and I enjoyed some of the music.
After Charles died, though, I told Frances I didn’t believe any of the spiritual stuff. She was indifferent, so I backslid. I never saw any value in supernatural belief. Lack of belief was associated with risk, if I gave any credence to Blaise Pascal’s wager for the existence of a god or gods. I didn’t, and eternal damnation was and remains the absolute least of my worries. Much later though, I came to appreciate Pascal as a father of decision analysis.
Frances slipped into clinical depression and an anxiety disorder. She was deeply in love with Charles, and unprepared for working and raising four large, headstrong, and unruly kids. Frances did her best, but she wasn’t a strong woman. She was broken, and for years, was prescribed a bewildering cocktail of powerful and toxic drugs. It wasn’t until she was in her sixties that she was weaned off the drugs and her condition stabilized. Her eventual dementia could be partially attributed to drug use. Many elderly people take multiple prescription and nonprescription drugs, unaware of possible negative interactions. If they drink alcohol as well, they risk increased psychological and physical damage.
Modern medicine is miraculous, but it doesn’t always work as well as it should. My health risks due to medical errors increased. This has been a major source of involuntary risk throughout my life. The first I remember was a prescription error. We lived in a rural area with many species of grass which flowered much of the year, and I developed a severe grass pollen allergy. Our physician, who still had bathrooms labeled Men, Women, and Colored, as if the latter were a third gender, prescribed one-hundred milligram capsules of diphenhydramine (Benadryl) every few hours, the maximum recommended adult dose. Diphenhydramine is also used as a sleep aid. I was a child zombie as a result. Perhaps Frances found me more manageable when I was zombie-fied. I missed much of the second grade because I simply couldn’t think. I don’t remember when the dose was adjusted downward, but due to a lack of other effective antihistamines, I took diphenhydramine for years.
I compensated for the zombie-ness by self-medicating with large amounts of sugary and caffeine-laden soda, and sugar in general. This didn’t help my oral hygiene, and had other adverse effects. In grade school, fluoride treatment was made available. Without it, I could’ve been indentured by now. Fluoride was also added to toothpaste (Look, Mom, no cavities!). The result of the overuse of fluoride was mild fluorosis, manifesting as whiter spots on my teeth. A dentist from my childhood, whom I recall with clarity because he had unpleasantly large and hairy, ungloved fingers, tried to grind away the spots on my incisors until he realized they weren’t just on the surface.
A missed childhood diagnosis was myopia, which isn’t a sudden onset condition. My third-grade teacher finally alerted Frances to the fact I couldn’t see a damn thing. Being able to see clearly with prescription lenses opened doors to many new worlds.
Frances loved to read, and she had a small library including a complete set of encyclopedias, which I read often. I read the entire King James Bible, as well as Greek, Roman, Norse, and other mythologies. I read everything I could find. I read the dictionary when I couldn’t find anything else. All this reading was a positive thing. Rural Southern schools back then weren’t exactly paragons of learning. History and social studies curricula were laughable, especially with regard to slavery and racism. “Fake news” isn’t a new invention. My voracious reading balanced the risks associated with a poor education, which can persist throughout life.
Back then, a Southern boy who didn’t play football, baseball, or basketball was considered a lower phylum of life. Confused hand dominance impeded my sports ability, but I also wore glasses and did well in academics. I was therefore branded as a nerd, a significant psychological and social impediment. These days, it’s cool to be a nerd, but certainly not then. I was excluded from the athletes’ tribe, and always picked last for teams.
This was devastating, but perhaps fortunate. There’s no better way to put a kid at risk for a lifetime of physical pain and dysfunction than to let them engage in contact team sports. Once I shifted to left-handed athletic activities, I became more proficient in baseball and softball. This was bad enough, considering the risk of high-speed balls hitting sensitive parts of the body such as the nuts and noggin. I wore a cup, but good batting helmets weren’t common when I played Little League baseball. My left shoulder and elbow suffered from throwing hard with poor form and little muscle. I was never good in true contact sports such as basketball or football, which was fortunate. Kids are at much greater risk for injury playing these sports.
The risks added up. Many were then uncertain, at least among the general public, such as health effects associated with tobacco use. One way to make a little money during the season was pulling, or harvesting, tobacco, a major crop in North Carolina. I started work before the age of ten, toiling alongside mostly Black adult laborers. Between sweating bullets in the torrid Carolina climate and getting tobacco plant sap all over my hands and arms, I recall being quite buzzed. The nicotine in the ’baccy countered my diphenhydramine zombie-ness. Most of the adult men, including Charles, smoked and chewed tobacco, as did many boys. The rate of lung and oral cancer must have been whopping. Chewie refused to kiss Charles until he spit out his chewbacca. I chewed ’baccy once I started playing Little League. All the boys did. If they didn’t enjoy it, they chewed to avoid being ostracized. It’s surprising I never became addicted, although there’s likely a genetic component to tobacco addiction.
It’s impossible to estimate my personal cumulative risk associated with all the toxic stuff I was exposed to in the 1950s and 1960s. I’m uncertain exactly what I was exposed to or in what amounts.
Environmental protection regulations didn’t exist, and food safety was rudimentary. The family lived on the edge of the higher radon zone in North Carolina, on top of granite with radioactive minerals as part of its composition. Our house was ridden with asbestos, including the siding and flooring, and perhaps the roofing and insulation. Lead from gasoline and paint was everywhere, as were numerous other chemicals later banned. Many substances later found to be toxic existed in prepared foods at the time.
I begged for and received a chemistry set for Christmas one year and proceeded to alchemize foul and toxic-fumed concoctions. I used an asbestos heat-diffusing pad over my Bunsen burner when boiling these brews. I melted lead, because it was interesting to transform a metal to liquid. I soldered wires in old electronic equipment, resulting in more lead fume exposure and potential electrocution. I tried to make gunpowder, but only succeeded in exposing myself to choking smoke. We burned most of our trash in old oil barrels, and I threw in objects or substances that exploded or caused fireballs or stunk. I collected mercury from old switches, thermometers, and other sources, acquiring a fat marble-size ball to play with. As a junior rockhound, I collected radioactive uranium minerals found in North Carolina pegmatite.
I explored under the house and in old abandoned buildings contaminated with pesticides. Frances didn’t let us ride our bikes behind the dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT-fogging trucks patrolling the streets during mosquito season, like many other neighborhood kids. Although DDT per se wasn’t likely to be particularly toxic to the kids, at least in an acute sense, I’m not sure what organic solvent mixture was employed to dissolve the insecticide. Multiple solvents were often used, some of which were nasty. Any one of these chemical risks may not have been of particular concern, but cumulative risk should have been. Whether these experiences started me down the road to a career in toxicology, is lost in the pesticidal fog of history.
I still owned firearms. There were no shooting ranges. I just went out into the woods or a field and blew away inanimate objects. Good thing there were no passersby. I had an aversion to shooting animals, if not humans. I engaged in BB gun wars with neighbor kids, which seemed safer than using a shotgun. Nobody experienced having an “eye put out” or was seriously injured, despite a lack of protective gear. Anybody who wore goggles or padding would’ve been laughed at.
There were always firecrackers. Solid fuel model rocket kits were popular at the time, but I took rocketry a step further into weaponry and rigged powerful firecrackers called M-80s to ignite when the rocket fuel was expended. Small rockets were cheap to build and thus disposable. My friend Keith, who would one day save my life, once shot a cow with a large, non-explosive model rocket. His expensive rocket was trashed, but the cow was unharmed.
In addition to minor crashes, I suffered my first major bicycle accident when I sped down a steep hill on my banana bike. I slammed into the driver’s door of a parked car just as it swung open and went airborne. The driver yelled at me for screwing up his door. I was stunned and suffered major road rash, and my cherished bike was totaled.
As a good junior scientist, I read the classic book Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif, which inspired me to grow colorful and smelly fungal and bacterial forests. This probably didn’t help my allergies. Annie caught me sterilizing my own piss in one of the household cooking pots, for use in a culture medium. After a “Lawd, Robert, what in sweet Jesus are you messin’ with now!” I received a good whuppin’. The whuppin’ is why this event stands out in my memory. Punishment, however, didn’t dampen my fascination with living things.
My diet suffered after Charles died. While he was alive and healthy, the family had a substantial garden, a dairy cow, and chickens, plus we hunted and fished. For my first seven or eight years, I ate a good diet, if heavy in grease, as was most Southern cooking. Once Frances started working, processed food largely replaced her wholesome country cooking. We contributed to the decline of the Atlantic cod, eating boxes of frozen fish sticks. Lord knows what was in hot dogs and sausage back then. White bread, white rice, white pasta. Frozen vegetables boiled to tastelessness. Barely edible TV dinners. Pounds of sugar from soda, candy, and desserts. I was so skinny, I developed ulcers on my butt from sitting in hard school desk chairs. Things might’ve been different if I’d experienced a good diet and stable family life during my childhood and teen years. I might’ve grown inches taller and many pounds heavier in muscle, possessed better teeth, and been much smarter. I coulda been a contender.
I grew tall, regardless. I’m sure there were advantages, but it’s been my experience that being at the ninety-eighth percentile for an American male’s height (six-foot-three) is associated with health risks. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve hit my head on low-clearance obstacles. My scalp has significant scar tissue. My wife, Linda, tries to get me to wear a helmet at all times. I don’t think I’ve ever suffered major concussions, or at least none I can remember, but I’ve come close. The world is engineered for the average, a uniformity of design contributing to my current neck and back issues. I suffer a stiff neck after parties and other social gatherings from bending over to converse with shorter folks.
***
Schools were integrated while I was in elementary school. The overtly racist George Wallace won a straw poll in my class before the 1968 presidential election. My aunt, neighbor, and grade-school teacher claimed, “Those little niggers just cain’t learn.” This was more a reflection of her lame teaching skills and racist attitudes than any inherent learning difficulties among students of color.
In Granite Quarry, riots didn’t erupt after schools were integrated, but a lot of friction existed and plenty of fights broke out. For example, in junior high I saw four White high school football players beat the hell out of a Black friend my age who happened to be talking to a White girl. I started to intervene, but my friend warned me off and just took the beating. It’s fortunate he wasn’t severely injured.
I was never threatened by Black kids. However, I was threatened several times with beatings and torture, such as having my head dunked into a filthy toilet, by other White kids. The bullies included White racist kids with Klan parents who threatened me for my refusal to join them in talking shit, or worse, about Blacks. Klan begat Klan. I managed to avoid fights with them by taking an aggressive posture, balling my fists, and silently staring down my enemies. I suppose I received some mental reward from taking the moral high ground, or maybe I just didn’t enjoy being fucked with, an attitude that persists to this day.
Yep, silent staring worked. They may have thought I was deranged, but after the first couple of times, I learned a valuable lesson. It’s possible to intimidate yourself out of confrontation. Intimidation didn’t always work, especially in fights with my brothers. It nearly always did outside the family, and served me well throughout life when dealing with male assholes. Avoiding fights was probably wise, as I have a bad temper. Allowing anger to take hold isn’t the best defensive strategy. Early exposure to violent White racism on the part of local adults and my Klan Kid Klassmates also influenced my lifelong hatred of racism and bigotry in general. Bigotry is among the ugliest of human attributes.
***
Frances dated a lot of men. I didn’t want to know why, although she was probably desperately lonely and sick of being a single mom. I don’t recall the parade of men with clarity. Some might have been nice guys, but I found her behavior repulsive. I withdrew more in response to her becoming weirder due to her mental state and the crude drugs she was prescribed, but also to my siblings becoming wilder. I was active, but wasn’t particularly athletic. I grew tall and looked emaciated by the time I was in junior high school. I was self-conscious and slumped. It took twenty years of yoga and physiotherapy to straighten myself out.
I found talking to girls difficult, despite having female friends in the neighborhood. I didn’t understand that girls were just people. Frances thought I was odd for not having girlfriends and tried to set me up with daughters of friends, which made things worse.
I just wanted to escape my family, but I needed a door.
