Although I didn't think so at the time, I was privileged to have a younger sibling rather unxpectedly join the Sutherland family in 1948. I say 'unexpectedly' because my parents were surprised by this development as well. After having spawned four children roughly two years apart in the first years of their marriage, Ken and Fran Sutherland – both well past the age of 35 – thought they were through with having any more kids. Well... SURPRISE!
I guess the birth of little brother Rex kind of upset my 9-year-old apple cart. For over nine years I had been the “baby” of the family and I had grown accustomed to all the attention, coddling and protection that position bestowed upon me. Then this squalling little red-haired blob of protoplasm pops onto the scene... and there goes my pampered status!
Not only that, but there went my semi-private bedroom! When Dad bought the house at 210 Woodland Ave. In late 1945, there were just three bedrooms on the second floor. The main room at the head of the stairs was large enough for two twin beds, so that room was shared by myself and my next oldest brother, Dick. The two smaller, but private, bedrooms were assigned to oldest brother, Bill, and my sister, Fay. There was a third door leading off the main bedroom, but that was to an unfinished attic. However, Dad and a local area friend and carpenter began work on the attic in 1946 and over the next few months turned the unfinished attic into a very cool knotty pine bedroom! Naturally, I wanted that bedroom for myself, but age hath its privileges... so Brother Dick moved into the neatest of all the upstairs bedrooms. At least, that left me with my own semi-private bedroom. I say semi-private because anyone going to any of the other three bedrooms had to troop through my bedroom. Also, there was no 2nd floor bathroom, so anyone needing to make a potty visit during the night did so through my bedroom. Still and all, it was MY bedroom!
Until the fall of 1948. Then that 2nd twin bed was replaced by a crib and that darling little pooping, peeing crybaby became my roommate! Ohhh... the humanity!!
But, as anyone from a large family knows, you gotta make accomodations. I believe all of us older siblings, at one time or another, took our turn at changing the baby's diapers. At age 9 I really didn't do that very much; perhaps two or three times and then only with Mom's supervision. Big sister, Fay, was the one who helped out the most with that messy chore.
Baby Rex was somewhat remarkable because he came out of the womb with rather bright red hair which never fell away as “baby” hair frequently does. He continued to sport bright red hair until well into middle age when... ALAS! His pate began taking over!
WHOOAA!! I'm getting way ahead of myself! This chapter is supposed to focus on the YOUNG Rex.
Actually, Rex really was a very cute kid. Besides the striking red hair, he had bright blue eyes and a captivating smile... whenever he wasn't bawling. It did seem to me that he would get upset and start crying over ANYTHING! When he first started actively crawling around and bumped into a wall or a chair... there came the waterworks! He had a lot of baby toys, of course, and he seemed to like it whenever I would sit down to play with him. But when I would focus my attention on one toy; then he would immediately want THAT toy. If I didn't immediately relinquish it... there came the waterworks! As an insensitive 9-year-old, sometimes I didn't feel like giving him the toy right away and just looked at him while holding the toy. That always resulted in an increased volume of squalling. And THAT always brought a rebuke from Mom or Dad. “Oh, Guy, just GIVE it to him!!!”
Little Rexie started wobbling around on his feet as he approached the one year mark. Naturally, I and my older siblings encouraged this by having him grip our fore fingers on either hand with his pudgy little fists while steering him around the room. I probably did this more than the others. I was now ten years old, but the older sibs had other interests to pursue and didn't spend as much time with “the baby” as I did. I guess I've always liked playing around with kids. Even crabby ones.
If I am to be honest, I must admit to developing a little sadism when it came to dealing with Rex's penchant for crying over everything. It was so easy to tease him to tears! As a beginning toddler he developed a strange practice for a few months whenever he got frustrated... which was often! And not just from teasing, but from any failed attempt at anything. He would start crying and then he would get to his feet and lean forward putting his hands on the floor in an all-fours position... and then start banging his forehead on the floor! Of course, after three or four bangs that hurt, he would flop back onto his butt and wail loudly! This maneuver took us all by
surprise the first couple of times we saw it... but, DARN! It was kinda funny!! Watching his older siblings laugh at him probably didn't ease his frustrations.
Mom didn't think it was so funny when he put on such a display and would go comfort him while admonishing the rest of us for laughing. In retrospect, I wonder if her consolation wasn't what caused him to persist with these periodic head-bangings. I don't know. Maybe he liked the pain! In any case, that weird behavior only lasted for a couple of months before Rex outgrew it... literally. As he got bigger and steadier on his feet the world became more interesting and enjoyable for him.
And for me too. Lord knows horsing around has been a favorite activity for all growing boys and I served as Rex's “horsie” countless times. Sometimes the rough-and-tumble got a little too rough and tears would result along with parental chastisement, but there was no end to the horsing around.
Now lets fast-forward a few years to my wannabe scientist period. The year is 1954 and I am 14 years old. Rex is a skinny, gangly five-year-old; kinda tall for his age. “What is so rare as a day in June?” It is either late spring or early summer because I remember the weather was quite warm. I had just finished up my freshman year. Rex was no longer a drop-of-the-hat crybaby. Of course, if something really hurt him he would squawk like any other kid.
In an earlier chapter I mentioned that Dad was a pharmaceutical salesman. He worked for a well established company called Wyeth, Inc., which was part of another conglomerate called American Home Products. I believe that Wyeth, Inc. has more recently been gobbled up by Phizer, a really huge drug conglomerate. At any rate, there was an alcove in the Sutherland basement reserved for the literature, pamphlets, samples, etc., pertaining to the many pharmaceutical products that Dad sold to drug stores, doctors and hospitals in northwest Ohio. As a curious boy I would browse through the material in Dad's alcove from time to time. I was intrigued by the colorful illustrations in many of those pamphlets depicting internal organs and the effects that various diseases or injuries could inflict on them. Brrrr...! That alcove was also where I obtained the small sample medicine bottles used in my first little “bombs”.
Another item in that alcove caught my eye: a shiny chrome metal syringe! Each syringe came in its own little box that Wyeth marketed as their “Tubex Syringe”. The plunge handle top of the syringe would fold over so that a cylindrical cartridge with a hypodermic needle attached could be smoothly slid into the syringe. The plunge handle would then be clicked back into place and a dose of medicine, vaccine or whatever was ready for injection. Dad also had samples of hypo cartridges containing nothing but distilled water. Naturally, I just had
to experiment!
The first time I pushed the syringe handle down on a Tubex cartridge of distilled water I discvered that the water would shoot out in a thin stream, but the stream was deflected by the sharp angular end of the hypodermic needle. So I used wire cutters to cut off the end of the needle and square off the tiny needle hole. The rubber plunger inside the Tubex cartridge also had a small, threaded metal tip at its center so that the syringe handle could be screwed onto the plunger... thus allowing the plunger to be drawn back to the top of the cartridge. The reason for this was to extract medicine from a dosage bottle into an empty cartridge. I dipped my modified needle tip into a cup of water and refilled the cartridge. When I pushed hard on the syringe handle, I was able to shoot a thin, straight stream of water over 25 feet! MUCH further than any squirt gun of the time!
Since I was already into making little bombs, my reckless mind immediately started thinking of a military application. This syringe just might make a nifty little flamethrower! I acquired a bottle of rubbing alcohol and on a quiet day with no one else in the house – Mom had gone grocery shopping, taking Rex with her – I tried squirting a stream of flaming alcohol from one end of the basement to the other. No success. Rubbing alcohol is mixed with some percentage of water and trying to light a one-second stream of it with my left hand holding a
lit match while my right hand did the squirting gave me NO control over the ignition process! Another example of how my own ineptitude probably prevented a disaster! However, in fooling around with the syringe I squirted some alcohol onto my shirt and was impressed by the immediate cooling sensation I felt from the rapid evaporation of the alcohol. I tuccked away the rubbing alcohol and modified syringe into a corner of the basement.
So now comes a warm spring day; school is out and, unlike my ambitious older brother, Dick, I am not steadily employed yet. The house is relatively empty because my two oldest siblings have left the nest. Fay got married in December of '52 and Bill had joined the Marine Corps earlier in the year. Dad was out working and Mom was housecleaning or something. And, as usual, my pesky little brother was following me around as his main source of entertainment.
We horsed around the back yard for a while until I got bored with that. We were both getting a little hot and sweaty. We were both wearing T-shirts. Then I remembered the syringe and bottle of rubbing alcohol I had stashed in the basement. I thought it would be a great joke if I surprised the little stinker with a squirt of cooling alcohol across his front! So I used some excuse to get away from him for a couple of minutes. I don't recall how; maybe a wild goose chase. He wasn't that hard to fool! At any rate, as soon as he was out of sight, I made a bee line for the basement knowing that when he couldn't find me he would check there before long.
I retrieved the syringe and alcohol bottle from atop a storage cabinet at the end of the long room that took up half of the basement. Rex would be coming through a doorway near the other end of that room... about 15 to 20 feet away. I filled my syringe with alcohol and stood there waiting... probably with an evil smile on my face. I didn't have long to wait.
I heard Rex coming through the rear screen door of the house. He stopped on the landing at the head of the stairway into the basement. He shouted down the stairs with the voice of a very annoyed little boy. “Guu..uy! Where are you?!!”
I answered in a voice of malicious sweetness: “Down here, Rexie!”
The little sucker scrambled down the stairs, across the first basement room and through the doorway into the long room where he stood facing me with a questioning look on his face. I said, “SURPRISE!” and pushed the plunger of my syringe... aiming for his chest.
Unfortunately, my aim was a little high. The thin stream of alcohol cut across his face and hit one of his eyes! I'm not sure, but I think it was his right eye. I remarked earlier that if Rex got got hurt he would squawk. What immediately followed my alcohol squirt was NOT a squawk. It was a blood-curdling scream! Worthy of any grade B horror film!
It wreaked an instant change in my attitude. “Oh, Rexie... GEEEZE, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to...” And then, realizing that Mom was upstairs; me in a low voice: “C'mon! Shhhh... Quiet down!” Waaaaay too late for that ploy! The first blood-curdler had her charging for the basement!
He was still loudly wailing with his palms pressed against his eyes when she arrived. “GUY!!! What in the world did you DO?!”
I stood there, wilting, with the smoking gun (i.e. syringe) still in my hand! I gestured with it lamely. “I... I... I only squirted a little alcohol at him. I didn't think it would, uhhh.....” I had no defense!
Mom gave me a murderous glare and quickly hustled her little boy upstairs to the bathroom to wash out his wounded eye. Knowing how royally I had just screwed up, I chose to just slink around the cool dimness of the basement, nursing a sudden depression.
Since Dad worked for Wyeth, Inc., the Sutherland family had several Wyeth products in its bathroom medicine cabinet. One of these was an eye wash solution called Collyrium. It came in a dark blue bottle that even had its own detachable oval cup to be used as a convenient small bowl that could be pressed against the facial orbit around an eye so the head could be tilted backwards while Collyrium worked its magical, soothing wonders to the eyeball. This snazzy little eye cup came attached to the top cap of the Collyrium bottle. But that made
the bottle too tall to fit onto any of the little shelves inside our medicine cabinet. So the eye cup had been removed from the top of the bottle and put on a shelf by itself.
There was another Wyeth product in our medicine cabinet called Sopranol anti-fungal solution. This was a treatment for athletes foot. For some unknown reason, Wyeth chose to market this product in the same color of dark blue bottle that Collyrium came in. Of course, it had a different lable identifying it as Sopranol.
I sulked around the basement long room for about a minute after Mom and Rex left. I could faintly hear Rex blubbering through the floor boards of the bathroom overhead. Then I heard a primal HOWL that raised the hair on the back of my neck! I also heard an, “Oh, NO!” from Mom. I'm thinking, “GEEZUS! Did she poke his eye out?!!” I started shivering with guilt and fear. I was too fearful to go upstairs to find out what happened.
The screams abated after a minute or so and things got quiet. I continued skulking in the basement; horrible scenarios racing through my mind. A few minutes later I heard Mom coming down the basement stairs. She entered the long room and faced me with a reproachful look. But I could see some guilt in her demeaner as well. She had been crying. She explained that in her haste she had confused the Sopranol bottle with the Collyrium and initially bathed Rex's alcohol-abused eye with anti-fungal solution! But subsequent eyecups-full of Collyrium seemed to have the desired effect. Rexie was put to bed for a much-needed nap.
I endured another heartfelt lecture from Mom where she stressed the need for me to be CAREFUL when playing with my little brother and to NOT give in to stupid, impulsive spur-of-the-moment stunts! I stood there in slouched, hangdog posture muttering, “I'm sorry. I KNOW, Mom... I'm SORRY!”
But I guess all's well that ends well.
And, HEY, Brother Rex. I AM sorry you suffersuffered through a double dose of painful chemicals in your eye. But you gotta admit: you've never had a case of athletes eye!