My youngest brother, James Rex Sutherland, was born September 23rd, 1948, and was a little over nine years younger than myself. He was the fifth of five siblings and his appearance was quite a surprise to the Sutherland family as Mom was 45 years old and thought she was all through with having kids. Then along comes this red-haired little cherub to disrupt a well established family routine... and steal my place as the pampered baby of the family!
Baby Rex got off to a bit of a rocky start because his little lungs didn’t work so well and he had to spend some time in an oxygen tent at Toledo Hospital before he could be brought home. At that time it was a very serious condition that might have been fatal to a newborn. I remember one morning sitting at the breakfast table with the family in an uncharacteristically quiet and somber mood. Dad finished eating and got up from the table with a worried face. Mom still sat quietly in her chair beside him looking at her plate. Dad felt compelled to say something to the rest of us. “Well, I guess I’ll drive into the hospital and get the verdict.” Mom’s shoulders jerked and she immediately started crying softly. Dad got a very perplexed expression on his face as he instantly regretted his choice of words. He put comforting hands on Mom’s shoulders. She quickly rose from her chair and headed straight for their bedroom. She never liked letting us kids see her cry.
Well, of course the “verdict” was favorable and Baby Rex was released a day or so later and came home to a doting family. I even thought the little red-headed bugger was kinda cute myself. I didn’t realize at the time that as the next sibling up the chain, I was going to get stuck with an unfair amount of baby-sitting!
Actually, all four siblings got their turn at bottle-feeding Baby Rexie after he was weaned off breast milk. And that probably happened a lot sooner than it did with us four older kids because by the time Rex came along Dad was a salesman for Wyeth Inc. and one of their best-selling products was SMA baby formula. It must have been good stuff because Rex sure grew up big and strong!
While Rex was still a toddler he interacted with me more than the three oldest siblings. After all, they were 11, 13 and 15 years older than Baby Rex and all had pretty busy lives of their own. Mom was always busy as mother of a fair-sized family and always present around the house to tend to Rex. But when I wasn’t at school, she usually told me to keep an eye on Rexie while she was doing this, that or the other. After Rex got big enough to crawl and then walk, I didn’t mind looking after him because he was fun to horse around with. And... yeah; he was SO teaseable!
I don’t know if all siblings have a bit of a cruel streak in them when it comes to dealing with younger ones; but I guess I was guilty. I think it started out with just the two of us playing with his first simple toys; like building blocks. Rex could put blocks together in simple shapes to form squares or rectangles and even stack them two or three high. I would then use his blocks to build something a little more complex... like a triangular wall. Rex would try to copy whatever I was doing. But his little one-year-old hands didn’t have have sufficient coordination or balance to make the same structures I was making. When his failed attempts crumbled or fell, tears of frustration would well up in his eyes and he would demonstrate how healthy his lungs were with screams of rage! And the blocks went flying! For some reason, that struck me as funny. I’m sure my laughter did NOT improve my little brother’s mood.
HEY! I wasn’t the only one. If my older siblings were present when Rex gave into a fit of frustration, they would also laugh ... at first. Mom usually came running whenever Rex started bawling and a nasty glance from her would quickly squelch the laughter. Then she would sooth him and direct his attention to another toy or read him a children’s book. He always liked that.
Between the ages of one and two Rex learned to walk around pretty well, but still threw hissy-fits whenever things didn’t go his way. Unfortunately, I was probably the instigator of several of those hissy-fits. The job of entertaining my youngest brother always seemed to fall to me. And he seemed to require entertaining every waking hour! Rex had a lot of toys so I would sit down on the floor with him and his toys.. and get him started on one. I quickly grew bored with that and would select another toy to focus on... but as soon as I did, THAT’s the toy he wanted! So I would let him have it and select another toy. Of course, then he would want THAT one! I mean... I was ready to start throwing hissy-fits myself! Instead, I started engineering juvenile revenge schemes with the toys that would result in another Rexie hissy-fit. If we played with the blocks, I would build structures I knew he couldn’t copy. If we played with marbles, I would steal some of his marbles. If we played hide-and-seek, which took place in and around three different rooms, I would not stay in one hiding place. I would silently sneak after him from room to room so he could never find me. BOY! Did THAT frustrate the little bugger! I only got away with it once or twice though. Mom got wise to what I was doing and I got a stern lecture on playing fair... especially with little people.
During his second year Rex acquired a weird way of expressing his frustration. It would start with the usual screaming and crying. However, by then, he had learned how to stand up, but was also small enough to bend forward way low, put his hands on the floor and start banging his forehead on the floor. He would give himself about three or four good thumps and then plop down on his little butt and wail! He did that once or twice in front of all four older siblings. We thought it presented such a ridiculous spectacle that we all laughed... which only made him wail louder! The first time Mom saw him do it, she shushed our laughter while grabbing up Rex and told us we should not let him hurt himself like that. I don’t think Rex got the message. He kept doing it for another couple of months. In retrospect, I think Rex learned that if he started banging his forehead he would immediately get picked up and comforted. At any rate, after two or three months he stopped doing it. I guess he figured the coddling wasn’t worth the pain.
On his third birthday Rex got a special present that he loved really well; a new tricycle. He was very mobile by that time and actively running around the house and yard... usually chasing after me. I suppose I was his main connection for toddler adventure. On nice days Rex yearned to roam, but was only allowed to leave the yard if an older sibling accompanied him... which was usually me. So we would take walks up and down our street and the alley behind the houses. The alley was more interesting than the sidewalk because most back yards had bushes that abounded with insect life... and spiders. I introduced my little brother to the hunter/prey relationship between grasshoppers and garden spiders. I had to speed up the lesson by catching a grasshopper and sticking it into a garden spider web. In a matter of seconds, the struggle vibrations of the grasshopper would cause the spider to quickly come out of its hiding place and begin enshrouding the grasshopper with more webbing while biting it a couple of times to paralyze the doomed insect. Rexie’s eyes sure popped the first time he saw that! But I digress. We had a fairly wide driveway and Rex spent a good portion of his birthday mastering his ability to ride his new tricycle. As with our prior walking adventures, I had to accompany Rex on any tricycle rides. He soon grew bored with just going up and down Woodland Avenue.
One warm autumn afternoon after I got home from school Rex immediately started badgering me to go with him on a tricycle ride. Only this time he wanted to “go downtown”. Downtown was only a couple of blocks away and Rex knew where it was as Mom had taken him there on shopping trips. Maybe Rex also wanted to show off his new tricycle. By this time Rex had begun to develop a gregarious – and sometimes aggressive – personality. With pleading eyes he looked up at Mom and me. “C’mon... Let’s go downtown!”
I looked questioningly at Mom. Swanton was a sleepy little town in 1951 and there wouldn’t be much traffic on a week day mid-afternoon. Mom silently considered for a moment. “Well, OK. But be careful crossing the streets, Guy, and don’t go past the railroad tracks. And come right back home!”
Rex was exultant taking off on this tricycle ride. He got to ride across streets and go past all those fascinating store fronts on Main Street! Of course I had to help lift his tricycle up over the curbs. There were no wheelchair accessible street curbs in those days. Rex proudly rode toward the railroad tracks that separated North Main Street from South Main Street. And he didn’t slow down as we got near the crossing. I put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Whoa, Rexie! We can’t cross the tracks.” Rex immediately rebelled and tried to shake off my hand. “I wanna GO!” I grabbed his shirt collar and held firm. “Mom said we can’t cross the tracks. Now C’MON! We gotta go back home!” Rex kept trying to ride forward.
There was a nearby witness to this domestic dispute: the railroad crossing gate man. In the early 1950s railroad crossing gates weren’t automatically operated electronically... as they all came to be later on. Back then on main crossings that required gates to be lowered, the gates were manually lowered by an employee who received a signal when a train was approaching. The employee would then operate a wheel and crankshaft mechanism to lower the gates. Of course this required gate men to be on duty shifts at all main gate crossings. The men who got these monotonous jobs were not always the brightest examples of model citizens. The one on duty this day was a tall, rough-looking character dressed in dirty clothes with about a week’s stubble on his face and chewing tobacco stains down his shirt. He spat out a nasty looking stream of brown juice while observing my difficulty with my little brother. He then injected himself into the situation with the following advice: “Beat his ass!”
Rex paid no attention to the gate man... or to me. He kept struggling to pedal his tricycle toward the tracks. I was getting frustrated. “Now STOP IT, Rex! We gotta go back home!” The gate man became more enthusiastic with his instruction. “G’wan! He’s askin’ for it! BEAT HIS ASS!!”
I was getting desperate. I didn’t really want to start beating on my little brother; especially in front of this nasty railroad character. But Rex kept trying to pedal and we were drawing looks from a few other people further up the sidewalk. I was thinking I might have to give him a smack on the head to get him to turn around. Then salvation suddenly arrived! Our father, Kenneth Sutherland, had been across the street in the A & P store and had just come out and noticed the commotion Rex was causing. Dad hot-footed it across the street and grabbed Rex, jerking him off his tricycle, and gave him three or four good whacks on his bottom. The RR gate man was greatly amused. “HAW Haw haw!” Dad then turned the tricycle around and plopped a stunned Rex back on the seat. Dad ordered firmly: “Get yourself back home, NOW!” Dad didn’t say anything to me. He went back to wherever he had parked his car.
At that point Rex realized the enormity of the disaster that had befallen him and he started crying loudly. But, as ordered by supreme authority, he began pedaling homeward with me bringing up the rear. He bawled all the way home.
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