In 1963 I was nine years old and my mother, at the age of 47, was getting her Doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in the capital city of Madison (Go Badgers!). We were living on her fellowship of $3,000 (that’s per year, not per month). She had rented a little house in a typical suburban development that must have had about 200 little crackerboxes of the sort you learned to draw when you were a kid. That means it was a simple peaked-roof “Cape Cod” with a door in the center with a three-step stoop and a window on each side. There were no garages (some people added them eventually, but most just had a driveway ending at the side of the house), very few dormers and almost no variation other than the limited pastel color palette. These were the sort of houses that sold for $10,000 when they were built. They were about 800 sf as best I can recall with a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom with a tub (showers were not so de rigueur in the Midwest at the time). My sisters shared one bedroom on bunk beds and my grad student mother and I shared a bunk bed in the other bedroom (at least I got the top bunk). As you can tell from the description, this was a very working class neighborhood and modest lifestyle. The house rent was $100/month, which meant we had a whopping $150 per month for food, clothing, transportation (a used 1956 Oldsmobile in white/teal…roll-up windows and no seat belts) and incidentals. To keep that in perspective, the American median income in 1963 was $6,200, so we were living on 48% of that. The American poverty level for a family of four was $3,100, so let’s just say that we didn’t have much wiggle room in our family budget.
My entertainment in those days involved playing with all the other kids in the development and since that was the era of families having 3.3 children on average, there were plenty of kids of our age to play with. For a Midwestern boy in those days (at least in my hood), the sports of choice were summer baseball on the adjacent vacant lot, winter sledding on the elementary school hills across the highway and fall football on the neighborhood asphalt streets. Athletic footwear was only just getting started. Our school, like most in that day, required leather shoes or dress shoes during the school day. That meant that most kids would wear canvas sneakers after school. The Baby Boom created enormous demand for durable, affordable children’s footwear and by 1963, sneakers were nearly universal for after-school and weekend wear among American kids. Keds and Converse dominated, costing around $3–5 a pair, which was hard to come by in our household. So, since my sartorial choices were largely left to me and me alone (my mother was very busy and my older sisters were equally disinterested), I usually wore my leather shoes for…everything. I don’t know that I ever noticed, but I imagine they weren’t too highly polished during those days. What I do recall is that these leather-soled tie shoes did not hold much of a grip on that asphalt when we played football on the street. I remember that because one day I was kicking off to the opposing team and I pulled a “Lucy”. That means that after running at the ball at full speed, I kicked off and fell back flat on my back. That was my first experience with getting the breath knocked out of me, which, as everyone knows, is a pretty dramatic life moment.
After the breathless trauma passed, the pain in my back slowly built to a crescendo and that evening I had to tell my mother what had happened. When the discomfort didn’t go away after a few days, I got sent to a local chiropractor who “solved” my problem with two adjustment sessions. My guess is that that made my savings on the sneakers somewhat uneconomic. And its unclear the sessions did anything to fix anything. At age nine, the best medicine is the passage of time and at that age, healing happens fast and attention to things like aches and pains is very short-lived. From that time on, I have always had a spot in my left middle back that bothers me every once in a while…not to any point of debilitation, but as a solid and recurring weakness and ache when it decides to rear its head.
During my year in prep school I played on the JV football team and they tried like hell to beat all the fat off of me and put muscle in its place. It only worked so well and I remember day-after-day in the fall of 1967 wondering why I was doing this to myself and especially to my aching back. As I grew through adolescence to eventually get to 6’5” during college, I put on more than a few pounds. Like most kids, posture was not a priority and hunching over was a natural state of repose. During that one summer in college when I did heavy outdoor work mowing vast arboretum fields, hefting downed trees from the gorges and unloading sack after sack of peat moss and fertilizer into a warehouse stacked to the ceiling, my back was probably as strong as it ever was (and my waistline was as small as it ever was). I recall needing to lie on the floor every night just to get the kinks out…especially from that certain spot in the left middle back.
As a young adult who did too little regular working out and too much thinking I could play racquetball from a standing start whenever I wanted to, I started having occasional back spasms that once or twice incapacitated me to the point of immobilizing me on my living room floor. Perhaps I had a chiropractor or two work me over, but I never sought out serious medical attention and it all passed with time. I once had an MRI and was told by the osteopath that I had a few mildly compressed disks and signs of a few hairline cracks in my various vertabrae…as well as one really noticeable one on this rib connection in my left middle section… As I aged, I traumatized a knee here and there and even contemplated some orthopedic surgery, but never did it. It’s pretty amazing that someone who carried as much weight as I have and played as many reckless sports and other activities as I have, has not had a serious back problem. There is that spot in my left middle back, but hey, who doesn’t have a few aches and pains, right?
After my motorcycle ride the other day, I was really feeling back sore and I mentioned it to my trainer yesterday. He decided to spend my hour with him working my upper and mid back muscles with my dumbbells and elastic bands. While I could feel the focused attention to my back muscles, it honestly felt like a pretty mild workout. And then I woke up this morning and guess what? Yep. My entire middle and upper back is on fire. I can feel every muscle and they all feel like they’ve had a major league workout.
Today, I probably have a dozen pairs of soft-soled shoes that are some form of what we might call sneakers and not one of them cost less than 20 times as much as a pair of Keds cost in 1963. So, I’m back to thinking about my back these 60 years later, wondering if my “Lucy” kick is the source of all my discomfort or whether I should just thank the universe for letting such a physically irresponsible person like me abuse his back for so many years and only have a little bit of soreness to show for it. I’m going with Door number two.