Nothing could have been more fitting
than these words as I open the doors of my life to reveal the “routines” of
daily living.
For most people living in Detroit, MI, on August 28, 1929, the
“news” of the day centered on the flight of the German dirigible, the Graf
Zeppelin, as it flew by. In the maternity ward of Henry Ford hospital,
however, William and Blanche McRae, were eagerly awaiting the arrival of their
daughter, Shirley Lou, named of course in honor of the child star in those
days, Shirley Temple. There appeared to be a
problem. The baby was not a girl, but a boy, and in those anxious moments
for others, I was born. What to do about the name, that was the question.
Somehow, some one recalled a banker who lived in St; Clair, MI, where
they had met and married, by the name of Sherwood Recor and so it would be Sherwood.
Shirley Lou would come later.
Those were happy days for my parents, but then came the stock
market “crash” a few weeks later, a harbinger of the hard times that would
follow.
“We” would move to Toledo, OH, and then on to Cleveland,
actually Lakewood, OH, where - in 1932, their Shirley Lou would enter our
lives. These were tough times, financially, and when our Mother’s Mother
came to help, she offered to take young Sherwood home with her, to Yale, MI,
where there was lots of room to play and plenty to eat. We never knew
her motives but she had suffered the loss of a son - to be named, Keith, who
was still born. The way she loved on me and treated me has always made
me believe that God had replaced her grief with a first grand son.
Times got worse, the family moved back to Detroit and then, our
Father who had been in a minor auto accident in Ohio, was incapacitated by a
cyst that was pressuring on his brain - as a result of an earlier accident, and
things went from bad to worse. I had come home to Detroit, but with this
burden on our Mother, I was welcomed back to the farm where I would live until
I joined the Army Air Corps in 1946. Somewhere along the line, our Father
passed away. I know the date but it would be years before anyone wanted
to share with me, the circumstances that ended his life.
No one seemed to notice that I should have known as I seemed to
be a happy youngster, had close friends in neighboring farms, a wonderful grade
school teacher and a high school where it seemed to others, I was accepted by
one and all. Except for the fact, it often seemed to me, I had no Father
and only an “occasional” Mother who would come home to Yale from her busy life,
working and caring for my sister.
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