Well I don’t know if they are the first, but they’re the earliest I remember: (circa 1966)
1) I remember this happening in our kitchen at the ripe old age of 7. My dad was home from the Navy for a while and he had a friend who had brought home this huge old camera for cheap. This was an old camera even for the time; one of those models that stand up on a huge black tripod with accordion-like bellows between the body of the camera and the lens.
My dad spent the afternoon talking about ‘shooting me’ when the camera arrived and it amused him to make a big solemn thing about it. Acting like being ‘shot’ by a camera was the same as being shot by a gun.
So when the guy arrived with the camera and set up in the living room I wouldn’t come out. I ran and hid under the kitchen table. No amount of threats would make me come out and I was crying that I didn’t want to be shot, I wanted to live! Which my dad and his friend “Santoz” thought was about the funniest thing they’d ever heard. It was probably the only reason I wasn’t dragged out and whipped for disobeying. My mother tried to calm me down but I wouldn’t budge.
It didn’t help that I could hear the pop of the flash gun when my parents posed for their photo with my older brother . He leaned down under the table afterwards and said “Santoz used blanks when he shot us but when he points it at you he’ll use REAL bullets!”
I started wailing again and finally my dad had had enough. He came into the kitchen and dragged me out from under the table and pushed me into a chair. He broke a banana from a bunch on the counter and shoved it at me. “Take this dammit!, What’s wrong with you boy? Would I give food to someone I was gonna shoot? No! I’d eat it myself THEN shoot ’em. Now take your banana and get out there!”
Somehow this made a sort of sense to my youthful brain and I stood in the kitchen doorway clutching my banana and still not going close to the camera while Santoz took my picture.
That picture is the earliest one I can remember having taken, and probably marked my relationship to cameras and my dad from that day forward.
2) This took place in the same time period but I can’t remember if it was before or after the banana photo event. We lived in rural Virginia just North of a place called Newport News. My dad had found us a place in an old farmhouse a long way back from the road and in the middle of low lying fields.
So when the rains came that year I had my first experience with flooding. It was fairly impressive as I remember it; covering the ground several feet deep in the back yard. So much so that the ditches dug between our house and the fields were a raging torrent.
My older brother got the idea of trying to surf on the muddy waves rushing thru those ditches by tossing out a piece of plywood and then jumping onto it before it washed too far away. Years later this would become the sport “Boogie boarding” but what did we know?
He was fairly successful on his initial attempts but soon got bored chasing the plywood down so he told me he would let me give it a try if I would fish the board out of the water downstream. I did that and gave it a good ol’ try, winging the plywood out over the water and then taking a run and jumping onto it like I’d seen him do.
Well my feet hit the wood perfectly but the rest of me was about a half second too slow. The board went skipping out from under me and I went backwards into the water and was washed along like so much dirty laundry. It hadn’t occurred to me that I should be worried that I couldn’t swim of course since I had no idea how deep the water really was. I remember being carried along under the bridge that our driveway was on and skinning up my arms and knees against the rocks and concrete tubes that run underneath it.
I was carried several hundred feet all told and eventually I got my feet back under me and jumped out scared outta my wits and covered in mud with my brother nowhere in sight. So I did what any other 7 year old would do; I went running inside to cry to mom. She wasn’t the source of comfort I anticipated. Instead she gave me a good scolding for getting her hardwood floors all wet and muddy and turned the garden hose on me before marching me into the bath. I don’t remember if my brother got in trouble too but we never did it again.
3) That same summer my older brother and I were playing along the ditchline by our driveway which was now very low and overgrown with grasses. I had found a spot with a seam of very nice clay in it and was busily digging it out with a kitchen spoon when I heard my brother scream and jump up on the bridge.
He was holding his leg near the shin and started screaming about being bit by a snake. I ran into the house to tell my mother who came out and started doing some screaming of her own. She told me to stay out on the porch, bundled my brother into her arms and ran back inside.
Shortly after that I heard her on the phone calling someone and talking in a rapid-fire voice that got higher and higher. I don’t know who she was talking to but in the part of Virginia we were in the nearest neighbor was about half a mile away. It normally took me a half an hour just to walk to the mailbox so there really wasn’t anyone nearby she could call for help. Time was passing rapidly and I looked in thru the screen door and saw a towel or something tied around my brother’s leg and a huge bump like a bruise just below it. Even at my young age I knew getting bit by a snake was serious and this looked really bad. I didn’t know what else to do so I went back to the bridge to get his shoe and sock that had been left behind. I saw a snake coiled up on the bridge and ran back to the house screaming about it being after me.
Of course it wasn’t chasing me but I never looked back. When I got to the porch I head a loud thumping noise from overhead and jumped off the porch so I could see above the house.
There was a large naval helicopter landing in our yard. It was white and had a red design on the bottom with some big black letters. Even before all three wheels were on the ground some men in uniform jumped out and ran in the back door. They took my brother onto the helicopter and shouted some things to my mother. Then off they flew and I was really scared I wouldn’t see my brother again. Seeing my mother scared too made things worse and we were both crying even while she was back on the phone talking to someone and holding my arm so tight it hurt. The farmer who owned our house came by and took us to his house where he left me with his wife and kids before driving my mother to the Naval hospital. I seem to recall I was there 3 days.
Nothing was said about it after that mainly because at the time my father was out in the Med someplace on his tour of duty. A year or two later I remembered the seam of clay in that ditch and asked my dad if I could go get some of it to make little cartoon figures with? He was under his car as usual and said yes just be quiet. And I did just that, having a great time molding funny little heads from balls of clay. Suddenly my dad came running up, jerked me to my feet and started wailing on me with a switch. No preamble, no build up, just beating me in a circle while I tried to get away. He was shouting “Didn’t I tell you never to play in that ditch? Didn’t I??” and I was trying to get out that he had just told me I could but it was no use. Eventually he got tired of switching me and sent me into the house. I was red and bruised from head to toe and really indignant that I had asked permission and still got in trouble.
It was years later, decades even, that I realized that the reason he was so mad about my playing there wasn’t because of the clay but because it was next to the bridge where that water moccasin had bitten my brother. He had nearly died from it and was very lucky the naval base had air-vacced him to their emergency room.