DAVE'S ORIGIN STORY — Episode 1
Jack and Wilda, John, Dave, and Jane
In one of the company houses in one of the coal mining patches of Western Pennsylvania, a boy just learning to walk toddled toward the card table set up in the little room between the kitchen and the parlor and, laughing, he slapped the table top. His twenty-eight year old father, who was playing Canasta with three of his brothers-in-law, said, “Get this kid the hell out of here before I break both his arms.”
The boy’s mother, who was twenty-five years old, came in from the kitchen where she had been making cheese, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches for the men and she picked up the boy, whose eyes had gone wide, and, with tears in her voice if not in her eyes, she said, “There will never be another child in this house. You don’t deserve to have kids.”
The mother, whose name was Wilda, carried in her heart the hurt from this night. For several days after, when her husband, Jack, spoke to her, she would answer curtly and she avoided looking at him. She did, however, pack his lunch each day before he left for work. And one day before he left, he leaned in to kiss her and she let him.
The boy, John, was nearly four years old when his brother Dave was born. And fourteen months after that their sister Jane came. John disliked Dave and Jane, and Dave and Jane became close friends. John regularly pounded Dave’s arm with his fist. Wilda would say, “Don’t hit him, he’ll get cancer” and John would laugh.
John and Dave and Jane shared one of two small bedrooms in the house and John and Dave shared a bed. Dave slept against the wall to avoid contact with John during the night.
The fifty-plus company houses in Whitney, the name of the patch, were two-story wood frame structures built on stone foundations with single gable roofs and single brick chimneys. They were duplexes, each half with five-hundred square feet of living space. Each kitchen had a cast iron coal-burning stove with a small wood burning stove in the little room between the kitchen and the parlor. There was no hot water and no indoor plumbing.
At the alley end of each yard stood a wooden outhouse that everyone referred to as the shithouse. These, too, were duplexes. The seat in each half had two holes, a big one for adults and a small one for children. One summer afternoon when John was nearly seven years old and Dave almost four—and still hadn’t learned to use the shithouse—Wilda said to John, “Take Dave with you. Maybe if you show him what to do, he’ll learn how to do it himself.” John took Dave inside and Wilda would later say that whatever they did in the shithouse, “after that, Dave never had any problem going by himself.”