Thomas Frazier III was such a pretentious name for a man
who showed so little promise as a young man.
His father, whose nickname was Junior, was a truck driver who tried to
own his own business but could not make a go of it. Junior tried to get into the regulated freight business but when the
trucking company didn’t take off; he sold it and bought an irregular route
carrier of truckload commodities, which ran from Minneapolis to Iowa. When Junior’s son was in his teens, Junior
needed him to drive his trucks. At a
very young age, Thomas Frazier III was well travelled, having driven his
father’s trucks all over the West, from Minnesota to Montana to Oklahoma.
Thomas and Junior
did not get along. The father was
content with being a good old boy trucker owner and operator while the son was
filled with piss and vinegar. The
younger Thomas couldn’t wait to begin his life; to strike out on his own. In fact, Junior’s oldest son did not invite
familiarity but instead insisted that everyone call him Thomas. This pretension drew a lot of sniggers from
the other truckers, but never to Thomas’ face because, even at a very young age,
he was lean, scrappy, and always spoiling for a fight. The older men often said to Thomas, “Don’t get above your raising” because they thought that
Thomas was too full of himself. The
young man never listened to anyone else’s advice, especially his father’s, and
was proud of becoming strong and independent.
From his earliest days, Thomas suffered from
eczema and, since he was the oldest, he often asked his younger siblings to
apply the medicine onto his back.
Sometimes he itched so badly that he couldn’t sleep and he ended up
reading the night away before attending school the next day. He had read
so much that he had read every historical novel at his local library and had
his name on the list to check out the new book arrivals. When the itching
became so bad and Thomas missed more than one night of sleep, he was prescribed
phenobarbital, a very strong narcotic.
Occasionally, his family woke up and found that Thomas was nowhere
around. The narcotic had make him so groggy that he couldn't figure out how
to get into his own bedroom so he slept in any corner of the house where he
could find peace.
While he was in
high school, Thomas worked at the local bowling alley. He worked the late-night shifts because the
manager had left and he could run the place without being harassed by his boss. Although he was only fifteen when he started
to work at the bowling alley, Thomas knew that he could avoid the child labor laws,
which strictly prohibited youths from working at night, and the young man would
often act as the closing manager. When the
local police decided to enforce the child labor laws, Thomas had to develop
strategies for avoiding the cops. Often, he hid up in the machinery at
the terminus of the bowling lanes, squirrelling himself in a secret corner spot
until the cops left. One time he didn’t
have any notice that the police were coming and to avoid a confrontation Thomas
pretended that he was part of the family who was bowling in middle lane.
After his junior year
in high school, Thomas joined a traveling carnival for a summer job. The truck driver in the carnival became too
sick to work and asked Junior if he knew of anyone who could take over his route
for a couple of weeks. Junior
volunteered his son. Thomas had to
hitchhike to Dallas in order to meet the semi and assume the driving duties but
what he didn’t count on was that the load he was carrying was a Ferris Wheel. This carnival ride is heavy, shifts easily,
and is difficult for a novice to handle.
Still, Thomas had a lot of confidence in himself because he was a
teenager and still too young to have been truly tested. He had not been on the job for even a week
when he found himself driving down a steep road that led to a small town in Montana. Thomas lost his brakes because he had not
down shifted enough and he sped straight through the town with his horn
blaring. This same situation had
happened many times before to other drivers, so the townspeople knew what was
happening and cleared the streets before anyone could get hurt. When the truck finally came to a complete
stop, and the police showed up, no one seemed to know who was driving the
vehicle because Thomas had fled the scene.
Since he didn’t have a commercial driver’s license, Thomas knew that he
would be arrested and fined if he were found with the truck, so he snuck away
and hitchhiked back to Minnesota.
After the carnival fiasco, Thomas entered into his senior
year in high school and almost immediately got into a grudge match with Principal
Kleinert. After flaunting the rules whenever
he could, Thomas was caught smoking on the school grounds and Kleinert expelled
him. Junior went to the assistant
principal’s office to voice his disbelief that the principal could remove his
son from the school on this one offense but Kleinert told him that Thomas had a
history of being a rebel but was too clever to get caught. The principal would not take away the
expulsion so Junior had no choice but to transfer his son to the next closest high
school, which was over ten miles away from his house, in the hope that he could
get the boy to finish out his senior year.
Unfortunately, the goal of graduating from high school just wasn’t that
important to Thomas. He became a truant
and, even when he did make it to school, he cut class so that he could sneak
out for a cigarette. By the beginning of
the second semester of his senior year, Thomas decided that high school wasn’t
for him and he dropped out to join the Air Force. Junior had to sign the papers to admit him
because Thomas was still only seventeen.
After boot camp, Thomas went back to his old rebellious
ways and became a pain in the ass to his superiors by flaunting the rules and
defying authority. For example, he
didn’t see the need to stop at the security check point and reentered the base
by speeding his rental car past the officer on duty. The officer quickly gathered a couple of MPs
to track down Thomas and they found him within an hour. He was eating dinner at the mess when the MPs
grabbed him, cuffed him, and took him to the police station. “Come on guys,” said Thomas, trying to
bargain his way out of being arrested and charged with violating the security
regulations. “This isn’t that big of a
deal.” The security officers
realized that Thomas was just a raw kid who wasn’t worth their time, and not
some kind of terrorist, so they let him go after roughing him up a little bit.
Thomas seemed to rub everyone the wrong way. Once, while on leave, he had left a bar at
closing time and decided to take a back way to base. A group of young toughs saw him walking in an
alley all alone and accosted him.
Instead of meekly handing over his money, Thomas tried to fight off the
robbers but it was four to one so he never had a chance. The robbery cost him more than his wallet
because one of the robbers hit Thomas so hard with a bat that he lost several
teeth. For the rest of his life Thomas
had to wear a bridge in his mouth but was too embarrassed to talk about
it. Only after he died did his family
find out that Thomas had implants.
The guys in his
unit didn’t like Thomas very much either.
He was a smart ass, and a know it all, and to teach him a lesson the
young man’s sergeant ordered Thomas to fix the radio antennae on a hill above
the base. The antennae was attached to a
fifty-foot tower and the sergeant told Andrew to check on the connections to
make sure that all transmissions were going through. In fact, there was nothing wrong with the
radio or the transmissions, the sergeant just wanted to see if Thomas had the
guts to climb fifty feet up in the air with nothing between him and eternity
but a flimsy tower. It was in that
moment, holding on for his dear life while scaffolding up the tower, that
Thomas decided that maybe the Air Force wasn’t for him. He wouldn’t quit the service but instead
would earn his GED before he was discharged and
then he planned to go to college once he became a civilian again.
It didn’t work out that way. Eczema, the
skin disease that had plagued Thomas since he was a young boy in Minnesota,
continued to trouble him while he was in Asia. The local farmers
fertilized the soil with manure and once the stuff dried up it blew away with
the wind. The dust settled onto Thomas’
skin, making his eczema much worse than before, and the condition became so bad
that the young man was sent to a hospital in Japan to recover. Even with
treatment, the affliction would not go away, and Thomas’ face blew up to twice
its normal size, and his back and legs became bloated. The doctor who was assigned to Thomas decided
that time, and fresh air, were the only cure for his affliction. He prescribed a prolonged stay at a base
outside of Burlington, Vermont in the hope that a month’s long convalescence
would help.
The problem was that in addition to
bad skin, Thomas had inherited an excess of energy and could not sit still for
long periods of time. As soon as the
bloating had subsided, Thomas decided that he needed to get off the small base
and socialize. The local women had
organized a U.S.O. club and
organized parties where the young service men and local girls could meet. Thomas made it a habit of his to show up for
these parties on the first Friday of every month. His uniform was pressed, his hair was slicked
back, and his body was lean from the months of convalescence. In short, he cut a very attractive
figure. This brash young man had been
rolled up, tight in a coil, and was waiting to be sprung.
In the corner of the church basement where the U.S.O.
parties were held, Thomas noticed a beautiful young lady with her nose in a
book. He craved attention and thought
that if he sat next to this girl then maybe she would give some to him. She was reticent. Gail hadn’t earned much in the way of social
skills in her youth or at her short stint at Green Mountain College where she
had been content to sit in her dorm room and nap her days way. Now she had to deal with this brash young man
who had sat down next to her, uninvited, and it appeared that he would not
leave until she danced with her. Gail
had seen Thomas strut across the dance floor, towards her, and thought that if
she could get past his obvious skin problem then he was good looking. The pox marks and acne may never go away but
she was willing to look past them.
She danced with him. Over and over they shared the dance floor
together and promised each other that they would do it again the following
Friday. It went on like this for months
until the Air Force decided that Thomas was well enough to be medically
discharged. After a brief engagement,
Thomas and Gail were quickly married in Vermont and then he whisked his new
bride away to Minnesota so that they could begin their new lives together.
It was at this point in his life that the self-confidence
that Thomas possessed came in useful, for these were the hard years that would
test his metal. After earning his GED,
Thomas enrolled in college and earned extra
money by driving a tanker for Archer Daniels Midland on the weekends. He left
school after his last class on Fridays, picked up his fully loaded tanker, and
drove to New England and back and still had enough time to sleep for a couple
of hours before his Monday morning classes.
Gail spent most of her time in the G.I.
married housing unit on campus. Because
housing was in short supply, the newlyweds were forced to live in a temporary
housing structure; an old Quonset hut.
It was a prefabricated structure of corrugated steel formed in the shape
of a half cylinder. They only were given
the front half of the hut, another couple lived in the back of the hut, and
there was no insulation. Gail liked to
tell the story of how the condensation on the window of their hut froze during
the cold Minneapolis winter and there were icicles everywhere. Still, even though they were crowded and
cold, the young couple was free and independent, and they could not have been
happier.
These
were the salad days of Thomas and Gail.
He was busy going to class, studying, driving a truck, and otherwise
growing into his name. She worked at Dayton’s Department Store to
help with expenses. Thomas decided that
they needed a car so he took a second part
time job unloading boxes from trucks at night to earn some extra money. Eventually he saved up enough to buy an old
model maroon Dodge with a Desoto race engine. Thomas loved to tinker with the engine
whenever he had the time but, no matter what he did, the engine rocked the car
back and forth even while it was idling.
Still, that car was hot, and Thomas would let his bride drive it
whenever she could come up with some gas money.
Gail drove the Dodge like a banshee through
the streets of St Paul. Like riding her
horse on the trails when she was just a girl, Gail felt a new sense of freedom
whenever she was behind the wheel. On
the rare day when they both had time off, Thomas and Gail loved to go to the
lake so that she could swim and sun herself while he worked on the Dodge.
After Thomas
graduated from college, he found a good job working at a family owned barge
line in Minneapolis. The owner and manager of the small company, Minneapolis Harbor Service, which was run by Frank Eiple, who wanted to hire Thomas before he
even graduated from college. Thomas
insisted that he be allowed to finish his course work, but was willing to put off
going to law school, and started to work for Frank the day after he graduated. For the rest of his life, Thomas regretted
not going to law school after earning his undergraduate degree. However, since Frank and Mable Eiple were an
older couple, they took Thomas and Gail under their wing and treated the young
couple as if they were their own children.
For example, When Thomas and Gail started a family of their own, Mable volunteered
to babysit. In her spare time, Mable knitted
sweaters for the babies. Thomas moved
his wife out of the Quonset hut and took an apartment next to the Eiples so
that the two families could spend even more time together. For the first time in their lives, Thomas and
Gail were truly happy and settled down to a marriage that would last for over
fifty years.
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