Back, Back To Culver Days Greta Hughes   © Copyright 2024 by Greta Hughes

Photo of Greta, her Mom, and two sisters.

On 6 April 1941 Adolf Hitler ordered German forces - backed by Italian, Romanian, Hungarian and Bulgarian allies - to invade Yugoslavia and Greece. He launched the assault in order to secure the oil resources in Romania and to keep his Balkan flank safe for when he ultimately planned to invade Russia.

The front page of the Detroit Free Press, in huge letters, announced the invasion:

GERMANY DRIVES INTO YUGOSLAVIA, GREECE

The story my dad told me is he rushed back to the room where mom was in labor to tell her the news, but they’d taken her to labor and delivery. Three hours later, on that cloudy warm Palm Sunday, I was born…one of 2.5 million war babies delivered in the US that year, the oldest child in the family, and also the oldest girl of the oldest girl of the oldest girl, going back to my maternal ancestors in Sweden.

-----------1941-1944----------

My parents were English teachers who’d met in the 30s when they attended a teacher’s college. Dad was a scholarship student, working in the cafeteria when he met Mom. He was 6’3” tall, blond, and with a huge voice you could hear in the next building. Mom was what they called “black-Irish…black hair and blue eyes,” and the attraction was instant (lasting until he died at 60).

He got a job teaching English at Fordson High School in Detroit. It was filled with the children of mostly Arab immigrants who’d come to Detroit to work in the auto industry. And he became one of the founders of the teacher’s union there. He was proud to know Walther Reuther, who, at the time, was doing the same organizing for the auto workers. Of course, he was called a Communist. Advocating for worker’s rights was not in the interest of the corporations or the American elite. Far from it.

His students loved him. He started a “Great Books Club”. There were always students in our living room debating over books he’d assigned to them to read. I remember none of this, of course, except that he told me the stories later.

Eight months after my birth, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and my father showed up the next day to enlist in the Navy. “You need to provide a birth certificate before you can enlist,” they said.

So off he went to his mom to ask for it. When she pulled it out of her records, he was surprised to see he was born in Canada, not Detroit. In 1913 when he was born, no immigration authority stopped people from moving back and forth on the ferries between Windsor and Detroit.

When he took the document back to the enlistment office, they told him, “Sorry, you can’t enlist in the US Navy unless you’re a citizen of the US. Come back when you get citizenship.”

By the time he did, it was November 1942, and he had two baby daughters, a wife, and was too old at 29 to enlist. He was also an ‘essential worker’, as teachers were often excused. So, he threw himself back into union work.

One of my earliest memories was when I was three-and-a-half and was standing in our basement rec room in Dearborn, Michigan. My two-and-a-half-year-old sister, Tina, was holding a little turtle in her hand. White and black tiles patterned the floor, and the walls were painted bright white. At least, that’s what I remember. My parents walked a small family into the room, father, mother and a boy about my age. They were staying overnight before moving on to Canada. I didn’t know at the time but was told much later they were Japanese fleeing to safer shores in Canada where they wouldn’t be rounded up and put into concentration camps in California and Arizona.

Years later, when I asked my mother about the story, she snapped at me and said, “Greta, you always exaggerate. They weren’t in our basement. We had no basement…they were in our kitchen.”

The story was true, the location was not.

By 1944, mom had had enough of union organizing and the FBI calling at our door. On top of those intrusions, students were wandering in at all hours needing help with more than English. She finally put her foot down,

“Art, it’s either the union… or the children and me. You make up your mind, but I’ve had enough.”

He found a new job as an English teacher in Culver, Indiana at a private boy’s school called Culver Military Academy (CMA). It was in the middle of the corn fields of northern Indiana, nestled on Aubanaubee Bay on beautiful Lake Maxinkukee. The land had originally belonged to the Potawatomi Indians (known for building huge earth mounds, one was in front of our home). But they’d been driven from their homes 55 years before Henry Culver showed up in 1894 to buy the land around the lake. Chief Menominee had resisted as long as possible until he and his village were removed to Kansas in 1838 along the Potawatomi Trail of Death. Culver kept the native American names, just not the Native Americans.

My dad’s activism with the unions in Detroit was over. Three months after we arrived in Culver, in May 1945, my sister, Johanna, was born. Mom and Dad were now parents to three little girls under the age of four.

---------------1946-1950----------

It was safe in those days to disappear all day and return when we heard our dad’s loud whistle telling us to come home for dinner. We’d moved upstairs into “The Homestead”, a duplex owned by the Academy. It was within walking distance to Dad’s classes, and five yards from Lake Maxinkukee. During the summer, we could run down the front steps of the house, out onto the pier and jump in the lake. My sister, Christina (everyone called her Tina) and I never remembered when we learned to swim. We just always knew. Mom was a terrific swimmer and must have taught us when we were babies.

We were born thirteen months apart, what was then called, “Irish Twins,” a derisive term, but the two of us thought it quite romantic. Since Mom was half-Irish, she was always answering anyone who would say, “Oh, Barbara, you have Irish twins. How nice.” by adding, “We’re Protestant, we’re NOT Catholic.” Of course, that answer went over the heads of the two of us at the time. We were just happy to be together.

We were inseparable until the day she died. There never was a Tina without a Greta, nor a Greta without a Tina. Because our dad was busy making a name for himself at the Academy and mom was busy with our sister, Johanna, we had the run of the campus, the golf course across the street and its environs. And we constantly got into trouble. Many of the pranks we pulled in the first ten years we lived there became legendary. Everyone knew who “the Hughes girls” were.

We were always cooking up mischief. I don’t remember exactly how old we were when we decided to dress up as Swedish orphans, probably seven and eight. My hunch now is that we’d read Pippi Longstocking or that our dad had read it to us. Pippi had bright red pigtails and was always having adventures. We figured we could do the same. After all, we were half-Swedish. And Tina had long brown pigtails. I had flighty blonde hair tied up in two little ponytails on either side of my head.

Somehow, we knew that parents who sent their sons to Culver were rich, whatever that meant to two small girls. We could see their shiny big cars when they came to visit their sons, and our Dad was driving a small blue Henry-J he’d bought in South Bend, Indiana.

Since we also lived across the street from the nine-hole Academy golf course, and it was a sunny afternoon in mid-May, we decided we’d celebrate Tina’s birthday in a spectacular manner by talking someone driving up to the golf course into taking us for ice cream. We knew our parents couldn’t afford to take us out, so we came up with, what to us, was a brilliant idea.

We smeared dirt on our faces, dressed in old clothes we found in our closet, and stood at the entrance to the golf course, waiting for one of the big cars to come along, roll down a window and ask us if we were OK. Tina could mimic any accent, and I could do a great job of looking really sad with big tears in my eyes.

It worked. Within five minutes of our standing there, a big black car stopped, and a man rolled down his window. “Are you girls all right?” he asked

“Ve are Svedish orphans, and ve are so hungry,” Tina replied. I nodded my head in agreement and rubbed my stomach.

“Where are your parents?” “Ve don’t hav any,’

“You must know someone here,”

“No, ve ver yust told to get oot of a car this morning, and that’s what ve did.” Tina responded in the lilting voice she had heard our grandmother use. I stood there with tears running down my cheeks.

“Please, get in. I’ll see if I can find some help.” And, in those days, we got in. “What would you like to eat?” He asked.

“Please, ve vould yust like some ice cream.” Tina said.

He drove us to the Culver Inn, a fancy restaurant/hotel on the grounds of the Academy that catered to the parents. We didn’t say much in the car, as the drive only took ten minutes, and he appeared really distressed for us. So, we now were in way too deep to tell him we were just kidding. We walked into the restaurant, our heads down, our dirty faces averted, past the woman at reception and sat down at a small table.

Tina ordered a hot fudge Sunday and I whispered in her ear to tell him I wanted a banana split.

“Is there something wrong with your sister? Can’t she talk,” the man asked.

“She’s just really shy.” And I looked at him and nodded my head, so he ordered what we asked for, then excused himself, while we dug into our treats and happily ate for a good ten minutes.

We kept giggling about our big coup and spooning in the ice cream as we talked. Tina had a mouthful of hot fudge when I looked up and saw her expression. Her eyes got huge, and her chocolate-ringed mouth opened in a big O. There, standing in the doorway was our dad, along with the receptionist and the man from the car. We hadn’t realized that the woman at the front desk had recognized the Hughes girls right away and called him.

We were in such big trouble. Not only did we lie, but we embarrassed our dad who, by now, everyone on campus knew as the outspoken ‘left-leaning’ English teacher in a school that catered to the wealthy Republican elite, military dictators and their casino buddies from Cuba, or boys who were so naughty, their parents sent them to Culver to straighten them out.

He insisted to pay for the ice cream, then, in front of the man (who was looking rather sheepish), informed him we’d be paying him back with our allowance of 25 cents a week until the debt was settled. And then we were grounded for two weeks…no swimming, no running wild in the forest, no playing with friends, and no desserts.

During our ‘incarceration’ for pretending we were Swedish orphans, Tina and I happily stayed in our room listening to “The Shadow Knows,” “Grand Ole Opry,” “Your Hit Parade”, “The Green Hornet,” and “Fibber McGee and Molly”. Our dad especially didn’t like us listening to “Amos and Andy”, because it was two white men who played the Negro parts. Of course, we listened to it anyhow, our heads tucked under the covers so no one could hear the radio. We didn’t understand the implications of two white men playing two rather dumb black men. After all, we couldn’t see them. I clearly remember my father being delighted when it was finally removed from radio in November 1960.

Throughout my childhood, Tina and I would listen to our parents talk about the racist underbelly of Culver, Indiana, so we knew there was some kind of injustice being done, just not what it meant nor who the victims were. It wasn’t until the late 60s we learned how racist the Academy had been and how hard my parents fought to change that.

Behind our duplex was a small stone house, (what would now be called a studio apartment). An old black man lived there whose name was “Sheep”. He was the head custodian of the Academy until he died. He used to make hot chocolate for us when we came in from sledding down the golf course hill in the snow. He had one daughter who’d gone to Howard University, then moved back to Culver with her husband, whom she’d met in Germany. Her husband was also university-educated and could teach German, but the only job he could get in Culver was fixing TV sets.

They had a daughter, Thelma Lilly, who was two years older than me, and one of my friends. What Tina and I didn’t know then is Mom and Dad were pretty much their only friends in Culver except for a couple of other faculty teachers.

When we were 14 and 15, we were inducted into “Rainbow Girls”, an offshoot of Eastern Star, an offshoot of the Masons, because women couldn’t belong to the Masons. Well, it was a big deal in a town of 2000 people. If you were a girl between 10 and 18, you had to be voted on by girls already in the organization, but if you received two black balls, you weren’t eligible. A year after we joined, Thelma Lilly was blackballed. She had applied twice before but we didn’t know that. This time, my Dad found out and pulled us out of the organization within a day of Thelma’s blackballing. Somewhere in all of my memorabilia, I have Tina’s crayon drawing of Thelma Lilly standing at the doorway of the Rainbow Girls building. She has big tears running down her cheeks, and Tina added a rainbow behind the building for added effect. When Thelma Lilly went off to college, she never returned to Culver.

No black students were allowed at the Academy either, only the young Negroes who served the cadets in the mess hall were allowed on campus, then had to go back and live in small shanties just off the Academy grounds. When we’d pile in the car with our dad and drive 13 miles to see a movie in the neighboring town of Plymouth, it had a sign posted on route 31 toward South Bend, Indiana that said, “All non-residents are required to leave the city by 8 pm.” That sign was specifically designated for anyone who was Negro. Plymouth was a “Sundown Town.” (These were towns that excluded non-whites and were common when we were young, even in the North and Mid-West. The term comes from signs that told "colored people" to leave town by sundown. Sundown towns used a combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, and violence to keep out non-whites.)We were taught at a very early age that not everyone was treated equally, even in Mid-Western states. Tina and I would learn those lessons when we chose the men we married and faced racism, some from dangerous people.

I know, I’m getting ahead of myself in the story, Back to selling gophers and golf balls in my next post.

We apparently didn’t learn our lesson from the Swedish caper, because two months later, in the height of the summer, we hatched another plan, one we thought was amazing. The man who ran the golf course, Irv Nelson, sat behind a big desk in a small golf shack at the top of a winding road just across the street from our house. He had bags of golf clubs lined up behind him on the wall that parents could rent and lots of white golf balls people could use for practice. We’d met him when we first moved to this house, and he became one of our friends. He’d entertain us with stories about the patrons who came to play who were famous: movie producer, Josh Logan; actor, Hal Holbrook; and New York Yankees owner, George Steinbrenner. In those days, golfers had to carry their own bags or hire a caddy, usually faculty sons, and he was always sorry girls couldn’t be caddies also. One day, he was complaining about the gophers eating up the greens, especially the 9^th hold green outside the golf shack. Culver had a nine-hole golf course.

Tina and I looked at each other. We might have been young, but we knew an opportunity when we saw it. “If we caught some of them, would you pay us for them?” Tina asked

“Of course. Tell you what, if you bring ‘em to me, I’ll pay you a dollar for every one you catch and get off that green. I don’t care what ya do with ‘em, just get ‘em off.”

And, in our minds, it was a done deal. Off we went back to the Homestead to collect our weapons of choice, giggling at how easy it would be to make some money getting rid of the critters, because we already knew how to do it. We’d flooded out gophers with help from our downstairs neighbors before. You see, gophers have a front and a back door. If you poured water down one of the holes, you could watch them pop up out of the other one. We and the Harris boys had been doing this for a couple of years, just watching them pop up and run. So, Tina and I figured we could do the work all on our own.

We gathered a couple of pails (we could fill them with water at the pump next to the club house, the one everyone used to clean their balls). Then we walked to the 9^th green, and Tina would pour water down one hole while I stood at the other and threw a pail over the fleeing rodents.

It took us a couple of times to get it right, because they came up faster than we expected, and we lost the first few as we screamed, “Get them, get them,” as they scampered off. I finally figured if I held the pail just above the hole, I could slam the pail down really fast and could surely catch at least one of them. By this time, it was getting close to dusk, and we wanted some kind of result for that first day, so Tina trudged back to the club house, filled her pail with water and came back for one last shot.

Bingo. We caught two of them. The trick now was to keep them in the pail (which was going a bit wonky side to side as they tried to get out) without their either biting us or escaping. I’d brought a big piece of cardboard with me and carefully slid it under the pail, turning it right side up. We’d done it. But Irv had already left for the day, so we had to take these two back across the street and store them someplace until the next day. We were so excited, seeing dollar signs in our eyes.

The last thing we were going to do was tell anyone about our plan, so we had to sneak two rather frantic gophers back across the road and somehow keep them overnight. Next to our garage (which was across a dirt road and far away from the house), Mom had a small coop made out of chicken wire to hold chickens when she bought one to cook. Yes, those were the days when we actually bought a live chicken off a farm, Mom would tie their feet to the clothesline, wring their necks, stick them in boiling water to loosen the feathers, and Tina and I would pluck them. The cage was the perfect solution.

How to actually get them into the small coop was the next challenge. Tina opened the door in the front, and I came around with the cardboard on the top of the bucket, set it on its side and slowly lifted the cardboard up. They popped into the coop perfectly, and we shut the door on them. Of course, we now worried they had nothing to eat. Exactly what do they eat? We went looking for earthworms, figuring they would be perfect, dug up a couple in our huge yard and small garden, dropped them through one of the holes and headed to bed, discussing what we were going to do with the money we’d make.

I wanted to save the money and buy cowboy boots. Tina wanted to spend it on candy. Candy was by far the easier choice, and we could ride our bikes to the small convenience store a few miles away, so we were all set for the next day.

Bright and early on a Sunday morning, we headed across the driveway to the coop where the two gophers were caged, picked up the small enclosure and walked it across to the golf course. Irv was thrilled, we were thrilled, and our adventure had netted us $2.00.

“I don’t care how you get rid of ‘em, just make sure they’re gone.” He said after paying us.

“Don’t worry, we promise you’ll never see them again.”

As we walked back across the street with the gophers still in the cage, we came up with the amazing idea. Irv hadn’t told us to kill them, just get rid of them. We stuck the cage behind the garage where no one ever went and sat down to plot.

If we kept the gophers and only sold them to Irv every weekend, he wouldn’t know it was the same gophers over and over. They all look the same. So that was our plan. We would catch a couple more, four would be perfect. Every weekend that summer we went back with two gophers and sold them back to Irv, exchanging the gophers every couple of weeks. In total, we collected $18.00, a fortune in 1949. And the gophers were getting quite fat on the constant meals of earthworms, so they looked different anyhow. We couldn’t believe our good luck.

That is, until it was no longer our good luck. Because, of course, we were caught… again.

Mom was a great golfer and often went across the street to play nine holes on the weekend. One weekend, she got into a conversation with Irv, who told her she had two remarkable daughters who had been catching gophers for him and now the greens on the 9^th hole had no gopher holes on them. Well, that was news to her. She marched back home and confronted us with the story. Of course, she was only angry we were making money for gopher sales and not letting them know about it. It took a while for us to finally confess what we’d really been doing. Fortunately, we’d only spent the first $2.00 of our stash. Hanging our heads and shuffling our feet, we walked back to Irv, confessed we’d been selling the same four rodents back to him, apologized, and gave him back $16.00. We had to work off the other $2.00 by giving him our allowance for the next month. Then we took these long-suffering critters and let them free in the Bird Sanctuary, a big forest just down the street from where we lived.

We were then grounded for six weeks.

The irony of the story is the next year, Irv took us into his small office and said “I know you shouldn’t a’ sold the same gophers to me over and over, but I gotta tell ya, for two little girls, you were awfully clever. I did laugh, just not in front of your parents.”

He told us that while we were cleaning the golf balls we’d stolen from the fairways. And, of course, that’s the next story. But you’ll have to wait a few pages while I tell you a bit about Culver.

It’s hard to explain how spectacular our lives were over those first ten years. We lived in the country, horses were boarded across the street from the Homestead in a barn carved out of the first fairway on the golf course. Tina and I would go over and feed them every day when they were put out to pasture during breaks between winter and summer school. Culver had a black horse troop with over 100 horses, famous throughout the world as one of the only high schools who had a troop that had marched in every inaugural parade in DC since 1913.

The troop attracted all the Cubans who came as long as strongman, Battista was in control. The Academy had a ‘quota’ of Cubans (expanded over the decades to include the Mexican and Venezuelan upper class). Only two Cubans per class per company were allowed to come, and they were drawn from the wealthiest of the wealthy, like the Silvas and Batistas.

During the summer months, we’d eat outdoors almost every night unless the mosquitoes were so bad, we couldn’t stand it. At dusk, thousands of fireflies would come out, their little tail-lights flickering across the yard. Tina and I would catch them, put them into glass jars, then clip off their tails to make bracelets for our baby sister, Jo. We’d fasten them together with needle and thread from mom’s sewing kit, and never thought at all about the poor fireflies, sacrificed for a bracelet that lasted five minutes.

If it was really hot, we’d run down to the pier anchored at the bottom of several wide concrete steps off our front porch, throw our clothes off as we were running and jump in the cool water. In the early morning, Tina and I would climb into a rowboat, oar out a few meters and catch perch, bass, red eyes, blue gills and catfish. We fished with long bamboo poles, (fish line attached to the top) and jars full of earthworms we’d dug up from the garden. Mom always had a freezer full of fish.

Her mantra was, “You catch them, you clean them.” And our Dad taught us how to scale the fish by putting their heads at the opening of a paper bag, running knives over their bodies as their gills flew into the bag. If we were lucky enough to catch a catfish or two, Dad would nail their heads to a tree, run a knife around their throats and strip off the skin. Our dog, Raffles, would eat all the entrails/heads that we’d give him and had the shiniest coat.

A ten-foot mound of dirt covered in grass and very old trees was in front of our duplex. We’d discovered it was full of arrow heads and Indian bead and spent hours digging in the dirt and finding the treasures,. We’d wash them off, then give them to our dad to take to the Indian museum on campus, never once thinking we might be disturbing a burial site or sacred ground. It would be decades before we were aware enough to be ashamed.

No one could have asked for a more perfect childhood. It was solid and happy and, in the case of Tina and me… extremely profitable. Yes, we often got into trouble, the two of us. But….we swam. We rode horses. We played hide and seek in the woods next to the house. The neighbor kids came over to our house and played Hide n Seek, Red Light, Green Light, Kick the Can, and Red Rover, Red Rover. No one had a TV set, everyone listened to the radio.

In the summer, we could stay out until dusk, when my father’s whistling told us it was time to come home. Tina and I dressed in overalls, cut offs, T shirts, and lumberjack shirts, Buster Brown or Keds tennis shoes and bathing suits. We were never in dresses, they were for our pretty younger sister, Jo, because Mom could dress her up. She’d long given up on us and we were usually pretty dirty unless forced to take a bath. The lake was all we needed.

*****

Now, back to the story of the golf balls and being entrepreneurs. Irv Nelson had a couple of ball washers outside his door. Balls are placed in a little cavity that has a plunger inside. When a golfer pushes the plunger down, the ball is cleaned with soft nylon bristles and soap suds and comes out nice and white. We were fascinated watching this little mechanism work and would often beg Irv to let us clean any spare balls he had lying around. One day he told us he was running short of practice balls because golfers lost them in the rough, especially on the first hole. Tina and I looked at each other… yes, well, you know what the next sentence is going to be.

“If we go out looking for golf balls, how much would you pay us for each ball?” You’d think he’d have learned by now not to trust the Hughes girls, but he said, “Of course…25 cents for each ball.”

Done. He didn’t ask us how we were going to find them. Dozens of balls got lost every day during the season, so there was plenty of opportunity to find them. We were on it.

The next day was a Saturday when many people would be out playing. On the first tee, a golfer would hit the ball off the top of a big hill. and it would fly down the fairway, past the horses, and over another small hill. Remember, these golfers had to walk the course, and they couldn’t see where the ball actually went until they came up over the crest of the little hill. There was no such thing as golf carts or cart bags. Players or caddies carried the bags over their shoulders. Hiding in the bushes, we’d watch the ball come over the hill, scamper out, steal it, then run back to our hiding place. Since golfers played in packs of four, we’d only take one of them, leaving the other three on the ground. Then we’d watch the one player try to find his ball. Yup, we thought it very funny.

After a couple of days of taking balls (and we also searched the weeds for lost balls, Tina getting a terrible case of poison ivy one time), we accumulated a dozen of them. Irv happily paid us $3.00, and we happily took it. What a great source of income this was going to be for the summer. And it was. It was amazing, first of all, how many lost balls we found over the course of three months. It was equally amazing how many we stole, considering we only worked two or three days a week. After the first batch, Irv suggested we set up a small golf-ball stand next to the ball washer and sell them to patrons for a quarter. We even talked our 5-year-old sister into helping wash the balls, because she was really cute and the two of us always looked like scruffy tomboys. We made enough for me to buy the pair of cowboy boots and for Tina to buy a cameleon.

Our parents were quite proud of us… this time. We had our golf ball stand for four summers,1950-1953. We were never caught.

Greta Hughes has been writing diaries of her life since she was 12. At the age of 83, she is now finishing her memoir. She has a BA in English/Theatre from MacMurray College, and an MA in Theatre/Journalism from the University of Illinois. She ran her own successful business for 35 years, teaching engineers and scientists how to write, design and present technical material. She currently tutors students in English from Morocco, Iraq, Spain to the US.