SuzieRonnie Dee (c) Copyright 2025 by Ronnie Dee  |
 Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. |
I was born Ronald Lee Durbin, on the cusp of World War II, on March 18, 1939 (Man, that's a long time ago) at Amy and Michigan Avenues in Louisville, Kentucky, in a lovely working class area known as the west end. I joined my five year old sister, Doris Lee. My father, Butch, joined the Army shortly thereafter and we moved to Fort Knox, Goldville, KY. Shortly after that, my parents divorced and shortly after that, Butch was in a bus accident and lost a leg. He never found it.
My mother, Thelma, remarried a couple years after the divorce. Our stepfather, Freddie, was in the Army as were most young men at that time. We lived in Providence, KY for a short time in the early forties when he was in army training and it was like we had been sent back in time. We had one of the few telephones in town and it was a crank phone. Mother had to try to cook on a kerosene stove and the sheriff of the town rode a horse. I think Main Street was the only paved street in town. We put our garbage in slop buckets and hung them out back for the pig farmer to collect. Our next door neighbors were like the Clampetts. The youngest boy, who was about three, often ran around naked. He would come over to play with me, and took a shine to a particular toy I had. This was during World War II, so just about all toys were made of wood. What I had was a Noah's Ark with a bunch of animals that fit inside. It had wheels and a rope with which to pull it around. The kid liked it and wanted it, but I wouldn't let him have it. So one morning I went outside and "someone" had pooped all over my Noah's Ark. Of course, no one knew who could have done such a thing, but the kid's mother said she would take it and clean it up as best she could. So I lost my ark and the final straw came shortly after that when a gang of men armed with shotguns stormed around the neighborhood, barging into some peoples houses looking for a "mad dog" supposedly seen in our vicinity.
My mother demanded that we move and we took off for Henderson, a much more civilized town. Freddie was the post lightweight boxing champion. He trained a lot in our basement as he had a heavy bag, a speed bag, a reflex bag and a big ol' heavy leather medicine ball. He would also give some of the neighborhood teens pointers from time to time. I was only three, but I would pay attention to what he said and try it out on any of my playmates who tried to get tough with me. I remember beating up a set of twins down the street, who tried to push me around. They were crying and threatening to send their daddy down to beat up my daddy. I laughed and told them to "come on down." They never did. I liked Henderson, but we were only there for about a year before Freddie was shipped overseas, so we moved back to Louisville to live with "Momboo," my mother's mother.
She lived in a little shotgun apartment house at 34th Street and River Park Drive, with a bookie joint in the front. We were in the back and shared a bathroom with the bookie and his wife, who ran a beauty salon as a front for his business. They were very nice and we remained good friends with his wife for many years following his sudden demise. There was a beer joint right behind us and I think I developed my love for beer then. I would hang around, waiting for the beer trucks to arrive and go watch them load the kegs down into the cellar. That scene and the smell of beer wafting up from that cellar was mesmerizing.
On 34th Street, I met my first girlfriend, a little curly headed blonde, like me, who followed me around incessantly. I sometimes wore a little sailor outfit and she would hang onto me and sing, "Bell bottom trousers, coat of navy blue, I love a sailor boy and he loves me, too," the Guy Lombardo song that was popular during the war. Momboo's apartment was pretty small and we had to sleep sideways on the one bed while Sis slept on the sofa.
Somewhere in this era I met a little girl who really couldn't be called my girlfriend, but was my best pal. Her name was Louise, but nobody called her that except her mother. To the world, she was Dumpy. Even the other mothers called her Dumpy. She liked it and we got along great as she was a real roughneck. She got into more trouble than I and laughed about it. Years later, when I first saw Peppermint Patty in the Peanuts comic strip, she immediately reminded me of Dumpy. Her mother would try to get the neighborhood little girls to come over and play with "Louise," but they would always go home crying, likely with messy hair, a torn dress and bloody knees from wrestling with Dumpy or falling off of one of her gadgets, never to be seen again in Dumpy's yard. We once put together a roller coaster that came out of her garage window and swooped down over a flower pond. We accessed the coaster by climbing onto a workbench along the inside wall. It was great fun until her mother made us take it apart for damaging said flower bed. A year or so later, her family moved, thus ending a beautiful relationship.
My mother found a house to rent on Vermont Ave. near 41st Street, where we were living when the war ended. I was six when we moved there and a lot happened at that location. My uncles came home from the overseas war and my uncle George got married. While the wedding party was at the church, my sister was assigned to stay home to keep an eye on me and a couple of our cousins. At some point I snuck into the dining room and got at the wedding cake. It was beautiful and I ate the decorative icing around the top edge of the entire bottom layer. When I saw what I did, I panicked and tried to smooth it over. It didn't look too good, but I thought, "Well maybe they won't notice it." No one ever mentioned it, so I thought I had pulled a fast one." Of course they knew, but it didn't dampen the festivities. "It was just Ronnie again."
I also suffered one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life, when I was deliberately and wantonly attacked by an irate chicken. I don't know where it came from or what I did to provoke it, but it came at me with malice, squawking and pecking the heck out of my legs. I was trapped in a corner and began crying and shrieking in terror. My sister and a few other kids came to my rescue, but couldn't contain their laughter. I was utterly humiliated. That chicken became my albatross for a long time. I now see grown people flee for their lives with a chicken in hot pursuit on YouTube and laugh. That incident notwithstanding, I, like James Dean, have never liked being called "chicken."
Vermont was also where I met my second girlfriend, a real cutie named Suzie. I really liked her, but I was pretty shy and she was a little more aggressive. She was constantly in companionship with another little girl and it was hard to find time to be alone with her. But I was seven, what was I going to do anyway? The two girls would entice me to "Look at that moon", and when I looked up they would stand on each side of me and start kissing me profusely. I, being thrilled and mortified at the same time, would just stand there not knowing what to do, while the kisses rained down on me. One day I wanted to get Suzie a token of my affection and decided to give her a ring. My mother thought that was a fine idea and bought one for me to give her. In one of my more brazen moments I took the ring and headed for Suzie's house. I leaped off the porch to the ground and severely sprained my ankle. I was bedridden for several days, so Suzie came to see me and gave me a picture of her in her first communion dress. She looked like an angel and I gave her the ring.
Momboo had been spending her winters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, working for some friends who owned a restaurant, when she came home that spring with a great present for me. It was a collection of Tex Ritter songs. These were the old shellac 78 rpm discs. There were six records, twelve songs including: The Chisholm Trail, Blood On the Saddle, Rye Whiskey, Boll Weevil and other classics. My favorite was, Froggy Went a Courtin.' I was so excited I had to show Suzie.
"Be careful with those," Momboo cautioned. "Don't take them outside, you'll drop them and break them."
"Yeah, right."
Out the door I go and get halfway across the street when I drop them. Five records were shattered. The only one to almost survive was Froggy Went a Courtin. I played it: "Froggy went 'tic' courtin' and he did 'tic' , um hu, um 'tic'." Momboo was devastated. She had hauled those records on a train all the way from Fort Lauderdale, Florida not ten minutes ago, and now they lay in pieces in her lap. My chagrin didn't help her much.
My mother died that year. I was then seven. My stepfather, Freddie, had been sent to Japan soon after the surrender and my mother, sister and I had been summoned to join him. Arrangements were made. Freddie had already rented a house, hired the help and bought a dog. We were practically on our way to Tokyo. Mother went into the hospital for a "minor" operation before our trip, as she didn't trust the army doctors, but she suddenly, unexpectedly, died there as a result. My grandmother would not allow an autopsy, so we never found out the real cause of her death. Freddie came back to Louisville for her funeral and quickly returned to Japan. We never saw him again. We didn't know what happened to him until we got a letter from his mother in November, 1950. He was MIA in Korea and a year later we were notified that he had died "in the hands of the enemy" on March 8, 1951 after four months of captivity. We didn't understand how that could be. He had been a Chief Warrant Officer before he went to Japan and he ended up as a combat First Lieutenant in Korea. Because of his military commitments he had not yet adopted us, so we were orphans, but not official military orphans, at eleven and sixteen.
After my mother died we moved to 605 South 35th Street. I actually saw Suzie again about six years later and she was still a real cutie. I was at the old Shawnee Theatre with my pals Jack and Kenny. Suzie was with two girls, so we started chatting. We sat right behind them in the theatre, but unfortunately we became overly exuberant and had the girls laughing, when we were unceremoniously ejected from the theatre. The movie had just started and seeing as how it was a double feature, we figured the girls wouldn't be out for maybe three hours, so we decided to go on home. And I lost Suzie once again. Years later I met and married the true love of my life, a tall, beautiful blonde who told me when we first met, "My name is Donna Sue, but I like to be called Suzie."