Youth and Grade School

Woodrow was a red-headed, freckle-faced kid, and always among the smallest in the class. He believes his life-long tendency to avoid arguments stems from always being the smallest kid in class; he knew he didn't have a chance in a physical scuffle or fight. Only in Junior High school did he suddenly grow to an average height, seemingly overnight. He says he got more attention from his teachers (teacher’s pet) because he was "cute" and always had the highest grade ranking of any male student in the class.  The house the Baldwin’s had purchased was on the edge of the area defined for his school’s attendance. Woody realizes that although they were poor he was lucky to attend Wolflin elementary school in the classiest neighborhood of Amarillo. The association with the class of students whose goal was college inspired him to seek the same, instead of the goal of a laborer which would have been the more common aspiration of students in schools having a poorer or more rural population. Kids at that age were not as socially conscious as they became in high school, so Woodrow never felt inferior despite wearing patched clothes and worn-out shoes while the other classmates might have more and finer clothes.  

The grade school building was not finished when he began school so the school year started at another location, but soon transferred to the new building. Woody was one of the first students in the first grade and he remembers having Locker #1. He lived only 4 blocks from school so of course he walked. No; the story does not have any tales of hum walking to school on his hands through deep snow because he had no shoes!!

Woodrow was an eager student and made good grades, other than the art courses. He had zilch talent in art and it often caused him to miss the honor roll as he would occasionally get a “C”. Woodrow was the fifth ranking student in the elementary school graduation and the highest grades achieving boy. He says he got along well with all but his third grade teacher. The school had promoted his first grade teacher to the second grade and so he had this very friendly teacher his first two years.  She hugged the children and allowed a closeness that all the young ones enjoyed as it made their transition from home to school’s environment much easier.  When Woodrow started the third grade, with the new teacher, there was an uncomfortable incident.  Early on in the school year, the exact reason is forgotten, he had brought the teacher an apple.  After the gift he gave the teacher a warm hug, as was accepted by his previous teacher, and was severely rebuked by this new person with a strong exclamation of “What are you doing? Don’t touch me!”  With this unexpected and certainly undeserved rebuke Woodrow felt, from then on, a distance from the teacher — an awkwardness. On the other hand, he still remembers, when he was in the next (fourth) grade, what a thrill it was that the principal chose him to ring the big bell to signify the end of each period. A big responsibility for a small boy!  

In the fifth grade the school started electing class officers, and he was elected Class President every year until graduation; although he asserts he doesn’t think it was anything more than his grades.  Those who know Woody are not surprised at his being elevated to a position of honor. One can see consistently throughout the years, Woody is recognized and honored for his attention to the welfare of the group and his all inclusive non-prejudicial attitude. Even as a youngster he would not let physicality enter too much in judging people he didn't know. Woody would force himself to get acquainted with the person he took an initial dislike to; and almost always found them to be much nicer than he originally thought. Certainly a trait more important to his peers than good grades.

Woodrow did not have a lot of friends. He thinks this was because he was so small and couldn't play sports. In later years this feeling of not being part of a “gang” would continue to haunt him, making him assert, “I have lots of acquaintances but very few friends.” From this earlier isolation, due to his size, Woody always felt on the fringe of society; always concerned about what was wrong with him that he was not included in the list. This also presented itself in later years in his being a congenital worrier. He was more often silent when he could speak up but worried that his comment would hurt someone. He still finds himself tending towards being too solitary and worrying too much but hides this by being publicly the optimist; wanting everything to be right.

Woodrow grew up in the approximate geographic middle of the Great Dust Bowl Storms of the 1930s. He remembers the depression and the Dust Bowl well. The immense dust storms often reduced visibility to a few feet. The Dust Bowl exodus was the largest migration in American history within a short period of time. By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the Plains states. Why the Baldwins did not leave remains a mystery.  Perhaps having already moved into town gave them a stronger financial base and less impetus to leave.

Farmers suffered terribly. The skies darkened and turned day into night. Seven times during one year the visibility was virtually zero. One notable blackout lasted eleven hours straight and in another instance a single storm lasted for 3 and 1/2 days! Many families suffered terribly during these horrific times, some to the point of near starvation. Elderly, as well as small children and babies, died as a result of dust sicknesses. Woodrow said, “We were in the heart of the dust bowl era and it was not uncommon for it to become as dark as midnight at 3 pm because the dust was so thick. People had to park their cars because they couldn't see to drive and so the drug store I was working in was an accessible destination to get out of the storm." He had the job of cleaning the store after a duster.

Young Woodrow was strongly affected by The Great Depression. America's Great Depression starting with the market crash of 1929 did not end until 1941 when America entered into World War II. Woodrow’s father had lost his job because farm implements were not selling and both his father and mother took FDR's manufactured jobs to make ends meet. Woodrow recalls his mother working in a canning plant. He remembers parts of the depression well; “A constant stream of guys coming to the door wanting something to eat. If they offered to work for food, mother would feed them even though there was no work to be done. She drew the line (had to at some point because they didn't have much more than enough for him and his sister to eat) at those who did not offer to work but just wanted food.”  

Woodrow does define himself with having one particular negative personality aspect which developed during those defining years. He feels he is still too frugal. As the result of being a depression kid, he still can't throw away a paper clip or rubber band. Having gone through so many years of having to watch every penny, he comments that now, “I shy away from spending money that I should; I am sure many of my friends and acquaintances think I am "tight", and I can understand why they would have that impression.” With the pre-qualification stated that he was not looking for sympathy by relating the tale, Woodrow conveys the following story from his youth:  

When I was a kid safety matches had not been invented and mother used large size matches to light the kitchen stove. She saved the used ones and they were one of my favorite toys. She also gave me her old thread spools (She made the clothes for herself and all the girls). And, somewhere along the line I got a fair sized collection of marbles. I made farms out of the matches, for example, and the spools were cars and trucks and tractors, etc. The marbles were people . I don't remember any toys except for those marbles. I did have a tricycle when small, but I never had a bike. But I didn't know I was disadvantaged; I had fun with my make-believe toys.

Woodrow still has the marbles from his childhood, kept in a glass jar in his home, although he admits he no longer remembers their names nor the specifics of the games he played with them.

Woodrow remembers well-dressed men going through garbage disposal cans to find any remnants of food. Other aspects of the depression were not nearly as evident to a young teenaged boy. Woodrow was so busy going to school from 8 to 3, working from 3 to 11 p.m., and then sleeping, that he did not have time to worry about the negative aspects of the phenomenon. He commented, “ . . . or maybe I was just not paying attention. I try not to worry about things I can't fix and concentrate on those that I think I can improve. Again, the dust storms were a horrible thing, but it was to me just a part of nature; I was too young to move away, so I tolerated them.” In 1930 the average income per year was $1,970.00 and by 1939 it had dropped to $1,730.00 per year. In 1930 a gallon of gas was 10 cents and by 1939 it was still 10 cents.

Age 13 - 18 and Amarillo High School, Class of ‘38

Amongst the “age defining events” for these formative years: Woodrow Baldwin would have been aware of The Emergency Banking Act passed to save the run on small banks and perhaps the start of work on building the Golden Gate Bridge. He would certainly have read with interest the stories of the bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow and, in that same year, a young man’s attention was certainly diverted by a running gun battle between FBI agents and the bank robber Baby Face Nelson. Although unaware that the 13th Dali Lama died in 1933, or that Humorist Will Rogers was killed in a plane crash near Barrow, Alaska in 1935. The distant events of Adolf Hitler becoming Fuehrer of Germany, head of state, as well as Chancellor would have little impact on Woodrow for a decade.  

Woodrow’s parents divorced when he was 13. His father was a “womanizer” and his mother discovered this when they had been married only a couple of years. She lived with this knowledge for 33 years because of the family, and because divorce was disgraceful in those days. Woodrow comments, “My father and I were never close, so my ability to cope with his leaving was not as hard as it would have been if we had experienced a good father-son relationship. Perhaps I was too young to comprehend the stigma of divorced parents, so I can't say that I ever felt cheated or neglected. I have had so much good fortune in my life that I have been able to cope fairly well with the few negative things.” — Woodrow’s current attitude throughout life, of focusing on the positive course of events and his emphasis on finding the good side of things.  

In later years Woodrow did see his father. The father, Claude, married twice more and eventually moved back to Amarillo. Woody saw him once or twice a year but his description of those visits show they were never close. Claude had senility during the last ten or so years of his life. Toward the end he didn’t even remember having a son named Woodrow, although he did recognize the other four children. In typical Woodrow manner our hero says, “I was not disturbed by the lack of recognition, my father saw far less of me than he did them; they lived in Amarillo nearer to him.” This is a remarkable level of forgiveness for a father who basically abandoned Woody at a young age. One memory remains close to Woodrow from his father, who gave him a letter signed by President Woodrow Wilson as a memento.

The divorce was more difficult on Woodrow’s mother.  The girls appeared to side with their father and the boys to emphathize with their mother’s hurt at the rejection. Woodrow commented during the interviews for this writing:

This fact was, I think, significant because it caused a slight attitude tiff between the genders. My sisters forced me (by setting up appointments before I got home) to see more of my father than I wanted when I would come home [in later years] from California and Massachusetts. I never verbally expressed displeasure, but I knew it hurt my mother when I visited him. She was very bitter toward my father. They are even buried in separate cemeteries in Amarillo.

Woodrow’s mother, in addition to becoming bitter at the circumstances from the abandonment, developed a critical and negative outlook towards others.  She would comment, as an example, when she saw a happy couple walking down the street together, “Look at them. They probably aren’t even married.” The negative outlook did not seem to change Woodrow’s positive one, or perhaps he developed his constant optimistic outlook as a balance against the pent up grief of his mother.  His mother became even more fiercely independent after the divorce and in her declining years, in the retirement home, was a “monster” unable to accept that she couldn’t walk or manage simple things on her own.

Woodrow Wilson Baldwin finished elementary school and moved to junior high school in 1933, at the age of 13.  At this point in our narrative one must still refer to him as Woodrow, as except for his mother’s nickname of Sonny, which was always how she spoke to him, the name Woodrow is how he was referred to by all who knew him. Although he does not recall this period being particularly traumatic such a significant change would have been difficult, yet he seems to have developed early skills at adapting to upheaval with an optimistic mind. This was still right in the middle of the depression, and his parents had just divorced. When his father left, his mother had nothing but household skills so she did baby-sitting, house cleaning, laundry, etc. for some of the more affluent families of the area. She was paid 10 cents per shirt. Many of Mrs. Baldwin’s old customers remember her as one of "the sweetest ladies they had ever met."  For the public she kept the hurt and bitterness of the divorce behind a kind and gentle smile.

When the Baldwin’s moved to Amarillo in 1923, they had scraped up enough money to make a down payment and have a house built for them at 1211 W. 18th Street. This was at a time when Amarillo barely deserved a gas station. All five children were raised there until the Depression years. After the father left, and all the older siblings had moved away, his mother Ledia rented the home and made mortgage payments for it with a laundry service she provided. She moved Woody and herself to a small bungalow behind Woodrow’s older brother’s house; vowing not to move back again until the home was entirely paid for.  

The house that young adolescent Woodrow lived in with his mother during his early high school, and junior college years would, by today’s standards, be considered a shed. The shed consisted of one small room divided by makeshift walls to include a tiny kitchen and an even tinier bathroom. The brother (Olbert) worked as a delivery driver for the biggest bakery in Amarillo but could ill afford to subsidize his mother and younger brother. He had married twelve years earlier, at 17, and had his own growing family to worry about. His wife worked also to support the family, running an S&H savings stamp store. Although the benefit of giving rudimentary shelter was a great blessing, the house lacked any privacy for the budding young hero of our syory. It was certainly not the sort of home to which a young man brought friends after school on days he didn’t have to work.

The mother and son lived in the small shed for a couple of years.  They shared the same bedroom, which was also their living room. Later on, when Olbert moved to Lubbock to be in charge of the Pepsi franchise there,  they were financially able to rent a small one room apartment in town where they again lived in very close quarters.  One small room for the working mother and the teenage son with a bathroom shared with one other apartment on the same floor. These years would be the ones wherein Woodrow developed his patience and sense of awareness for the feelings of others. After a short time in the apartment Woodrow’s mother was able to find a small house to rent and they lived in that house through his time in junior college.  Ledia was able in the small house to begin to take in laundry, rather than go to peoples homes to do it, and the living room of the house was crammed full of her equipment. Because there was only the one other room, the mother and son again shared the bedroom, but at least in this home she placed a quilt across the bedroom to give some sense of privacy and help maintain a better sense of modesty. Mrs. Baldwin did however achieve her goal of returning to live in the home on 18th Street in 1944, while her youngest son was in the Army, by converting it into a duplex and renting out the one unit to afford to live in the other.  

During his high school years, and later in college, Woodrow had to work to make his way.  There were no programs for disadvantaged children in the early years of the 20th century. If he wanted books, school supplies, and the basics which we today take for granted as being given to today’s students, he had to work.  

Woodrow worked full time at the downtown Amarillo drugstore from the age of 13 till after high school, when he worked at a clothing store during the school year and the drug store during the summers. He started first as a “car hop” attendant bringing beer, soft drinks, ice cream to the drive up lot area.  There were no canned drinks in those days, only bottles and draft.  The store sold some sandwiches, made by some guys wife, for 10 cents each. His second job at the store, including the usual cleaning and stocking shelves, was as a soda jerk at the fountain counter. He also was the local delivery boy. The longer distance deliveries being made by a fellow with a motorcycle.

During Prohibition the drugstore sold liquor illegally out of the Prescription room. The boss was a binge alcoholic and occasionally he and his buddies would be found the next morning passed out in the room.  Woody’s Saturday deliveries started out as a bit of a worry for him.  He was delivering illegal booze to three or four clients.  As it turned out there was some hidden pleasure to be found in these walking distance deliveries.  Regular deliveries to two women resulted in our young heroes first encounter with adult sexual activities and one must wonder if the boss thought he was just a very slow delivery boy.  There was also a group of fellows who drank at one of their wives apartments, as she was away every Saturday. They played the very dangerous game of drawing him into allowing one of them to have sexual relations with him, and eventually each of them. If they had been caught or reported for sex with a minor, especially same-sex, the consequences would have been dire.  Lynching for such offenses or an unexplained “accident” was not uncommon in those days.

After Prohibition the drug store owner opened a bottle store next door to the drugstore and sold whiskey and alcohol from there.  It was still illegal to sell mixed drinks from either establishment, but the clever folks figured a way around that too.  They would buy their liquor in the bottle store and come to the counter of the drug store and order a fizzy, but not quite in a full glass, with the understanding that nobody would take notice when the drink was spiked. Woody was still uncomfortable with this .

In mentioning that he occasionally received oral sex from these older men, when he was around 14, he doesn't recall it having any effect other than he found it very exciting. He says he never felt guilty or remorseful about it — never felt he was "abused" by anyone — simply enjoyed it immensely. “Being so young (14), I was not mature enough to realize the social consequences of homosexual behavior,” he said. Here are the early formations of Woodrow’s open minded attitude towards sexuality. When asked where he stands on sex, Baldwin replied, “I have always been a "live and let live" sort of person. I do not condemn those persons who choose ways of expression that are different from mine. As long as they are not hurting others by their behavior, I am tolerant.”  

On this subject Woodrow wrote a very funny column in his later years, about learning the birds and the bees as a child in Amarillo, Texas in the late 1920s and early 1930s.  He wrote about the misinformation he and his peers were given as kids:

No one with authority ever told me about birds and bees and homo sapiens.  I learned it all from other mal-informed adolescents — and later from perhaps mal-intentioned dirty old men and women.  And I heard some pretty weird things!  I was in the third grade when my wise 9-year-old buddy (Gordon) taught me that I was quitting too soon in my masturbation process. Then at age 12 or 13, this same masturbation act resulted in the explosion of a white, gooey liquid.  I thought for sure I had broken my favorite toy.  Some of my more resourceful friends (younger than I) were present when the crisis occurred.  After my harrowing night, they reported back the next day (after doing extensive research) that this was what made babies and was nothing to worry about.

First, I heard that if I masturbated, I would go crazy.  The result was that I kept on playing, but now with anxiety.  I worried myself almost into dementia. Then I heard the old chestnut that it would make me blind.  Goodness knows, if that were true I would have had a seeing eye dog long ago.  It was this theory that gave rise to the joke "But can't I do it just until I need glasses?”

When we had finally learned that that slimy stuff was the stuff that made babies,  what a rash of theories that produced!  One of them I remember is that each time the act was performed we deprived our someday child of one part of his body. I guess I rationalized that eventually I'd waste away one entire baby and then I could stop when I began the new one.  I don't recall how I reckoned that I was going to know when one baby stopped and the second began. I guess I thought that miraculously I would know when the first child was completely destroyed.  Then I could stop the activity and child #2 would be normally complete.  At a time perhaps later than other folks would, I realized this was not true.

He makes the humorous statement that, at about 16 or 17, young Woodrow realized that, if he were going to heaven, he had to get out of the Baptist church, so he moved to the Methodist church, an added incentive being he was dating the pastor's daughter at the time. The Methodist church was a bit more liberal than the Baptist, but not much. Woodrow wrote in his later years: 

I have never understood what religion has to do with sex, and vice versa. I was raised in the Bible Belt with all the fundamentalist trappings.  As a kid, I wondered about the geographical expansiveness of a hell that could accommodate everyone who swore, played cards, danced — not to mention (dare I?) masturbated or had sex out of wedlock.  Some words describing sexual activities were in themselves so offensive even to contemplate that the church leaders would obscure their meanings by using expressions that served only to confuse and often result in the complete loss of their meaning.

I progressed or regressed to having my own personal religion because organized religion did not seem to fit into what my god and I considered to be natural and productive.  So I stayed away from organized religion entirely for some thirty years.  This was comfortable but not entirely fulfilling.  Later on I discovered a very liberal church which never threatened with either heaven or hell, but instead encouraged me to think.  No religion I had experienced before ever gave me leeway to think; the church spoon-fed all my religion and I was obligated to believe as the church dictated.  This new freedom allowed me and my God (who I had begun to think was unique only to me) to be comfortable in our relationship.   

Woodrow is not one to drown in self-pity and never felt disadvantaged by having to work full time through the high school years. He loved to work and felt that he learned a lot that his peers were not exposed to until much later in life, if ever. Working the long hours limited participation in extracurricular activities and he became just an above-average student at high school. Woodrow graduated in 1938 with a grade point average of 86.37. His notes remind us: “Funny how we remember such insignificant things like that when nowadays I can't remember whether I have taken my pills.”

He keeps a picture from his junior high school yearbook of the girl who was his first sweetheart although they were too young to truly date. He dated other people all through high school. He says he dated just because it was what you were supposed to do and it was a change from the daily grind. He had a reprieve from work only a couple of nights a week. Without a car, he tended to double date with friends who had cars. This was long before the birth control pill. There was absolutely no way anybody dared get a girl pregnant and even condoms were a difficulty to obtain for those rare few so courageous as to try more than conventions of the day allowed. He writes as openly as he speaks: 

So after a show, or whatever the date was centered on, we'd park and the worst we did was kiss. Gals did not want to get pregnant and the guys didn't want to impregnate a gal; because in those days if you did so you married her. We didn't dare consummate then, so we were still horny after taking them home and we did what teenage boys do.  Right? But we never touched each other.

Baldwin remains very private about other sexual escapades of his youth and shies away from discussing them in detail.  

During these years Woody did not make many friends or develop close friendships. He was booked pretty solidly between work and school and home responsibilities. He was well liked and had some best “buddies” but didn’t chum around with them because he didn’t have time. No significant girl friends are remembered but he does recall a regular surreptitious romantic relationship with a Senior High School English teacher. The years seemed to just go by.  A period in his life when he does not recall many significant events, unlike the tumultuous years which followed shortly after.

Woodrow was exempt from Physical Education Classes because he was working but he did enter the Musical Memory Competition every year.  As a young man, and even into his retirement years, he loved a friendly competition. He was not good enough to be on the team challenge to recognize the song, composer, genre, instrument, or voice range; except for the 7th grade when he did make the team.  Regardless he won pins in the 5th, and 6th as well as the team in the 7th.  He eventually became president of every organization he belonged to, then and in his later years, and always remained undaunted in his goal but never vicious. He was running for Class President in the 7th grade, after having been elected in the 5th and 6th grades, and at the last minute he found himself suddenly opposed by a group running for President, Vice President and Secretary and who had signs and pins and a very “classy” campaign. Woody was running only by nomination, not by asking or seeking the goal. Woody still won the title as President but doesn’t think it was popularity, rather that it was his academic achievements and a natural ability to be a leader, one who could delegate and share responsibility easily.  A winning factor in his future endeavors.

When put in a position of responsibility Woodrow says he, “wants the organization to be the best it has ever been. I really work hard at that and enjoy immensely the efforts involved, although there are time I feel like I overdo it because I want to be more than just another President of the organization. I want to be the best.”  

When he would have normally finished high school it was 1937, and still the heart of Depression. The pre-college school years in the ‘30s consisted of only eleven grades. In those days they didn't have scholarships and government loans, etc. You either had money or you worked. The Baldwins did not have the money for college, so Woodrow graduated in 1938 having stayed in high school an extra year to get the necessary skills to work his way through college. Woodrow intentionally dropped one course in his last normal year so he couldn’t graduate and so, during the following year he only had to take typing, shorthand and bookkeeping. Woodrow W. Baldwin was one of the 41 Honor Roll students who made the “A” list in 1938 when was taking only three courses, instead of four. Today he is still alumni president of the 1938 Amarillo High School graduating class. At their last reunion in 2008; 25 (from an original class size of 478) attended.

During that last year of high school Woodrow’s shorthand teacher was the Dean of Women of the School; the disciplinarian. The shorthand class was at 1 pm and in those days returning late from lunch was a worse sin than having a baby out of wedlock is today. Each guilty girl had to see the Dean so this shorthand teacher was frequently called out of class. She had the class elect a substitute teacher on those occasions when she had to perform as disciplinarian. With his usual luck in those circumstances, the class elected him. Prior to the election he had been struggling to just get by in the shorthand class and was not doing well in the subject. But, with this new responsibility he spent every spare minute he could find working on shorthand with the result that he became very good at it. Spare minutes were hard to find; remember he worked in a drug store 8 hours a day all through high school. The push from the election changed his life in the immediate moment and had a significant effect on his entire future academic career.

When his sister Leora, with whom he was closest, had her high school graduation the two children created a paired photo with her in high school graduation gown. As a mark of her closeness to Woodrow, she returned to make the same photo when he graduated.