Solely For My Own Satisfaction

In an earlier post about the good ol´ days in Genoa, Nebraska I made an offhand reference to Teeny Burroughs, and mentioned that I would put off writing about her until another day. It was the sort of reference that anyone reading it probably forgot by the time they finished the paragraph, but I have been tormenting myself ever since about how best to describe this woman.

The first trouble I run up against is trying to estimate how old Teeny was when I knew her. Sixteen or seventeen year olds have no sense of how old adults are. At least I didn't. If you think about it, that makes sense; as adults we have acquired much more expertise at judging the lines in someone's face or recognizing the rather phony youthfulness that results from plastic surgery or excessive cosmetics. I never really thought about age. I was a teenager. Other people were adults. Subtler distinctions than that were apparently beyond my self-centered self.  Having made all of those disclaimers, I'm going to guess that Louise (Teeny) Little Burroughs was between 55 and 60 when I knew her.

Teeny owned and operated the only cafe in Genoa and I started working there when I was a Junior in high school. By the time I was a Senior I had graduated to the position of night fry cook. The title says it all. Perhaps there was real prepared food available at lunch, but at night the only options were fried this or fried that. You could have regular fried (hamburgers, hamburger steaks, pork chops, t-bones) or deep fried (chicken fried steaks, breaded frozen chicken), all accompanied by fried hash browns or deep fried french fries. Probably dinner came with a side of vegetables that had come out of a can and been boiled within an inch of their lives.

Teeny seemed exotic to me. First of all, as her nickname and maiden name both suggest, she was small of stature. She had flaming red hair whose color might have been natural many years earlier, but was now maintained at one of the local beauty shops, bright red lipstick, too much rouge and eyeliner, a permanent cigarette in her lips or close by, and a well-practiced sarcastic take on the small-town hypocrites and prigs. As we might say today, she had a mouth on her and could be a bit coarse.

Teeny didn't have to suffer the small-mindedness of small-town life alone. Her helpmate was Harry Burroughs. And now I'm back at the problem of guesstimating ages. I would guess that Harry was somewhere from ten to twenty years older than Teeny, and I have the idea that he once had an occupation apart from the cafe. It was, after all, always called Teeny's and not Teeny's and Harry's. But when I knew him he was pretty much a slug. The lunch counter in the cafe had an opening for wait staff to pass through. Harry owned one of the seats next to that opening and that is where he spent his day, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and coughing up phlegm, which he would walk to the bathroom to expectorate into the most disgusting sink that has ever existed in a food establishment. If the waitress was busy somewhere else, and he felt like it, he might get up and pour someone a cup of coffee or give them a refill as long as he was up getting one for himself.

Having just called him a slug, I want to stress that I liked Harry. He wasn't as sarcastic as Teeny, but he had a sense of humor and I have no memory of him ever being anything but pleasant to me. I have distinctive memories of him laughing. The one interest in Harry's life that outweighed all others was baseball. When I was in grade school Harry had been the manager of the Genoa men's baseball team. That was the end of an era when all the small towns had baseball teams, made up mostly of locals, but also with the occasional ringer brought in from Omaha or Lincoln, probably from the university. By the time I was working at the cafe, that period was already coming to an end, if it hadn't already reached it. At any rate, if the team still existed, I don't think Harry managed it any longer.

(A side note that interests...me, at least: I think the games were worked with only a home plate umpire, and it seems that all of the games had the same umpire. He was an old, chubby guy who was known only as Tucker, who I think was from Silver Creek. What is odd about that is that there were teams from Genoa, Fullerton, Silver Creek, St. Edward, Osceola, Polk and who knows what other nearby towns...but the umpire for Genoa home games was always Tucker.)

The town of Genoa had 1000 people and at least 5 churches. People were largely defined by their religion. Perhaps Teeny and Harry had a religion (I know their daughter and her family did), but I like to think they did not. They certainly weren't church goers. I liked that.

If either of them had been inclined to get religion, they were given a fine opportunity. When we were probably in what would now be called the Middle School years, my brothers and I had the local paper route delivering the Omaha Weird Harold (or World Herald). Late one winter night, the town was awakened by the sound of the local volunteer fire department siren, a particularly scary sound in the middle of a freezing night. When we got up a few hours later, still in the dark, to deliver the papers we learned what had happened. It was the first time I had ever seen a house virtually burned down to the ground. Either Teeny or Harry had fallen asleep with one of those ubiquitous cigarettes still burning. Somehow or other, they both made it out with minor injuries. Teeny was permanently scarred from burns on one or both of her arms, but I think that was the extent of the damage.

I can't think of any specific life lesson that I learned from Teeny, but I have no doubt that, if I am more than a little sarcastic today or a little more irreverent than is normal, Teeny is one of the responsible influences. If I take a particular delight when sanctimony is revealed as hypocrisy, to some extent I am channeling Teeny.

One last note. Many years after I left Genoa and long after I had any contact with Teeny or Harry, I discovered that Teeny had a younger brother who had gone into the circus world and become a famous clown with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey. When he died in November 2010, he became surely the only Genoa native to have his obituary in the NY Times.