John Bargowski

My classmates were all getting their driver’s licenses. Like any of us had anywhere important to go. They drove cars their parents had gifted them, either a hand-me-down or a brand-new lease. I was the last without a provisional license and the only one without a car parked outside Shane Yamamoto’s house in Salt Lake, a neighborhood made up of military and upper-middle-class families and surrounded by Pearl Harbor, Fort Shafter, and Hickam Air Force Base.

The Kansas summer of 1953 was hot and humid — too hot to play war or basketball. By midmorning the temperature had climbed to one hundred degrees. Most houses had nearly worthless “swamp coolers,” but my dad’s appliance store was air-conditioned, so I jumped on my bike and rode there for relief. I soon spotted the empty cardboard boxes that had held large appliances, and I nagged Dad until he let me take one home.