CHAPTER 1

KANSAS

I was born on September 17, 1951. This is how long ago that was: Harry Truman was president, Patti Page was kicking record-chart butt with “Tennessee Waltz,” and All About Eve took home the Oscar for best picture. Oh, and the wheel had already been invented.

I was born at a very early age, an age that was too young to have a sense of good judgment, which I understand doesn’t kick in until around thirty. Unfortunately for me, it still hasn’t.

If I’d had better judgment, I wouldn’t have chosen to be born in Manhattan, Kansas. The Little Apple. The city that always sleeps. Not that Manhattan is a bad place; it’s actually a very pleasant small city. It’s just a bad place to be from if you’re destined for a life in show business.

My father, Dale Warren August Peterson, had barely finished high school before he left to join the Merchant Marines toward the end of World War II. Upon returning to his hometown of Randolph, Kansas, he encountered a beautiful eighteen-year-old redhead, Phyllis Schmidt, at the local swimming pool. A senior in high school, Phyllis aspired to become a nurse, and after graduating, she wasted no time in moving to Manhattan to sign up for nurse’s training. Dale followed her, and they married on Groundhog Day, 1951, shortly after Phyllis discovered she was pregnant.

After a quick courthouse wedding, they returned to Randolph. The town was too small to support a hospital, so I was born in the nearest “big city,” Manhattan. My parents chose the name Cassandra after one of my mother’s teachers whom my dad had dated. I know, right? Cassandra (pronounced Ka-SAWN-dra, not Ka-SAND-ra) was such a bizarre name for 1951 rural Kansas that I might as well have been called Zor-El. It was one of the things that would later contribute to my feelings of freakishness. For expediency’s sake, my name was shortened to Soni (Sawn-ee), a name everyone in my family could pronounce. Daddy enjoyed telling the story that upon hearing the name Cassandra, my German great grandmother exclaimed, “Accch! Zuch an uk-lee name ver zuch a bee-u-tee-ful baby!”

Broke, newly married, and with their first child, my parents were given the enticing offer of a free place to live. All they had to do was take over the farm Grandma and Grandpa had vacated because, as oldsters, it was becoming too much work. Mother and Daddy packed up their few belongings and their new, bee-u-tee-ful baby and headed to the farm, twenty-five miles away. They tried their hand growing milo, a type of corn used for cattle feed, and when that didn’t pan out, they used what little money they had to buy several calves. Despite being kept in the barn and fed with baby bottles, the poor little things died during the first winter, which was unusually cold. My mother hated every second of living on the farm. She told Daddy in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t find a normal job and get them the hell out of there, she was taking me and leaving.

Miraculously, Daddy found a job as a salesman in the Singer sewing-machine store in Manhattan. On the first day, he showed up for work in his overalls with no shirt and was given the job of vacuuming the store. He vacuumed all day, eight straight hours, which not only made the Singer store’s carpet the cleanest in town but earned Daddy enough to buy a secondhand suit (even though he was afraid it would “make him look like a queer”).

Although he had no experience as a salesman, he took to it as if selling had been in his blood his whole life. It was a perfect fit. He had a fierce competitive streak and had always been able to cajole, beg, or threaten people into doing whatever he wanted.

The drama began only a year and a half into my life.

Good Friday, 1953, seemed no different than any other day on the farm. Daddy took the Singer truck to work in Manhattan and left my mother alone to care for me and Jeannie, my eleven-year-old cousin who was visiting. It was the first warm April afternoon of the year. Crocuses popped their purple heads up through gray patches of snow and the first pink blossoms burst from the crab-apple tree in the yard. Jeannie helped my mother, who was eight and a half months pregnant, spread a blanket on the grass in the sun to color eggs for our Easter Sunday get-together at Grandma and Grandpa Peterson’s.

Meanwhile, I was left alone in the house to explore on my own, which always struck me as a little odd. According to my mother’s account of what happened next, at only eighteen months old, I apparently had the strength and ingenuity to drag a kitchen chair across the linoleum floor to our worn-out O’Keefe and Merritt stove. I climbed up on the chair to check out the sound the eggs made knocking against the sides of the kettle as it bubbled.

Sometimes I have to wonder about what happened next. I must have lost my balance and grabbed on to the closest thing to me, the enormous cast-iron pot of boiling water. When Mother heard my cries, she ran into the house to find me lying on the kitchen floor, bathed in scalding water, going into shock. She slathered me in lard (so much for nurse’s training), trying her best to ignore the skin that kept slipping off in her hands. Wrapping me in a clean sheet, she and Jeannie got me into her old Pontiac station wagon and hauled ass over the deep-rutted dirt roads to the hospital in Manhattan, twenty-five miles away.

Third-degree burns covered a third of my small body, so the prognosis wasn’t good. Back then, if more than twenty-five percent of your body was burned, you were pretty much history. Along with a good amount of skin, all the hair on my head had melted off and my eyelids were fused shut. When I was still alive after a night and a day, the doctor told Daddy he needed to get me to the University of Kansas Medical Center as fast as possible or there was no hope.

Once I was there, with no other option, the doctors suggested treating the raging infection that resulted from the burns with a new experimental derivative of penicillin, only recently mass-produced. They couldn’t make any promises, but what did my parents have to lose? My father gave the go-ahead and I was pumped full of the stuff. Several touch-and-go days went by and, miraculously, I was still alive. When the doctors finally declared me stable, skin was peeled from my stomach and thighs and grafted onto my back, shoulders, neck, and ankles. I stayed in the hospital for several weeks and over the next year would return to the burn center in Kansas City again and again.

While I was recovering, my mother was admitted to the hospital across the street from the burn center, where she gave birth to my baby sister, Melody. Once home, while Mother cared for my newborn sister, Daddy spent every night of the following year lying on the cool, bare floor of my parent’s bedroom rubbing my back, while I cried and squirmed from the relentless pain and itching.

Just take a look at the lucky things that happened. Penicillin had just come into widespread use. The nearest burn center was one of the best in the country. Okay, pulling a pot of boiling water on top of myself—not so lucky, but ironically, I’d eventually come to think of the accident as one of the best things to ever happen to me.

My first press!

During my recovery, my parents gave up on farming and moved into town. Randolph was a sleepy little burg of 350 of the most white-bread residents ever assembled in one place, and it seemed the majority of them were my relatives. Before I left Kansas, I wasn’t aware there were Blacks, Asians, Latinos, Jews, or gays, only people who looked and acted like me.

My grandma, Ivah Singer, was a tall, big-boned gal with short, curly, apricot-colored hair. She was from strong German stock. Think Kaiser Wilhelm in a dress. My grandpa, who was a diminutive five foot one, exaggerated Grandma’s five-ten frame whenever he stood next to her. I still have old valentines she gave him calling him her “little man.”

Grandma had come west to Kansas with her family as a baby. She married my grandpa, August Peterson, when she was only fifteen and he was sixteen. He’d come from Sweden and had such a heavy accent that most of the time I had no idea what he was saying. His best English erupted when he got mad. Several times a day, we could hear him yell, “Yumpin’ Yiminy!” or “Ye-sus Christ!” which always cracked us kids up. Whenever I walked next door to Grandpa and Grandma’s house, past the lilac bushes with their intoxicating aroma, past Grandma’s huge bed of purple irises, and up the porch steps of their two-story, whitewashed house, Grandpa always opened the door and called out a cheery “Gudag!” I was almost nine before I realized he wasn’t mistaking me for the family pet.

Randolph was mainly populated by northern European immigrants—Petersons, Bergstoms, and Schmidts, oh my! It was a real-life version of The Andy Griffith Show nestled in a valley carved by the Snake River, a town full of people with nicknames like “Wuzzy,” “Hooney,” and “Dudd,” where every few feet of pavement was studded with bricks that commanded “DON’T SPIT ON THE SIDEWALK.”

In the center of town was a square dotted with enormous shade trees, surrounding a white wooden gazebo where, on Sunday afternoons, my grandpa led a band. On the streets bordering the square were a post office, a church, a beauty salon/barber shop, a grocery store, and my favorite place, Peterson’s Drugstore, which happened to be owned by my Uncle Lyle and Aunt Vergie.

I lived for the afternoons when one of my older cousins, usually Jeannie, would take me along with her to the drugstore, where we got to sit up on the high metal stools at the soda fountain. Jeannie, who was a teenager, hadn’t yet bleached her natural dishwater-blonde hair, but she made up for it by wearing short shorts to show some leg.

Peterson’s Drugstore looked like a place you might see in an old movie starring Lana Turner. The floor was made up of tiny, white mosaic tiles with a decorative black pattern running through it. The few small, round tables that dotted the room were flanked by twisted wire “ice cream parlor” chairs. Ornate tin ceiling tiles gleamed overhead and a long, polished-wood soda fountain ran the length of the store.

“What’ll it be, girls?” Uncle Lyle always asked, even though he already knew what we wanted.

“Chocolate phosphates, please!” we shouted back.

Uncle Lyle squirted a shot of chocolate syrup into each of two tall Coke glasses he took from the icebox, added the acid phosphate, and stirred in the fizzy seltzer water while we watched with anticipation. Finally, he set the drinks on the counter and slid them toward us.

“That’ll be twenty cents!” he bellowed. We both laughed because we knew he wouldn’t really make us pay. While the noisy ceiling fan hummed overhead, giving us a temporary break from the sticky Kansas-afternoon heat, we sipped our frosty drinks through paper straws and were allowed to peruse the comic books on a rickety, rotating wire rack. Superman was my favorite. I couldn’t get enough of him and his amazing adventures. He reminded me of Daddy, with his bulging, muscular arms and shiny blue-black hair slicked back over his perfect skull. I sometimes daydreamed that Daddy could fly. Then he would scoop me up, just like Lois Lane, and carry me away, zooming across the sky to Metropolis, far away from Randolph, away from Kansas, away from my mother.