The Clan of the Williams

I come from a big family.

Not big in the sense that we all need to try out for "Biggest Loser Families." Well, we probably could do that, but I don't mean big like that.

I mean big in the sense that I have four sisters and two brothers. That makes seven children - nine people living in the house that I grew up in, when Mom and Dad are thrown in.

That's unusual. That's not Ripley's-Believe-It-or-Not unusual, but it is not something you see every day. Growing up in a suburb of San Diego, California in the 1960's, it was definitely not something you saw every day.

Unless you lived in our neighborhood. Then you saw it a lot.

A kid living near Oasis Avenue in Chula Vista naturally gravitated to our house nearly every day, because something was going on there. The seven kids' ages spanned just nine years, so it was easy to find something to do with kids your own age - you pretty much showed up and looked to see if something was happening that you were interested in.

My brother Tony was likely playing football in the front yard, or basketball in the driveway. My sister Glenda was in the house (on the phone) or in the bathroom or the back patio, with a few of her teen-aged friends, fooling around with their hair and talking about boys.

Brother John was in the back yard, on restriction. John was always on restriction. Ask anyone. This was because he could not stay out of trouble - not the kind of trouble where you picked him up at the police station at 4 a.m., but the kind of trouble that meant he was staying after school and the teacher (or principal) called Mom, and then Dad would yell at him and extend his restriction again.

If he served out the actual time he was given, he'd still be in the back yard - and he'll turn 54 this year.

Mom and Dad, looking back, did an amazing job to keep us all fed, clothed, healthy and unsuccessful in our efforts to kill each other. Dad was career Navy by the time the younger children arrived, and instead of moving us every few years as happens to most military families, the Navy left us in San Diego for 12 uninterrupted years. Dad took any assignment he could that kept us there, so he worked a variety of Navy jobs at a variety of Navy bases from north of Tijuana to northern San Diego County.

As you might expect, money was tight with all those kids and just a Navy paycheck. So Mom and Dad worked nights at the base's NCO club to make the money go further. That left Glenda in charge, which permanently made her the most unpopular kid amongst us seven - the boss, after all, is the bossiest.

We pushed her around, to be sure. But the ultimate retribution was on Glenda's side - "I'm telling Mom and Dad on you!" And she did, too.

Dad was a yeller, a lecturer in reality. He was the grand pooh-bah of household punishment. As the son of a minister that believed in not sparing the rod, he intended to raise his kids in the same manner.

Now don't go all right-wing, corporal-punishment-is-abuse spastic on me. He was administering what he saw as tough love. And there is a difference between smacking a kid's backside and bloodying it with a switch. Thank God he knew the difference.

He believed in gang mentality behavior - if one kid did it, they all got punished. So he would line us up for spankings, oldest to youngest. Of course, by the time he got to the littlest kids, he was so worn out that we just got sent to our rooms - which we gladly accepted.

Mom, however, was different. She delivered swift and terrible punishment, on the spot, with the quick wrath of a lightning bolt. She was handy with the palm of her hand, supporting the convicted child with the non-swinging hand clenched around an arm so they were left to dangle as she paddled.

She was impressively good with her slipper, which came to be the delivery method of choice as we got older. She would throw it at you, hit you, then tell you to "bring that back to me." The child then had a tough balancing act - get close enough to Mom that you could give her the slipper back and stay clear of the swinging zone and another barrage, whilst not being so far away as to be accused of "throwing my own slipper at me."

Mom learned this from her mother, my Big Momma. She was revered for being able to throw slippers around corners. I never saw her do it, but both my brothers swear to her doing it.

But punishments were not so frequent. The best method of gaining control was clearing the house of non-family members and sending the kids to their rooms or the back yard. Dad or Mom would walk out the front door and deliver this message - "If you do not live here, go home. If you do, go to your room!" In about five minutes, calm was restored.

Of course, you never had to tell John. He was already in the back yard, remember?

A few friends had special privileges. Glenda's friend Janet Holmes had free run of the place, and Tony's bud Robert Phelps, who lived down the street, would frequently walk into the house and just jump into whatever Tony was up to. Someone challenged him to at least knock before he came in once, and from that point on Robert would walk in the front door as he always did, and knock on the hallway walls, yelling, "It's Robert Phelps!" Robert had a pool in his backyard, so he was a shoo-in for popularity among the neighborhood kids.

Sister Kathy was sneaky, at least to me. She never seemed to get into trouble. I am sure she did, but she was very low-key about it, having her on-the-edge fun when it made the smallest splash.

The big kids - Tony and Kathy, usually - apparently had this past time when Mom and Dad were not home of climbing onto the roof with their friends. The house had a typical flat roof and was very low to the ground, so it was easy for an average-sized teenager to get up on it. As far as I know, that was Kathy's big home risk. I guess she did her thrill-seeking out of the neighborhood.

Cindy was the good one. She usually went along with whatever everyone was doing, but she was not in nearly the daily trouble the others were. Later in life we would pick on her about being "the sheltered one" who seemed to never get the off-color jokes we heard and repeated.

We had lived in military housing in Coronado ( Pam and I were just babies), so we had a life before Oasis Avenue. But Dad bought the house shortly after it was built and moved in. We saw our world grow from that little neighborhood. The elementary school was just a block away, our friends were across the street or down the street, and you could go outside and play after breakfast and play all day, with a break for lunch, and not come home until dark without anyone worrying about you.

Gradually, our world got bigger. We all started junior high and high school, met new friends, and matured. Glenda would bring home boyfriends. Tony was suddenly too cool to hang with the little kids, which infuriated John the most.

He was the in-between child, fourth in the line, and stuck in the middle. He was too young to be considered a "big kid" as were Glenda, Kathy and Tony. But he always felt too old to be a "little kid" like Cindy, me and Pam. It was a point of contention for many years with him, and it manifested itself in our bedtime.

The little kids always went to bed at 8:30 p.m. and the big kids went to bed later on. John saw it as a tragic miscarriage of justice that he had to go to bed with the little kids, and he was always vocal about it come bed time.

For me, I loved it, I was a scaredy-cat as a kid, and I hated going into that dark bedroom alone. I would casually insist that John always go first, to scare off the night-beings that stayed in the closet when no one was looking, intent on slaughtering me as I walked across the bedroom floor.

When he finally received the coveted "big kid" designation, I am not sure it was all he thought it was. He got to stay up, sure. But I don't think he ever got control of the TV watching that he thought he would get.

More later ...