My Burning Leg
This happened during the winter, probably within the last two years we lived in New York. My dad was either back in Detroit or at work. I suspect he was in Detroit because my mother was in the backyard shoveling snow—the only time in my life I remember seeing her do that.
I may have just awakened from a nap, and my sister was probably still napping. I wanted to find my mother and let her know I was up.
A Leg Caught in the Radiator
Our home had hot-water heat that circulated through radiators. I did not understand how the heating system worked or that the thermostat could turn on the furnace.
To see my mother outside, I climbed onto the radiator beneath the window. I do not think I was even wearing shoes. An earlier photograph shows how small my legs were at the time. My right leg slipped between the radiator sections and became caught.
The radiator must not have been hot when I climbed onto it, because I would have felt the heat with my left foot. But while my right leg was trapped, the radiator began getting hot.
I started pounding on the window, and my mother rushed inside. By then, the radiator had burned the inside of my right leg, both above and below the knee—from my thigh toward my knee and from my knee toward my ankle.
A Scar That Has Lasted More Than Eighty Years
It was a third-degree burn. The skin healed long ago, but I have carried the scar for more than eighty years.
If someone looks carefully, they can see a narrow stripe of intact skin through the middle of the scar, with burned areas on either side. That stripe must have lined up with the space between the radiator sections, where my skin was not touching the hot metal.
Remembering Butter—and Realizing It Was Oleo
For years, I said that the doctor must have told my mother to put butter on the burn immediately. As I was writing this story, however, it dawned on me that I had probably been using the wrong word.
This was during World War II, and we did not have butter. What we used was oleo, or margarine. If the doctor recommended putting something on the burn, it must have been oleo.
My mother put oleo on the burn, which was a common home remedy at the time. I have always remembered that it hurt terribly, and I believed the salt in the oleo contributed to the pain. I recently learned that the oleo we used very likely did contain salt, already mixed into it when it was manufactured.
When I told the story using the word “butter,” people sometimes asked about the salt. I now realize that I had thought of oleo as butter and used that name for it over the years.
A Childhood Memory of Oleo
Another memory from those days is what passed for “fun” for us little kids: kneading a plastic bag of oleo to mix in the yellow coloring. We would squeeze the bag until the little dye packet broke, then keep kneading until the color spread throughout the margarine.
Over the years, people who noticed the scar when I was working as a lifeguard or wearing shorts sometimes asked what had happened. I would tell them this story, with slight variations. Now, after more than eighty years, I have finally corrected one detail: what I remembered as butter was almost certainly oleo.
David's burn
Ernie's son David also experienced a burn. Not sure how old he was then - maybe 12 or 13. He was in a neighbors yard who had a unattended small fire going burning leaves. It was beginning to go out so David kicked the ashes to get it back going and his shoe caught on fire. He can't recall how it went out - by stomping it or the nearby lake but he does recall running home and telling his mom. She drove David to what he thinks was Pontiac Osteopathic Hospital on M-59. This would have been around 1982 or 1983. He recalls the doctors had to unroll the skin that burned of and was in rolls around the circle shaped burn and then cut away this skin. This scar lasted many years/decades as well. David's philosophy is what German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in 1888: "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger".