How Scooter Lane Got His Name

     Robert Earle Lane, Jr. was born at 8:04 pm on April 11, 1944, at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Terre Haute, Indiana. Of his immediate family, only his mother, Melinda Bauer Lane, was present. His father, Robert Earle, Sr., was with the 1st Infantry in England, preparing for the Normandy Invasion. His older sister, Betty Jean, had been sent to stay with Melinda’s parents in Prairie Creek in anticipation of his birth. 

Melinda had driven herself from their home in Flatiron to the hospital in the green 1935 Chevy Master Deluxe. Robert purchased the car from his Uncle Pete. That afternoon, she had called Doc Wallace when the labor pains started. Grabbing the tan suitcase with the red Wabash College sticker, she backed the Chevy out of the garage and drove the twenty miles to the big brick hospital in Terre Haute.

At the reception desk, Miss Emily Davis, RN, looked perfect and professional. Her starched white dress and cap were just as they taught her at the Goshen College Nursing Department. She promptly escorted Melinda to the maternity ward on the second floor. By the time Doc Wallace arrived, she was well on the way to having little Robert Earl, Jr. 

Little Robert Earl, Jr. was never what you would call little. He weighed just over eleven pounds at birth, and by the time Robert Earle, Sr., got home from the war 6 months later in October, he weighed twenty-two pounds on the nose. Melinda’s mother, Anna Bauer, said the child got his size because her daughter was “big-breasted and had wholesome” milk. (The men who sat in front of Jack Hoffman’s barbershop on Main Street described her breasts much more graphically.)

Whatever the reason, Robert Earle, Jr. was a big boy with brown hair and eyes and somewhat protruding ears. He loved to sit in the kitchen on the green-speckled linoleum and watch his mother as she worked. Dressed in a diaper and cotton shirt, the boy often banged the floor with an old enamelware water dipper. While he sometimes crawled, his favorite method of getting around was to scoot along on his bottom, and that’s what he was doing the first time Robert Earle, Sr. saw him. 

It was about four o’clock in the afternoon on October 21, 1944, when Robert Earle, Sr., opened the kitchen door. Melinda was just coming into the kitchen from the dining room, and three-year-old Betty Jean was playing with her paper dolls at the old round oak table. When he heard it open, Robert Earle, Jr. was sitting in front of the Hoosier cabinet and turned towards the door. Spotting the giant figure of the daddy he had never seen before, he screamed and scooted as fast as he could toward his mother. Robert Earle, Sr. dropped his duffel bag on the floor and exclaimed, “For God’s sake, would ya look at that little scooter go!”

And that is how Scooter Lane got his name.