I have included LOTS of photos with this entry to the Transmitter, and I haven’t sought permission from anyone. I ask for your kind forgiveness if you are included in the images here.If you don't like it, tough luck for you. Take it up with my attorney. He's pictured at left, in the red.
Spring is trying to arrive.
Recently I started a garden, a task in which I haven’t participated in almost 30 years. I may have told you in the past that as a boy growing up I was a member of the Melvin Adventurers 4-H club, and that my parents insisted that I take gardening as an activity.
I never really had a problem with gardening, so to speak, but as a pre-teen my mind was on lots of other things besides operating a shovel or a hoe for a few hours a week. Go on a bike ride, Jim? On it like stink on an ape. Wanna build a go-cart, Jim? Just let me get my hammer! Wanna climb a tree? I'm already up it and gettin' ready to spit on you.
I was not averse to getting a little dirt under my fingernails, either, but gardening at that age just seemed like a chore and not something someone would do for the enjoyment of it.
I dropped a bad smoking habit a couple of months ago after quite a bit of soul searching. That, and the price of a pack of smokes was set to go up. And the federal tax on cigarettes. Oh, and the state tax will go up, too, this year---mark my words here. All in all, I am saving more than a couple hundred dollars monthly by not smoking, and that is one of the lesser benefits of cessation—I hesitate to use the word quit, because nobody likes a quitter.
Springtime is really the best time to drop a bad habit, I think. The weather is becoming nice (marginally nice this year, it seems), and the opportunities to engage in activities that distract from the need to light up seem to double now that it is warm enough to spend time outside.
Smoking really was a bad habit that spawned other bad habits. But after considering the fact that I could get away with smoking in the building over a year after the law banning it had passed, and that I had fallen into the habit of hunkering down in the basement for the winter and passing long, grey afternoons making up my own dialogue to Mexican soap operas and chain smoking cigarettes, it just seemed like the time had come to finally drop it once and for all. That, and the price went up, did I mention that?
So now it’s springtime. Time for another habit.
I rented a rototiller from Ralph here in GC and with the help of my brother Steve (whose son Alex cannot wait to get out and plant some seeds—he is five and loves to garden), I spread rotten manure and compost in a patch 20 feet by 30 feet. It’s about one-third the size of the garden we had growing up, but I want to go slow at first—if I fail it might be enough to drive me to seek an early death by lung cancer again. I also built three raised beds that I stuck on the north side, and north of those a patch 4 feet by 20 feet to plant climbing stuff like cukes and tomatoes.
I want to plant stuff this year that I will eat or give away. The most exotic thing I purchased was a packet of okra seeds. We grew it when we were kids and liked it, but the rest is garden-variety garden varieties. Spinach. Lettuce. Cabbage. Peas. Beans. Of course sweet corn. And pumpkins for Jack-o-Lanterns this fall.
All this time outside got me thinking about how I spent time as a kid, especially in the weeks ramping up to the last day of school and summer. There was always a passel of kids on Green Street then. The last days of spring meant the last day of school, and the last ride on the school bus of the year. It meant proms, and graduations.
This is my older brother Lance, spring of 1980. He looks just like a kid, doesn't he?Those last days of spring meant sleeping in and hanging out and weeks of entire days of absolutely nothing to do but play with the other kids on the street and in town through all hours of the day and into the evening until well after dark. It meant Camp Shaw.
These are a few of the kids I grew up with. Starting at the left is Kristy Stevenson, Jim Shearl, Bruce Killian, Deanna Shearl, Tammy Hubner, and Andy KillianEarly one spring my younger brother Bruce was nearly killed after being struck by a car. I told you that story before. Bruce spent the summer of 1983 in a body cast that went from one ankle to his ribcage. He got by with shorts most of the summer. I remember them, several pair that were primary blue with orange and yellow stripes up the side, and they were made of terrycloth. And they were really big, because of the cast that went around his waist. He spent most of the summer wearing just that, and maybe a t-shirt over the top—it became kind of a uniform for him that year.
Here is Lance and his wife Ann at a party in our backyard on their wedding day in 1983. Notice the fantastic garden in the background? Our mom did most of the work.But that year our oldest brother Lance got married on what had to be the hottest day of summer. Bruce had to wear a pair of modified dress pants and a white polo shirt over his massive plaster cast that Saturday, and we propped him up in the back of the church for the service. I don’t have any of the professional family photos of the day, but I remember he looked very pale and on the verge of passing out or falling asleep in them. We had a reception in the Catholic Church hall in Gibson City, and after that a big family party in our backyard in Melvin. But that was a day of too much action for Bruce, and it also marked the first time that many of our relatives got a chance to see him after his accident, so he got lots of attention and by mid-afternoon he was worn out entirely.
Maybe once in awhile we’d go on vacation during the summer, but not always. I can remember camping trips so long ago that it was just Lance and I in the back seat. We were regulars in Branson before Branson was Branson. Yes, that Branson. Or Hannibal, Missouri. Wisconsin Dells once. The Ozarks. Many times we would travel to Arkansas to visit some of My Mother’s distant relatives. Or to Nashville to see the Grand Old Opry.
From Left: Jim Shearl, Andy Killian, Deanna Shearl, Bruce Killian, Jim Killian, Brenda Shearl, Steve Killian. This is at an air show in Rantoul, maybe in 1981. There's my lawyer again, number 12.We used to go places too, day trips in spring and summer. My family and the Shearls across the street and maybe Kim and Kristy Stevenson would take day trips to Monticello to the train museum, or to Allerton Park. I remember several trips to Chanute Air Force Base Open houses back in those days, too. There was always something going on within driving distance, something to do, something to see. There were things to do in Melvin, too, but not that would keep a more urbane child occupied. We weren’t exactly Amish, but we found things to interest us.
One Saturday afternoon I dragged an old soapbox and a broken stroller from our garage. Bruce said that they would make a neat car, so we got some wood and cobbled this racer together with some nails. Our neighbor Mike Duke is helping us paint it. As I recall it didn't work very well, but the time we spent putting it together is what I remember--like I say, we made our own fun.Like the John Clark haircuts? They really highlight the ears.
The Duffys might be spreading tar on the roof of one of the buildings uptown, and that could keep us staring for an hour. Fred and T.D. Thackeray would fire up the big iron printer in the front window of The Ford County Press office on a Tuesday evening, and we’d watch as the mechanical beast rolled out sheet after sheet after sheet after sheet after sheet. The Melvin Fire Department might do a training exercise outside of the high school, and train the hoses on the building on a hot summer night.
One day our dad's boss, Ed Munsell, called our house. "Stay right there and don't go anywhere. I have something for you, Ernie." He always called us Ernie and Bert. About 10 minutes later he pulled up in his truck and gave us these two bicycles. We rode them till the wheels fell off. I will remember the gift 'til the day I die.I remember when the village superintendent would work on a broken water main and would dig out a hole in the middle of the street. Even then we wondered why the water service didn’t come from the alley behind the house, but nobody ever consulted eight year olds on such matters. If the water main work wasn’t done by the end of the day, he’d place a barricade over the hole and several smudgepots, steel spheres filled with a kind of grease that would burn a dirty orange flame and emit thin, greasy black smoke. They looked quite spooky at the end of a long, dark street.
There was a brief period of time that we could walk around town without the fear that many have today. We weren’t really bad, but we could find our share of trouble with a bar of soap and the cover of night. Some of us moved on from the childlike soap to write on windows, having since graduated to sticks of canning paraffin, which does not come off with water. One night some of the older kids showed us a neat trick. For some reason all of the streetlights in Melvin were wired in such a way that if you gave the light pole a good kick, the light would go out for several moments. We made a game of it. Can you make it all the way to the end of the block before the first light you kicked out would flicker back on? Ahhhh, good times. Like I said, you made your own fun in Melvin --if you were bored then you were boring.
I am just now reminded of a pastime that is in the past for good, one hopes. Several of us, me included, used to participate in this form of sport that might answer some of the most confounding questions we have about ourselves. Many of us did it, and what seemed like good exercise and lots of fresh, evening air just might have been the cause of all of our woes in life. Why are we not so good at math? Why do we forget important dates? Why can’t we remember this certain thing or that certain thing? Simple. It’s because they used to fog for mosquitoes in our town, and we rode our bikes right behind the truck. Better living through chemistry, m’boy!
My brother Steve, the youngest in our family, was a li'l pimp. He was allowed outside to play with us since he was about two. The girls on the street were constantly arguing over who gets to watch Steve, who gets to push Steve's stroller, who gets to pull Steve in the wagon. Here he is, rockin' the Radio Flyer with Tamie McRae.Aww, Yeahhhhhhhhh.
I remember watching Francis Stevenson as he built a garage behind his house across the street, or Big Jim Shearl as he used a plumb bob to map out the lean-to garden shed against his garage. Woody Steinberg purchased the house next door to ours, and was always renovating, painting, improving, roofing, always up to something over there. Not one to remain idle, Woody would set up scaffold and big spotlights and paint the side of the house into the early hours of morning. One Saturday evening I remember he was installing a window in the bathroom of his house, and was listening to ABBA on the stereo inside. I sat in the cool grass in the shade of the north side of his house and watched him remove the old window, size the hole for the replacement, and install the new window. Woody was also handy with a car, and we’d pester him while he worked on his.
Which reminds me of a story I can tell you now, and it’s how I will close this installment of The Transmitter—one time Woody replaced the gas tank in this old blue El Camino he had. He took the old tank out to the alley behind our houses where it sat for a day or two, until Don Lange could come and take it away. One early summer morning while the air was still cool, a gang of us, all boys as I remember, were gathered in the big yard beside our house to plot the day’s events. I was perhaps eight or nine, which puts Bruce at about five, and Andy at about three years of age. Assembled were Jonathan and Nathan Shelton from down the alley, Larry Mesker from up the alley, and maybe the Lang boys, Ernie and Chris—sons of the Methodist minister who lived down the street, and a few other stragglers.
One of our number—I don’t recall who but I have an idea—produced a book of matches from the front pocket of his bibs and proposed we take turns lighting them and tossing them into the grass. We were all hot for that idea, but I was the only one thinking at least one inch past his nose.
“No, are you crazy?!” I hissed. “My mom’s in the kitchen RIGHT THERE,” I seethed, pointing at the open kitchen window. “We’ll get caught! We’ll get into trouble! Let’s go behind the garage where she can’t see us!”
You see, cooler heads usually prevail. But not that day.
I led the troop to the gravel behind our garage at the alley. Needing a place to sit down to hone our matches-lighting skills, we dragged that El Camino gas tank into the cool shade between an overgrown lilac bush and the frame of the 250 gallon gravity fed gasoline tank my father had beside the garage. Once situated, we each took a seat on the gas tank and started striking matches, throwing them into the gravel driveway, and watching them burn out before passing the book to the person on the left. We tried all different ways: tearing out a match, quickly running it along the striker strip, or even striking two at once. We tried folding the book over backwards and pulling the match out from between the cover and the strip to great effect and the admiration of the younger among us. Some were perfecting their ability to single out one match and strike it using only the five fingers of one hand. It was a great exercise in Taking Turns, until My Mother rounded the corner of the garage with two bags of trash for the burning barrel.
Now when we first moved to Melvin there was a woman who lived uptown who was a bit touched in the head. She was given to wandering into Lowell Dueringer’s corn field at dusk on a summer night, and shrieking and wailing to wake the dead until the county cops came to take her home. Screaming Bloody Murder. It scared the hell out of us the few times it happened, but that sound was as the purr of a contented kitten compared to the howl that erupted from My Mother that pretty May day. I have heard the wail of the Banshee, friends and neighbors, and I hope to hear it never again.
Everything happened so quickly I can barely remember it. My Mother, for lack of a better word, exploded on the spot. She went intercontinental. She went atomic. Then she went supernova. Shrieking, she grabbed all of us at once and yanked our little arms right out of their sockets. Everything is a blur now, 30 years downstream, but I remember a shower of blows and slaps to my head, shoulders, neck, and face. My Mother was beating on and yelling at kids that weren’t even hers. She’d grab, shake, and throw the kid over her shoulder and in one fluid gesture she’d have the next one by the ear or hair or collar or ankle. She was unhinged.
This was maybe 10 in the morning. We scattered, all of us in tears. She dragged us into the house blubbering. We spent the rest of the day holding hands on the couch in the living room with the television off. That was punishment for us when we were in REAL trouble. We weren’t allowed to talk. We weren’t allowed to move. We were lucky she let us breathe. Any other time, any other offense, we would have sat there for maybe ten or twenty minutes, but not that day. We sat there for the rest of the day, and into the night. No lunch, and eventually no dinner. When our father came home from work that evening, we learned that playing with matches is a grave offense. We learned that when things blow up or burn down that sometimes they can never ever be put right again. We also learned that we would spend the remainder of the summer indoors with no television or radio. NOTHING for the duration.
Looking back, I see how lucky we were. We could have been killed. We could have been horribly disfigured, or maimed, or dismembered. There might have been little bitty pieces of us raining down on every single rooftop, street, yard, and gutter in town.
It would have been really bad, too, if the gas had exploded instead of My Mother.
