Summer Memories

When I was very young I had a friend named Jeff.  He was a year ahead of me in school and wasn't afraid of anything in the entire world.  I was in awe of that, because I was afraid of just about everything.

Jeff was a daredevil.  We lived on a very steep hilly street, and Jeff's house was one block higher up the hill from mine.  Jeff would ride his Schwinn Racer bike so fast down the hill and go flying past our house like a blur.  I was too afraid to ride as fast as he did.  In the winters we would sled down the hills of the park across the street from our houses and Jeff could make his sled go so fast, careening around trees and flying off the end of the hill out into the middle of the street.   It is a wonder he didn't break his arms or legs each winter.

One winter,  Jeff got the insane idea that he and I should  pour water down the concrete embankment on the side of my front steps and let it ice over and then slide down the ice on our feet.  He convinced me that nothing bad could possibly happen to us, so we did just that.  We carried pitcher after pitcher of water out and poured it over the concrete, watching as it froze the snow into a sheet of ice.  When he judged that it was frozen enough he took an running start and jumped onto the ice and slid, with a bit of a wobble, all the way down to the bottom of the stairs.

I was terrified, but didn't want to look like a sissy, so I took a try,  it was the most amazing sensation I had ever felt; even better than sledding.  We both took another turn, and then another, which was probably wearing down the ice because on my next turn down the slope I lost my balance completely and fell face first onto the edge of one of the concrete stairs.  I cut my forehead just above my eyebrow, and there was blood everywhere on the crisp white snow.   Facial cuts bleed quite a bit,  apparently.  Jeff went running into my house to get my mom,  when they came back out he was in tears apologizing over and over because it had all been his idea.  My mom had to put a butterfly bandage over my cut eyebrow to stop the bleeding, and then ice over that to keep it from swelling but the cut wasn't really all that big.   To this day you can see the scar there above my eye from our little luge adventure.

He had a fascination with leprechauns, and for one entire summer he carried around a huge butterfly net determined that he was going to catch one in the woods of the park.  My brothers put a doll head in the knot hole of one the trees in the woods and teased him that they had seen one on their way home for lunch.  Jeff got all excited and took his net and ran off into the woods. I remember the look on his face,  he was so full of glee that day.  He was so close to his goal of having his own pet leprechaun.  We followed him up into the woods my brothers giggling  and giggling so hard .  He was so sad when he realized that they had tricked him.

We went to an Elementary School that had an open campus meaning we were allowed to walk home for lunch if we lived close enough to get there, eat lunch and get back in our forty-five minute lunch period.  Since both my mom and Jeff's mom were both better cooks than what we could get from the cafeteria,  we often walked home for lunch; Jeff would leave me at my house and walk the extra block to his house.  When it was time to go back to school Jeff would stop at my house and wait for me so that we could walk back together.  We had wonderful talks about so many things on these walks.  They were very special times.

I remember the last day of his sixth grade year when we were walking back to school and he said, "I am going to miss this next year", because he would be going to Junior High and I still had another year of elementary school/   I didn't say anything then, but I would miss them too.  I took my lunch a lot more often in sixth grade,  somehow going home for lunch had lost its charm.

Jeff had a paper route before I did, in fact it was because of Jeff probably that I got a paper route.  He got his because he wanted a new bike and a new fishing pole and his mom said they couldn't afford it,. so he went out and got himself a job as a paperboy to make enough money to pay for the things he wanted.

He loved to fish, and most of the spring, summer and fall he was never without his fishing pole and tackle box strapped to the back of his bike.  The Mississippi river was just a few miles from our house and he loved to ride down there on his own to fish, sometimes for the entire day.  I hated fishing,  this was one adventure we never shared.

You may wonder why I am suddenly reminiscing about my old friend?  It is because the summer that I was 12 years old Jeff died. On June 8, 1972 Jeff came home from his paper route, gave the money to his mom and went down to the river to watch the fishermen, something he did all of the time.    He was never seen again,  People in the community searched for nearly a week first finding his bike and then his badly decomposed body naked and strangled on June 15.

I miss him so much this year especially for some reason, maybe because there has been so much loss in my life.  Even my sister called to say she had dreamed about him just the other night.   Was Jeff too fearless for his own good?  Was he killed by a serial killer passing through the area?  We have always wondered.  My younger brother spent years trying to solve Jeff's case, which remained open until the mid 80's when the FBI declared it closed due to lack of new evidence.  

We had an idyllic childhood,  we had total freedom to roam wherever we wanted to, miles and miles away from home, until the summer Jeff disappeared, Then everything changed.  I don't know if we were scared, or our parents were scared, but we didn't get as far from home after that summer.

I have wonderful memories, and frightening dreams and a little scar over my eyebrow.  Jeff would be 52 years old this year.  I have always wondered what kind of man he would have become.

Neighborhood Memories

I grew up in Rock Island Illinois. My father was a middle school English teacher, and later a guidance counselor after receiving his Masters Degree. My parents purchased this house in an established neighborhood on 22nd street only seven or eight blocks from the bustling downtown district when I was about 18 months old. (My brother took this picture of the house we lived in when he went back for a visit a few years ago.) It looks much like it did when I grew up in it, except there was a chimney back then that is no longer there, and the house was ringed with bushes as well I remember my cousin fell out of a first floor window once and landed smack into the bushes and didn't even get a scratch. (Knowing my brother and my cousin it may have been more of a bet than an accident.)

I lived in this house until I moved from Rock Island in 1975. I loved this house. We had a big family of eleven people, and except for the fact that this house only had one bathroom for all those people, I never felt like this house was too small. We played many games in the full basement (in fact don't tell my mom, but we used to ride our bikes around and around through the rooms during the winter when it was too cold to ride outside.)

One of my favorite places in the house was the attic. Actually it became a favorite place out of necessity; my older brother used to trick me into going up there and then shut the door on me. The door was so big that I couldn't get it open from the attic side, so I would be stuck in the attic until someone noticed that I was up there. I found that my dad had stored old books up there, and I would pick out a book and snuggle up by one of the windows that faced 22nd street (the ones up under the eaves in the picture) and read until someone came looking for me, or it got so hot that I just couldn't stand it and had to bang on the door till someone opened it.

We lived in a great neighborhood in which to grow up. Most of the houses were single family dwellings with a few duplexes and apartment complexes interspersed among them. Everyone knew everyone else and we all took care of each other. Kids were respectful of adult authority because most of the adults were your parent's friends (who were your friend's parents by extension) and had the deputized authority to punish you for any infraction of the rules. In fact some neighbor's parents were more strict than ours so we knew to be on better behaviour when playing in their yard.

The city was laid out with paved access alleys between the streets. When not needed for garbage pickup or parents to stow their cars in their garages, these alleys were the domain of the neighborhood kids. We played very intricate games of kick the can or capture the flag that lasted all afternoon. Sometimes we even had bike and go-cart races down our alley because we were lucky enough to live on a hill. The boys in our neighborhood made some of the most amazing go carts out of the refuse they confiscated from the trash before the city trucks made the weekly rounds.

There was a huge estate of property that The Hauberg family had deeded to the city as a park that still sits directly cater-cornered across the street from our house. This was our domain. It was everything from fairy wonderland for the girls to viet Kong jungle for the boys all summer long. It had some of the most amazing rope swings that my older brothers and their friends constructed across gullies that I was too terrified to use, but loved to watch other kids swing across.

My brothers played war games all over these woods. In fact my younger brother broke his arm in one of their elaborate "training exercises" that my parents never did find out all of the details about because good soldiers never tell.

In the winter, the hills coming down from the back of the estate were the greatest sledding hills one could ever imagine. Some were even dubbed suicide runs, only to be used by the more daring of our brothers. All of us were known to sled down the long hill from the gatehouse down to 23rd street, knowing just when to strategically fall off our sleds so that we didn't shoot out into the street.

We had free reign of the entire neighborhood, so long as we came when my parents called us home. Every family had a different method to call kids home. One family up the avenue had a cowbell. One family just had a loud holler. My parents used a coaches whistle; two short blasts and one long blasts was the signal that it was time to come in for dinner or at the end of the evening. It was funny, we could tell the difference between mom's whistle and dad's, and we knew that if dad whistled it meant get home right now, while mom's meant better wind things up within ten minutes.

It may have been a simpler time then. The public school (Lincoln Elementary; sadly now just an empty shell) was six blocks straight down 22nd street and we all walked to school from Kindergarten on. The Public Library was three blocks beyond the school and I remember walking there from almost the time I was old enough to go to school, often by myself. In fact we kids walked downtown by ourselves or in groups during the summer to see movies at the Capri (they had 25 cent matinees on Saturday of kid movies; can you just imagine?) and the Fort theater before it became an adult theater. Or we would walk to the Drug store for a soda at the soda fountain.

We often walked down 12th avenue about seven or eight blocks to 15th street where there was a little corner store that sold penny candy. I can still remember walking home with our little bags of wax lips, candy dots and red hots.

Our Church, St Mary's, was two blocks further on than Lincoln, much of our family life was centered on the Parish community. It was a small parish. By the time I was old enough to attend school the parish school was about to close, so I never attended it. The nuns moved out of the convent shortly after they closed the school. The Parish Priest, Fr George Schroeder remained the backbone of the parish through my entire life in Rock Island. I went to CCD on Wednesday evenings, and to make it convenient for all the parish families, Fr. provided a bus that drove around the city to pick up the kids and deliver them to the church so parents didn't have bring the kids themselves. Our Parish Picnic and Winter festivals were well attended by families in the parish.

I loved my childhood. There were many things that happened that have left me with bittersweet memories, like the death of my close friend Jeff Ramsey when I was 12, and the death from cancer of my father just a year later, but I have many more happy memories of living in Rock Island, and I don't think I ever had better friends than the ones I had in elementary school and middle school.