By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Going Places
Beep-beep-ahuga! Agent Mansel Boyd’s Model T tooted the State Farm Insurance jingle pulling in our driveway.
Dad, stepping up from Lansing agent to Saginaw manager, had moved Mom and four sons (at 6, I was oldest) into a new split-level from an interim dead-end rental. Through woods downhill from the former I’d lay bed stones on steel rails and watch engines pulverize then. Older kids chanted “Nixon-Nixon” on the street above.
“Who?” I asked Mom.
“Running for president against Kennedy.”
“That’s who I’m for,” I said.
School
Kindergarten had been strange. Birds flew between windows in my first Lansing classroom. Then a Saginaw school near our rental, now a third.
Mansel tooted from the front drive of our new digs which smelt like timber, glue and sealants. My brothers and I poured out and were awed as he chauffeured us in his old car around the flat plat. Sold lots had split-levels and straw lawns with shoots growing through them too. Spec ones bore holes for foundations or saplings laying with roots wrapped nearby in burlap.
Dad, not yet 30, was moving fast. State Farm soon after made him agency director at its new regional office in West Lafayette, Ind.
We’ll make enough, he told Mom, to do a repeat, this time better. Rent a year while we build another split-level, this on a dead-end lot with wooded paths down ravines on two sides to the Wabash River. Can’t hurt four boys to grow up in a college town.
At our rental home cross river I learned my best friend was Jeff Wurst across the street, I’d marry Mary Dine next door and her big brother Tommy could climb and hide in my Secret Tree. The front-yard birch was big enough to boast peeling white bark with black marks and knotholes, book pages I thought mine.
Dad took me to work in his new, State Farm-furnished car. Look, my oldest son. We parked between fresh-painted lines on asphalt the size of Utah and passed between white pillars into a desk ocean hubbed by a glass-encased Univac. The monster machine spat out punch-card dandruff. I saw no curtains behind where the Wizard of Oz might work.
“What do you make here?” I asked Dad.
“Money, peace of mind,” he said. “Policies insure auto, home and life.”
Woods
Our new home in Glenwood Heights was built backwards. Street-facing front picture windows were inverted into a walk-through sliding glass door from the family room onto a backyard patio, lawn and precipice. Pitch a football down there, you hoped a tree stopped its tumble before it got soggy lodged in a bottom stream.
Winter too was a revelation. Between bare trunks Lafayette’s lights twinkled across the river. Next spring we found and forged paths to the Wabash and concrete ducts built beneath the bypass grade leading to the bridge.
Fort Dogwood boys had initiation rites. First, climb the cement abutment and sit under the bridge I-beam girders while cars and trucks thundered over. Hobos hung out in places like that, Dad told me. Then pass stooping through dark ducts under the road with stormwater trickling into your sneakers.
Mummy’s Mansion led to mysterious woods on the other side of dank echoes and the bypass. Devil’s Den jutted off it into another outlet stream; coming back you could not see light at the other end.
West Lafayette was annexing river wilds, farms and meadows north. Some was Purdue campus sprawl, other new homes growth from young business families who felt raising kids near their new office jobs attractive.
For Grade 2 I was bused to Tippecanoe County’s Klondike School. I punched a boy in the face— it was cool he fell backwards like on TV — then stayed home a few days till Mom talked my fears down. Impermanence lasts forever.
Where did Mansel go?
Reprise
The city, having annexed Glenwood Heights and more tracts with plans to build a northside elementary, bused me to start third grade at Kingston Elementary. North lay a sledding hill and beyond paths through woods down to Happy Hollow Park.
Mr. Curtis — The Principal! — came on the intercom just past noon. We dropped round-tip scissors used carving construction-paper turkeys to hear “President Kennedy has been shot, early buses will take you home.”
“Think a Republican did it?” asked Lewis Ashman. “Who knows.”
Buses rolled off Salisbury into the Kingston lot, lined up, diesel engines clicking, sixth-grade girls boarding steps near us wore tear-stained makeup, brakes sighed, black clouds behind and gone.
Mom was distracted from window-gazing when “As the World Turns” stopped and Walter Cronkite broke in: “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time.” This time she seemed scared.
Playing with rabbit ears on the set, I could clear buzzing static lines zipping cross-screen where the picture should be. It was black-and-white.