I took a gun to school once.
In a more innocent time.
A long, long time ago.
It was a revolver that held seven .22-short bullets.
It wasn’t loaded.
Here is the gun:
Well, not really THE gun. Our house burned down three weeks before Christmas when I was a high school freshman. I lost my coin collection that included a mis-strike nickel that had two heads, several plastic model airplanes, a baseball card collection that probably included a Mantle rookie card, a few Red Man Chewing Tobacco cards, and assorted other baseball cards that would have put both of our children through college had the collection survived, a collection of Lone Ranger novels (since re-accumulated through the years), my old maid aunt Gertrude’s National Geographic collection that began in 1907 (I had looked through only a few as I sought out the ones that had stories about African natives whose lack of above-the-waist attire was very interesting to a boy my age), and the gun.
Today I would be rushed to the principal’s office; my parents would be called; I would be home-schooled for a while, to say the least.
My great-grandfather played the fife for the 126th Illinois Infantry that served under General Sherman at Vicksburg and then was instrumental in gaining control of northern Arkansas, including the capture of Little Rock. He enlisted in another town in Moultrie County and after the war lived in what we called a big city in those days—Decatur—for sixty more years where he once owned an ice cream store.
His pistol was the first Smith & Wesson pistol. Not THE first, but—well, you get the idea.
I think I took it to school because we were studying the Civil War in an elementary school class and it was no big deal.
I don’t remember the duck-and-cover drills some children of that vintage practiced, thinking that hiding under a school desk would save them from an Atom Bomb. We had fire drills, though. A couple of times a year. Outside we’d go. Never in rain or snow but I do remember some cold days standing on the sidewalk while the teachers checked every room to make sure one of my classmates hadn’t decided to hide out.
I grew up in two towns in which Abraham Lincoln, then a circuit-riding lawyer, occasionally visited to take part in trials. I have been told that the one in which I spent the most time had a Sundown Ordinance—no Negroes allowed in town after dark. (I use the word because that’s the word that was used then.) Many years later I considered the irony of a town where Lincoln was a sometime-lawyer that told black people they were not welcome after sundown. But then, as I have learned, Lincoln’s own attitudes toward black people were pretty undeveloped then.
My class was the first to graduate from the new high school that I could watch being constructed when I was in my Junior English class in the old high school—which was torn down a few months ago. Some black men from Decatur were part of the construction crew and one day one of my classmates told me he had heard that they planned to move their families to our town after the new school was built and “if they do, there’s going to be trouble.”
I couldn’t understand why he felt that way. I was young, innocent of worldly things. I did not meet my first black people until the second semester of my freshman college year when the Residential Assistant for my dormitory floor brought a couple of black guys around to every room and introduced them. To me they were just guys. Years later, I figured out that the university was integrating the dormitories (I watched the first black football and basketball players perform for the school). By the time I left, America had undergone a painful change. I had changed, too, picketing a segregated bowling alley one evening with my church group, and came to work in a segregated city with an HBCU that would taste violence during the Civil Rights struggle.
My little town surrounded by the rich land of the Illinois prairie still has high school sports teams unapologetically called Redskins. It’s about fifty miles from the University teams are called the Fighting Illini. My class ring, safely in a bank deposit box, features the abstract image of a Native American Chief. Or at least the profile of a Native American in an ornate headdress.
Not commenting. Just saying.
One of our World War II heroes was a B-25 pilot who wasn’t satisfied to just fly over his hometown. He buzzed it. Stood that plane on its wing and flew around the courthouse dome. That was before we moved there. By the time we moved there he was our school principal. Col. Loren Jenne’s Army Air Corps uniform is in the county historical museum. It’s a really, really good recently-built museum constructed with the help of an advisor for the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield. Visiting it for a reunion a couple of years ago made me realize how lacking we are in Jefferson City for a good local historical museum.
The town library’s board room holds part of local resident’s collection of 700 hood ornaments and the former Illinois Masonic Home has one of the largest collections of sea shells in the country.
I had a laid-back high school history teacher who once told me he became a teacher because “it was better than working for a living.” Everybody had to do a report on some historical event for his class. Mine was on the Battle of Gettysburg. It took as long as the battle took—three days. Even then I could write long.
I missed one of the biggest events in town history because I was in college. Richard Nixon dropped in on this little town of about 3600 during his 1960 campaign. Town leaders had invited him and challenger John Kennedy to hold an old-fashioned debate at the annual buffalo barbecue. Kennedy didn’t show but Nixon ate half a sandwich and then spoke to about 17,000 people who gathered in a park where I had learned to love playing baseball. A Boy Scout who helped provide security at Nixon’s table picked up the remainder of his buffalo sandwich and took it home. His mother put the remnant in a pickle jar and froze it. Sixty years later, he published a book, The Sandwich That Changed My Life, recounting how the sandwich is still in that jar but occasionally had been on public display including the day he took it to Los Angeles for an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Carson gave him one of his half-eaten sandwiches, which led people such as Tiny Tim and Steve Martin to make additional contributions.
Nixon wasn’t the first presidential aspirant to visit my little town. When Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas were holding their famous debates throughout the state—Lincoln was challenging Douglas for a seat in the U. S. Senate—Lincoln paused to give a speech in a little grove of trees that is now the site of the civic center. Douglas wasn’t there. However, a riot between Lincoln and Douglas supporters broke out on the town square during the 1858 campaign.
We had a Brown Shoe factory, as did many small towns, for decades. It was near the now-gone elementary school I entered late in my fourth grade year. I hit a softball through one of its windows one day during a noon hour game on the vacant lot between the school and the factory. Foreign competition shut it down. The building is still there, re-purposed several times. .
I went away from that little town to study journalism at the University of Missouri. In those first few days, new college students ask and are asked many times, “Where are you from?” There were nods of the head when the answers were St. Louis, or Kirksville, or Joplin, or Polo, or Hannibal (my roommate), or other Missouri towns. But when I said, “Sullivan, Illinois,” there was the second question:
“Where’s that?”
And I would reach into my back pocket and pull out an official Illinois State Highway Map, William G. Stratton, Governor, and I would unfold it and show them. Today I would say, “It’s about 40 minutes north of Effingham” and everybody would know because Effingham, then a bowling alley and a gas station-small town on Highway 40, is a major stop on straight and boring I-70 between St. Louis and Terre Haute. I’m sure some of my new classmates walked away thinking, “He’s too weird.”
In a few days, I’m headed back to Sullivan for my (mumble-mumble) class reunion. I cherish these get-togethers, especially as our numbers dwindle. I have a nice red polo shirt, although I wish I could find an appropriate red and black sweatshirt or jacket to wear while I ride in one of the 1959 convertibles a classmate has arranged for classmates to ride in during the homecoming parade. It shouldn’t be as hard as it was the other day to find the right thing in Jay and Chiefs country.
But the other day I bought a new car that’s red with black trim and I hope that is appropriate.
A few years ago I came to the conclusion that the last time we met as a class was the night we graduated. Now, we are the Community of ’59. Then, were a homogenous group raised in the same county, for the most part, part of the same culture for the first 18 years of our life, no more acutely aware of the greater world beyond us than teenagers today probably are plugged into life outside their schools. But since then, life has changed us, has filled us with our own unique experiences and we come together as diverse individuals shaped by the decades that have passed.
Yet, when I think of them, it is easy to see them in my mind as perpetually young. And when we meet, we don’t spend a lot of time reminiscing. Instead we talk as contemporary people who have been friends for a long, long time who have nothing to prove to each other or no reason to try to impress one another. We are special friends bound together by long-ago experiences who can talk about present issues, even those on which we not unexpectedly differ, and then go back to our homes and our separate futures cherishing this one more chance to be with each other.
I’ve lived in Missouri (except for three summers while I was in college) for almost eighty percent of my life. Each year I travel from Jefferson City to Indianapolis for a couple of races. I usually stop for lunch in Effingham. And each time, I feel a little tug to turn north.
All of our towns and each of us have stories such as these. Someday, descendants I will never know, might read these stories.
Think about writing yours.
For them.
I went to school with a gun one day in a time my grandchildren probably would not understand, when the only drill we had to worry about was the fire drill.
That was a long, long time ago. But if nobody every tells about those times, how can anybody else ever hope that there ever can be that kind of safe era again?
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