My mom was The Talking Christmas Tree. I use “The” because, as far as I know, there’s only ever been one Talking Christmas Tree. So unless you’re over 40 and from Eastern Iowa — or partial to holiday-themed psilocybin trips — odds are you’ve never heard of such a thing. But let me clarify: the woman who brought me into this world is not – nor ever was – a tree. She was a cheerfully neurotic, 5′ 4″ Lebanese-American – all curly black hair, sunshine and hypochondria – who raised 5 sons and a lovely daughter in a large, chaotic, endlessly cluttered home at the top of a hill in the middle of a blue collar town that, thanks to its colorful array of factories, smelled alternately of baking Cap’n Crunch and freshly slaughtered cattle. She was married to the world’s foremost aeronautical engineer earning $25k a year or less, and they were married for 68 years, swerving that three-ring household through every administration dating back to Truman (they always liked Nixon the best).

I’m a little shaky on all the details surrounding the true genesis of this holiday miracle, but I think it goes something like this. Back in about 1973, my sister Sara had an after-school gig at Killian’s Department Store in downtown Cedar Rapids. In those days I imagine that Killian’s and Armstrong’s department store were the Macy’s and Gimbel’s of Cedar Rapids — forever undercutting or outdoing each other with fiendish retail trickery like CorningWare closeout sales and 2-for-1 specials on L’eggs panty hose. The stores were kitty-corner from one another and I imagine there was a good deal of lunch hour espionage afoot…

“What’d you see over there, Donna?”

“It looks like maybe they beefed up their Russell Stover section. And I saw a new Buster Brown display.“

“Buster Brown? Why those sneaky sons-a-guns.”                                                                      

“Should we tell Dick?”                                                                       

“I’ll tell Dick, you take the counter.” 

It’ll surprise no one that once Christmas rolled around, the action kicked up a notch. Or should I say, Armstrong’s kicked it into gear. Anyone from the Chicago area will probably remember the holiday windows at Marshall Field’s — massive walls of glass framing enchanting holiday scenes starring eerily fascinating animatronic elves and reindeer and snowmen. Well, Armstrong’s of Cedar Rapids had holiday windows just like that, but way smaller, much less richly imagined and nothing moved. Still, when the holidays rolled around in Cedar Rapids, Armstrong’s had a lock on curb appeal and, as Robert Armstrong, the iron-fisted Armstrong’s patriarch probably used to say, “The windows will bring them in, and the great everyday values on popular brands like Haggar will keep them here. Helen, where’s my pipe?” Sure, Killian’s had holiday decorations too, not to mention their own Santa Claus. But Armstrong’s? Well, it was all in the name.

So it was that back around 1973, Killian’s probably recognized the need to get some proverbial skin in the Christmas game – and that skin was made of tree. But here’s the thing: whereas Armstrong’s had just the one flagship store in downtown CR, Killian’s had two stores – the one downtown, and a sister store at the fledgling Lindale Plaza out on the east side of town. 

In those early days, Lindale was still an open air mall – a sprawling, low-slung affair. It was home to Killian’s, Younker’s department store, Sears and Bishop’s Cafeteria. I should mention here that one of Bishop’s main draws was its parting gift for children: a colorful balloon cinched at the bottom with a pair of flat cardboard clown shoes that allowed the balloons to stand up – another seemingly hallucinogenic-inspired childhood delight. In addition to these major players, Lindale was home to not one, but two drug stores – Kresge’s and May’s – as well as Country Cobbler shoes, a Swiss Colony cheese shop and a place called Holley’s Men’s Shop where, as I’m sure my dad was crestfallen to discover, there was no sign of any woman who looked even remotely like someone named Holly. But, for Killian’s, the best part about Lindale Mall was what it didn’t have: Armstrong’s. Clearly, this was the place where Killian’s could make its mark.

Once word got out to the staff that Killian’s was going to be rewriting the Christmas books with an anthropomorphic tree at the Lindale Mall store, I’m sure the chatter among the racks was nonstop…

“So wait, they found a tree that can talk?”                                              

“No… that can’t be right. Can it?”                               

“Should we tell the news? My brother-in-law works at Channel 9, wait’ll he finds out!”                                                                             

“Your brother’s on TV?!”                                                                                            

“No, he works in billing but he’s pretty tight with the makeup guy over there. They go on vacations together. So I bet my brother could butter him up to put in a good word for us.” 

Eventually, of course, after the understandably disappointing clarification that this Talking Christmas Tree did not, in fact, speak on its own, it became apparent that someone – a person perhaps – would be needed to do the “talking.” But who?

The setup was pretty straightforward, in Talking Christmas Tree terms. The “tree” was actually a 10-foot-high hollow pyramid, the top two thirds of which was covered with fake greenery and lights and decorations. But right in the middle of the greenery was a large white moon face with somewhat haunting human features. Its big eyes, too-pointy nose and overly rosy cheeks were underlined by a wide red crescent which, when it was manually maneuvered up and down from inside the tree, provided the illusion of “talking” (or at least made it look like a big tree with only a bottom lip was trying to communicate with you in a somewhat mechanical fashion). In short, it looked like Thomas the Tank Engine dressed as a Christmas Tree. The bottom third of the structure was the base, painted white with gold specs and featuring one oval “mirror” centered on each of the four sides. Unbeknownst to all but the most cynical children, these mirrors were two-way, designed so that the person inside the tree could see who they were talking to. Finally, there was the crude mic/speaker combination, which delivered an eerily muffled version of the operator’s voice to the awestruck, somehow-not-completely-crapping-their-pants-terrified children in front of the tree.

I should point out that there was only enough room inside the tree for either a midget, or a squatting adult, or my mom, who was a little bit of both. So while outwardly, the whole package was somewhat “magical”, inside the tree – what with the operator pulling the mouth lever and speaking into a mic – it looked like a behind-the-scenes glimpse at some kind of sinister sweatshop Wizard of Oz puppet show operated by a squatting middle-aged woman.

Even now, questions torment me as to the origins of Killian’s Talking Christmas Tree gambit. Was the notion of taking a pass on the time-honored store Santa Claus in lieu of a conversing tree arrived at in some kind of heated brainstorm within the hallowed walls of Killian’s boardroom? Was it the vision of some new, young marketing hotshot from out East with “fancy shoes and big ideas”? Was it the drug-addled dying wish of some Killian’s executive’s mother? And how was the tree itself built? Was it mass produced on a Talking Christmas Tree/Talking Sleigh assembly line somewhere in Lapland? Was it a one-off, conceived of and painstakingly constructed by a former Killian’s employee – a custodian perhaps – having suffered through countless Christmases darkened by the easy popularity of the Competition’s holiday wizardry? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but somewhere along the way I’ll bet my mom heard the real story.

So, every day of every holiday season for most of my elementary school life, my mom would pick me up from school, drive straight to Killian’s and lead me through the circuitous bowels of the store until we arrived at a pair of curtains spanning a doorway which, when parted, revealed the backside of the tree – and its secret entrance. 

“What should I do while you’re in there?” I would always ask, always knowing the answer. 

“Well, go look around for awhile. See if there are any new toys.”

“Since yesterday? Okay. Can a get a Hot Wheel?” 

“Not now, maybe later.”

Then, in a scene I’m certain few grown women have been party to, she’d sink to her hands and knees and crawl into the big, fake tree. Once inside she positioned herself on her specially designed chair. By “specially designed” I mean an old wooden dining chair with its legs shortened by three-quarters, courtesy of my dad and his Craftsman hand saw. This allowed my mom to sit, not on the floor, but 5 inches off the floor – high enough for her to see out the two-way window yet low enough to allow for maximum knee and hip strain. Luckily, she’d only have to “sit” like this for two hours at a time, three times a day – squatting in darkness, speaking sweetly into the microphone to the trembling child standing in front of the tree – yanking furiously on the mouth cord with one hand while trying to massage away her knee pain with the other.

And boy, was she a hit. Legend spread far and wide – or at least as far as surrounding communities such as Vinton and maybe Waverly – of the delightful talking tree that clearly wasn’t living yet somehow able to carry on conversations with delighted/mortified children (or was it living – what about that moving mouth??). Christmas business at Killian’s exploded, no doubt prompting emergency meetings among the top brass at Armstrong’s….

“You say the tree is alive?”

“Yes Mr. Armstrong, I hear the mouth moves and everything!”

“Well we need our own talking tree. Contact every talking tree farm out there. And tell everyone to start looking into this.”

“Yes sir, who should I tell?”

“EVERYONNNNNNE!!!”

My mom was simultaneously delighted at her popularity and exhausted from squatting like a tunnel rat for hours on end. I myself was thrilled to finally be related to someone famous, although I was sort of over my initial excitement at being able to spend virtually unlimited time in Killian’s rather limited toy section (an 8-year-old-boy can only admire the same Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle and Scramble Van set and GI Joe with Kung Fu Grip so many times before he starts rationalizing that Ken dolls are maybe also kind of somewhat cool). Still, these were the glory days of Christmas for me – get out of school, head to a mall, hang out behind the scenes of a new and wildly popular holiday phenomenon and experience the smug, moral superiority that comes when you know something that the other kids don’t: “Ha! This tree ain’t really talkin’, suckas.” And hang out I did – occasionally squeezing into the tree with my mom and crouching down to get a true tree’s eye view of whichever poor young schmuck she currently happened to be bamboozling with her warm, welcoming tree-like voice and the hand-activated moving mouth.

You could say that every holiday season between 1973 and 1977, I experienced what felt like my 15 minutes of fame: my mother was The Talking Christmas Tree, and everyone in town knew The Talking Christmas Tree. Unfortunately, nobody really knew who The Talking Christmas Tree was, and I had the dubious and difficult charge of not spilling the beans. So I was really only a legend in my own mind. But I remember in those days feeling like I was secretly related to royalty, at any minute prepared to counter even the smallest perceived slight with a vicious “do you have any idea who I am?”, to which I could never actually provide the true answer. Still, it was there if I ever chose to use it. But I’m glad I didn’t. Because if I ever followed, “Do you have any idea who I am?” with, “I am the son of the Talking Christmas Tree!”, I have a feeling it wouldn’t have worked in my favor.

Time marches on and, as we all witness every January 2, Christmas trees don’t last forever (except in certain homes where the Christmas decor droops into early March, no doubt accompanied by the smell of bacon grease and cats and the 24/7 sound of The Game Show Network emanating from an old 25″ Curtis Mathes console television).  No sooner had I outgrown my Killian’s-purchased Hot Wheels tracks and Evel Knievel toys than the department store that raised me was forced to shutter — first its downtown Cedar Rapids unit, followed by its Lindale outpost. This, of course, spelled an end to the Talking Christmas Tree – cut down in the prime of her life, like the legs on the chair her little Lebanese ventriloquist squatted upon. 

Ironically, it was the redevelopment of Lindale Plaza as a proper indoor mall and the building of another mall across town – both pulling customers away from downtown – which led to the demise of the Killian’s brand. Because while Armstrong’s played it safe with only one store, Killian’s gambled with two – each cannibalizing the other as competition for the precious Cedar Rapids dollar grew and dispersed.

Eventually, of course, Armstrong’s and nearly every other downtown establishment withered, as Cedar Rapidians flocked outward to the malls – eschewing locally-owned, lovingly-curated and personably-run department stores and shops for Orange Julius’, Spencer Gifts, Dress Barns, Chess Kings and countless other cultural death knells. As with so many other cities on the backside of the 20th century, when downtown died, good taste died with it. Heck, even Bishop’s Cafeteria turned itself into an all-you-can-eat buffet (and they stopped giving away those balloons with funny shoes). Clearly, this was no environment for a one-off holiday eccentricity with potentially devastating worker’s comp issues.

So gradually, quietly and, based on the condition of her knees, probably not-so-regrettably, my mom and the rest of us came to accept the fact that Talking Christmas Tree superstardom was not to be. There would be no front page profile in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, let alone the holiday variety show on CBS co-starring John Davidson and the Ray Conniff Singers. Christmas was back in Santa’s lap now, and no more would mortified children be talked at by the enormous tree with the rosy cheeks and bobbing lip. In the years following, as I moved through junior high and then high school, Christmas in our family became a little less harried (with my mom’s holiday schedule opening up a bit), but also, I think, a little less magical. Sure, I was getting older – instead of cool toys I was now being gifted things like wallets, English Leather cologne and Steve Miller albums. But I think those Talking Christmas Tree years made me feel as though we (I had nothing to do with it of course) were delivering a little bit of Christmas joy rather than simply receiving it. As the guy who hand-made the Talking Christmas Tree probably once said, “Santa can only talk to one kid at a time, but this tree will speak to the masses. Not like Catholic mass, Donna and I are Lutheran. She’s Lutheran, I go on Easter for the coffee cake.”

Growing up, I was the youngest child in my family by six years, and my 5 siblings wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. By about 1973, when I was 6 or 7 – a time when a kid is usually primed and ready for stick fights, booger wiping battles and suffocation contests with his brothers — I was mostly left to my own devices. To be clear, I wasn’t lonely, and certainly not alone. Our house was nothing if not action-packed, albeit random, impulsive, and ill-conceived action. There was a seemingly constant stream of bodies and notions entering and exiting the residence. So, by sheer benefit of distraction, I was often able to preside over my own little universe, usually under a tree in our spaciously dumpy backyard, climbing the walls of the local abandoned mansion across the street or secreted away in some improbably quiet corner of our big old house.  

No doubt, I would’ve benefitted from a skosh more structure or some level-headed, hand-on-the-shoulder advice. Frankly, the whole family would’ve. This is not to point the finger at (or give it to) my parents or my siblings with charges of abandonment, just to help paint the picture that the Colton household was a living, breathing, shouting, laughing, loving embodiment of a rickety bicycle with 8 riders, each trying to steer it in a different direction as it careened down a steep hill paved with bricks. It was a ridiculous, adorable madhouse and I, as its youngest mascot, represented it proudly. 

The question is, can a childhood forged, alternately, in moments of both chaos and solitude create a normally functioning adult? Don’t look at me, I’m asking you — I’ve known myself for 57 years and I still don’t have the answer. But maybe by taking a looking at the building blocks – the little moments and tableaus of a childhood – we can figure out why I’m asking the question in the first place. 

We were all half Lebanese (my mom was full Lebanese, Dad was of Scot/German descent – the usual white people stuff) but my oldest brother looked at least 200% middle eastern, with rich olive skin and a head dripping with a mop of insanely tight black curls. 14 years my senior, he was always kind, matter-of-fact and patiently instructional in the early days. Unfortunately for me, he was now off in college birddogging co-eds and playing CCR licks on his guitar. He would later quit college, spend 4 years in the Army, discover the band Kansas, tell everyone about discovering the band Kansas, and return home to open a hang glider store in the heart of a Great Plains state. 

My next oldest brothers were then about 20 and 19.  I will refer to them by their nicknames “Dunes” and “Bag.” They Kirkwood Community College in town, so were around the house plenty. We did hang out a bit, by which I mean they enjoyed dangling me by my shoelaces from increasingly treacherous heights. I think they may have been smoking some pot in those days and were probably more bored than I was and way more imaginative, so I was kind of like their human hacky sack: when they weren’t holding me over the upstairs banister for the benefit of their bleary-eyed giggling friends, or pinning me down for a “Chinese torture” attack, they were demanding I fetch them more Cap’n Crunch or act as lookout as they sucked down Winston cigarettes in our TV room.  It was all mostly good-natured and I have to admit, I probably would’ve done the same thing to me.

And, God bless her, but my 17-year-old sister Beth’s vain attempts to shield me from these two only served to make me seem like more of a wuss, to which they naturally reacted by attempting to toughen me up through increased “torture” techniques. Occasionally she would style and bobby pin my longish hair in place and parade me around the house like a little doll. This did not help my cause. However misguided Sara’s big sisterly affections were, she was sweet and kind and often laughed (out of sorrow) at my young-doofus-in-the-making attempts at humor. She placed third in the Miss Iowa contest and attended college at Southwest Minnesota State for two years before returning home to be closer to her pimply boyfriend, Dave, and his fledgling career as a semi-semi-pro basketball player. 

The sibling closest to me in age, 12-year-old DJ, had no time for me, as he’d recently taken up the baritone horn and was already in full blown band dork mode — practicing his instrument day and night, unfolding and adjusting his music stand on a seemingly hourly basis, debating on the phone with bandmates on the virtues of bass clef versus treble clef, leaving sheet music everywhere, and attending to the constant barrage of weeping cold sores blossoming across his lips, apparently the result of an allergy he’d developed to the nickel-plated brass mouthpiece of his horn. Besides, he was never a big fan of mine. I was, after all, the whiny little prick who robbed him of his Baby of the Family mantel. On most days I’m sure it was all he could do not to lure me into the basement freezer and shut the door, leaving me to solidify until the following Christmas when Mom would inevitably come looking for last year’s leftover cookie dough.

As a simple matter of survival, I was best off finding a way to make my own fun. Frankly, I was bored stiff, but I was always on the lookout for new and interesting approaches to being bored. These included, but were not limited to, turning my burgeoning reading skills to the phone book to count whether there were more “Smiths” or “Johnsons” living in the greater Cedar Rapids Metropolitan Area, killing flies with said phone book, dining on small amounts of paste, hiding underneath furniture (from what or whom I don’t know — nobody was ever looking for me), sniffing the insides of whatever shoes happened to be laying around, attempting to milk our pet dachshund Greta, and tasting raw salt.

Once, in my backyard on a dreary winter Saturday, bored out of my damn mind, I crouched down and sipped the standing water from the top of a discarded car battery. I’m not lying, I did that. My dad, per usual working under the hood of our late model Oldsmobile, came running over in a panic, “What are you doing?! That could be battery acid!!” My God he was right — I suppose it could’ve been battery acid. But if I remember correctly, he simply ordered me inside to get a drink of water and he went back to work, never again mentioning the incident. To this day, whenever I get one of those sudden inexplicable pains in an eye or a knee or my belly button I still wonder whether that small dose of battery acid had any long term effects. I bet it did.

I should probably mention that it was not out of the ordinary for random, disused items to be found in and around our house. For as busy as she was cooking for and cleaning up after all of us, my mom always found time to be doting, affectionate and impossibly sentimental. Which is probably why when she stopped collecting children, she started collecting things.Actually the two activities overlapped for years. For starters, she never threw away anything we kids wore or read or created or played with. Same with hers and my dad’s stuff. Adorable baby booties? Yes. Torn and smelly 5th grade sneakers? Also yes. My sister’s homemade prom dress? Absolutely. Her panty hose from prom with the cigarette burn in them? You bet. Combs, brushes, bobby pins, old records, old broken records, old notebooks, unused notebooks, other peoples’ notebooks – you name it, we kept it and usually ended up tripping over it. And I won’t even get into the tools and kitchenware.  Books? Of course. Magazines? Almost every single one we’d ever received. Sure, it was cool and scholarly that we had every monthly National Geographic dating back to 1950. Alternatively, we also had every Cosmopolitan going back to 1968. You have to wonder what timeless literary brilliance was lurking within the pages of all those Cosmos that none of the issues could be parted with.

We also had years worth of Redbook, Reader’s Digest and, since my dad was an aerospace engineer, Mechanix Illustrated and Scientific American. We even had stacks of long-since-perused issues of the The Cedar Rapids Gazetteand the local PennySaver (correct me if I’m wrong, but those 10-cents off coupons for Doan’s Pills have an expiration date, right?). Basically, if it had words in it, it wasn’t getting thrown out — unless, of course, it was a crucial instructions manual for how to assemble or operate something. In fact, as the years went on, the seemingly worthless far outnumbered the things we actually needed and/or used.

The good news was, if I ever wanted to play Spaceship Battle and the only toy spaceships in the house were broken (and of course they were), I could always fashion new spaceships out of a couple of the seemingly thousands of spare stainless-steel drapery hooks we had laying around the house. Seriously — we could’ve opened a drapery hook store. Other kids my age had friends, I had drapery hooks.

The thing is, my mom probably picked up most of those drapery hooks used, at garage sales. Probably by the shoebox. In fact, she may have separately purchased a used shoebox for the sole purpose of carrying the used drapery hooks. 

You see, not only did my mom not throw anything away,she paid money to other people for things they should have thrown away: broken window shutters, malfunctioning transistor radios, sewing machines missing critical components, books on subjects no one needs to know about (Arc Welding for Beginners, anyone?), scratched LPs filled with music no one needs to hear (Jim Nabors’ The Lord’s Prayer), suitcases without handles, locked suitcases without keys or handles, tote bags with broken zippers. 

It’s safe to say that with the money my mom paid over the years for worthless, used luggage, she could’ve purchased all new luggage and a roundtrip plane ticket to Paris to purchase worthless, used, French luggage.

As long as I’m on the subject of my mom’s serial obstruction of all clear spaces in our home, I should tell you that our house was really pretty big: a 5-bedroom colonial with a full third floor attic. So filling it with stuff to the extent that my mom did (all the way up) was a monumental undertaking — one to which she was, apparently, uniquely suited. 

Having grown up during the Depression, as it was often rationalized to me, she’d never been able to tolerate parting with her possessions, no matter their real value. I suppose it would stand to reason then, that allowing other people to simply throw their stuff away was also a non-starter:

“You’re getting rid of this early era J Geils Band album featuring no discernible hits, a large scratch rendering the middle half of Side 1 unlistenable and your last name scrawled in Sharpie across the front cover? I’ll give you $1.25 for it. If you decide you want it back, it’ll be sitting on the used suitcase on top of the broken wicker chair in our middle bedroom for the next 27 years. Right underneath a Jim Nabors album. Actually, I’ll give you 2 bucks if you’ll throw in that old baby wipes container filled with typewriter ribbon.”

In fairness, having an all-access pass to a bottomless supply of dumpster-worthy miscellany did, to a certain extent, make up for my lack of friends. It may have even exacerbated my friendlessness. Why go outside trolling for playmates when I could joyfully review an old photo album chock full of timeless images of someone else’s family? “Ah yes, here’s that time they visited Strawberry Point, Iowa — Home of the World’s Largest Strawberry! Look at the size of it, would you? I bet they remember that well!”

Why try to connect with other kids when I could simply dump out the broken laundry basket filled with old, mismatched Hot Wheels tracks and connect those? Never mind that the first items lost in any Hot Wheels set were always the purple track connectors, in our house they were easily replaced with somewhat less flexible and inevitably failing cardboard shims fashioned from my mom’s world-class collection of empty shoeboxes. 

Still, they’d always work well enough initially to enable me to create a continuous track stretching from the opening peak — clamped onto a living room windowsill — down to the floor and across the living room, the foyer, and into the dining room where, in theory, the rocketing car would explode through a makeshift wall of half-gnawed (dachshunds!) Tinker Toys. In practice, however, whichever “hero” car I chose — generally the one with the biggest, fattest rear tires — would leave the track halfway down the initial slope, either the victim of an unsupported track (like I couldn’t find anything laying around to support it with?), an impossibly bent rear axle or, of course, the track portions separating due to a faulty (cardboard) connector.

When I did finally venture out of our house and down the block in search of a playmate that was an actual functioning human, I did find one or two, although they were malfunctioning at best. To be honest, there were two perfectly nice, normal little girls down the street — both named Julie. But every time I had a play session with either of them, the inevitable chorus of, “Oooh, Shane’s got a girlfriend!” arose from the smoking gallery. My two teenage brothers were nothing if not consistent buzzkills, which was ironic as they were most likely high as kites any time they were in good enough moods to “engage” with me. No wonder I swore off girls until I was 12. 

The dearth of suitable playmates in the blocks surrounding my home was truly was breathtaking. Unsuitable playmates, however, were everywhere I turned. 

Down the block at the bottom of the hill, in a small two-story frame house with a tragic front porch, was Jimmy Canton. He was the youngest of the 16th Street Cantons, who, as far as I could tell, were a ragtag band of eastern Kentucky mountain people — with their orthodontically-challenged cackling; their junked-appliance-friendly dustbowl of a front yard (I never saw their backyard but I could imagine: a doghouse fashioned entirely from old license plates? A pentagram-shaped series of crudely dug holes in the ground filled with antique dolls heads? A beauty salon chair in the middle of an inflatable baby pool filled with empty Spaghetti-O cans? This last one I only mention because I remember Jimmy smelling vaguely of dirt and Chef Boyardee sauce.); and their flimsy front screen door through which family members were constantly either sprinting or shouting threats at one another: 

“Darrell, get yer ass back in here and help your dad off the couch or you can sleep in the ‘frigerator! What? No, the one in the yard! No the small one!” 

The only things I ever really learned about Jimmy were that he had a curly mop of sandy brown hair, he smelled like a canned meal and he seemed perpetually surly and prepared to sock me in the kisser, kick me in the shin, or snipe me with a bottle rocket at any given moment. So whenever I had to walk past the Cannon home, I stayed on the opposite side of the street — safer distance, better view.

All the kids I really wanted to play with lived on my side of the street. Jill, and Denny, her snarling crewcut of a little brother, were the kids I played with the most. Along with their parents, Garth and Betty, and their elusive older sister Paula – a sort of adolescent Peppermint Patty, they resided in a tidy blue story-and-a-half home 4 houses down the hill from our own. To contextualize the monotony of the neighborhood architecture a bit, I was always fascinated with the screened-in breezeway between their home and garage – it was inside, but it was also outside! Jill was my age and Denny was a year younger. Whereas Jill was sweet and friendly, Denny was somewhat loud, barky and often in a pissy mood. Still, he was a living human child close to my age with whom I could sometimes connect and do things. 

While I do remember us occasionally spending those hot Iowa summer afternoons doing normal little boy things like playing catch and taking bikes off of “jumps” and screaming for Denny’s mom after the inevitable injuries that followed, I recall much of our time together was spent doing things like playing two-person hide-and-seek, using long sticks to poke at the occasional decomposing animal found in the alley behind his house, and trying to dig to China in his backyard sandbox. We always quit before we got to China, but not before unearthing more than a few petrified cat turds.

My playdates with Denny were almost always impromptu and usually initiated by me. After quickly finishing dinner, I’d stroll down the hill to see if Denny was available. Rather than approaching their door, I’d gauge the situation from the sidewalk — usually catching a glimpse through their front screen door as the family sat in silhouette at their dinner table. Without fail, there was no discernible dinner conversation, just the lonely clinking of silverware to plate. Having just come from a house where supper consisted of six to eight people arguing over who was entitled to the last bottle of 7-Up while eating creamed tuna on toast at a picnic table stuffed into a kitchen nook, this funereal scene of Lutheran propriety never ceased to scare the hell out of me. So I’d keep my distance, pacing back and forth past the house until either Denny would come bounding out ready to play, or the front door would slam shut, no doubt the result of Denny testing out a new way to be disrespectful at the dinner table.

It was Denny, after all, who at lunch one day at that very table, introduced me to the ages-old rite of passage of sticking Cheetos up ones nose. He did it, I didn’t, his got stuck, I was promptly sent home. I’d say that 3 out of 4 playdates with Denny ended with me getting sent home, either because I wasn’t playing by his rules, or because he wasn’t playing by his parents’. That cloudy Saturday afternoon when we were told to play quietly in his living room, toying with his Playskool Parking Ramp while his dad was splayed out on the couch drinking a 16-ounce bottle of Pepsi and watching Hee Haw? I think Denny knocked over the Pepsi and I got shown the door. That one night in his basement when we came upon his dad crossing wires and tuning knobs and “talking to Russia” on his HAM radio? I believe Denny ran up behind him and shouted something “in Russian.” I was promptly given the boot. 

And lord knows how many times Denny himself sent me home for things like me not wanting to see how many Monopoly hotels I could hold in my mouth at once. I can picture him now, stabbing a pointed forefinger at me and then in the direction of my house and shouting, “Go on, get the hell outta here!” Sweet kid. Somewhat confusingly, he’d always be ready to resume our friendship the next day as if nothing had happened. If nothing else, Denny helped introduce me, at an early age, to the dichotomy of man, and the ability to roll with the punches when occasionally presented with dickish behavior. I would face bigger buttholes in my life than Denny, and this prepared me to meet them with the kind of grace and dignity you’d usually find nowhere in the vicinity of a butthole.  

Two houses down from Denny and Jill, brothers Wayne and Glenn had recently moved in with their divorcee mother, who was perpetually bathed in cigarette smoke and, along with a half-hearted beehive hairdo, usually wearing either a bathrobe or a dull pink waitress’s uniform. All three were lanky and decorum-challenged, but their home was always open to me. By this I mean their front door was always wide open, allowing nature and everything else to waltz right in. That said, there wasn’t much to do in there, besides take in secondhand smoke while their mother lounged on a couch sucking down Virginia Slims beneath a black velvet Elvis tapestry. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it’s really the only thing I remember about the inside of their home – I’d never seen a velvet Elvis before and I’ve never seen one since such as this, in its truly natural habitat, completely devoid of kitsch or irony. 

Wayne, with his sandy, overgrown Dutch boy hair, was closer to my brother DJ’s age, but Glenn was only a year or so older than me and always looking for fun. He was usually shirtless and seemed entirely unaware of the concept of shoes. He was quite literally footloose, and his long, bony specimens with their unkempt talons seemed to convey a message of caveman fellowship to anyone with a spare moment, of which I had plenty. As it turned out, Glenn was slightly intellectually disabled, but his friendly and inclusive adventurism and crooked sense of humor were far more interesting to me than his status as a special education student. In fact, at that age, his tenuous relationship with social propriety made him a damn good time. 

Not so surprisingly, Glenn was obsessed with Elvis, but he was just as enamored of the long since deceased Buddy Holly, whose work I wasn’t familiar with. Thankfully Glenn, in his unbridled, unbathed and lovingly unhinged enthusiasm, was happy to bring both rock-n-roll icons to life for his one-child audience. We spent long portions of sunny summer afternoons in his damp, dark and unfinished basement – Glenn reenacting the career trajectories of both stars by the dim light of a dangling incandescent bulb. He was a one-man American Bandstand, circa 1958: he’d pop in a poorly recorded cassette of “Peggy Sue” and bring the rockers to life. (Where these secondhand recordings originated I’m afraid we’ll never know. Had his mom carried a tape recorder to her favorite bar, pressed record and held the microphone close to the jukebox as it played Elvis and Buddy songs while she swayed along, perhaps trying to woo a potential new stepdad to the boys with the lure of free cigarettes and shitty pirated rock recordings?) As the tapes played, Glenn would bang around half-assed on a stringless ukulele and warble insanely into a non-existent mic while gyrating his hips Elvis-style. Simultaneously enthralled and somewhat frightened by the insanity of the scene, I’d sit on the cold cement floor at a safe distance — giggling just enough to cover for the fact that I was constantly considering slowly backing out of the room. And while I understood that Glenn’s behavior was offbeat and borderline something-or-other, at heart I also knew he was kind and well-meaning, in addition to being one hell of an entertainer.  

Over that first Summer of Glenn, the two of us survived long days tearing through the neighborhood trying to climb unclimbable trees, whittling sticks, playing two-man hide-and-seek (Glenn’s persistent lack and shirt and shoes was apparently a red flag to all parents but mine), and spending minutes at a time trying to start new bands. Yet there was always an unscalable barrier between us. I remember returning to Tyler Elementary School in the fall, where I was entering 2^nd Grade and Glenn was in the Special Education wing. We’d see each other in passing and never exchange much more than a quick wave or nod. At the time I comforted myself with the thought that he was no more interested in advertising our neighborhood friendship than I was. Now, of course, I understand that I should’ve done more in those moments to reach out and be a friend. Something I’ve thought time and again with many relationships in my life. Years later, when I was living in Chicago after college, my parents – still living in the same house – would report back to me whenever they saw Glenn, usually downtown, talking to himself on a park bench or walking alone on a busy street at night. 

When I was about 8 or so, Mr. Glass, the monosyllabic elderly man with Coke-bottle glasses who lived next door to us, shuffled off to the sweet hereafter, leaving behind a large 1920’s home that he’d subdivided into rental apartments that no one rented, and a steel blue 1956 Cadillac Fleetwood locked in his garage. A precocious car nerd who could name any make and model of car my older cousins would point out to me (this was back when almost everything was American-made so if I had just shouted out “Galaxie” or “Impala” every time I probably would’ve been right five times out of 10), I knew what a treasure that old mint condition Caddy was. So a couple times a week at least, for what seemed like months, I’d walk over to that garage and peak through the windows, just to make sure it was still there, hulking in the dark, untampered with, collecting dust, waiting for me to turn 16 in eight short years (I was unfamiliar with the ins and outs of estate law).

So I was crushed when one day when I peered through the garage window to find the Blue Behemoth gone; vanished, apparently in the dead of night. Had it been stolen by burglars in black eye masks? Had Mr. Glass summoned it from beyond the grave to join him up in Mediocre Landlord Heaven? Had it driven itself away? Had it been claimed by another child who’d just turned 16? Those questions were left unanswered, instead supplanted by a whole other series of more pressing questions: Why was there now a yellow F-100 pickup pulling into Mr. Glass’ driveway? Who were the two crusty-eyed, stringy- blonde-haired children sullenly staring at me from the bed of the pickup? Who on God’s green earth was the honey-haired hot mom in the driver’s seat? And finally, where was the nearest bush I could hide behind to watch and judge?

As it turned out, we had new neighbors — the Braynards. 

“That Kingsmen ’72 show with “When Johnny Comes Marching In” is probably THE greatest DCI show ever.”

“Wait, I thought you said that ’73 Santa Clara Vanguard show where they do the Bottle Dance was the best?”

“Have you heard the ’72 Kingsmen show?’

“I’m just saying, you said..”

“Don’t put words in my mouth…”

“But you did say…”

Even before he turned 14 and became an official member of Cedar Rapids’ own Emerald Knights Drum and Bugle Corps, my older brother Derek had already collected scores of legendary drum corps performances on cassette tapes – professionally recorded each year at the season finale DCI (Drum Corps International) tournament and endlessly bootlegged down through the ranks of the nation’s drum corps faithful. Nevermind that by the time the tapes were in Derek’s hands, the recorded performances sounded as if they were being transmitted through the speaker imbedded in the chest of a GI Joe doll. Still, one of the first things Derek and I, his aimless putz-of-an-8-year-old brother, ever bonded over was playing and listening to these tapes in our big corner bedroom, often acting out the part of the drum major, over-dramatically pretending to conduct these brass, wall-of-sound masterpieces and endlessly ranking and re-ranking our favorite performances like a couple of band nerd Deadheads:

“All I’m saying is, have you heard the ’72 Kingsmen show?”

“How is it better than the Vanguard Bottle Dance…And what about that Muchachos prelim show before they got disqualified, when the soprano player hits a double high C??”

“Okay that was cool. But I think they got disqualified because that soprano was like 25 but still the Kingsmen show in ’72 was better anyway.”

“Well, I don’t know about that.”

“Wait shut up, did I tell you what song we’re learning for Emerald Knights?” 

“What?”

“It’s gonna be the first song of the shows we’re doing this summer. Guess.”

“Bottle Dance?”

“That’s what the Vanguard does. Nobody else can touch that. Guess what Emerald Knights are doing, dummy.” 

“A Kingsmen song?”

“Theme from Sanford and Son.”

“No way! NO WAY! 

We all had music in our blood for some reason. If not necessarily the greatest ability to play it, a desperate need to listen to it and an ease with which we each enjoyed it. Maybe it was my dad’s fault. Ever since I could remember, he’d been the choir director at our church, Calvin Sinclair Presbyterian, up on Dalewood Avenue and 38^th Street. This required him to develop a program of songs each week, working hand-in-hand with Reverend Huebner to parallel the message he’d be delivering with the sermon, not that anyone noticed, and work it out with the choir on Wednesday night and Sunday morning prior to church. In service of this critical duty, Dad would constantly plink around on our ramshackle upright piano, warbling through a few hymns, figuring out which tunes best suited that Sunday’s theme as well as the questionable vocal abilities of his vitality-challenged choir members. 

That ramshackle piano, ancient and bathed in crackling bone-white paint, musical notes written on Scotch tape and adhered to the white keys, was a defining feature of our home – not just because I’m positive it was holding up one of the dining room walls, but because it forever served as a musical way station for anyone passing through that room on their way to the kitchen, or vice versa – the most heavily traveled route in whole house. I always listened with cringy delight as Dad hammered (literally) out his programs on the thing, but I could hardly wait for my turn. And I always attacked it with all the verve and passion of someone who has no idea what they’re doing. Same with my siblings. The noise was insufferable. And although the virtuosity never really rose above “Chopsticks” or “Heart and Soul,” I believe that piano was the wellspring of our musical curiosity. 

Around the time I was 8 or 9, circa 1974, my two older brothers Dana and Craig, had taught themselves how to play guitar a little, and they were thinking about starting a rock band. To that end, they began practicing with a few bandmates every Wednesday night while me and my parents were at choir practice, crowding the main room in our basement with drums, amps, guitars and pot smoke. My mom, noticing my interest in driving people away with my piano skills, was gently prodding me towards lessons with Julie Pokorny, the church organist. She was as sweet as a Sara Lee’s frozen cherry cheesecake and just about the same height, with cat eye glasses and a mousy bouffant hairdo, but the relationship was short-lived. I was done after 2 or 3 lessons, probably due in large part to my profound anti-lesson stance, but also because Mrs. Pokorny had all the dynamic instructional presence of a quiet fart. 

Derek, meanwhile, was chomping at the bit to join the exalted ranks of the Emerald Knights. And why wouldn’t he be? Their songs were cool. Their uniforms were cool. And what could be cooler than spending the entire summer doing more band stuff?  Of course, having my usual dearth of extracurricular activities since the Pokorny Sessions, I was equally fascinated and giddy about being closely related to a future Emerald Knight. 

As it turned out, through Derek’s years long membership in the corps, Mom and Dad and I became as deeply enmeshed in Emerald Knights and drum corps culture as he did. For a few critical years, it provided our little corner of the family with a social life – something my parents hadn’t really experienced until that point. And I look back on it now as a defining, instructional period of my childhood – a place where I was able to observe from a distance how teenagers (albeit slightly offbeat band kid teenagers) interact with one another – what worked and what didn’t, social hierarchies, and the best places to look for half-smoked cigarette butts. 

Today, a typical drum corps show is as much about over the top stagecraft as it is about the music. I’ve seen bits and pieces of recent shows and they look like David Copperfield productions of professional ballroom dancers pretending to be marching bands, if you can picture it. Back in the 70’s, the concept was much simpler: a drum corps was just like a marching band, but without woodwinds, trombones and provocative baton twirlers. There was a drum section, a color guard section featuring “rifle” and flag carriers, and a horn section comprised of a variety of sizes of bugles. Bugles mirrored typical band horns with one crucial difference: all bugles had two keys rather than three. For some reason, this was better, if only because it allowed these organizations to be called “drum and bugle corps” instead of the dork-adjacent “marching bands”. It also meant the horn parts were specifically written for instruments with two keys. So perhaps the whole endeavor was secretly funded and steered by the shadowy puppetmastery of Big Sheet Music. 

Unlike marching bands, which mainly function as a performing arm of a high school or college’s music program by playing in parades and football halftime shows, drum corps existed in large part to compete with other drums corps. You heard right: these were 14 to 21-year-old band geeks looking to kick other band geeks’ asses with a nasty dual threat of musical precision and showmanship. These competitions, or “tournaments,” unfolded (and still do) most every weekend throughout the summer months in high school or college football stadiums across the nation. Most, like Cedar Rapids’ own Emerald Knights-hosted Tournament of Drums, were semi-local affairs – drawing 6 to 8 drum corps from the surrounding states, parents and family of the drum corps members, and literally no one else. 

Each corps performed a 4 to 5 song set of choreographed arrangements fine-tuned during regularly scheduled practices which began over the winter months and increased in frequency and intensity during the spring and summer (I recall a great deal of screaming, sweating and underage smoking). Ultimately, the performances were evaluated and scored on both musical and visual execution by up to 8 judges who spent their summer Saturday nights judging drum and bugle corps, so you be the judge. At the end of the evening the scores were tallied, and all the corps marched back onto the field and lined up side-by-side, waiting with baited breath. As the drum majors stood elbow to elbow along the sideline, the winners were announced in ascending order. This created a dramatic Miss America moment at the end of each tournament, but without flowers, evening gowns or viewers. Upon their name being announced, each drum major took one step forward and executed a signature salute to the house, usually involving a complex series of snappy head and arm movements before the actual salute comes. The more complicated, the better. It was, in a word, breathtaking. 

Soon, we – our family – would be a proud, honored part of all of this. It would be like a badge of honor, but dorkier. Because I would soon began collecting buttons from all of my favorite corps and wearing them. All at once. In public. On my Emerald Knights windbreaker. I was not to be messed with, which was fine, because no one bothered. 

“Whaaat?!” There it was, Dad’s locally-famous howl of disbelief. As the son of a Presbyterian minister, he wasn’t much of a curser, so this was usually his way of saying, “What the hell is this shit?!” Many times he used “whaaat?” in half-jest – as a way of proclaiming a soft disapproval — a kinder, shorter way of saying, “Well that’s remarkably stupid but if you think it’s a good idea, go ahead. Dummy.” This was not one of those occasions. 

“What does this uniform have to do with the Emerald Knights?!” We knew he was genuinely, furiously perplexed because he rarely raised his voice like this, except at wrestling meets. Thinking back on it, it may have been a mistake for Derek to bring home his new Emerald Knights uniform to try on for my parents’ approval. After all, it was their and the other parents’ valiant fundraising efforts over the last year that had helped to fund the new EK makeover. 

Not that my dad was a fashionable man. He would, and did, choose a pocket protector over a pocket square every day of the week. And Mom, daytime schedule mercilessly jammed with cooking, cleaning, tending to her innumerable collections of miscellany and pretending not to watch soap operas, was a house-dress-until-noon afficionado. Still, they rarely missed an opportunity to cattily carp in private about perfectly well-intentioned outfits painstakingly cobbled together by others in their limited social circle.

“What did you think of that dress Shirley was wearing at church this morning?”

“I don’t know why she thinks she can get away with a dress like that. With those ankles?

And it certainly wasn’t often they were given the opportunity to critique a marching uniform. Really, who among us can claim that privilege? Anyway, they had to see it sooner or later and, to be fair, Derek was schoolgirl-giddy over the new look and dying to show it off. “What do you mean, Dad? This is the uniform everybody wanted!” The problem was, for all the months of speculation over what an authentic Emerald Knight (whatever that was) should look like, this new uniform, objectively speaking, shat the bed. 

“Why is it red?!” my dad squawked loudly enough to inform the whole house, even though it was just the four of us there and we all could see, if not fully understand, what we were looking at. The pants were white polyester bell bottom slacks punctuated with one notable feature at the bottom: within each pant flair was housed a triangle-shaped swath of burgundy-colored satin, designed to catch the eye and suggest perhaps, that the insides of the pants were made of red satin? 

Adorning the waist, bridging the disastrous lower half with a billowy and ruffled black satin blouse, was a five-inch wide burgundy cummerbund, with a long and wide plumed tassel hanging off of one side. 

The black top was offset by a buttonless white polyester vest and an ascot fashioned from burgundy satin. Topping it off was a black felt caballero hat with a wide, flat brim and a burgundy satin hatband for good measure. 

There was not a single whiff of green anywhere on the uniform and frankly, it’s a good thing because it would’ve clashed with all the burgundy. And, emerald or not, this was not the uniform of any knight we’d ever been introduced to. No, on the field, this was going to look more like a convention of half-assed mariachis with good footwork and snazzy pants. 

But by now I’d been around the drum corps block – crushing on not just their musical themes but their looks — and I knew exactly what was afoot here. “You’re supposed to look like the Muchachos, right? Cool!” 

The vaunted Muchachos Drum and Bugle Corps, hailing from Hawthorne, New Jersey, were the current bad boys of the drum corps scene. While admired as much for their Latin-themed repertoire and uniforms as their take-no-prisoners horn work, their recent meteoric rise to the top had taken an unseemly turn after they were disqualified from national competition for fielding overage members – a couple of 23 or 24-year-olds in a strictly 14 to 21-year-old’s game. But as disappointing as this was to us, it only added to their legend: they were the coolest.

Derek was quick to the defend his and the Emerald Knights’ honor. “No! I mean, well, it’s kind of like the Muchachos…but it’s totally different!” It was exactly the same. 

“Why is it red? Aren’t you the EMERALD KNIGHTS? What’s the Munchachas?” Aside from Dad’s stubbornly intentional mispronunciation of a non-English word, these were all valid questions. 

“Mu-cha-chos, Dad! They’re really good. But this is like, a totally different look from that.” No it wasn’t. “And it’s what everyone wants!” 

“Is it Mexican? Are there knights in Mexico?” Another great question for the room that none of us knew the answer to.  

Ever the diplomat and more street savvy than any of us, Mom played both sides. “Russ, if this is what the kids want, I think it’s neat. I want to see what the whole band…”

“Corps.”

“…I want to see what the whole corps looks like. But I would like to know how much it cost for these. They look expensive. Russ, you should talk to the manager about it.” Confrontation was not Dad’s field of study, but it never stopped Mom from ruthlessly attempting to press him into duty.

“Jim Bishop doesn’t know what he’s doing and I don’t trust him.”

“Well if you don’t trust him, you should definitely talk to him and try to get to the bottom of how much this cost.”

“For gosh sakes. Red uniforms. All right. I’ll talk to him.” It was settled then. Dad wouldn’t talk to Jim Bishop and the Emerald Knights would spend the next two seasons marching in black and red mariachi costumes. 

How many cigarettes did I inadvertently smoke as a child? I often wonder this. I’m talking of course about the secondhand smokes. In the years before I ever actually blazed one up and cautiously inhaled — brief titillation kicked in the throat by an eruption of panicked coughing – I wonder how many packs I effortlessly sucked down without even knowing it. Also, did I look cool doing it?  

There were the listless afternoons spent watching TV in our bright but cramped back room.  Lounging sideways, legs draped over the arm of one of our old gold silk easy chairs, I’d spend hours watching Andy Griffith or Bewitched or The Partridge Family on our 25-inch RCA console television set. Not infrequently, one or another of my older brothers was reclining nearby, sucking down a Tareyton or a Winston like it was their job. I remember them launching playful smoke rings across the room which no doubt silently unfurled into my mouth and nasal cavity as I giggled at one of Barney Fife’s or Dr. Bombay’s or Rueben Kincaid’s hilarious quips. Perhaps I was high on the nicotine.

Even at a young age, I was a student of cultural trivia of every kind, and one of my favorite pastimes was examining the fine print of cigarette ads in magazines to unearth the tar count in each brand of cigarette. It was not lost on me that the tar counts of Tareyton and Winston smokes were 21 and 20 mg respectively – the highest counts of any cigarettes at the time. Was it purely coincidental that my brothers chose the two most lethal brands on the market, or had they too run the numbers and chosen to go for broke? Either way, I was quietly in awe of them for achieving such lofty goals.

There were the Wednesday evening trips to and from choir practice at Calvin Sinclair Church, that always began with a Norman Rockwell innocence. As Choir Director and ostensible leader of the pack, my dad would chauffeur anywhere from one to three of the more senior choir members, stopping at each of their homes to pick them up. As he manned the helm of our steel blue ’71 Impala with Mom beside him, I would slouch in the cavernous blue vinyl of the back seat, sliding side to side with every turn. 

On a full night, we’d first swing by Virginia Olmstead’s place just a few blocks away on Higley Avenue. Virgina’s maiden name was DeFore, and she, along with her younger brother Clifford –were famous on the Calvin Sinclair scene for being the lesser-known siblings of actor Don DeFore. Don had made his fortune playing, among other characters, George Baxter, the head of the household in which Hazel – everyone’s favorite loudmouth maid – was employed in the show of the same name. Never mind that few outside of Cedar Rapids remembered DeFore’s Hollywood reign, he was a hometown hero and his sister Virginia consistently represented the family with a quiet dignity, never a coiffed salt and pepper hair out of place and usually resplendent in a smart lavender or light blue shirtwaist dress with sensible shoes. She was always friendly, kind, and appreciative of the ride, yet somehow aloof and distant, as kin to royalty can sometimes be. 

Virginia would elegantly climb into the back seat, pat me on the knee with a gentle hello and we’d head over to the Oak Hill neighborhood to retrieve Esther Gosnell from her dainty story-and-a-half bungalow, perched on a hill overlooking the Cargill corn starch plant and, beyond that, the Cedar River. Royalty in her own right, Esther was considered “the Queen of the Church Potluck,” always going above and beyond all comers to whip up more and better dishes for the occasional post-Sunday service event. Whether it was Chicken Tetrazzini with a crumbled potato chip topping or a 7-Up and sour cream Jello salad, Esther deftly cranked out the largest quantities of the unhealthiest foods known to man. Her chronic physical conditions were a testament to her sampling resume: she had bad knees, bad hips, bad ankles and, without going into too much detail, the passenger seat of more than one of our cars was later determined to have broken springs. Nevertheless, Esther always plopped into the front seat next to Mom with good-natured, albeit breathless, cheer.  

Next up, we’d backtrack over to the alley behind Bever Avenue to gather none other than crotchety senior extraordinaire, Cortland “Scoop” Stevens. While Virginia and Esther were most likely in their late fifties or early sixties at the time, I actually have no idea how old Scoop was. Let’s just say he was somewhere between 75 and whatever 75 squared is. I don’t know why we always picked him up in the alley behind his house, but the venue seemed fitting. I remember Scoop for his full head of Vitalis-slicked graying hair neatly perched atop his deeply creased and angular face, his stooped and lanky sideways gate as he hobbled toward our vehicle, and the inches-thick horn-rimmed glasses he wore, making his sunken eyes appear at least 4 times their actual size. But mostly I remember him for how he filled our car with cigarette smoke once he’d completed his painfully clattering journey into the backseat.

“How you doin’, Scoop?”, my dad would always say. 

“What’s that?”, would come the inevitable phlegmy croak. 

“I say, how you doin’?”

“Yeah. Good.”

Scoop was smoking when he climbed in, had been smoking long before that — most likely from birth on — and continued to smoke all the way to church. Scoop was made of cigarette smoke. And the windows could’ve been up or down, it didn’t matter – for the next 15 minutes, we would be, all of us, fully immersed in the stinging, smoky Scoop-ness of a thousand VFW halls. What began each Wednesday evening with such refined purity — Virginia bathed in rosewater perfume, Dad in his English Leather, Mom in her Wind Song, Esther with her essence of twice-baked potatoes and me with my somewhat-virginal lung capacity – always ended with us piling out into the church parking lot, a clown car of well-dressed chimney sweeps. Each of us now black lung-adjacent, we’d take a moment to allow the fresh air to penetrate and cleanse our clothing — partially undoing the damage that could be undone — before entering the church refreshed and ready to belt out the good lord’s greatest hits. 

To be cont’d

And then there was Bingo Night — Night of a Thousand Smokes. Unlike many of my encounters with adults at the time, which were generally populated with warm and kind church-going folk, Bingo Night was, for a 9-year-old, a den of vipers. These weren’t the aunts and uncles and grandparents who’d gently push you on a swing on a Sunday afternoon. I’m afraid many of these people would push you off a swing. Most likely so they could have a seat and burn one down, and flick ashes on your face. Defeated by the Bingo Gods too many times, these folks were cynical, embittered and endlessly raspy. But in many ways they showed me a path – directly away from the one that they were on. 

“Bottom of the board, OOOOOOOO Seventy Five!” Wayne Dickinson would bellow from behind the Lucky Jim Bingo King Air Blower. Aside from winning a game and ecstatically shouting that dumb and magical word so the entire room could hear you, Wayne delivering this line with trademark aplomb was always the most entertaining portion of the evening. Then, with a long-ashed Newport permanently wedged into his microphone hand, he’d hold the 75 Ball aloft with the other, offering visual proof to a ballroom full of life-hardened skeptics. Floppy salt and pepper hair. Rectangular wire-framed glasses with tinted lenses. Clocking in at 6-foot-something a hundred-and-nothing. Wayne cut a striking figure on the Bingo Night stage: a match striking a box, then slowly flaming out. In a room full of top-flight cigaretters, Wayne was second to none. 

Saturday night was Emerald Knights’ Bingo Night at the decrepit Hotel Montrose in downtown Cedar Rapids. It was the Corps’ main revenue engine, and locals streamed in from both the factory-adjacent neighborhoods surrounding downtown and the scattered farming communities of rural Linn County to have a crack at a fleeting win. And if the Emerald Knights were up-and-comers, the venue in which they chose to stake their future success was a has-been of the highest order. 

Opened in 1906 and occupying nearly half a city block, the 7-story Montrose was once a grand showpiece of Eastern Iowa. Hard evidence of an era pre-dating the age of Howard Johnson’s and Holiday Inns and Travel Lodges, the Montrose, with its light-filled rotunda, marble walls and 16-foot ceilings was once the playground of whichever jazz-age dignitaries and elites found their way to the Midwest. At the height of his creativity in the early 30’s, the artist Grant Wood – a hometown boy and at the time a local resident — even created paintings, murals and chandeliers for the hotel. But, like much of Cedar Rapids in the mid-70’s, the tasteful and extravagant touches had long been removed in a momentary money grab and replaced by a lot of cheap ugliness. It was often rumored that many of the Montrose’s rooms were now single occupancy residences, filled with men and women of ill repute.   

Accordingly, the once grand and gleaming Crystal Ballroom on the second floor of the hotel was now a giant ashtray, a bubbling petri dish of stained burgundy carpeting and row upon row of long folding tables filled to the brim with chain-smoking, small-time gamblers throwing away a buck at the long odds of winning two. And I was right there in the middle of them, sucking it all in, a captive of Mom and Dads’ dutiful obligations as parent volunteers for the drum corps. 

Truth be told, as much as I disliked being dragged away from my CBS Saturday lineup of All In the Family, Carol Burnett and everything in between, I was casually thrilled at the idea of playing the big board. Perhaps, I thought, I could siphon away a win or two from these cranky, nicotine-shriveled relics. I had no money of my own, so, my thinking was, as reimbursement for following them into a Benson and Hedges convention that night, maybe my dad would part with couple of bucks to play a game or two. 

Mom and Dad were there to walk the floor, double check winners’ cards, and sometimes man the card purchasing table, so my requests were always interruptive. Apprehensive, but still feeling I had the right to ask, I’d sheepishly approach my Dad and tap him on the shoulder, whispering, “Dad, can I have some money to play?” I felt I had the right to ask. 

“What? To play bingo? I saw some kids out in the hall doing something, why don’t you play whatever they’re playing? They look like they’re your age.”

“They’re not. Pleeeease? I don’t know them.”

“That’s why we brought you here, to make some friends.”

“That’s why you brought me here? Pleeeease?”

“Oh Russ, he can play a game or two.” Mom, always ready to pamper her baby with money! Or at least stop the incessant whining. 

Then would come the inevitable, exasperated sigh, long and loud enough to distract everyone from their cigarettes for a brief instant, and maybe even fill the immediate air with something other than smoke. Mom and Dad were nothing if not world class exasperated sighers. “Here. 

Three dollars for the night. Get good cards.”

“What?”

“Go.” 

It usually wasn’t until I’d purchased a card (two if I was feeling my oats), found an open seat and pushed my chair up to the long table that I remembered how fat my chances actually were. Up and down the table every woman – and they were almost always women – had at least six cards. Some of them had a dozen or more, arranged neatly in rows so that they could quickly scan the whole set once Wayne Dickinson called the numbers. 

Early on in my bingo days, I was also astonished to discover that, in addition to their leatherette cigarette pouches with the twist clasp, most of these women came to the Montrose with their own dabbers – sometimes personalized. If you’re not familiar with Bingo parlance, the dabber is the device each player uses to mark off, with colored ink, the called numbers on his or her Bingo sheet(s). Mark off 5 in numbers in a row – horizontally, vertically or diagonally – and you get Bingo. I should note here that public dabbers were freely accessible at the front table for anyone who asked. In other words, these folks were so committed to their craft that, at some point after careful consideration, they’d driven to the nearest bingo store and put good money down to purchase their own dabber. Probably a six pack. They were pros. They were the bingo equivalent to the person who shows up at the bar with his or her own pool cue. They meant business. However, unlike pool, the only skills required for this game were knowing all the letters in the word BINGO and how to count to 75. 

Needless to say, all of my daring bingo outings were a bust. That is, all except one. Due to a blur of what one might call “winner’s ecstasy,” the details are scant, but one night in the summer of 1975, I brought home the gold. And by “gold,” I mean 73 dollars. 

This is what I do remember:

My 20-year-old sister Sara was there with me that night. Apparently my non-stop pestering – always attempts to help keep the boredom at bay — had become a professional liability for my parents, distracting them from their crucial duties as deputized Bingo Monitors. So they asked Sara to burn a precious Saturday night accompanying me – to tamp down the Whine Machine and help facilitate my gaming. Or maybe I just asked her to join me as my “good luck charm.” But probably not. Bottom line is, that’s what she was. 

In the giddy panic that followed me dabbing in the fifth square in a row on my Bingo card, I first showed Sara before making any rash decisions. “Hey – I think I got it!” 

After briefly scanning my card, Sara completely lost it. “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. You got it! Say it! Say it!”

“Hey! Hey!” I yelled to Wayne. “BINGO!!!” 

For good measure, Sara offered an adult’s perspective, “He got Bingo! He did. He got Bingo!” 

Ashes dropped all over the ballroom at the sound of 9-year-old shouting out the magic word. Then came the scowling disbelief, accompanied by an audible groan – a hacking symphony of familiar disappointment. This loss, I suppose, was more of an all-over, full-body loss for most of these folks. I remember necks craning up and down the aisles to get a glimpse of me, the Golden Child. Many, I think, were hoping to meet my eyes, deliver a silent threat, “You ain’t got no business playing the Lord’s Game. Empty my ashtray.” 

The next day, after deep introspection, Dad and I drove downtown to the Montgomery Ward sporting goods store, where I purchased what I’d long been missing in my life: my own, non-hand-me-down, state-of-the-art bike. Done up in black with flame decals in various spots, it was in the earliest style of a bmx bike, big nobby tires, a long seat, and fakey number plates featuring the word, in flames, “Wildfire.” As they say, “where there’s smoke…”

A normal 8-year-old child in a normal household might ask for help. Or a stepstool. Then again, how many children in how many households discover their favorite toys sitting on top of bookcases sitting on top of radiators? “Normal” was not the spirit of the day. Besides, all our stepstools were already being used as shelving units for other items. No, the most expeditious course would be to scale this sucker and use my extendo-reach superpower to grab the robots and pull them down.

The vintage 1974 scar smack dab in the middle of my right shin is v-shaped. No hair has ever grown there. V’s are among the simplest of the letters, giving the infinite “o”, which arguably requires more talent to successfully complete by hand, a run for its money. Two lines beginning apart and then angling downward towards each other, on a crash course to meet and terminate at the same point, creating a chevron. In my case, this neat and perfect symbol is a complete betrayal of the idiotic and ultimately gory accident that created it. And since both capital V’s and lowercase v’s are the same simple shape, it’s difficult to determine whether my shin v is upper or lowercase. I suppose, since it hurt so damn much when I got it, I’d prefer it be a capital V. But since it was completely of my own moronic volition and creation, I’ll accept the lower case. 

That Saturday, I suddenly and desperately needed to play with my Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. We were stuck amid a never-ending early Iowa spring, a season of nonstop overcast skies occasionally punctuated by 40 mile an hour rain. It was a fertile breeding ground for childhood boredom. 

I’d originally received that wonderfully simple boxing robots toy as a Christmas gift the year before, playing with it nonstop, in the middle of the living room floor, for several weeks. Two 8-inch-tall plastic robots – one red, one blue – atop a one foot square plastic boxing ring, stood opposite one another in punching position, fists clenched. Using a thumb from each hand to operate the controls of each robot, I’d press the buttons with malevolent glee to make each robot throw punches toward the other’s chin. Land a punch in just the right spot and the opponent’s head would instantly pop up an inch or so, with the aid of a spring-loaded steel post affixed to the bottom of the head. Magical. Of course, once I figured out the exact placement of a punch that would knock a robot’s “block off,” I did it over and over for an hour or so. After that, I was pretty much done with the toy, having gained enough self-worth to rest on my laurels until the next mind-bending challenge came along. 

Now, a year or so later, having apparently exhausted all other entertainment options, I was prepared, no, demanding, to regain my title as world heavyweight thumb twiddler. But in that house of ours, beloved toys were known to disappear, usually submerged somewhere among the crowded noise of bottomless bric-a-brac. At times like this I would often consult with our Chief Miscellany Officer, my mom, usually by shouting to her from 3 or 4 rooms away. “Mom, have you seen my (item here)?”, is how the conversation would generally commence. 

“Yes, Shaney, it’s here. Somewhere. Do you need it now?”, is how a simple question would inevitably launch an hours-long search. As with everyone else living under our roof, Mom was constantly on her own desperate hunt for some random quarry, usually a newspaper from the recent past or a back issue of People. In a familiar scene, this time I found her rummaging through a tall stack of newspapers in our cramped but cozy den. 

“Yeah, Mom. I want to play with it.”

“Did you look in your closet? Russ!” she shouted to Dad somewhere on the other side of the house, “Where did you put last week’s Penny Saver?”

“I threw it away!” he shouted back. Nearly 25 years into their marriage, Dad still hadn’t learned that if you insisted on throwing away garbage, it was best Mom not know about it.

“I was saving that!”, is a phrase Mom cried out 6 or 7 times a day, steeped in performative outrage. “They had a coupon for rubber gloves!”

“We have a whole basket of rubber gloves on the back stairs.” (Large home that it was, ours had a back stairway leading from the second-floor hallway down to the kitchen. A fascinating and unique feature that had become hopelessly clogged with kitchen miscellany that somehow wouldn’t fit in our massive kitchen.)

“Mom?”

“What?”

“Robots?”

“Did you look in your closet?”

“It’s not in there.”

A lengthy, loud and exasperated sigh filled the room, code for, “Do we really need to get into this now, can’t you see I’m busy looking for expired coupons?” 

“I don’t know, Shane, I saw it someplace.”

“Is it…do you think it’s in the attic? Should I go up to the…”

“Don’t go in the attic.” I was expecting this response, but I loved triggering Mom with the prospect of me barging into her third-floor treasure chest and trampling all over the neatly organized warehouse of family memorabilia. Our attic was indeed warehouse sized, but one would consider it “organized” only in the sense that the most valuable items were consistently the hardest to find. It was a 2000 square foot minefield of disappointment, a sea of broken furniture stacked high with boxes large and small, labeled in magic marker with cryptic messages like “Christmas 1970,” “Purple Collection,” or, misleadingly, “Important.” Still, I enjoyed the occasional visit to the top floor, always with the dim hope of unearthing some long-forgotten plaything. 

“Go look in your old room,” Mom suggested distractingly, “I might’ve seen it there.” My old room was the second-floor sunroom – a space my brother Derek and I had shared for several years until Dana and Craig’s larger bedroom, in the opposite corner of the hall, became available to us. The sunroom had since become a sort of mini-attic – a way station for gently-used, still-useful items not yet ready for a full burial in the attic. It was full of sewing-related materials, boxes of old magazines, and bookcases jammed with encyclopedia volumes, Time-Life collections, children’s books and all manner of not-very-good fiction and non-fiction. 

Mom was right. There was a good chance — not great — that my Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots had taken up residence somewhere in that room – out of the way, but not yet retired. I quickly tore out of the backroom, sprinted through the living room, rounded the corner into the front hall and bounded up the stairs three at a time. Throwing open the sunroom door with the anticipatory delight of an archeologist on the verge of an historic find, I quickly scanned the bright space, hoping to spot a glint of the toy’s familiar colors – the dull red of Robot 1, the aqua blue of Robot 2, or the pale yellow of the square plastic boxing ring. 

I started low and left, eyes darting back and forth across bookcases, boxes and baskets. I slowly turned to take in the rest of the room directly in front of me. I caught a glimpse of our old orange corduroy daybed, now a comfortable retirement spot for small appliance boxes, now filled with everything but appliances. So that’s what happened to it. I looked to the bookcase next to me on the right, resting precariously atop a low, wide radiator. This was our home: things on top of things that shouldn’t have things on top of them. My eyes tracked the bookcase upward toward its terminus until, my god, I spotted a glorious wedge of yellow plastic jutting out from its top ledge. There it was. My Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, a mere eight feet above floor level. 

I remember grabbing a vertical edge of the bookcase, stepping on top of the right edge of the radiator and pulling myself up. Once I reached elevation, balancing on the outer edge of the radiator, I reached my hand up as high as I could in the direction of the robots. 

I would love to see the next instant captured on video, in slow motion. The fingertips of my right hand grazing the bottom corner of the robots toy just enough to unmoor it from atop the bookcase. Its full two pounds of sharp and jutting molded plastic airborne southward toward my dumb, horrified face like an anvil in a Road Runner cartoon. My skinny body tipping backward and joining the toy in midair for a fraction of a second before we both hit the floor in a two-note thud. 

All the great scars are somewhat expository – a visual feast not so much divulging the how and why as demanding that they exist, leaving you wanting to know more, sparking your imagination, “Looks like he was maybe sliding down a telephone pole and caught a massive splinter straight through his pectoral region. My god, I bet that was a hell of a mess.” I wouldn’t consider the dainty “v” on my right shin a great scar. Unique, I suppose. Still, it represents of snapshot of a single moment – a collision of circumstances. Also, it was a hell of a mess. 

If you’re familiar with a traditional hot water radiator, you may be able to picture the round valve knob on the end, usually about 3 inches in diameter, which you can turn clockwise or counter to adjust the heat. The valve knob is round and smooth. But it straddles a jutting square valve (steel, of course) which is apparently ideal for poking, stabbing and tearing flesh. As it turns out, on my way floorward from earlier heights, my shin had made illustrious contact with this radiator valve. First my jeans were torn, then my leg. 

It was not apparent at first how my injury occurred. Later on, after the excruciating pain and the blood and the attendant screaming and crying, after the trip to the emergency room, Dad and I reconstructed the events of the moment. “Yeah. I should probably get a knob for that. Or maybe duct tape.” 

It could’ve been a real bloodbath. It probably should’ve been. 

“Marv! Mmm…‘nother round of Jack shots over here pleash – ‘n you should…you should do one too.” With two pudgy mitts, Lon Svoboda, distinguished Potentate of the El Kahir Shriners, gingerly removed the crimson fez perched atop his flushed forehead, set it down on the bar, smoothed the 7 remaining brownish red hairs on his scalp and gave a labored wink to the bartender. At 51, Lon had now drunk well over his age in ounces of beer. 

Ted’s Happitime Lounge was a small and tidy tavern on First Avenue and Third Street in Cedar Rapids, just across the Cedar River from downtown. It was the type of place that dotted the working-class corners of the city – not too fussed over and not particularly inviting, just there to get the job done. Geographically speaking, Ted’s was something of an imbiber’s gem, approximately a one-cigarette walk from the white-collar offices populating downtown, but also within stumbling distance of the near-Southwest side’s blue-collar neighborhoods – home to the city’s most dynamic drinkers. 

Ever the firm and mindful lieutenant in these situations, Gary Steinke, Chief Rabban to Lon, aimed to point him in the direction of sober reality, if only for a moment. 

“Marv’s gotta run the place, dummy — I beg your pardon, Illustrious Sir.”

“Pffff Marv ain’t runnin’ shit – that Hamm’s sign’s been on the fritz longz I can remember.”

“You can’t remember where your dick is,” Ronny Melsha reminded Lon. 

“Pfff. You’re a dick. I rememb…that’s what I ‘member.”

“You hear that Marv?” Ronny boastfully giggled, “I says to Lon, I says, ‘You can’t remember where your dick is’! Hey Lon, Potentate this!” Though ranked as mere Prophet in the El Kahir pecking order, Ronny was married to Lon’s sister Bev, so quite comfortable giving Lon the business with the best of them. Marv, entranced by a drag racing competition on the 13-inch Sylvania black and white mounted above the corner of the bar, continued working a hand towel over freshly rinsed mugs, eagerly awaiting the impending departure of these be-fezzed cacklers. 

Cedar Rapids is split into quadrants – Southeast, Northeast, Southwest and Northwest – dictated on one axis by the north-south route of the city’s main thoroughfare, 1^st Avenue, and on the other by the liver-tinted Cedar River, which slimes its way, inconveniently for clean mapping purposes and anyone trying to easily navigate the city, from Northwest to Southeast. Thus, each quadrant is a shapeless and convoluted tangle of half-assed grids featuring both numbered and alphabetized avenues and streets, encircled with and punctuated by winding drives, dashed-off lanes and sad courts. And we were all just trying to find our way. 

Luckily for the eight or so men gathered at Ted’s Happitime this warm June Saturday morning, urban planning was not on the agenda. Today was a day of celebration for this group of beer-softened war vets and salty assembly linemen. Across the Cedar, as the early summer sun warmed the downtown pavement, restless young families and cranky older couples, festooned and sweating in bulging plaid slacks and muted polyblend shirts or the colorful tank-toppery of the day, began clotting the sidewalks of Second Avenue, eagerly awaiting the commencement of the city’s 47^th Annual Shriner’s Parade. 

The Shriner’s organization is known throughout the United States as a pretend-ancient order of heroic do-gooding gentleman, gathering in regularly scheduled meetings to help raise funds for local organizations in need – hospitals, orphanages, and the like. Virtuous as their official duties are, the Shriner’s are not allergic to a little fun. So today, the increasingly plastered men of Cedar Rapids’ El Kahir chapter of the Shriners, would be heroes in another way.  

A few blocks north, in the sweaty, dimly lit bowels of the Veteran’s Memorial Building, Mom and Dad and I anxiously watched as the heat moistened teens of The Emerald Knights Drum and Bugle Corps ran through their final parade prep in the expansive lower-level Armory. The Veteran’s Memorial Building was also known as Cedar Rapids City Hall. A stately Beaux Arts-style concrete behemoth, the building was completed in 1927 and resides, along with the Linn County Courthouse, on Mays Island. Together the buildings create something of an administrative battleship, splitting the Cedar River in two between from 1^st Avenue south to 3^rd Avenue.

The Emerald Knights practiced in the massive two-story room – nightmarish acoustics notwithstanding – during the winter months and were usually able to use the Armory as a de facto HQ whenever the need arose. Today, it happened to be geographically convenient as the Shriner’s Parade was set to launch just outside the front doors of the building. 

“There’s Derek!” I pointed for the benefit of my parents, somewhat thrilled to see him in full Knights regalia, standing among a gaggle of fidgety corps members, tonguing the mouthpiece of his baritone horn in an unpleasantly suggestive manner. “What’s he doing?” I grimaced. 

Mom rolled her eyes, “Don’t look at it.”

“Dave,” Mom’s maiden name was David so Dad nicknamed her “Dave” long before any of us were a glint in their eyes. I never heard him address her as Delores once. “He’s just wetting his mouthpiece.”

“Like he used to wet the bed?” I giggled.

With this, Dad stared at me with steely disappointment just long enough for me to hang my head in temporary shame. “A moist mouthpiece is key.” 

Anticipation was high as today’s event was the official opening of the Knights’ season. Though not a competition, the parade would be the first public presentation of the corps’ repertoire for the Summer of ‘76.

“One. Two. Three. Foh!” With that affected staccato command, drum major Matt Daugherty launched the Emerald Knights into their legendary program opener, Tito Puente’s “Oye Como Va,” a perennial fan favorite. 

Over the span of Derek’s six or so years with the Emerald Knights, these early summer appearances were always the most titillating for me. As a younger sibling with not much (nothing) on his plate, my parents (also in search of evening action) would often take me to Knights practice. While they met with other parents and discussed fundraising activities, I dawdled listlessly through hours of tedious rehearsals here at the Armory on winter evenings, and, during the spring, on the vacant football field at Wilson Junior High School. So, come summer, I was always thrilled and secretly proud to finally witness the fruition of my hard-earned hours of drum corps practice watching: the tightly executed horn melodies, the exacting drum line underpinnings, the thoughtfully choregraphed pageantry of the color guard. It truly was a breathtaking achievement of mine. 

After running through the two or three numbers selected for the parade, the Knights began slowly filing out of the Armory and up the stairs, where they’d line up in formation on the access road running along the west side of City Hall. This was our cue to beat a path to our usual parade viewing spot up on 2^nd Avenue and 6^th Street – not too early in the parade route, allowing the featured acts time and space to fine tune their performances prior to offering them up for our highly discerning palates. 

“I got the red one. Fuckin’ number 51!” Lon raced out the back door of Ted’s to the awaiting sports car/go-karts arrayed in a semi-circle in the alley parking lot. As the founding members of El Kahir’s distinguished Motor Corps, Lon, Gary and Ronny, as well as the 5 other Shriners now pouring themselves out of Ted’s, were tasked with bringing that old Shriner’s magic to today’s parade. 

“Shit you can take 51,” Gary giggled. “That one crapped out on ya last year. ‘Member?” 

“Mm she’s still my baby,” Lon slurred, baby talking as he sloppily lowered himself into the cramped cockpit of his comically small  convertible. His larger- than-life ass found the seat with a thud, nearly tipping over the entire affair in the process.   

Sure, there would be other parade attractions. The Mounted Guides of Indian Creek Nature Center atop their beautiful Quarter Horses were always good for a few poop stories – a visual wonder for the kids. The Amana Colonies’ signature Bavarian Brass Band featured cantankerous, well-nourished men in Lederhosen. And the Czech Village Clowners were a perennial favorite in this era before clowns were officially deemed pedophilic horror tropes (and these clowns tossed un-inspected candy to eager children, for heaven’s sake). 

Of course, there were the Emerald Knights with their youthful, albeit occasionally off-key, exuberance. The Shriner’s Parade was always considered a critical recruitment tool for the Corps – a captive audience of children who, like me, dreamt of one day marching in a parade, wearing colorful uniforms of questionable provenance, playing songs made popular by Santana. 

But nothing brought the kids out like the El Kahir Motor Corps: grown men, red faced and funny-hatted, stuffed into go-kart sized Corvette replicas, driving (shit-faced as it turned out) in formation, zig-zagging and executing figure-8’s along the way. It was entertaining to imagine these men in a vacant parking lot somewhere – maybe out front of the recently shuttered Giant superstore on the far west side – arduously practicing their stunts, honing their craft as it were, in these ridiculous vehicles. You have to wonder if they practiced drunk in order to replicate the road conditions. 

We were standing at our spot on 2^nd and 6^th, gathered in the noon sun with all manner of parade watchers. We’d already enjoyed the fine parading of several acts, among them the CRPD’s motorcycle unit and the Knitting Sisters of So Fro Fabrics – twelve middle-aged women arranged in a chevron, carrying knitting needles and waving to listless onlookers. Now, The Emerald Knights were smack dab in front of us. Sounding better than early-season form, they were just polishing off the final notes of “Oye Como Va,” segueing into an ill-conceived upbeat rendition of “The Way We Were.” That’s when we first heard the faint, high-pitched buzzsaw of what sounded like lawnmower motors. 

The distant drone created a discordant bed of noise to the Knights’ already unfortunate take on Hamlisch. And as they marched past, we politely clapped, but our attention was already drawn southward toward the source of the racket: a circling swarm of balding drunk men careening toward us in tiny automobiles. 

“Oh, Dad!” I laughed, “Here come the Shriners in their cars!” 

“Oh! Ha. These guys,” Dad laughed. He was always as entertained by their big-guy-in-a-little-car routine as I was. Everyone was. “Wonder if Lon Svoboda is still in charge over there.” 

Mom watched the fast-approaching buffoonery, shook her head and smiled, embarrassed yet entertained – a mother of five boys. “Someone’s going to lose a hat.” 

The first sign of trouble was a sense that, as the Shriners circled one another on their way to us, the parade goers on either side seemed to be backing away from the curb. To be sure, their haphazard circles appeared to be widening, punctuated by an occasional swerve inward – a vain attempt to right the ship; to undrink that morning’s beers. 

But the alarm bells went off when we realized that Lon and the gang were not just closing in on us, they were also rapidly gaining on the rear flanks of the much slower-moving Emerald Knights Drum and Bugle Corps.  

“Yep! There’s Lon!” my dad pointed and laughed, completely unfazed by the impending catastrophe.

“Russ tell him to slow down — they’re getting out of control! 

“They’re probably just dizzy from all the circles!

The Shriner’s Death Squad was upon us know, close enough for me to see Lon’s bloodshot eyes widen as he came around. 

“Hang onto your hat Lon!” Dad cracked as Lon passed by within inches of the curb, his dark red fez askew, it’s gold tassle flying in the breeze. My dad’s comical warning jarred Lon out of his drunken tunnel vision, and as he jerked his puffy noggin around to see who the wiseacre was, he jerked the steering wheel along with it. 

The first person Lon Svoboda struck with the front end of his miniature Corvette was 54-year-old Irene Webb. Common sense would hold that Irene tried to jump back and to the side to avoid being struck by Lon’s vehicle as it hit the curb and briefly achieved zero gravity. Common sense would also hold that you’d wear more sensible shoes to a parade than Irene had. Thus, as she torqued her full weight to the right in an ill-fated evasive measure, her shoe heel gave way and Lon’s bumper helped her the rest of the way to the ground. 

As we watched the spectacle unfold in breathless disbelief, Lon continued accelerating, turning the steering wheel away, so when the tires of #51 once again met the earth, the vehicle immediately veered to the left and back into the street, where the rest of the Shriners had suddenly slowed to a cautious crawl behind the Emerald Knights. Luckily, Irene escaped with nothing but a skinned knee, torn panty hose and a broken heel. To her credit, she recovered like a champ. 

“My gosh are all you all right there, ma’am?’ Dad rushed to help her up but her mind was elsewhere. 

“Somebody fuckin’ stop that sumbitch!” 

Although not necessarily exclusive to or a surefire sign of drunkenness, overcorrection is one of the key tenets of the condition. And that day it was riding shotgun with Lon Svoboda. So, as he shot back left, he struck the front right fender of Gary Steinke’s Corvette, sending the vehicle and a wide-eyed Gary spinning to the left towards the audience on the opposite side of 2^ndAvenue. Luckily, Gary’s car missed the crowd altogether, instead ramming head-on into a US mailbox, causing catastrophic front-end damage, crushing Gary’s fez and no doubt denting his head. 

Lon, meanwhile, was now on a different journey. Dancing with the one who brung him, as they say, Lon continued his quest for better and more severe renditions of overcorrection. Having just struck Gary after veering left – and rather than applying the brakes — he now veered hard right and straight towards the color guard section of the Emerald Knights. Oddly jocular strains of “The Way We Were” provided the soundtrack to an impending go-kart/flag carrier pileup. 

Just in time, Lon regained his wits, hit the brakes and turned hard left. The vehicle skidded sideways right and jerked to halt, ejected Lon from the cockpit and into the while blue yonder. For a man his size, it seemed to me Lon was aloft for a wildly inordinate amount of time – say, 25 or 30 seconds. Green and white striped flags, a familiar signature of the Emerald Knights Drum and Bugle Corps, rocketed skyward as all 245 pounds of Lon barrel-rolled through the back two lines of flag girls. Limbs flailed, skirts flew up, at one point a fez appeared to float in midair and the sound of bloodcurdling screams ended the Knights’ song none too soon. 

Stunned silence does not a wonderful parade make. Finally, slowly, the sounds of an aftermath arrived: a few random groans; a bit of soft, post-traumatic sobbing; the muffled swearwords of a drunk Shriner with a broken clavicle. Parade watchers and, as I remember it, a few nearby clowns, descended on the victims in an effort to comfort, clean up and, hopefully, get on with the parade. There wasn’t much else to do that day. 

Fortunately, aside from Lon’s collarbone, there weren’t any serious injuries. Pam Jemmings sprained her wrist, Mo Utley had a bruised knee and some small facial abrasions, and Cindy Bammert ended up with a chipped tooth. The girls gamely got back up, regained their composure and the Knights marched on. 

After the other Shriners and a clown or two uprighted Lon’s tipped-over car and picked up tipped-over Lon, they moved all wreckage to the curb. The surviving Shriners continued on up 2^nd Avenue in their vehicles, slowly, cautiously and in a straight line. 

I wish I could tell you that the Shriner Police arrived soon after in miniature Black and Whites, and hauled Lon off to a tiny fez-shaped jail. In fact, let’s say they did.