Donna Bellous
If you guys haven’t already done so, you really need to check out Frank Kennedy’s website. Not only has he captured Galena and some of its most endearing residents in his paintings and drawings and photographs, but he can take you on a ride on every country road, stopping at all the hotspots, in a way that truly depicts Galena life in the ’60s and ’70s. After you’ve read even one of Frank’s books, I guarantee you will know and love him even more. Finally, you really need to listen to his music for more storytelling. I suggest you play a song or two while browsing his website. It will be an adventure for you and take you away to that other time and place that we all loved so much, the one that has brought us all together on this Facebook page

Frank Kennedy
galenaartist.com
The best preserved city of its era in the United States, Galena Illinois. The new sidewalks and main street surface are a welcome improvement to an already wonderful place to spend your holiday. Home of Ulysses S. Grant and nine Civil War Generals, Grant lived here both before and after the War, and…

The deserted mansions were castles, and the abandoned lead mines battlefields where the knights of old fought and died. My great adventure began when I escaped the boundaries of the yard when I was six and started exploring the town on my own. I met a lot of interesting characters, two of whom saved my life when my head was busted by some kids up the street from 604 Franklin, who cracked my skull with one of the famous Galena Bricks, for intruding on their territory. Jim Wickler and Bob Blum, from the old Blum Pop Factory across the street from Dillon’s Tavern, now the Country Companies office, saw me stumble past with blood gushing from my head and rushed me into Bob’s kitchen where, with cold wet towels and left-over Sulpha powder from World War Two, they stopped the bleeding and knowing who I belonged to took me home and got my mother and rushed me to the small clinic on Bench Street in the Taylor Mansion at the top of Perry Street. The doctor fixed me right up, and told Ma that if those two hadn’t stopped the bleeding I would have been dead in just a few more minutes. My skull was cracked; I had a severe concussion, and a dozen stitches just above the hairline. I was kind of stupid for a couple of weeks and that is how I got the end cut off my finger in the screen door. Damn nice cast, though, that worked well as a hammer. When I was seven we built a fort in the old lead mine diggings behind the house out of Kraft Cheese boxes, and all the neighborhood kids wanted to hang out there and fight the Injuns with us. The girls too… That was the year my sister told me that our great-great grandmother was half Blackfeet Sioux, and from then on I was the Injun! I acted like a wild Injun, too.

Friends and I explored nearly every game trail and old abandoned farm in the area, traveling to the islands out on the Mississippi, (swimming to them!) and crawling in and out of every cave and old mine we could find. The whole area was full of great places to explore, from the Leadmine and Steamboat days of the 17 and 1800’s. On Saturday mornings they would show us kids old Western movies at the Galena Museum, Red Ryder, the Lone ranger, and all those old crooners with the likes of Gene Autry and Roy, and while there we discovered the relics from the Civil war and old moccasins and stuff dug up from Indian camps around Jo Daviess County, and learned about the chief Black Hawk.

In fourth grade we started going fishing down at the Light Plant, Turtle Pond, the ‘Y’ ponds, and a few others north of town on the East Side, and the Galena Junction, where the old Locks were located that allowed the great riverboats to navigate the Fever River, which were owned by my brother-in-law’s family since they let the first paddle-wheeler through. We spent a lot of time there at the old Locks, having family picnics and swimming in the twenty-two foot deep water, and jumping off the train bridge a hundred feet away. Then we discovered we could climb the Train Bridge in Galena! By this time we had moved to 500 South Bench Street. For years the people of Galena would call our little group ‘the Bench Street boys’, and blame us for all kinds of stuff we didn’t do, and some that we did. The Train Bridge became our clubhouse and we ran all over that old monstrosity like a bunch of monkeys, and played ‘tree tag’ in the jungle that grew right up next to it from the South. Jump off the bridge into a tree, get it swinging back and forth as far as it would go, and leap from it to the next twenty or thirty feet away. Yes; it was dangerous! That’s why we liked doin’ it! Only one person ever got seriously hurt in those years. Stupid Andy. He leaped without having picked another tree to land in. Stupid. Caved in his chest when he landed. The City cops started wondering why they always saw ‘the Bench Street boys’ heading toward the Train Bridge, and they tried to chase us off the thing for months but were afraid to climb it to catch us, and we laid up on the old cement block weight that opened the bridge for riverboats and laughed at them. Never did catch us. There were hundreds of pigeons living up there in the heights, and after they became used to us being up there with them were as tame as if we had raised them ourselves, and allowed us to handle their young in the nests with no complaint, like we were part of their family. The steel beams that we used for pathways were three inches wide, and we ran across them ninety feet above the river with no fear, knowing Huckleberry Finn could never have kept up with us. Then we became interested in raising pigeons. Hunting them. In the dark. Way up on the rotted wooden walkways above the cement floor of the Light Plant with a forty foot drop. In flooded mineshafts where a person could slip away into an unseen shaft and never be seen again. High in the timbers of old barns. Up in the unused floors of the Main Street buildings, many of which were empty and had the windows either boarded up or broken out, allowing not only the pigeons a place to roost but raccoon as well, and those ‘coon did not like us disturbing them! Pigeon Coops blossomed all over town. There were flocks with hundreds of the beautiful wild birds that would land on Main Street and eat out of your hand. For as long as Galena has existed they were part of the town, then one of our Mayors heard somewhere that pigeon shit could make people sick and murdered all of them, after never having a single report of anyone in Galena getting ill from them. Those of us that handled them every day never even got a sneeze from being around them. Sure, they shit on the sidewalk; that’s what birds do.

While I was in second grade I drew an animated twenty page moviola of Indian maidens building a fire and cooking a rabbit that amazed the nuns at Saint Mary’s School on Franklin Street. I drew pictures of everything I saw, and cartoons, and people, and made more posters and signs for school than I could count. As I grew older I became known as ‘The Galena Artist’, being the only one, and have gained fame painting signs on Main Street since 1973. Today, we have many transplanted artists from different areas around the country, but until I was in my thirties the only one here from Galena was me, after Paul O’Rourke left town to explore the world.

Galena is a unique place, and has a unique place in History. People from all parts of the world came here in the Lead Mining and Steam-boating days, searching for a better life than the one they left behind. Some found it. Many didn’t. Their gravestones will tell you that, if nothing else. Take the time and visit some of the Cemeteries from the early days; look at the ages of some of the people interred there; children, many of them, and young adults in their twenties and thirties. They had hardships we can hardly imagine today; not only hostile Indians, but sickness from bad water, bad food, bad neighbors, poor hygiene, no electricity or insulation, or tarpaper or toilet paper.
Could you live in those conditions?
In 1826 the mud was hub-deep on Main Street after a good rain, and mosquitoes and biting flies dominated the town, when the Sand Flies weren’t in residence in the springtime. It stunk, from the horse manure and urine, stale beer and bodies, and no sewage system. A fine place, exciting as only a new boomtown can be. My ancestors, Patrick and Julia Sullivan, trekked through that slop in the spring of 1828, coming north from just east of Saint Louis near where the famous Indian mounds of Cahokia are located. They found a better life than what they had left behind, just a few miles north, where they homesteaded.

All of my early life my parents took us kids to visit relatives in the old Lead Mining towns around Galena. Shullsburg, New Diggings, Benton. There were tall corrugated tin structures with monster-sized conveyors leading to the top levels used in the ore processing that are nowhere to be seen today, as well as huge piles of mine tailings, rocks, broken machinery, and trucks bigger than a house laying all over the land, rusting where they had sat for decades. Junk cars and salvage yards were everywhere. Along the road, everywhere we went, were the ‘Burma Shave Signs’. I read every one I saw, and tried to memorize them, as soon as I learned how to read. It was my first exposure to Roadside Advertising Signs, and poetry…of a sort. Then I started paying attention to the big Billboards. Every chance I got when I was a kid I would watch the men pasting up new signs and quiz them endlessly about what they were doing, and then one day when I was about nine I looked out the window of our new apartment at 500 South Bench, that is no longer there, and saw the Bull Durham sign, and the giant Wrigley’s Gum, and all the rest of the ghosts of old advertising on that landmark building in Downtown Galena, and was hooked. I was destined to be a Sign Painter. When I was twelve I watched Irvin Lieb, a Sign man from Elizabeth that had been lettering trucks and windows since 1940 painting the name on the Bakery windows and bugged him to no end, finally telling him that I was going to do that one day. He smiled good-naturedly and I could tell I was making the poor fellow nervous so I left.
Every morning before school I looked out the window at the Bull Durham sign, wondering who had painted it, and one day I got as close as I could to it without killing myself and found the name, brush-painted with some skill, ‘Peewee McQuade’. It may still be there, though that was fifty years ago. There were and still are the remains of dozens of huge signs on both sides of that building. My teachers at St. Michaels were very aware that I was studying those old signs, as I lived right across from the school and the building was directly across the street, and they had to yell at me a few times to quit and get back to class. From then on whenever a poster or some sort of art was required at school, I was elected to do the job. I felt like I was already becoming famous! I was!!
Kids looked up to me ‘cause I could draw any damned thing they could imagine, at the same time they looked down on me for being one of the poorest kids in town, wearing hand-me-down clothes and shoes. I developed my ‘starving artist’ syndrome at an early age! When I was about eleven though, Walter Schmidt hired me to clean his Men’s Clothing store next to the Cozy Café, and let me have some nice new duds on credit that I worked off after school at night, and Mr. Albaugh from the shoe store across the street did me the same favor, allowing me to pay him two dollars a week for shoes that hurt like hell ‘til I waded up Harney’s Creek and got ‘em soaked good. I was doing such a good job for Walter that the old Kraemer’s Jewelry Store where the ancient clock still hangs hired me to clean too. ( I had a lot of practice being a janitor, helping old Pete Snyder clean the school, gym, and church at Saint Michael’s for a quarter an hour in seventh and eighth grade.) Yeah. Then I helped Gary Felderman deliver newspapers too (two big bags; he had about a hundred and eighty on his route.) After about a year he thought the job was beneath him since he was starting High School, and gave me the whole route which I kept for two years, only being severely bitten by one dog. (yeah but, the next time I went past that dog’s house I whacked it between the eyes with a four-foot club, and the dawg crawled off and died….Andy was mad at me for five years!)
By the time I had my own paper route I had been friends with Ted Spiers at the Desoto Hotel for four years already. His grandfather Ted Opieda owned the great old hostel for fifty-five years, and his Mom Irene was the desk clerk. She started giving narrated tours of Galena to folks around 1960 for a dollar each in her 1955 Buick two door sedan, something nobody else had ever done. Yeah. She started the booming Tourist industry here in Galena, and the City has never done a thing in her memory. See, the people who stayed at the original Desoto Hotel, for twenty-four dollars a week, could tell that it was a really interesting old city because of the artifacts and photographs that were displayed among the dust-balls and dead flies in the huge one-piece plate glass windows. Naturally they asked about these relics. Naturally she told them what she knew, which was considerable. I was there when the first one asked, “Could you show us some of these places?” “Well, I suppose I could, if you can wait until five when I get off and don’t mind riding in my old Buick.” The lady smiled and said deliriously; “Wow, that would be so fantastic!” And there it was; the beginning.
Ted and I thought she was goofy as hell to go out of her way like that to help strangers get a true ‘experience’ from their trip to town, but since she hauled us all over the place in that old Buick too we kept our mouths shut. She took us to the roller rink under Eagle Point Park in Dubuque by the old toll bridge two nights a week for about four years. Nice lady; she called me ‘son number two’, because I was underfoot just like Ted most of the time. She got permission from Old Ted to let us use the small ten by fourteen foot room under the staircase for a ‘meeting room’ when we were ten. It became our clubhouse complete with a good stereo system and all the comic and science fiction books we could stand to read. That’s where Ted’s Aunt Virginia stored her wares for the cool Book Store and News Stand where the Green Street Tavern is now located. Where I picked up the papers for my route, and went to get paid.
John and Melvin got hired to help out at the Stanley Theater while they were still in grade school. They lived in a small apartment across from the old Post Office on Commerce Street, right behind the Laundromat. (Yeah! There really used to be one downtown!) Being good pals who hung out with us at the Hotel, they started letting us into the Theater FREE as soon as the boss was gone. In later years when they took over the management of the place, in their early teens mind you, it got REAL interesting! Girls….
The Stanley Theater was only half a block north of the Cozy Café, where every cool kid in town liked to hang out, and the Pool Hall, where every bad boy in town hung out was just forty feet away in the other direction. The Edmar Café was located right across from the Cozy where Honest John’s is today. Art Rodden kept both places hopping with the latest hot Rock ‘n Roll records on the Wurlitzers, as well as Burbach’s Restaurant down across from the Hotel and all twenty-seven bars in town where on weekends the live country bands took over. Main Street was lively regardless of the fact that half the buildings were inhabited by nothing more than animals and ghosts. There were lit Beer Signs and neon all up and down the drag, which was then a two way street. It was pretty at night, all lit up that way. Now they don’t allow signs like that. The businesses can only hang a small one that indicates they are open for business. Too bad, for it was cool.
I helped Gary deliver the edition that told the world about the death of the Big Bopper and Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. Damn right I was sad; we listened to that stuff all the time even though we weren’t yet in our teens. Everybody mourned their passing. We thought right then Rock ‘n Roll had died right along with them. Yeah. That was it. Gone….
I’d been working at the oil-soaked loading docks at McLaughlin’s next to the Slattery Building since moving onto Bench Street when I was nine, and helping my dear ol’ daddy clean the Sportsman’s Tap with my brother John in the early mornings. Pa was the main bartender there for about five or six years so I got to meet all kinds of interesting characters; one of them told me about how the flood control dike was built and what they used in its construction. I found it hard to believe but others in the bar swore it was truth; in the thirties and forties there was an old junk yard right across from the Post Office on Commerce Street, and a railroad track next to that along the river. The man was the construction boss of the job, and if you hunt him down through old Galena Gazette files at the Galena Library you’ll find him. He said… “We dragged all them old cars into line and piled ‘em up over the railroad tracks and buried ‘em. Even buried a steam engine up behind the blacksmith shop.” Anybody got a good metal detector?
I know for a fact that Galena was littered with junk cars and abandoned trucks, wagons, barrels of trash, dead dogs and cats, and gawd only knew what else was hidden away in the ten foot tall weeds that covered most of the yards we ran wild through. It was a hell of an adventure! Back Street had a neat old Laundromat in a corner building where the Bank sits now, behind the Log Cabin, and back of that structure, which was a saloon and hotel at the turn of the century, was a massive old lumber yard. It had fifty year old piles of rotted lumber and junk trucks and machinery peeking from the tall shrubbery and long narrow storage buildings that still held quite a lot of usable wood and stacks of roofing shingles and the like. The place had been out of business since before I was born so our gang felt no guilt as we hauled most of that stuff away to build our first two-story tree-house up in the rocks behind St. Michael’s school on Bench Street. About that same time we also discovered that our skinny little nine-year old arms could slide, with some difficulty, up into the vintage ‘forties Cigarette machine in the adjacent run-down Laundromat. I started smokin’ Lucky Strike, and Chesterfields when I had depleted my source. Every kid I ran around with had a pack of one kind or another rolled up in their shirt sleeve for several months. Then they took the machine out of there. Shit…
Next to the Steakburger cafe, across from the Ben Franklin on Main Street a hundred feet from the Pool Hall was an old Farm Implement Dealership. Yeah… junk! We played on the old tractors and machines all the time ‘til we got ran off. “You boys are gonna get hurt on that stuff!” Well, we didn’t think so; we never got hurt runnin’ around on top of the damn Train Bridge or in the rotten rafters of the Light Plant! Or in all those dark old lead mines… or the caves… or the neighbors yard! They just didn’t want to have to pay for getting us patched up if we fell or the possibility of the old man shovin’ a broom up their ass for trying to sue him.
Everything a person needed could be found right downtown. Half a dozen small grocery stores were on Main along with Butcher shops, clothing stores, shoe stores, dime stores, restaurants that never had anything costing more than a dollar and a half on the menu, and junk shops where you could buy used furniture, stoves, kitchen ware and used cars. Usually the warranty on any of these items was twenty feet or twenty minutes, whichever came first. They sold a lot of stuff… yeah, sure, it was old and used and not very pretty but… the people that had to survive with trash like that in their kitchen, living room, or attic bedroom didn’t care; they had to have it and didn’t have the money to buy anything decent. Unless they got sucked into a ‘loan’ from Household Finance Company or one of their peers… then the poor folk had to puke up half of what they earned to make the payments or they’d lose the nice new furnishings, that usually held up pretty good ‘til just a few months after it was paid for. Yeah; go get another loan. Ol’ daddy got a loan for a padded chair; it was a piece of crap that fell apart before it was six months old. Household tried to make him pay for it for ten years and finally gave up… I remember the day he burned the damn thing.
I got tired of that paper route; I always liked the country and the sweet smell of fresh cow manure on the air so found me a job on a farm halfway to East Dubuque for the summer. We (I) milked twenty-seven cows twice a day in the basement of an old shed that had three feet of old cow shit on the dirt floor, and NO stanchions… had to follow the damn cows around down there in the dark trying to drag the three-legged stool through all that shit and straw and stuff the old boy had neglected to clean out since he started farming. Yeah; the stool, a tin pail for the juice, all the while yanking on stinking shit-slimed teats trying to squeeze a little milk out of ‘em. Yeah. It was a great summer… and I have to admit it; the milk was damned tasty stuff once it was chilled in the old spring house. One day a calf died. Well, the old farmer didn’t tell me until a week later, when he told me to drag it down to the hog pen and cut it open so the pigs could get at the meat. He had me slice the gut and neck and up and down each leg… stink! GAWD! Maggots were crawling all over inside the husk, and the damn hogs, each one weighing nearly eight hundred pounds and all covered in their own stinking shit, trampled me in the rush for the delicacy. I got bit four times before escaping and jumping the board fence. The old boy had been watching to make sure I did it right and I said, “Man, I need a ride to town.” “Why? Is sumpin’ wrong wif ya?” “It’s Ma’s birthday… can you pay me so I can get her something nice?” I didn’t go back.
One day while a bunch of us were trekkin’ down the old abandoned railroad tracks on the East Side that went down to the Galena Junction we discovered an old shack someone had built next to the rails, dug right into a hillside, made from discarded ties and roofed over with rusty corrugated tin. As we were snoopin’ thru the trash inside an old hermit, buried under a pile of nasty-smellin’ quilts and old coats, bib overalls, and empty soup cans, stuck his head out and growled, “Git outta my gawd damn house!”
Yeah. We got out. Didn’t go far though. Tom said, “Who the hell is that old sumbitch? I never heard about nobody livin’ down this way.” Dick said, “Let’s ask him! Look; he’s got an old boat down there next to the river. Must be how he gets to town when he goes. Hey! He’s got a rope in those trees with pulleys and stuff so he don’t have to carry his stuff up from the boat!” “Maybe he’s an old railroad worker, and liked the looks of this place. Maybe that’s why he lives here,” I put in. About that time the old tramp stuck his head out the door and croaked, “You boys got any whisky?” I looked him up and down, never havin’ seen anything like him before, “Naw, we’re too young. Nobody’ll give us any. Hey mister, you been livin’ here long? We thought the shack was empty or we never woulda snuck in. Sorry.” He growled some but came out into the sunlight and sat on the old tar can. “Whatta you boys doin’ around here anyhow?” “Explorin’! We always hike around out in the country lookin’ for stuff! You know, like Injun stuff, and old mines and sunk boats and trappers junk.” “Find any?” “Well, we found you!”
He said his name was Amil Botter or somethin’ like that, and he’d built the shack ten or fifteen years back when they threw him off the train down at the Junction. “There was a hole in the ground where some folk had a log cabin but it burned down a hundred years or so back. All them ties was just layin’ around so I stacked ‘em in the hole and threw the tin over it. Ain’t been a bad place to live. Don’t cost me nothin’. Guy that owns the land don’t care if I’m here neither.” “Sounds like ya got it made old timer. Kinda drafty in the winter though, ain’t it?” “I got an old bucket in there I burn stuff in.” “Cool. Prob’ly as good as that old coal burner we got at home. Only place in the house that’s warm is right next to the stove.” “Yeah. Here too. Sleep right next to the bucket though.” Tom asked him how the hell he managed to eat, bein’ a hermit, and the fella said, “I go to town and clean the tavern. Well, I usta. Ain’t been there for a time. Damn boat got a hole in the bottom.” “Ya hungry? We got some samwitches my ma made for us.” “Oh…jeezus…food? Well, yeah, now…ain’t had none for a spell. Lemmee see one!”
We kinda liked the old fella and brought him some of the commodities
our ma’s got at the fairgrounds. It was hardly fit to eat anyhow. He didn’t have any way of cookin’ stuff but the fire he put together in a pile of rocks in front of the shack, in a rusty old iron fryin’ pan. Said he got a rabbit now and then in an old box trap he’d made when he first moved into the shack. Drank slimy water out of a little pool where the creek ran down past the place, full of cow shit and rotten tree limbs and old tin cans. Tom said, “Jeezus Kee-rist, how the hell can somebody live like that?”
We had to start school so we never made it back to see the hermit for a couple weeks, but thought he’d be all right since we’d swiped all that canned food and stuff for him. When we got a chance we hiked down the tracks to visit one nice fall afternoon. He was gone and so was the old boat. “Musta patched that hole, huh? Maybe we oughta go back to town and see if he made it.” Dick looked under the stinkin’ pile of blankets, just to be sure, and shook his head and we took off for town, keepin’ an eye on the river to see if maybe he was down there fishin’ or somethin’ but never saw him.
He wasn’t anywhere in town either, and we got kinda worried. Tom said, “Maybe we better get a boat and go look for him. Hey! We saw that old wood flat-bottom in the trees by the Light Plant! Upside down and been there a long time, but it might float! Washed up there in a flood a long time ago.” “Beats stealin’ one; let’s go! ”
It leaked a little, once we got it flopped over and tossed it into the river, but not enough to scare anybody too bad. We stayed pretty close to the shore though, and made it all the way to Ferry Landing before it sunk on us. Never saw the hermit or his old boat. Nobody down there did either. Bob Schubert told us, “Prob’ly sank above the Junction somewheres. Prob’ly come to the surface and get snagged in some trees in a coupla weeks. I’ll keep an eye out.” “Do ya think we oughta tell the cops?” “Why? They ain’t gonna do a damn thing about it. Wouldn’t believe ya anyway. Nobody even knows that old fella. They’d say ya made it all up so ya could watch ‘em runnin’ around like chickens wif their legs cut off. Naw, just go home an’ fergit about it, boys.” We saw him crankin’ up the ‘phone when we took off, but never heard another word about the old hermit. It was a long walk back to town on the Ferry Landing Road, but we were too tired to go by the tracks and try to hop a train. Good way to lose a leg.
Suzy was the only one that believed us when we talked about the hermit, but she was only one that ever wanted to hang out with us of the girls we knew. We were all about ten, and she was kind of a tomboy, even hunted for ghosts with us that time. Scared the snot outta her, too! I think I was in love with her for a while. She had curly blond hair, bright green eyes, and really cute dimples when she smiled or laughed at one of our stupid jokes. Yeah. She was fun. She was a pal. Her and Tom’s family was just as poor as mine, and gave us somethin’ in common. We never had to feel shamed wearin’ the hand-me-downs when we were together, like other kids made us feel at school. The uniforms we were forced to wear had been worn out before we got them, and the kids whose parents could afford it bought them new ones every year. The clothes we wore after school were of the same quality, patched, re-sewed, semi-ragged trash, but it beat runnin’ around naked.
One day she looked back over her shoulder at me as she was walking off to school carrying her books and Tom ‘n I were cleaning up the yard for his dad before we were allowed to run off. I looked right back, kind of wondering what she was thinking about with such a look… She really was pretty! I scratched my head in confusion and went back to work… Suzy… Hmph. I really liked that curly hair and those dimples… yeah; and she was growing up… almost a teenager…
Back when I was eleven I had foolishly ran with some older boys one night and we broke into the candy stand at the Fairgrounds and swiped forty-two dollars worth of penny candy. I couldn’t eat that shit for years afterward. I ended up in the old Jo Daviess County Jail on the top floor where they locked up unruly women and whores for two weeks all by myself. (They could have brought at least ONE in!) The other boys were old enough they got locked up downstairs with the hardened criminals. (There weren’t any incarcerated at the time, however.) I didn’t like it much; when we went to court they put me on probation for six months. I was a damn criminal! Shit… I managed to behave myself though and got off finally after proving to the court what an ambitious hard working boy I was; I still had all those cleaning jobs and paper route, after all. One day about a year and a half later Suzy chewed me out for being so stupid when the subject came up, and I agreed with her; it had been damned stupid. After promising her I wouldn’t do that shit no more she gave me a hug and kissed me. That did it; I couldn’t get her out of my head for weeks; I had just become a teenager! Thoughts of going over to see Tom gave way to thoughts of going over to see Suzy! I even carried her books to school a few times… I really wanted her to kiss me again!
We played ‘house’ a couple of times that summer. Maybe it was ‘doctor’. Somethin’ like that… one day she said she was thinking of going off to a school for Nuns; I felt like something had been stolen from me. I looked her right straight in the eye and said, “Have a nice trip,” and went down to the Pool Hall.
Abe found me there and sat on the steps with me. “What the hell’s wrong wif you?” “Who, me? Nothin’! Why?” Ya look like somebody swiped your guitar or somethin’.” “Really? Naw, I still got it.” I laughed at myself and told him about Suzy going off to be a nun. “I was just thinkin’ about asking her to go steady!” He got up and said, “Let’s shoot a few games. You’re too young for that kinda stuff anyway. Hey, ya wanna take a run to New Diggin’s?” “Yeah! We gonna get some beer?” “Damn right.”