The Units–A Remembrance

1948

A kid has drunk turpentine that Mommy left on the porch in a tin can. 

What is “turpentine”? What is “the hospital”? What does it mean to “get your stomach pumped”? 

“Darn that Dale Price,” Mommy says, “always getting into things.”

We do not have stomach pumpings every day. Most days, it’s only ice chips.

We beg them from the iceman when he goes back to his truck with empty tongs after bringing a huge cake of ice to the kitchen in one of our units. The iceman always has loose chips in his truck, mixed with straw flakes and dirt. He gives a chip to each of us. We wipe the end clean and suck on it as long as our fingers can stand to hold the other end.

Iceman. Library of Congress, Public Domain.

Why is ice so cold? Why is it mixed with straw? Where did last week’s ice block go? What did the icebox do with it? 

Maybe Daddy knows. In winter he broke an icicle off our unit’s roof, brought it in, and ran hot water over it. He looked sad when the icicle went away, but he wanted to show me that it does go away. Ice can’t stay under hot water.

I have a girlfriend. Her name is Hea-th-er. That’s hard to say, but I call her Hado. She is a year younger, so I always have to tell her things. Her mommy and daddy play cards with my mommy and daddy every night, in our unit or theirs. When they play next door, I lie in bed listening to switch engines shuttling cars in the “Q” yards till Mommy or Daddy comes back to check on me because they’re dummy. When they play in our unit, I hear the thwop of cards being shuffled, the slip, slip, slip of cards being dealt, and the odd words that follow: “One heart . . . one spade . . . two diamonds . . . pass . . . .” 

What’s it about? Why are they a “dummy”? What are clubs and spades for? Where do you find diamonds? If you don’t have a heart, does that make you a dummy?

What is a no-trump? I don’t think they want me to find out. The grown-ups drive me crazy. They know all these things, like a secret code. I can only ask questions, over and over. 

Soon—maybe today, maybe tomorrow—Something Great will be revealed.

Then I can tell Hado, so she’ll know, too, and we won’t be left out anymore.

#

When I was three years old, life was exciting. I thought once I grew up, I would have it all figured out. I would no longer be on the outside, looking in. 

The way to gain enlightenment was to worm the facts out of my mother and father, since they already knew everything. The trouble was getting them to take my questions seriously. 

Today we worry about the formation of our children’s psyches. Back then, children were only small, deficient beings who ought to be ignored until they reached maturity and somehow became adults. Of course, we children were sent to school to cure the worst of our ignorance; but not much could be expected from us, at least until we held full-time jobs.

As to my parents’ magisterial authority, I had no doubts. Mommy and Daddy were primeval; they had always been there. I never inquired into their antecedents. 

It took years before I understood that I had come in at the end of a great war—a long ordeal that devoured half the world and damaged the rest. My father, Lloyd Sommers, had joined in that war when he was barely out of high school. He had served in the 132nd Infantry Regiment, Americal Division, on the Southwest Pacific islands of New Caledonia, Guadalcanal, Fiji, and Bougainville. 

Then he had come home to the small town of Knoxville, Illinois, and married his high school sweetheart, Barbara LaFollette. I was born nine months later, in June 1945. Both my parents were then twenty-three years old. 

In September, at three months of age, I moved with Mommy and Daddy to the campus of Knox College in nearby Galesburg, where Daddy had enrolled as a freshman, hoping for a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Such a goal might have been out of reach if not for the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944—the “G.I. Bill”—which sponsored a college education for millions of war veterans. America was raising a great wave of future scientists, engineers, teachers, and managers out of the surplus manpower shaken loose by the largest military demobilization in history.

Postwar student housing at Beloit College, almost identical to ours at Knox. Public Domain photos.

At Knox, our friends were other young families like ourselves, headed by young men four years older than the usual college freshman, men who had tasted war and who yearned to make up for lost time now that peace was at hand. We all lived together in “the units,” triplex shacks lined up like barracks at the south end of campus. 

Each apartment held a small living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a small bedroom for the parents, and a smaller bedroom for one or possibly two infants. There was a sofa and a lamp, an icebox and a stove, a large bed and a crib. Daddy put glow-in-the-dark images of five-pointed stars on the headboard of my crib—“decals,” he called them. I liked the glowing stars. The idea was that I would be hypnotized by these stars and would fall into blissful sleep. This might have happened had not my parents spent every other evening playing contract bridge, at full voice, with Helen and Bud Steele in the next room.

Even on those nights when the card game was held next door, my ears registered the all-night operations of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, whose hump yard fanned out just south of the units. Switch engines pushed cars over a hump, where they were cut loose. Each car rolled down a long incline, through a switch, and onto a pre-assigned track to couple with a string of standing cars. The grunt of a diesel engine, the long roll of wheels on steel track, and the bang released by a fifty-ton car smacking into a stationary string of other cars: These mere sounds, not yet cluttered by explanations and rational understanding, held me entranced.

I was not alone in the adventure. My bear, Teddy, huddled in the dark with me and shared the drama. Teddy’s shiny eye caught a glint of light from a streetlamp outside my window. By placing my eye next to his, I could see through that tiny glint into a translenticular world of strange machines crawling over jumbled terrain—an industrial landscape, where mechanical beasts toiled at obscure tasks. This scene—immensely packed into its microscopic sphere—perfectly illustrated the alien sounds from the railyard.

What if I could actually crawl through the glint and descend bodily into that bear’s-eye world? Would I fit in? Would I measure up to that test?

Teddy today.

It was a harsh, black-and-white place, lit from high above, almost a lunar landscape. The ground was jagged, all up-and-down, in-and-out, strewn with I knew not what, so the not-exactly-animals but not-quite-machines which ranged over it had to rise and plunge like boats in a sea-storm, requiring huge wheels (or something) to master the chaotic substrate. 

How could I find my way in that remote domain?

Teddy is still with me. He sits like a sphinx on my dresser. Between the two of us, we hold the secrets of seventy-five years. Our eyes have frosted over. Ted’s pupil is no longer a gateway to an alternate world. For me, no separate vision remains. 

The stark bear’s-eye vision is only a memory—the lingering enigma of an astonishing landscape still waiting to be discovered.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

The Burg

Galesburg is an old town for Illinois, having been established in 1837. 

Since then, it has gathered thousands of distinct strands of memory. 

Some of those memories attach to famous people. Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters, poets. Mother Bickerdyke, the indefatigable Civil War nurse. George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., inventor of the big wheel that takes people up in the air and brings them down again.

The original Ferris Wheel at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Public Domain.

Some of the memories attach to me. 

Body Snatchers cover. Fair use.

I don’t mean to compare myself to Great Figures of the past, Dear Reader. You see, it’s just that we were all jumbled together—George Fitch who spun droll fin-de-siècle yarns about football and other college hijinks; Grover Cleveland Alexander, Hall of Fame pitcher whose career started in Galesburg; Jack Finney, Knox College graduate who wrote such classic speculative fiction novels as The Body Snatchers and Time and Again; Edward Beecher, abolitionist preacher, close friend of the martryed Elijah P. Lovejoy; plus tens of thousands of other folks you never heard of.

Oh, my dear—that brings us back to me.

Why I mention this is that all of us, famous and otherwise, contributed strands to the giant skein of recollections and speculations that is Galesburg. And the reason I belabor the point is not that Galesburg is much different from other small Midwestern towns. 

Only that it is mine. What commends it to comment is the homeness of the place.

Antecedents

Mom and Dad graduated from Knoxville High School, five miles from The Burg, in 1940. They might have gotten married there and then, but Dad was ever slow and deliberate. The Army got him before Mom did. After he got back from the Southwest Pacific, in September 1944, they married, in a home ceremony in Knoxville. By the time Dad entered Knox College the following September, I had been added to the ménage.

Dad was not the only veteran who wanted a college education. Uncle Sam catered to the aspirations of millions by providing funds, under the GI Bill, to make their dreams come true. Cheap housing units were thrown together on college campuses for returning veterans and their young families. We lived in one such apartment.

Icebox

We did not have a refrigerator; we had an icebox. The iceman would come once or twice a week—more often, I think, in summer—lugging a huge block of ice using iron tongs, sliding the ice into the upper compartment of the icebox. The lower compartment was where we kept milk, meat, eggs, and butter.

The Burg was a gridwork of purple brick streets, lined with glass-globed street lamps which cast a soft glow on warm summer nights. My little friends and I played on green grass crisscrossed by walks of crushed white gravel. 

Mom and Dad stayed up late, playing bridge with their neighbors. I lay in my tiny bedroom with my teddy bear and listened to the thwop of cards being shuffled and the more distant roll-and-bang of trains being assembled in the nearby Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy freight yards. By day, passenger trains dashed by on the main line—just across Cherry Street from where we lived—pulled by big black locomotives, streaming white vapor from their stacks.

A Durable Pageant

Later, in the 1950s, Aunt Bertha and Uncle Harry would take us across town to get ice cream at Highlanders’. It was a little stand run by a family who made the product in their own kitchen. I knew about chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. But it was not until we patronized Highlanders’ that I learned ice cream could be infused with crushed bits of peppermint sticks. Zowie!

Mom liked black walnut fudge. Yechhh!

Even when Dad graduated in 1949 and we moved away to little Dwight, and then Streator, where he had chemistry jobs, we always came back to The Burg and its little satellite Knoxville. Because that was home. It was where all our people were.

Aunt Bertha would pile us kids into her Ford Victoria and take us to Lake Bracken for swimming. There was a nice sandy beach and a big clubhouse where you could get a Snickers bar that was frozen. Another zowie.

Sometimes we went to Lake Storey or Lincoln Park at the other end of town for picnics. Life was pretty good.

The Small End of the Telescope

All that was decades ago, Gentle Reader. Things have changed dramatically. Highlanders’ is no more. Purington Bricks folded up long ago. The Lake Bracken Clubhouse burned down in 1987.

But the memories mean something. They stick in people’s minds. In 1960, when The Body Snatchers and other work had already made him rich and famous, Jack Finney reached back and penned a short story called “I Love Galesburg in the Springtime.”

We are not just a jumble of experiences. We are a bundle of associations.

Even on increasingly rare visits to The Burg of today, I sense immediately that I have come home.

I pray, Dear Reader, there is a place like that for you. 

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)

Memoirs of Millie Marie Gunsten Sommers, Part III

This is a guest post by Millie Sommers (1889-1971), my grandmother. In 1969, at my request, she wrote a memoir of her life, mostly telling about her early days, around 1900. She wrote 13 pages, in clear, crisp longhand. I have broken it into three parts for easy reading. It is verbatim, straight from her pen, except for a few additions of my own, in [square brackets]. 

Grandma’s Narrative:

I mentioned transportation, but didn’t say what kind. It was horse drawn of course, and usually was a “spring wagon,” which was a light wagon with two spring seats with leather cushioned seat & back.

Spring wagon. Public Domain.

My grandparents never did have anything with a top. They had umbrellas for sun or rain in Summer, and when it was snowing or raining in the winter, I think we mostly stayed at home. We did go quite often in sleigh or bobsled when there was snow on the ground. We always had sleighbells on.

The sleigh was not one of those fancy looking ones with large round runners. But I rather think it may have been home made. Anyway it was made of wood, painted red, and had two seats. Then there was straw in the bottom and hot bricks to keep warm.

Millie Marie Gunsten, age 18.

We never tho’t of anything better. There were top [?] buggies and “surries with the fringe on top,” but very few around then. 

Later came the Klondikes or enclosed buggies, but we never had any of those.

When our family was small, we usually went to Greenview for Xmas, but later spent it at home. There were now several families of relatives living there, and they would take turns having family dinners—one at Xmas, one at New Years, another at Thanksgiving etc.

Age of the Telegraph

When we moved to Middletown there were still no telephones. When Election time came, the returns would come in by telegraph at the R.R. station.

Everyone would go to the hall or Opera House and there would be some kind of entertainment.

Every so often a Messenger would come from the station with a Bulletin, which would be read.

How to Keep Food Fresh

Most every one had a small vegetable garden and fruit trees. But we didn’t know how to can vegetables then, except tomatoes. We canned fruit, but not a lot, as we did after I was married.

Vegetables, such as beans etc., were dried, and we also dried some fruit.

Most everyone had cellars or caves which would keep apples, Potatoes, cabbage etc. 

Girls were pressed into service as “icemen” during World War I. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Public Domain.

Most people baked their own bread, but when there was a bakery near by, the bread would be shipped in, in large baskets, unwrapped. The loaves were baked in large pans & were stuck together. They were put in wall cases with sliding doors, and when you wanted to buy some, they would tear off as many loaves as you wanted, and wrap it.

Of course there were no Electric refrigerators or freezers. The fresh meat was sold in Butcher shops, who had large coolers, cooled with ice. They did their own butchering, as did all private families who had butchering to do. and also smoked their own hams, bacon, etc. The sausage & some other meat was fried, and put in stone jars, and covered with Grease so it would keep.

It all tasted much better than the meat we get today, or so I tho’t.

Dairy Products

Our milkman had a horse-drawn covered wagon & the milk was in a large Milk Can. We would take a pitcher or something out & he would dip out as much milk as we wanted. That was in larger towns. In smaller towns most people had their own cow & some sold milk, but you would usually have to go after it.

Milk wagon. Public Domain.

My own folks never had a cow, that I remember, but we bought milk & butter from a farmer who lived on the edge of town.

My grandparents were Norgeian [sic], and they always had 2 kinds of cheese on the table for Breakfast. One was made from what we call cottage cheese. It was wrapped in cloth after being drained & salted, and laid away until it became real strong. I didn’t like that quite as well as what was made from the whey. It was boiled down to about ¼ of what it was, and then a little sweetening and thickening added. There were small grains of the cheese as it had not been strained. I tho’t this was super & could eat it at every meal

Well this is all I have written at the present time. I may think of more later.

June. 5 – 1969.  .

And that’s all she wrote.

Next Week: Something Completely Different!

Blessings, 

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author 

Larry F. Sommers

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)

The Units

Daddy’s friend Clark drove standing up. That’s the first thing I noticed. “That’s how milk trucks are,” he explained. “You have to drive standing up.” I was still amazed at this when we arrived at the circus. 

A three-ring circus, Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Combined Shows. Public Domain image from State Archives of Florida, published under Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 license.

There in the gathering darkness: a big tent on a dusty lot. We sat high up and saw people called “acrobats” fly through the air and drop into a big, bouncy net. And there came a little car that drove around the three circus rings and dropped off clowns, one by one—at least a dozen of them. The little truck, by some magic, seemed to to have an inexhaustible supply of clowns. 

A milk truck. You had to stand up. “DSC_5874” by improbcat is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 .

Clark drove the milk truck but did not own it. He was not a regular milkman. He was a college student like Daddy. He drove an early morning milk route for extra cash and could use the truck in off hours.

It was 1949; I was four. We lived in The Units—three or four rows of jerry-built shacks on the campus of Knox College. Each unit, one of three connected side by side, had a kitchen, a bath, a small livingroom, and two small bedrooms. Each unit housed a mommy, a daddy, and one or two very young children.

The occupants were families of war veterans attending college on the newly-enacted GI Bill. We moved in when I was three months old, in September 1945, and left in June 1949, not long after Daddy took me to the circus. 

Special Bond

The families who lived in The Units shared a special bond and a certain kind of outlook. The men were college students, the women housewives. They were all, on average, four or more years older than the typical entering freshman. They were householders, married, with young children. The usual campus hijinks of the era held no charm for them. They had their own hijinks. 

They were more serious men, you see, having just fought a war. Yet, like all students everywhere, they sometimes put studies on the back burner, accepting lower grades as a  reasonable price for the rich social life of The Units. That social life included beer, cigarettes, the needs of their toddlers, and late-night bridge games.

The family next door, with whom we shared a wall, was Bud and Helen Steele and their daughter Heather. Helen and Bud played bridge with Mommy and Daddy most nights in their place or ours. When the visiting couple got the contract, the one who was dummy got up and ran next door to check on the ostensibly sleeping child. Bud, whose name was Virgil, was a wiry man with a ready smile, from a family that farmed just south of Galesburg. Helen was a fresh-faced and friendly young woman from Saskatchewan. I don’t know how they managed to find each other, but they made a great match. They remained fast friends with our family long after The Units and until their dying days. My younger sister and I still keep in touch with Heather and her siblings, Hugh and Linelle.

Diversions and Hijinks

One of the men in The Units sought to beautify the little patch of green grass in front of his place by planting two or three sapling trees. Several of his colleagues, by dark of night, dug up the trees and, perhaps inspired by the beer, re-planted them upside-down.

Iceman and children. German Federal Archives, published under the  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.

Life was likewise fun for us tots. A small pack of us roamed The Units, outdoors in almost any weather, older ones picking on younger ones. In summer the iceman came twice a week. Our iceboxes had to be replenished with large blocks of ice, which were slid into the upper compartment to cool the meat, butter, eggs, and milk in the lower compartment. The iceman used black wrought-iron tongs to lug these ice blocks into our kitchens. We kids waited beside the iceman’s idling truck until he came out, tongs empty, to get another ice-cake. Then the boldest of us, Dale Price, begged ice chips from the iceman. He gave us each a two- or three-inch sliver of ice to hold in our hands, very cold under the hot sun. You had to brush dirt and sawdust off the ice chip. Then you sucked on it for as long as you could stand, dropped it, and ran off to play another game. 

It may not sound like much, Gentle Reader; but for us it was a treat.

One time Dale Price drank turpentine from an old Campbell’s soup can my mommy had left on the back stoop, midway through a furniture painting project. Dale was rushed to the hospital to get his stomach pumped out. “Darn that Dale Price,” Mommy said. “Always getting into things.”

The Railroad

Burlington engine No. 5633, no longer going anywhere, on static display in Douglas, Wyoming. Photo by Wusel007, published under the  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Galesburg was a railroad town, astride two great lines: The Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe, and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy. The Units stood across South Cherry Street from the main line of the CB&Q. I clearly remember standing in our front yard on a bright morning, watching a fast train zoom by, pulled by a chugging black steam locomotive, perhaps a 4-8-4 “Northern,” a long cone of white smoke streaming out behind it. At night, I lay in my crib beside Teddy, my bear and best friend, and listened to the imponderable chug, roll, and bump of iron thunder as switch engines sorted and grouped railcars in the nearby Burlington yards. 

Mrs. Grable’s School

Life went on. Daddy had a part-time job taking the Galesburg Register-Mail to the outlying district of Bushnell in the afternoons. The GI Bill provided tuition, subsistence, books and supplies, equipment, and counseling services for veterans in college; but daily  expenses, beyond “subsistence,” could be tight. When I was three, Mommy got a part-time job as a secretary in an auto parts company, and I began attending a nursery school, “Mrs. Grable’s.” 

1950 DeSoto Suburban ad, Public Domain. Scanned by Alden Jewell, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Mrs. Grable had a large house with a big backyard and lots of toys and crayons. One or two other old ladies helped her wrangle kids. She had maybe a dozen of us. She picked us in the morning in her DeSoto Suburban—a big car with jump seats and room enough for the whole dozen of us. Later in the day she drove around The Units and dropped us off one by one, like circus clowns alighting from a mystery vehicle every afternoon at three.

Blessings, 

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author 

Larry F. Sommers

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)