Last week, I took my daughter through a time tunnel. We entered in 2024 and came out in 1951.
It wasn’t her fault. She had no way to get there, except with me. Katie had never visited this time, which vanished lon before her birth.
Contemporaphobia
Yes, I know: My bill of indictment already lists numberless counts of living in the past.
How do I plead, Your Honor? Guilty—but I can explain.
It’s about the stickiness of life. Some of us shoot through like lightning, slick as greased pigs. Others get caught up in the net of circumstance. Our skin adheres to dates, places, and events. We fall farther and farther behind our peers.
Like Emily Webb in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, I want people to stop and notice what they’re living through.
We don’t do that much. The remaining option is to go back and re-examine the past once it’s over; fondle it, breathe in its scent. Get a whiff of the roots.
The Conundrum of Childhood
So Katie and I plunged into LaSalle County, Illinois, to the city of Streator, where the ghosts of my boyhood are laid.
I wanted to expose her to the real-life setting of my forthcoming middle-grade novel, Izzy Strikes Gold! Izzy’s fictional town of Plumb resembles Streator, where I lived for six years.
Katie has already read the book. I showed her the places where this scene happened, where that action unfolded, where the plot took some peculiar turn. She got to feel the ambience of this small place that is in her family’s rear-view mirror.
What did I get out of it? I got to spend time with my much-loved daughter, to talk with her, to give her some sense of the experiences that made her old man who he is.
Thank you, Thomas Wolfe
It’s true: You really can’t go home again. The best I could offer Katie was a string of reminiscences, illustrated by physical ruins.
The first house we occupied in Streator, on First Street in the shadow of the glass factory, is no longer specifically identifiable. It was a tiny place and may lie hidden in one wing of the larger house that stands there now. Or maybe it was razed and replaced.
The Owens-Illinois glass factory still stands but employs a tenth of its former workforce, due to increased automation.
Formerly, thousands of people worked there. The company sponsored a club, the “Onized Club,” for its employees and their families. They had picnics and bowling leagues. By taking a job with Owens-Illinois, you became “onized.” Folks went to Piggly Wiggly, the corner tavern, or the gas station wearing their “Onized” jackets—just as people today wear Packers gear. It was a badge of belonging.
Each of the three neighborhoods I lived in had its own mom-and-pop store. Those buildings are still there, but they are no longer stores.
In the old days, your neighborhood store was a short walk from your house. Today, the gas stations have become convenience stores sprinkled along streets at the edge of town. I guess that’s okay, because people no longer walk much. They drive instead.
Katie, who became a full-grown adult almost instantly, before my astonished eyes, holds a graduate degree in urban planning. I wonder how she views vanishing neighborhood stores, from a professional standpoint.
“Do we lose something,” I want to ask her, “when traffic patterns change?” But I hold my tongue. This trip is not for interrogation or philosophy. It’s just to put her on the ground here in the 1950s.
Merriner Field, beside the old Illinois National Guard armory, is no longer suitable for playing baseball. Its infield is now bisected by an earthen levee designed to keep the Vermilion River in proper bounds.
In my day, they just allowed it to flood and cleaned up afterwards.
Did I mention my daughter is also a certified flood plan manager? Here eyes lit up with humor when she saw the green wall where kids once played ball. “Now people downstream can enjoy bigger floods,” she said.
Is it wrong of me to want Katie to see and know these things? Is it vain?
If she doesn’t experience them, how can she pass the knowledge on to my grandchildren?
Maybe they need their own trip through the time tunnel.
Carnegie and Endres
One place that has endured fairly well is the Streator Public Library, on Park Street.
It’s a handsome building, donated by Andrew Carnegie at the dawn of the twentieth century, its lighted entryway flanked by Ionic columns. A wing was added at the back some years ago, freeing up space in the entire library, giving it an airier and more open floor plan. That’s an improvement, I think.
The big circulation desk still stands front and center when you come in. I approached the folks at the desk—youngsters all—to tell them about my forthcoming book and leave them a pre-publication copy.
I couldn’t help noticing the desk itself is new, gifted to the city by the son of Oral and Dorothy Endres, who are described in the accompanying plaque as “Long Time Patrons & Fans of the Library.”
I had Katie take my picture by the plaque.
“I knew Oral Endres when I was a kid,” I explained. “He was an old man—maybe forty or so—with receding hair and dark-rimmed glasses. He came around from time to time and sat down at the kitchen table with Mom and Dad to make sure we were covered by Metropolitan Life.”
Now here is Oral Endres, memorialized in a library desk.
“What goes around comes around.” I’ve never known just what that saying means. Maybe it refers to the Wheel of Life, picking up loose bits of roadway which may cling for two or three revolutions before falling aside as time rolls on.
It was nice to encounter Mr. Endres on the back side.
Moving On
From Streator we drove to Ottawa, stopping at Prairie Fox Bookstore to introduce ourselves—and Izzy Strikes Gold!—to the good folks there. I’m hoping we’ll be able to do “author events”—talks and signings—there and at the Streator Library.
Katie’s reward for slogging through this old-time history and contemporary book-schmoozing was nature hikes.
At Matthiesen State Park, which we called Deer Park back in that era when any deer sighting (especially in Illinois!) was a phenomenon, we hiked a sunken trail amid rocky dells, following a babbling stream as far as we could go before the walls closed in.
My daughter found several interesting plants, including an uncommon lady’s-slipper orchid. Did I mention she is a tracker of wild botanicals?
But the pièce de resistance was Starved Rock State Park, where sandstone bluffs tower above the broad Illinois River. From the top of the largest bluff, the one where misty legend whispers that a whole tribe of Indians perished in a long siege, one can see a monumental dam across the river and squadrons of white pelicans fishing in its outflow.
The park was established in 1911. In the 1930s, members of the Civilian Conservation Corps constructed the Starved Rock Lodge, a wood structure of elegant rusticity, like similar lodges at Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. Since paying a brief visit to Starved Rock when I was eight, my bucket list has included an overnight stay at the Starved Rock Lodge. On this trip, we checked it off.
The rooms are cozy. The food, beverages, and service are excellent. After dinner, Katie and I sat on the lodge veranda, which overlooks a broad expanse of the Illinois Valley. We sipped our chosen beverages and talked. It was a great time for catching up.
The next morning, we set out on the park’s hiking trails, which parallel the river and traverse several dramatic tributary canyons. Katie found more plants. We saw squirrels and birds, and plenty of other hikers.
We covered about five miles of trail, including a few stretches over rough, broken ground. We did not exhaust all the park’s trails, but we did exhaust this old man before climbing back in the car and heading back to 2024.
Starved Rock State Park and its iconic lodge rate my sincere recommendation. Spring, fall, and midweek days in summer would be the best times to visit. On summer weekends you might encounter quite a crowd.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
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