by Roger Ebert
Saturdays at the Princess involved a time commitment, a fact not lost on our parents. The show started about noon, with a slide offering a five-dollar reward for the apprehension of vandals. Then a slide reading Ladies! Hold onto your bags! Do not place them on the seat next to you! Your cooperation will help them in not getting lost! Then the ads. Busey Bank. Hudson Dairy. Urbana Pure Milk Company. Lorry’s Sport Shop. Mel Root’s, Serving fine food at affordable prices 24 hours a day—we never close! Then the coming attractions. Next week! Roy Rogers, King of the Cowboys! Cheering! Dale Evans, Queen of the Cowgirls! Booing! Coming soon! Hoppy! Rex Allen! The Bowery Boys! Then five color cartoons. Mickey Mouse. Daffy Duck. Tom and Jerry. Mr. Magoo. Goofy. Then the serial. Batman, Superman. Rocket Man. Flash Gordon. Cheering as the hero escaped from last week’s fatal trap, only to fall into another one ten minutes later. Then the newsreel. Commie defeat in Korea! A-bomb tests! Premiering the new Studebakers! It looks speedy—but which way is it going? Yankees off to a good start! At Florida’s beautiful Cypress Gardens, syncopated mermaids parade on water skis! Their smiles say, come on in—the water’s fine!
By this time only the girls doling out Neccos to themselves were still in business. Even the all-day suckers were gone; they hadn’t been licked, but crunched in greed. There was a sudden fanfare, as on the screen searchlights crossed over the words Our feature presentation. There was a preshow rush downstairs to the boys’ room. It had a semipermanent population of underage smokers, looking like they were ready to paste you.
It was always a double feature: A Western and a comedy. Of the comedies, usually the Bowery Boys or Abbott and Costello. When Bud and Lou met Frankenstein, it scared the shit out of us. Then the Western. For some reason, I have vivid memories of two enigmatic cowboys, Whip Wilson and Lash LaRue. They packed wicked bullwhips. It was incorrectly believed by some that they didn’t carry guns. Untrue. They carried them, but they didn’t need them, because their whip snatched your gun out of your holster faster than you could draw. I wished they’d been married, like Roy and Dale. I fantasized about their wives Whippet Wilson and Lashes LaRue.
As the afternoon came to an end, the theater, now hot and humid and smelling of sweaty T-shirts, grew quiet in suspense. Dan-Dan the Yo-Yo Man strode onstage—from the steps, because there was no backstage—with twin Yo-Yos spinning, maybe Whistlers. The Yo-Yo showdown began. The second Saturday, the prizes were cartons of six Coke bottles, courtesy of the Champaign-Urbana Coca-Cola Bottling Company on South Neil Street. Third weekend, after a surviving handful met the challenges of advanced tricks, the winner got a brand new Schwinn. I assume the Duncan Company paid for this and Dan-Dan’s salary out of the Yo-Yos they sold across the street at Woolworth’s. What Dan-Dan did to pass the time Monday through Friday, I have no idea.
After some lucky kid had his new bike handed down to him from the stage and pushed it up the aisle, we staggered out into the sunshine with sugar headaches and went to the dime store to buy a professional Yo-Yo; those cheap red and black models would never win you a Schwinn. But one year I lingered over a display for the Miracle-Gro Garden in a Pan and brought it home to my bedroom windowsill. It was an aluminum pan like chicken pot pies came in, filled with vermiculite and embedded with eager seeds. I bathed them with water, and they brought forth young shoots, and it was spring, and everyone was in love, and flowers picked themselves.
7 SUMMER
ON THE LAST day of school, time stretched forward beyond all imagining. There was a heightened awareness in the room as the second hand crept toward our moment of freedom. We regarded the nuns as a discharged soldier does his superior officer. Here had existed a bond that would never be again. We didn’t run screaming out the door. We sauntered. We had time. We were aware of a milestone having passed.
Some kids would go to second homes, or to visit relatives, or to summer camp. My friends and I would stay at home. We would have nothing planned. The lives of kids were not fast-tracked in those days. We would get together after breakfast and make desultory conversation, evaluate suggestions, and maybe play softball, shoot baskets, go down into somebody’s basement, play cards, go to the Urbana Free Library for Miss Fiske’s Summer Reading Club, rassle on the lawn, listen to the Cardinals, play with our dogs, or lay on our stomachs on the grass and read somebody’s dad’s copy of Confidential magazine. Somebody’s mom was probably keeping an eye on us through a screened window.
Our bicycles were our freedom. We would head out for Crystal Lake Park, dogs barking behind us until they grew uninterested in this foolishness and fell back. Or maybe this would be a day when we would earn money. This we did by mowing lawns, or when we were younger taking a card table out to the sidewalk and opening a Kool-Aid stand. Some kid would announce he was “opening,” and we would look at him in envy, because he was in retail, and we wished we had thought of it first. It was nothing for two adults, perfect strangers, to pull over and invest a dime to drink from two jelly glasses, washed out in a soup pot full of dishwater. When the sun fell lower in the sky, the newspaper trucks would come around pitching bundles, and I would ask a pal, “Want to walk me on my route?” Always “walk me.” Never “walk with me.”
In all of our movements away from home base, we peed when we had to and where we could. Behind trees, in shrubbery, against back walls, in the alley. This we called “going to see a man about a dog.” When the City of Urbana dedicated a plaque on the sidewalk marking my childhood home, from my seat on the little platform I could see several of my boyhood pissoirs. Why didn’t we just go home to pee? Your mom might grab you and make you do something.
As an only child I was sometimes content with my own company, especially after I discovered science fiction. In a corner of the basement I positioned my cast-metal bookshelves, for which I redeemed three books of Green Stamps each. On these I placed the old s-f magazines that two foreign brothers, graduate students on my Courier route, had given me. Astounding, Galaxy, Fantasy & Science Fiction. Then I discovered, more to my taste, Amazing Stories, Imagination, and the final issues of the full-size pulp Thrilling Wonder Stories. Science fiction itself somehow had an aura of eroticism about it. It wasn’t sexually explicit, but it often seemed almost about to be.
Down there in the basement it was cooler. I reclined in an aluminum lawn chair and played albums on my record player—Pat Boone, Doris Day, the McGuire Sisters, Benny Goodman, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Polly Bergen, who sent me an eight-by-ten autographed photo. I wrote to Percy Faith and he mailed me a dozen of his 45s. I wrote asking Stan Freberg for an autographed photo, and he wrote back regretting that he was all out of photos, but as a consolation was enclosing a hairpin from Betty Furness. A lot of my records evoked thoughts of lost romance, about which I knew nothing. I grew sentimental at second hand.
Sometimes a central Illinois thunderstorm would come ripping out of the sky, loud and violent. All hell broke loose. Afterward the rainwater would be backed up at the corner drains, and we would ride our bikes through it, holding our Keds high to keep them dry. The rest of the time it was hot outside, sometimes for a few days even “above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit,” we said in an official tone. Air-conditioning was rare except at the movies. Windows and screen doors stood open day and night. The idea was to get a “cross breeze,” although actually you just left everything open and the breeze did what it wanted.
Eventually my parents bought a Philco window air conditioner for their bedroom. After they finished their iced tea and their last cigarettes on the front porch, my father would say, “Time to turn on the air conditioner.” In my room I read late into the night in the heat and humidity, the book balanced on my chest. I was decked out in what my aunt Martha described approvingly as “shorty pajamas.” I read far later than I should have. I’d joined the Book-of-the-Month Club with a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate from my aunt Martha, at a time when few books were as much as five dollars. I read By Love Possessed with fascination for the adult characters entirely outside my experien
ce. Countless science fiction books. Erle Stanley Gardner. The angry screeds of Vance Packard, like The Hidden Persuaders with the attack on “ad men” and its photos discovering subliminal images of genitalia in the ice cubes of vodka ads. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, feeling smug. All the King’s Men, recommended to me by the lady at Robeson’s Book Department. I read it four or five times, absorbed in its portrait of its hero Jack Burden, the cynical newspaper reporter and enabler for the corrupt governor.
In my teens I began to read Thomas Wolfe, and felt I’d met my soul mate. From a small town he went north to Harvard and then to the great city of New York. He was a Writer, filled with fierce energy, pouring out a stream of passionate prose. His hero stalked through the stacks of the Harvard library, feeling driven to read every book. On the train north, he had dreamed of the soft white thighs of the farm women of the night. He walked the campus, uttering wild goat cries to the moon. Through my window, a lonesome train whistle blew. My chin made a puddle of sweat on my neck. No writer since has been able to sweep me up like Thomas Wolfe when I was thirteen and fourteen. I read all his novels nonstop. We all grow less sweepable. I read Look Homeward, Angel again a few years ago and expected it to seem overwrought and dated, but it held up pretty well. Then I began again on Of Time and the River but got bogged down. I still have my Universal Library reprints of The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again, but they remain on the shelf.
In the summer mornings, I remember the freshness of the new air, and my father in the kitchen listening to the radio. Television came late to Champaign-Urbana, because the News-Gazette and the Courier were fighting for the license. But we had radio. The fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel stations boomed in from Chicago: WBBM (CBS), WGN (Wally Phillips with Your Top Ten on WGN and the Cubs), WMAQ (NBC), WLS (ABC and Dick Biondi). And from St. Louis: KMOX (Harry Caray doing the Cardinals, until, every kid repeated, “Augie Busch caught him in bed with his wife and threw him out of town”). The local stations were WDWS, WKID, and WILL, the university station. WDWS had CBS and news about flooded viaducts, farm reports, local election results. WKID had Joe Ryder, the “Country Gentleman,” in the morning, and a mix of pop and country all day. It was only on sunup to sundown. In the evening sometimes I would ride my bike out to the Philo Hard Road and visit the Dog n Suds, where the Dog in a Basket, including coleslaw, fries, and a root beer, seemed to me a spectacular feast. WKID was next door in a hunched concrete-block building, and once on a long summer evening when the station was on late, I shyly knocked on the screen door. Don McMullen invited me in. He was the deejay, news reader, engineer, everything. Joe Ryder was the station manager, long gone home. Don let me sit in the studio and watch him cue records, holding them in place with a thumb while he finished reading a commercial, then announcing a song and lifting his thumb, perfectly timed.
While a song was playing he showed me into a closet where the UPI wire was pounding, ripped off yards of news and threw it away, ripped off the weather forecast, and went back to the broadcast booth. “Something Smith and the Redheads,” he said, and then: “We have a young announcer here named Roger who is going to tell us about the weather.” He pointed to the paper in front of me and swiveled the mike over. I was almost dizzy with a flush of excitement. “Sunny and warmer tomorrow, with a high around eighty,” I read. “Good job, Roger,” Don said. I had been on the radio. There was no turning back. When Don got married I gave him steak knives.
My best friends were Hal Holmes, Jerry Seilor, Larry Luhtala, George Reiss and Danny Yohe from across Washington Street, and on my side of the street the Shaw Boys (Steve, John, and Chuck Shaw), Johnny Dye, Karen Weaver, and Steve and Joe Sanderson. Gary Wikoff and Jackie Yates were around the corner on Maple Street. We boys would form circles with our bikes, one foot braced on the ground, as a girl would sit on her porch steps and hold court. I sensed these conversations were about more than they seemed. Hal and Gary were a little older and seemed to understand more.
The Four Stampers Stamp Club would meet in my basement to trade stamps, allegedly, and look up years and prices in our “Elmers,” the thick orange booklets from Elmer R. Long in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I say “allegedly” because the talk quickly turned to girls—those at school, and then, with wonder, Jayne Mansfield. One night a Four Stamper explained to me what men and women “did” together, demonstrating with the fingers of one hand forming a circle and a finger from the other hand poking into it. “You know, like this,” he said. All became clear to me, although I couldn’t figure out what the circle stood for. The navel, probably?
A lot of time was spent trying to get cool. Riding our bikes worked, but when we stopped we’d be streaming with sweat. All of us would ride over to Harry Rusk’s grocery, lean our bikes against his wooden porch, and reach into his cooler, a block of ice floating in the water, and haul out a Grapette, a Choc-Ola, or maybe an RC, because for the same money you got more. Never a Coke or 7Up, which you got at home, and you didn’t see the point of 7Up anyway, although “You Like It—It Likes You!”
If we rode our bikes out to Crystal Lake, we would pass the A&W Root Beer stand at Race and University. A five-cent beer in a frosted mug. Then we would go to the swimming pool and wash off our bike sweat in the water. In high school I was hired by the pool manager Oscar Adams to be an assistant lifeguard. My duties included the Poop Patrol, my tools a face mask, a waste basket, and a spatula. General cheering each time I emerged triumphant from the deeps. Oscar Adams was also the high school basketball coach, driving instructor, physical education teacher, and chaperone at the Tigers’ Den on Friday nights. Urbana couldn’t do without him. He had one daughter in particular, Barb, who brought to life the wonderful qualities of a bathing suit.
Movie theaters advertised It’s Cool Inside! To make this difference more dramatic, the Princess on Main Street made the temperature as cold as possible. Returning to the blinding sunlight, we got headaches between our eyes. Hal and I called each other Holmesy and Stymie. Sometimes Holmesy and I would head across the street to the fountain at McBride’s Rexall Drugs where he introduced me to the Cherry 7Up, and my prejudice against 7Up disappeared. We sipped them so slowly they could have been liquid gold. We agreed it was the best-tasting drink in the world. There I also searched the paperback racks for Robert Sheckley, Arthur C. Clarke, and Theodore Sturgeon. Also the Ace Doubles, two s-f novels in the same binding, the cover of one novel on one side. Turn it over and there, upside down, was the other cover. I read my first Philip K. Dick in an Ace Double. To sell Philip K. Dick in those days, Ace had to bundle him with someone else. Today he has two volumes in the Library of America.
Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s was sweltering. The doors stood open, the lower panes of the stained glass windows were propped wide, and big oscillating fans swept the congregation, although these were turned off during the sermon by Father Martel, who followed Father McGinn. The longer he talked, the more we sweated. We worked the fans that were Compliments of Renner-Wikoff funeral home.
The midday meal was the big one on Sundays, and after a nap, for his dinner on Sunday my father liked oatmeal. Then we watched Ed Sullivan. Then my father would say, “My oatmeal has worn off. Does anyone feel like a chocolate malted?” In my high school years there was the Dairy Queen, but in grade school we went to Hudson Dairy on Race Street, a counter lined with stools, a strong aroma of milk, a malt that came with a metal can to hold the part that didn’t fit in the glass. “They give you a smaller glass so it feels like you’re getting more,” my father explained several dozen times.
The nature of summer changed as I grew older. I got a part-time job at Johnston’s Sport Shop in 1956, and my first newspaper job at the News-Gazette in 1958. Holmesy got an early 1950s Chevy. We’d go out to the new McDonald’s at Five Points, across the street from Huey’s Store (“What’s not on the shelf is on the floor. If it ain’t on the floor we ain’t got it no more”). A couple of years later I got my first car, $395, a 1954 Ford, sky blue. I painted the wh
eel rims red, bought stick-on white sidewalls, and hung a pair of foam dice from the rearview mirror. Left sitting in the sun, it smelled inside like scorched plastic, and the steering wheel was too hot to touch. The last day of summer came sooner.
8 CAR, TABLE, COUNTER, OR TAKHOMASAK
IN MY THIRD or fourth year I ate my first restaurant meal, at the Steak ’n Shake on Green Street near the University of Illinois campus. The eyes of the world were on this capable little man, sitting on a stool at the counter, grasping a Steakburger in his hands and opening up to take the first bite. My dad passed me the ketchup bottle and authority flowed into my hands as I smacked it on the bottom. “Aim it on your plate next to the fries,” he advised. I did. “Good job.”
If I were on death row, my last meal would be from Steak ’n Shake. If I were to take President Obama and his family to dinner and the choice was up to me, it would be Steak ’n Shake. If the pope was to ask where he could get a good plate of spaghetti in America, I would reply, “Your Holiness, have you tried the Chili Mac or the Chili 3-Ways?” A downstate Illinois boy loves the Steak ’n Shake as a Puerto Rican loves rice and beans, an Egyptian loves falafel, a Brit loves bangers and mash, a Finn loves reindeer jerky, and a Canadian loves doughnuts. This doesn’t involve taste. It involves a deep-seated conviction that a food is right, has always been right, and always will be.
Steak ’n Shake is a fast food chain, the first except probably for White Castle. Certainly it’s the best. How many fast food chains bring you a glass of water and silverware, and serve you on china? Friends in Los Angeles took me to In-N-Out Burger, and I consumed a mushy mess on a soft bun and shook my head sadly. The very names of the two chains describe the difference in styles of sexual intercourse between California and the Heartland.