Boys Enter the House

by David Nelson

  “They might have five, six kids in three bedrooms, but we were bunking up like cowboys,” Jeff Billings recalled. “Nobody was on the street.”

  Tim was there, too. Just a few years earlier, while living in Florida, his parents had decided to divorce. His mother had remarried and remained in Florida, but Tim and his siblings refused to join her, unable to put up with their strict new stepfather, who abhorred the kids’ “long hair.” Although Terry stayed with their mother in Florida for a while, Tim moved back to nearby Omaha with their father.

  But he continued moving around the country.

  “It was not uncommon for my parents to bring a cousin back,” Beverly recalled of holiday visits. So Tim, along with one of Aunt Tiny’s sons, decided to take a few days in Michigan with Beverly and her siblings.

  There, with his cousins and his aunt and uncle, Tim rang in the New Year 1972. There were snowball fights, matches on the basement pool table, late-night movies, and maybe a little bit of weed.

  The kids made a movie of the fireplace on the 8mm camera, putting fake feet in the fire to stand in for Santa Claus. Tim proved his knack for mechanics when he helped repair his uncle’s snowmobile, giving the kids a chance to tool around through the thick drifts of mid-Michigan snow.

  Beverly’s girlfriends passed in and out of the house, casting curious glances at the handsome sixteen-year-old. Even though he didn’t hit it off with any of them, he joked that maybe he should move up to Michigan.

  On Christmas morning Beverly presented Tim with a new belt buckle engraved with the outline of a Model A car. He wore the belt buckle for the rest of his visit.

  The last photographs of Timothy McCoy show a teenage boy standing beside the Christmas tree in his aunt and uncle’s home in Michigan. He wears a green army coat, and his dark blond hair runs long, curling around his ears and glancing the tops of his shoulders.

  In one photograph, Tim, caught in mid-laugh, looks off to the side, maybe at a cousin who has no doubt just said something funny. In another, he stares directly into the camera, hands in his coat pockets, his smile tentative. In Tim’s eyes you can see some hesitation, the smile upon his face just about to break or fade. Someone who looks at Tim’s photo without knowing his age might say he’s still a boy. Others might look at it and say he’s a grown man. He sits smack dab between the two. Sixteen years old.

  Some days later, Beverly, her parents, and a few siblings took Tim to the Greyhound bus station in Lansing. He was headed back to Omaha via Chicago, where he’d have a few hours to kill in the middle of the night.

  Before he got onboard, each of the family members hugged Tim and told him they loved him. “Just what we do in our family,” Beverly said. “Every one of us.”

  He promised to call them when he got back to Aunt Tiny’s home in Glenwood, Iowa. With that, he got on the bus, waved through the windows, and rode off as the family looked on.

  They waited fourteen years for his call.

  Chicago probably did not scare Tim. Although he’d grown up in small towns, he’d also lived in busier places like Burbank, California, and Hollywood, Florida. He’d been to all edges of the country. The city along Lake Michigan was just a new corner for him to explore during his overnight layover that January of 1972.

  Tim had been mischievous and adventurous ever since he was a child. Siblings and cousins alike remembered a daring boy who threw himself into quarry lakes or mud puddles.

  A railroad ran through the town of Bartlett, Iowa, and sometimes the kids were tasked with sweeping the box cars free of grain along the tracks near the house. Tim and his younger brother Terry happened to be inside one of these boxcars one day when the train began to move. Petrified, Terry began to cry as the train gradually picked up speed. But Tim, full of glee, shouted enthusiastically, “We’re going to Kansas City! We’re going to Kansas City!”

  The boys’ mother, Susie, happened to come out of the house at the same time to call them in for supper. When she instead found her two sons slipping away from Bartlett aboard a rapidly moving train, she yelled for help.

  The noise attracted neighbors (mostly other relatives in the small town), and soon the boys’ older sister’s husband was running through the fields, clambering aboard the train, and jumping from roof to roof of the cars in order to rescue the boys.

  Still thrilled with the situation, Tim eventually encouraged his panicked brother to jump from the train, and together they leaped over a passing barbed-wire fence. As Tim untangled his foot from the barbs, the train engineer finally looked back and caught sight of the boys’ brother-in-law, who was now trying to get off the train himself. Eventually, the train came to a stop, and their would-be rescuer stepped off to safety.

  Jobs like sweeping grain were usually commissioned by Granddad—Bain Study, the self-made patriarch who adored his many grandchildren and encouraged both their mischief and their sense of responsibility. Granddad had started out working on the railroads to build himself up. For a time, he lived in a rundown cabin in an area known as Green Hollow, where nearby caves often gave warmth or served as cellars during winter and summer. Eventually, Granddad was able to save up for his own house, which he and Grandma filled with children.

  At the height of his prosperity, Bain oversaw the Bartlett general store and post office, a one-pump gas station, a grain elevator, and a local bar aptly named the Honker Inn, in honor of the local goose population. With some time for leisure since he’d quit the railroad, Granddad often hosted poker games in the office at the grain bin, banished there by Grandma, who preferred he do his drinking and gambling outside. When enough beer bottles had piled up, he had his grandkids gather and exchange them for money to buy candy. Granddad was also generous with his winnings, but much of what he gave his grandkids came back to him eventually—after all, they purchased the candy at Granddad’s store.

  While Granddad cleaned up at his poker game, his grandkids ran amok around him, whipping each other with long ropes of red licorice or succumbing to stomachaches after they eventually ate it all.

  In Iowa the McCoy kids—Tim, Terry, Linda, and Cindy—had an idyllic family life on the plains. There was Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, guitars and BB guns, rodeos and baseball games, chores and Sunday dinner. Along with their cousins, they climbed train trestles, swam in rivers, threw frogs at one another, and dug up treasure, once even uncovering Granddad’s lost poker winnings in Prince Albert tobacco tins scattered in the yard.

  Dirt-clod wars waged through the summer, until one dead-on projectile knocked an eyeball clear out of one cousin’s head. Later on, Tim’s cousins remembered a family visit to Florida spent wading through hurricane floodwaters and jumping off interstate bridges into waterways populated with alligators, as they learned when the coast guard pulled up to warn them.

  At night when the McCoy kids went to bed, they lay listening to the sounds of their father’s band, the Country Rebels, practicing in the house downstairs. Their father, Jack, had come from Tennessee, of slightly unknown origins. He’d been given away twice as a baby, choosing later to join the navy around the age of seventeen.

  Jack found family through a girl named Norma Study (known as “Susie” to her family), whom he’d impressed as a young cowboy with Elvis Presley hair riding motorcycles or bulls at the rodeo, where they first met. The wider Study family was not as impressed with this seeming bad boy, especially after watching him spin out on his Harley Davidson in their yard, running over Granddad’s cherry tree in the process.

  Eventually, Susie’s nine siblings, as well as her parents, came to love Jack. “I hated that boy then,” Granddad said later. “Then, after I got to know him, he was the best son-in-law I got.”

  Jack put music in their lives, too. By day, he worked in the fields or in surrounding factories, but in the evenings, Jack went to the bars or the local VFW and played music on his guitar. In his time, he recorded three 45-rpm records.

  “Everybody in every town we lived in loved him and went to see him,” Linda
McCoy recalled.

  When Jack eventually took the family to California, he went to get noticed. He’d always been content just to play in local venues and entertain those he cared about. But now he wanted to see if he had what it took to go professional. The time spent there was short-lived.

  Linda, it turned out, had developed a lung disease from the Hollywood smog, and doctors recommended they remove her from it soon. Slightly defeated, Jack took the family back home to Iowa, where the Midwest climate quickly restored her health. “When my horse comes in,” Jack used to say about his fortunes. And though he never got fame, Linda said, “he always chased that neon rainbow.”

  While the orbit of the family revolved mainly around Susie’s parents, Granddad and Grandma, Jack and Susie were beloved by the rest of the family. They remembered Jack as a jokester and musician, while Susie was caring and generous, opening her doors to an endless stream of cousins who came to learn how to bake or cook.

  Kindhearted and giving, Susie found a way to care for outsiders as well, helping mentally challenged persons through local organizations. She was from folk that finished their chores and enjoyed the simple things: a broken-in pony, a tended field, and a Dilly Bar purchased at the local Dairy Queen.

  From his mother, Tim McCoy took a softer side. This side was good-natured and tender, a side that never told dirty jokes, exuding politeness and care, winning over people like the girlfriends of his female cousins, and earning him extra bowls of strawberries in milk from his grandmother, who did little to conceal that Tim was one of her favorites out of thirty-three grandchildren. This favoritism never wavered, not even after Tim unwittingly locked Grandma in the post office late one afternoon, which required someone to come rescue her.

  This was the side of Tim that made sure to hit enough grounders so every cousin got a chance to catch one. This was the side of Tim that came from the heart of America, a salt-of-the-earth family that grew up in the “hills and hollers” and could trace its history back for centuries.

  The family was loyal, sometimes to a fault. Tim’s mother, Susie, who attended school under her Christian name, Norma, once passed her homework to the front of the class through her twin brother, Norman, who mischievously put an n at the end of her name and turned it in as his own. She never told on him, because she didn’t want to get him in trouble.

  Tim, too, did whatever he could to help cover for his siblings. Late one evening, he was making peanut butter sandwiches as Cindy attempted to sneak out of the house. Before she left, Tim made her two sandwiches as well. But the noise attracted their mother, who quickly appeared in the kitchen, asking why.

  “Well, Linda wants one, and Cindy wanted one too,” Tim had said.

  When their mother went to ask the girls why they needed so many peanut butter sandwiches, she found Cindy vanished. Of course, when Cindy eventually returned several hours later, she earned a torrent of trouble.

  From his father, Tim gained his sense of humor, a side of mischief, and a spirited restlessness that drove him all over town, and eventually the country. Likewise, he inherited his father’s love for music, happily blaring Steppenwolf and Creedence Clearwater Revival on his stereo.

  In retrospect, Terry, the youngest of the McCoy kids, often considered his brother outwardly as a “long hair” with “redneck ways.” He recalled Tim teaching him to play chicken with a penknife in the yard in Florida, throwing the knife into the dirt just inches from Terry’s foot. Once, it actually stabbed him. When Terry protested, Tim apologized and insisted it wouldn’t happen again. Sure enough, on the next throw, Tim’s knife pierced Terry’s foot once more.

  But the closeness of the family also concealed edges that were beginning to fray. By the time the McCoys moved to Florida—again, on one of Jack’s whims—the children were older and fighting more frequently, burgeoning adults vying for independence.

  Cindy and Linda clashed, mostly out of jealousy, as Cindy, tied down with a child she had had early on, watched her carefree sister come and go in the Florida sun. After one particularly bad fight resulted in broken lamps, their parents issued an ultimatum to the girls, and Linda moved out to live with a friend in a nearby town.

  Their parents, Jack and Susie, had begun to grow apart as well. They were no longer able to ignore the differences in their personalities. Jack dipped tobacco and drank at the bars where he played music. Susie was straitlaced, indifferent to music, and preferred to stay at home and bake or spend time with her many sisters. At the start of the new decade, the 1970s, they split for good.

  While the girls dealt with their own lives, Tim and Terry stayed behind in Florida with their father. Both parents moved on quickly, finding new partners—and in Jack’s case, stepchildren.

  Terry, the youngest, remembers feeling confused by the divorce. Tim quit school and eventually moved to Nebraska with his father. He procured a fake ID and, at only fifteen, got a job as a forklift operator at Blue Star Foods in nearby Council Bluffs.

  Around this time, another event occurred that was destined to become family legend. While traveling back and forth to the Midwest, so the stories go, Tim started dating a girl in Florida. She eventually became pregnant with his child, and he sent her a bus ticket to come up to Omaha and move in with him. There, she allegedly gave birth to a daughter. Some family members are skeptical that Tim could have possibly fathered a child, but others believe it. No one knows for sure.

  Nevertheless, this time in Tim’s life reveals a young boy looking anxiously for the next phase of his life with a little bit of longing, a little bit of doubt. Terry saw him less frequently, his sisters even less so. Tim’s life in these last few months becomes a mystery.

  But the last witness is perhaps the least truthful.

  Tim arrived in Chicago sometime after midnight that January night in 1972, just after the holidays. His connecting bus home to Iowa was not scheduled to leave until early morning, giving him a couple of hours to spend in Chicago.

  So when a car pulled up and its driver—a plump young man with a baby face and confident demeanor—offered to give him a ride around the city, Tim didn’t hesitate. The driver called himself John.

  All their lives, they’d been getting closer to each other without knowing it. Tim had moved around a lot, but he’d come back to what he always considered home: Iowa. Just a few hundred miles away in Waterloo, John had been making a name for himself. But it wasn’t until they were in Chicago, perhaps both at a crossroads in their own lives, that they finally crossed each other’s paths.

  That evening, John had gathered for the holidays with members of his mother’s family at his aunt’s home. John had been feeling lonely and depressed, though, as an aunt on his father’s side had died just days before. At the end of the party, John’s mother had refused to drive home, due to John’s inebriated state. He’d driven alone downtown, where he met Tim, who had time to waste and seemed friendly.

  Perhaps the two had bonded first over talk of Iowa, where John had spent several years of married life. Now, back in Chicago where he’d grown up, he was a divorced twenty-nine-year-old working as a short-order cook and living near the airport in a new home he’d purchased with his mother, who also lived there.

  Despite this, John presented himself as an ambitious entrepreneur, boasting about his prospects or his involvement in the local Democratic Party and his pending second marriage with a woman who had two daughters from another marriage.

  He might have bragged about cooking for players of the Blackhawks hockey team, who frequented the restaurant Bruno’s, where John worked, often alongside a team of teenage boys who had also helped him out with some renovation work he’d done.

  John knew Chicago well. He’d come of age on its streets. Mayor Richard J. Daley, a personal hero of his, had been mayor most of John’s life, having recently won a fifth term. Only a handful of years prior, the city had seen its way through the 1968 Democratic Convention, an event that had devolved into violent clashes outside the convention between ant
iwar protesters and police, as well as inside among delegates, journalists, and politicians. For Americans watching on television, the violence capped not only a chaotic year that had seen the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and a peak in American troops in Vietnam but a chaotic decade that seemed unending in its upheaval.

  Aside from the convention, Chicago had been an epicenter for much of the bedlam of the 1960s. The city had become a battleground for radical political and activist groups. After the convention riots, the federal government brought charges against seven antiwar activists in what became known as the trial of the Chicago Seven. In 1969, as the trial unfolded, Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and fellow activist Mark Clark were gunned down in an assassination coordinated by the FBI, the Chicago police, and the state’s attorney’s office.

  Standing in solidarity with the Panthers, the Weather Underground sought to end US-led wars and imperialistic ambitions, often through its own brand of violence. Dozens of bombs went off in major cities in the 1960s and ’70s, most notably in October 1969 at the Haymarket Square memorial, commemorating a police officer who died in an 1886 anarchist bombing during a labor demonstration.

  Only two days after, during events later called the Days of Rage, the Weathermen looked to incite more chaos by hosting rallies intended to spill into the Gold Coast, a tony neighborhood north of downtown. While the protests grew over the next few days, causing extensive damage to shops, cars, and homes, they were outmatched by Chicago police. Illinois state representative Richard Elrod was paralyzed from the waist down during a scuffle with a protester. Elrod would later become Cook County sheriff and would someday tour the home of John the driver, a fellow Democrat.