Requiem for a Requiem

When I started this blog, I thought it would run for a few weeks. A few weeks turned into a few months, and close to 40 posts later, I am finally wrapping things up. Not that I’ve said everything I wanted to say on the subject. For instance, I’d like to tell you more about:

-How I believe the house at 841 N. Maplewood was built in 1911 and after a discussion with realtor and west bluff resident Pat Kenny, we decided the house was a modified Craftsman

-The long crack in the living room ceiling that looked like Abraham Lincoln sitting in a chair

-How we could hear the thunder of the races at the Speedway on Farmington Rd. like the cars were zooming down Western

-Making regular trips to Convenient to gorge myself on candy—to say nothing of Mr. Donut or Baskin Robbins. What a trifecta!

-The issues of development, land use, conservation, historic preservation (Maybe Cooper, Rebecca and the Uplands should consider trying to become a historic district.)

-Hitting tennis balls against Morgan Hall

-How far you can trust institutions, even institutions that are practically encoded in your DNA

-The day Maplewood changed its one way direction. I think this happened in the middle of the day with all the cars that had parked for the day facing the wrong direction when it came time to go home.

And, of course, I could go on, but requiems must end. I thought finishing this blog by the first day Bradley starts classes would be appropriate. Here are just a few more thoughts.

Before 841 N. Maplewood was knocked down, my brother Jim and I visited the house. We are only 18 months apart so our memory pools are similar. One of my earliest recollections from our home was bedtime. Jim’s room was at one end of the hallway and mine was at the other. From his baby bed, he would call out, “Wee-a!” the syllables and vowels in my name being hard for a toddler to say.

On the day we visited the house, we went down into the basement, the least changed part of the house. The musty smell was exactly the same. We walked through the room where the ping pong table had been and poked our heads into the small, dark room where we took refuge during tornado warnings. Jim pointed out a cutting board from our old kitchen that was propped up against a wall. My parents had later used the cutting board as a base for the Christmas tree stand.

“I think that’s the spot where we left it,” said Jim.

Out in the front yard, in the light of day, I talked about the sadness of the house going. Jim thought for a moment. “It’s good not to get too attached to things that aren’t permanent,” he said. This is true, and as a priest, he keeps the truly important things more in mind than his older sister.

A couple of weeks ago, West Peoria councilman Tom Dwyer told me he enjoyed reading my blog. “Yeah, it’s sad. The old neighborhood is gone,” I said.

“But the spirit stays alive with you,” he said.

A major part of my childhood occurred in the seventies, so I’ll close with the words from the following song. Sing along if you know them.

“I’m so glad we had this time together.

Just to have a laugh or sing a song.

"Seems we just get started and before you know it,
Comes the time we have to say ‘So long.'

"Good night everybody!”

http://www.livefromhaiti.blogspot.com/

http://www.dyinginhaiti.blogspot.com/

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http://www.peoriasmedicalmafia.blogspot.com/

My mother gave us the above drawing after we moved from the house. The inscription reads:

"You never really leave a place you love: part of it you take with you leaving a part of you behind."

The Souvenir

Way back in late May, I showed up at 841 N. Maplewood on the day the students were to vacate the house. The front door was open and my husband, son, and I walked right in. I wandered around the house in an indignant state. I called Ken Goldin at Bradley to apprise him of the situation.

“Anyone could walk in here,” I said. “What if someone vandalizes the house?”

Now, you really are kind of a case when you’re concerned that a house that has an imminent date with a wrecking ball will be vandalized. But Ken was patient and told me that he would send Bradley security over to lock up the house.

I had another question for Mr. Goldin. “Would it be possible for me to take something from the house?” Again, more patience from Ken as he explained to me that Bradley had contracted with salvagers who would strip the house of things could be recycled.

“What is it that you want?”

I hesitated knowing that it would sound strange but in keeping with the whole tenor of the call, I said, “The front door door knob.”

Almost all of the door knobs in the house, including the one I wanted, were made of cut glass. This one had special significance. In the later years that we lived in the house, the door knob would simply not stay on. Often when we went to open the door, it would come off in our hands. When an unsuspecting guest was leaving and this would happen, my dad would pretend that they broke it. It was the set up for a never ending joke.

“Maria, your family lived there long enough. If you want the door knob, you can take it.”

So I did.

The Sleepy Visitor

Let me recount an incident that was scary, funny, and sad all at the same time.

By 1995, all of us had blessedly moved out from our home at 841 N. Maplewood, except my brother Joseph, who was out this particular evening, leaving my parents to enjoy some domestic tranquility for the first time in 35-odd years. My brother Mike, a new Bradley graduate, lived in an apartment not far away and was a frequent visitor at home to catch a meal or do some laundry.

On this particular evening, my parents, who were reading the paper and watching television in the family room, heard the back door open and close. As my mom turned the pages of the newspapers, she called out, “Mike?” and received no reply. Not thinking much of this, my parents continued their evening recreation activities. About a half an hour later, my mom said to my dad, “That’s strange that Michael hasn’t come in to say hi.” My dad probably shrugged, and my mom set off in search of him.

She went upstairs and checked his old bedroom. He wasn’t there. She went to the door of her large bedroom. Now my parents’ bedroom was actually composed of two room, connected by a French door way. She flipped on the light in the first room. In the back room, where their king size bed was, she saw a head come up from the pillow.

It wasn’t my brother’s.

Not believing what she saw, she turned off the light and then turned it back on again. Once again, what she thought was a head raised up from my dad’s side of the bed.

At this point, my mom hastened downstairs to summon my dad, who initially had a hard time believing her account of events. After he verified that the head coming up from his pillow was indeed happening, dad called Bradley security, who came to the house in a matter of minutes.

A couple officers carefully approached the figure in my parents’ bed. As they drew closer, one of them exclaimed, “Cornelius! What are you doing here?”

They aroused the man, who reeked of alcohol, from the bed and tried to ascertain why he was in my parents’ bed.

“I was tired, and I wanted a place to sleep.”

As it turned out, Cornelius was a—I don’t know what the politically correct term is now—transient? vagabond? occasionally homeless man?—local person who was familiar to the Bradley police.

I don’t know if this was the last day my parents ever kept the back door unlocked, but it might have been. My mom and dad didn’t press charges. I’m sure my mom prays for Cornelius—the tired trespasser.

The picture above is of the door to the furnace room in the basement of our house. Boo was painted there before we moved in in 1964.

The Long Good Bye

One time, more than a decade ago, I was visiting a friend who lived on the other side of Maplewood, the side that still exists. Her neighbor was obsessed with finding out how many unrelated adults lived in a certain house on the block. He had his suspicions that it was more than allowed. “Wow,” I thought. “He seems a little anal about this.”

I didn’t understand then, but I do now.

Ever since many of the houses became home to students--about ten years before this summer's destruction--the 800 block of Maplewood made for a sad ride. Now, I don’t have anything against, students, God love them, and have aspired to remain one all of my life. But those in the 18-23 year-old category aren’t really concerned about property values and curbside appeal, nor are their landlords.

It took an act of will not to speed up and avert my eyes as I drove past the bushes with the little white flowers in front of 841 N. Maplewood. We used to dive into those bushes and shake them, pretending the white flowers were snow. After awhile, the bushes were ripped out, exposing the brick base of the house.

The screens on the attic windows were out and I wondered how many bats had gotten into the place. My mother always said that summer hadn’t really started until we had a bat in the house. The screens were also off the side porch, which was perhaps my mother’s favorite part of the house. With the white wicker furniture on the cool maroon tile, she and my dad like to take their breakfast out there and watch our part of the world go by.

At least there were no couches in the front yard or no German shepherd poking his head out of an upstairs window with a beer can in his mouth on a Sunday morning, as my mother once saw at another student residence.

My parents moved out of the house in 1996. My dad was retiring from Bradley and four of their five children had moved on. The three-story, six-bedroom house was more than they needed. A few weird things had happened, too. Laundry was stolen off the clothesline in the backyard. And there was a scary but ultimately harmless visit from a man named Cornelius that I’ll describe in the next post.

It was a hard decision for my parents and one made with mixed emotions. On the day they moved out, my mom went around to each room to say good by and think about all the things that had happened there over the years. She insists the house was creaking and groaning as they left.

In Memoriam of a Maplewood Boy

Danny Dahlquist grew up on Maplewood. He lived with his parents and six siblings north of Main Street on the blocks of the Avenue where the cool Arts and Crafts houses and the maple trees still stand.

It was a life of sports and school and church, and I’m sure, a lot of fun. Danny started his adult life on the Hilltop playing soccer at a place that he grew up with, that employed both his parents, that has fielded nationally ranked teams with players that went on to the pros.

As his obituary said in sweet, heart breaking, haunting lines: “Danny was a sophomore at Bradley University and was living his dream. He was where he wanted to be, being a Bradley soccer player.”

How many of us can say this of ourselves now? Of any time in our lives?

Dreams often seem the province of young people, those who haven’t become hardened by life’s difficulties or weighed down by its debts, those whose lives stretch out before them with a myriad of glorious possibilities. How wonderful that Danny was living his dreams.

Along with dreaming, risk taking is also often a feature of early adulthood. Several years ago, I was talking with some people from work about the risky behavior that young people engage in. I made the trenchant observation that many, many people were lucky to get out of their early twenties alive. A week or so later, the son of one of the women I was talking with died in an alcohol-related accident.

I have always hoped that my comment didn’t cause my friend extra pain.

In 1995, Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich addressed the subject of risks much more eloquently. She wrote about a 22-year-old man from Champaign-Urbana who was killed while running with the bulls in Spain.

She writes, “We all tell stories of the crazy things we did in our 20s, at least all of us do who were lucky enough to have done crazy things in our 20s and luckier yet to have survived them. From the safety of later adulthood, we reminisce fondly about the risks we took in those days, back when we were greedy for sensation and bold enough to seize it. . . The rides we took as hitchhikers. The rides we gave hitchhikers. The weird places we slept. The dangerous streets we walked alone. The strangers we accompanied to even stranger places. These are our purple hearts of foolish courage, our badges of experience, cherished souvenirs. We are proud of the reckless things we did at 20, 21, 22 even though at this age we would be too smart to do them, or maybe just too scared.”

I once read that one of the best ways to find the presence of someone who has gone on is by seeking him out in what was the best about him. In other words, if a person was friendly and welcoming, we will meet him when we act the same. Certainly Danny had a lot of virtues to emulate.

Danny’s family has their faith to help them deal with the loss of their boy who was living his dreams. It has to be a searing reality. But it isn’t complete. As smart as we are, the universe is still more filled with mysteries than explanations. A better place beckons all of us.

A place with great soccer fields.

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming. . .

. . . to comment on the new Bradley president, Joanne Glasser (and may there please be a moratorium on referring to her as “a little lady”).

This is an appointment that almost everyone seems to be raving about. I’ve polled many of the BU people in my life, and they all think she is a smart choice.

My biggest hope is that she is as good as she seems. My greatest fear is that she is as good as she seems and won’t be here very long. Well, this isn’t my greatest fear, but she does seem to have been in demand over the past several years.

Three years ago, she took her name out of consideration as one of the finalists for the Illinois State University presidency. Before that in 2001, she withdrew her candidacy from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas after the board of trustees unanimously chose her as the president. Despite this disappointment, here is what one SFA student prophesized according to Towerlight, the student newspaper of Towson University, then Glasser’s current employer:

“SFA graduate student Jason Gomez, who served as the only student representative on the University’s presidential search committee, said Glasser was well received at SFA, and many admired her choice to explore the campus on her own rather than take a guided tour like the other candidates.

“‘She was very, very charismatic,’ Gomez said. ‘A lot of people commented on her being inspirational. Although she is not president of our University there is a lot in store for Joanne Glasser.’”

Hopefully, Mr. Gomez was unwittingly talking about Bradley.

Since she’s interested in hearing from stakeholders and with two degrees from the Hilltop (for a total of seven in my immediate family), I consider myself one of them, here are my top ten unsolicited suggestions for Madame President on how to improve Bradley University.

1. Do something radical, trend setting, and right: pay adjunct (a fancy work for part-time) faculty the same—or close to the same for teaching a class—as full-time faculty.

2. Watch the tail: yes, basketball is great and from a president’s perspective, wonderful for keeping the alumni financially involved. But we have to make sure we don’t allow Bradley’s recent success to turn the team into an NBA farm club. I think we have the right people in place to prevent this from happening, but cheating is a constant temptation.

3. If you are looking for a three word motto for your term, here’s a suggestion: excellence with diversity. Let this apply to Bradley’s faculty, student body, and board of trustees.

4. Private money might be the lifeblood of Bradley, but academic freedom is its oxygen. Lots of times, there’s tension between money and truth. Large corporations and wealthy individuals don’t always like the messy, rabble rousing process that accompanies the search for the truth.

Let me quote from my own alma mater the University of Wisconsin’s 1894 Board of Regents: “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the Great State University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”

Let the sifting and winnowing continue unabated (i.e. if you have to err, please err on the side of academic freedom).

5. Promote Bradley’s graduate programs. Bradley will likely always be primarily an undergraduate institution, but its graduate schools are excellent and unheralded outside of central Illinois.

6. Do what you can to insure the survival and prospering of Cooper and Rebecca. It’s good to have faculty and staff live near the university, and the beautiful houses on these streets make ideal homes. Don’t knock them down to put up a parking deck. If you somehow find yourself unavoidably having to do this, please be upfront about the University’s intentions so that home owners and residents have fair warning.

7. Strengthen Bradley’s ties with St. Mark’s Grade School and other neighborhood schools. Okay, this is a little shameless of me, as my husband and I are graduate’s of St. Mark’s and our son will likely attend there. But I think a closer relationship would benefit all institutions.

8. Before students graduate, require they pass a test on the life of Lydia Moss Bradley. Knowledge of her life inspires compassion and humility.

9. With a few exceptions, Main Street around the University looks terrible. There is no way a lot of Campustown can be considered progress. I know this is asking a bit much, but anything you can do to help make this area safer and more aesthetically pleasing would be a boon for the area and Bradley.

10. You have used your one chance to publicly utter the phrase “play in Peoria.” I now charge you with coining another, less annoying motto for your new home.

Welcome to Peoria and Bradley Madame President, Joanne Glasser!

More Field House Memories

I’ve been in a little bit of a posting slump since 841 N. Maplewood came down. Now, except for the big machines and a huge mountain of dirt where the old house used to stand, what were formerly the 800 and 900 blocks look barren. The whole scene seems a bit like “The Road,” the apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy. I’m sure that comparison is overstating the case, but, on the other hand, how do you describe destroying charming, quality—the kind of quality that’s not built any more—100-year-old houses to put up an undoubtedly unaesthetic, concrete parking deck for fossil fuel burning vehicles? It’s definitely not the New Urbanism.

Dirt and destruction aside, I do have a few more memories and thoughts to share before I rap things up.

Not by my design, both my dad and my husband played basketball for Bradley University. My dad was a starting player on a Mt. Vernon team that won back to back state championships in ’49 and ‘50. His inclusion on the role of Bradley basketball players is a little more obvious than my husband’s.

John barely made his freshman team in high school and didn’t play in any games. His sophomore year was basically a repeat. However, he kept working and growing, and by his junior year, he started some games for a 1970 Spalding team that finished fourth in the state. He had a strong senior year, and as a freshman at Bradley, tried out for the frosh team and made it. After his first year on the Hilltop, he received a scholarship and played on the JV team his sophomore and junior years. He was voted the most valuable player his junior year and led the team in scoring and rebounding.




John came by his basketball success through hard work and perseverance. In basketball and many other areas of his life, especially his work providing medical care to Haitian children, he reminds me of the following Calvin Coolidge quote:

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

When we were dating, John said, “Let’s go shoot baskets at Haussler.” We both loved to shoot around. As we walked down Glenwood toward Haussler, the side doors of the Field House were open. We could see a lot of activity going on around the floor. “Hey,” said John. “Want to shoot baskets in the Field House?” Now, you have to understand that I view the Field House much like the Ark of the Covenent. Even though I had passed the open side doors of the quonset many times, I would never think to step foot on the sacred floor. But with John leading the way, we hopped up on the hardwood. There were seemingly about three different teams, including the woman’s volleyball team, practicing, which I know attests to the need for a new facility. No one seemed to mind the two interlopers, so we shot around for about a half an hour. It was a lot of fun.

Princess For A Day

You would think that since I’m writing these posts, I would spare myself the embarrassment of relaying hokey events from my past. Well, you would be wrong. Out of respect for the historical record, I’m including everything, including the fact that I was the flower girl at Bradley’s 1966 Homecoming. You didn’t know Homecoming necessitated five-year-old flower girls? Well, read on.

The ceremony at which the Homecoming Queen was to be coronated was held in the Field House. This was such a big event that it required a rehearsal. At the rehearsal, the grownups explained to me that each member of the homecoming court would be announced and would step on the stage. My name would be announced last, and I would make my entrance carrying an armful of flowers. While we were being announced, the Bradley Brave would be doing a Native American dance on the stage in full war dress. (Very strange writing about those non-PC and in many ways offensive times in PC language). At the end of the dance, he would throw the headdress off his head.

At this, I would run to the young co-ed they pointed me to, hand her the flowers—thus designating her queen—pick up the headdress and run off the stage. I am aghast at the responsibility they gave a five-year-old. What if I handed the flowers to the wrong girl?
Anyway, we practiced this routine a couple of times. It seemed easy enough to me.

I got a special Indian princess/flower girl costume for the occasion, which was later recycled as a Halloween costume.


Above is a picture of my sister Theresa and I wearing part of the costume along with my brother Jim. I should add the disclaimer that my siblings did not give me permission to post any of the pictures I've used in this blog. They are helpless bystanders.

On the big night, my dad stayed by my side the whole time. When they announced my name, I didn’t want to go on the stage. I wasn’t really suffering stage fright. But the Bradley Brave was thumping around very energetically and I was afraid he would step on my bare feet. I need to remember this line of reasoning when I can’t understand why my four-year-old is refusing to do something.

My dad, whose priorities were always straight, did not insist I go on stage. He didn’t even act like my refusal was a big deal. After a few moments, I must have figured out my tootsies would not be pounced on, and I stepped up on the stage. The rest of the routine went swell. The right gal got the flowers, though I can't remember which one. My main motivation was to get my hands on that headdress. It was probably bigger than I was and with all the colorful feathers, it was beyond cool. Sadly, the Bradley Brave retrieved it almost immediately.

Thus began and ended my career as a homecoming court member.

How the Demise of a Neighborhood Sounds

PeoriaIllinoisian has a sad, beautiful short film portraying the houses and neighborhood of Maplewood in their final stages. The music makes it seem like a prayer.

Ghosts of Faculty Past on Maplewood

In 1964, when my family moved to 841 N. Maplewood, the John Shroyer family lived in what at this writing is the sole remaining house on the 800 block of Maplewood. Dr. Shroyer was Head of the Chemistry Department and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The Shroyers lived in the house less than two years after we arrived. However, when my sister Theresa was born in the Spring of 1965, they gave my parents a silver spoon as a gift. The south wing of Bradley Hall is named the Shroyer Academic Hall.

My family and the Shroyer’s are just two examples of the Bradley employees who lived on Maplewood. A very partial list of the family names includes: Cummings, Deliniski, Hurd, Keating, Wessler, Dusenberry, Nothdurft, Novak, Smythe, Haverhals, Teeven, Richey, Jamieson.

One of the most colorful Bradley employees who lived on Maplewood had to be Pat Sier. She and her husband Don lived on the corner of Maplewood and Laura across from our house. Among other things, Pat worked as hair dresser, a veterinary tech and from 1976 to 1982 a security guard at Bradley. She was a short, short-haired, feisty woman who was the Gladys Kravitz of the neighborhood. One time, some soda bottles were stolen off a neighbor’s porch and thanks to Pat’s observant eye, the thief was apprehended.

When I was in high school, I used to baby sit Pat’s daughter Robin. A few years later when I was leaving my house for a potluck, the brownies I had on the front seat started to slide to the floor as I turned left from Laura onto Maplewood. Stupidly, I went to save the brownies and kept turning into a parked car on Maplewood. It was an old car made of heavy metal. Almost all of the damage was to my parents’ station wagon. I was very upset and not knowing whom the car belonged to, went up to the Sier’s door and knocked. I was crying when Pat answered. She was very comforting to me, telling me the other car was hardly damaged and the people wouldn’t care anyway.

After Pat’s stint at Bradley, she and her husband went on to own an auction company, a job perfectly suited to her energy level. Besides their daughter Robin, they also adopted a son, Justin. Pat died in 2001 at age 55 of a brain tumor.

She was the kind of person who made Maplewood such a fun place to live.

And Then There Was One

The house at 841 N. Maplewood, my childhood home and the focus of many of these posts, was knocked down yesterday. I was in St. Louis for much of the day with my husband and son, so I wasn’t around to see the big collapse. Yesterday was also my mother-in-law’s 93rd birthday, and we drove down Maplewood around 9:30 pm as we took her home from her birthday party. Ominously, all of the houses on the south end of the block were gone. We could see the silhouette of the Boesen’s brick house, one house from the corner. But then as we moved past it, the outlines of the rubble sitting on the lot of our house came into view.

John stopped the car and we all kind of looked at it. That mess had once been our home? It didn’t seem possible. I had been hoping that the house would somehow defy the laws of physics and refuse to destruct.

No one said anything except our son. He had been with me on many earlier drive bys and asked plaintively, “Why did they knock down mommy’s house?” I told him they were going to build a new building. It was kind of shocking to see the house gone, but my mother-in-law’s birthday put things in perspective. I had told myself that I didn’t want to see the demolition of the house anyway, but in truth, I probably would have watched if I’d been here to see it.

Of course, this morning I had to return to the scene of the crime and watch the mop up operations. When I arrived, the excavator was ripping into the tree on the corner of the lot that my dad and brother planted. I had written about the tree in a previous post with the hopes that it could be saved. Watching the excavator go to work emphasized how beyond quixotic this hope was. In about five minutes, the 30 foot tree was gone. Three swipes by the excavator amputated the branches and a couple more uprooted the trunk. Those excavators are scarily efficient machines. They are like steel, gas-powered dinosaurs. With its vicious-looking maw able to maul anything, the excavator is a most excellent destruction machine. They should make a movie about them along the lines of Killdozer.

After the tree was eliminated, the excavator turned its attention to the debris and began scooping it up and dumping it in the huge truck parked on the front yard. I kept searching for recognizable pieces from the house, but it all looked like a bunch of old wood and other junk. There really is something to that entropy stuff. I imagine by the end of today, the lot will be cleared.

That leaves just one house on the two blocks. You can see why that third little piggy was smart to construct a house of brick.

Below is the one house left on the two blocks of Maplewood.

Worth More Dead Than Alive To Some

In efforts to get a little exercise, my husband John and I visit Meinen Field a couple times a week, where we jog around the track for varying durations and intensities, depending on our energy levels.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a huge tree trunk lying on wood blocks at the south end of the track. My oxygen-deprived brain didn’t initially register that this was kind of odd. But as we continued our laps, a truly strange thought emerged from my synapses.

“I wonder if that’s the truck from the copper beech that Bradley cut down,” I remarked to John. He immediately embraced this idea. “I’ll bet it is.”

We continued to discuss the notion during our jog. It seemed a little preposterous. Why would Bradley, or somebody, lug this huge tree trunk to Meinen Field and put it up on blocks? It also seemed a little preposterous that we would just stumble upon it this way. It would be like me walking into a random Peoria house only to find the staircase from my old house at 841 N. Maplewood newly installed and leading to the second floor. And yet. . .

Well, I was able to verify that this is indeed the trunk from the copper beech that until a few weeks ago had been growing for more than 100 years on Glenwood Avenue between the now non-existent Sigma Chi house and the equally non-existent Alumni Center. The trunk is up on blocks to be dried out, and beyond that I don’t know what’s going to be done with it.

File it in the “It’s a small, strange world” category.

Still Standing

I really thought 841 N. Maplewood would be gone by now. Heck, I didn’t think it would even see the light of June. Having been stripped of its windows, shutters, and much of its siding, the grand, old homestead doesn’t look much like the picture above, but it’s still there.

The 900 block of Maplewood, however, is gone, a span of empty lots now. As of a couple days ago, eight houses, in varying stages of intactness, remain on the 800 block of Maplewood between Laura and Bradley Ave. Three houses on Bradley have recently been demolished with one more to go.

Williams Brothers, the construction company, has parked a couple of trailers on the 800 block and put up a chain link fence around a few of the newly created empty lots. 841 N. Maplewood, on the corner of Laura and Maplewood and 839 are outside the fence. Likewise there is a fence around part of the 900 block, where the parking deck will be constructed. If I read Bradley University’s plan correctly, the spot where our old house is will be part of a quad, so perhaps there’s not as much urgency to get the house down.

For whatever reason, it’s still standing. I think I feel one more flurry of posts before this blog and probably the remaining houses on Maplewood are finished.

900 Block of Maplewood R.I.P.

All the houses on the 900 block of Maplewood are gone. Destruction is quick compared to construction.

An Assist from Dr. Harold Vonachen

I have Pete Vonachen’s father to thank for my existence and the fact that it is taking place in Peoria. Well, he at least deserves a little bit of the credit.

Pete’s dad, Harold, was a physician. So was his uncle John, who lived with his wife Isabelle and their four children, Molly, Carol, Betty, and Bob at 841 N. Maplewood from 1918 to 1945. John was the first pediatrician in Peoria and one of the first in the state. “I remember being in your old home many, many times,” said Pete. “It was a great house.”

Before he became the medical director at Caterpillar, Harold had a general practice and was also the doctor for the children who lived at Guardian Angel Orphanage on Heading Avenue. Sometimes he asked his brother John for help.

Both Pete, who has an amazing memory, and my dad contributed details to the following story.

My dad lived in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, where, as a young man, he became a pretty good athlete. In high school, he triple-lettered in baseball, basketball, and football. As center, he was voted the most valuable player on the Mt. Vernon Rams football team.

But it was on the basketball court where my dad and his teammates had their greatest success. In 1949 and 1950, the Mt. Vernon Rams won the Illinois State Basketball Tournament, going undefeated in ’50. And this was back when there was only one class for high school athletics in Illinois.

The starting players on the team, including my dad, received attention from colleges wanting to recruit them. The team’s star, Max Hooper, who was recently honored as one of the 100 top high school basketball players in Illinois history, was going to the University of Illinois. My dad decided he would go there too.

But that was before Dr. Harold Vonachen and a couple of his friends paid a visit to Mt. Vernon. Dr. Vonachen was very involved in the Bradley boosters club. He and his friends made the drive from Peoria to Mt. Vernon that in that day had to be close to six hours.

They came to town in a big black sedan. Dr. Vonachen handed the keys to my dad and his teammate John Riley and said, “Here boys, take the car for a ride. We want to talk to your parents.”

After the meeting, my dad’s parents suggested he check out Bradley. He had never heard of Peoria, much less Bradley, but he made a campus visit. And he loved what he saw. “The campus was beautiful and so much more personal than Illinois.”

He came to Bradley, majored in economics, pledged Sigma Chi, and became a starter on the basketball team, which placed second in the NCAA Tournament in 1954. While he was a student, Harold Vonachen was his physician.

My dad went on to receive a master’s in counseling at Bradley and spent his entire career working in administration at the Univeristy. He met my mom, who lived in central Illinois, and in 1961 the first of their five children were born.

And it all got its start because of Pete Vonachen’s dad. Thanks Dr. Vonachen

The top picture is of the 1954 Mt. Vernon Rams, who won the Illinois High School Basketball Championship. My dad is number 46. The bottom picture, from the Peoria Journal Star, shows the happy, victorious Braves after they defeated the Oklahoma City Chiefs, a victory that won them a berth in the 1954 NCAA Tournament.

Pickin' the Winners on Maplewood

Orville Nothdurft, the Dean of Admissions at Bradley University for 25 years in the sixties and seventies, lived in the 900 block of Maplewood. His former home was the second to last to be leveled on this block.

After the Nothdurft’s moved from this home, Bradley English professor Peter Dusenberry and his family lived in the house for 23 years. “Mim Orville was very short woman,” said Dr. Dusenberry. “One of the Nothdurft daughters was a carpenter and she made all the counters and cabinets lower,” something the Dusenberry’s had to change when the house became theirs in 1984.

When I would walk to school, I remember seeing Mr. Nothdurft in his dark suit, walking across Bradley Avenue to his office in Swords Hall. He always had a friendly smile and a greeting. My dad, who early in his career at Bradley was the Assistant Dean of Students, was friends with Orville.

Dad, Mr. Northdurft, Les Tucker, the Dean of Students, and Doc Norton, the Dean of Men and head of the Speech Department formed the disciplinary committee, which started meeting in 1959-60. The four men were big Bradley basketball fans and after they dealt with whatever issues misbehaving students presented them, talk turned to the Braves.

To make things interesting, the four men created a friendly contest. Before Bradley games, they would each predict what they thought the final score of the game would be. A complicated—to my mind—scoring procedure was developed and at the end of the season, the fellow who earned the most points through his predicting prowess was declared the Bradley Basketball Top Prognosticator. His name was engraved on the plaque pictured above. The plaque only goes until 1977, but the contest continued into the early 90’s.

I remember many times my dad phoning in his prediction to whomever’s turn it was to track the scores. I would ask him his prediction and was always disappointed when he didn’t pick Bradley. According to my dad’s recollections, three times in the history of the contest one of the men correctly predicted the final score of both teams, the equivalent of a prognosticating hole in one.

Orville Nothdurft was a wonderful man, educator, and promoter of youth athletics. He died in 2001. In 2002, my dad received the Orville Nothdurft Lifetime Achievement Award, for service by a former Bradley student/athlete to his profession and the community. I know it is one of the biggest honors he has ever received.

The 900 Block of Maplewood

In this trip through the dimly lit tunnels of my memory, I have been almost completely neglecting the 900 block of Maplewood. Actually, I have been mainly neglecting the experiences of everyone except me—and a few of my family members. Ah, the self-absorbed dangers of sitting down behind a computer with memories to burn.

Anyway, as to the 900 hundred block of Maplewood, my family also lived on this block for four years. My newlywed parents moved into the green shingled house on the corner of Main and Maplewood, 931 N. Maplewood, in 1960. The house was owned by Bradley, and my mom and dad paid $75 a month in rent. This house isn't part of Bradley University's current demolition project as it was knocked down years ago and turned into a grassy lot.

I and my brother Jim were both born while we lived in this house. The memories from this time are pretty hazy, but I have a few.

Our next door neighbors, the Peyers, had beautiful rose bushes, which Mr. Peyer faithfully cultivated. One day, he gave me a rose, which is undoubtedly the first flower I ever received from a man.

The school crossing guards for Main Street stowed their flags on our front porch. How I coveted those flags! My mother was very adamant about not letting us touch them, though. One day, she relented, and we have pictures of my brother and me delightedly frolicking with the flags.

In December 1964, on my brother’s second birthday, we moved down the block to 841 N. Maplewood. Later that month, Mel and Evelyn Novak, who lived in the middle of the 900 block, had a holiday open house. Evelyn was the secretary for Cam Prim, who was then the Dean of Women at Bradley. Mrs. Novak had all these beautiful and intricately-made hors d’oeuvres set on the coffee and end tables throughout the house. It was with horror that my mom watched my brother Jim go around to the tables and pop many, many of these exquisite appetizers into his mouth. They were a little too low to the ground and a little too perfectly sized for a two-year-old’s fingers.

Mrs. Novak was just one of many Bradley employees who lived on Maplewood through the years. I’ll talk some more about a couple of them in my next post.

Peoria Journal Star sports editor Kirk Wessler mentions some of these Bradley folks in his wonderful June 22, 2007 column reminiscing about his childhood on Maplewood. He remembers the football games and the great Homecoming celebrations with all the house decorations. I can’t really recollect those times and the wish to do so, as well as what some would call a perverse desire to have come of age in the sixties, caused me to remark to my husband, who did grow up during those days, that I’d like to have been born about a decade earlier.

“So you wish you were 55 now?” he responded.

Well, I’m sure 55 will be fabulous when it gets here, but not exactly, and I guess you can’t have one without the other.

My mom, brother, and I standing in the back yard at 931 N. Maplewood. My face reflects the unadultered glee I was feeling with the chance to hold the flag.

My dad holding me outside the house at 931 N. Maplewood.

"They Say It's Your Birthday. . ."

According to the cosmic calculator, I wonder how many birthdays have been celebrated on Maplewood. If our family’s photo albums are any indication, the general answer is a lot. A couple of comments on the photo montage with this post:

Do any one-year-olds have fun at their own birthday parties?

Apparently my dad and I like to stand on chairs on our birthdays.

My mom, who was so good about celebrating and photographing other people’s birthdays, had no picture of her own birthday and I had to make due with a picture of her cutting someone else’s cake.

As a non birthday-related aside on pictures that didn’t make the cut, why didn’t someone tell me how awful my various hairstyles were? In the same vein, why is it that things we think look so good at the time, we recognize as hideous years later? Evolved taste? Some sociologist needs to do a study.

Destruction and Debris on a Sunny Day

For the past week, I’ve been taking my four-year-old son to bright, summery Lakeview pool for swimming lessons. There is nothing like enthusiastic, competent, 17-year-old girls who are good with kids to renew one’s faith in humankind. While I keep one eye on my son, dogpaddling in the clear, sparkling water with a noodle under his arms, the other’s on a book of essays, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory by Patricia Hampl.

Some of her writings don’t exactly match the sunny, good times vibe of the day, with pieces about Polish poet and writer Czeslaw Milosz, who speaks of “looking into the hells of our century” (the 20th) and Jewish/Catholic saint Edith Stein, a victim of the hell known as Auschwitz. “Memory is not just commemoration;” writes Hampl, “it is ethical power.”

It is a strange thing to be reading about such things while sitting by a pool, but good too. Perhaps this type of life where kids get to have swimming lessons can triumph over the kind of life where hatred spawned the Holocaust.

To continue my juxtaposing ways, I drive over to Maplewood to look at the destruction/progress on this radiant day.

The 800 and 900 blocks of Maplewood now look like a tornado or a war has hit them. Several of the houses are completely gone and others have been ravaged for what is valuable. As I look at this process, two metaphors leap to mind, one cup-half-empty and the other cup-half-full. The cranes, work crews, people going in and out of the houses remind me of vultures picking through the remains. On the other hand, when I look inside the glassless windows of my old house and see that the radiators and fireplace are gone, I tell myself that our house is like an organ donor and parts of it will live on in other homes.

The above paragraph begs the question, “Why are you continuing to drive by the neighborhood when it’s such a painful sight?” The whole process is like a slow motion death penalty for these houses.

The only answer I can give is that it’s to bear witness. I think there is inherent value in observing and describing events, even when they are depressing and register lightly on the historical scale. Hampl writes, “If we refuse to do the work of creating this personal version of the past, someone else will do it for us.”

For me, it would be even worse if this neighborhood was being eliminated with no one watching. I appreciate the coverage of this subject by PJS sports editor, blogger, and former Maplewood resident Kirk Wessler and blogger, Peoria, Illinoisian.

What's a college?

My dad used to shave in the downstairs bathroom. This bathroom had two doors, one by the sink, opening onto the family room and one opposite the toilet, leading to the kitchen. My dad is 6’3” and he would have to bend his knees to see himself in the mirror.

One morning as he went through this daily ritual, my youngest brother, Mike, asked him, “Dad, what’s a college?”

As my dad continued running the razor over his face, he replied, “You walk through one every day.”

This is the way it was for us with Bradley University when we were kids: our dad worked there and we walked through the campus to school. We lived across the street from the university, and if familiarity didn’t breed contempt with me, it surely dimmed the mystique of the place. Bradley was so much a part of our day-to-day lives that we didn’t really think about it that much. It was just there.

My dad worked in at least three different buildings on the campus during his tenure as Dean of Men, later renamed to the Director of Residential Life and the Judicial System. Doesn’t that change of title tell you a lot about the evolution in society, for better and worse? Through his almost 40 year career, he had offices in Bradley Hall, Swords Hall, and Sisson Hall. I don’t remember ever stopping in to see my dad at work, although one day when I was in junior high, in a cheesy grade school exercise, my friends and I polled some of the Bradley students as to what they thought of my dad. He got good reviews.

My memories of walking through the Bradley campus are specific, yet mundane: the wide, shallow steps between Bradley Hall and Westlake that led from Glenwood to the main quad; the impossibly steep wheelchair ramp between Westlake and the library; the “hills” in front of University Hall on Bradley; walking through the Swords Hall parking lot and marveling at the domed, space ship like appearance of the green house. A landmark day for us grade school kids was when the Sweet Shop, with its fancy candy, opened in the Student Center.

I remember the first time I noticed the two monstrous-looking appendages on the roof of Bradley Hall. “What are those?” I asked my father, shuddering. “Those are gargoyles,” he said. “They scare away the evil spirits.” A revelation: monsters for good.

The gargoyles are part of the gothic design of Bradley’s first two buildings, Bradley Hall and Westlake Hall. Bradley Polytechnic Institute was planned with input from William Raney Harper, the president of the University of Chicago, who was a member of Bradley’s original board of trustees. Bradley’s buildings look similar in style to those of the University of Chicago.

We soaked in the Bradley campus atmosphere as we walked to school. Any more, middle and upper class kids don’t seem to walk to school as much. My sister, Theresa, a Bradley grad, and her family live in Oak Park. The neighborhoods in this tree-filled, village-like suburb adjacent to Chicago, remind me of the neighborhoods of the West Bluff, albeit with vastly higher real estate values. Like their mother and aunt and uncles, my sister’s children attend a parochial school a few blocks away. But they don’t walk to school, and neither do their classmates. It’s a different day now.

The Porch

What’s the most romantic part of a house? Some people would say a porch. Well, 841 N. Maplewood had a great one, and I would wager it was my mother’s favorite part of the house.

Our porch wasn’t a front one or a back one, but a side one that ran at least half the length of the house and overlooked the corner of Laura and Maplewood. We resurrected the porch in spring, like some people open up their summer homes. With its maroon tile, white wicker furniture, and screens that ran from almost the ceiling to more than half way down the walls, the porch was cool on the hottest day. It was the perfect place to sit and watch our part of the world go by.

To be honest, I didn’t appreciate the porch when we lived in the house. But my mother did. “Breakfast, lunch, and dessert,” she listed when I was trying to remember the times she spent on the porch. She would read the newspaper and drink her tea.

During the day, a steady stream of Bradley students and staff passed by the house: Ruthie Keyes, who worked in the library, John Kenny, the physics professor, (he once replied to my husband, his student, who said in frustration during a lab, “I have no idea what I’m doing.” with “Who does?”), Clarence Brown from the counseling department. I wish we could run a tape fast forward through the decades to see all the people who walked down Laura to and from Bradley; it would be a cornucopia of hair lengths and clothing styles.

When I was 16 and in possession of my driver’s permit, my friend Bernadette, who had her license, picked me up along the side of our house in her family’s station wagon. We drove one block to the corner of Cooper and Laura, where Bernadette and I switched places in the front seat. We didn’t drive quite far enough away, because my mom sitting on the porch, couldn’t help but witness this act, shocked at the treachery that her firstborn would engage in. I don’t remember this incident or the repercussions that followed, but my mom assures me she saw the whole thing from the porch.

What easy, fun childhoods many of us who grew up in the latter half of the 20th century had. It wasn’t the same for the namesake of the street that our porch overlooked. In 1864, about 113 years before my driving shenanigans, Laura Bradley, 14, the last surviving child of Tobias and Lydia Bradley, died. According to Allen A. Upton in Forgotten Angel: The Story of Lydia Moss Bradley, one of Laura’s teachers had this to say about her:

“I became acquainted with the family of Mrs. Lydia Bradley in the fall of 1862, and I was an occasional guest at their home. The family then consisted of the father, mother, and Laura, the last survivor of several children. The loss of the other children seemed to have intensified the affection of father and mother for their daughter, and their affection was fully and warmly reciprocated. When Laura entered my school—the old Franklin—in the fall of 1862, she was a slender, vigorous, fair, light-haired girl, ambitious and earnest. She was a generous, amiable and affectionate girl, and always did her best with all work given her to do. Her unselfish generosity and kind disposition made her a general favorite. . . . She was possessed of a dignity and propriety rarely found in one of her age, though full of life and spirit.”

High School Days

At one time, early in my childhood, kids who lived in the 800 and 900 blocks of Maplewood could go to either Manual or Peoria High School. However, by the time I was in high school—1975 for anyone who’s counting—kids on the Field House side of Maplewood, the south side, were in the Manual district. Those who lived on Maplewood but on the other side of Main Street—the north side—were in Peoria High’s district.

Of course, the other choice in high schools then were the two Catholic schools, Academy/Spalding and Bergan. Most of the kids in our neighborhood—the Boesen’s, Keister’s, the younger Mallow kids, the Koperski’s—went to Manual.

My siblings and I went to Academy/Spalding. We lived almost exactly two miles from the downtown campus. During my junior and senior years, on nice days, I would walk to school, often with Bernadette Dries, who lived on Moss. But usually, I caught a city bus that went down Main Street, specifically for the purpose of picking up AOL/SI students. It was called the Special and you would think the time it arrived on the corner of Main and Maplewood to pick us up would be engraved in my mind; I think it was 7:30, but I’m not positive.

There would be anywhere from three to eight kids waiting for the bus. More than a few times, I had to break into a sprint down Maplewood, alerted by those who were already on the corner of bus’s imminent arrival. And also a few times, I would be barely out the front door, only to see the bus pulling away from the corner.

Most of the kids waiting on that corner were from the other side of Maplewood—Cindy Brissette, the Moore’s, the Potts, the Kenny’s—while most of the kids on our side of Maplewood went to Manual. We were used to attending different schools than our neighbors, as we had gone to St. Mark’s and most of our neighbors had gone to Whittier. As we grew older, this difference in schools made more of a difference in our friendships with these kids, not because of any bad feelings, but mainly because we were spending more time now with different people.

I remember the good-natured rivalry that ensued between Kevin Boesen, who lived next door, and me in 1976. Kevin was the middle of the three Boeson boys. I was a sophomore at Spalding and Kevin, a really bright guy, who is now a minister in Hudson, Illinois, was a junior at Manual.

Late in the season, both Spalding and Manual’s football teams were undefeated. Spalding had been blowing out their opponents, and in the second to last game of the year, their record stood at 7-0. Manual was having an equally impressive season and the excitement before this big game was the talk of the school. At our pep rally, all the players sauntered out on the gym floor looking cool and full of confidence—Dave Mischler, John Venegoni, John Girardi, Jim Ardis, Joe Slyman, Don Crusen, Tom George, Ron Mischler, all of whom, I think, were all conference.

A few days before the big game, Kevin was doing dishes in their kitchen. Their kitchen windows were directly opposite ours. He began gesturing through the window at his Manual t-shirt and holding up his finger to indicate #1. I responded in kind, as we pantomimed our messages of school football superiority through the windows. Many of the windows in our house—the landing, some of the bedrooms—matched up with the windows in the Boeson house.

Well, I don’t remember Kevin rubbing it in after the game, and he could have because Manual spanked Spalding 28-0. Ouch! Manual didn't lose until the second round of the state play offs when they were defeated by Danville. Oh well, at least Spalding ended the season by beating our archrival, Bergan.

The 1976 Spalding team plays Peoria High School.

Globetrotting on Maplewood

My dad worked at Bradley for his entire career—almost 40 years. During that time, we met a lot of his colleagues. One of them was Curley Johnson, who served as head of security at Bradley University.

Like my dad, Curley had an association with Bradley before going to work there. In Curley’s case, he was one of the first African-American basketball players at Bradley. After he graduated, Curley worked as a probation officer in Chicago before coming back to Peoria.

One of my dad’s responsibilities at Bradley was student discipline, so he had a close working relationship with the head of security. Curley would occasionally stop by our house.

I remember one embarrassing encounter that I had with Curley. Well, I wasn’t smart enough to be embarrassed by it then. Curley was a very friendly, jovial man whom we immediately took a liking to. When I found out that his first name was Curley, I insisted on knowing what his “real” name was. Chomping down on his cigar, he repeatedly told me, “Curley.” I asserted that this had to be a nickname, and feeling like I was being duped, persisted in asking him, “No, really, what is your real name.” Wide-eyed, what could Curley do but insist upon the truth? I think later when I asked my, dad who confirmed that Curley was indeed his real name, I may have felt a bit perplexed but the embarrassment didn’t come until later.

One day, Curley dropped off his young son at our house to stay with us for a few hours. His son, whose given name was also Curley, had the nickname of Boo. Boo was probably about eight or nine years old and we liked him as much as his father. He was quiet and had the most beautiful afro. What else could we do but go across the alley to the Dougherty’s and shoot baskets?

Boo Johnson, of course, went on to have a glorious 17-year career with the Harlem Globetrotters, where he was known as one of the fastest dribblers in the world. I never had any more contact with Boo after a couple of these childhood visits, but like many Peorians, I followed his career through the newspaper.

I remember reading Boo’s remarks to some students at Harrison School. As a Globetrotter, Boo had gotten to do just that and had been all over the world. He told the kids from the south side of Peoria about the homeless children he had seen in some poor countries, children who didn’t have families or food on a regular basis or a school to go to. You have everything, Boo told these kids—running water, teachers, books, a place to sleep. Appreciate and take advantage of your opportunities was the message.

How many times have Peoria’s children from District 150 been told that from such a credible messenger?

Harlem Globetrotter and Peoria native Curley "Boo" Johnson demonstrates his basketball spinning prowess.

Campus Carnival

Basketball games weren't the only events the Robertson Memorial Field House hosted. Rock groups like REO Speedwagon, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and other acts played there in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. Sometimes during concerts, the naughty, sweet smell of marijuana would waft through the air, tingeing the night with the forbidden.

For many years, the Field House has been home to another event that I looked forward to almost as much as Christmas: the Campus Carnival. This extravaganza was put on by the fraternities and sororities to raise money for charity.

The Field House was transformed into the childhood equivalent of Las Vegas with garishly decorated booths where we tried to win the much-coveted beer holders, beer mugs, beer signs, and—if we really got lucky—beer lights. Talk about marketing to children. Really, the companies probably donated the stuff in deep gratitude for all the business the college students gave them. And, anyway, this was before the days of car seats, bicycle helmets, and no drinking while pregnant. In some ways, children are physically safer now, but emotionally and psychologically, childhood seems under assualt. Beer paraphernalia seems practically innocuous compared to MySpace, gangsta rap, and R-rated primetime programming.

I remember one year during the Carnival after I had spent the amount of money I or my parents—I can’t recall which—had allotted to the festivities. I would race back and forth between our house, which was kaddy corner from the Field House, raiding the stash of 50 cent pieces, kept in a cigar box, that my grandfather gave me, like an addict on the Par-a-dice hitting the ATM machine. For all the anticipation and fun of the carnival, I had a bad feeling walking home empty handed or with stuff that somewhere deep inside I recognized as cheap, having depleted my Eisenhowers and Kennedys. In fact, I would like to apologize now to my grandpa in heaven for squandering these precious coins.

A couple of years, my dad was a participant in Campus Carnival. He volunteered to be a target for a dunk tank and another water game. I had strange and mixed feelings watching kids I knew, as well as some college students, do their best to send my dad plunging into the tank or soak him with water, which, if the above picture is any indication, he seemed to enjoy.

The Bard of Maplewood

I remember standing alone in front of my house after a deep, winter snow. The world evoked Robert Frost’s poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Along came a man, walking down the middle of the street where the snow was packed. He was wearing a trench coat, and a fedora capped his head, above his ruddy face.

It was Daniel Webster Smythe, a poet.

I knew this because my parents had told me, and, like my father, Mr. Smythe worked at Bradley University. I don’t think I ever spoke a word to Mr. Smythe in my whole life, though his friendly wife Ruth, with the sound of Cape Cod still in her voice, occasionally visited my mother. She would take mom to their book crammed house, five places down from ours, looking for some thing or another. The Smythe’s had two children, a boy and a girl, who were grown by the time we came along.

So, all I really know of Daniel Smythe is what I learned reading his poems and bits of public information about him. He was a widely published poet with poems in more than 100 publications, including the New Yorker and Harper’s. He won the Annual Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1940 and many other prizes during his life.

Before his academic career, Mr. Smythe worked on a farm in New Hampshire and on a wildlife sanctuary in New York, which perhaps explains why so many of his poems have nature as their theme. He served in the armed forces during World War II, and he came to Bradley in about 1949 to teach American literature and creative writing.

Daniel Smythe was praised by many influential poets, including Robert Frost, about whom he wrote a book, Robert Frost Speaks.

The book of poems on my shelf entitled, The Best Poems of Daniel Smythe, is inscribed, “For Ed & Mary King With best wishes, Daniel Smythe Thanksgiving 1974” He died seven years later.

I didn’t know when I saw him walking down the street that I would one day take classes in creative writing—poetry no less—as a graduate student at Bradley. Poetry—it’s a word that makes a lot of people, including me, a little nervous. There’s a kind of mystery about it. I think poetry has something to do with trying to see the world with fresh eyes and translating the observations into fresh language, though this is a stale way of putting it.

Well, as the saying goes, “I know what I like.” Here is a poem from Daniel Smythe’s anthology. It’s not one of his many award winners, but I like it.

THE BEACH

Landscape,
sea-bird,
shell shape,
sea heard.

Fog snug,
beach rose,
rockweed rug
grows and grows.

The snail hut,
word-lost shore –
this is what
I am looking for.

Dogs in the Neighborhood

As far as I can remember, few dogs called our neighborhood home. The families around had mainly kids and not dogs. But those canines that did take up residence on Maplewood and Cooper were memorable.

Across the alley from us, owned by the Dougherty’s, was a black and white medium sized mutt named Boots. Boots was a rather fierce dog, as evidenced by the muzzle he had to wear. He was not the kind of dog that you would go up to and pet, but nonetheless, he was a familiar and comforting fixture in the neighborhood.

Boots spent all of his time in the Dougherty’s house, backyard, or most memorably on their back porch. When a bunch of kids were playing in the Dougherty’s yard, incidentally agitating Boots, all John Doughtery had to do was issue the one word command, “Porch!” and with military precision, Boots would march directly to the said porch. I felt a kind of reverence for Boots and John for the obedience and the ability to command it, respectively.

Another neighborhood dog was a friendly German Shepherd-Collie mix owned by the Keister’s, who lived two doors down from us. They received the dog as a puppy. It was an adorable tan dog, and they named him Adolph Bone Hider. Except there was some question in the neighborhood as to whether Adolph was actually a he. One of the Mallow girls, who was an expert in such matters, insisted that little Adolph was a girl. Her opinion was ignored in favor of more established renderings. Well, as time went on, Miss Mallow was proved correct, though I don’t think she was ever given proper credit, and the pup’s name was changed to Ada Bone Hider.

But far and away the greatest dog of the neighborhood was our own Templeton. It was a small miracle that our family even had a dog. I had made half hearted requests for a dog as a child, knowing that it was about as likely as being allowed to have ice cream for breakfast. My mom had been a farm girl, with an unsentimental view of animals. Plus, even as a kid, I could somehow discern that she had enough on her plate.

But parents soften up as each kid comes down the line and my sister, Theresa, four years younger, was more persistent. “I want a dog. I want a dog. I want a dog,” was her mantra upon graduating from 8th grade, until one day I returned home to discover a black ball of fur trying to climb our back porch steps. We named him Templeton, a name suggested by my youngest brother Mike and inspired by St. Louis Cardinals infielder Garry Templeton.

I know I can’t capture the genius of Templeton’s personality in mere words, but here are a few examples. At 11:45, faithfully every work day, he would lie down in the front hall and stare expectantly at the front door, waiting for my dad to come home for lunch, where he would greet him most enthusiastically. (This was one of his big charms; he was gladder than anyone else to see you). On the rare occasion that my dad didn’t come home for lunch, at about 1 pm, Templeton would slink off with his tail down in search of comfort from someone else.

Templeton was a smart dog. In the winter, he always found the warmest place in the house, somewhere near a radiator, and in the summer, he would sprawl out on the kitchen linoleum with his legs straight out behind him.

He wasn’t permitted to go into the living room or upstairs, areas covered in gold carpet or get on the furniture. But when we would come home after Templeton was alone in the house, we would feel the sofa and chair in the family room; invariably, one of them had a warm spot, indicating where he had lounged.

He would also come upstairs during nighttime thunderstorms, which terrified him. Someone would hear the jingling of his chains and eventually he would be led back down stairs and put in the laundry room.

Templeton had a girlfriend named Suzie who lived down the block. Suzie was Templeton’s twin, except that she was white and about 15 pounds heavier, owing to the fact that her owners fed her candy bars. When we wanted to tease Templeton, we would say, “Su-zie!” in a high pitched voice and he would run to the front door hopefully.

He loved cheese, eggs, meat, and peanut butter, which we used to kill ourselves laughing watching him eat. One day as I was getting ready to go to a potluck, I walked into the kitchen to pick up a plate of deviled eggs my mom had made. The eggs only covered half the plate. I didn't have to wonder long what happened to the rest of them, when Templeton nonchalantly strolled into the room, his muzzle ringed with yellow.

When I would come home from college breaks, Templeton would wait at the foot of the stairs until I arose late in the morning, greeting me like he had been waiting for me all of his life. He treated everyone in our family that way, and thus it was a sad day on November 1, 1994, when at the age of 15 and largely blind, deaf and hardly able to move, he had to be put down.

But what a dog, what a dog, what a mighty fine dog.

Pictured above is Templeton, the best dog in the whole world (next to yours, of course).

The Bradley Braves

On January 25, 1975, when I was in eighth grade, I got the chance to serve as an usher at the Bradley-Louisville game. This was a stroke of luck, as Louisville was ranked #2 in the country and all of the Field House’s 7,300 seats and then some were sold out.

The excitement and expectations were intense, as Bradley had nearly knocked off the Cardinals at their place three weeks earlier, losing by two points in overtime. The Braves were having an up and down kind of year, starting out the season 6-0 and garnering a ranking of 19th in the nation, only to fall to 8-6 a few weeks later.

The seniors on the team—Mark Dohner, Tom Les—had a taste of victory against Louisville their freshman year. They defeated the Cardinals 85-79. My husband, John Carroll, was on that team and had the unenviable job of helping guard Junior Bridgeman, Louisville’s future All-American, who was held to 10 points. John played two more years of JV basketball at Bradley. He was the most valuable player on the team his junior year, and also the leading scorer and rebounder, and still has the prettiest jumper this side of Jerry West. There wasn’t going to be much of a role for him on the varsity his senior year and medical school was on the horizon, so he still has one year of eligibility as a Bradley Brave.

Four years later, with Denny Crum’s talented, deep Cardinals coming into town, the seniors and other players had a chance to fulfill a little of the early season promise.

I don’t remember doing much ushering at the game, but what I do recall was the tension of the night. Bradley was down by only two points at halftime. The Braves were in the game! But, this would mean if victory slipped from their grasp at the end, the defeat would be even more painful.

The second half was a whip lasher. Bradley led 50-41 with 12:26 left to play. But then, the Braves would not score a basket again for more than eight agonizing minutes. Fortunately, they played defense, as exemplified by Tom Les’s three steals, and were only down by four points after this scoring drought.

How many times has the underdog team led for much of the game, only to go down to defeat in the waning minutes, a result caused at least partially by not truly believing they could win? Many, many times, I imagine.

Well, not this day. In the last 55 seconds of the game, Bradley scored seven points and defeated Louisville, 65-59 for the Braves biggest victory in my childhood career as a fan.

I had to recreate many of the above details of the game by reading Dick Lien’s account in the Peoria Journal Star. What I remember 32 years later are the tension of the game, and, for some reason, Jumpin’ Jimmy Caruthers, the Braves fearless guard, bouncing the basketball at the top of the key. He made four of those last seven points, including two at the charity stripe. As Lien wrote, “Caruthers is a money player who knows it.”

“Tom Les (older brother of the current Bradley coach) had a great game,” said my husband John. “I remember seeing him at church at St. Mark’s gym the next day.” Mass was held in the gym because the church had almost burned down and was being renovated.

So, finally, in a big time game, Bradley led at the only time the score really matters. The victory seemed unbelievable, but it was true: Bradley had beaten Louisville.

The Field House

The largest building on Maplewood is also being knocked down to accommodate Bradley University’s expansion. That, of course, would be the A.J. Robertson Memorial Field House.

Having served as airplane hangars during WWII, the two structures comprising the Field House were put together and reincarnated as the Home of the Bradley Braves from 1949 to 1982. On game nights, with the lights glowing out of the glass lobby doors, the Field House reminded me of a giant battleship in the sea of night. And from the lifeboat of our house, we wanted to get in.

We finally got our chance. After listening to many games on the radio during the era of players like Sam Simmons, Henry Sylvester, and Seymour Reed, my dad took my brother Jim and I to a game. As a Alumni B-Club member, dad's ticket was free (I couldn’t believe his good fortune). The general admission tickets were $2.50.

The Field House didn’t disappoint; it was far and away the coolest place I had ever been. The scent in the lobby, a combination of popcorn, sweat, and smoke heralded the excitement within the arena. With its raftered, curved ceilings, the rows of benches that seemed to rise out of sight, and the raised wood floor, the Field House was magical. No marketing genius could create that kind of atmosphere. And then at tip off, at the precise moment the ref tossed the ball between the two centers, all the lights in the arena except those illuminating the floor darkened, focusing your attention on what had to be the center of the universe. How could there be a better place to watch a basketball game? And right across the street.

I am happy to report that Bradley won the first game I saw them play live, against a nonconference foe whose name I can’t recall, though I do remember the Braves won by five points. I was thrilled, but my father not so much. “It was pea soup out there tonight,” he said disgustedly, displeased by Bradley squeaking out a victory against a lesser team. I had my first glimpse that there were victories and losses other than what a final score might indicate.

We didn’t go to that many games as kids, but we still got to participate in the excitement of the outside environment. On game days, the cars and people would start to come in the early evening, especially if there was a JV game beforehand.

We would watch the cars line our streets, waiting for the one who would park illegally in front of our house at the corner. The things Bradley basketball would drive a person to do. We were jealous of our neighbors, the Boeson's, who had a long drive way. They could charge people the exorbitant price of $1 or even $1.50 to park for the evening in their ribbon of a driveway, which could accommodate six cars or more.

We might still be awake when the game was over to hear the car doors slamming and the engines starting. Could we tell by the sound of the crowd whether it was a victory or defeat? Sometimes. The muffled conversations were more animated in the event of a victory.