Observations about Growing up in Thomson, Illinois
Thomson Rail Road
Depot
I grew up in
Thomson, Illinois, a small town of 500 on the
Mississippi River in northwest Illinois. Our house was a quarter mile
from the river. I experienced a kind of Ozzie and Harriet or
Leave It to Beaver childhood. My father, Franklin, died of bone
cancer long after I had been grown and married. My mother, Hazel, still
lives in Thomson. I have three sisters, Janice (Bradley), one year older,
who lived in Wethersfield, Connecticut until she passed away in 2004; Rita (Badger), ten years younger,
(Havana, Illinois); and Rhonda, twelve years younger, (St. Charles,
Missouri).
Much of my childhood was spent playing school sports and
sandlot baseball and basketball and touch football. I spent most of my
leisure time with childhood friends Lew Frosch and Johnny Creighton -- and
Ken Milow and Donnie and Phillip and Dale and Bill and Terry. I spent
much time playing dice sports games I invented and playing Lew's APBA
baseball game. During high school and college, in addition to playing
summer baseball, I played on Bud Bull's fastpitch softball team, the
Thomson Merchants, one of the best fastpitch teams in Northwestern
Illinois.
My earliest jobs were mowing lawns and shoveling snow. I
moved on to detasseling corn and, for five summers beginning after my
junior year of high school, working at a local (Lanark, Illinois) Green
Giant canning company.
I graduated from York Community High School in Thomson, one
of eleven students in my graduating class. I had the same English
teacher, Cletus Underwood, for all four years. He gave me the foundation
I needed in grammar and was, without question, one reason I decided to
become an English major in college.
The sixty poems in my 1999 book When Main Street Was
One Block Long all are based on childhood experiences. Some of the
poems are totally true; many are truth laced with bits of "changed
reality." My childhood experiences also form the basis for many of my
other poems and fiction.
I moved from Thomson after graduating from Northern
Illinois University in Dekalb, Illinois, and got a job as a high school
English teacher and coach (I minored in Physical Education). I started
writing poems about ten years after college. When I first started
writing, I felt at a disadvantage, feeling that my small town background
limited the range of what I could write about. After awhile I realized
that my "growing up experiences" actually were an advantage in
that the number of writers who grew up in towns of 500 people is
considerably smaller than the number who grew up in large towns or
cities. My experiences were after all the seeds from which poems and
stories could grow.
Free from threats of stoplights,
cars whizzed through our town
in seconds. Though just a nuisance
spot in the road to them, a brief
slowing in trips from here to there,
our town formed my whole world.
Sis and I sat at roadside, waved
at car-filled strangers, stuck our
tongues out at those too rude
to wave back, giggled at anyone
silly enough to return our wave.
Strangers seldom stopped in our
town. They had no right, after all;
it belonged to us. We owned it.
A lifetime later, after many homes
at ends of far-flung miles of roads,
I now know that it owned us.