My home town, South Pekin, population maybe 1050, or so. Right in the heart of Illinois. Although I was not born here, I still call it my home town because I grew up here.
I was born in a farm house, a few miles from a wide spot in the road called Gladden Missouri.
My father was a Saw miller, and my mother was a house wife, and mother to,(eventually) seven children, me being the oldest, and the only boy. That's all she ever was, and that's all she ever wanted to be. She was very happy in this role. It was her divine calling, and she did it very well.
At the end of WW-2, My father bought a sawmill outside of the small town of Maeystown, in southern Illinois. The sawmill burned to the ground in 1948, and we moved here. I was in the second grade.
It was a great little town to grow up in, and still is I think. There has been some change, but not a great deal. The population is about the same as it was in 1948, although two new additions have been built at both ends of the town. There are a lot of new houses in my part of town, since a tornado came through here in 2003. There have been eight tornadoes through here in the last 15yrs. In 1938, a tornado wiped out the whole town.
The big news in town right now is, we are getting a new water tower. That's a pretty big deal for us small town folk. We would like to have a new Library Building too, but I guess we don't have enough money for both, they have been here since the 1938 tornado. The Library building is a cement block building, that also houses the Police Station.
In the very beginning the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad built a huge Round House, and switching yards here, and the town just grew up around it. These were the days of the great Steam Locomotives,
and in those days everybody that lived here worked for the railroad. Almost all the houses were made from old box cars, one of which I lived in until I was 17, and joined the Navy. It wasn't much, but my Mom kept it clean,(with a little help from my sisters). There was a lot of love in that little home, and most of the time we didn't know how poor we really were. I could write a whole blog just about growing up in that house, which I may do later.
Eventually, three of my sisters married railroad men, one a Conductor, an Engineer, and a Yard Master. Only the Conductor still lives today.
In the summer we played baseball almost everyday. We would choose up sides, and sometimes we didn't have enough players to man up both sides of the field, so if you were right handed, you would be out if you hit the ball to right field, and vice versa. We would play for hours, and on the way home, hot and sweaty, we would stop at the Gas Station, that is if we had at least 11 cents, we could get a handful of peanuts for a penny, and a 12oz bottle of Hires Root Beer for a dime. We would drop the peanuts into the Root Beer, and eat the peanuts as we drank the root beer.
There were no video games, no cell phones. When we finally got a telephone, we were on a 4 party line. Only two families on the block had a television, so I had to go down the street to my best friends house to watch it, and that was only on Friday & Saturday night.
Those were the best of times, as I remember it. Of course they weren't all good. I remember the Summer of 1952, I was terribly afraid that I would come down with Polio. Of course I never did, and I am thankful even today for that. We had 4 or 5 cases here in town between 1949 and 1952.
There are still a few friend here in town that I grew up with, including my loving wife.
