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By Root 852 0

and the real thing —.22s — shot at tin cans, bottles or overfed rats in the town garbage dump. Also, we had rubbergun fights. Rubberguns were made from pine wood that were cut into L-shaped pieces. You’d grip the short end, which had a spring clothespin taped hard to the side. The rubber that we’d get from inner tubes back then was authentic, thick rubber that we’d cut into round strips, tie them in bows and stretch them from the hammer position, which was the top of the spring clothespin — stretch that all the way to the business end of the barrel. When you held the L-shaped gun in your grip (you could make them in varied sizes) and you squeezed it, the rubber would snap out with swift, violent force and you could hit a target to up to ten or fifteen feet away. You could hurt somebody. If you got hit with the rubber it stung like hell, burned and caused welts. These games would be played all day, one game after another. Usually you divided up sides in the beginning and hoped not to get popped in the eye. Some kids had three or four guns. If you got hit, you’d have to go to a certain spot under a tree and wait until the next game began. One year everything changed because the mines began using synthetic rubber on their tractors and trucks. Synthetic rubber wasn’t as good or as accurate as real rubber. It just dropped off the end of your barrel with a plop or else flew about four feet and flopped to the ground. This just wasn’t any good. I guess now, if you use real rubber, it would be like using dum-dum bullets.

Just about the same time that the synthetic rubber came into the picture, so did the big-screen drive-in movie. That was a family activity, though, because you had to have a car. There was other stuff going on. Dirt track stock car racing on cool summer nights, mostly ’49 or ’50 Fords, bashed in cars, coffin contraptions, humpbacked cages with roll bars and fire extinguishers — seats taken out, doors welded shut — bumpin’ and rumblin’, slammin’ and swivelin’ on a half mile track, summersaulting off the rails…tracks littered with junkyard cars. There were three-ring circuses that came to town a few times a year and full tilt carnivals complete with human oddities, showgirls and even geeks. I saw one of the last blackface minstrel shows at a county carnival. Nationally known country-western stars played at the Memorial Building, and once Buddy Rich and his big band came and played at the high school auditorium. The most thrilling event of the summer was when The King and His Court fast-pitch softball team came to town and challenged the best players in the county. If you liked baseball, this was the team to see. The King and His Court were four players: a pitcher, a catcher, a first baseman and a roving shortstop. The pitcher was awesome. Sometimes he pitched from second base, sometimes blindfolded, at times between his legs. Very few players ever got a hit off him, and The King and His Court never lost a game. Television was coming in, too, but not every home had one. Round picture tubes. Programs usually started broadcasting at about three o’clock in the afternoon with a test pattern that ran for a few hours and showed a few shows broadcast out of New York or Hollywood and then went off at around seven or eight. There wasn’t much to watch…Milton Berle, Howdy Doody, the Cisco Kid, Lucy and her Cuban bandleader husband, Desi, the Father Knows Best family, where everybody’s always dressed up even in their own house. It wasn’t like in the big city, where there was a lot more happening on TV. We didn’t get American Bandstand or anything like that. Of course, there were other things to do. Still, though, it was all small town stuff — very narrow, provincial, where everybody actually knows everyone.

Now at last I was in Minneapolis where I felt liberated and gone, never meaning to go back. I’d come into Minneapolis unnoticed, I rode in on a Greyhound bus — nobody was there to greet me and nobody knew me and I liked it that way. My mother had given me an address for a fraternity house on University Avenue. My cousin Chucky,