The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [112]
All the downtown stores went one by one. Ginsberg’s and the New Utica department stores closed. Kresge’s and Woolworth’s closed. Frankel’s closed. Pinkie’s closed. JCPenney bravely opened a new downtown store and that closed. Then somebody got mugged or saw a disturbed homeless person or something, and hardly anybody went downtown after dark after that, and most of the rest of the restaurants and nightspots closed. In the ultimate indignity, even the bus station moved out.
Younkers, the great ocean liner of a department store, became practically the last surviving relic of the glory years of my childhood. For years it held on in its old brown building downtown, though it closed whole floors and retreated into ever tinier corners of the building as it struggled to survive. In the end it had only sixty employees, compared with more than a thousand in its heyday. In the summer of 2005, after 131 years in business, it closed for the last time.
When I was a kid, the Register and Tribune had an enormous photo library, in a room perhaps eighty feet by sixty feet, where I would often pass an agreeable half hour if I had to wait for my mom. There must have been half a million pictures in there, maybe more. You could look in any drawer of any filing cabinet and find real interest and excitement from the city’s past—five-alarm fires, train derailments, a lady balancing beer glasses on her bosom, parents standing on ladders at hospital windows talking to their polio-stricken children. The library was the complete visual history of Des Moines in the twentieth century.
Recently I returned to the R&T looking for illustrations for this book, and discovered to my astonishment that the picture library today occupies a very small room at the back of the building and that nearly all the old pictures were thrown out some years ago.
“They needed the space,” Jo Ann Donaldson, the present librarian, told me with a slightly apologetic look.
I found this a little hard to take in. “They didn’t give them to the state historical society?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Or the city library? Or a university?”
She shook her head twice more. “They were recycled for the silver in the paper,” she told me.
So now not only are the places mostly gone, but there is no record of them either.
LIFE MOVED ON FOR PEOPLE, too—or in some unfortunate cases stopped altogether. My father slipped quietly into the latter category in 1986 when he went to bed one night and didn’t wake up, which is a pretty good way to go if you have to go. He was just shy of his seventy-first birthday when he died. Had he worked for a bigger newspaper, I have no doubt my father would have been one of the great baseball writers of his day. Because we stayed, the world never got a chance to see what he could do. Nor, of course, did he. In both cases, I can’t help feeling that they didn’t know what they were missing.
My mother stayed on in the family home for as long as she could manage, but eventually sold it and moved to a nice old apartment building on Grand. Now in her nineties, she remains gloriously healthy and perky, keen as ever to spring up and make a sandwich from some Tupperwared memento at the back of her fridge. She still keeps an enormous stock of jars under the sink (though none has ever experienced a drop of toity, she assures me) and retains one of the Midwest’s most outstanding collections of sugar packets, saltine crackers, and jams of many flavors. She would like the record to show, incidentally, that she is nothing like as bad a cook as her feckless son persists in portraying her in his books, and I am happy to state here that she is absolutely right.
As for the others who passed through my early life and into the pages of this book, it is difficult to say too much without compromising their anonymity.
Doug Willoughby