Our Ravine
I’m a ravine kid. My ravine was just east of 17th street behind the little brick bungalow in the dip in the road in Rock Island, IL. Fifty years ago, if I went beyond the garage and the barbecue pit I’d come to the steep drop-off that led directly into another world. Generations of ravine kids had played there before. And before that braves had hunted in the ravine for wild game or gathered acorns.
Once you built up enough courage, you could run straight down the slope of the ravine achieving speeds impossible by sheer foot power alone. Gravity would kick in and for a few moments, you would travel as fast as the wind across the floor of the ravine and start up the other side, hoping that your momentum would carry you to the top of the slope but knowing that the same gravity that gave you speed would make your feet heavy and leave you lying on the ground listening to the sound of your heart thundering in your head. And then you would do it all again. And you would wonder if wearing PF Flyers on your feet would indeed make you run faster than the Converse All-Stars you were wearing.
The ravine was a place of legends. There were arrowheads to be found and stories to be told. Older boys would warn us to watch out for quicksand, caused, as they assured us by the ‘Quick Fish’ who would soften the soil as they burrowed down many feet and then wait with wide-open mouths for innocents get caught in the mire and sink down into their gullets.
Sometimes, on summer days when it was too hot to run, we would lie in the shade and think of all the things that we could undoubtedly do before the end of the summer. A village of interconnected tree houses up in the tall boughs above the ravine; a separate world beyond the authority of adults. We would travel from house to house by vines, just like Tarzan in the movies or by narrow bridges only strong enough for kids.
I don’t know that we looked for mushrooms, not when there were far more fascinating turtles, frogs, and toads to seek out. Not when you could capture a Praying Mantis in a jelly jar.
Spring, summer, and autumn were prime times to play in the ravine. We didn’t go there much in winter. Though there is one morning that I have never forgotten. It was a Saturday in January and for some reason, I woke up just before the break of dawn on the morning after a heavy snow. Crossing the back yard was rough going because the snow came up to my knees but I made it past the garage, past the barbecue pit and had started carefully down the slope of the ravine as the sun broke through the clouds. It was then that I saw a ravine that I had never seen before, mostly white with a few black lines and many grey shadows.
The blank whiteness was accented by the diamond-like sparkle of the fresh snow in the sun. And there was a brilliant Cardinal roosting on a snow heavy branch. Perhaps it saw me was an intruder or just felt the need to move. With a gentle flapping of its wings, the flash of scarlet left the branch leaving diamond dust falling from where it had been. And it was so quiet.
It was a moment before I realized that tears had frozen on my cheeks and snot had frozen in my nostrils. I turned and went home.
When I came back to Rock Island after thirty years my friend Danna Hatfield Scott, who is not just a friend and fellow Ravine Kid but also a force of nature, took me to the edge of the ravine. We were both in jeans and running shoes, we could easily have revisited the summers of so long ago. But there was bush along the edge of the slope and tall weeds that had never bothered us before. We both knew that it was no longer our ravine; it belonged to other generations.
But we would never forget it.
More than you ever wanted to know about Octopuses
After the 2019 barrage of new octopus information, it seemed as if octo-mania had subsided. But then this morning. Bang! More octo-info. I saw what has been described as an unprecedented picture of an octopus nursery. (Someone Call Ringo Starr, I feel a song coming on.) The little octopuses are so cute that I almost hope a baby submarine would come along so they could play—just like in the movies.
There was also a video of an octopus that had been rescued by some nice people. The next day, the octopus came back and shook hands with his/her rescuers. I feel a Hallmark Channel movie coming on.
These are handsome additions to last years crop of octo-info that could only be found without a great deal of study on mass media.
Last year we learned that Octopuses dream. (Call Ringo) Now We pretty much know that dogs and cats dream. The cats don’t show it. That’s a dog thing. But Octopuses–is it octopim in Hebrew?–are cephalopods. What do they dream about? One example may be that when they dream about hunting various tasty aquatic morsels they change color. When they dream about mating they probably turn a bright red. What color do they turn when they dream about showing up late to class having forgotten to study for the final and wearing only their underwear? We may never know. Fish swim in schools but octopuses are loners. Except maybe on Saturday night.
Not only do they dream, but they also change color in response to various dreams which is kind of cool considering that octopuses are color blind. Humans have brains but they still like the Home Shopping network.
Octopuses probably don’t have the falling dream or the flying dream. Let’s face it: octopuses do not lead very exciting lives. That’s one reason that they don’t keep diaries. (Sorry Ringo, there’s no song there.)
This is old news but octopuses walk and even hunt on dry land. Watching them do this kind of creepy and reminiscent of alien invasion movies. Speaking of which..
Some scientists, much to the amusement of their fellows, believe that octopuses so different from other fauna that they must originate from space. How jejune! (Some please insure that our tentacled overlords know that I have debunked this notion. All hail master Squiddley Diddley!
Sledding in 1954
One of the best memories I have from that time on 17th in Rock Isalnd, Il It took place about this time of year in, I believe 1954.
It was the first really big snow and a bunch of the guys trooped over to Long View Park. I think we crossed 17th at Farrel’s Market and then we crossed 18th avenue to get to the park. This was in days before the municipal swimming pool and it seemed like the hill at the end went on forever and ended up in a usually—if you were lucky—quiet street. Some kids had coaster sleds: others had sheets of cardboard. I was too stupid to be scared. Also too stupid to use the buckles on my boots. I remember letting the sled do it’s thing. It started slow and then picked up speed. Just before the bottom I rolled the sled. Then just ran back up and did it again and again.
By the time I got home the snow was packed around my feet and legs. When my mom saw that she picked me up and dropped me into a full bathtub. I screamed! The water may have been cool but it felt like it was burning hot.
Christmas dreams 1954
At this time of the year I always find myself thinking about Round John Virgin.
I first heard of Round John at Audubon school in December of 1954. I was 5 years old and a student in Mrs. Rogers’ kindergarten class. It was close to the holidays and every day Mrs. Rogers would sit down at the upright piano and play holiday songs. Many of them were new to me.
I’m Jewish and when the songs went beyond “Jingle Bells” I found myself exposed to a whole new group of people.
Santa Claus I knew. Who doesn’t know Santa Claus, aka Saint Nick? “Rudolph the red nosed reindeer” was a great ballad that anybody who’d ever been the last to be picked for sports could identify with. It was great fun.
Then we got down to the serious stuff. “Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see the night.” Having seen far too many cartoons my mind went to an establishing shot of snow falling on a peaceful village with a big moon overhead. How said moon could be seen on a snowy night was not an issue.
Five-year-olds are not big on logic.
Other images dissolved in and out and it never entered my mind that I was imagining a music video.
It was then that I encountered Round John Virgin. It was in “Silent Night.” There was Round John Virgin at the beginning of the second stanza — though back then I had no idea what a stanza was, or what “yon” meant or what “virgin” meant. 1954 was a much more innocent year. I also learned that Round John Virgin was also “tender and mild.”
My mind switched from music videos to radio soap operas and I heard an
announcer say: “and now the story of Round John Virgin, the story that asks the question, can a man who is round find true happiness in a world when he is tender and mild — like Pall Mall cigarettes.” Pall Mall was a brand of unfiltered smokes that claimed to be not only outstanding but mild. Round John’s introduction was similar to the one heard on “The Romance of Helen Trent,” the story that asked the question, can a woman over 35 still find true romance.
I don’t know what my classmates thought of the Dreidel song, which was just about the only Chanukah song anyone ever knew. Usually they were left in awe at the thought of eight nights of presents. If only they knew.
With the passage of time I learned that there was no Round John Virgin and that Bethlehem is rarely peaceful. You generally can’t see a full moon when it’s snowing. Cartoons are rarely as evocatively presented as they once were, radio soap operas have disappeared and those cigarettes that were outstanding were not especially mild.
Music in primary schools, especially holiday music is becoming increasingly rare. Groups of people don’t know much about other groups and “No Child Left Behind” doesn’t leave much room for daydreaming or anything much beyond what will be covered on a standardized test.
The dueling dime stores
Every life should have a few benign little mysteries just to keep things interesting. One of mine stared me in the face every day for the 21 years that I lived in Rock Island and I didn’t notice it until quite some time after I left.
I’m talking about the `dueling dime stores’ in downtown Rock Island. The fact that a downtown the size of Rock Island’s in those pre-District days had both an F.W. Woolworth’s and a Kresge’s was not in itself unusual. The fact that they were right next to each other, though, was. By “right next to each other” I mean adjacent, contiguous and an extreme example of propinquity.
This arrangement might have made some sense in the second decade of the last century when there actually were quite a few items that sold for no more than five or ten cents.
Imagine, if you will, the manager of one store walking outside to size up the competition and seeing that the other store was selling a 5-cent spool of thread for 4-cents. The manager could rush back into his store and lower his thread price to 3-cents a spool. A price war, albeit a very short one, ensued with the only logical outcome being that both stores would start paying customers increasingly large amounts of change to take the thread off their hands. It probably didn’t come to that. Paying people to take merchandise off their hands was sheer fantasy even in pre-inflationary times.
But I still find myself wondering what the advantage was to having the two competitors side-by-side. Both stores offered a wide variety of goods although both store sold the same wide variety. Thread, buttons, toys, lamps and lamp shades could all be found in both stores under the same roof. There were even special lines of glasses and tableware manufactured exclusively for the dime store trade. Dime store glass has become a valuable collector’s category via online auction sites.
Both stores had lunch counters with virtually the same menu in both. Due to the fact that they were virtually in the same building, each luncheonette was on the opposite side of the same wall and both had mirrors against the walls. If you wanted to play “Alice through the looking glass” you didn’t have to magically step into the mirror, you just had to walk out one store and enter the other to view basically the same store with everything reversed. This was really amusing the first two of three times.
The only real difference between the two stores was that one had a door that faced the back entrance to McCabe’s department store which was across the alley. This gave the one store the dubious advantage of having bored kids chase each other out of McCabe’s, across the alley and down the aisles of the lucky store.
Both stores, though, shared the advantage of having Gerri’s Dance Studio on the second floor. This meant that in addition to whatever music was piped into the store, shoppers could enjoy the sound of waltzes, fox trots and cha-chas from the ceiling above. The plaster dust that fell from the ceiling under the tap dance studio made for a fairly convincing snow effect during the holiday season.
I believe both stores were still competing when I left Rock Island in 1970 and they both disappeared a few years later. I have never figured out how two basically identical stores could last so long side by side.
In their old location you can probably find three or four bars right next to each other selling the same things at basically the same prices.
And so the mystery goes on.
Police Chase
Some people are born stupid, some people achieve stupidity and some people have stupidity thrust upon them!” This isn’t quite what Billy Shakespeare said in his play, “The Twelfth Night,” but it will do for the subject at hand.
I belong to the second group though some folks might claim otherwise. I only bring it up because I achieved stupidity on a summer day like this some forty-one years ago.
It was the perfect day for riding my bike. It was bright red and it was a coaster bike. In those days, most kids had coaster bikes. My mom had bought it on the easy payment plan somewhere and I think she had a few payments left. When it was summer back then, most kids lived out the lyrics of a Chuck Berry song with “No particular place to go.”
With no destination in mind, I rode down the 17th street hill, which was always a thrill though less of one than riding down the 18th avenue hill.
Not much was happening in downtown Rock Island. There were the usual shoppers and buses but not much more. I headed west with thoughts of visiting my dad at the junkyard.
It was then that I saw it.
The approach to the Centennial Bridge had been under construction for quite some time. (When you’re thirteen years old a week could be construed as ‘quite some time.’) Now it was finished; A huge, seemingly endless mass of clean concrete. I was struck by the idea that I could be the very first person to ride on it. No one would know except me and it was something that I was sure that I would secretly take pride in for many years to come.
The area was marked as closed to traffic though I was sure that it didn’t apply to a kid on a bike with a dream in his heart. I pedaled slowly, trying to savor every moment of the experience. I was the first to ride on the bridge approach! There would never be another number one. Everyone else, even the mayor, would truly be number two.
It was then that I heard the siren and I knew that I was going to jail unless I did something. It was then that I achieved my supreme moment of true stupidity. I didn’t look back at the squad car. I just pedaled as fast as my short, skinny legs would allow me. Heck, I could feel the wind blowing through my hair. I must have been rocketing along at over five miles an hour!
I can only imagine what was happening in the squad car behind me. Maybe service pistols were being drawn and a report was being radioed back to the station calling for back up. More likely, one officer turned to the other and asked, “Do you believe what that stupid kid is trying to do?”
I had no escape plan in mind. I suppose that I could have made it to the bridge but I didn’t have a dime for the toll in my pocket. Besides, if I did have a dime I would cross state lines, which meant that the FBI would be called in. I could ride up the bridge, ditch the bike and climb the girders to the top of the first hump. I’d just seen the James Cagney movie “White Heat” on TV and I saw myself standing high in the air yelling “Top of the world, Ma! Sorry about the payments on the bike!”
The siren was even louder and the squad car pulled up next to me. All bets were off. Maybe they’d just work me over with a rubber hose to get their confession. Worst of all, it might go on my permanent record.
I applied the brakes, planted both feet on the concrete and raised my hands high above my head.
The officer rolled down his window. He didn’t even get out of the car.
“Kid, this road is closed. You’re not supposed to be here. Go ride somewhere else. I don’t want to see you trying this again.
Was that it?
“Is this the end or Rico?” I asked myself, having just seen Edward G. Robinson in “Little Caesar.”
I never rode my bike on the bridge approach again. When I was old enough drive a car I avoided it. When I’m in town, I still do.
Perhaps the story of “Little Idiot” floated around the squad room for a few days, weeks or months. Maybe they still talk about it when they’re really bored.
This has been an incredibly stupid stories from the secret files of the RIPD.
DAVY CROCKETT DIED FOR YOUR BUBBLE-YUM!
You might know him from the song. ‘Born on a mountain top in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free.’–or as Frankie from the old neighborhood continued ‘drank all day, drank all night, went to the Alamo and died in a fight.’ No one could sing it like Frankie. But that’s what happened. In 1836 Davy and all the other brave defenders of the Alamo were wiped out by a force led by General Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón. Let’s just call by his nickname Santa Anna. His victory was due to the fact that he had modern equipment, employed modern tactics had spiffy uniforms and a honking big army. David, he hated being called ‘Davy,’ is mostly remembered for his valiant death—or was it valiant—defending the Alamo, which we remember thanks to many loud Texans telling us to.
While not well thought of here, he has a much different reputation south of the Rio Grande. He is remembered for his military campaigns as well as being elected president some twelve times—not consecutively and not for a four-year term. He was also married twice to two wealthy young women and didn’t show up for the ceremony either time. Some claim the money was at fault.
He is also one of the few people that history records as being exiled to New Jersey, among other places.
He arrived in New Jersey with a supply of Chicle–he milky latex of the sapodilla tree. He envisioned it as a replacement for rubber in the manufacture of buggy tires. It tended to stick, not to mention the fact that people hated buggy tires that lost their flavor overnight.
Thomas Adams who had been assigned to assist Santa Ana saw potential in the Chicle that Santa Ana had missed. Adams mixed the Chicle with flavors like peppermint and eventually founded the Adams Gum Company.
Rags
Even my father can’t remember the difference between The Preacher and The Reverend. Granted, Dalkoff Iron and Metal has not existed for some forty years and his memory at age eighty is not what it once was. Still, I couldn’t tell the difference even when the junkyard was in operation. I know that one man was white and the other was African-American but the names never really lined up with the faces. Still, the junkyard must have been a fairly religious place to merit a Reverend and a Preacher—There had once been a second preacher who drank a great deal because he said that’s what they did in the Bible. The last I heard he had promoted himself to Bishop and was never seen again.
One really hot day in July of 1962, my father decided that it was time for me to be of some use and so he paired me up with one of the clergymen and told us to go sort rags.
Pre-sorted rags brought a higher price than unsorted rags and it seemed like a way to build a business. The problem was that I had no idea how to sort rags. I don’t know if the Preacher/Reverend had any idea of how to sort rags either. If he did, he was certainly not going to tell the boss’s son how to do anything.
The rag house was a big green barn with two windows at the very top and a large door in front. No matter what the weather, the door never closed. It couldn’t. The building looked like it was constantly vomiting rags and the door was blocked.
The Reverend/Preacher was dressed for the job with long sleeves and work gloves. I wore a t-shirt. Like every other building in the junkyard, the rag house was infested with rats. I don’t remember being afraid of them because I’d never seen one. I just wasn’t too thrilled about handling the rags because they smelled strange and felt even worse.
So how do you sort rags? By color? By fabric? Color I could deal with except when it came to patterns of several colors. Dealing with fabric was beyond me. I’d start a pile for fabrics that felt one way and another pile for fabrics like something else. Soon, I had more piles that I knew what to do with and it seemed like every armload of rags carried a new tactile and olfactory adventure. The best, though, was yet to come.
I reached down to pick up another armload and I saw the leg. It was a human leg dressed in a work shoe and a white sock and one leg of a pair of blue jeans. I assumed that the other shoe, sock and the rest of the jeans were attached along with the rest of the body.
My response was not eloquent. It was something like “Homina-homina-homina!”
The Reverend/Preacher said nothing. If I had no idea of how to handle rags, I certainly had less of an idea of how to handle a human body that been covered by several layers of rags.
I don’t know what I was thinking or if I was even thinking at all. I grabbed the shoe and pulled on it as hard as I could. It didn’t move. I planted my sneakers firmly in the rags and pulled even harder. The leg moved this time. It moved so quickly that I fell back and found that the shoe was firmly planted on my chest.
When I finally got up enough courage to open my eyes, I saw that there were canvas straps at the top of the leg and an aluminum form below.
Trying to cover my fear, I held up the prosthetic and asked. “Anyone need an artificial leg?”
The Preacher/Reverend lifted the left cuff of his Jeans enough to reveal some aluminum and said “No thanks, I already have one.
I may never learn the difference between the Preacher and the Reverend but I’ll never forget the man with the artificial leg.
Malcolm Dalkoff Concepts & Creative 
A bit “twilight zone”ish. Really enjoyed it.
Enjoyed your writing especially because it was about our hometown. It was interesting learning about your life as a child. Probably crossed paths as some point
at the parks.
Debbie, I know for a fact that our paths crossed. I know that I sat behind you in a class at Audubon. At Washington I was so shy that I ran away when you and Gloria Linke tried to talk with me in front o Patnoe’s one winter afternoon.
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I was a ravine kid in Rock Island, IL also and can so relate! Wonderful article as it made me smile and get a tear in my eye. We were lucky!