Taylorville

 

That summer of 1966 we moved to a large old rental in Taylorville, Illinois just before my senior year in high school. I dreamed of going back to live with Barb in Springfield, but leaving the family was unthinkable. It was the only really stable thing in my life.

This is probably why the trip my youngest brother and I took with my uncle's family was not a good idea. I was already feeling a bit fragile and right after our move to Taylorville Henry and I went to Tennessee to help our youngest uncle move his family to West Virginia. He was a mining engineer and he and my aunt had a baby daughter and five year old son. Henry and I had to share a bed with the five year old who was still waking up wet, Then there was the move and new job jitters my uncle had to deal with. It was a chaotic trip. My uncle had envisioned letting me drive part of the way, but I didn't have my license yet, so he drove straight through with two very young children, two teens, an unhappy dachshund and his wife. When we got to West Virginia things were not hunky dory. The house was covered in coal dust. The water was polluted and they had to put a nylon stocking over the shower head to catch worms and bugs that came through. The drinking water was non-existent. We had to take a clean barrel to a mountain spring and fill it up.  People there often thought I was the mother of my cousins and their mother was my niece! She looked so young. In the end my brother and I came home on a very long and harrowing bus ride that tore through the mountains like there was no tomorrow. We ended up at a bus station in Ohio and my parents waited for us to come in at another bus station in Ohio. It took four hours before they realized what was going on and found us. The next week that bus went over the mountain!

My other brother and my sister went with my dad to visit his mother and sister in Texas. They met the pet skunk and St. Bernard there as well as getting to eat Grandmother's fantastic cooking. Their trip was much less traumatic.

My brothers got the third floor bedroom and my sister and I shared a double room separated by a double pocket door that we mostly left open. At night she snored like a buzz saw and set her record player so that it would play and replay the same record all night. Bobby Vinton, singing Blue Velvet, is burned into my brain. She let it play every night. All night long.

I was back in band here and back in French class because they did not teach German. The first few French tests were horrific combobulations of French and German, but my teacher was very understanding. I also took chemistry, which was not my favorite subject. I spent much of my time for this class devising what I thought were clever tricks like making a very large pink spider out of dough and having one of the boys attach it to a piece of fishing tackle in the ceiling grate overhead. He let it dangle slowly down as she lectured until it came into sight. Then our first year chemistry teacher, a tiny blonde glamour girl, flattened herself against the blackboard and screamed like a banshee. I'm surprised we did not get into trouble, but we didn't. I also roasted marshmallows over a Bunsen burner and one day, honestly quite innocently, I poured the chemicals we were using into the sink together in an attempt to clean up quickly. Instead I flooded the school with the smell of rotten eggs. I also accidentally burned the tip off of several flame testers and generally made a nuisance of myself. All of this while my dad was still the Title 3 Science director for Illinois.

I resented having to go to this school my senior year. I felt it was a step in the wrong direction, but I liked band. We had one band for the whole high school and both my sister and I played in it. Boys in band sometimes asked me out thinking I was the sophomore and she was the senior, for some reason. 

When his state job in ended my father considered moving us to Australia where they would pay for our family to come if he would agree to teach for a certain amount of time. I imagined being the kid with the American accent and never seeing my cousins or America again.  I read about dingos and wild fires and I did not want to go. My mother refused to go and in the end Dad did not take that job, but he was not having much luck getting back into teaching high school. They said he was over qualified and too expensive to hire. He was offered one job teaching if he would also coach the football team. That was like asking an owl to teach English while playing hockey with wolverines  As a boy my dad wanted to play violin, but my grandfather said the only way a son of his was playing violin was if he also played baseball. My dad tried, but by the time the ball was in sight of his thick glasses it was always too late to hit it and it often hit him.

Mom went to work for Grandma at the Big House which was now a very popular nursing home with a long waiting list. She became the administrator and loved it. My parents bought two small Datsuns with stick shifts on the floor. They warned us that we had better never have three people in the back seat unless they were three very undersized short people. They gave me the old Dodge my mother had been driving so I could drive myself, my sister and my cousins to school. We called it Shasta because she has to have gas and oil, lots of oil. I would drive to my grandmother's gas station and Forky, the owner would fill my car with gas on grandma's ticket, then put the oil he saved from other cars into Shasta. She had a few other quirks like the push button gear shift whose buttons sometimes pushed straight into the dash. I had a screwdriver and could remove the plate, reposition the buttons and be ready to go in a minute! She also had a poor defrost system, so on rainy days with a car full of kids, everyone except me, the driver, would take turns holding their breath hoping it would keep the windows clear. But I considered her my car and I spent many hours driving around the countryside exploring with my cousin and my sister by my side.

Sometimes my friend, Barb, would come down from Springfield and we would spend the whole afternoon driving around in her car, eating M&Ms and listening to KXOK radio.

I met Greg on a band trip. He was a ginger haired junior in 4H and a member of Future Farmers of America who also played in the band. I remember him defining cows for me. He said, " A bull is a daddy cow. A cow is a mommy cow. A heifer is a young cow that wanted to be a mommy but wasn't yet, and a steer is a boy cow that will never be a daddy." His face got redder and redder as he said these things! His project for 4H was a heifer he named after me! We took care of her all year until one fateful night in late summer when his parents invited me to dinner. There was cherry pie and ice cream and steaks from that heifer! We spent a lot of time together. He taught me to shoot both pistols and rifles and his mother really liked me, but that first day he introduced us he was standing in the doorway at the top of the basement stairs when he said, "Mom, this is Caroline." Immediately realizing his mistake he turned bright red and immediately stepped backwards and fell down the basement steps. He was my date to prom that year.

I played saxophone in the marching band because one cannot march with an oboe. I found the band uniforms and marching in parades and at school games fun, but I remember losing a shoe marching around the football field in the mud at Homecoming. I went to the Homecoming dance with another junior and discovered that in Taylorville, the parents came and sat in the balcony above the gym so they could watch all of us at the dances. Now I realize why parents would want to do that, but back then I considered it pretty voyeuristic. 

I didn't make a lot of friends that year. I mostly wished I was back in Springfield, but I did have one girl friend whose dad ran the pound. She was also a junior. Otherwise I was back to my old habits of reading and writing my thoughts on life as it was and as I wished it was, and I played the piano. I didn't think anyone really heard me, but just recently a man said that he used to walk by my house and listen to me playing.

My dad took me to visit several different colleges, but what I was looking for was the college most likely to have my friends from Springfield. In the end I got a teacher's scholarship to Western Illinois University in Macomb and that was where I went.

The summer following senior year was spent working in the laundry at the nursing home, or helping the cook there do odd jobs. My mother shopped for all the things she thought I might need when I went away to college and many of them were bought with green stamps. WIU was on the quarter system then and my parents dropped me off  at my new dorm right after Labor Day,