The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) (27 page)

So one Sunday morning Katz and a kid named Jake Bekins drove downtown, parked beside a boxcar, and knocked off its padlock with a sledgehammer. They slid open the boxcar door and discovered that it was filled solid with cases of beer. Wordlessly they filled Bekins’s car with boxes of beer, shut the boxcar door, and drove to the house of a third party, Art Froelich, whose parents were known to be out of town at a funeral. There, with Froelich’s help, they carried the beer down to the basement. Then the three of them went back to the boxcar and repeated the process. They spent the whole of Sunday transferring beer from the boxcar to Froelich’s basement until they had emptied the one and filled the other.

Froelich’s parents were due home on Tuesday, so on Monday Katz and Bekins got twenty-five friends to put up five dollars each and they rented a furnished apartment in an easygoing area of town known as Dogtown near Drake University. Then they transferred all the beer by car from Froelich’s basement to the new apartment. There Katz and Bekins drank seven evenings a week and the rest of us dropped in for a Schlitz cocktail after school and for more prolonged sessions at weekends.

Three months later all the beer was gone and Katz and a small corps of henchmen returned downtown and spent another Sunday emptying out another boxcar from another distributor. When, three months after that, they ran out of beer again, they ventured downtown once more, but more cautiously this time because they were certain that after two big robberies somebody would be keeping a closer watch on the beer warehouses.

Remarkably, this seemed not to be so. This time there were no boxcars, so they knocked a panel out of one of the warehouse delivery bay doors, and slipped through the hole. Inside was more beer than they had ever seen at once—stacks and stacks of it standing on pallets and ready to be delivered to bars and stores all over central Iowa on Monday.

Working nonstop, and drafting in many willing assistants, they spent the weekend loading cars one after another with beer and slowly emptying the warehouse. Froelich expertly worked a forklift and Katz directed traffic. For a whole miraculous weekend, a couple of dozen high-school kids could be seen—if anyone had bothered to look—moving loads of beer out of the warehouse, driving it across town, and carrying it in relays into a slightly sagging and decrepit apartment house on Twenty-third Street and Forest Avenue. As word got around, other kids from other high schools began turning up, asking if they could take a couple of cases.

“Sure,” Katz said generously. “There’s plenty for all. Just pull your car up over there and try not to leave any fingerprints.”

It was the biggest heist in Des Moines in years, possibly ever. Unfortunately so many people became involved that everyone in town under the age of twenty knew who was responsible for it. No one knows who tipped off the police, but they arrested twelve principal conspirators in a dawn raid three days after the theft and took them all downtown in handcuffs for questioning. Katz was of course among them.

These were good kids from good homes. Their parents were mortified that their offspring could be so willfully unlawful. They called in expensive lawyers, who swiftly cut deals with the prosecutor to drop charges if they named names. Only Katz’s parents wouldn’t come to an arrangement. They couldn’t comfortably afford to and anyway they didn’t believe it was right. Besides,
somebody
had to take the rap—you can’t just let every guilty person go or what kind of criminal justice system would you have, for goodness’ sake?—so it was necessary to elect a fall guy and everyone agreed that Katz should be that person. He was charged with grand theft, a felony, and sent to reform school for two years. It was the last we saw of him till college.

I got through high school by the skin of my teeth. It was my slightly proud boast that I led the school in absences all three years and in my junior year achieved the distinction of missing more days than a boy with a fatal illness, as Mrs. Smolting, my careers counselor, never tired of reminding me. Mrs. Smolting hated me with a loathing that was slightly beyond bottomless.

“Well, frankly, William,” she said with a look of undisguised disdain one day after we had worked our way through a long list of possible careers, including vacuum cleaner repair and selling things door to door, and established to her absolute satisfaction that I lacked the moral fiber, academic credentials, intellectual rigor, and basic grooming skills for any of them, “it doesn’t appear that you are qualified to do much of anything.”

“I guess I’ll have to be a high-school careers counselor then!” I quipped lightly, but I’m afraid Mrs. Smolting did not take it well. She marched me to the principal’s office—my second visit in a season!—and lodged a formal complaint.

I had to write a letter of abject apology, expressing respect for Mrs. Smolting and her skilled and caring profession, before they would allow me to continue to my senior year, which was a serious business indeed because at this time, 1968, the only thing that stood between one’s soft tissue and a Vietcong bullet was the American education system and its automatic deferment from the draft. A quarter of young American males were in the armed forces in 1968. Nearly all the rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush. For most people, school was the only realistic option for avoiding military service.

In one of his last official acts, but also one of his most acclaimed ones, the Thunderbolt Kid turned Mrs. Smolting into a small hard carbonized lump of a type known to people in the coal-burning industry as a clinker. Then he handed in a letter of carefully phrased apology, engaged in a few months of light buckling down, and graduated, unshowily, near the bottom of his class.

The following autumn he enrolled at Drake, the local university. But after a year or so of desultory performance there, he went to Europe, settled in England, and was scarcely ever heard from again.

Chapter 14

FAREWELL

In Milwaukee, uninjured when his auto swerved off the highway, Eugene Cromwell stepped out to survey the damage and fell into a 50-foot limestone quarry. He suffered a broken arm.

—
Time
magazine, April 23, 1956

FROM TIME TO TIME
when I was growing up, my father would call us into the living room to ask how we felt about moving to St. Louis or San Francisco or some other big-league city. The
Chronicle
or
Examiner
or
Post-Dispatch
, he would inform us somberly, had just lost its baseball writer—he always made it sound as if the person had not returned from a mission, like a Second World War airman—and the position was being offered to him.

“Money’s pretty good, too,” he would say with a look of frank consternation, as if surprised that one could be paid for routinely attending Major League baseball games.

I was always for it. When I was small, I was taken with the idea of having a dad working in a field where people evidently went missing from time to time. Then later it was more a desire to pass what remained of my youth in a place—any place at all—where daily hog prices were not regarded as breaking news and corn yields were never mentioned.

But it never happened. In the end he and my mother always decided that they were content in Des Moines. They had good jobs at the
Register
and a better house than we could afford in a big city like San Francisco. Our friends were there. We were settled. Des Moines felt like, Des Moines was, home.

Now that I am older I am glad we didn’t leave. I have a lifelong attachment to the place myself, after all. Every bit of formal education I have ever had, every formative experience, every inch of vertical growth on my body took place within this wholesome, friendly, nurturing community.

Of course much of the Des Moines I grew up in is no longer there. It was already changing by the time I reached adolescence. The old downtown movie palaces were among the first to go. The Des Moines Theatre, that wonderful heap of splendor, was torn down in 1966 to make way for an office building. I didn’t realize until I read a history of the city for this book that the Des Moines was not just the finest theater in the city but possibly the finest surviving theater of any type between Chicago and the West Coast. I was further delighted to discover that it had been built by none other than A. H. Blank, the philanthropist with the penthouse apartment that Jed Mattes and I used to visit. He had spent the exceptionally lavish sum of $750,000 on the building in 1918. It is extraordinary to think that it didn’t even survive for half a century. The other principal theaters of my childhood—the Paramount, Orpheum (later called the Galaxy), Ingersoll, Hiland, Holiday, and Capri—followed one by one. Nowadays if you want to see a movie you have to drive out to a shopping mall, where you can choose between a dozen features, but just one very small size of screen, each inhabiting a kind of cinematic shoe box. Not much magic in that.

Riverview Park closed in 1978. Today it’s just a large vacant lot with nothing to show that it ever existed. Bishop’s, our beloved cafeteria, closed about the same time, taking its atomic toilets, its little table lights, its glorious foods and kindly waitresses with it. Many other locally owned restaurants—Johnny and Kay’s, Country Gentleman, Babe’s, Bolton and Hay’s, Vic’s Tally-Ho, the beloved Toddle House—went around the same time. Stephen Katz helped the Toddle House on its way by introducing to it a new concept called “dine and dash” in which he and whoever he had been drinking with would consume a hearty late-night supper and then make a hasty exit without paying, calling over their shoulder if challenged, “Short of cash—gotta dash!” I wouldn’t say that Katz single-handedly put the Toddle House out of business, but he didn’t help.

The
Tribune
, the evening paper which I lugged thanklessly from house to house for so many years, closed in 1982 after it was realized that no one had actually been reading it since about 1938. The
Register
, its big sister, which once truly was the pride of Iowa, got taken over by the Gannett organization three years later. Today it is, well, not what it was. It no longer sends a reporter to baseball spring training or even always to the World Series, so it is perhaps as well my father is no longer around.

Greenwood, my old elementary school, still commands its handsome lawn, still looks splendid from the street, but they tore out the wonderful old gym and auditorium, its two most cherishable features, to make way for a library and art room, and the other distinguishing touches—the clanking radiators, the elegant water fountains, the smell of mimeograph—are mostly long gone, too, so it’s no longer really the place I knew.

My peerless Little League park, with its grandstand and press box, was torn down so that somebody could build an enormous apartment building in its place. A new, cheaper park was built down by the river bottoms near where the Butters used to live, but the last time I went down there it was overgrown and appeared to be abandoned. There was no one to ask what happened because there are no people outdoors anymore—no kids on bikes, no neighbors talking over fences, no old men sitting on porches. Everyone is indoors.

Dahl’s supermarket is still there, and still held in some affection, but it lost the Kiddie Corral and grocery tunnel years ago during one of its periodic, and generally dismaying, renovations. Nearly all the other neighborhood stores—Grund’s Groceries, Barbara’s Bake Shoppe, Reed’s ice-cream parlor, Pope’s barbershop, the Sherwin-Williams paint store, Mitcham’s TV and Electrical, the little shoe repair shop (run by Jimmy the Italian—a beloved local figure), Henry’s Hamburgers, Reppert’s Drugstore—are long gone. Where several of them stood there is now a big Walgreens drugstore, so you can buy everything under one roof in a large, anonymous, brightly lit space from people who have never seen you before and wouldn’t remember you if they had. It has men’s magazines, I was pleased to note on my last visit, though these are sealed in plastic bags, so it is actually harder now to see pictures of naked women than it was in my day, which I would never have believed possible, but there you are.

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 had what might be called a lively four years at college—it was an age of excess; I’ll say no more—but afterward settled down. He now lives quietly and respectably in a small Midwestern city, where he is a good and loving father and husband, a helpful neighbor and supremely nice human being. It has been many years since he has blown anything up.

Stephen Katz left high school and dove headfirst into a world of drugs and alcohol. He spent a year or two at the University of Iowa, then returned to Des Moines, where he lived near the Timber Tap, a bar on Forest Avenue which had the distinction of opening for business at six a.m. every day. Katz was often to be seen at that hour entering in carpet slippers and a robe for his morning “eye-opener.” For twenty-five years or so, he took into his body pretty much whatever consciousness-altering replenishments were on offer. For a time he was one of only two opium addicts in Iowa—the other was his supplier—and became famous among his friends for a remarkable ability to crash cars spectacularly and step from the wreckage grinning and unscathed.

After taking a leading role in a travel adventure story called
A Walk in the Woods
(which he describes as “mostly fiction”), he became a respectful and generally obedient member of Alcoholics Anonymous, landed a job in a printing plant, and found a saintly life partner named Mary. At the time of writing, he had just passed his third-year anniversary of complete sobriety—a proud achievement.

Jed Mattes, my gay friend, moved with his family to Dubuque soon after he treated me to the strippers’ tent at the state fair, and I lost touch with him altogether. Some twenty years later when I was looking for a literary agent, I asked a publishing friend in New York for a recommendation. He mentioned a bright young man who had just quit the William Morris agency to set up on his own. “His name’s Jed Mattes,” he told me. “You know, I think he might be from your hometown.”

So Jed became my agent and close renewed friend for the next decade and a half. In 2003, after a long battle with cancer, he died. I miss him a great deal. Jed Mattes is, incidentally, his real name—the only one of my contemporaries, I believe, to whom I have not given a pseudonym.

Buddy Doberman vanished without a trace halfway through college. He went to California in pursuit of a girl and was never seen again. Likewise of unknown fate were the Kowalski brothers, Lanny and Lumpy. Arthur Bergen became an enormously rich lawyer in Washington, D.C. The Butter clan went away one springtime and never returned. Milton Milton went into the military, became something fairly senior, and died in a helicopter crash during the preparations for the first Gulf War.

Thanks to what I do, I sometimes renew contact with people unexpectedly. A woman came up to me after a reading in Denver once and introduced herself as the former Mary O’Leary. She had on big glasses that she kept around her neck on a chain and seemed jolly and happy and quite startlingly meaty. On the other hand, a person I had thought of as timid and mousy came up to me at another reading and looked like a movie star. I think life is rather splendid like that.