"A" & PTSD - 1965 - 1970

Prev:  My Family - 1952 - 1965 

"A" & PTSD - 1965 - 1970

On July 5, 1965 my family moved from our house in Rock Island Illinois to a farmstead 5 ¾ miles north of "A" Nebraska when I was 12 years old, where we lived a traumatic, violence-plagued existence from 1965-1970, during the Vietnam War. 

The trauma and violence had more to do with the friction between us and the townsfolk. I found life on the farmstead very amenable, so long as I did not have to mow the acre of windblown weeds that thought the property belonged to them! 

The fields and streams, and the huge, beautiful sky ... all of these fascinated me endlessly.  The Big Blue "River," which today might not even qualify as a stream,  crossed beneath Highway 14 a quarter mile north of our little acreage. I reveled in hearing the roar of bull frogs when rains would swell its banks in the spring. This is when I truly became an amateur astronomer, learning the sky, making observing equipment, and studying sunspot populations. I read Isaac Asimov's book The Universe, and studied Sam Brown's All About Telescopes (see pdf) were for me the beginnings of what would eventually become a thousand+ volume library, today housed at the Branched Oak Observatory in Raymond Nebraska. The insects, too, fascinated me, even while their infernal, unending whir threatened to drive me crazy! 

The animal life too was fascinating: the Coyotes, Jack Rabbits, Pheasants, Quayle, and other birds. I never did become a hunter, however, despite forays into that activity. Once, while shooting birds, I injured one which fell from the sky, only to have its leg lodge in some twigs, where it hung screaming, and the rest of the birds mobbed me ruthlessly. That was when I learned what it meant to a creature to truly be a living, and sentient creature. I never again picked up a gun with such intent.

It was the endlessly picky, judgmental people who were the bane of our existence. I ;loved learning from the farmers about farming, but the townspeople, especially were bigoted and ignorant, not to mention hateful.

The problems stemmed, I believe, from the fact that we were now outsiders –  two families that had moved to a small rural area from much larger metropolitan areas, two and three states away. There were eventually some  significantly complicating factors, but this, for "A"=ans, cut off communications at the source.

Our family was from  Rock Island Illinois, in the Quad Cities –  comprised of Rock Island, (IL), Moline (IL), Davenport (IA) and Bettendorf (IA) – which made for a huge metropolitan area for its time (pop. 250,000), all scrunched together as one city with the Mississippi River running through the middle of it; much larger than Lincoln in 1965 (pop. 168,853). My father opened a hearing aid office in Grand Island and got us a house on an acreage (3/4th of an acre) 5 3/4th   miles north of "A". 

The Blacks from Evansville, Indiana (not huge, but in the same general region of Louisville, Indianapolis, and St. Louis; so a town in a rural area surrounded by large metropolitan areas). George Black made a business of purchasing bankrupt businesses and turning them into businesses generating millions of dollars, then selling them. He had bought a seed company in "A", where they lived in a trailer outside the business.

My mother made sure I played down my “big city” background. Just the same, we were, all of us, reviled as interlopers on "A"'s rural turf. 

I befriended the Black's daughter, Sarah, when she was being teased and bullied in 7th grade. Her mother contacted my mother and they became close, life-long friends. We were all Methodists and later formed close ties with the Methodist minister, Dick Turner, and his family. At one point, in the seventh grade I think, after some youth group activities, Dick suggested I let him teach me some leadership skills since he thought I had a talent for it.

Well, that was not so bad, but . . . 

The complicating factors started when a janitor at the Hamilton County Courthouse saw, on the desk of a Selective Service employee, an application by one of the Black's sons for the U.S.  Draft indicating that he was seeking the status of “CO”. The janitor got the word out that they were COmmunists. So, this diligent sleuth put out the word, and before long the whole town “knew” we were communists, the FBI had been contacted, and we all (my family, the Blacks, and the Turners) were investigated for being communists.

Much later, through a set of very odd circumstances (not so odd if you understand how moral, compassionate, and caring the Blacks were), the Blacks became acquainted with the Director of the Regional Office of the FBI in Omaha. They had picked up his runaway daughter on the highway, and convinced her to call home, and reconciled them.

He had of course, initially checked for FBI records concerning these people who had his daughter, which is how we came to know about this investigation. The FBI had, long before his daughter ran away, concluded that we were NOT communists. 

“CO” was, in fact, the Selective Service code for Conscientious Objector! If the idea of “Conscientious Objector” is a bad thing for you, PLEASE watch the movie Hacksaw Ridge.

But the damage was done. We were hounded. I and my friends suffered at high school, especially at the hands of the coach and his athletic teams, as well as others.  I, being who I am of course,  made friends with the disenfranchised, the underdogs, as was my wont -- as I had slways done in Rock Island

I reacted to the town's hounding of my underdog friends, primarily by, eventually, publishing an underground newspaper that we called The Oracle (with the help of my mother and Rev. Turner). 

One evening in 1969, When I was visiting the Blacks one night I got a call informing me that the football team was hunting for me and my friends armed WITH GUNS. I called the State Patrol officer who lived less than a quarter mile away, and he told me “Well, I am not surprised; you pinkos deserve to be hunted down. Good for them, I hope they get you.” (Or words to this effect.)

I was 15. and I reacted by attempting suicide. To this day I am amazed that I did not succeed. 

A few months later, I and some friends tried to run away to San Francisco. My parents got whiff of it. They stopped us at the I-80 interchange where my friend had his "Goat" (Pontiac GTO) at a service station before we could drive off. 

After that, my parents and I went to the Nebraska Psychiatric Institute (NPI) at UNO for family counseling, to try to figure out how to deal with all this. After a few visits, I was placed on medication, because I was severely depressed and suicidal.

My parents, with the NPI Counsellor, decided that the main problem was "A", and they needed to get me safely out of there before some stupid kid murdered me. So it was that I was legally emancipated and sent to live on my own in Lincoln, under the 'watchful' eye of the Nebraska Vocational Rehabilitation Services. I was given a monthly allowance; not enough to live on, but with a job I could pay rent, eat, and attend school.

Sarah Black, my girlfriend, was sent to a Quaker boarding school in eastern Iowa. Sarah is now a folk singer, living a rural life on a farm near Austin Texas, and fighting cancer.

After a few years, the entire Black family was driven out of "A",  In the early 1980s George & Virginia engaged in missionary work in the largest and most dangerous slum in Africa, Kibera in Kenya, and in Peru; the poverty nearly killed her mother.

So too was Rev. Dick Turner and his family driven out. Dick went on to be on the Board of Governors at Wesleyan University in Lincoln, the South Central District Superintendent, Executive Director of Ministries for the Nebraska Conference and Lincoln District Superintendent. Dick and I would frequently  have coffee in his later years before COVID fragmented the ability for people to socialize. He would meet and talk with people on the porch of his house, but I had no car and could not reach his house after 2020. 

My parents moved to North Platte, where they both eventually died – my mother of cancer and my father of heart failure. Thankfully they had been able to meet with George & Virginia after their travels to Africa and South America when they passed through North Platte one summer.

After they moved to North Platte my mother could never again bring herself to even look in the direction of "A" as she passed on I-80. 

It was not until 2015 that it was determined by three psychologists that I had been suffering from PTSD since 1969, a diagnosis that did not officially have a name until 1980. 

Before that, it was called either "shell shock" or "battle fatigue". both diagnosed in connection with soldiers in battle, and I had been neither a soldier nor on a battlefield – at least not in a military sense. Yet outside that context, I suffered from the same psychic trauma as did soldiers in battle. 

Next: Exiled to Lincoln - 1970 - 1975