1252 N. Main Street

Friends, History and Projectiles

Friends are important especially when you are growing up. And history isn’t important until you’ve lived a good amount of it. Both friends and an awareness of history came together in remembrances of my early teenage years with Terry and Pete Walton.

The Value of Friendships

It was the only BB gun I’d ever almost owned. The “almost” is what makes the story.

It was the summer of 1950 when our family had moved back to the North End from the east side of Rockford, Illinois, the side of town we'd moved to four years earlier and where Dad and Mom had run Wentland’s Grocery at 1724 Second Avenue. We three boys helped out in various ways, I helped by sweeping the floors and general cleanup, Tom and Stan could handle money and served as clerk’s at the checkout register.

Our move to 1252 Main Street made Mom and Dad happy to have found a house in August before school began and glad to return to the North End and away from the East Side. They had found the distinct culture of the predominantly Swedish Evangelical Lutheran area a bit more judgmental than our experience in the North End. Our family had lived in the North End since Mom and Dad came to town in 1926. The move to the East Side in 1946 was their first venture as entrepreneurs to be “their own bosses” of Wentland’s Grocery. We lived in the second floor of the building.

I was happy to be going back to St. Peter’s to graduate with the class I left three years earlier when we moved to the east side where I’d attended St. James School. And an added bonus was that the back yard of our new home looked across the vacant lot that served as the school playground annex and I had only to cross Church Street to get to school.

With the new home came a number of tasks to be completed in the moving-in process. I was assigned the task of cleaning up space in the basement. That’s when I found it. I was on a ladder cleaning the space in the basement rafters at the top of the foundation when I felt it. I held it carefully in my hand and lowered it carefully from its resting place. I laid it on the floor and looked at it. It was a BB gun. I had never had a BB gun, but I knew this one wasn’t like most of the ones I’d seen. This one looked old and hadn’t been used in a long time. I couldn’t even tell if it worked. It was all dusty. I could tell it wasn’t loaded because, when I was moving it down from the top of the foundation to the basement floor, there was no sound of loose bee-bees rolling around inside.

I would find out later that it was a Vintage Daisy Pump Gun Model 25 BB Rifle.

I marveled at my good fortune. After I finished my work in the basement, I went upstairs and told Mom about my discovery. She wasn’t concerned, because it wasn’t loaded, and she knew there were no bee-bees in the house. I wasn’t aware of real estate transactions and clauses in home purchase contracts that she told me about, making clear that, after the signing, whatever is in the house belongs to the new owner. In my about-to-be-teenage mind I didn’t consider the legalities of home purchase transaction. I’d found it, and the rule of the age had always been “Finders keepers. . .”

Early on I had discovered new friends living two doors away, the Waltons. In addition to a five-year-old daughter, the Waltons had two sons, Terry entering seventh grade and Peter going into sixth. Though they were younger than I was, I was glad to have other kids living in the neighborhood who were in my school. Their home was originally a Civil War era hospital. The walls were almost 4 feet thick, and the tall window casings on the upper floor rose from the floor to almost the top of the twelve-foot high ceiling.

It is a testament to ignorance that the city, not caring enough to research the history of the area of the former Camp Fuller and this Civil War Hospital, made the decision to tear down this historic structure because it was considered "an eyesore."

Link to Civil War History—a Digression

Back in the 1860’s, Rockford was the site of a Civil War encampment that covered the area stretching from that hospital to the Rock River, just four blocks away. It was in August of 1862 that Camp Fuller http://www.churchillsgrove.org/neighborhood-history was established as a training ground for four Illinois regiments, the 74th, 92nd, 93rd and 95th. It was set up in an area of Rockford, known as Churchill's Grove, named for an original owner of the tract of land. It was a picturesque site, along the river with groves of trees. It was a popular visiting site for the local populace, as they showed their patriotism and support for the war by showering the soldiers training in the camp with food and attention. When the soldiers left, in December of 1862, the camp was closed. Its legacy is a plaque on a stone (pictured right) set in the corner of Huffman Boulevard and Fuller Avenue marking the former entrance to the camp. It reads: ”1861-1865 - Marking the entrance to Camp Fuller where the 74th, 92nd 95th and 96th regiments Illinois Volunteer Infantry were encamped 1862. Erected by John A Logan, Camp No. 26, Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War and Auxiliary No. 20 - September 1922.

Back to the Story

In the week we’d moved in, I’d gotten acquainted with Terry and Pete. They told me about Leroy Ratz, their friend, who had lived in the house at 1252 before we move in, and who had moved away, and how much they missed him. But they knew he’d come back to visit now and then since his family hadn’t moved too far away. They were glad that another boy had moved into the house to keep the boy/girl balance of the neighborhood--an important factor at that age.

I began to think. I wonder who the BB gun could have belonged. It was so dusty when I found it, I wondered if it could have been left there in that remote place in the basement by a previous owner some years ago? Or could it belong to the previous owner? Could Leroy have forgotten he had it? What kind of kid could have had something so valuable and then forgotten he had it?

I was to find out in a couple of weeks. Terry and Pete mentioned that Leroy was coming over to visit. I hadn’t mentioned the BB gun to them earlier. And I hadn’t wanted to bring it out, thinking they might recognize it and “rat” me out to Leroy. And anyway, I didn’t have any BBs for it so there was no point in taking it outside. Then there was the chance that once they knew I had it and they knew it was Leroy’s, I ran the risk of losing their friendship if I didn’t let Leroy know I’d found it. After all, they’d known Leroy for a lot longer time than they’d known me.

When Leroy came over, even though I could have claimed the BB gun as my own since it was in the house when the sale was final, I was suffering pangs of conscience. I asked him about it, and his face immediately lit up. “Yes, I wondered what happened to that! Where did you find it?”

I went into the story of my finding it when I was cleaning the basement.

In the end, I gave up the BB gun, though reluctantly and with a twinge of regret. But I kept three good friendships.

Making Fun of the Neighbor Kids

The little sisters of Pete and Terry and Carol Parkinson were the only girls on the block beside Pam Gee on whom I had a crush in the summer of 1951—that’s a story for another time. As pre-teens so often do, we gave names to girls that sent them ballistic with embarrassment or rage. Carol was in Pete’s class. And she received teasing by way of a reduction of her name to “Cowo,” a slurring the pronunciation of her name. Needless to say, she didn’t like it and let them know. In a later era, that kind of behavior would be classified as bullying. But at that time we had no idea of the hurt such activity caused.

In a later year, the Parkinson’s home was bought by Saint Peter Church.

The home of the teased-in-jest girl became in 1958 the site of the St. Peter Church and Rectory and lies beneath what is part the sanctuary of the church. Seems some sort of justice in that.

Home for the Summer

The summer of ’52 was my first summer vacation home after freshman year in the seminary. All my seminary classmates at Sacred Heart Mission Seminary in Geneva, Illinois, were from Ohio, Pennsylvania and distant parts of Illinois. My grade school classmates now attending high school in Rockford—either West High or St. Thomas—were going in other directions. I found it easier to be with friends living close by. It never occurred to me that Terry and Pete were two and three years younger than I.

The Summer of Projectiles

One of the Terry’s passions was his love for science. He loved to experiment. Pete and I were drawn into them. The summer of ‘52 was the summer of projectiles. I remember we started with a project to create our own form of small rockets. Scrounging around our basements, we found various materials to construct rockets and launcher. It was at first two boards making a trough in an “V” shape. We packed match heads tightly into aluminum foil rolls with a match protruding from the back and sent those miniature rockets progressively farther across the yard. By finding ways to reduce the friction of our launcher, we were able to gradually extend the flight of our rockets. When we launched one over the phone wire in the back alley and onto the roof of the Talmadge’s two story mansion two houses away across the alley up on Church Street, we began to consider alternate flight paths. The interest turned to launching projectiles from a lead pipe resurrected from plumbing leftovers.

“What if we were to cap off the end of the pipe and drill a hole in the cap, tightly pack match heads in the end of the pipe?. And what if we could find a way to plug the butt end of the pipe, where the “rocket” would be. . .?!?” Our “what ifs” developed from a rocket launcher to a foot-long pipe with a compartment for a firecracker. The projectile became chrome rivets—rejects from my brother Stan’s work—I found in our basement. We tightly waxed the rivet into the end of the pipe. We set up our launcher at one end of in the two adjoining back yards—ours and the Doran's’. We lay down in the grass carefully aiming the pipe, one end held by bricks placed at just the right height, the butt end propped up on a rock. After the first “experiment” when the burnt wick of the firecracker fell on the exposed skin of my arm, we learned to keep our arms away from under the wick. After we lit the firecracker’s wick protruding through the hole in the elbow of the pipe, the wick fizzed into the “firing chamber” at the back end of the pipe, and the firecracker went off, sending the rivet out the “muzzle” of the pipe some 30 feet across the back yards toward a stack of logs lined up endwise next to our garage. Excited by our successful shot, we rushed to the logs and found that the rivet had imbedded itself flush into the surface of one of the logs. However, in subsequent “launches,” the rivet missed its mark, passing between the logs and lodging in the side of the garage. One of the marvels of this summer research-and- development project was how the power of the “launching” increased each time. But then we reached a point when we knew we had to stop. We arrived at this conclusion when, at the last firing, the rivet missed the logs, passing between them and hitting the garage. There were a couple of noises after that. Again we got up from the grass excitedly and went to the garage as we looked at the log pile. And to our amazement, we saw that the rivet had again missed the logs, passing between them and puncturing through the garage wall. We ran to the garage door and quickly slid it open. We looked inside the garage wall for the chrome rivet. A search revealed that there was broken glass on the floor next to two storm windows with holes through the panes. But no rivet. Then we looked across to the opposite wall of the two-car garage. Luckily the car was not in the garage, for against the opposite wall was a rivet-sized dent in the wood. And there on the cement floor was the rivet. We never said it in just so many words though we thought it: we had made a gun. The “projectile” experiment stopped there. We turned to making fireworks after that.

The Walton-Wentland Fireworks Factory

After the “projectile” experiments, our attention turned to the thought of making “fountains.” Sparklers were readily available for purchase in the weeks before the 4th of July. And “Lady Finger” firecrackers could be bought in some places.

Terry had this idea that removing the magnesium compound from the sparklers would serve the purpose. So after removing the material, we crushed the material and paced it in an empty Old Spice jar from the trash. We placed the heavy jar container on the driveway of the alley and, using a sparkler as the wick, we lit it and stood back to watch the flame slowly make its way into the jar and its contents. Sure enough.the compound took the flame and began to spew a fountain of sparking fire about a yard up into air before fizzling out leaving a molten blob of red hot mass on the ground.

Following that success, we began to consider a more dramatic effects.

After a few further alterations we were ready to go public, offering a fireworks display for our parents the night of the 4th.

We’d found that it was important to wrap the jar with duct tape to keep it from losing form before the fountain was completely burned out, thereby making sure the spewing flame would keep its form and height. But the dramatic ending was to be accomplished by the placing of a firecracker in the bottom of the jar.

In preparation for the event, for safety, we had dug out a six-inch deep hole in the yard for the piece-de-resistance finale.

When the time came, we invited our parents to sit a safe distance away on our picnic table down the yard near the house. Family members watched, moms almost certainly nervous, though they didn’t let on.

When we lit the sparkler “fuse” and stood back a number of feet for safety, everyone was in expectation.

The fire of the “fuse” reached the crushed magnesium and a fountain of sparks rose a few feet in the air for a few seconds until there was this loud boom as the firecracker went off. And with that, the contents of our creation went spewing into the air in a final blast, molten glass and clumps of the caked red hot coals went flying up into the air, coming to rest on the surrounding grass. Terry, Peter and I looked at one another in amazement and then to our parents. It wasn’t clear if they were amazed or in shock. What was clear is that they were relieved no one had been hurt by the flying masses of molten coals. That was the last of our fireworks creations. We’d accomplished our goal.

Still to Come:

Siamese Cats of the Walton Family: Dwindling Tumbling Synge

The Inner Tube Raft on the Rock River

Views of the Rock River at the end of Guard Street at National Avenue (2005) From the shore here Terry and I launched the inner tube raft we built in 1953.