An Anchor in the Prairie: The Life and Times of Bill Forbes

By Bill Forbes

"As a kid I guess I was too dumb or naïve to realize I was poor." So writes Bill Forbes about his growing up years in a small town in Midwest America in the 1940s and '50s. From humble beginnings he began a journey that would take him through three careers and into retirement. Following four years on active duty in the U.S. Navy and then two years selling encyclopedias door-to-door, Bill reenlisted for another four year tour in the Navy; much of it in a war zone. After an honorable discharge he began a 20 year broadcast journalism career; during which he interviewed four U.S Presidents. In 1988 he left the broadcast world for a civil service career in Washington, D.C., again with the U.S. Navy. After traveling the world with the Navy job and upon retirement in Southern California, Bill continued to travel, this time for leisure. he has the bragging rights of setting foot on every continent on the planet. Yes, even Antarctica. As he looks back on more than six decades Bill Forbes still feels the influence of the U.S. Navy He says, "I'm just a Fleet Sailor at heart."

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 21, 2006
• ISBN: 9781483505084

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Script

PREFACE

I never intended to write an autobiography. It all started when I met a talented young writer named Eric Obenauf. He was tending bar part time while completing his first novel, Can You Hear Me Screaming? He worked at a bar in a hotel where I frequently stayed during my working years on the road. After sharing a few of my on the road stories with him, he casually mentioned that I might want to write a book myself. I didn’t take him seriously (well, not at first), but when he offered that encouragement some months later, I gave it some thought. More out of curiosity than anything else, I began putting some of my lighter memories into my computer. When I showed those pages to Eric, he suggested that I expand my story to include more of my personal life. One thing led to another and the following pages resulted.

In the early pages that follow, I hope to paint a picture of a more innocent time in the Midwest. I grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s on the prairie of Illinois. For those who grew up in my time and place, I hope these pages bring back fond memories. For those of a later generation, I understand that times change and you must change with them, much as I changed from my parent’s generation. However, I hope not all things from the past are abandoned.

Not all of the experiences in this book are mine. I was a news reporter for 19 of the 20 years I was in broadcasting, and I have always been fascinated by the tales of other people. Because I made a career out of gathering and telling the experiences of others, I couldn’t possibly tell my story without sharing some of theirs.

While there are exceptions, I intentionally omitted full identities of most characters in the book, but the characters are and were real people. I believe some of the characters would be embarrassed if they were identified, even many years after the fact. It is not my intention to do this. So to avoid any chance of embarrassing those few, I simply used first names for most people (and in some cases, no names). However, there are times when I feel full identity is necessary.

A major part of my adult life involved the U.S. Navy. I admit that I’m still a Fleet Sailor at heart. I make no apologies for this. I’m proud of it. And I’ll always be proud of my Midwest heritage. I was born in Illinois, also known as The Prairie State. The title of this book, AN ANCHOR IN THE PRAIRIE, is symbolic of the pride I have in the U.S. Navy and symbolic of the values I gained while growing up in Middle America. Those values have been my anchor in life. That anchor has served me well.

Most of the research for this book was done in the library of my memory. The events were as I remember them. In my mind, this is the way they unfolded.

Chapter 1

THE EARLY YEARS

As a kid I guess I was too dumb or naïve to realize I was poor. Not the kind of poor that meant I went to bed hungry or never had clean clothes to wear; but poor in the sense that my divorced Mother was always scraping to get by; always in debt as she did her best to raise her four kids. There was my older sister Elda, who was born in 1934, then my brother Bob, born in 1935. My younger sister Ruth Ann was born in 1938, and I came along in 1939. Yeah, that’s me, William Arthur Forbes. I was teasingly called the baby of the family for many years. My older sister was named Elda Louise but when my brother came along and was just learning to talk, his translation of his sister’s name sounded like IE. That’s what she was called by her siblings ever since. My other sister was called Ruth Ann by her family.

Family portrait circa 1942

My Father had been in the Army during World War II. He was one of the fortunate ones never transferred overseas. Following the war he worked at various jobs, sometimes in Chicago, 100 miles away. He would be gone all week, and after a few years, his weekend visits became less frequent until they stopped all together. While I have a vague memory of my Father as I was growing up, I don’t have a memory of him living at home. My parents divorced when I was five. Although the court ordered my father to pay child support, he seldom did. While there was no court ruling that prohibited visitation, I probably saw my dad fewer than 5 times as I was growing up, even though he lived less than ten miles away. After the divorce, my Mom took her four kids to live with her Mother.

My grandmother’s house had two bedrooms, a living room, dining room, and kitchen. One of the bedrooms belonged to my Uncle. He was a single guy who tended bar, not necessarily for a living, but for alcohol. Very few nights would he come home sober. That fact alone is amazing since my grandmother was a strict Baptist and forbid any trace of liquor in her house. And she let everyone know, including my Uncle, that she prayed for him every night.

The second bedroom was for my Mother and her four kids. With a double bed and a roll-away bed, we managed. There was a daybed in the dining room that was used as sort of a couch during the day. It became my grandmother’s bed at night.

Boyhood home

My Mom would get a bank loan every October so she could give her kids a Christmas. Then she would work hard all year, barely paying off that loan so she could get another one the following October. I guess I didn’t realize we were poor because I was aware that there were a few others in my little hometown of Utica, Illinois that had less than we did. Even though I was aware that my Mom lived from pay check to pay check, I didn’t often think about what we didn’t have.

My Mother worked at the Westclox clock factory in Peru, Illinois from the time I was five until after I left home at 18. She worked on an assembly line, doing the same thing over and over all day, every day; and then she would come home to face the typical problems of raising four kids. It couldn’t have been easy for her, but the factory job was the only source of income she had.

Another reason life wasn’t easy for my Mother was my Grandmother. In my family we called my Mother Mom. Because she had called her Mother, Ma, that’s what we called my Grandmother; she was Ma to us kids. I believe Ma was convinced that her way of doing things was the only way, or at the very least, her way was the right way. I don’t want to paint the wrong picture here. My Grandmother could be a very warm person. There was no doubt that she loved her family. And she was certainly a hard working woman when it came to keeping her house. Her husband, my Grandfather, had passed away in the mid-1930s, several years before I was born. Ma made sure everyone in the household knew that she was the matriarch of the family.

Reinforcing that point, an Aunt of mine told me a story, years after I had grown up: In early 1935 my family consisted of Mom, Dad and my older sister. They lived in a rented house on Canal Street in Utica, just a block away from Ma’s house. Mom was pregnant with my brother Bob and had decided she was going to have her baby at home. Ma insisted that the baby was to be born in the hospital. When my strong willed Grandmother made her opinion known, it was a rare event if my Mom went against her wishes. But this time she did. Bob was born at home and was doing just fine. Several weeks after the birth, my Aunt, who lived in a different town, went to see her new nephew. As she told the story, as soon as Mom saw her, she started to cry. What’s wrong? my Aunt wanted to know. Through her tears, Mom said, Ma hasn’t been to see my baby. Apparently, Ma was so angry that Mom had gone against her wishes; she was going to teach her a lesson. It was a lesson learned because my sister Ruth Ann and I were born in St. Mary’s hospital in LaSalle.

My other Grandmother, my Father’s Mother, lived a couple of blocks from us as I was growing up. She was a widow who, while not rich, was known to be financially comfortable. She lived by herself. Gram Norton, as we called her, was a nice enough lady but she would never be close to me or my siblings. I don’t remember ever getting a birthday or Christmas present from Gram Norton. My Mom always made sure Gram Norton had a Christmas present from us kids.

Most kids in Utica, Illinois in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, as well as kids for miles around Utica, were brought into this world by Doc Geen. I don’t even remember his first name. He was Doc Geen to everybody. Doc Geen was an older man when I was born so he was always old to me. I remember him as a portly man with snow white hair. He lived in one of the biggest houses in Utica, just a block from where I lived. (The neighborhoods in Utica had absolutely no bearing on your income or social status). Doc Geen would deliver babies in the hospital or in the home, wherever the occasion arose. He was also the doctor who did the appendix and tonsil removal when necessary, but this had to be done in LaSalle, the closest hospital.

There were so many Geen babies in Utica that, during the town’s centennial celebration in 1952, as a money raising venture for the centennial committee, one could buy a pin-on button that read: "I’m One - Are You? Geen Baby". There probably weren’t too many citizens of Utica who didn’t qualify to wear one of those buttons. My Mom made sure that each of her kids had one of these buttons. I still have mine. I know my sister Ruth Ann has hers.

My sisters, brother, and I were all Geen babies. I can’t recall a time in my life when all four of us didn’t get along. I suppose there were times when we were angry with one another over some perceived offense, but none of those times come to mind. Well, there was one time: I was probably eight years old. I recall my younger sister Ruth Ann and I were in my Grandmother’s front yard playing. I don’t recall what we were doing, but I do remember things weren’t going my way. I guess even eight year olds can vent their frustration. At my tender age, I don’t know how or when I added this to my vocabulary, but I said, God Damn it. I didn’t know my sister could run so fast. She beat a path to the house so she could tell Mom I had said the GD word. As I saw her disappear around the corner of the house headed for the back door, I knew I was in trouble. The next thing I knew, I was being called into the house. I found out that day what toilet soap tastes like. Yeah, my mouth was washed out with soap. For those who haven’t had this punishment; soap doesn’t taste good. When my sister told my Mother of my extended vocabulary, there were no questions asked. I wasn’t even given a chance to deny it before the bar of soap was applied to a washcloth and that washcloth applied to my tongue. As I look back on this incident, I guess I was lucky that Ruth Ann loved me because, while she knew no questions would be asked before the punishment was meted out, she didn’t make up things for which I could be punished. I guess I did enough on my own that she didn’t have to make up things. The fact that I remember this incident at all shows me that this old fashioned punishment worked very well.

My siblings and I were raised in the Baptist Church. My grandmother was the enforcer. If we missed Sunday School it was only because we had the chicken pox, measles, mumps, or some other contagious childhood disease. (I think we had them all). Likewise, we never missed the Sunday evening meeting of the B.Y.P.U. Although it was seldom ever referred to as the Baptist Young People’s Union, that’s what the letters stood for. We could also be counted on to attend Daily Vacation Bible School, a weeklong session in the church basement at the beginning of school summer vacation. Bible School consisted of games, arts and crafts, and of course, Bible studies. The Baptists didn’t miss a chance to pass the collection plate here either. Instead of a formal passing of the plate, there would be a contest between the boys and girls to determine which team would contribute the most pennies on any given day. A running total was displayed all week. One summer we were amazed as one kid had a dollar. He went to Selmer’s Drug Store and traded it for 100 pennies. We boys won the contest that year.

We were taught by the Baptists that it’s sinful to consume alcohol, dance, and go to movies. It was also a sin to play cards. Gambling wasn’t mentioned. I guess it was assumed that if you played a game of cards you were gambling. While it was also sinful to smoke, that was often overlooked since most adult males in the church were smokers. Many were drinkers too but they did this more discreetly. As far as my grandmother was concerned, it was okay for men to smoke cigarettes in her house, but for women it was strictly forbidden.

It was important to Mom and Ma that I and my siblings be baptized at an early age. Baptists believe that the only people to reach heaven are those born again Christians. Apparently part of the process of being born again is to be baptized. But before being baptized, one must accept Jesus Christ as my own personal Savior. And of course this declaration must be made before the entire congregation. It was always called, coming forward because that’s what we did. When the minister made the call for those who had recently seen the light, if any were so moved, they would walk to the front of the congregation. They would come forward. After several people came forward, a baptismal service would be scheduled. In my church they always waited for several new converts to come forward before scheduling the service. It was not convenient to conduct a service for just one person. Baptists believe that you must be totally immersed in water. The ritual would take place in the church. Beneath the platform the minister used to deliver his sermon (it was never called a stage) was a tank that was big enough to hold the minister and one person. The hinged floor of the platform would be raised, the tank would be filled with water, the principals would be dressed in white, and the minister would perform the ritual for each person. But a person couldn’t be baptized until he or she was old enough to realize what accepting Christ really meant. At least, that’s what the Baptists told each other. That’s why babies are not baptized in the Baptist church. I was seven years old when I was baptized. That’s hardly old enough to realize the significance of what was going on. But the pressure from parents and grandparents was intense, so I declared to the world at age seven that I was born again, and I was baptized by Reverend Beck. Years later I would remember my baptism when I watched a segment of the TV series THE WALTONS. The grandmother on that show, played so well by Ellen Corby, reminded me so much of Ma. The pressure exerted by the mother and grandmother on one of the Walton children to get baptized seemed very real. When the character Ben, played by Eric Scott, was reluctant to be baptized, mama and grandma Walton showed their true Baptist colors when they became very angry. Never mind that accepting Christ is supposed to be a personal thing. I think the creator of THE WALTONS, Earl Hamner, and I must have had similar upbringings. I suspect his hometown was similar to mine in the 40s and 50s.

My hometown had city limit signs on the highway that declared the population was 1,000. To my knowledge, that number hasn’t been changed in 65 years. When someone said downtown, they were talking about Mill Street, a two block stretch of store fronts. Mill Street was actually three blocks long, but only two blocks had stores. For some reason, the alley behind the stores on the west side of Mill Street was officially named Main Street. Because no one ever referred to either street by name, the fact that an alley in town was named Main Street was merely a fact of Utica trivia. Actually, each side of Mill Street had an unpaved alley running behind the stores. Ostensibly, the alley was for delivery vehicles. But this is where many of the Baptists parked their cars so they could go in the back door of the three taverns in town.

On the north end of downtown was the Rock Island railroad tracks. On the south end of downtown was the Illinois and Michigan Canal. This was a canal built in the mid 1800s to link Lake Michigan in Chicago to the Illinois River in LaSalle, a few miles west of Utica. The Illinois River empties into the Mississippi, thus giving farmers and merchants water transportation from Lake Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico. The canal was abandoned in the early 1900s. As I was growing up, the canal was little more than a huge mosquito farm. In recent years many miles along the canal have been turned into parks and nature trails.

Although my hometown is officially named The Village of North Utica, to nearly everyone, it was (and is) Utica. The original town grew up near the Kaskaskia Indian settlement on the banks of the Illinois River, a mile south of the present location. When the Illinois & Michigan Canal opened up in 1830, businesses moved closer to this waterway because, unlike the Illinois River, the I & M Canal didn’t flood. However, a creek flowing through downtown did overflow its banks on occasion.

When I lived in Utica, the demarcation line separating the sections of the village was downtown. Anything east of Mill Street was the east end. Anything south of the canal was the south side. If you lived directly north of the Rock Island Railroad, you didn’t live on the North side, you lived on Clark’s Hill. I don’t ever remember hearing the west end of town being called the west end. One either lived in Zulu Town (a neighborhood of one street and probably three or four houses), on Lincoln Street, or on Gobbler’s Knob. I have no idea where the names Zulu Town and Gobbler’s Knob originated. I won’t even speculate.

Mill Street Utica, Illinois 1960s

I lived in the east end. There were only three other boys in my immediate neighborhood near my age so they were my closest friends. My older brother had his own friends. The two groups would never mingle. However, when I grew older, I would frequently pal around with my brother and another kid. We were carefree as we did the same things kids did all over the country. We captured lightning bugs in the summer evenings and kept them in a mason jar with air holes punched in the lid. We played softball, basketball, and football, all in the appropriate season. None of the games was organized. We were just a bunch of kids choosing up sides and playing the game. There was no Little League in Utica. In fact, we never played baseball, just softball. If it wasn’t at the Major League level, we called the game of baseball, hard ball. And speaking of Major League baseball, my boyhood idol was Stan Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals. I’m still a Cardinal fan.

When there was no ball game going on, we frequently played mumble-d-peg. Have you heard of this game? This was played with a pocket knife. Every boy carried a pocket knife for whittling or some other perceived emergency. One of those perceived emergencies was a challenge to play mumble-d-peg. It was the pocket knife equivalent of HORSE in basketball. A small peg (whittled with your pocket knife) would be stuck in the ground. The first player would throw or flip his pocket knife in some elaborate manner, trying to stick the knife upright in the ground. If he was successful, the next person had to match the shot. If he didn’t match the preceding player’s shot (although we didn’t call it a shot), that person might have to pull the peg from the ground with his teeth, or he could be eliminated from the game. The punishment for missing the shot was always determined before play began. If the pocket knife stuck upright, the next player would have to match the play, and so on. Although there would eventually be a winner to the game, the only thing won was the bragging rights.

Marbles was another game in which we tested our talents with our buddies. Sometimes the winner was able to walk away with the loser’s marbles; but more often than not, it was played for the bragging rights of winning.

As I look back on my childhood, I now realize my family was not in the same financial league as my playmates’ families. Not that their families were considered rich; they were not. But at least they had their own home, a car and a television. These were the 50s after all. Every family in this small town had a car and a TV then. And every family had their own home, right? No; not everyone. For my Mother and her brood, we didn’t have any of the three. And some of my friends had this thing called an allowance, something unheard of in my family. When I or my siblings got a job, whether a full time paper route or a summer job or just mowing lawns and shoveling snow, the meager income went from us to my Mom. But we were proud to help. If the other kids in the neighborhood passed judgment on us, I was not aware of it. In hind sight, even though it was unspoken in my family, we knew there was a difference.

Perhaps it was the fact that I was sharing my Grandmother’s small house with her, an Uncle, my Mom, two sisters, and a brother, and the fact that I didn’t have indoor plumbing where I lived until I joined the Navy at 18 that put me and my friends on a different level. I didn’t feel comfortable inviting friends to my house. I suspect those who knew of my circumstances wouldn’t be comfortable visiting.

I would have been mortified, even at a very young age, if one of my friends was visiting and needed to use the bathroom. To most Americans, the bathroom is not only a place to take a bath, but it’s also where the toilet is located. For me, the bathroom was a kitchen sink with a basin of water heated on a coal burning cook stove in the winter. In the summer, water was heated on a three burner kerosene stove atop the now cold cook stove.

For us, bath night was Saturday night. Most of us in this country today would be surprised (and very upset) if we turned on the water faucet and couldn’t get hot water within a few seconds. It’s just one of those things we take for granted. Our source of water back then was one indoor faucet at the kitchen sink. The only time it wasn’t cold is when we wanted a drink of cold water. Then, for some reason, it didn’t seem to be very cold. But try to bathe in it and it was a whole different matter. Hence, the basin of water on the stove.

The toilet was a whole different issue. Nearly everyone who grows up in a climate with four seasons will have stories about the coldest place in the winter and hottest place in the summer. As a kid, for me, this would describe the outhouse. Our euphemism for the outhouse was outback. This was years before we knew Australians used the same term to describe an area of their country considered desolate and harsh. The main thing about our outback that was harsh was the aroma. I won’t go into detail; suffice it to say that, had the person who founded a famous Australian themed steak house grown up in my family, he would have found a different name for his restaurant chain. My siblings and I learned how to control our bladders late at night (most of the time) because we didn’t want to go outback, particularly in the winter. More than once my Mother and Grandmother would be very upset with my brother or me when they woke up to find yellow snow not too far from our back door.

Don’t think I’m feeling sorry for myself because of what I didn’t have as a kid. As a child in the 40s and 50s, growing up in the Prairie State of Illinois was a happy time in a happy place for me. I knew I was loved by my family. (At this point I didn’t consider my father part of my family). I believe a happy childhood made way for a happy adulthood.

I cherish many of those memories from the 40s and 50s. Some of the earlier memories were of formations of war planes that would fly over our little town enroute to a war zone; a place that I couldn’t even imagine. We could hear them before we could see them. We would stop whatever we were doing and search the sky until someone would shout, There they are! I always wanted to be the first to spot the planes, but it seldom happened because I was the youngest of the group. Those older more experienced kids of 6 or 7 knew where to look. We would watch until the planes were out of sight. An event of such importance was worthy of supper table conversation. I never failed to share these sightings with my family. I couldn’t imagine anyone not being as excited as I was. Over the years I have thought of those planes and how they were so delightful to a little kid. The concept of war wasn’t even a part of my young life. I was too young to realize the purpose of those aircraft, and how they meant death and destruction to strangers a world away. We certainly didn’t realize that many of the men in those airplanes wouldn’t survive the war. It’s simply a memory of carefree and happy times.

Another memory from the war years is what we considered our small part of the war effort. Before WWII, the U.S. military imported a material from seed pods of a species of tree in the Orient. The material was used to make kapok life jackets. The Orient was an area of the world that was controlled by the Japanese during the early war years, so a substitute material had to be found. Enter the lowly milkweed found in many parts of the U.S. To a kid, a milkweed was important because we knew if there was a caterpillar on it, that caterpillar would eventually turn into a Monarch butterfly. It’s only on the milkweed that Monarch butterflies lay their eggs. But this weed was considered a nuisance by most farmers. WW II changed that, at least temporarily. The milkweed grows a seed pod that contains a silky material. It was this milkweed pod that replaced the material previously used in kapok life jackets. Americans were asked to collect these milkweed pods and hundreds of tons were gathered. I recall my Mother, brother, sisters, and me collecting these pods. My Mom explained that it was to help win the war. I guess that was the easiest way to explain the purpose of our labor to little kids. I can still remember plucking the pods from the milkweed and watching in fascination as a milky substance oozed from the wound I inflicted on the plant. I’m not sure where we took those pods, but school kids all across the country were asked to make this collection a project. Perhaps we took the pods to the local school where they were gathered by a government agency, I don’t know.

My grandmother’s house was on the edge of town in the east end of Utica. It was near the Rock Island Lines railroad tracks. On the other side of the tracks was what we simply called, the woods. It was about 13 miles before the railroad tracks reached Ottawa, the next town to the east. Nearly everything in between was covered by woods. As kids, we enjoyed this natural playground as we explored those woods. We pretended we were great outdoorsmen and could live off the land if need be. The closest we came to living off the land was swiping tomatoes and watermelons from neighboring gardens and taking them into the woods to consume.

On our many treks into the woods we would often be near the tracks when a train came by. Without fail, when the engineer was sitting in his seat by the window as he passed, we would signal him to blow the train’s whistle by raising our right arm and jerking it in a downward motion, as if pulling the whistle chain. We always felt a sense of accomplishment when the engineer complied with our hand signaled request, which was more often than not.

The close proximity to railroad tracks meant we would have an occasional visitor who had been riding the rails. There were still people we called hobos and bums back then. The term bum to us kids wasn’t necessarily a derogatory term. It simply described a man who was down on his luck and had hopped a freight train for a free ride to who knows where. These men showed up at my Grandmother’s back door from time-to-time asking for something to eat. It was not uncommon in the 1940s. Despite our financial status, these hobos were never turned away without food. As strange as it may seem today, these men were tolerated by folks in the neighborhood. The County Sheriff was never called. These drifters were simply given a free meal and they went on their way. But you can bet they were visually tracked to make sure they made their way back to the railroad. By the mid-50s we seldom saw a hobo.

Back then trains were still pulled by steam locomotives; not only freight trains but passenger trains. Yes, there were still regular passenger trains scheduled through our town. In the very early years of my memory, passenger trains stopped at the Rock Island Depot on the north end of Mill Street. I clearly remember the hand pulled cart that was used by the station attendant to carry baggage and mail to and from trains. But there were many times when a train would go through Utica without stopping. The station attendant would hook a heavy canvas mail bag on a pole designed for this operation. As the train passed by the station, a device on the mail car would snag that mail bag and it would be retrieved by the man on board. From those trains that did stop in Utica, I can still hear the steam locomotive as the engineer began pulling out of the station. It was a loud chhhhhug of escaping steam followed by another and another. Each succeeding chhhhhug would come closer to the last until they were in quick succession as the engineer built up speed. As the train was pulling out of the station, the engineer would blow the train’s whistle several times. Many years later, in Washington, D.C.,