Everything Is True, Except the Parts I Made Up: Reminiscences and Revisions of My Muscatine Youth

By Ed George and F. P. Kopp

During the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, Fred Kopp's image, name and deeds were erased from all obelisks, temples and public monuments in Muscatine, Iowa. This book attempts to rectify that injustice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 11, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462843510

Book preview

PART ONE

I

The Eternal Warrior

We were warriors. At that time, over half our lives had been spent in mastery of the arts of war. Some days there was a platoon full of Five-Star Generals in our foxhole. Each one of us holding the absolute highest rank so that none of us would outrank the others. Each one of us wielding our rifles, pistols, machine guns, and bayonets to stem the Nazi hordes from overrunning my backyard.

When heroism was demanded, we all dutifully laid down our lives for the good old U. S. of A. Never before (or since) have so many Congressional Medals of Honor been awarded, posthumously, to the same honored dead for repeated and successive deaths while on active service in my backyard in so many different historical eras in one afternoon.

Between my fourth birthday and somewhere around my twelfth, Denny Kopf, Billy A., John Boston, the Gesell brothers (Cranston and John), David (whose last name remains unremembered), various others who came and went, and I fought approximately 6,833 battles in my backyard. Of course, some of our warlike endeavors ranged over most of the known block on which I lived—a veritable World War, if you will. But my backyard was the Western Front of our small world, battered time and again by successive armed conflict. It was behind the large root from the elm tree on the western side of my yard that all final offensives were launched and all final stands were made. Here our five-year-old bodies found just enough room to cover ourselves and raise our guns in defiance at the imaginary hordes of evil, which had coveted my backyard through the years of my youth.

Yes, there were occasions when we all played baseball, football, hide and seek or tag with a larger group of neighborhood kids; but mostly we shot and killed each other and counted to thirty and came to life again as cowboys, Indians, GIs, sailors, and spacemen. We were children of our environment, and mostly that environment was the war stories and westerns on TV and in the movies.

Television was new then. Many of my friends from those days can recall when their homes first got a television, and all of us can recall the shows that we saw. The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, The Range Rider, Buffalo Bill, Jr., Maverick, Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, Bronco, Rawhide, The Roy Rogers Show, the Disney shows (Davy Crockett, Zorro, Texas John Slaughter, The Swamp Fox, etc.,), Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel, Wanted: Dead Or Alive, The Rebel, Trackdown, Tales of Wells Fargo, Twenty-six Men, Yancy Derringer, starring Davenport’s own Jock Mahoney, Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion, Rin Tin Tin (at Fort Apache), and endless reshowings of all the B movie westerns and Republic serials with John Wayne, Bob Steele, Tex Ritter, Bill Elliot, Hoot Gibson, Lash LaRue, and others. These shows filled our every conscious hour as we checked out the wonder and the glory of the original black-and-white TV.

The movies were more of the same as far as westerns were concerned: Davy Crockett (again, only this time big screen and in color), The Great Locomotive Chase, The Lone Ranger—movies where the lines to buy tickets were two city blocks long—even Elvis as a cowboy in Love Me Tender. But the movies, more than TV, gave us World War II in Cinemascope and Technicolor. The names of the movies are lost in a kaleidoscope of machine-gun fire, exploding tanks, and brave deeds. It was a war of which Americans were proud. So the cinematic retellings of every act of heroism were just about infinite.

World War II had only ended nine years before I turned five. The Korean War had only ended the year before. Denny Kopf’s own father had served as a genuine private, then a sergeant, then a private again, and finally as a sergeant again in WW II. (I’m not sure why exactly it gave Denny such pride to recount how his father had been busted in rank, but it did. And we were all duly impressed that our friend’s father had yo-yoed through the lower ranks of our Army at War.) And on the mantle in Denny’s house was a picture of his Uncle Donald whom I never knew personally and yet always knew as the real-life hero killed in action as a gunner in the Army Air Corps. Other houses had similar stories and similar pictures. In those days, Army helmets came from the attic, not from Army surplus stores.

Was it any surprise that we lived by the code of the warrior (as handed down by Channel 4 and Hollywood) for most of our youth?

This is not to say that there were no other TV shows or movies to interest us. There were lost cities and lost worlds, monsters and dinosaurs galore, even The Adventures of Robin Hood, Sir Lancelot, and Peter Gunn on a weekly basis. And which one of us of that certain age can forget 77 Sunset Strip with Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb. But time and again, TV and the movies gave us a new western hero or combat soldier to idolize. I could be Wild Bill, Denny could be Cheyenne, and whoever had a mask with the elastic string unbroken could be the Lone Ranger. None of us lost our dignity, even if someone else had dibs on our favorite character.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said of a show like Superman. In those days, he was the only superhero on TV. None of us had yet heard of Batman, The Flash, Wonder Woman, or The Hulk; those were TV shows far, far in the future then. So once the part of Superman was cast, the rest of us had to fight over who got to be Jimmy Olson and who had to be Lois Lane. When it came to playing that sort of show or movie, most of our time went into arguing about who was going to play the supporting cast. It was far better to stick with cowboys or war where every body could be a star.

In my neighborhood, we kids were fortunate enough to have vast arsenals of play guns. Thus, none of us ever suffered the acute embarrassment of being a World War II GI armed with a flintlock rifle or a Revolutionary War soldier armed with a Thompson submachine gun.

The plastic guns of my youth were usually cheap, easily broken affairs. Our best toy guns were made of metal, heavy and awkward for us to handle, almost as heavy to us as the real thing. I had two sets of twin six shooters, both sets made of cast iron with real leather holsters. For as far back as I can remember, they were just there. I have no idea how, or from whom, I got them. Probably Santa Claus had some idea I’d need them to protect the backyard. One set of guns was so long in the barrel (about eight or nine inches) that they were almost too heavy for me to lift. It took an effort to pull the trigger.

Best of all, these were cap guns. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! One hundred shots to the roll—five rolls to the box—a box or two in an afternoon. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! I’ve noticed that they still sell caps at the toy stores, but the guns today aren’t as well made. The caps don’t glide through them easily. If the kids try to use them, they soon get frustrated. I never hear the neighborhood yards erupt with Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! anymore.

Speaking of heavy guns, the TV shows now say, Kids, don’t try this at home for a reason. Back then, they didn’t and we did. Good guys and bad guys never killed each other in our TV shows. But the bad guys were forever slugging the good guys over the back of the head with the handle of their gun to knock the good guy out. And the good guys would invariably regained consciousness uttering the phrase I’m okay. He just knocked me out.

So we tried that out ourselves. What harm could there be? Trouble is, they didn’t teach knocking each other out in school or anywhere. So all we did is leave each other wideawake with darned sore heads. But we kept trying. Obviously, all we needed was practice. It worked so well on TV. Picture, if you will, a neighborhood full of bizarre children unsuccessfully conking each other over the head with cast-iron pistols.

Denny Kopf was my personal favorite target. But I wasn’t going to tell him I was practicing until I was as good as the TV guys.

Ouch, ouch! What are ya doin’?

Sorry, Denny, said I, there was a mouse on your head; (a common childhood problem) and I was kinda tryin’ ta knock it off ya. Sounded reasonable to me.

I wonder what we’d have done if only the TV of our day had said Kids, don’t try this at home . . .

In my crowd, the best guns around in 1957 or 1958 were put out by the Mattel Company. I had two of them, the Tommy Burp machine gun and the Winchester rifle. The Tommy Burp is long gone, but the Winchester survives in our attic. The Tommy Burp was plastic, but it was solid, hard, and heavy, with a bolt that you pulled back to load it. When you pulled the trigger, the gun rattled like a machine gun until the bolt returned to its original position. It came with a removable metal wire shoulder stock. When you removed the metal shoulder stock, you had one wicked looking space gun to police your average intergalactic backyard. The Winchester rifle shot caps and, when the rifle was cocked, ejected a spent cartridge.

When our army got old enough to cross the street, we began our push to drive the enemy out of the jungle at Uncle Billy Downer’s house. Uncle Billy wasn’t anybody’s uncle. He was just a nice retired banker who lived by himself. But he had a thicket of bushes and trees in his backyard, and he endeared himself to us by being so old and hard of hearing that he didn’t object to the constant jungle warfare outside his window. We never were finished exploring the vast uncharted depths of that ten-by-thirty-foot patch of earth. Countless scouting patrols were lost or ambushed in its dark places. But its strategic position with its commanding view of the Spruce Street sidewalk two feet below made it the focal point of our across-the-street expeditionary force.

‘Round about eight years old, one of the guys must have felt that shooting invisible, imaginary enemies ranked right up there with playing ring-around-the-rosy. About that age, it also gets annoying to have to explain wrestling with invisible people to your parents. Much better to divide up into two sides or armies and fight the other kids in your neighborhood. This is an intricate and complex type of war, blending the skills of all the major childhood disciplines of war, hide and seek, tag, kick the can, ditch ’em, and dodge ball. Counting skills too were tested as the rules required ever longer counted periods before the wounded and the dead could return to the action. Of course, only the worse cads and bounders would deliberately short count or lie about who shot whom first.

Rarely did this new form of warfare result in a peace treaty to end hostilities. Usually, the war ended when we got mad at each other and went home. You might say that the pretend hot wars we’d staged gave way to real-life cold wars.

One of the highlights of this period was the summer when we all went to sea as sailors in submarine crews. Washington School, which in those days lay at the corner of Spruce and Third, was in the process of installing new desks. Each of the desks came disassembled in a fairly sturdy cardboard box. The box probably measured eighteen inches by eighteen inches by thirty-six inches. At any rate, it was big enough to hold one boy comfortably with his legs bent and his knees pulled up.

One day there must have been ten or so empty boxes lying in the schoolyard when the local chapter of seven- and eight-year-old pack rats descended. I’ll never forget how our faces looked when we asked one of the workmen, Mister, can we have those empty boxes? and he said, Sure. Straight away each of us grabbed one or two boxes apiece and transported them to the shipbuilding facilities in my neighbor’s backyard.

The design we used was based on the well-known design for submarines that we’d all seen on TV: four boxes on the bottom with one box on top of these as the conning tower; and all of the boxes accessible to the crew, including the conning tower. We had enough boxes for two subs, one launched in my backyard and one in Denny’s. Imagine how little we must have weighed, if an empty cardboard box below could support a boy in the upper conning tower box with nothing supporting the box underneath.

For at least a week, maybe two, we went to sea every day to engage in submarine warfare. This consisted of everybody taking between fifteen minutes and a half hour to get positioned in the subs, then lying relatively still inside our respective compartments for an hour and a half while we shouted the sounds of war and defiance at the other sub. Did we ever sink the other sub or kill its crew? I doubt it. How much fun could it be for one crew to lay there for five minutes while the other crew counted to a thousand? I don’t remember any boredom whatsoever. Those boxes were pure gold to us.

Eventually, both subs were lost in a raging storm somewhere in the North Atlantic. One morning we came out to find the shattered remains soaked and flattened by an overnight rain. We knew that the war was far from over, so we went back to the schoolyard for more of the crucial shipbuilding materials. But the workers were gone. Never again would the American and German submarine fleets sail from our backyards. Never again would our voices be heard shouting at each other for hours from inside cardboard boxes.

When I wasn’t practicing war outside, I was playing war games inside. Between ages four and ten, I acquired hundreds of Louis Marx & Co. cowboys, Indians, knights, Roman legionnaires and soldiers. I had a Prince Valiant Castle set, a Wyatt Earp western town set, an Alamo set, a Civil War set, a World War II set, Ben-Hur figures and chariots, a Cape Canaveral (now known as Cape Kennedy) set, and odds and ends of astronauts and other figures, with a dinosaur or two thrown in for good luck. Denny, next door, had a few that I didn’t have such as a Revolutionary War set.

For that time, these play sets were fairly expensive, costing around $6 or $7. In the day when the average weekly paycheck was around $40-$60, that was quite a lot to spend on a kid’s toy. The one advantage over today’s toys is that once you had a particular play set, there was nothing more of that item to buy. You could move on to the next toy.

In comparison, today’s toys always seemed to me to be too open-ended. What one of us parents could afford to get our kids a complete set of Star Wars action figures and their accessories at one time? Sometimes I felt as if my children’s Christmases were a series of reruns with Barbie, GI Joe, She-Ra, and He-Man gifts being given year after year.

When I was young, I received 50¢ per week as my allowance. This may seem paltry today, but it had vast purchasing power then. A movie ticket cost 25¢, popcorn and candy at the show cost 5¢ each, and pop was 10¢. Even so, I had to save my allowance for some three or four months before I accumulated enough to buy a Marx World War II Battleground play set for myself. It cost $6.50 from Sears. When I first decided I wanted one, Christmas and my birthday were too far in the future. I couldn’t expect it as a gift until one or the other of those days, so I either had to wait an impossibly long time or buy it for myself. The only thing that kept me going was a picture I clipped from the last year’s Sears Christmas Catalog.

When I finally had saved the $6.50, I’ll never forget how disappointed I was when I first learned what the phrase plus tax meant. I had to wait for another week’s allowance to cover the lousy 2 percent sales tax. Needless to say, I’ve been real disappointed with our tax system ever since that time.

The one play set which was truly priced out of my reach was the Ben-Hur play set. It cost in excess of twelve bucks. My folks unequivocally said no, it cost too much. And I knew that I would never have the patience to save up my allowance for the succeeding ten or twelve months that I calculated it would take to stash away over twelve dollars. So I tried something that I’d never done before; I wrote directly to Louis Marx & Co. Toys and begged them for some figures and chariots.

Imagine my surprise when they sent me fifty or sixty figures and four chariots with horses. Must have been people there that really liked kids. (No wonder they ultimately went bankrupt.) Of course, when I wrote them a second time, I got the more traditional sorry, kid, but you have to buy our product through one of our many fine retailers letter. Between the lines, I read the real message loud and clear: Don’t get greedy, kid!

The toy soldier sets with which Denny and I played were reserved for wars that were too big and complicated to stage outdoors. With the skills of Hollywood producers and scriptwriters, we used to put together extravaganzas that took days or weeks to play to conclusion. Some of the simpler story lines involved, for instance, cowboys discovering a lost world of dinosaurs with a futuristic superscientific civilization of knights and Romans living in a city that bore an eerie resemblance to the Alamo, Cape Canaveral, King Arthur’s Camelot and building blocks. I think that particular one, or possibly a later remake, won Oscars for Best Screen Play and for Best Set Design in a Kopp household production.

Even though the play sets had all kinds of accessories such as vehicles, cannons, broken wheels, dead horses, trenches, and barbed wire barricades, the most versatile accessory was plain old kitchen aluminum foil. Aluminum foil could change an ordinary army officer or cowboy into a hooded, masked, and caped superhero. My eyesight must not be as good as it used to be. Today I look back on a plastic figure with its head crudely wrapped in tin foil. Back then, I could clearly see that the tin foil had been perfectly shaped into an outline identical to Batman’s cowl or Rocket Man’s helmet.

A lot of the time these were solo flights of the imagination. Just me and a miniature cast of hundreds all spread out over my bedroom floor. And like a chess game, the pieces were scrupulously left in place as each chapter ended. My mother liked to clean my room once a week, but sometimes she had nowhere to step. Every usable spot on the floor was covered with little figures.

Denny and I never took our play sets outside. We had tried that early on, and we always seemed to lose pieces. I had a sandbox that was four by four inches. The sand was six inches deep. How could we permanently lose toy soldiers in something that small? But we did. Try as we might, we could never dredge them up again. Obviously the sand was quicksand. If someone were to go to my old yard and dig straight down at the location of the sandbox, I’m sure the missing figures will be found about eight feet down.

Another frequent hazard to the troops was death by giant dog. If you look at some of my old figures you’ll see the distinct imprint of dogteeth. All I can say is that some got swallowed, some got spit up.

Although most kids played with their toy soldiers outdoors, Denny and I had learned our lesson. Our troops were under house arrest for the rest of their natural play lives.

II

Port City of the Corn Belt

Muscatine. I’ve seen it from the air many times since I’ve grown up. I’ve flown over it relatively slowly in my partner’s small, twin-engine Cessna, flying back to the Quad Cities from court hearings and business trips to Des Moines or other semi-exotic Midwestern locales. I’ve flown over it swiftly in commercial jets descending to start their landing approach to the Quad Cities Airport. Either way, it looks small, really small, maybe three miles east to west and two miles north to south. Weed Park looks as if it were right next to the Grain Processing plant when they are actually on opposite sides of the town. It seems hardly big enough to have encompassed all of the adventures and dramas that my friends and I played out within its boundaries as we were growing up.

The city is located on the western end of that long stretch of the Mississippi where the river runs east to west, instead of its more celebrated north to south route. Just as the river runs contrary to expectations, the city itself often seemed to run contrary to expectations.

Take for instance the old high bridge, which connected Muscatine to Illinois, which lay to its south. Yeah, Illinois lies south of Iowa across the Mississippi at Muscatine, just as it does in the Quad Cities. Anyway, the bridge was a narrow 1890’s construction, built for horse and buggy, situated high enough above the main channel to allow the old paddlewheel boats with their tall smoke stacks to pass underneath. There was hardly room for two approaching gas-guzzling behemoths of the Fifties and the Sixties to pass each other. So you had to go slow, a lot slower than you would have liked. During the few times I drove across it after I got my license, my impulse was to floor the gas pedal and get the heck off the bridge as quickly as I could. Instead I had to fight my rising panic and keep pumping the brake pedal and steer and countersteer.

The darned thing wasn’t even straight. It seemed to me to be the only river bridge around these parts that didn’t cross the river in a straight line. As you neared the Illinois shore, the roadway jogged about thirty degrees to the west, then about one hundred fifty feet later, it jogged back about thirty degrees east.

When I was in kindergarten, a portion of the bridge collapsed, throwing two or three semis into the river. This was apparently the second time it had collapsed since it was built. State, County, and City officials all agreed that the construction of a new bridge was a safety imperative, a necessity. Accordingly, the new bridge opened for traffic as I was graduating from college.

Looked upon from the river, Muscatine resembles the cross-section of a shallow bowl. The riverfront and downtown district are at the bottom of the bowl with the land rising higher to the east and the west. Hence, the old-timers in my youth often referred to East Hill and West Hill as destinations and sections of the town.

Just about everything I knew on the Riverfront is gone now. The building that was the real hub of the Old Muscatine was the Power Boat Club located right on the shoreline by the harbor, later replaced by the new Power Boat Club. The Boat Club, in whatever version, was a great leveler of the social classes. It had the sort of ambiance where the country club set could socialize on equal terms with those that trapped and ate muskrats.

According to the postcards of my youth, Muscatine was the Port City of the Corn Belt. Apparently, the McKee Feed and Grain elevator must have shipped a heap of corn and beans out of the city.

In some circles it was still known as the Pearl Button Capital of the World. The buttons were made from clamshells dredged from the Mississippi. Yet, by the time I arrived on the scene, the pearl button industry was in decline. Plastic buttons were proving cheaper, more versatile, and more colorful. There wasn’t such a thing as a turquoise clamshell, but you could get plastic buttons to come out that color. Many of the button companies in Muscatine were switching to plastic or going out of business. At least one company was selling clamshell chips to Japan to be used in the budding cultured pearl industry there.

Some say the word Muscatine was the French trappers’ corruption of an Indian word meaning burning island or island of fire. In the not-too-recent past, part of what would become the southwest side of the city was physically separated from the mainland by a long slough. This island was covered with prairie grass, which frequently caught fire in the dry, hot summers. The Indians seemingly immortalized it as a place inhospitable for habitation. My hometown, fiery, inhospitable? The slough was filled in the early part of the Twentieth Century, but old-timers still referred to the Island when speaking of that area and the farmland beyond.

The Island was where the best watermelons and tomatoes were grown. To dissuade teenage watermelon thieves, the growers allegedly maintained a vigilante patrol to safeguard their crops. Legend says that these vigilantes were armed with shotguns loaded with rock salt. Whether the legends were true or not, I can’t say. Watermelons were cheap enough at the roadside stands that proliferated on the Island, and I always felt that rock salt under your skin was too high a price to pay for a free one. So I bought mine. However, at least one friend of mine swore that he had a very unpleasant time at the emergency room early one morning having rock salt picked out of his butt after a watermelon raid.

The Island was also home to the Gravel Pits. These were big holes in the earth, which were left after sand and gravel had been extracted. These holes were a hundred to two hundred feet or more deep. When there was no more sand and gravel to be extracted, the holes were allowed to fill with water.

The Gravel Pits were on private property, and trespassing was prohibited, at least in theory. Nevertheless, thousands of young people from Muscatine, Iowa City, and the Quad Cities used the Pits each summer for fishing, swimming, and partying. High school kids, motorcycle gangs, hippies, even parents with small children all used to frequent the Pits as though they were at some California beach. Because the area was partially secluded and sparsely patrolled by deputy sheriffs, the area became a focal point for semidisreputable activity. There was always a lot of underage drinking, and because of that, there were frequent fights. Sometimes there was nude swimming and sunbathing. Altogether the Gravel Pits had the seductive pull of some sort of outlaw Disneyland.

The bad thing about the Pits, aside from whatever moral judgments one may have formed from all the sordid goings-on, is that people died there. Every summer at least two or three people drowned in the Pits.

Essentially the Pits were without shallow water. Sure, there was a narrow fringe of gradually sloping water around the outside edge, but there was no telling how wide it was going to be. In one step, you could go from two or three feet deep to a hundred feet deep. Nor was it always clear how to get back to the shallow water. A few feet to the right or left of the shallow water in which you were just standing may be another deep drop-off. A lot of people that couldn’t swim, or were too drunk to swim, literally got in over their heads, panicked, and drowned.

Denny Kopf’s dad used to take Denny and me fishing at the Pits when we were eight to ten years old. Denny’s aunt and uncle had a farm across the road from one of the Pits. All I ever caught were little croppies and blue gills, which were generally not worth cleaning and frying, unless, of course, you could wheedle your mom into it just once. But I didn’t go to the Gravel Pits much in high school. In a manner of speaking, I was fortunate. My summer work schedule at the pool didn’t allow me much time for hanging around the Pits. As the Sixties came to an end, the Iowa Legislature passed a law making it a crime to swim at the Gravel Pits. The authorities were able to take a much more aggressive approach to patrolling the area. That pretty much put an end to the excesses.

In my youth, the population of Muscatine was approximately twenty thousand people. As I later came to learn, the population had stayed more or less constant since the turn of the century.

Economic dominion had passed from