My Big Fat German Adolescence

I was eleven years old and a whole new world opened up to me when I moved to Minonk from the farm in 1952. Being a farm kid with a German name presented some obstacles that I had to overcome in order to be accepted by the city kids. In addition to adjusting to life in the city, I had to also adjust to becoming an adolescent at the same time.

In those days, most obstacles were overcome by excelling in sports. Sports transcended all prejudices. Luckily, I was good at baseball and started playing sandlot ball in the summer with the city kids on the south playground of the Minonk grade school which then was covered with grass, not blacktop. Every once in a while someone would hit a ball over the fence into Dan Claussen's yard on the alley side east of the playground. He would come out and get the ball and wouldn't give it back to us and that meant the end of the game.

To become citified you had to avoid dressing like a farm kid. This meant not wearing high top work shoes and long underwear in the winter. I can still remember a particular farm boy who broke into tears after being unmercifully teased about the garters he wore to hold up his Rockford socks.

The stereo-type in those days was that the farmers were mostly German, Republican, Protestant and drove Chevrolets while the Minonk city folk were more likely nonGerman, Democrat, Catholic and drove Fords.

Being a new kid on the block, I had to learn how to get along with city kids. I remember one time when I crossed over into the east side of Minonk for the first time. I encountered "Chow" Ketchmark who looked at me like a dog ready to attack. He finally did and after pounding the crap out of me for a few minutes, Jerry Glowacki came to my rescue. In those days us German farm kids considered the Irish and Polish kids who attended parochial school at St. Pat's as tough hombres who were not to be crossed. I finally figured out that if you didn't act scared and avoided eye contact, you wouldn't be picked on. Young boys are like dogs. If they sense that you are scared, they go after you.

The Cullen brothers, who lived on Walnut Street, would fight amongst themselves instead of with someone else. They would start wrestling and would put a hold on each other that would last for over an hour before one of them would give. We would stand around and ask them when they were going to give since we didn't want to break up the fight. We just stood there in amazement.

One of the rites of passage when you were a freshman in high school was to avoid being picked up and "dumped" by upperclassmen. Each fall after school started, upper classmen would cruise around Minonk looking for vulnerable freshman who might happen to be walking somewhere. Many times the upperclassmen would get out of the car and give chase to capture the poor sap who made the mistake of being out after dark. They would put the freshman in the car and take him to the country and put him out. The freshman would then have to suffer the indignity of walking back into town. I remember a few times running home with Bob Veihman after a movie just to make sure that roving upperclassmen wouldn't catch us and dump us.

Another adolescent rite was to "sit" with a girlfriend in the Minonk Theatre. Often times while watching a movie, a girl would come up to a boy and ask him if he would come sit with another girl. The interested girl herself would never do the asking directly, it had to come through an intermediary. Usually, the guy would say yes and go down and sit with the other girl. Initially, it would often be an uncomfortable encounter while both would sit mute waiting for the other to say something. If they hit it off, they would eventually began to "neck." There was a couple of seats in the theater reserved for hardcore "neckers". The arm rest was removed between the seats to allow the two lovers to get real close to each other.

My adolescence coincided with the popularity of Marilyn Monroe. Boys back then considered her the ultimate fantasy girl. While her partially nude calender made her famous, you never saw nudity in magazines on the newstands in those days. Compared to today's standards, the so-called mens magazines back then looked like church bulletins compared to what's available today in movies or television. Some of us guys used to go to the Princess Sweet Shop and look at the girlie magazines on the magazine rack. More than once Herc Paloumpis, the proprietor, would ask me if the library was closed when I had lingered too long looking at magazines.

Nudity was non-existent in those days of Hollywood Biblical epics when the most exotic scene you could expect would be to see Victor Mature carry Deborah Padget out of a burning temple. However, a foreign import film with subtitles entitled "Monica" had a brief display of nudity. I joined some friends to drive to the Esquire Theater in Bloomington to eagerly see this daring new film. The movie turned out to be pretty boring with very little action. At some point I left to go to the restroom. When I returned my friends starting heckling me with, "You idiot! You missed the scene which showed her nude!" They were right. The rest of the movie was just as boring as the beginning with no more nudity. My friends never did let me forget that one.

I knew of no one who drank or took drugs or smoked dope in those days. Some of the kids would sneak a cigarette once in awhile but for the most part, we all had to deal with reality. The reality was that adolescent then as it is now was a wonderful and terrifying experience.