November 2008 Message from Dan

Greetings Readers, Friends, and Other Visitors:

Watching the Presidential Debates in Elm Haven – Part II

The fall of 1960 had been relatively mild in central Illinois, but on this night of Oct. 21 when the five boys in Elm Haven, all members of the former Bike Patrol, gathered to watch the last Kennedy-Nixon debate at Dale’s and Lawrence’s house when their parents were both away for the evening, a cold front coming down from Canada collided with a wet air mass coming up from somewhere in the south and produced the first dramatic storm of autumn.

The kids first noticed something was going on outside when the picture on the Sylvania Halo Light TV began being lashed with static, the droning voices of Kennedy and Nixon occasionally being drowned out. Then a powerful gust of wind hit the old house and slammed the front door open at the same instant thunder crashed and the lights and TV went off.

The boys rushed to the front door to look out through the screen at the approaching storm. With the porchlight out, the whole town looked dark. Then lightning would strike somewhere to the south or west and all the trees surrounding the empty school block across the street would stand out in black silhouette. As the wind gusted again, the air was suddenly filled with leaves that hadn’t yet fallen from the oaks and elms and other huge trees that lined the streets.

“Holy shit,” said Jim Harlen. “I’m definitely not walking home now.”

“Where’s Mom?” asked Lawrence, the youngest. “Bowling should be over by now.”

“She probably went to the Parkside Café with the other ladies,” said his older brother Dale. Or to the tavern next door, Dale thought. Both brothers hated it when their mother had a few beers, either at home with friends or when she went out after bowling. Dale always got a stomach ache when he heard his mother slurring words even the slightest bit. “Lawrence,” he said as the lightning and thunder crashed again, “run back to the kitchen and get the flashlight out of the junk drawer.”

“I’m not going back to that kitchen!” cried Lawrence. “It’s dark!”

The other four boys all laughed.

“Afraid of the mummy?” asked Mike O’Rourke. The previous winter, even before that summer’s terrible events, Dale and Lawrence had been home alone on a snowy Saturday afternoon watching a Boris Karloff mummy movie on Channel 45’s scary “Crossfire” show and when the movie was over, Dale had switched off the TV and Lawrence immediately heard – or said he heard – the slow drag of a mummy’s dead foot across the linoleum of the kitchen. It had been a dim, overcast day and neither boy had volunteered to go to the kitchen to check it out. Instead, they’d thrown up the living room storm window, pushed out the screen, and jumped out into the snowy front yard. Both boys were shoeless, so they’d rushed to the front porch clad only in their jeans, white t-shirts, and now-wet athletic socks. But the front door was locked and they were too afraid to go around to the unlocked backdoor that opened to the kitchen. Their mother had come home from shopping twenty minutes later to find them still there on the porch, huddled and shivering. And Lawrence had been stupid enough to tell their friend Mike what had happened. Within a week, every kid in Elm Haven had laughed at Dale and Larry and the mummy in their kitchen.

“OK,” said Dale, “I’ll go and . . .”

At that second, the entire sky lit up with multiple lightning strikes which backlit the quickly baring trees and seemed to freeze the blizzard of leaves in place as they flew.

In that instant of strobed light, Dale and the other boys’ mouths hung open as they stared in silence at the illuminated mass of Old Central School across the street. The school that had been the source of so much of their terror in the summer just past. The school that had burned down that summer.

“Holy Jesus crap,” whispered Jim Harlen. The boys looked at each other, mouths still open and eyes wide.

The lightning flashed again. The school was no longer there, the center of the wide city block that had once housed the old structure now empty except for its sentinel lines of almost bare elm trees and the forlorn playground equipment on the south side of where Old Central had once risen.

The lights flickered back on, the television blared men’s voices at them, and all five boys squealed like little girls.

They closed and bolted the front door and shakily went back in to the small living room to watch what was left of the debate. Dale trottted to the kitchen, switching lights on in the dining room and hallway as he went, and came back with the flashlight. “Just in case,” he said.

Senator Kennedy was saying, “I really don’t need uh – Mr. Nixon to tell me about what my responsibilities are as a citizen. I’ve served this country for fourteen years in the Congress and before that in the service. I’ve just as high a devotion, just as high an opinion. What I downgrade, Mr. Nixon, is the leadership the country is getting, not the country. Now I didn’t make most of the statements that you said I made. The s -- . . . I believe the Soviet Union is first in outer space. We have – may have made more shots but the size of their rocket thrust and all the rest . . .”

“Quiet, you guys,” said Kevin Grumbacher. “I want to hear this part.”

All the boys were pale. Jim Harlen’s hand shook as he helped himself to another cookie. No one mentioned the school they had all seen exposed by the lightning, the three stories and belfry and dead windows of the thing standing out clearly against the night and bare trees behind it.

Dale looked at his friends and wondered if the other three – he knew his brother did – had the same dreams that he had most nights: dreams of suddenly being in Old Central and having to walk its abandoned, rotting hallways, climb its shadowy stairways, go into its stinking basement and abandoned and trashed rooms. He’d never ask them. Now he shook his head and tried to listen to some of the stupid debate, realizing as he did so that his little brother Lawrence had moved over to sit next to him on the arm of the chair so that their shoulders were touching.

Lawrence (Don’t-Call-Me-Larry) Stewart will take it even harder than Dale will when, seven years after this night, their parents both die of cancer in 1967.

The younger Stewart boy will have just turned 17 when his mother dies after months battling the disease, then his father seven months later. Dale was away at his first year at Kenyon College in Ohio and came home so often during his parents’ illnesses that he had to make up much of that first year, but Lawrence had been home alone with them through all of it. They had no other family in the area.

A week after their father was buried and Dale had returned to college, Lawrence dropped out of high school and went to enlist in the Marines. He wanted to go to Vietnam and fight.

The Marines were willing to accept a distant uncle’s letter of permission allowing the under-age Lawrence to apply for enlistment, but they weren’t ready to accept Lawrence. First of all, he was seriously underweight. Secondly, during the physical exams, they discovered that Lawrence had a serious case of diabetes. This discovery shook the adventurous young man almost as much as had the deaths of his parents. Lawrence tried to enlist in the Army or Navy, but somehow the medical news of his diabetes was shared between the services and he couldn’t even lie his way into the military. So he returned to finish high school and begin the lifelong regimen of insulin shots that would keep him alive.

After graduating from high school – Dale was too busy taking finals at Kenyon to return for Lawrence’s graduation so Lawrence had no one there that day – Lawrence enrolled in the Sociology and Criminal Justice program at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. He wanted to be a police officer or perhaps even a lawyer.

The studies were difficult and Lawrence would be distracted both by his illness – the diabetes was not yet under control and his weight dropped to 97 pounds that freshman year and he was always fatigued – and by a girl named Susan. He spent his summers working construction days but racing go-karts and then other men’s sprint cars at night. He also took up skydiving and rock climbing that year. In the autumn of his sophomore year, he married Susan – the first of five marriages over the next seventeen years, the last one being the one that took – and dropped out of the university with the intention of becoming a Pinkerton agent.

Lawrence enjoyed being a Pinkerton detective for fourteen months, but left that work shortly after he left the marriage with Susan. Lawrence’s and Dale’s father had sold automotive diagnostic testing equipment and for a while Lawrence – who was an excellent mechanic – worked as a salesman there, but he discovered that he enjoyed being a mechanic much more than being a salesman. For a year or two with his second wife, he did a variety of jobs – always finding a car to race in some league in Illinois and Indiana and then in California where they’d moved so that Margaret, his second wife, could become an actress – but eventually he went into auto insurance work as an adjustor. This work he truly loved (their father had once done it before joining Sun Electric Corporation) and while Margaret didn’t care for her husband’s long hours or low pay, he stayed with the work in California after that marriage ended.

By the mid-1980’s, Lawrence had found the perfect wife and home and work: Trudy, who officially owned their adjustors company being the wife, the suburbs of San Diego being the home, and private adjusting and advanced accident investigation being the work. Besides being hired by insurance companies and firms to investigate accidents and accident fraud – a work that Lawrence found totally challenging – he also was in demand as an expert witness in trials related to accidents and lawsuits resulting from accidents. By this time Lawrence had amassed more than three hundred hours of advanced instruction in accident reconstruction and forensics. He continued to race almost every weekend (his wife serving as his only pit crew) and had now taken up piloting sailplanes and Motocross as well. Between the two of them, Lawrence and Trudy owned two company cars, three private cars, two race cars, and three motorcycles – one for Motocross and two huge touring bikes for serious cross-country travel. Both eschewed Harleys as loud, stupid machines.

Lawrence’s politics, always conservative – he loved the military, owned more than a dozen guns, and hated paying taxes since he knew the government wasted most of his money – took an even sharper right turn during the Reagan years.

Part of what formed Lawrence politically was his work. A large part of their job was investigating insurance fraud, from the run-of-the-mill slip-and-fall con artists to men and women who were sueing their employers for many millions of dollars for purely fictional “accidents” and “injuries.” Lawrence spent thousands of hours interviewing professional accident victims and covertly videotaping men and women who were “too injured to walk, much less work” as they went to exercise classes and drove their dune buggies through the desert. Most of these lying parasites, he knew, were already receiving welfare and workman’s comp. It was how they made their livings – sometimes to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

But it will be the illegal immigration problem that finally will become an obsession with Lawrence (Nobody-Calls-Him-Larry-Now) Stewart.

In his early years in California (with wives two, three, and four) this annoyance at Spanish-speaking illegal immigrants was a minor thing, a common affliction shared with the other few conservative Republicans Lawrence had met. Politics wasn’t important to him; work was. During his years living and working in Los Angeles County, Lawrence was fairly sanguine about the changes in the city, saying to his wife that Los Angeles was now the second foreign city in America (the first being Miami, which had been run for years by industrious Cubans.) But when they moved to their home and business near San Diego in the late 1980’s, the minor irritation of feeling like an outsider in one’s own country grew into a serious pet peeve for Lawrence.

There was the absurdity of the permanent roadblocks on the I-5 – searching for vans full of illegals – and the constant fleet of abandoned vehicles in the parking area nearby where the drivers and riders in those clapped-out old vans had abandoned the vehicles and run away. There was the absurdity of the warning sides along the highways – a silhouette of a running woman tugging a child into the air while other silhouetted children ran behind them. Watch Out for People Crossing the Highway. Watch out for illegals risking their children’s lives as they ran across eight lanes of traffic as they stole into the country was Lawrence’s translation. Every morning when Lawrence drove down his surface street to the freeway from his suburb in the hills, there would be the group of Hispanic men at various turnouts and shopping malls, waiting to be chosen that day for gardening work and other menial labor. None of it seemed right to Lawrence. The way he saw it, if you want to invade a neighboring country, do it with an army, not by sneaking through a damned fence in the middle of the night or by bringing your pregnant wife to a San Diego hospital to have her kid at American taxpayers’ expense or by sending your other kids across the bridge into America every morning to go to an American school.

But it was his work that completely soured him on the immigration wave that was breaking over California and the United States in the 90’s and into the new century.