1977 - Small Town Personallities

I was raised in a small village called Winthrop Harbor in Northern Illinois. Winthrop Harbor, "The Cornerstone of Illinois," had a population of around 1,400 people. I’m not sure why but our “unique” characters were not all that “unique.” We had Robin Bottenfield, an unconventional rebel but not really weird; Tennie Ford, a brilliant-nerd rebel (although you had to know Tennessee pretty well to know he was a rebel); John Orfali, an intellectual hippie rebel like so many of us were to become in the future; and Rory Tompoles... class-clowns are always rebels but usually not abnormally strange – just funny. (I’m sorry if you’re not mentioned here but I had to stop somewhere…don’t worry though because if you think you might be weird …that’s actually pretty normal.)

1977 - Small Town Personalities

Maybe it was because our village was essentially a remote Chicago suburb and we considered ourselves, although rural, somewhat more cosmopolitan than the “more rural” folk, but we really didn’t have an Ernest T. Bass or an Otis, the town drunk. Or, really, we may have had them but only family members were aware of whom they might be.

I found this to be somewhat different when I moved to Southern Illinois and into a small town called Effingham. The town had traditionally been a small village until 2 major interstate freeway crossed paths just outside city limits. Now, due to increased traffic, the town had grown but retained much of its rural small-town charm. This included people whom, in a different place, may have been ostracized or, at least, not well accepted into the town’s infrastructure of personalities that make up the mind-set of small American villages.

Granville
“I mow the lawn at the drive-in every year,” he said. The character in front of my desk was an unusual sight in 1977…or any year. Granville stood in front of me with greasy shoulder-length hair, a 2-day beard, a faded red/blue wide plaid button-down collared shirt, shoes, socks and…a heavy flannel skirt. The skirt was slightly tattered and dirty. It was a tan and brown narrow-plaid flannel skirt with a yellow stripe that came to just below his knobby knees. It fought for attention with the shirt, which DID NOT match the skirt. It also displayed his hairy, varicose legs to the world – overall this was not a pleasant sight. Slightly taller than me at around 5’ 8” he looked like he was in serious need of a shower, a shave…and a job.

I had seen Granville around the downtown district washing windows and sweeping sidewalks. I had noticed he cleaned up the lobby of the little motor inn across the street every morning and swept and washed the floors of the bookshop, right next door, every Thursday. A unique individual, Granville was “cared for” by the little town of Effingham by giving him all of the little miscellaneous jobs for which businesses used to hire youngsters before child-labor laws. “Well,” I said, “let me think about it. Stop by tomorrow and I’ll let you know.” He left.

As I was dialing my bosses telephone number to take advantage of his experience in this particular theatre – many years before this had been his first job and in the town to which he still commuted to every Wednesday and Friday, when my assistant manager, Kathy, stopped in front of my open office door. “I see you’ve met Granville. Oh, he’s a little rascal. He works at the drive-in every year. Was he here for that? I don’t know…I never trusted him but they hire him every year. Tsk-tsk-tsk” She ticked her tongue as she moved on.

The phone rang on the other end. My boss, the GM answered, “Mike.”

“Mike? Larry. I just met Granville and…”

“Oh yeah, Granville.” He laughed, “Bet he gave you a turn didn’t he?” Our conversation continued with details you don’t need or want but, ultimately, it was revealed that Granville, indeed, was hired every year to mow the lawn at the drive-in although Mike made it very clear that Granville was not to use the big tractor-mower that I used to mow the surrounding area and the 2-acres adjacent to the drive-in that lay fallow. Granville was restricted to mowing the grass near the entry-drive to the lot, the playground and the large left-hand area that butted up against a windbreak tree line.

Incidentally, during that summer we had a hail-storm that wiped out over 150 of the trailer-lights (flashed in specific order) that “filled” the under-side of the marquee that hung over the street in front of the, Heart Theatre, my indoor house. The hail bounced the 12-feet up from the ground to bust 65% of these lights. It also made my new car look like the surface of the moon. Kathy, my assistant manager, learned to her distress the next day, while replacing light bulbs that there was nothing under that skirt that Granville wore. Kathy decided maybe she needed to get over her fear of heights and let him hold the ladder instead of the other way around.

I once asked Granville why he wore a skirt. He told me several years before, while he was in junior-high, his family moved to Effingham from "the big city." He said he dressed like a city kid while his classmates wore jeans and farmer-johns. as he was severely outnumbered he was made fun of and generally ostricized. In rebellion one day he dressed as outragiously as possible, including a skirt. He found that was picked on just as much but also, somehow, became a celebrity, which he found he liked. It was comfortable for him after awhile and he just adopted this mode because it "kept him unique."

Kathy
45-Years old. Bald. Sweaty…always sweaty and naturally wired like a rat-terrier. She had never married and was still living with mom. A talent for mathematics that was truly amazing –for the four basic functions: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. She could add the candy prices in her head, then figure and add tax before I could even enter the figures in a calculator. She was never wrong. If there was a mistake it was me and never her.

But, Kathy was a living soap opera. Everyone else’s business was grist for her rumor-filled mind. Her public face was energetic and confident but in reality she was foul-mouthed and less than confident about her ability to deal with new realities. The addition of a protestant church to this mostly Catholic enclave was still controversial to her many years after the event.

Kathy was the person who sat across the street from my drive-in theatre with binoculars and a notebook writing down every time a worker took a smoke break, both during and after work hours, as well as noting every time they took a drink from “a can of unknown substance,” which was known to me as orange soda. She reported the next AM to the home office that my workers had hung-out in the concession stand drinking and smoking unknown substances. As I was “the manager from California” she “knew” what these substances were: beer and marijuana. These were the substances I knew as Orange Soda and Marlboro cigarettes.

She was in the mysterious vehicle that sat outside my house until I arrived in the middle of a snowstorm so she could report that I had taken one of my girls home that night – which, in essence, was true except I took her to her parents house and not my own – which might be why it took 1 ½ hours to drive the 10 miles home. These two incidents are added up to the straw that broke this camels’ back & caused me to quit this position. Both of these episodes are being prepared to publish as I write.

I had been told she was instrumental in the former marital friction of the company’s general manager’s marriage when she told his wife about the affair she had imagined. She was caught in this bald-faced when she accused Mike of spending the night in a hotel with a mystery woman. Turned out the mystery woman was Mike’s wife. The previous manager and brother-in-law of the former manager, now GM, left his job because of rumors and accusations that had no connection to reality. Unfortunately, as I was from Southern California, all of her imagined controversy was assumed to have been accurate, this time. Eventually it was time to go.

Tom
Tom rode to the front door in his Harley-Davidson golf cart and parked off to the side. Struggling with his crutches he hoisted himself out of the cart and through the theatre door. Dragging himself to the stairs he placed one crutch on his arm next to the first, which now hung loose from his right forearm, and grabbed hold of the handrail with both hands. Gritting his teeth he lifted one leg off of the floor and placed it on the step. Leaning forward he placed his weight on the elevated foot and stepped up, dragging his other foot to the same level and, with great effort on to the next step. Re-aligning his hands higher up the rail he pulled himself up one painful step at a time. It easily took all of 8 or 9 minutes for Tom to attain his nightly goal of the second floor where he would proceed to the Projection Booth to play the movies and do any maintenance needed while the evening’s entertainment played itself out on the big screen.

Tom rode a Harley golf cart because, after his last cart had broken down the Junior Chamber of Commerce voted to buy and maintain a new cart so he could get around town. He was known in town to be a war hero and someone that had been a recognized figure downtown as he went from bar to bookstore to bar. Tom was well loved in this little town where people stood together and cared for their own. That was just how this little town was.

Alex
“Yessir Mr. Larry.” Alex did the cleaning in one of the company theatres in which I spent time cleaning an old pipe organs disassembled parts from. There were old dressing rooms to empty and the old carbon-arc lamps. There were old vaudeville props that needed taken to the dump. He was an ancient old black gentleman that had a severe case of arthritis that caused him to move very slowly. Alex was in his 90’s but maintained his job just as he had for the last 35-years. He was salaried which we maintained to enable him to keep his job. An hourly worker would have been finished in 1 ½ hours but Alex took all day due to his slowed movements. The job he did was always excellent and he always left the theater spotless. Despite asking him to simply call me “Larry” he continued to call me “Mr. Larry” just as my dad was “Mr. Bob.” He was an honorable gentleman with an unbelievable lifetime of experiences, very few of which he related as it took time away from his cleaning. It was quickly apparent, after a short conversation with Alex that there was a lot more to him and his life than he preferred to reveal. When he passed I sincerely felt that Alex’s passing was humanity’s loss.

The Catholic Church
I often thought of the town’s big Catholic Church as its own personality because it held so much sway over the town and the activities and entertainment considered being “acceptable.” An example of their influence was illustrated when my theatre booked “Kentucky Fried Movie.” The film was a series of short skits directed by John Landis. It was bold, irreverent and “racy.” It lasted 2-days. The nuns attended the first evening, as usual. The following day I received a call from the home-office. We would be re-booking “The Outlaw Josie Wales” the next day in order to remove the current film from availability. They didn’t approve so the film was pulled. This happened twice while I was there although the second film “Rabbit Test” was pulled before Billy Crystal or Joan Rivers ever got anywhere close to our screen. Instead The Spy Who Loved Me arrived a week early and stayed for a 2-week stand.

Thinking back of the movies screened at the drive in as opposed to the indoor house… hmmm… it immediately becomes obvious...

...there were no nuns in that back row.