The summer of ’69 — two high school chums headed out of town to work for the father of their favorite teacher, a Jesuit seminarian. Mark the gregarious one, happy to grow up, explore the Midwest, become “a man, yes I am.” Me, getting out of Denver a priority, headed to Chicago for college after this summer intern; he was headed west to California, the land of dreams for Colorado boys who hadn’t settled on Boulder’s university. I guess Kansas City was our tidal pool in the sea world of adult life. I had visited Chicago every summer for a decade to see relatives. That was my usual summer vacation — when I was younger it was with my three sisters, but later just with my mom. Big Shoulders Chicago grabbed me, with its lake like the ocean I’d never seen, where my rich aunt once rented a motorboat to thrill us all. Denver seemed to be the nominal cowtown compared to Chi-town. I was looking for action; Mark was looking for confirmation in the holy sea of Cali.
Forty-five years later, Mark is dead. When hearing of his death, his soccer teammate said in an email, “Mark was a good man.” He acted self-assured. I doubted authority and asked questions, started breaking rules at the end of high school, dropped Latin, failed college Calculus, fated to attend a small liberal arts college. I had been good at math, but my mother’s intellectual curiosity was goading me. After being lobbied by the department heads in science, economics, and history, I careered into the catchall of American Studies. I became a generalist. I was fascinated by the literary horizon on the wine dark sea when most of my mates were piloting their yacht careers. Mark found his destiny or should I say career to become a doctor in St. Louis. How did that summer stream his channeled focus on a profession versus my solo kayak run through the buoys of my life?
Mark played soccer in high school, a sport coached by Becker, the teacher who saw two young guys who were ambitious, smart, and naïve, and figured a spell with his father might energize the old man as well as alert us to an eminent and ominous life change. Becker was a father figure to me — I was always looking for a dad. I tried some team sports in grade school, but my job as an afternoon paperboy got in the way. I played outside handball at recess in high school. Mark and I organized a tournament in high school with Mr. Becker’s assistance, since he was an ace, along with the Latin scholar who sported a pompadour, Father Bakewell, who we imagined to be the hoodlum priest. Track and cross country were the other sports I took up because they allowed me to pace myself. Mark energized that inaugural soccer team, a team player, a good man was he.
We ran together those years, hanging out at Elitch’s for the minuscule price of admission, where we’d meet friends, ride the carved carousel horses or the rickety wood Wildcat coaster on summer nights. We were both North Siders in Denver, although he properly lived in Wheat Ridge, across the Sheridan line. We’d meet up riding bikes before we were driving age. We knew some girls north of Sloan’s Lake, and would wander those blocks of tidy Tudors and brick Denver squares, knocking on a few doors for whispered hushes, before hurdling the hedges that separated front lots. The shrubs and side fences distinguished this city neighborhood from the unbroken grass plains of the suburban homes to the west. Many Italian families had moved from where I lived in the Highlands to these fancy houses on Denver’s west border. My mother was singly supporting three girls through their teen years and a new baby boy, so she never moved. People are either too poor to move, or have established a legacy in a mansion and only need pay the taxes on their estate and park. Mom sold off pieces of the big lot surrounding the house to make ends meet. The land around our manse grew smaller as the family dwindled to just my older mom and myself. She was forty when I was born, so she was fifteen years older than most of the mothers of my classmates. Older, wiser, and poor without a man.
Mark would get a ride in his first years of high school with the sons of doctors who ministered to all the Italians in town — they lived half-way to Golden, and drove a Willys Jeep, the Colorado Range Rover of its time. My mother worked for those same doctors. They made the move away from Mount Carmel in the Highlands; she landed and stayed just across the parish line with St. Catherine’s. She was a receptionist, and made a miserly salary, but it was a decent job for a woman in the 1950s, who needed money after her first husband died and her second took off after I was born. I typically got a ride from her to school, and walked the two miles home. I was a scholarship kid. Mark would always boast about the cool sailing he encountered as a passenger in the Willys.
Living in a rambling farm house on a big corner, where my mother rented the upstairs to returning GIs for extra income, one of them my dad, I envied Mark’s house that was 1950’s new, a blond brick ranch with a rec room in the basement, a mom and pop and sister and brother. I grew up with empty chinchilla cages in the basement. That was one of my mother’s attempts to bring in some extra money after my father left. She met a rancher from the hills named Hank, who convinced her there was money in raising cute rodents, but they kept escaping and my older sisters were in high school and tired of chasing them down. I grew up climbing through the leftover cages as a childhood warren, having covered the outsides with cardboard and the floors with blankets. Looking back, we had the finer home, a good size Queen Anne, a sound investment, a way for my mother to survive, someone who had been at the top of the social scale back in Chicago, her first husband a detective who was connected. She moved west with her girls to get away from his family; his sisters would have ruled her life.
The chinchillas had long been gone by the time I was in high school; so were my sisters. Married off; their choice, since Mom had little to dowery them, although she would support them through trying times in their lives, usually by sharing the cost of a rental when they were in arrears. They had a tough time growing up, losing their dad to TB or pneumonia or cancer, I never got the straight story, and moving from Chicago Heights to Las Vegas, New Mexico, and then skipping out on the rent one night to escape to Denver where my mother’s aunt had found a house. They were big city girls, who put on plays, charged admission to the neighbors — regular Judy Garland and Andy Rooney productions. I was born later, didn’t talk for years, because my sisters would cater to my pointing. The big house scared and delighted me. I dreamt of lions under the crib; the gas inferno of the converted coal furnace room frightened me. But the big maples and fine fescue in the large side yard cooled me on arid summer days, and the gabled roof provided furrows to slide down the ridges during winter, like skiing without the expensive tab of a train and lift ticket; I would grab a dormer before falling off the house cliff. I’d get to the roof by shimmying up a tree of heaven, to an upstairs porch where the renters lived. After my sisters left, I spent much of my time alone, bouncing a pink handball against the stucco house wall for fun, or walking Ginger my German Shepherd on long snowy walks, searching out sledding hills.
Mark’s rec room in the basement of his ranch house, fitted with a couch, ping pong and pool tables, invited company, like the graduation party his mom and dad hosted, the only one I attended where the guys could have a beer. Mark’s dad was a liquor salesman. His job was socializing. I know that because my father-in-law sold liquor, too. Sales provided great jobs for many of those WWII vets — without going to school, they could become businessmen. My dad was a salesman, but he kept traveling, unwilling to settle down with three adopted daughters and a new son. I never heard what he sold besides good looks and charm. My oldest sister said he was mean. He probably made some Willie Loman mistakes along the way. I never knew him, and didn’t learn till I was 21 that my sisters had another father. The next time I saw my mother, she asked me what I wanted to know. She didn’t think it important to explain her divorce before then. I never asked, and the neighbors provided me with answers like he was killed in the war, or got sick and died. I think that Mark’s life was normal for that post-war generation; I wanted to be normal, but my mom kept telling me I was the greatest, buying me a red sweatshirt that announced, “It’s hard to be humble when you’re the greatest.” All the unasked questions about my family left me with endless avenues to explore in life, and the naïveté to think I could do anything. Mark’s father wanted a career for his kids. My mother wanted the best for me telling me she could get me into the Air Force Academy or after college into the FBI through her contacts, but I wanted to see the world, explore the arts, work in the sun.
Mark and I didn’t know what to expect in Kansas City. Becker said we could live with his father, a widower, and work in his warehouse. Mark had a white VW bug the last year of high school. Other classmates had Mustangs and one had a Corvette, but the Beetle was the choice of a new generation — my mother bought one because she knew fashion, trusted German engineering, and the dealer took her brown ’49 Chrysler for trade. The girls were gone so it was her and me. My best friend from high school had a turquoise bug. He was gay, which I didn’t know at the time, but he knew style, which my mother had instilled in me. I didn’t learn to drive until I was 17. I depended on two wheels for jobs and transportation. In KC, I was totally dependent on Mark, since he drove us out there, and we joined that new generation of suburban commuters.
Mr. Becker lived in the far suburbs southeast of the city, in Raytown, near Independence, home of Harry Truman. My first job out of Denver and I’m commuting thirty miles each way. But Mark and I made a game of it, weaving and bobbing down the new interstate, sometimes passing people on the right shoulder, doing whatever we could to make time. Denver didn’t have this kind of traffic, but it was coming. The drive to work that summer made me promise to never commute again. But that summer, the commute could be considered instructive: a part of growing up, being responsible, working where the job took you. Getting on. Mark understood what was demanded. I was along for the ride.
Living with this older man, by that time in his sixties, in a wood paneled house where he had raised two sons who had moved on, and working in a warehouse in the KC bottoms where the men comprised a blue collar assortment of unskilled laborers could not have presented two young parish school prepboys with more of a Weltanschauung. Robert E. Fisher, our supervisor, voiced lines that made us laugh. Mark was “strong” and Mike “stout and slim.” How if either of us had an accident, he would “check our wallet first before he called the ambulance.” To have this black man give us instructions with his streetwise humor, make light while we labored under conditions OSHA would not allow, advise us regarding the habits of other employees because we were the boss’s charges, and invite us to his house for a dinner of chops and greens cooked by his wife followed by a ballgame at the old Municipal Stadium appealed to us rookies. He was a Dickensian mentor, guiding us through the rigors and joys of minor league life, virtually catching flies with the brand new Royals franchise.
We unpacked boxcars full of Monsanto fertilizers, broken bags and all, at the same time that protesters claimed that this chemical company was responsible for the hail of fire in Vietnam. I wouldn’t connect the two until later. It was sweaty, debilitating work that two young guys ably performed, proud to serve, making money for college. We unloaded boxcars of A-1 sauce, many jars broken. Imagine that barbeque chemical smell in your nose through days of Midwestern heat. Haven’t enjoyed it since. At least there was still summer work for teens in 1969. We didn’t talk with many of the guys at Central Storage, though we heard stories about them. Danny drove a forklift, was recently married, had a few bad days when he dropped a pallet and lost the product. Mr. Fisher said he was hung over. Lorenzo was a tall Mexican, part Indian, who never said much, but apparently drank his lunches — Fisher would reveal details as we learned the ropes that summer. He had given up the bottle and become a Jehovah’s Witness. I don’t remember many of the other guys, since Mark and I worked alone unloading the boxcars that no one else would touch, but I was fascinated by the motley crew of people working the warehouse. It was the same for me in high school, the same held true for college — I moved through social groups and academic majors, individual sports and part time jobs with relative ease because I revealed little about myself but performed. My mother passed this attitude onto me.
Driving home from the warehouse district, we’d listen to the radio, top 40 hits before FM was installed in cars: Jr. Walker’s “What Does It Take,” “One” by Three Dog Night, “Going in Circles” by the Friends of Distinction, but the traffic drew most of our attention. The new interstate home to Raytown from the river bottoms became our Mother Road where we daily encountered the same cars, jams, and people flinching at the sprawl that we bugged our way around. Everyone wanted out of the sweaty city. Back at the house, we’d shower and do the necessary chores of mowing the grass or taking the trash out before dinner. Next door to Mr. Becker lived his two sisters, who took care of him and us. They made dinner every night. They reminded me of the Italian old maids who lived across Bryant Street back in Denver, who hosed down the grass daily, swept the street gutters, and kept house for their brother who was seldom seen. We’d watch Cronkite on the news every night.
It was Woodstock summer, where we began to discover the world around us. We watched the moon landing, and agreed with the old folks that the hippies handled themselves in a respectable way at the festival. Our entertainment every night after supper was playing Frisbee at the fountains in Country Club Plaza. It seemed to be the only place that retained middle class types in the city. When the fountains closed for a week for maintenance, we investigated blues clubs, but were too innocent to pursue that downbeat. We had been warned by the house oldsters to avoid those clubs. We went to Shakey’s in Kansas to drink 3.2 beer and sang along to “A Boy Named Sue.” The year before I had spent a day on the north side of Chicago, right before the Democratic convention, and shopped hip clothing stores like Sir Real, was given directions for avoiding tear gas during the upcoming demonstrations, and declined the acid that a long hair offered me in Lincoln Park. My rich aunt who worked at the highest levels a woman could achieve at Union Carbide was picking me up later. I may have explored more on my own in Kansas City, but Mark and I were more a team throwing the Frisbee across the waterways, skipping it on the pavement, impressing people with our expertise that summer. We hardly met a soul, but we were from the provinces; we knew our place as long term tourists.
Crosby, Stills, and Nash released their debut that year, and we would listen to that album at least once a night, on Mr. Becker’s record console. We’d never met a Renaissance lady like “Guinevere,” but the jaunty beat of “Marrakesh Express” and the heavy warnings in “Long Time Gone” pricked our ears without fail. We were caught romantically between a mysterious girl, exotic travels, and political protest. CS&N voiced our longings. For now, we saved money for college. Mr. Becker made oatmeal every night for our breakfast come morning. We made our lunches, and would buy Cokes at work.
Mark went back to Denver for a week to see his girlfriend who had finished her first year at the University of Wyoming. She was older and nice enough, but I think he was still a virgin, although we didn’t talk about that. I went to Appalachia that week to water ski with Becker’s brother and his girl friend. It was my second attempt at schussing through lake waves, after an early attempt when I was eight on Grand Lake. An adventure without Mark was riskier, more entertaining. At the end of the summer, Mark wanted to leave a week earlier than I did, so he could spend more time with his babe, but I wanted to stay on and earn that extra paycheck. We split on less than friendly terms. Seeing each other a few times over the years never included a discussion of our split at the end of that summer. He drove home without me to help with gas. I had to pay for the train. Mr. Becker and his sisters mentioned that it was nice to just have me eating dinner with them. I think it was my thoughtful conversation that warranted this comment, although maybe it was the relief of having only one teen on hand. When I arrived in Denver at Union Station, my mom picked me up. I had grown a goatee like Graham Nash; she cried for her lost son. I didn’t know I was riding on the Marrakesh Express.
One time Mark got infernally angry with me for placing a razor edge up in a drawer. He cut his finger and couldn’t articulate how stupid I was. I never had a father to teach me those things. Two kids up the block once had told me to pick up a razor blade in the street when I was five, and I ran home bleeding, not knowing how to handle it. So we had a few disagreements, but Mark also saved me from myself the one night we went to a party. Some guy from Country Club Plaza befriended us and invited us to a party. I didn’t drink, couldn’t stand beer, and so he bought a pint of tequila for me, which I proceeded to drink, on my own. By the end of the night, I was trying to make some girl. I was loaded, and luckily Mark and this other guy pulled me off her and Mark drove me home. I didn’t get sick, but let out the loudest belch ever bellowed in that house, before I passed out. I’ll always thank Mark for not letting me make a fool of myself hurting someone else.
At the twenty year Regis reunion, my best man who died this last year accompanied me on a drunken spin out to the gala south of the tech center, to crash the dinner where couples celebrated their glowing adulthood. David and I were so drunk and high, we could hardly make sense of the scene, but I talked to Mark at length one of the only times since we worked that summer. He had a pretty wife and kids and was giddy over life, nothing a bother. He was a good man. Some friends had pooh-poohed my spending the summer after high school with him, doubting his thought, eschewing his eagerness, his willingness to please. I didn’t mind — he was a standup guy and it would be an adventure. He had become an oral surgeon, which said to me he had achieved his goal of a fine profession, but which he termed just “dealing with meat” like a butcher. His time in KC had served him well. We were both humbled that summer by seeing how laborers got along, and how the fortunate sons in their naïveté had chances to make good on their parents’ hopes for them. The summer of ’69 meant separation from family, mature we did, but in many ways it forecast the people we would trend to be. I’m still a loner, reaching for an identity that has escaped my years. Thanks for the summer of ’69, Mark. I’m sorry I never told you what it meant to me. That is so typical of folks remembering those who died. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.