I live in the best of all possible worlds. I live in
Rockford, Illinois.
Rockford is centrally-located in
the north-central part of the nation, about equally-distant between metropolitan
Chicago (home of John Wayne Gacy) and Madison (near the home of Ed Gein) in
Wisconsin or Milwaukee (home of Jeffrey Dahmer). I’m six hours out of
Indianapolis going southeast, or six hours out of Minneapolis heading northwest
or six hours north of St. Louis. I can drive to New York in fourteen hours or
Atlanta in fifteen hours. I’m a good day out of East Texas or Kansas City. I
can drive to O’Hare International Airport in around an hour. It took me an hour
or longer to get to O’Hare when I lived in downtown Chicago or in Oak Park. What
difference does it make if I’m stuck in urban traffic or cruising past mile
after mile of cornfields?
My daughter Tammy, who chooses to
live in mountainous states like Colorado or Washington or Oregon, calls me a
flatlander. To her, endless miles of Illinois cornfields is “bore-ring!” But I
write in my mind while I’m driving, and it’s easier for me to write and drive
while racing past boring cornfields than fighting construction and congestion
on the Eisenhower or Kennedy expressways.
Although I was born and raised in
Rockford, Illinois, I moved around a lot to attend various universities and
when I worked for the U. S. Army. I spent seven years going TDY (temporary
duty) to Timbuktu, or packing up the entire household (including four-year-old Tammy)
for a PCS (permanent change of station). I hadn’t intended to return to Rockford
after seeing Paris and living in Chicago, Atlanta, and D. C. But, as John
Lennon said, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”
The reason I mention Rockford is: much of the action of my forthcoming novel Abandoned takes place in Rockford,
Illinois. My other novels are set elsewhere: Arizona, Texas, New York,
Virginia, Thailand, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Wisconsin, Tibet, Sweden, Abu Dhabi,
even other worlds that may or may not exist. Abandoned is the first novel that mentions Rockford by name.
Although the setting is an actual place, the characters are all figments of my
imagination.
I mention the Army, too, because I
was associated with the military in active, reserve, or civilian status for
more than twenty years (not counting five years of junior and senior ROTC). Several
of Abandon’s main characters are
active or former military.
So let me introduce you to
Rockford, Illinois. Rockford was built in the early nineteenth century on both
the east and west banks of the beautiful (we used to call it the Mighty Muddy
Rock, not because it was a mighty river but because it was mighty muddy) Rock
River, and Rockford was the stagecoach stop at the ford of the Rock River midway
between hog-butchering Chicago and the lucrative lead mines of Galena. Rockford’s
about a hundred miles from Lake Michigan and ninety from the Mississippi River.
When my paternal grandparents came to Rockford from Sweden in the last half of
the nineteenth century, there was already a railroad from Chicago to Rockford’s
Seventh Street train depot. Seventh Street was a Swedish village in America,
and the old Swedes called it “Sjundegarten” which was hard for Americans to
pronounce because the Sju sounded like wind “whoooondegarten” whistling through
the fjords. Some folks even called Rockford “Swede Town” and my father, who was
born and went to school in Rockford, spoke Swedish instead of English. Dad
dropped out of school in the fourth grade because Turner School stopped teaching
most classes in Swedish and everyone had to learn to speak and write in
English. Dad found work with the Army at Camp Grant on Rockford’s south side
during WWI, and he worked there driving a horse and wagon between the camp and
cemeteries during the swine flu epidemic that killed so many in 1918.
Rockford was then, and still is, a
divided city. The west side of the Rock River was populated with Italian
immigrants on the south side and Irish, English, American immigrants on the
north. Swedes occupied most of the east side, along with a few Jews and
Germans. I had to learn to speak multiple languages to communicate with friends
after school. The Tondis and D’Agostinos spoke Italian, the Singers spoke Yiddish,
the Harts spoke German, the Witkowskis Polish. My father, neighbors, aunt, and
grandparents spoke Swedish. Rockford had a great multi-cultural mix, and I
learned to appreciate differences as well as similarities among residents.
My mother’s side of the family
lived on the northwest side of the river. The Crosbys were English, Irish, and
German. My cousin Pam Crosby Yager, a Mormon, wrote and published a history of
the Crosbys to get her degree from Brigham Young University.
My grandmother Crosby was Roman
Catholic, my mother was Methodist, and my father was Swedish Covenant. Pam’s
family was Mormon. My uncle Bill was Baptist. Monroe Singer was Jewish. I grew
up with all of those religious influences.
This, too, I mention only because
it has bearing to the novel Abandoned.
Rockford had a wonderful public
library with branches in each of the ethnic neighborhoods. The main library
itself, a gift of Andrew Carnegie, sat on the west bank of the river, between
two bridges fording the Rock, with doors symbolically facing both east and
west. The Montague branch was (and still is) on the southwest side of the river
and served both Italian and Spanish speaking residents. The West branch served
the English and German and Irish of the northwest side. The Southeast branch
served the Swedes. The Highland branch served the Jews and Swedes and Germans
and peoples living on the northeast side. There was even a bookmobile that went
to each public elementary school every two weeks. The bookmobile is no more, unfortunately,
and the main library is about to be demolished. But the legacy of the library
endures, and there are still branch libraries serving each part of the city. If
there was one thing that unified the city, it was the public library.
The other thing that united the
city was factory work. Skilled Swedish, Italian, German, and American craftsmen
built multi-national industries with headquarters and production facilities in
Rockford. Every family in town either worked for the factories or for one of
the local businesses that serviced the factories and their workers. Camp Grant
was a major military installation that housed and trained thousands of troops
during both World Wars. Rockford had a great economy until Camp Grant closed
and the old visionary capitalists died off. Because Rockford had no major
universities (why bother when Chicago was so close and the University of
Wisconsin and the University of Illinois were handy), the heirs to Rockford’s
fortunes moved elsewhere for higher education and few returned. They sold their
inherited stock to global conglomerates like Textron and United Technologies
who moved the headquarters and manufacturing out of Rockford and left the city
with the highest unemployment rate in the entire country. All that remained
were a few aerospace technology companies that found a bonanza in currently unemployed
highly-skilled engineers and machinists that would work cheap.
To Be Continued
