The Day the Stink Ditch Died

                                  The Day the Stink Ditch Died

“Donnie, you stay out of that Stink Ditch when you go to Roger’s house!”
“Sure, Mom, you know I will.”  She always worried that I would fall into the dreaded “Stink Ditch”, the open sewer that ran through the west side of town on its way to the city water treatment plant.  It was also, she knew, inevitable that Roger and I would end up over there throwing rocks into it.  And, her motherly intuition told her, probable that Rog or I would get too close and one of us would fall in.
         Growing up in the Sweetcorn Capitol of the World was great in the 50s and 60s.  No one would bother a kid on an old rebuilt bike going across town to see his best buddy.  And since Mom and Dad owned the most popular coffee shop in town, everyone knew me and would wave and yell at me.  That was also the draw back.  Do something wrong, and my parents knew it before I got home.  That always kept me on the straight and narrow. It also kept my friends close to the line, and very seldom over it.  We knew that if we did something wrong, my Mom or Dad would call their mom or dad and all of us would be up the proverbial Stink Ditch without a paddle.
         Roger was my best buddy when we were in the sixth-ninth grade.  Inseparable.  I called his mom “Mom” and he called mine the same.  Mom had a different connotation back then.  We all shared mothers and had no qualms about doing so.  When something was wrong, they all turned on their mom radar and wanted to either help or to scold.  We all expected it, we survived it.  Roger’s dad was a mechanic, so we often watched him work on cars in the garage down the street from the Donut Shop my parents had.  That is how Roger and I met, when his father came in for a couple doughnuts and a cup of coffee.  Roger usually had chocolate milk and two doughnuts, but he mixed his up, now having a vanilla one and a chocolate one, now just two vanilla, now just two chocolate…
         I am not exactly sure how we hit it off.  I guess we started talking about the doughnuts while watching them being deep fried in the Lincoln Model Doughnut Machine my parents had bought used from the Red Cross following World War II.  But, one thing led to another, and before we knew it, we were making plans to get together.  This all led to sleepovers and backyard camp outs.
         Roger was a normal looking kid for those days.  His brown hair was cropped close to his head, especially around those large ears. He was not bald, but his dad certainly got close with the clippers.  He needed some orthodontics, but there was no such thing back then, unless, of course, your parents had money.  He had a great laugh, (which he was doing often) and an imagination that would often lead us down a path that found us near that imaginary line.  He always knew where that line was, and this eventually led him to become a police officer.
         Me, on the other hand, I was just a slight bit left of normal.  If one would look at my first grade picture, they would see a kid who had outgrown his shoes, his shirt, his pants and even his glasses.  Not that I was growing so fast my parents could not keep me in clothes.  Well, maybe I was. But I was not growing up, I was growing out. All those doughnuts seemed to find their way to my middle, and my legs and my feet. I was vertically challenged, but not horizontally.  I just could not stay away from those gooey globular orbs of deliciousness.  We had so many of those scrumptious delicacies around that I would sneak them to my room, hide them around the yard.  I was a doughnut addict, and there was no end to the hole in sight.

My imagination matched Roger’s, and I loved to laugh, too.  Give me a Red Skelton or Bill Cosby record, and I was set for quite awhile.  Records were made of vinyl back then and I played them on this thing called a “record player’ which stayed under my bed unless I wanted to use it. I used it often for Red and Bill, and could usually recite their routines word for word within hours of the first listening.  Reading was something I did little of, unless Superman, Batman, and the other Legion of Superheroes characters count as epic heroes.
         This particular day in June was just another day; I thought nothing was going to happen at its onset.  I would get up, have my normal half dozen doughnuts with a cup of coffee (yes, I drank coffee when I was young.  Dad always made me drink it black, no sugar.  He said if I was going to drink coffee, I was going to drink it as it was intended.), said good bye and was on my way for the day.  Mom giving her warning about being careful, looking both ways, as she usually did. Roger, I am sure, had his normal breakfast, too.  Sugar Smacks with a dash of milk, toast with peanut butter and maybe a slice of bologna.
         Upon my arrival at Roger’s house, we plopped down in front of the old Motorola and began watching Ray Raynor and Bozo’s Circus on Channel Nine from Chicago. There was no cable TV and Hoopeston was over a hundred miles south of the Windy City, but on a clear day with a tall antenna, Channel Nine came in clear for a few minutes during Bozo, but faded just before the Cubs came on, ironic, huh?  Something, however, did not seem right.  Roger, you understand, lived right next to the Stink Ditch.  And although Hoopeston was a quiet town in Central Illinois, today it was buzzing with excitement and noise.  That noise had infringed on our watching the Grand Prize Game, so we jumped up off the floor and skeedaddled over to the door to see what the commotion was. 
         There, in front of Roger’s house, was a brand new Caterpillar bulldozer going up and down the bank of the Stink Ditch!  Behind it was a group of men with a crane.  Attached to the boom of the crane was large cement tile that was going into the ditch.  We hopped our bikes, rode like the wind to the second street bridge and found, no bridge, no Stink Ditch!
         On that June day, 1960, in front of our eyes, our hometown had come of age.  No longer would we have a Stink Ditch,  but our mothers would have greater worries.  Civilization had come to us.  Roger and I looked at each other and wondered what was next, dial telephones?