Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy-2.pdf - Microelectronics ...

Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy
Richard B. Wells
laughing about it in the teachers’ lounge. Nobody liked the Hotel man.
Dad never said a cross word to me about the incident, beyond a clear instruction that I wasn’t to “take
any guff from that S.O.B.” I continued to hang out at the Hotel.
The river was a big part of our lives for a lot of the south side kids. Florida and California kids have
their beaches. We had the Mississippi, the Great Father of Waters. For the commercial fishermen the river
was their whole livelihood and they fished it twelve months out of the year. In the winter they’d drive
their pickup trucks out onto the ice and cut big holes in it so they could continue to fish it. Late in the
winter, one of them drove out there, parked his pickup, and walked off a ways and cut a hole. While he
was laying his net, there was a huge crack! everybody heard all up and down Riverview Street.
Everybody looked out on the river just in time to see the ice give way and the pickup truck drop into the
water. Fortunately nobody went down with it, but the fisherman lost his truck. The general feeling on the
south side was that he should have known better than to drive out there this late in the season.
A lot of us kids lived out there on that river from spring to fall. Most of the south side kids had flat
bottom boats we’d go out in. In the spring of ’70 Dad came home one day bringing with him a wondrous
surprise: A sleek, fast speedboat. Why he’d decided to buy it all of a sudden nobody knew except him. I
didn’t care why. I was just thrilled to overflowing that he had. She could seat six with no problem at all
and she was the MGB of the waves. We couldn’t get her in the water fast enough to suit me.
From the very beginning she was practically my boat. Dad hardly ever took her out, but I did all the
time. Looking back, I’m not so sure that wasn’t what Dad had in mind in the first place. He knew I wasn’t
happy about living in Bellevue. There was no name painted on her stern, but I called her the Cindy.
Danny and I took the Cindy on expeditions as far down the river as we had gas to get us there and back.
Well south of Bellevue we found a little stretch of sandy beach far away from everything that made a
perfect spot to anchor and knock back a few beers. Just four to six of us kids at a time, which was what
the Cindy could carry. It wasn’t all that hard for us to get beer; like bottle rockets, there was a black
market for that, too. Most of us got to be pretty good little bootleggers, much better than Maquoketa kids.
Bellevue made a lot of its money from the thousands of tourists who would come every year, spring
through fall, to enjoy the river and the many pretty little parks and campgrounds that surrounded Bellevue
like a necklace. River people know the river, know how to handle boats, and respect the power of the
water. A lot of tourists, though, didn’t have the first clue that the Mississippi can bite if you don’t know
what you’re doing. Every summer some tourist would manage to kill himself out there. In every case I
knew of, they died of stupidity. One dummy had put in north of the lock and dam and decided it would be
fun to get a close look at the spillway. He got a close look alright. The river took him backwards right
through the spillway, his motor going full throttle, and dragged him under, boat and all, on the other side.
They didn’t find him or his boat for several days. Another guy wanted to get a nice close look at one of
the big barges. Everybody that knows anything about the Mississippi knows you give the barges a wide,
wide berth and you never come up on the stern of one where its powerful engines create one of the worst
undertows imaginable. Everybody on the river that day was screaming and yelling and waving at this
moron to veer off. He just grinned and waved back – right up to the second he and his boat disappeared
under the water. They didn’t find him for awhile either.
Spruce Creek, about seven miles or so north of Bellevue, was one of the nicest parks and trailer
campgrounds in the area. The old Spruce Creek Lodge had a big pool table and it was one of the most
unlevel pool tables anyone’s ever seen. There was pretty much no such thing as a straight shot on that
table. Danny and I played that table all the time and knew every curvy inch of it. We’d go out there in the
afternoons or evenings to shoot pool and hustle the tourists.
My New Year’s Eve hope that 1970 would bring better times didn’t live through the spring. Grandma
Wells, my last grandparent, died in the middle of March. I’d never seen Dad so sad. Then came
Cambodia. When Nixon had run for the presidency he had promised he would end the war in Vietnam.
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