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

Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy
Richard B. Wells
Much closer to home was the death of John Putman late in the school year. Stereo equipment, both car
and home, was relatively new on the scene and John had been one of the first to equip his car with a new
car stereo system. He was out on the highway one night, driving back to Bellevue from somewhere, when
somehow the wiring of his stereo shorted out his car headlights. In the dark he rammed into a bridge and
was killed. John was well-liked, the youngest except for Larry of the five Putman boys in high school,
and his death was a terrible tragedy for all of us.
I was working in the bakery one Saturday when word came that Lyle had been hurt in a car accident
the night before. I don’t know the details of this one, but he’d been a passenger in a car with some other
Maquoketa high school kids when the accident happened. The word we received was that he was in the
hospital with a broken back.
When I heard this, I immediately left work and drove over to Maquoketa. Maquoketa is twenty miles
from Bellevue, and all the way over I was sick with worry. I didn’t know what I’d see when I got there,
but I was fearing the worst. When I finally got to Lyle’s room, I found him in great pain and he was
suffering as well from nausea caused by his back injury. You see, all the nerves that control the inner
organs and bring information about them back to the brain travel through the spinal cord. That is why
anything that injures or irritates the spinal cord (without actually severing it) can produce an array of
symptoms that look and feel like something is wrong elsewhere in the body. In Lyle’s case, his back
injury was making him throw up every few minutes.
As bad a shape as he was in, and as awful as he looked, I felt a great relief when I saw him. He was
conscious and he was able to move his arms and legs, so my worst fears about how badly he was hurt
were laid to rest. He would recover and he would not be left an invalid. It turned out he had only cracked
a vertebra and, while this is nothing to take lightly, as back injuries go things could have been much,
much worse. I visited him while he was in the hospital when I could as much as I could. The old Lyle
returned by the next day, as they got the pain from his injury under control, and he was even able to find a
silver lining in all this. “At least now I’m 4F,” he said to me cheerfully. This referred to the selective
service classification system, i.e. the draft. With the war in Vietnam still raging in full fury, the draft was
very much on the minds of all boys our age. Classification 4F meant ‘unfit for military service’ and
having a broken back certainly qualifies for that. No matter what else happened, Lyle would not be going
to Vietnam, and we were both happy about that. It turned out, though, that a rich irony was in store for
him. When the draft lottery for our age group was finally held, Lyle’s lottery number turned out to be 365,
the very last number.
It was another accident that led to Ricky and I finally becoming friends. This one developed out of an
odd series of events that in an indirect way had started with me. Danny and I had driven over to
Maquoketa one afternoon to shoot a little pool and take in the county fair later that night. While we were
at the pool hall, a kid I had known from my Maquoketa days walked in with a couple of pals. He and I
had a history. When we were both little boys we had played on the same Little League team and had been
casual friends. Later, though, he had started hanging out with some of the hoods I detested so much and as
a result our friendship ended. This day we got into a fight and the pool hall guy told us to take it outside
into the alley.
As he and I were walking back there, his two pals came out behind us. I didn’t like the looks of that at
all, so I sneered at him, “You need your friends to come along and help?” He had a big grin on his face,
but it vanished when he glanced back at his friends. I looked back, too, and here was Danny following the
other two guys. Great Big Danny. He had my back. My opponent said to me nervously, “They don’t have
to come if your friend doesn’t.”
The fight itself isn’t worth talking about very much. About all that needs to be said about it is that it
turned into a dirty fight – a street brawl as pointless as it was devoid of honor. Danny thought the both of
us were morons for even engaging in it. His actual language was a bit more colorful than this, and when
all is said and done, he was right. When it was over I’d come out on top, although I’d gotten careless and
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