8 Gungors
The Neillsville of my first memories may have been rural, but it was not completely removed from “The Sixties” of the rest of America. One of my first glimpses came in art class, when the teacher let the girls bring record albums to play while we worked: popular songs of the day, like Leaving on a Jet Plane, or Do You Know the Way to San Jose, repeated over and over.
My school held bomb drills, last vestiges I guess of the 50s and 60s fear of nuclear war, where once or twice a school year we learned to duck under our desks for protection.
We had hippies, Hells Angels, and draft evaders just like the big cities. One day, while browsing a copy of US News and World Report, I came upon some photos of the Black Panthers, and my mother warned me to immediately report to her if I ever saw anyone like that in real life.
One sunny morning I woke up to find one of our downstairs windows shattered. Dad had run outside to catch the two teenage boys responsible. He apprehended them and was arranging to settle the matter with their parents, a doctor and his wife. Although they lived only a block away, that was the first time I heard their name: Gungor.
Dad had been working at the high school as a substitute teacher, and the two were in his class. Somehow the teenagers learned that Dad’s real occupation was a small-town preacher, and this was apparently funny enough to them that they decided to vandalize our house. I don’t know the full story, but if their intent was to intimidate my father somehow, their plans backfired.
This was not my father’s only close call. While setting up the church, he reached out to many people and groups on the margins: alcoholics, deadbeat dads, single moms and their unruly children. He even spoke to members of the nearby Winnebago Indian tribe, including one very large and mean-looking man named Rudy, who arrived at our doorstep once very late at night insisting that he needed to talk about God, alone, in a place far away.
Dad greeted all of these rough people with the same missionary zeal that led him to Neillsville in the first place, but his farm-raised instincts kept him well-grounded in the ways that people could be evil, so if Rudy started with any ill intents, they evaporated by the time Dad finished talking with him and Rudy became a regular church goer.
So it was with the Gungor boys, who quickly became enthusiastic members of our church, forming our local version of the “Jesus People”, a Hippie-inspired movement that spread with the Sixties, substituting Christianity for drugs but keeping the same dress code (long hair, blue jeans, bandanas) and focus on love and peace. The two boys, Ed and Mark, were also musically inclined and they formed a Christian rock band, drawing even more young people to our church.
One of them was their little brother, who was introduced to me in the basement of our church one Sunday as Jimbo, the precocious doctor’s son, who soon became my best friend.
Jimbo was a year younger than I was, but had skipped first grade and was a third grader like me. He was the pride of his mother, Lily, who knew he was destined for greatness and spared no expense to ensure he had the finest of everything. It was a treat to visit his house, which seemed overflowing with the latest toys of course, but also with books and innumerable puzzles and games. We soon discovered a mutual interest in Chess, Stratego, and many other board games of strategy that kept us busy every weekend.
Jimbo had a younger sister, Lisa, who was Connie’s age, and they became such close friends that they nicknamed each other “sissy”. Gary joined us too, and there probably wasn’t a Saturday where we all didn’t play together. In the winter, we could go to the Gungor’s large basement with its musty shag carpeting and endless games of the board game Life.
The Gungors had one important possession we didn’t have: a TV, a full-size color model that seemed to be always turned on. To us Spragues, this was both a treat and a mystery: we had no television at our house, so anything we saw was new. But in those days before home recording and cable TV, the viewing options were limited on weekend afternoons, so we watched less than you might think. Still, Jimbo watched enough that he was able to introduce us to TV-inspired real-life games, where we would imitate the premise of a show, taking on the roles of one of the characters, pretending to live in that world. Our favorite was Star Trek, which I had only been able to watch in brief glimpses, but with Jimbo we played incessantly. He liked to be Captain Kirk, Gary was Scottie – the resourceful fix-it man, and I of course was Spock, the unwaveringly logical, science-oriented, and endowed with special powers that let me do mind melds and Vulcan death grips.
It was also at the Gungor house that occasionally I was allowed a peek into his father’s study: a small room that was positively crammed with books and magazines. Dr. Gungor was a Bulgarian-born Turk who had lived under the Nazi occupation as a boy, became a medical doctor, and immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s. It was while practicing in New York City that he met Lily, a lively Puerto Rican woman who became his wife. The rumor was that Lily had been a single mother with three young boys and she met Dr. Gungor while bringing them to his clinic.
I have no idea how such an unlikely family ended up in Neillsville. When I met them, the three oldest boys were followed by an oldest sister, Leyla, then Jimbo, and the youngest girl Lisa. It was a big family in the middle of Wisconsin farming country. A doctor’s income in Neillsville made them among the wealthiest families, and Lily’s gregarious personality meant they were among the most social families too, seemingly connected to everyone.
The Gungors, besides being close friends, also became for me an aspiration, of another world that could be realized through education and money. And their world was highly approachable: through my friendship with Jimbo I realized that money had great usefulness but it didn’t determine happiness or success.