19 Neillsville People
If you’ve only lived in big cities, you might think that everyone knows each other in such a small town. That’s not quite true – even with fewer than three thousand people, nobody knows everyone. But much of the population has been there for generations, and long-time residents can find a connection with just about anyone. With fewer than 100 kids in each grade, anyone associated with the school system will know somebody with common family names. You could also identify people by their occupation (farmer, hospital worker, teacher) or by their church.
19.1 The Pack
Though it’s true that people in a small town are naturally open and friendly to one another, that does nothing to diminish the human instinct to separate into smug cliques and, beginning in middle school, this segregation began in earnest.
There were early hints even in elementary school, like the time walking home with my brother in second grade, when the Larsen boys appeared out of nowhere and threw our art projects into O’Neill Creek. The projects weren’t that important, we told ourselves, and those kids were way bigger than we were, so we chose to simply ignore that act of meanness.
By middle school, though, the Larsen boys – especially Mike Larsen, the oldest – were completely out of hand. Between classes, Mike was always surrounded by the biggest, toughest boys, all of whom seemed permanently on the lookout for weakness. It was as if they fed on it, like vampires in a never-ending search for blood.
They found their first blood in David O’Grady, a friendly, slightly portly boy who otherwise was normal in every way. He was in the same grade as my brother, who was a friend and regular lunchtime and recess companion. But David had one conspicuous weakness that was quickly and mercilessly exploited by the unforgiving mean boys.
David had arachnophobia, a fear of spiders that was impossible to ignore among boys looking for a target to prove their own strength, because as every boy knows, nothing is a better proof of strength than the weakness of another.
The rumor was that David had, as a very young boy, been attacked by spiders in an outhouse while using the facilities, and the experience had traumatized him so much that he was barely able to think about spiders without getting chilly reminders of the incident. His fear was total, completely irrational, enough that the mere mention – the mere threat of a mention – would send him into a clear defensive stance, his eyes widening, his lips pursed, his stance ready to flee. The other boys, seeing his, could not resist the easy kill, and soon David was surrounded by taunts.
During the Fall and Spring, when live spiders were abundant and easily snared by the farm boys, David was in especially big trouble, but even Winter brought little relief. Nothing gave greater pleasure to the meanest boys than to draw a picture of a spider on David’s notebook – watch him squirm! – or to threaten that one had been discovered and was now – here – in my hand waiting to be tossed right in his face.
David, sadly, was unable to hide his fear. The mere mention of the word, the slightest hint that the very concept of spider was about to be brought into the room, send him shivering with chills. There was no refuge. When he tried to hide in the library, the boys brought him magazines and books with pictures of spiders. It got to be so bad that he couldn’t go near the “S” section of the library, for fear that a heartless bully might be lying in wait ready to pounce with a book of gruesome photos.
My brother, being an erstwhile friend of David’s, soon became a target as well. Gary was not himself afraid of spiders, but there was guilt by association, and the meanest boys began to search for his weaknesses, as if it was their solemn duty, like inquisitors, to find every soft spot in the school body.
Being younger, though only by a year, threatened to push me into the negative association as well, and I began to see constant reminders of how close I was to becoming the class punching bag. The mean boys showed no mercy on David O’Grady, and now the boys in my own grade, seeing the fun, couldn’t help but notice the advantages to their own status by being able to prove that somebody else was weaker. It seemed to be just a matter of time before they came after me too.
Jimbo was worried. A city boy through and through, he was unable and uninterested in the physical activities that the bullies respected. The meanest boys always traveled together, “like a pack”, he said, and soon that’s the label we assigned them.
The Pack. They congregated during free moments at school, like wolves hunting for prey at breaks between classes, at lunch time, and after school. If you saw them together, you knew it was trouble, and I soon learned to avoid certain areas of the school, or – when that was impossible – to make sure to pass only when other, weaker boys could be sacrificed to ensure my safety.
Gary and I were obvious weaklings. Both of us, tall and skinny, Gary with his awkward glasses, our pants always too short. Today’s school administrators, ever-vigilant against bullying, would have intervened to protect us. But we had no such help. There were no anti-bullying signs posted in the hallways, no hall monitors to watch for signs of the weak being exploited by the strong. We were on our own.
19.2 Our Friends
I no longer remember precisely when the Miller family arrived in Neillsville. The father, Dan Miller, was a woodcutter who raised his family in Athelstane, a small rural town on the way to Upper Michigan. The oldest was a boy, David, who towered over his four younger sisters. The parents were serious Christians who attended our church regularly, and the older kids matched ages with ours, so we naturally came to know them well.
Dave Miller and my brother loved many of the same things: cars, motorbikes, fixing things – all guy stuff. I think there was much friendly competition between them over who could their various guy hobbies, so they leapfrogged each other through high school buying and then fixing up old cars. Though Dave was deep down a serious, well-meaning boy, he had more tolerance for risk-taking than either my brother or me, and we looked at him as living right at the edge of lawlessness.
It’s funny to reflect on this now, because by any of today’s standards, Dave would be squeaky clean, but we saw him as a bold and daring ne’er-do-well. My brother enjoyed dirt-biking as much as any boy, but Dave’s ability to tolerate high speeds and dangerous situations topped anything we would have attempted. Where the rest of us (especially me) were barely willing to go up and down hills, Dave thought nothing of flying his bike right over a cliff. We joked about how crazy he could be.
His father, a straight-and-narrow pillar of the church, gave Dave little room to get into trouble at home, but school was another matter. Events reached a head one day when Dave did something so egregious (I don’t remember precisely) that, as punishment, Dave’s father decided to join Dave at school for the day. Obviously nothing could possibly be as mortifying to a young teenager, and he complained about it for years, but that I suppose was the father’s intention.
It may have been his status as an only boy in a family of sisters, but he seemed more comfortable – eager – to be around girls than we were. He was not afraid, like we were, to ask a girl out, or to take her for a long ride in his car, and later he would brag – just us guys – about what he had been able to get the girl to do.
Like most teenage stories, I doubt the reality was anywhere close to the imagined bravado when they were told, but Dave was a risk-taker in other areas so who knows.
He fell head over heels in love with a girl from another town, and he talked constantly about wanting to see her. He even changed his car license plates to “NADEEN”, which of course we thought was ridiculously short-sighted.
But then I remember one day, a Wednesday evening after church, when we normally had time to go over his most recent exploits, Dave confessed to us that he was no longer interested in misbehaving. “I don’t want to go to Hell,” he said, a point that we took more seriously coming from a boy who till then didn’t seem to consider the consequences of his risk-taking.
Dave married Nadeen a few years later and literally lived happily ever after – last I checked they’ve been together for more than 30 years.
19.3 Neillsville Friends
Maria Marks was one of half a dozen, maybe more, children in a family that attended our church. She had an older sister who I know worked far away at our Christian summer camp, and a younger brother who was a year older than me. The mom was an elderly woman who, I’m sorry to recall, sticks in my memory because her body odor was so overpowering that eventually somebody had to intervene and ask her to bathe before coming to church.
Maria was a nurse, probably in her late 20s, maybe 30s by the time I knew her, and very single. She wanted badly to be married, and I don’t blame her: she would have made a wonderful mother and I’m sure she wanted a family more than anything. She was also a very devout Christian, pure and sweet and loving.
After living in Neillsville for so long, she apparently decided that she was unlikely to meet a suitable husband there and so she took a chance and moved to Alaska on a one (or two?) year missionary program that involved some church-related initiative. I didn’t hear much about how it went, but i’m sure it was quite the adventure. Nevertheless when the assignment finished, she returned to Neillsville, unmarried and a bit older.
Sometime after this, a man named Joseph began to regularly attend our church. I’m not sure how he happened to come here — maybe he was related to somebody? — but he was very taken with Maria and began to pursue her. It was clear to us outsiders that the two were not a particularly good match, notably due to his rather large girth. He was very obese, not especially attractive. I don’t know that he had any other qualities that would make him ordinarily somebody she would seek, but apparently none of this mattered relative to his charm. He did everything to make her feel like he would be a good husband. One night at church, after I guess they were a thing, he testified how much weight he had lost since meeting her — proof, he believed that God wanted them together.
Long story short, they married and last I heard are still together, though childless. A real shame, because Maria would have made such a good mother.
Mark was a boy my age, who lived about a block beyond Jimbo’s house. Mark was well-liked and intelligent, and although our paths crossed regularly, I don’t remember any particular incidents that would have made us close friends. Everyone knew everyone, so my memories of him don’t stand out for anything in particular.
He was a budding filmmaker, in the same way that I was obsessed with computers, but like me, he had to live within the constraints of the technologies of the times. Still, using what today would be unthinkably primitive techniques, he was able to make some interesting home movies, often about his favorite theme: space travel. We were all heavily influenced by Star Trek and later, Star Wars, but Mark brought his interest to the rest of us, writing short movie scripts, and then directing them using the consumer film movie cameras of the day. (Later posted to YouTube)
I don’t remember how he met Julie, his high school sweetheart, but whatever it was, the two of them are inseparable now in my memory. I think they attended the same college (Eau Claire) and then married within a few years of high school and they were still together 40 years later.
Right out of college, Mark and Julie started “Ag News Network”, a radio program with daily updates relevant to farmers. I lost track after leaving Neillsville, but it apparently didn’t last very long because the next time I heard about them, they were living in Minneapolis. I think he worked at a bank for a long time, until he took advantage of a layoff package to start his own marketing business.
Along the way, I remember that he won some kind of screenplay contest that let him pitch in front of the makers of Star Trek. I read the script at the time and thought it was very original, very well-done, although it apparently never made it to a contract. He self-published a book too.
19.4 Small Town Low Life
The knowledge that our parents loved us was a deeply-ingrained fact, like air, and like wind sometimes something to resist. Of course, parents should love and care for their children – no exceptions – but we also knew that not all families could take that for granted.
Neillsville was a small town, and it was possible – just – to know something about everyone. Even among those we didn’t know directly, there was a connection not far removed, and gossip got around. As kids, we were well-protected from the worst of humanity, but that didn’t mean we were wholly unaware. Years later, when I could understand the bigger truths, I could see that sometimes when things aren’t quite right, there was a deeper problem.
One of the girls in eighth grade left school because she was pregnant. She had always been quiet, not a particularly good student, with few friends, so we didn’t notice too much. I remembered how, years earlier in fourth or fifth grade, while playing some kind of game of tag at school, she and another girl had tackled me. It was all just fun, so at the time I just thought it was rather odd, not malicious, that she grabbed my groin and squeezed me. This hadn’t happened to me before – touching that way was considered more gross than inappropriate – and the game was too fast to dwell on such oddities, so I attributed it to normal roughhousing. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that her pregnancy was a result of incest, an apparent rape by her father.
Then there was a boy who seemed to prefer to play with girls. Again, we didn’t see this as particularly shameful or undesirable. In kindergarten I preferred the quieter games of the girls too sometimes, and this boy didn’t exclude boys – we played with him too. He just seemed like he felt more comfortable around the girls, and he was otherwise fairly friendly and interesting so we didn’t think anything of it.
Years later, the town optometrist – an otherwise well-respected neighbor who we all knew as “normal” – committed suicide, shooting himself in his basement, having left a thoughtful note to his wife warning her not to come downstairs. It turned out that this man had regularly invited that boy alone to his house, showing him pornographic movies in his downstairs theatre.
We all know what we mean when we say “small town values”: nuclear families with a working father and stay-at-home mom, active in the community including regular church attendance, hard working, clean living, even short haircuts for men and boys and always long hair and dresses for the girls. Popular movies and sitcoms often hold these stereotypes up for ridicule as a repressive society drenched with hypocrisy: the church-going father who beats his wife and children, the gay-bashing minister with the secret homosexual affair, the abstinence club run by the school slut.
Nobody uses the word “big city values”, because the only difference, it seems between the secret alleged sins of the small town is that the city people are open about it, unashamed, even proud of their immoral ways. “At least we’re not hypocrites,” they say in smug judgment of the small-towners.
But I think the difference is not one of hypocrisy but aspiration. Nobody in a small town believes that people are always righteous and good or that sin is limited to big cities. Maybe it’s the direct experience with sin and its personal, individual affect on people that makes a small town more averse to such habits. Of course we sin, but we really wish we didn’t. If the city people want to claim that their bad behaviors are actually good, then that’s the part we don’t understand because we know from first-hand experience the wages of sin.
I learned about infidelity long after I left, because as a teenager I guess it never occurred to me that people could run into trouble later in life. We knew that husbands could cheat on their wives, of course, but it seemed like something that only happened to those who weren’t active in the church.
Our high school guidance counselor, for example, was always friendly, active in the community, a great resource for kids who didn’t know what they wanted to do after high school. His wife was the most popular teacher in fourth grade; Gary had her, and their policy of spreading siblings out among different teachers was the reason I was passed over for selection into her class, which seemed so much more full of interesting projects and great teaching than the comparatively dull class I was assigned.
A few years after I had left, we learned that this same guidance counselor and his wife had abruptly quit town, moving far away after it was discovered that he had been having an affair with one of the high school girls. Everyone knew the girl well, of course; she was popular and outgoing. If he had been a high school student himself, we would have thought the two made a great, natural couple. But clearly, something had not been right all along.
Many other examples: our high school history teacher, who abandoned his wife and teenage daughter for an affair with another teacher. The math teacher who, besides algebra and geometry, taught me by example the harsh and lonely world of an alcoholic, and that unforgettable, medicinal smell of alcohol on his breath. The town banker, who after forty years of marriage ran off with another woman, who subsequently left him, and yet in the end his original wife was there at his funeral mourning and treated like a proper widow.
But later we learned of examples that hit much closer to home.
George Williams lived around the corner from us with his postcard family. His wife was the always-prim daughter of one of the founding families of Marshfield, and they had two children, a boy and girl who attended our church and we knew well. George was by all accounts a successful businessman, owner of the local Radio Shack, and lead accordionist in a popular polka band. Though he himself wasn’t an enthusiastic Christian, his wife attended our church regularly and the kids were raised just like me. A few years after I left Neillsville, George too apparently came to the Lord and the last conversation I had with him was about Evolution and how easy (and important) it was to dismiss the science. He had been forced to move to Marshfield after his business failed, and – who knows – maybe that was the cause, maybe the consequence, but sometime after that we learned about an ugly affair, and his tragic divorce. Although nothing about the situation would have made sense to me at the time, I could somewhat explain it by the fact that he wasn’t, perhaps, as enthusiastic a Christian as others.
Bill Smith, on the other hand, had no such excuse. An active outdoorsman and head of our scouting troop, he was by all accounts a loving husband, father of three boys, and deeply-believing Christian. A few years after I left Neillsville, we learned that he had been involved with a woman who had been renting a trailer home from him. His wife discovered it by accident when, upon opening a Christmas card addressed to him, saw that it was signed by “your other wife”. Turns out this renter was herself an enthusiastic Christian, and the affair started over various theological conversations they’d had when he visited her to check on the property.
Then there was Steve, one of my favorite Sunday school teacher friends, a plumber who inspired me with his eager interest in all things intellectual, far beyond what you’d expect from a humble small-town plumber who’d never been to college. To this day, he is proof that the world is full of people, in places you’d least expect, who are meant for bigger and better things but who are held back, somehow, by circumstances.
His wife, Jill, is best described with the word “loud”. She seemed his opposite: the type of person who prefers to think while talking, and although she talks much, the signal to noise ratio is, well, low. But she was a kind, cheerful person and a good mother to their one son.
When I last saw them in person, they were fretting over their (now adult) son’s involvement in a relationship with a much older woman. Steve, I remember, was not fooled when the son insisted that he had to stay overnight on her couch because he couldn’t get the car to start. “I wouldn’t have stayed on the couch if I had been you,” he said. But with the son out of the house and on his own, there wasn’t much else they could do, and Jill had other things on her mind anyway: she wanted to leave town and move to Mexico for a while to live with some missionaries. She wanted Steve to join her, but he was reluctant.
I learned later that in fact, Steve did ultimately come along with her, but that somehow in Mexico he became involved with a woman, that Jill didn’t find out until much later, at which point they of course divorced. By then he was apparently fed up with her completely because he soon found another girlfriend, online, a Thai woman who he married and brought back to America. Now Steve is settled with the new woman, a few houses down from Jill, crossing paths regularly with townspeople who knew him from his youth, but apparently he simply doesn’t care. The last I talked with him, he had completely renounced his faith and was reading and studying progressive politics and ideas – a complete change from when I knew him and a bit sad.
All of these episodes taught me more about human nature and about how the world really works. There was great good in Neillsville and great evil, with the good always slightly ahead of the evil.
We didn’t have much drug use in my school. Sure, there were the “bad kids” who went behind the bleachers to smoke cigarettes between classes, and who knows what else they may have done, but it wasn’t something that affected me. They were a tiny minority, and the sad stories from the rest of their lives made it obvious that they were people to be friended, not emulated.
Gary and I were insulated from all this anyway. Neither of us would have tried smoking even if we’d had the opportunity. It seemed dangerous, a sin that crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed.
One kid, who we nicknamed Jesus because of his long hair and beard, seemed to be an important influence on the behind-the-bleachers crowd. I remember him because his first name, Richard, meant that we were sometimes compared and contrasted, and because he sat behind me in history class, where he enjoyed poking me with his sharp pencil. I didn’t know him well, although as with most people in Neillsville we had a connection. His mother, divorced, lived on our street and showed some interest in our church. When in an attempt to be friendly I happened to mention that connection to him, he warned me sternly never to speak of it to anyone. He hated church, he said, (and his mother?) so he didn’t want any association whatsoever to come back to him.
Years later I asked something about him and learned that he had been killed, murdered in some uncharacteristic small town violence in which he was found cut gruesomely into pieces, supposedly as a result of a drug deal gone bad.