Geneva, Illinois

My clearest memory as a six year old has me sprinting through a grassy pasture on my grandparents’ farm in Illinois.  I was pretending to be Superman.  I practiced my flying skills after the popular show was over each week.  I ran as fast as I could with my arms outstretched, like a large seabird taking off in the wind.  Fortunately, I didn’t get far off the ground.  It was my favorite TV show, especially the introduction.  Besides my Superman memories, I remember the Illinois sunsets.  The best sunsets were brilliant red and orange brush-stroked canvases extending across the western sky, probably because pollution had drifted westward from the Gary, Indiana steel mills.

I always wanted to travel.  While watching sunsets, I would imagine a world far to the west.  Far for me at the time was about a mile.  But there were plateaus, mountains, deserts, and other exotic places out there to be explored.  I especially thought of mountains, the Rocky Mountains.  My family occasionally visited mountains, the eastern summits, long folded thrusts, the ridges of the Appalachians.  We regularly drove to New Jersey to visit my Mother’s relatives, especially our cousins, Dolores and Gary in South River.  We would drive the Pennsylvania Turnpike, through tunnels, up long grades and over mountains.  I enjoyed those trips, but my father lacked a spirit of adventure.  He wanted to reach our destination as swiftly as possible.  I wanted more.

I also loved the texture of the land, the hills and valleys, how they formed, and why they were there.  I was clearly aware of the topographic contours on my grandparents farm and can still imagine the uphill grade through the corn field to the western property line on Old Kirk Road, the low relief center, the railroad tracks and the woods farther south, and Old Alternate U.S. 30 just north of the property line.  My parents, my brother Tom, and I lived on the eastern edge of my grandparents 13-acre farm, in a small house attached to the family business, a tavern.  The place seemed large and remote in the early 1950’s.  Just walking through the corn field to Kirk Road was a big deal for me, especially when the corn was over my head!

The distant whistles of passenger trains speeding westward always thrilled me.  Many of the locomotives still had steam engines and belched black smoke.  It was pensiveness, or maybe sadness.  They were going somewhere and I wasn’t.  I had heard stories about the hobos riding trains during the Great Depression.  We even had a few come to the farm looking for work or just a meal.  I was envious.  I wanted to ride with them but had to travel first class, with a comfortable seat and a dining car that served pancakes for breakfast.  In retrospect, I think a lot of it was about motion.  I wanted to travel and experience the act of travelling, the sensation of movement, the speed, and the change of physical and mental space.  I was a closet road warrior and I needed a mission.

I had collected rocks for as long as I could remember—round ones, big ones, shiny ones, all kinds.  Any rock was collectible if it interested me, and most did. But the pickings were slim on a farm in northern Illinois where three feet of black, organic rich soil formed a soft earthy veneer over everything.  We lived far from rock outcroppings where beautiful specimens weathered out of the mother lode.  Actually, rocks were generously exposed in northern Illinois, but I knew none of this at the time.

My first mother-lode experience occurred when my cousin Joey returned from a vacation to the Wisconsin Dells, an incised valley formed by the Wisconsin River.  Joey was a rock collector too and brought his specimens to the farm on a weekend visit.  He lived in Chicago where buildings with colorful facades of granite, marble, and gneiss were common, but collectible rocks were rare.  We met secretly in my grandparents basement.  There was a sinister aspect to our meeting, as if we were a couple of felons counting stashed loot.  The basement was a dark place of all things collectible—mason jars full of fruits and vegetables, mops and brooms, muddy boots, a monstrous coal-burning furnace and adjacent coal bin, dirty work clothes on wall hooks, a freezer with the remains of my favorite cow, and my grandfather’s chair.  He would sit in the basement and smoke cigars, no doubt to escape his wife, my paternal grandmother, an angry, vindictive, and troublesome woman.  His sanctuary had a distinctive musty smell, a combination of cigar smoke, unwashed jeans, and coal soot.

Joey showed me some of the most beautiful rocks I had ever seen—but how much has a seven year old really seen in the way of rocks anyway.  The specimens were wrapped in newspaper. They were fist-sized chunks, coarse textured and grainy, mostly yellow, white, some gray.  I bled with envy and wanted those rocks, but mostly I wanted to find them myself.  I didn’t know it at the time, but I yearned to be a geologist.  Joey’s rocks—as I would later learn—were sandstones from the St. Peter and Eau Claire Formations, lithic wonders that formed the colorful bluffs of the Wisconsin River at the Dells.  We were fondling specimens from the North American craton, home to the oldest basement on the continent, an ancient place draped in a veneer of 400-million-year old Paleozoic sedimentary rocks.

My big opportunity came in 1956 when we moved to town.  My parents bought an old frame house, a fixer upper on a half acre lot, an 1860’s farm house and tiny orchard with apple and pear trees.  Geneva was small at that time, only a few thousand residents, but it had an excellent school system and lots of great shops.  I could walk or bike just about anywhere.  We lived across the street from the Fox River, and it was only a short hike to Good Templar Park, the city dump, Hillquist Brothers Excavating Company, and Harrison Street School.  Several neighbors had kids my age, so baseball, fishing, clubhouse construction, and trouble making were in close proximity.  The Good Templar Park included a half-square mile wooded area a few blocks north of our house.  My friends, Terry and Floyd, my brother, Tom, and I spent long hours there devoted to various forms of mischief.  The river provided fishing, boating, ice skating, and rock skipping.  The Geneva dam and Island Park were only a few blocks away.  On my way to the dam, I walked or rode my bike through Hillquist Brothers excavation company.  The site was basically a large parking lot full of earth moving equipment, a storage garage, and two or three towering piles of gravel, graded by size—cobbles, pebbles, and sand.  I could easily waste away an hour there on a summer evening.  The place was unfenced and unguarded.  A young collector could easily steal priceless rock specimens.

These mountains of gravel contained untold stories, one for every pebble and cobble of schist, gneiss, granite, and quartzite.  Rocks were pushed, rolled, or shoved southward from Canada on advancing ice sheets during the Pleistocene Epoch a few tens of thousands of years ago.  When the ice melted, torrential rivers sorted and weathered these bits and chunks into rounded, polished relics.

At first, I just collected for fun, but soon developed an interest in understanding how rocks formed and where they came from.  About that time I discovered the Geneva Public Library, an old rock-faced building within easy walking distance from our house.  The building was made of rocks!  I clearly remember career day in fifth grade at Harrison Street School.  Mrs. O’Hara asked each of us “what we wanted to be when we grew up.”   When my turn came, I stood up and proudly said “geologist”.  I had chosen my life’s mission.

Unfortunately, my mission was interrupted one day when a fellow fifth grader pushed me off the top of the tallest sliding board on the playground.  Mr. Paylitner, the principal, carried me into his office and called my mother, who needed far more calming than I did.  The most unforgettable memories were of the pain and holding my broken arm so it wouldn’t dangle at my side.  Rock collecting was over for awhile.  My musical career permanently ended that day as well.  I had just taken possession of a new clarinet and was about to start lessons.  As it turned out, nearly a year would pass before my left arm was fully healed, and I would have been a lousy clarinet player anyway.  I had broken my left arm in three places at the elbow, a rather “difficult” spot according to Dr. Bordineve, our family physician.

I was driven by intellectual pursuits during my convalescence and caught up on inspirational literature.  After reading my first full-length novel, a 200-page science fiction drama about exploring the moon, I concentrated on Scrooge McDuck, one of my childhood idols.  Uncle Scrooge, as you may recall, was Donald Duck’s uncle and mentor, a cheapskate and selfish fuddy duddy who loved adventure.  His wild and wacky exploits reinforced my interest in geology.  My favorite stories revolved around lost Indian tribes and extinct cultures, rock hounding, and mining adventures.  For ten cents, Dell Publishing and Carl Barks, the cartoonist, rewarded me with hours of reading and viewing entertainment.  Scrooge unfortunately appeared only four times a year.  As each publication date approached, I would ride my bike to Nelson’s News Agency daily, hoping to see Uncle Scrooge’s scowling face on a Dell cover.  As a kid, I owned more than a dozen issues of the Dell comic editions.  I returned home once in my 20’s or 30’s to find that my Mother had trashed my priceless collection while cleaning the garage.  I attempted collecting the original Dell editions again years later only to find my prized issues selling for hundreds of dollars.  I had to settle for newer reprinted editions of my cherished stories.

My only attempt at an alternate career path came during my junior high years when I was in the Geneva city parks baseball league.  Our father played baseball with my brother and me as kids, usually using a major leagues-style hard ball, back and forth, playing catch with a real catcher’s mitt.  Our yard was big enough to host neighborhood games.  I learned how to pitch and was good at throwing curve balls, thanks to our father who was probably a decent ball player as a youngster.  I started out as an outfielder in the city league, usually playing right field because no one hit the ball there.  On rare occasions when a fly ball headed my way, I would panic but usually caught it.  I kept bugging our coach to let me pitch but didn’t get a chance until his favorite right hander got sick or left for summer vacation.  I started out as a relief pitcher and ended my first game by keeping the enemy team at bay.  Ultimately, the coach let me start a game.  After a mediocre first inning I got my groove, and we won.  I continued practicing my curve ball and could scare the daylights out of most batters.  I aimed for the batter and flipped the ball out of my hand with a sharp spin.  At the last second, the spinning ball would usually curve sharply to the left onto home plate for a strike.  Regretfully, I sometimes hit a batter who would limp to first base. I still managed to win a few games, but in the longer run, I couldn’t focus on the ball properly.  My mind would wander, and sometimes I just couldn’t concentrate at all and would blow my chance at a win.  Pitching requires intense concentration.  I was “headed to the showers”, but actually just to the bench or right field to watch the rest the game.  I ultimately returned to my first love, throwing rocks, especially after entering high school, where kids twice my size could throw a fast ball at 90 mph.

During Junior High School, I became fascinated by old things. I loved my grandparents’ old radio, a 1930’s monster that stood three feet tall.  Old marbles, coins and stamps, games, toys, and puzzles also intrigued me.  The city dump became my second home for a while.  Relics of the past were everywhere, fun stuff to collect and study, old furniture, broken appliances, tools, and household items galore.  Today, city dumps are called “sanitary landfills” and are secure places, off limits to the collector, and besides, everyone recycles today, so good free stuff is hard to find.

By the time I made it to high school, I had read nearly everything the earth science shelf at the Geneva Public Library had to offer:  Pettijohn’s Sedimentary Rocks, Weller’s Stratigraphic Principals and Practice, Strahler’s Physical Geography, and regional publications of the Illinois State Geological Survey and the U.S. Geological Survey.  I breezed through J. Harlen Bretz’s Geology of the Chicago Region and numerous periodicals on the mining, mineral, and structural history of the U.S.  I knew the hydrologic history of Midwestern glacial terranes, the fluvial evolution of the Fox River, the trace of the Sandwich fault, and the location of Silurian reefs in northern Illinois.  I could even identify all of the moraines, eskers, and kames in Kane County and spot them on topographic maps I had purchased from the State of Illinois.  I even knew some colloquialisms and jokes dealing with geology:

Hardrocker= a person who studies igneous and metamorphic rocks,

Softrocker= a person who studies sedimentary rocks,

TGCFAOQTCD…The Girls Can Flirt And Other Queer Things Can Do (the first letter of each word represents the first letter of a mineral on the Moh’s hardness scale).

Fuberite= f­­ucked up beyond recognition (a euphemism for deformed metamorphic rocks.

I was committed!

I always seemed to bring home a pile of school books every night.  I can’t remember doing much homework, but I sure carried a large stack back and forth.  I must have done some homework though because I got good grades through high school.  I wasn’t a total nerd, but was limited in what I could do on my own because I didn’t have wheels.  I could occasionally borrow my father’s car, a 1963 Dodge station wagon, but my trips involved getting the Sunday paper, taking my mother to church, or running a quick errand.  During the summer months I would drive my father to work but used the car sparingly.  Geology fieldtrips involving more than a few miles were out of the question, but I did manage a few forays near home.

Geology didn’t consume all of my free time in high school.  I had other important duties to perform.   I was Emperor of the Latin Club, a very prestigious position.  At the end of Latin III, as juniors, several of us realized that an easy A-grade was to be had if we continued our studies as Latin scholars and Roman historians during our senior year.  Mr. Plichta, the Latin teacher, was a friendly and knowledgeable guy and encouraged us to take his classes.  I was made Emperor by my fellow students because I found a complete literal translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, our semester reading assignment for Latin IV class.  My primary duties were to manage the crib sheets for each assignment and to supervise efforts to find someone over 21 to buy beer for us for Friday night forays through the local post-Roman countryside. Everything fell into place for us at the beginning of our senior year.  John, an English exchange student and fellow Latin highbrow spent the year at Geneva High.  Surprisingly, he was 21 years old and thought that U.S. liquor laws were absurd.

As a senior, I had to take the SAT and ACT tests and decide on a college to attend.  It never entered my mind NOT to go to college.  I did a pretty mediocre job on the SAT, but scored well on the ACT, classifying me as an Illinois State Scholarship semi finalist, a fete that granted me Roman god status and invitations to several Midwestern schools.  The mail arrived, letters from schools like Illinois Wesleyan, Southern Illinois University, Rockford College, Northwestern University, and Grinnell College asking me to apply.  I was pleased with the attention, but was waiting for invitations from more exotic places out west. None came, but I didn’t let that stop me.  As an incipient geologist, I considered several western schools that had the name School of Mines attached to them: New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and South Dakota.  I skipped Michigan and Missouri because they weren’t far enough west.  As it turned out, I applied to four, as well as a couple of fall back schools near home.  Surprisingly, I was accepted by all four.  I favored Colorado School of Mines in Golden until I received a letter indicating the annual price tag for out-of-state tuition, room, board, books, and travel to the tune of $3,500—at 1964 prices!  Needless to say, even with a $500/year scholarship from the Furnas Foundation and $1000 in savings, Colorado was out of the question.

South Dakota was looking better every day as photos, brochures, and personal letters arrived.  The athletic teams were called the Hardrockers, and Grubby, a grizzled old miner, was the mascot.  I saw photos of the foothills around the campus, images of Rapid City, the Badlands, and Black Hills.  Out-of-state tuition was $125/semester, a bargain even in those days.  Even corrected for inflation, at today’s prices, it was a steal!  I accepted their offer and instantly became a South Dakota School of Mines Hardrocker, even though I was a Softrocker at heart.