Michael Johnson's
Deer Crick Diaries
Second in a Series
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second in a series of excerpts from the book-length memoirs of Michael Johnson, covering his youth in Delphi, Indiana, where his family published the local newspaper and he first began to absorb what he needed for a life as a professional reporter and writer.
That toilet booth may still be locked today, 50 years later, the toilet all dried up and crawling with spiders.
The Merry Pranksters of Delphi, Indiana
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
for TheColumnists.com
SOMETHING about life in Delphi propelled me into a life of merry pranksterism. I know my younger brother, Jerry, followed in my footsteps. Somehow our older brotrher, Dinty, was too busy achieving to do such things. Or was he young so long ago that pranks had not been invented yet?
I definitely had the bug, and one prank that I can talk about concerns trigonometry--one of the few branches of math that appealed to me, probably because it involved a lot of drawing. In my senior year we were about to sit down for our final test of the semester. The teacher, Dan McMillan, was late for some reason.
Someone handed me a firecracker and dared me to do something with it. I could never resist a dare, so I got myself a piece of string, wrapped it around the fuse, and lit the string with my cigarette lighter. I placed the firecracker under Dan's desk. String burns very slowly but steadily. About 30 minutes into the test, I was bearing down on trig stuff, when BAM! went the firecracker. Dan almost had a heart attack, and the whole class lifted off their seats about two feet and dropped back with a thud, including me.
Dan, a former Marine, decided to do a shakedown to see who had firecrackers in their pockets. We were told to empty our pockets onto our desks. I managed to hide my cigarette lighter in my sock, and the rest of my pitiful belongings were innocent. Dan found no incriminating evidence.
So, the next day he took the class into a vacant classroom and handed out blank pieces of paper to the entire class. He invited us to write the name of the person who did the deed, fold it up and place it, unsigned, in a box. I scanned the local yokels and figured there was only one who might crack. But when the ballots were opened, it turned out that nobody cracked. I was never caught.
Meanwhile, among us juvenile
delinquents, all this talk of television arriving in town had
got our hormones going, and we needed relief. We found it when
one of us came up with a pair of wire-cutters. It took no time
at all for us to make the link: wire-cutters plus TV antenna
cable equals a darn good time by Delphi standards.
We set out under cover of darkness to Delphi's better homes (doctors,
plumbers, etc.) and watched for the telltale bluish flicker--proof
of TV inside. As we snipped the cable, we peered into the living
room. The master of the house would jump from his chair, approach
the expensive box, fiddle with the knobs, shake the box, kick
the box, curse the box (“I paid 600 dollars for this piece
of crap!”), and slump back into the chair--all quite hilarious.
Within a week, we had made the "Main Street" column
on Page One of The Citizen, as a report of vandals on the loose.
Getting a mention in "Main Street" was a real bonus,
which we achieved only five or six times in our careers.
In those days, I did a couple of years of $4 lessons with Sister Rufinia, a watercolorist at St. Elizabeth's Convent. It was rumored that I had some innate ability to draw. I have been trying for 60 years to prove this true, but am still having huge problems. Anyway, in the early 1950s, the lessons seemed just another torture session for me, like every day at school, and pranksterism was the only way to stay sane.
I had no idea what Sister Rufinia was talking about when she said we could find beauty in any slum scene. And I could not control the watercolor paints to get those still-lifes down on paper. I was doing flowers, bowls of withered fruit, some Mexican hat-and-shoe combination. Every Saturday morning I got a free ride to Lafayette, 17 miles away, with some Delphi matron who worked near the convent. I was 12 and she was about 60. Not much fun. To get back home, I was told to stand at a street corner bus stop and flag down a Greyhound that made twice-daily runs through Delphi. It meant leaving a lot to chance for a kid that age. On my second Saturday, in the rain, I thought I had missed the bus (it was late or I was impatient), and went across the street to a diner and called home.
Instead of getting picked
up, I was told to go back to the Convent with all those nuns
and hang around for the next bus. As I was on the phone, I saw
my bus whiz by, and felt really stupid. Then I ordered a hamburger,
only to discover I didn't have enough money. The waitress took
pity on me and let me pay half the price. I was so mortified
I never went back into that place, no matter how hungry I got.
I then returned to the convent and waited for Sister Rufinia
to surface from her lunch of bread and water. Always alert for
a chance to make mischief, I went into the bathroom, locked one
of the booths, and crawled out over the top of the booth. I got
some weird satisfaction over the next two years as that booth
remained forever locked. It still may be locked today, 50 years
later, the toilet all dried up and crawling with spiders.
I also spent a couple of summers working at the Country Club in the pro shop selling golf balls and beer. This is where I saw my first personal check. Some Lions Club member bought some golf balls with it. I accepted it, wondering what I was supposed to do with it. I had no idea how the system worked. Was I supposed to sign it, too? I played it cool and just threw it in with the cash.
My fellow-delinquents used to gather around me at the golf course as I “worked” and plan mischief. We once built a small cannon out of water pipes, using cherry bombs as gunpowder. That thing could shoot a golf ball through a brick wall. The job went wrong, though, when one evening it was decided to fill the ball-washers with urine. Human urine. The next day, some of Delphi’s finest complained to the manager that the ball-washers needed cleaning. By this time I was learning to keep a straight face through almost anything.
A few days later, my mother took me aside for a talk. She started by warning me that she had had some upsetting news about me. My mind raced through the 20 or 30 misdemeanors (maybe a few felonies, but just a few) I might have been observed committing. When she said I was being sacked from the Country Club because of my friends, I felt a huge wave of relief. First, I didn’t have to work there any more, and second, the other mischief had not been discovered. I stayed totally poker-faced, trying my best to look disappointed.
The Country Club continued to play a part in our lives, though. High school dances, various celebrations were held there. It was where the elite would meet to eat. And of course golf was the only known leisure activity going except drinking and sleeping. When Delphi finally got a bowling alley, the birth rate dropped sharply.
One of my most traumatic memories concerned fire. It was a very dull summer, and bulldozers were clearing part of the woods bordering the golf course. A huge pile of brush and trees had been shoved together for collection--it must have been two or three stories high, and a couple hundred feet long. Jim Cope and I bought a gallon of gas at one of the downmarket gas stations and calmly walked through town and out to the golf course. Around nightfall, we doused the woodpile and set it alight. It just smoldered because the wood was so green, so we gave up and headed back to town, assuming it would burn itself out.
Two hours later, some girl
we were with said, “Wow, look at the sky. It’s all
red-like. I wonder what’s going on. Maybe something’s
burning."
Jim and I suddenly remembered what we had done. We were absolutely
certain the fire had jumped to the clubhouse and that we were
in for serious trouble. An image of me in Carroll Country Jail
flashed through my head. I ran into the Whiteman’s house
(the nearest telephone) and shouted to the operator, “The
Country Club is on fire!" Two minutes later the siren went
off, and the fire engine roared past, seven or eight volunteer
firemen hanging on tight, heading out to the clubhouse.
Of course it turned out not to be quite that dramatic. The woodpile had just slowly built up into a fantastic blaze, lighting up the sky and showering ashes for miles around. Like Druids, the whole town turned out to stare into the flames. Jim and I ambled onto the scene a half hour later. We hung back, around the edge of the crowd, acting casual and pretending not to be very interested. Yawning. Looking away. Laughing uproariously inside. Even the telephone operator had recorded the alarm being called in by the Whitemans, not by me.
My friends and I were definitely undergoing a minor, temporary vandal phase by now. Our favorite pastime (when not burning things down) was to set out in a pickup truck owned by one of the delinquents’ parents, with two of us in the back weidling axes. As we sped down the gravel roads, we would swing the axe at the country mailboxes. Either we chopped them off, or the mailboxes came off their wooden stands, stuck to the axe. God forgive me. (Much later, I learned that this is a common pursuit among country boys, and it’s now called “Mailbox baseball”.)
© 2001 by Michael
Johnson. The illustration © 2001 by Jim Hummel.
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