Six or seven years ago, I tried to find the house where my father grew up. But what Tom Wolfe said famously is true. You can’t go home again – and it’s not always a walk in the park to go to your father’s home, either.
My father’s home was in Hindsboro, Ill., a hamlet in east central Illinois, on the north side of State Route 133. The latest census says about 350 people live there. It wasn’t much bigger than that when my family traveled through in the mid-’50s, but it was more of a town.
It was high summer. Mom had died of cancer the year before. Dad, my sister and I traveled in a 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air from Boulder to Washington, D.C., for a vacation. En route, we stayed with Dad’s parents one night.
Dad may have been Hindsboro’s most successful son. He was much smarter than the rest of the family. He enrolled at the University of Illinois, just 40 miles north of his home, at an early age and studied engineering.
Less than a decade later, he was doing postdoctoral work in theoretical physics.
Dad’s boyhood home was a modest house, to put the best light on it. The paint was peeling from the wood slats when we were there. The house smelled of coal oil and the accumulated staleness of long years of living in the same place: old clothes, aging wood, cooking grease, mildew.
It was hot. The windows were wide open. We could hear the trucks booming by on Route 133. If I hadn’t been at such an awkward age, I would have looked for fireflies blinking in the inky foliage. But I was a teenager and above it all.
What I wanted instead was for the long night to end, to be on the road again, toward motels and air conditioning and swimming pools. I’m sorry now I was too teen-cool to savor it more.
Perhaps that’s why I went looking for the house again, 40 years later.
I had been attending meetings in Greencastle, Ind., 90 miles east. There was a free afternoon, so I pointed my rental car west and drove.
July in that part of the country is green and hazy. There are no long vistas. It’s too flat; there’s too much moisture in the air. The leaves – the millions upon millions of leaves of trees and grass and crops – seep haze from their pores.
The air is alive with the humming, buzzing, clicking and trilling of insects, filling the blazing days and the sticky nights with their amorous advertising.
It was mid-afternoon when I pulled into Hindsboro. There was no sign of the soda fountain I remembered from so many years before, with its marble café tables and wrought-iron chairs. No place to get a lime phosphate or cherry Coke. There was very little left downtown except for a post office in a prefabricated building with a flag out front.
Worse, there was nothing of the place where I thought I remembered my grandparents’ house to be. Only a flat, grassy lot. But I may have been wrong.
So I reverted to reporter mode. I would venture among the citizens of Hindsboro, especially the older ones, seeking information about the Brown house.
There was a park that the town elders appeared to favor. I pulled up there, the Pontiac’s fat tires crackling on the gravel, and stepped out deferentially.
Does anyone here remember the house where Scott Brown and his wife, India Mae, lived a half-century ago? No. No glimmers.
I walked on, looking for others even older. But no, they didn’t remember either. Most of them had come to Hindsboro only recently, to live with children seeking an exurban Eden.
After a fruitless hour, I returned to the car. Word had gotten around about the stranger in town. An ancient woman in a flowered dress tottered up to me, taking short steps to preserve her precious balance.
“I heard you were looking for someone,” she said. “Maybe I can help.” So I told her the few things I thought I remembered of my grandparents’ house. She looked thoughtful for a while.
No, she said finally, she guessed she couldn’t help much, either. “I just moved here last March,” she explained.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists.
