'HUCKLEBERRY' BILLY and 'TOM' GARY...

One of my forte’s, I like to think was Ping Pong. I spent a lot of time at the YMCA while I was growing up. Besides swimming, running, basketball and all the other activities offered, ping pong was something special for me. We had tournaments quite often and I always done really well in them. My biggest competitor was Gary F. He was a really small kid who loved all sports but was always too little to compete because he was so small. But he worked harder than anyone I knew to prove himself to himself. Two of these sports that he did do really well were long distance running and ping pong. He and I played ping pong most every day at the “Y” and he would beat me probably 3 out 4 games on any given day.
Sadly though, his home life was as bad as mine. Maybe worse. His parents constantly fought and his dad drank a lot. Like me, he tried to stay away from home as much as he could. One time we decided to run away from home. We were 12 or 13 at the time. We packed a lunch each and took off walking across the bridge from Rock Island, Illinois to Davenport, Iowa. We ate our lunch early on the way. This was about 8:00 in the morning. We reached the outskirts of Davenport around 4:00 in the afternoon and got hungry. We sat down and talked it over and decided we would do this another time.

We took the ferry back across the river between Davenport and Rock Island. We had walked enough and It was only a dime. When we each got home about 7:00, nobody even missed us or knew we were running away.
When Gary and I were not running away from home or playing ping pong, we would go up to Augustana College where there was a lot of empty land and trees and a really muddy and rather small pond hidden by a group of trees. We found it one day while walking and running through the woods. Like huckleberry Finn, we claimed it as our pond. We found some old logs of different diameters but pretty much the same length. We got this idea of building a raft so we figured pretty much how to do it but we needed some rope and boards and nails and a hammer. A couple days later we took off to the pond with some equipment and proceeded to build our ‘Getaway’ raft.

With some patience and determination, we had built what looked somewhat like a raft, if you used your imagination. Up to this point, neither of us had the courage to actually go into that filthy pond but after having made a raft, then we couldn’t back down. We pushed and tugged and pulled and we actually got it into the water. Of course we sort of had to go into the water a ways to get it out far enough to float. And float, it did, until we got on it. It floated but with us on it, we were sitting on a partially submerged raft. But we did manage to get it out to the middle of the pond and most of the way back. Almost. Eventually, very close to the bank, we had to jump off and wade to the bank.
We, of course, had taken off our tennis shoes and socks before we had got on the raft so we were barefoot and had our pants legs rolled up. The mud must have been a foot deep under the water. I waded back to the bank first and Gary was alongside of me. All of a sudden Gary screamed like a bloody murder. We had already conjured up visions of monsters and poisonous snakes and everything in between, that lay in that pond. I was certain that Gary was a goner. He limped to the bank and saw that he had a terrible gash on the bottom of his foot and partly up the side. We found a bottom part of a broken milk bottle that he had stepped on. Of course, his mother had told him not to go to the pond almost every day that he came here. He said he couldn’t tell her about the accident but I told him he should see a doctor. He thought about it and said that in a movie he remembered these Indians would pack grass around the wound and wrap it up and it would heal the wound. I told him he was crazy but he had made up his mind. We found some grass and I gave him my socks to wrap it up. My socks alone should have been bad enough. I wrote him off as a friend who was going to die for sure. However, after about a week and about a pound of fresh grass later it was healing. The good thing was that for about a week, I could beat him in ping pong.
We never ever went back to the pond. I visited there many years later but the pond was gone. They had expanded the college grounds so much that I couldn’t even see where the pond was in the first place. Kind of like the ‘Time Machine’ movie scenes. Progress. They can’t change the memory, though. Like all my distant friendships back then, I can’t remember when or how but we sort of went our own ways or moved or found new friends. For a time he was a good friend. And, a good memory and I do cherish that.