I’m always joking with my Illinois cousins that I’m probably the most hopeless member of my father’s side of the family when it comes to Illinois cred. After all, I wasn’t born here and truth be told…I think I’ve maybe spent a month of my life in total in this Land of Lincoln. Apparently my Illinois credit ranking did go up a bit last year when I was forced to pay Illinois income tax on some ill-timed (but ultimately appreciated!) coal royalties…
Arguably, the village of Hutsonville on the Illinois side of the Wabash River is where I’ve spent most of that time. Grandpa and Grandma’s farm is just outside of town on Illinois highway 1 and Bam-Bam’s house is downtown just off the High Street.
This is where my mother and father met and when Mom would talk of her home town, this village where her adoptive family lived is often the place she thinks of well before she considers New Jersey where she was born.
The last time I was here was likely in 1976 or 1978 and even though the town hasn’t changed *THAT* much in that time…I still was having the devil’s own time recognising Grandpa’s farm. Once again, this was a case that I should have trusted my instincts because the one white house I had fixated on Highway 1 as the most probable (though it looked different from the picture I was using as a guide) turned out to be the correct one.
I headed a bit further south to Robinson which I didn’t recognise at all except for one drive-in joint called the “Dog n Suds”. Bam-Bam and I used to stop here after she’d made the trip to Robinson to raid the Heath Bar factory (the only one in the world!) for a huge bag of broken up Heath Bars for $2. Bam-Bam was fond of their root beer floats and truth be told, so was I sans the ice cream.
The same goes for Palestine a few miles to the east…didn’t recognise a darned thing in town and as I’m following Main Street to the north to head toward Hutsonville I passed by the Haws farm (Mom’s adoptive family) and didn’t recognise it at all. Granted, I didn’t spend much time there but I do remember my cousin Jamie and I being hauled up by the ears by the strongest two-finger grip I’ve ever experienced in my life after he and I had gotten into a bit of a dust-up that went a little too far.
At least downtown Hutsonville was very familiar though the park round the boat launch is much newer than I remember. But the post office and the Farmers and Merchants bank look as if time has totally stood still for them!
Finding Bam-Bam’s house was much easier…her lot spanned the distance between High and Rose and I remembered Captain Midnight’s trees which are still going strong. The room above the back of the house is typically where I would stay when visiting which provided easy access to said tree closest to the house. 🙂
Whilst we’re at Bam-Bam’s, I remember my father telling me often that he harboured few regrets in his life but that pulling up in front of this house astride a tractor pulling a manure spreader that was almost certainly very recently used on a neighbour’s farm with the idea of meeting up with Mom for a date was certainly one of them.
I think you can imagine how that went over amongst the hoi polloi in the teeming metropolis of Hutsonville. And I’m sure that he figured out right quickly that his idea stank worse than the aromatic spreader he was hauling but I’m sure he was only thinking of how long it’d take to haul the thing back to the farm and miss his window of opportunity.
I’m sure Bam-Bam eventually forgave him his trespass with the poo-flinging tractor implement because she would laugh about it years later…but she for darned sure never let him forget it! 🙂
But in the here and now I am honestly trying to wrap my mind round how in the hell he managed to get the tractor in front of the house in the first place…those two streets are so narrow that my Traverse barely fit on them and his turning radius was about nil!
Once I was over the amazement of my father’s driving achievement and the fact he actually survived it…the next destination was the high school just round the corner toward IL 1. They’ve clearly added onto the building since I saw it last and the tube from the third floor that was used as a fire escape is long gone. I can only imagine how unpleasant it must have been to go through the tube during an evacuation but it’s likely better than the alternatives.
One thing that struck me odd was the sense that Hutsonville was much larger to me when I was way younger. Perhaps that’s a function of being much shorter but I distinctly remember it feeling like a proper town with a decent distance between points of interest whereas now I could probably walk it end-to-end in five minutes or so.
The other thing that struck me odd is the two signs on opposite ends of town. Illinois signs showing the town limits tend to have a population under the town’s name. In this case, the sign on the approach from Palestine said the area had 700 residents whereas the sign approaching from IL 1 had the population at 600. Oops!
One last pass through town and it’s over the bridge into Indiana toward Sullivan and Graysville and points north to rejoin the motorway.
