Requiem

I guess we’ll be dropping like flies from here on out. I won’t repeat the clichés about people who obsessively read obituaries, for I am not one of these people. I rarely read local print newspapers anymore, preferring to gather my news from sources of my choosing. Everything’s out there on the internet, if you want it.

Besides, Ogden’s newspaper has gone from being the mediocre locally owned newspaper it was when I carried it all over the bad parts of town as a kid to a pitiful, pandering rag owned by some small media firm based in Ohio, I think. In those bygone days, I would ride my bike after school to the even-then-old Kiesel Building on the corner of 24^th Street and…well, Kiesel Avenue (of course!) to collect my daily papers. I would fold them in the basement right near where the presses ran…there was a dirty little hallway-shaped area accessed from a service stair off the sidewalk where a rough bench had been built for the purpose. It smelled overpoweringly of hot metal and ink and paper, and it was extremely noisy. Do any of you youngsters know what a Linotype machine is? I thought not. Look it up. That’s why the “hot metal” smell. If I had rubber bands, I would encircle the papers for throwing. If I didn’t, well, it took longer, but the papers could be folded in such a way that one side of a tri-fold could be tucked into the other to hold them together into a throwable package. IF you threw gently and at low velocity, they would stay folded until landing on the sidewalks or porches of the houses on my route. But I digress, this isn’t about my old paper route, or the degeneration of a decent local newspaper into a cheap rag that’s not fit to print. It’s about childhood becoming “The Old Days”, and me and my old buddies becoming blue-haired fossils and worse…assuming room temperature.

I spent fifty cents to buy an Ogden Standard Examiner on Friday because I was desperate for something to read while having breakfast at a new little restaurant I’ve found. Looking up at me from a grainy obituary photo was Fred Meeks. You may know him better as Vern Tessio, from the 1986 Rob Reiner movie “Stand by Me.” No, he wasn’t really in that movie or any other, as far as I know, but if Stephen King had been following me and my pals around in the 50s, Vern’s part might have been written with Fredric Meeks in mind.

I wrote a letter to Fred’s still-living parents who, amazingly, seem still to be living in the same house where our little band of brothers used to collect Fred as snowballs rolling down hills gather mass, going from house to house until we had a quorum for the day’s events. Here’s my letter; I can’t think of any other way to say what seeing Fred’s face in the newspaper made me think.

Dear Mr. & Mrs. Meeks and family;

I offer my condolences to you on the loss of Fredric.

Fred was a childhood friend. You may or may not remember me. It’s been so many years. Fred and I were the same age; he was born about three weeks after my birth.

I lived in Sunset with my parents, first at 56 Johns Drive, which I believe is now 300 West, and then later on the corner of Burns and Center streets, where my family operated the Center Market, which is now a pizza parlor.

I guess it was 1953 when we moved onto Johns Drive. At that time, Johns Drive was the last subdivision street on the west edge of town. Only railroad tracks and farms were west of us. I was in second grade then, and attended Clinton School until the new Sunset Elementary school opened. I think we started attending the new school when I was in fourth grade, with Mrs. Morby as our teacher. In fifth grade, we had Mr. Golden Sill, and in sixth grade, Mr. Quinn Beckstead. I offer these names, because I’m not sure when your street was completed to the west of us, and I’m not sure what grade I was in when I first met Fred. Maybe the teacher’s names will help.

Anyway, our little “rat pack” often included Fred, me, Michael and Gary Hoskins, Ronald Udink, Robert Gunderson, Benny Barger, Arthur Peterson, Johnny Watson and a few other kids who came and went in the shifting sands of childhood groupings. Together, we roamed the streets and farms of the Sunset/Clinton area, playing hide-and-seek, pretending to be soldiers, cops & robbers, or cowboys & indians. Sometimes we might have helped ourselves to apples from the orchards, or watermelons from the patches. It was just exciting enough for young boys out at night but not too bad in the large scheme of things. We hunted frogs and snakes in the drainage ditches alongside the railroad tracks and in the irrigation ditches running between the pastures and fields. Sometimes, we would bring our captured pets home to put in our desk or dresser drawers. Exciting for Mom. We put pennies on the tracks, then hid in the weeds for the trains to pass so we could collect our newly flattened ovals of copper. We played in the tall corn, imagining that we were in dense jungles and being stalked by lions and tigers. We slept out often in the summers, in sleeping bags thrown out on the grass under the open skies. We rode our bikes on great day-long safaris to the sloughs near the shore of the Great Salt Lake. In the winters, we would play or ice skate on the frozen surface of the big canal up by Highway 91, which was the four-lane main highway of the time before Interstate freeways were built. We would make incursions into Hill Air Force Base, packing off aircraft switch panels and other junk from the WWII leftovers dumped in big piles in the dirt, until the Air Force security police came to run us off. A week or so later, we would go again. I’m sure our parents wouldn’t have approved of some of our adventures, but this was an innocent time in America, a time of light, energy, and optimism.

These years were my best in this life. Regardless of what the others in our little group went on to later, I would bet that most all feel the same. It was a simple time. The summers seemed endless. We would often wake up to one or more of our rat pack sitting on our front porches or lawns, waiting for us to hurry outside for the day’s Great Adventure. We seldom knew where we were going, or where we would end the day, and we didn’t care. It was a rich, happy, full, and wonderful time upon which to build our lives. When I first saw the 1986 Rob Reiner movie “Stand by Me”, I thought that my elementary-school years with my pals in Sunset had been captured perfectly.

At the end of seventh grade at North Davis Junior High, my family moved back to Ogden. I guess Fred and I and the rest of our group were 12 years old, going on 13 when we moved.

After that, I lost track of almost everyone in Sunset; Ogden may be only ten miles or so distant from Sunset, but for kids on bikes, that was far. Besides, our lives revolved around neighborhood and school, and Ogden was a different world.

Still, through all of the intervening years, Fred’s face and personality, like the those of the rest of our little group, has stayed fresh and detailed in my memory. Those few years between 1952 and 1959 helped form me into the person I later became, and I thought you would like to know that your son/brother/companion/father/uncle and my childhood pal Fred had something to do with that. I would also like you to know that he is remembered fondly by someone who hasn’t seen him for over forty-five years, and that he will live on in my memories for as long as I draw breath. If it helps you to know this, Fred is young, strong, laughing, and extremely happy as I see him.

I’ve had a full and mostly happy life, rewarded with friends, a wonderful mate, and four lovely children. I hope that Fred enjoyed similar happiness in his life, and that in leaving us, he has found eternal peace.

With my sympathy and warm regards,

Mike Thompson

I signed Mike Thompson, because that's who I am, in my DNA. No one in Sunset would have any idea who someone named St James was. Maybe they won't even read my letter. They have to be old as dirt by now. But they are still apparently living more or less independently in their own home, so let's hope.

Anyway, another one bites the dust. It sounds from the obituary that he died suddenly and unexpectedly at home, which is of course, the Cadillac way to go and what we all hope for.