Slip Sliddin’ Away
The Source
It sounded like one of those urban legends, but since I lived in a decided un-urban town of only 400 people I figured it must have been true. His name was Kenny Durbin and he went on to become a movie distributor, but that had absolutely nothing with his crash at the bottom of Thompson’s Hill. Buddy K. Thompson lived just west of our little village and even though his small acreage drew almost notice in the summertime, once the snow hit Perry, Illinois, his hill became our version of Disney World with real blood. In my memory, the snow-packed hill stretched some three miles long. It’s strange. I recently drove by the same hill and it’s shrunk to only twenty yards or so. Must be global warming. But when the flakes started falling from the Pike County sky, all sleds, toboggans and slabs of aluminum roofing headed for Thompson’s Hill where legends were made. Our grandfathers had told us tales of the generations of sledders before us who’d lost their lives on that hill, and although our grandpas tended to be the biggest liars in our families, it’s sometimes more fun to believe the tall tale than to question it. Grandpa was seldom truthful which made him just delightful to grandchildren. So Kenny D. stood at the lip of Thompson’s Hill that snowy morning in the early sixties and pointed his sled toward the bottom on the hill, an adolescent eternity in the distance. Kenny pooh-poohed the idea of using a real sled, opting instead to bring the hood of his uncle’s wrecked Pontiac. This hood-sledding was not all that uncommon on those days of much snow and few sleds, and Kenny’s wasn’t the first car hood to see our infamous Hill of Death in wintertime. Of course on Pontiacs you had to remove the spikey hood ornament. Even accomplished sledders couldn’t make it very far down the hill with Chief Pontiac’s head sticking into the snow like a reverse rudder. Kenny was several years older than I and so I had to rely upon the boys who were gathered there that day. School had been called off for the snowy afternoon to keep folks off the bad roads so the mothers all headed out shopping while the kids headed for the hills. According to the best authority I could find (my cousin Mike who at times was even a better liar than my grandpa), Kenny looked at the ice-slickened hill and announced that he’d go down first with the hood of his Pontiac to test the hill’s velocity after a sheen of freezing rain had turned the snowy hill into a diagonal version of the Indianapolis 500. This was back in that heady day before seatbelts, roll bars, and helmets. If you had a pair of work gloves we called that a major safety factor. Kenny pulled his stocking hat down over his head, jumped onto the upturned belly of the Pontiac hood, yelled “Geronimo!” and took off down the hill. Yelling “Geronimo!” was a requirement. Your sled went faster if you first screamed the name of a dead American Indian chief. The boys gathered there that afternoon said it was the fastest slide they’d ever seen. Not only was the hill a blaze of frozen water, but Kenny had taken care to bring his dad’s grease gun and had liberally lubricated the car hood before jumping on. A word about Illinois topography: Even though we’re called The Prairie State, the prairies are all gone and in their place we’ve put fences. Then in 1897, Lucien B. Smith of Kent, Ohio, invented something called barbed wire. I guy from DeKalb, Illinois, improved on the patent, and the stuff started stretching out across the Midwest. I think it was the DeKalb version that Kenny Durbin ran into at the bottom of the hill. Oh, occasionally a sled would make it to the fence ringing the bottom of Buddy Thompson’s hill, but the trick was to stop the sled before it got there, jump off just before you got there, or duck low enough to get under the bottom strand. Poor Kenny did none of these things. He’d pulled his stocking cap down so low that he had no idea where he was and when his nose caught the lowest-hanging strand of wire he became the world record holder for the bloodies mess to ever end up at the bottom of Thompson’s Hill. Some terrified accounts of that day said that his nose was removed. Others said he was blinded, and one spastic little Methodist swore that Kenny’s entire face had been torn off. I recently found him on Facebook. He lives in Texas, has 11 grandchildren, still works for a movie distributor, and his face looks just fine. It may have been just a legend, but I think it’s telling to note that he moved to a state with very little snow.