Pittsfield DAR

Feb, 2010 Precious Weirdoes

You’ve learned a lot about great American figures.. maybe even local heroes.

I was born next to Drummy Sutton. For non-Perry residents, he was the town’s leading eccentric at the time. Lived in a spooky house next to us. Toilet built up high. General Store up town.. only went in once and ran back out… Business man, entrepreneur, eccentric. Bought up land during depression. All Perry residents have their own Drummy Sutton stories. First wealthy man I ever knew… lived in a run-down shack. I thought he was dead long enough I could put a chapter about his weirdness in my last book. Signing books at Jacksonville Savings Bank. Lady: “That stuff you wrote about my uncle Drummy was exactly right.”

Drummy is a part of my history..of our county’s history. As much as John J. Nicolay and John M. Hay who are connected to East School here in Pittsfield. The local eccentric. The town fool. The town character. The town genius. The precious weirdo.  ec·cen·tric Greek ekkentros : ek-, out of. See ecto- + kentron, center adjective Departing from the norm or pattern. 2. . Having the axis located elsewhere than at the geometric center.

I was born at the tail end of the age of eccentrics in Perry…. the 1940’s and 50’s.

A few examples… Pop Van Pelt (Earl)… stone gravestone.. Eye-bungers…. Slowly drove around town and everyone got out of his way. Once, Grandpa Brad didn’t. St. Police came to get his license.. shotgun.. there it is on the table. Could see through the cracks in his walls.. After her died, found out he gave large amounts of money to the Meth church

Fellow down by Pleasant Hill. Snake. Horses. Drinking cup.

Lappy Six… slowly walking back and forth in front of the Perry Hotel. The only resident of the hotel. Slept in a different room every night. Grave digger.. matches in one pocket, dynamite in another.. I once had to go “pick up” his mistake.

If you lived in St. Louis or Chicago, you would see these people, but you’d pass by them. You wouldn’t know their names. You’d probably try not to make eye contact. In a small, rural community they are our neighbors.

The fellow from Griggsville who’d go to all the ballgames and broadcast the game into his little tape recorder.

Chicken House Charlie Williams… old brooder house. Cecil’s trash… pipe…

Archie Moore drove team by our house.. Gunshot… looked out, team coming to a halt.. dead rabbit

Man from Brown County..funerals.. walked.. painted feet.

My current town: Arenzville. Franky Meyer. Shack. Long underwear. Hank Williams.

Do we have more than our share in Pike County?

 Geographical isolation for so long. Isolation breeds Independence.

 Immigration patterns. My study of cemeteries.. Less nationalities, the fewer eccentrics. Pike Country..very mixed.

What’s happened to them? Two answers: Technology and Social restructuring Tech:. Used to be you could travel 100 miles and hear a different dialect than yours…. Now…Radio and TV have flattened out American speech. Even local dialects are disappearing. Me: speech contest… Pike County

But television’s influence has gone beyond speech dialects. Along with: Better roads, Interstate…. a more mobile society.

Social changes: Chicken House Charlie would be in a retirement home…

Knollwood: Jimmy the singer.

Drummy would be tested and put somewhere…we now laws against using an uncovered toilet 12 feet in the air. Lappy Six… I don’t know, but I’m sure we have a drug for it. …the guy with the snake… would definitely come under the jurisdiction of several social agencies.

So what do you gain by living in a part of America where these people are very much still with us? You learn to appreciate the value of being different. The world is trying very hard to make us all the same. You can get on Facebook tonight and learn what the kids in San Francisco are wearing, listening to, talking about. You will grow up very little different from them as a result. But because you live in rural America, you still have a chanced to be unique.

A guy who grew up around here …in a town of 100 people. His schoolteacher failed the state tests for teachers. The town was a mix of people from the south, New England, and Great Britain. This was nearly 200 years ago but many of the 100 people had college educations. His best friend: Jack Kelso.. hunter, never had a job, had much of Shakespeare memorized. The guys he hang around with were called the Clary’s Grove group and every Saturday night they’d ride into town, get drunk, tear it up, then pay for the damages on Sunday morning. Had two business partners…both died of booze. One fell in the Sangamon river and drowned in four inches of water. Sounds rough, but Abraham Lincoln didn’t do badly for himself. He learned how to accept people who were different, how to be tolerant.

Bob Brim… peacocks ran all over the town. John Thompson… run a one-employee grocery store, flip you double or nothing for groceries, run across the street to get his Wall Street Journal, order Cardinal fans out of the store, and carry thousands of dollars under his shirt? …. find ceramic pigs nightly on his doorstep …eventually, 300. Never found culprit. Harry Read..the greatest artist I’ve known personally… grocery store.…..a man build boats in his basement, hang stuffed eagles above his meat counter, built a blue plaster house…Mom: salad bowls

John Kennedy.. build miniature farms and towns in his basement…

I’d love to read a book on the eccentric personalities of Pike County. Of course, be careful…your relatives may be on the list.

You will live in a vastly different world than I did…than your parents did. Very few of you will spend your life around people pretty much like you.

My XM radio…dead… first spoke to a girl in Indonesia…she transferred me back to a man in South Africa… who told me to call my Honda dealer in S’field.

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