Published January 20, 2022 in The Tecumseh Herald
A couple of days ago, I pulled in to the Perky Pantry on E. Chicago for a fill-up. I typically pump my own gas but it was before 9 a.m. and I was making a breakfast run to McDonald’s. I thought about getting gas only after I had left the house wearing slippers. Also, I wasn’t wearing a coat because I wasn’t planning to get out of the car.
Jeff Baker, bundled up and with his back to the wind, was popping open the gas cover and putting the nozzle of the hose into the tank before I had my window down.
“Fill it up?” he said, grasping my credit card in his gloved hand.
“Yep,” I replied.
I hadn’t seen him for a while, but he looked the same as he always had, back when I used to get full service at the Baker Brothers station on the other end of town.
We chatted in that way of old acquaintances who have the common history of spending our entire lives in the same town. He asked about my brother, Rich, who he had coached in Little League years ago. He recalled my brother getting hit in the head with a line drive.
“He went down and I thought he was dead,” Jeff said. “But then he got up and your dad said, ‘He’s fine,’ and the game went on.”
I could picture my dad in that situation. I shared my father’s reaction when one of my sisters wrecked my 1977 Cutlass Supreme back in 1983.
“First words out of his mouth when my sister called him were, ‘How’s the car?'”
We laugh.
“Your dad was a good guy,” Jeff said. “He’s been gone awhile, hasn’t he?”
“Thirty-two years this year,” I reply. “Does it make you feel old to know Rich is 50 this year?”
“Not as old as when my daughter turned 50,” Jeff said with a laugh.
He set the nozzle of the hose back into the pump and handed me the receipt.
Jeff is a decade older than I am, and in his family, there are siblings who are around 18-20 years apart, similar to me and my youngest brother, John Lapham. We compared notes on that for a few more seconds. But my breakfast sandwiches were getting cold and another customer was waiting on Jeff, so we said our goodbyes.
As I drove away, I was smiling. I have been doing that a lot since I retired from the college and started writing for the Herald. I thought about my short conversation with Jeff Baker and all the other people I’ve interviewed, the parish family I see at Mass on weekends, and classmates I follow on Facebook. Life in small-town America is all about being surrounded by people who share your history. In Tecumseh, it’s the folks who knew your parents and grandparents. It’s the people you sat with on Mrs. Barb Retan’s school bus or cheered with when the THS girls won the 1974 state basketball championship or sizzled with under the hot June sunshine, waiting to get that THS diploma. Think about that for a moment. Who do you remember pushing on the swings at Herrick Park School? Or playing kickball with at Tecumseh Acres? Who was your junior prom date? This collective memory is our shared history, the heart of our small town.
There are memories whispering from every sidewalk, every street corner, every park and playground. When I stop at the traffic light at W. Chicago and N. Occidental and look over at Huntington Bank, I remember Rusty’s B&K Drive-In, where I had my first job as a waitress. Phyl Williams was already a seasoned professional by the time I got there and she schooled me in the technique used to carry two cups of coffee to a customer’s table without sloshing the joe over the edge of the mug. The Sunday morning last November when I interviewed Fay Greene at Tuckey’s Big Boy, Phyl was there with the coffee pot and a smile.
Growing up in Tecumseh also meant finding your Girl Scout troop news or homecoming parade immortalized in newsprint, a photo or story carefully scissored from the pages of The Tecumseh Herald and pasted in a scrapbook or glued to the front of the fridge with a slice of Scotch tape. Just last week, I found my birth announcement from 1958, a testimony to the importance of small-town news. Spoiler alert: I was a lot smaller then.
The community newspaper is an important part of our lives in this little city. It’s the first draft of our history, the story of who we were and what we meant to each other, our celebrations and our tragedies. It’s a necessary part of the town, as essential as good water and good schools. And like the human condition, surprisingly fragile. This is an era of newspapers being subsumed by corporations sporting the accoutrements of journalism but focused on squeezing as much revenue as possible from communities like ours for their investors. They don’t care about what’s happening at the city council or board of education meeting, much less letting you know about it. That’s why local journalism is so important. Do we get it wrong occasionally? Sure. We’re not perfect. But we keep on going. We know we need local journalism to record our births and marriages and deaths, let us know what our local officials are doing, and once we’re gone, to show we not only survived but thrived in our communities, leaving them better because we were a part of them.
Everyone has a story to tell about their town.
What’s yours?
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