“So I walked over to the desk drawer, got out my .22 revolver, and shot it dead,” Goines tells a judge after his arrest for discharging a weapon within the city limits. Upon firing the fatal bullet, his .22 still smoking in his hand, Goines says to the vending machine, “That’s the last time you’re going to cheat anybody.”
The judge, unmoved, sentences Goines to ten days in jail and fines him $160 plus court costs, a fine my father fervently wishes to be paid in nickels. Almost immediately, no fewer than eight lawyers come to the defendant’s aid, helping him to file an appeal, presumably on the grounds that shooting a pop machine at the dawn of the 1970s is justifiable homicide.
In the years to come, children will find other ways to get revenge. Slugs—the smooth circles of metal punched out of electrical boxes—sometimes work in the absence of coins. Friends become adept at sliding a hand up the chute and manipulating the machine’s inner workings. They are soft-drink ob-gyns, expert at digitally extracting a Mello Yello or a Mr. Pibb.
In the 1970s, I will learn to remove the pull tab from a can of Coke and casually insert it into the beverage, hoping to swallow the one but not the other. It is as tough as any eight-year-old can hope to look without benefit of a candy cigarette or a souped-up Sting-Ray.
But on this night in the late summer of 1969, I am not quite three and struggling to stay awake, freshly fed at a greasy spoon in the resort town of Wisconsin Dells. “The Dells,” as everyone in the Upper Midwest knows, are the largest single tourist attraction in Wisconsin, outdrawing even the Mars Cheese Castle or the House on the Rock.
The Dells in 1969 has fifty-six swimming pools, “twenty-two man-made attractions,” and one hundred thirty motels, enough to attract 1.9 million guests a year. And every one of these motels—the Pine Aire, the Black Hawk, Landeck’s Auto Court, their neon NO VACANCY signs buzzing—is conveniently adjacent to one of the town’s fifty-five restaurants. In a town with fifty-five restaurants and fifty-six swimming pools, a day does not pass without a thousand mothers instructing three times as many children to wait forty-five minutes after eating before going for a swim.
Each of these fifty-five restaurants is the kind of joint favored by Dad, a car-based salesman with a weakness for alliteration: Country Kitchen. Korner Counter. Coffee Cup. To the eternal question “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” Dad can always answer “The Pie Pan, off the Edens Expressway.”
Even beyond the pancake houses and the pop machines, the Dells are, for any child under ten, a wonderland of unearthly delights. You can’t throw a rubber tomahawk in any direction without hitting an Indian Trading Post selling fringed buckskins, hand-tooled wallets, peace pipes, tom-toms, cowboy hats, bows and arrows, and beaded moccasins.
At the center of it all is Fort Dells, a reproduction pioneer outpost and Western-themed amusement park that steals from Disneyland in broad daylight. It is divided into sections named Frontierland, Adventureland, and Indianland. Kids can be locked up for a jaunty photograph in one of the fort’s many stockades. A famous statue of a saloon girl—“Lady Lou”—is seated on a park bench in Frontierland, her dress hiked to mid-thigh. Teenage boys rest their heads on her emerald-clad bosom while dads—posing for Polaroids—snap the garter belt on her fiberglass thigh.
An array of glossy brochures racked in the lobby of the Shady Lawn Motel advertise the Tommy Bartlett Water Show on Lake Delton. It is the best of its kind, the Pyramids of pyramid-based waterskiing spectacles. Amphibious duckboats decommissioned from World War II ply the streets and waterways of the Dells, where middle-aged men—also decommissioned from World War II—reenact Old West shootouts. In Wisconsin Dells, from mid-May to September, Black Bart is killed every hour on the half hour.
All of this is to say that three boys aged eight, four, and two can fall asleep in a cheap motel on a midsummer night in Wisconsin Dells and never run out of dreams for the next morning: of go-kart tracks, wax museums, haunted mansions, ghost towns, lost canyons, enchanted forests, storybook gardens, and prehistoric lands.
But these rituals of a Dells vacation are all in a distant future, in the decade that is looming but not quite here. We made a brief flyby of these various attractions before checking into the motel, enough to whet our various appetites, but on this trip in the summer of ’69, we are not on holiday. There will be no Cactus Coolers or Tahitian Treats. On this night, rather, Wisconsin Dells is chosen strictly for its location: equidistant between suburban Chicago (where we had lived until this very morning) and our unfurnished new home in suburban Minneapolis (where we will take up residence tomorrow afternoon).
Our growing family is leaving Illinois and starting a new life in Minnesota. Dad has been transferred—summoned, promoted—to the international headquarters of the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, known to its employees the world over as Mickey Mouse Mining, and known to the rest as 3M. Dad shortens the employees-only phrase further—every night at the dinner table, in his sigh-heavy conversations with my mother—to Mickey Mining.
A Mayflower moving van with all our possessions trails us by a day. When my father says, “Look,” as he holds me in his arm outside the motel on this Sunday night, I gaze up at that waxing crescent moon. Like us, it’s looking west, toward Minnesota. It’s a cartoon moon, the kind suspended above a high school stage. All the way here in the car, the moon has followed us, and now we are following it. The whole world is following it.
My 1970s childhood begins in earnest on this night, on July 20, 1969, at the Shady Lawn Motel in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, with my dad hooking an index finger at the moon and whispering, “Someone’s up there. Right now.”
In a few years’ time I won’t be able to look at the moon without thinking of an anagram from Henry Ernest Dudeney’s 300 Best Word Puzzles.
astronomer = moon starer
I share a bed at the Shady Lawn with Jim and Tom. I was meant to be Dan, three-lettered like my brothers, but Dad vetoed the name in the hospital room. His new boss was named Dan, and Dad told Mom he’d be damned if he was going to be the ass-kisser who walks into the office on Monday morning having named his new son for the new boss.
In spite of (or perhaps because of) Don Rushin’s unwillingness to brownnose, that new boss now requires Dad’s presence at 3M headquarters in Saint Paul, on the Mickey Mining mother ship.
I sleep bracketed by my brothers, Three Stooges–style, in a room adjoining Mom and Dad’s. On the other side of a thin door, Dad turns on the TV and manipulates the rabbit ears. At 9:56 p.m. central daylight time, I softly snore as Neil Armstrong sets foot on the moon.