The Legend of Bob Neal

Friday night football, Mogen David and fish sandwiches...another legend created.

Transcript

The Legend of Bob Neal 

When you bounce from school to school you learn to make new friends quickly. Either that or you’re pretty damn lonely. I transferred schools eight times in twelve years so my brother and I were always the “new kid” in school.

Transferring back to Sandwich, Illinois, High School my senior year was my second time there. I’d spent most of my freshman year and the first half of my sophomore year there. And the year and a half between was spent five miles to the east at Plano, Illinois, High School. Football and basketball rivals, the kids from Sandwich thought of Plano Reapers as hoodlums and greasers, definitely lower class, while the Plano kids thought of Sandwichites as farmers, they were after all another five miles away from Chicago and the last stop on the train. 

In fact, each of the towns was working class with small factories. The dads who didn’t work in one of the town factories commuted to the big factories, like Caterpillar or All-Steel, in Aurora, Illinois, like my dad did.

Bob Neal, like me, was a new kid in town. Dark-haired, six-foot or so, with a soft touch on a basketball, matching the soft round tone of his Poplar Bluff, Missouri, tinged accent.

Bob left Poplar Bluff to live with his sister, brother-in-law and their two daughters, due to a family estrangement that he never discussed. Immediately upon my return to Sandwich, Bob and I became fast friends. We were both told by mutual friends, “hey you gotta get to know Bob/Bill. You guys are a lot alike.” 

We were both in the college prep classes, with honor roll grades, but also with just a bit of a “heller” attitude. Although I played football and he basketball, we didn’t particularly take a serious attitude towards training, with packs of unfiltered Camels in our cars and drinking beers on the weekends. Although Bob wouldn’t show up for beers until after he dropped Houghie off at home after their weekend dates.

Houghie, or Laura Hough, was universally regarded as smokin’ hot, although many of the guys were intimidated by her brilliance. National Honor Society, DAR award, cheerleader, and officer in every club. Carefully restrained sexuality hidden by demure class.  She had the body of a Playboy bunny with the deportment of a vestal virgin. She was the only girl, along with Teddy Fritsch and me, to go off to the University of Illinois after graduation.

Neal, as we all called Bob, wouldn’t be going off to college after graduation. He had a plan though. He talked of the best journalism school in the country. He would go the Marine Corps, get the GI bill and head back to Missouri to the University of Missouri’s journalism school. He wanted to do the Marine Corps, like he wanted to go to Mizzou’s J-school, because they were the best, and there was a war going on...Viet Nam. He after all, was the editor of the yearbook and would doubtless be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald or maybe even Ernest Hemingway. 

Bob, like most of us, had a part-time job after school. He flipped burgers in the Dog and Suds root beer stand on Highway 34, across from the roller-skating rink on the east edge of town, where he taught my younger brother to fry a perfect hamburger and pull the French fries from the smoking oil just in time.

The Dog and Suds parking lot became the site of our most famous escapade. Neal, Eric Prestegaard and I were in the little red Corvair that Neal frequently borrowed from his brother-in-law. Neal somehow obtained a bottle of Mogen David wine. You know, the sickeningly sweet syrup. Neal had just gotten off work, while Prestegaard and I had played in the game. I don’t remember the opponent but I’m reasonably sure we lost, since we only won one game, against Plano, all season long. At any rate I’d played all four quarters on both offense and defense. Prestegaard, our starting center, had only played part of the game as he’d injured his knee part way through the game. The team doctor had given him some kind of pain-killer, so he was even loopier than his usual crazy, red-headed self. At any rate, we killed the bottle of wine in the parking lot, while scarfing down fish sandwiches Neal convinced the staff to give us for free.

Twenty minutes after finishing the wine, Prestegaard is rolling around in the tiny backseat passed out. Neal drives him home, where the two of us half carry, half drag him up onto the enclosed back porch where we abandon him to his fate. As I recall his outraged father grounded him for the rest of the school year.

Shortly after, Neal dropped me off at home. I slipped in the backdoor and made my way upstairs careful not to awaken my parents. In the middle of the night, I felt the unmistakable need to vomit. Cheap fish sandwiches and Mogen David do not sit well even on a teen-agers iron stomach. I couldn’t get out of bed to stagger to the bathroom across the hall. I rolled to my left to struggle with the window. Failing to get it open, I rolled back to the right to vomit all over the new gold carpet. Satisfied I hadn’t puked in my bed, back to sleep I went.

The next morning my dad woke me at 6 am to go to work frying donuts in my parent’s little bake shop. His voice penetrated my pounding head, as I opened my bleary eyes, “You’d better get that cleaned up before your mother sees it.” Cleaning vomit at 6 am was punishment enough. Neither of us ever mentioned it again.  The purple stain was still in the carpet the day I left for college, never to return. I imagine it was still there the day my parents sold the house to settle their divorce.

As for Neal, he never married Houghie.  He never went to Mizzou. He did join the Marines. He did go to Viet Nam. Houghie made them open his coffin. She didn’t believe he was dead. 

She told me later she wished she hadn’t made them open that coffin. There’s a reason it’s a closed casket funeral when you step on a mine.

I thought of Bob when I stood on the flight line at Kadena Air Force Base staring at the rows of caskets filling the C-141 Starlifter, refueling on its way from Danang to Travis Air Force Base. How many brown-haired, basketball playing eighteen-year-olds were on that final flight home. How many Bob’s or Bill’s or John’s would never get to J-school and never marry their high school sweethearts.

Four decades later I stopped at a small-town funeral home in Missouri, not far from the Arkansas border. I asked the undertaker if he could help me find my old friend. He looked up the name, gave me directions to the cemetery a few miles out of town. I hadn’t smoked in twenty years, but I stopped and bought a pack of Camels. 

At the cemetery I pulled a cold can of beer from a cooler, toasted Bob with it, poured then beer out in front of the VA tombstone and left the cigarette pack for him. It was the least I could do, after all I got to go to journalism school on the GI bill. He didn’t.

(c) William L. Enyart 2020