I wasn’t drunk, but I was staring at the bottles so neatly stacked on the shelfs in front of me on the other side of the bar. As I was staring at the bottles, my right hand was draped around a glass of Budweiser. Ken was by my side.
It was a quiet place where you could be alone. The Trust Me Tavern in Mossville, Illinois was located between my hometown of Chillicothe and Peoria on Route Twenty-Nine, but it was far enough away from someone noticing us. Jill the bartender didn’t card us. We looked older than we were. Ken and I had graduated from High School a couple of years earlier.
When you opened the door to walk in you felt the smoke in the air lingering on the walls and ceiling. The floor felt sticky and tacky as each step got you closer to your favorite bar stool and you could feel comfortable. This was long before they thought smoking was bad for your health.
I really thought I was ‘feeling my oats’ at the time. Drinking hadn’t been something that occurred in my home. Neither of my parents even thought about drinking. My grandfather on my mother’s side was always kidding about drinking but he never did … I never saw him drink.
Ken was smoking a cigarette, it made you look older. I emailed Ken to see if he remembered any of this and all he remembered was that he had a 1963 Split Window Corvette. The corvette got us to the Trust Me Tavern. I was not impressed with the ride and thought it was like riding on the ground. My 1959 VW rode a lot better. I haven’t been in a Corvette since that time.
Since we were underage at that time, we had been meeting on these bar stools for the last several weeks. I was working but I’m having a hard time remembering where I was employed. But sitting on that bar stool I know, I was pondering my life, I was coming to realize that my life had no purpose. Just sitting on that barstool.
So, life gets a little fuzzy here. One person that was influential in my life was Earl Nightingale. I was nineteen years old driving home from working the overnight shift at Caterpillar Tractor Company in East Peoria, Illinois. The radio in my VW, was tuned to WMBD AM and there was a daily motivational feature from Earl Nightingale that I listened to:
INSERT EARL
“Life should be an exciting adventure, it should never be a bore, a man should live fully … be alive. He should be glad to get out of bed in the morning … he should be doing a job he likes to do because he does it well … - - - … the architect of the universe didn’t build a stairway leading nowhere … and the greatest teacher of all the carpenter from the plains of Galilee gave us the secret time and time again … as ye believe so shall it be done unto you.”
MUSIC UNDER
… That got me thinking about what I wanted to be … what I wanted to become.
As I think back on the life and times of people who have influenced and inspired me, the first name comes to me is Reverend Ken Yocum. He was the pastor at the small Methodist Church in Sparland, Illinois. I got to know him at my father’s dry-cleaning business. He was a customer. I pressed his pants and waited on him at the front counter as I was working for my father through high school.
A couple of years later, I was working as a production assistant at Bradley University in the ETV department that was in four-converted classrooms in the EE Building. It’s amazing the year before I was a freshman at Bradley University skipping classes so I could learn more about television production. Now the next year I was employed by Bradley University, and I was getting firsthand experience with television equipment. My job classification was listed as a faculty member. From dropout student to faculty in