Here I was traveling again. I’m not on an exotic cruise or an adventure in Antarctica, no I was on another road trip to my home town of Chillicothe, Illinois. I was averaging thirty five miles per gallon and thirty semi-trucks per mile.
Chillicothe is a small town just outside of Peoria, Illinois on the Illinois River. It has two railroad lines. One is the old Rocket Island Line with a spur-track from Peoria to Chicago. The second is the main line for the Santa Fe which is now the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway.
Before Amtrak took over the railroad passenger business, there used to be great passenger service on Santa Fe Railroad. You could get on a train in the morning and go shopping in Chicago for the day and then come home the same evening on another Santa Fe train.
When I was younger in the summer time, entertainment in the evening was for families to get in their car and head to the train station. The excitement was watching the trains come in, it was fun fantasizing what it would be like to get on one of those luxury trains and head west.
The Santa Fe Railroad Depot used to be a wonderful place to see many celebrities like Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and some remember seeing Walt Disney coming from Chicago heading to Hollywood on The Super Chief. There were other famous trains like The El Capitan, The Chief, and The Grand Canyon. Great classic trains of that era all came though Chillicothe every evening of train watching.
Several of my friend’s parents either worked for the Santa Fe or they commuted to East Peoria and worked at Great Yellow Father: Caterpillar Tractor Company.
There was a big event taking place in the small town that I grew up in. The weekend of September 22 and 23rd 2023 was Homecoming for the High School.
I graduated, yes, I did graduate from Chillicothe Township High School, but now they constructed a new high school building, and moved it out into the country, renaming it Illinois Valley Central High, known as called IVC.
I would not be attending many of the homecoming festivities, the real reason I am traveling is attend to my Class of 1963 small reunion. There was a meal at one of the new bistros in town on Friday night after the annual homecoming parade and Saturday night we met at the old Grecian Gardens where we had full blown reunion twenty years ago.
The reason for the smaller reunion was not many of us are left and I am not sure how many had said they would try to attend.
We were a class of one hundred students in 1963. I would have to say, everybody knew each other. Bob Cusac was the son of the grade school principal, Larry Mills was an all-star pitcher on the baseball team, JoAnn Viloa was Miss Teen for Illinois as a senior, and Kathy Shepard always had at hard time adjusting her reeds on her oboe. We weren’t all the best of friends, but we knew each other. And our parents knew each other as well, keeping us in line as we grew up.
I hung around the band because the band was one hundred players strong from all the four grades in the school. We prided ourselves on the band’s performance every time we were in a parade or on the football field.
My baritone saxophone was too heavy to march with and it didn’t really help the sound of the marching band so; I took up the bass drum.
Amazing thing, band director Marlin McCutchen discovered new wooden mallets that would make a better thump on the bass drum. I really got into keeping the beat and my thumping went through two different bass drum heads. Yes, I broke the bass drum twice. I loved marching onto the football field every year in high sc