Wednesday, March 08, 2006
A Tale of Two Flagpoles 1959 – 1969 (part 2)
The next year was 1962 and we moved 300 miles south to Pine Ridge, along the Nebraska border. I attended school in Pine Ridge through the eighth grade. I learned in the eighth grade that Shannon County would pay tuition to any student from that wished to attend school outside the county as the only high school in Pine Ridge was a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) high school and not a public school. My family and I felt this would be a good choice as I could take Latin, participate in Band and have better college prep course off the reservation. Thus I began 9th grade at Rushville High, in nearby Rushville, NE. Rushville is about 20 miles south of Pine Ridge and was the community where we often bought groceries. We also shopped in Gordon, which was another 15 east of Rushville. Rushville and Gordon are both on U.S. 20 which continues west through Yellowstone Park. Rushville had a little over one thousand residents. The high school had 200 students; a little over half from out of town. Some came from as far away as 50 or 60 miles and boarded with town families during the week. Others drove cars to school every day. I was impressed so many freshmen had cars and licenses already. Shannon County provided a van and driver for the half dozen or so kids from Pine Ridge that went to school in Rushville for couple of years. During my junior and senior years, the county school district discontinued this practice and we organized car pools to get to school. My experience with reservation border towns up to this point had pretty much been we went there to shop, to visit the library or the doctor. The Indians we knew on the reservations where we lived and those that attended Church with us generally stayed there and didn’t go to town much. The ones that went to town hung around the bars and were drunk a lot. My ideas about drinking as a young adolescent were it should pretty much be avoided. My dad would have a beer once or twice when we took our vacation in the summer. Usually with a picnic lunch while we were traveling. Sometimes he and my mother would have a mixed drink on New Year’s Eve. Alcohol was viewed as a destructive influence on the reservation. Those ideas were to change in my mind as I became older and entered high school. My first year as a freshman was that of a normal freshman. I didn’t talk to a lot of upper classmen. I stuck to my studies and band. I wandered around during lunch with my sandwich and bought a soda with a dime I’d take every morning. A lot of the rural kids ate at the Dairy Queen which wasn’t a drive in, but a café and bakery. It was owned by my friend Bill Sydow’s dad. Bill was in the band also and he played the tuba. We did have a hay ride near the end of the school year and I took along a can of beer I had found alongside the road. I poured it into the punch that we had at the end of the hay ride. I doubt it had any affect when dispersed with the punch.
The next year as a sophomore, my attitudes on drinking began to change more rapidly. Chauncey and his brothers had gotten me drunk the previous June. The Folsom boys had come into a little money and bought two cases of tall boy Budweiser’s. They gave me four over the course of an hour. Needless to say, I was quite wasted. Chauncey walked me back to my house in the rain late that afternoon. I had a tent set up in my yard and thought maybe I could crawl in there and sleep it off before I had to face my parents. However, my mother came outside, found me in the tent, saw that I was obviously quite intoxicated and confronted me about the incident. Chauncey’s brothers began to talk about home brew that summer and dared me to try my hand at making a batch. I saw an advertisement in a magazine for a Dandelion Wine Recipe. I sent away for it and shared the recipe with the Folsom Boys. They contributed raisins (a government commodity item) and chipped in for five pounds of sugar. I gathered the dandelion flowers and soaked them in water for two to three days to make a liqueur which was added to raisins, sugar, oranges, lemons and yeast. After several weeks of fermentation, it yielded a cloudy liquid that was somewhat similar to Muscatel. Pheasant Brand Muscatel was the preferred drink of alcoholics around the Pine Ridge. If you let it sit a day or two after bottling it cleared up considerably, leaving ½ inch or so of residue in the bottom of the bottle. I salvaged old muscatel bottles, mostly flat short pint bottles (four-fifths of a pint) to bottle my brew. The Folsom’s continued to give me advice on how I could improve my techniques. That summer we traveled to Buffalo, New York to visit my mom’s parents. I spent a considerable amount of time walking to downtown Buffalo and researching home brew and home wine making techniques in the Buffalo Public Library.
My sophomore year began to see increased experimentation both with wine making techniques and an increased fascination with drinking. I would spend the night with a friend in town and learn more about high school partying as well as hanging out with the Folsom’s during the summer and on weekends. I learned of Legion Dances in Rushville. A teen dance was held on Friday or Saturday night in a part of the Legion separate from the bar. I never had the courage to ask a girl to dance, but I did continue to experiment with alcohol. If I didn’t spend a weekend night with a friend in town, I would hitch-hike to Rushville on Saturday to take in the dance that evening or hang out with buddies. I only had to get to town and walk down Highway 20 and I would see a friend and hang with them. One Saturday afternoon I hitched to Rushville and bought a five gallon crock as an enhancement to my wine making supplies. I was able to get a cardboard box big enough to fit it in and then carried it on my lap back to Pine Ridge. We had a collection of several buildings on the ten acres the Church had and I converted an unused corner of a shed to create my wine making hobby/ club area. I had an area set for washing bottles and a fermentation closet. I met a kid when I was a sophomore who was named Jurgen Jung. His family was German immigrants who lived just south of White Clay, NE, which was only two miles south of Pine Ridge. He was a wild kid and we had a common interest in partying. One Saturday night near the end of the ‘68-69 school year, Jurgen and I decided to hitch-hike to Rushville and attend the Legion Dance. We figured we could afford a gallon of Muscatel. Little did we realize that although we could afford it that amount of wine was way more than either of us needed. I found a bootlegger who was willing to purchase the bottle for us in return for the first swallow from the jug. We carried our gallon around and went in and out of the dance. We stashed the jug when we went inside to the dance. Later that night as fortune would have it, I was attracted to flagpole outside the Legion Club. It didn’t take long after I swung on the pole that an officer was called and I was being arrested. Some of the veterans from the Legion probably felt pretty strongly about their flag. The Legion club was right behind the County Courthouse and the jail. The officer asked me why I was drinking. I told him it was social pressure. I ended up spending the night in jail and my dad had to pick me up Sunday morning after church. Needless to say, he was disappointed in me. I learned years later that I had been nominated to the National Honor Society and was to be inducted in the spring ceremonies that sophomore year. After that incident, the faculty advisers decided to place my induction on an indefinite hold. I was finally inducted into the society the spring of my senior year. Thus not only was our nation reaching an end of the age of innocence, I myself had lost my innocence, not necessarily to the flagpole, but to alcohol. In the eyes of some, I was not realizing the potential that others felt I had. I had made poor choices in association and in activities. These experiences would be difficult to overcome later, but yet would become building blocks as I developed a sociological and spiritual view of the world I was to live in. The liner notes on Marty Stuart’s recent Badlands CD written about the Pine Ridge reservation contain these words, “Reservation land; A country of stark realities where the sweet taste of liquor can make your soul seem to rise above the poverty that surrounds you.”
The next year was 1962 and we moved 300 miles south to Pine Ridge, along the Nebraska border. I attended school in Pine Ridge through the eighth grade. I learned in the eighth grade that Shannon County would pay tuition to any student from that wished to attend school outside the county as the only high school in Pine Ridge was a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) high school and not a public school. My family and I felt this would be a good choice as I could take Latin, participate in Band and have better college prep course off the reservation. Thus I began 9th grade at Rushville High, in nearby Rushville, NE. Rushville is about 20 miles south of Pine Ridge and was the community where we often bought groceries. We also shopped in Gordon, which was another 15 east of Rushville. Rushville and Gordon are both on U.S. 20 which continues west through Yellowstone Park. Rushville had a little over one thousand residents. The high school had 200 students; a little over half from out of town. Some came from as far away as 50 or 60 miles and boarded with town families during the week. Others drove cars to school every day. I was impressed so many freshmen had cars and licenses already. Shannon County provided a van and driver for the half dozen or so kids from Pine Ridge that went to school in Rushville for couple of years. During my junior and senior years, the county school district discontinued this practice and we organized car pools to get to school. My experience with reservation border towns up to this point had pretty much been we went there to shop, to visit the library or the doctor. The Indians we knew on the reservations where we lived and those that attended Church with us generally stayed there and didn’t go to town much. The ones that went to town hung around the bars and were drunk a lot. My ideas about drinking as a young adolescent were it should pretty much be avoided. My dad would have a beer once or twice when we took our vacation in the summer. Usually with a picnic lunch while we were traveling. Sometimes he and my mother would have a mixed drink on New Year’s Eve. Alcohol was viewed as a destructive influence on the reservation. Those ideas were to change in my mind as I became older and entered high school. My first year as a freshman was that of a normal freshman. I didn’t talk to a lot of upper classmen. I stuck to my studies and band. I wandered around during lunch with my sandwich and bought a soda with a dime I’d take every morning. A lot of the rural kids ate at the Dairy Queen which wasn’t a drive in, but a café and bakery. It was owned by my friend Bill Sydow’s dad. Bill was in the band also and he played the tuba. We did have a hay ride near the end of the school year and I took along a can of beer I had found alongside the road. I poured it into the punch that we had at the end of the hay ride. I doubt it had any affect when dispersed with the punch.
The next year as a sophomore, my attitudes on drinking began to change more rapidly. Chauncey and his brothers had gotten me drunk the previous June. The Folsom boys had come into a little money and bought two cases of tall boy Budweiser’s. They gave me four over the course of an hour. Needless to say, I was quite wasted. Chauncey walked me back to my house in the rain late that afternoon. I had a tent set up in my yard and thought maybe I could crawl in there and sleep it off before I had to face my parents. However, my mother came outside, found me in the tent, saw that I was obviously quite intoxicated and confronted me about the incident. Chauncey’s brothers began to talk about home brew that summer and dared me to try my hand at making a batch. I saw an advertisement in a magazine for a Dandelion Wine Recipe. I sent away for it and shared the recipe with the Folsom Boys. They contributed raisins (a government commodity item) and chipped in for five pounds of sugar. I gathered the dandelion flowers and soaked them in water for two to three days to make a liqueur which was added to raisins, sugar, oranges, lemons and yeast. After several weeks of fermentation, it yielded a cloudy liquid that was somewhat similar to Muscatel. Pheasant Brand Muscatel was the preferred drink of alcoholics around the Pine Ridge. If you let it sit a day or two after bottling it cleared up considerably, leaving ½ inch or so of residue in the bottom of the bottle. I salvaged old muscatel bottles, mostly flat short pint bottles (four-fifths of a pint) to bottle my brew. The Folsom’s continued to give me advice on how I could improve my techniques. That summer we traveled to Buffalo, New York to visit my mom’s parents. I spent a considerable amount of time walking to downtown Buffalo and researching home brew and home wine making techniques in the Buffalo Public Library.
My sophomore year began to see increased experimentation both with wine making techniques and an increased fascination with drinking. I would spend the night with a friend in town and learn more about high school partying as well as hanging out with the Folsom’s during the summer and on weekends. I learned of Legion Dances in Rushville. A teen dance was held on Friday or Saturday night in a part of the Legion separate from the bar. I never had the courage to ask a girl to dance, but I did continue to experiment with alcohol. If I didn’t spend a weekend night with a friend in town, I would hitch-hike to Rushville on Saturday to take in the dance that evening or hang out with buddies. I only had to get to town and walk down Highway 20 and I would see a friend and hang with them. One Saturday afternoon I hitched to Rushville and bought a five gallon crock as an enhancement to my wine making supplies. I was able to get a cardboard box big enough to fit it in and then carried it on my lap back to Pine Ridge. We had a collection of several buildings on the ten acres the Church had and I converted an unused corner of a shed to create my wine making hobby/ club area. I had an area set for washing bottles and a fermentation closet. I met a kid when I was a sophomore who was named Jurgen Jung. His family was German immigrants who lived just south of White Clay, NE, which was only two miles south of Pine Ridge. He was a wild kid and we had a common interest in partying. One Saturday night near the end of the ‘68-69 school year, Jurgen and I decided to hitch-hike to Rushville and attend the Legion Dance. We figured we could afford a gallon of Muscatel. Little did we realize that although we could afford it that amount of wine was way more than either of us needed. I found a bootlegger who was willing to purchase the bottle for us in return for the first swallow from the jug. We carried our gallon around and went in and out of the dance. We stashed the jug when we went inside to the dance. Later that night as fortune would have it, I was attracted to flagpole outside the Legion Club. It didn’t take long after I swung on the pole that an officer was called and I was being arrested. Some of the veterans from the Legion probably felt pretty strongly about their flag. The Legion club was right behind the County Courthouse and the jail. The officer asked me why I was drinking. I told him it was social pressure. I ended up spending the night in jail and my dad had to pick me up Sunday morning after church. Needless to say, he was disappointed in me. I learned years later that I had been nominated to the National Honor Society and was to be inducted in the spring ceremonies that sophomore year. After that incident, the faculty advisers decided to place my induction on an indefinite hold. I was finally inducted into the society the spring of my senior year. Thus not only was our nation reaching an end of the age of innocence, I myself had lost my innocence, not necessarily to the flagpole, but to alcohol. In the eyes of some, I was not realizing the potential that others felt I had. I had made poor choices in association and in activities. These experiences would be difficult to overcome later, but yet would become building blocks as I developed a sociological and spiritual view of the world I was to live in. The liner notes on Marty Stuart’s recent Badlands CD written about the Pine Ridge reservation contain these words, “Reservation land; A country of stark realities where the sweet taste of liquor can make your soul seem to rise above the poverty that surrounds you.”
