Truly, I don't know how my friends and I managed to get out of adolescence without having had some major medical emergency or some part of our anatomy removed by accident. We were, in a word, violent, to one another. And maybe that is what made us such good friends. We tried in earnest to hurt each other, but in the friendliest of ways.
As I have mentioned before, living in Claytonville posed its own set of problems for kids with a lot of imagination and energy. Little was offered in the way of entertainment that kids have today, but what it lacked in pre-packaged entertainment, it made up for it in being a blank canvas for us to create our own fun. And for better or worse, that fun usually involved, a stick, a weapon, a bb gun, or as I recounted in an earlier article, gasoline and a match.
Almost all of my friends, including my brother had some interest in history and especially the history of warfare. And many of us were frequent travelers into the fantasy world of Dungeons and Dragons, a role-playing game were you became the sword swinging hero in a world setting made up of your own design. Yes, warfare made up a big part of our leisure-time activities. Whether it was a war game, watching a war movie, or re-creating great battles of the past, it almost had some sort of "history of warfare' twist to it.
BB GUNS...
BB guns were probably first introduced into our young hands around the age of 8 or 9, but they were the simple, single Daisy pump bb guns that would hardly break a glass bottle at 20 feet. Soon, newer, more powerful, and farther reaching bb guns began to appear in the hands of the "Claytonville Militia." It did not take long before those guns to become the bane of plastic army men, empty pop bottles and nuisance critters and birds. But at the same time, we boys also saw the potential that these more powerful bb guns could have out on the field of re-created battle!
I cannot recall who came up with the idea of holding the first bb gun fight but I do recall there being a code of ethics for those that participated. Codes that if broken, would incur the wrath and enmity of the rest of the participants. (One transgressor of the code faced what was the equivalent of a firing squad for his actions.) No more than three pumps on a gun, no closer than 20 feet from your target, and no head shots. Once agreed upon, the fight was on. In and around the fuel tanks that sat across the road from my parents home. In, around and on the actual structures of our respective homes (being careful not to shoot out windows) and our favorite of all places, the railroad bridge spanning the creek about a half mile west of Claytonville. The battles would rage on for hours. Usually there was a mission or goal to the fight but in the end it was a matter of determining how many times you could place a hit on your opponents. BB gun stings are quite unlike any other pain I have experienced. Like a bee sting, it burns at first and then it starts to throb. Why we willing decided to do this to each other, I have no idea but we were in it together and we reveled in the action and the endorphin rush that came from it. I have no idea how many rounds of bb's were spewed out in these battles over the years, but should some future archaeologist ever do a metal search in the Claytonville area, he or she might be quite confused over the amount of copper bb's scattered out over the area.
BB gun fights are, I think a right of passage for most rural teen-aged boys and news of the fights spread to our other friends. Before long, the bb gun fights became all day events, with most of us decked out in a pretty good collection of WWII and Korean war Army Surplus clothing and gear. And sometimes these fights would grow to such a size that actual maneuvers could be managed between the opposing sides. The biggest of these battles might actually take place over miles of ground with our cars being used as personnel carriers. I recall seeing Gary Rasher's car travelling down a gravel road with about 8 bb guns sticking out of the windows while it pursued another vehicle driven by members of the opposing side. (I would like to say that names in this article will be changed to protect the innocent, but none of us were innocent, so if you recognize your name, congratulations. You're famous.) Tony Kaufman would often get us permission to camp out at Kaufman's Timber and inevitably a bb gun fight would break out almost as soon as the sun began to set. Nothing like shooting at someone in the dark. Afterall, we thought we were immortal and impervious to pain.
At some point, which I cannot seem to recall, the desire to shoot at each other dwindled. Maybe it was school, maybe it was girls, or maybe it was that one time when one of our group, affectionately known as "Panda", actually had to have a bb surgically removed from his arm that quelled the bb gun wars, but eventually they ended. They were glorious affairs and something that I will never forget. Even today, when I play paintball with my kids and friends, I am often taken back to those heady days of bb gun fighting, when trying to shoot your best friend with a bb was your way of saying "I love you, man."
BROADSWORDS AND BOWS AND ARROWS...
"We're gonna get medieval on your ass." - Samuel L. Jackson in the film "Pulp Fiction"
Many of my Claytonville friends and I were players of the game "Dungeons and Dragons." Say of it what you will, but this game was a breath of fresh air to a bunch of small town boys that wanted something new and exciting to do with our free time. It provided us with uncounted hours of fun and friendship, and I think that for at least myself it opened up doors in my life in so many different ways that I don't think I could count them. And at the very least, it allowed many of our parents to know exactly where we were and what we were doing. If we were not at my house, we were at Mike Feller's house. If not there, we were at Tony Kaufman's, Doug Barth's, Troy Krumwiede's, or the Frick boys' house. Yeah. There were a lot of us who played the game. It kept
some of us out of trouble. The game was a great outlet for fantasy battles with sword and shield, against foes big and small, but even so, it still could not stand up to a real battle against your friends with weapons that, while not lethal, certainly were painful have used against you!
The real force behind the idea of having a real-life/mock medieval battle came from our Social Studies teacher, Steve Selle. He was pretty aware of the likes and dislikes of most of my friends and I and I like to think that had it been appropriate at the time, he would have joined us in our interests. Even so, he was a wonderful teacher that, at least for me, inspire me to pursue my interest in history which has been a huge part of my life ever since leaving CPHS. It was during one of the study halls that he monitored that he talked with myself and some of my other gamer friends about how neat it would be to see or take part in a mock medieval battle with safe weapons. That was it. The rest of the study hall was devoted to planning out how to do this and not kill each other. After school, for next week or so, Mike Feller, Doug Barth, Rob Fanning, and Tom Hasslebring began thinking of ways to make swords, axes and other medieval weapons that we could beat each other about the head and shoulders without actually removing said body parts. What we came up with was to loot the stash of snow fence that had been stored at my house in Claytonville, or what remained standing around town from the previous winter, and remove individual lathe pieces and form them in to our weapons of war. Using duct tape, electrical tape and nails, we managed to make a pretty good armory of varying types of weapons. There were longswords, axes,and spears, all ready for the coming combat.
Testing out how well these weapons would hold up to being beat against each other and against the flesh of combatants took place in the back yard. We discovered a number of flaws with certain designs, and found that indeed, if you were struck by the edge of a piece of wood lathe shaped to look like a sword, it hurt like hell! we briefly considered finding a way of padding the weapons but decided that would take away from the look of the weapons, and would rather let each combatant decide if he wanted to pad himself instead to avoid unwanted pain. Tom Hasselbring realized quickly that the wood would be too weak to last long in a battle so he took the weapon making to a new level. A level that even we boys knew could dangerous. But we did it anyway.
Tom always seem to have access to the best tools and supplies to make new things. His idea was to take one and half inch steel pipe, cut it into 36 inch lengths, drill out a hole near the handle and drive a gutter spike through the pipe to act as a cross-guard of the pipe sword. In theory it sounded great! It would not be likely to break when hitting another weapon like it, and it made a great sound when struck! The issue was that due to the weight of the weapon it made it hard to pull your swing and once it was swung at a target, you were kind of committed to the follow through. In practice, we quickly found that gloves were a requirement as when two of these weapons hit each other, the vibration in the hand was so severe it felt like an electric shock. Secondly, a shield and helmets were a
must. Using small round metal snow sleds as shields, we strapped them to our arms, placed motorcycle helmets on our heads and flailed away at each other. Again, theory did not hold up to reality. The thin metal shields did not hold up well and I remember at least once of having a shield beaten and wrapped around either Mike Feller's or Tom's arm so tightly, that we had to use a tin snip to cut the metal away to free his arm. And finally, when Tom was dropped to his knees from an errant blow to the top of his helmet, we decided to go with the less lethal form of wooden weaponry.
At the same time we were developing hand to hand weaponry, we were also experimenting with an odd form of organic archery. It was nothing to get our hands on an old archery bow, but it was another thing to find suitable arrows for those bows. Any real arrows that we might find were typically lost when shot at a target and missed, or were simply unusable for the sort of bows we had. But not to be out done by the simple lack of projectiles, we managed to come up with very suitable substitute.
At the time of my childhood, there was a general disregard for regular mowing and upkeep of the area ground that flanked each side of the railroad tracks that ran through Claytonville. The grass grew tall, trees grew up into small groves and the horse-weeds grew in abundance. Horse-weed, that tall bamboo like plant which, when dried, turns into a strong yet light-weight shaft that if harvested correctly, could be used as a very passable arrow shaft. In order to do this we waited until late fall or early spring to pull the weeds from the ground, shake off the dirt and make our arrows. The root end almost always produced a sharp pointed end, and the growth bands made for very nice arrow nocks if you broke them off in just the right way. Strip away any stems and leaves and you had serviceable arrow that could be shot from a light-weight bow. We got so good at this harvesting that we could even pick differing sorts of horse-weed for different shooting purposes. The thicker shafts, called "Tubers" where used for erratic flight patterns. When shot, they went anywhere but straight, often traveling in loops and at times, coming right back from where they were launched! The mid-sized plants were called simply "Shafts" and were used for long range accurate shooting, for which they worked very well. I seem to remember getting well over 50 yards worth of distance from these "arrows." And the smallest and thinnest of the plants were called "Needles." They were for up close shooting as they moved very quickly and accurately but only flew a dozen yards well before dropping out of the sky. Many hours were spent harvesting these horse-weeds and before long, we had large numbers of usable arrows at the ready.
What did we do with these "arrows?" Well,we shot them at each other. What else would you do with them?
I am sure, by now, that you are not surprised that my friends and I have turned weeds into weapons. What might surprise is the extent to which we took our efforts to collect and then shoot these organic arrows at one another. Using any form of motorized transport we would load wagons and carts full of the horse-weed arrows and then transport them back to home to clean the ends off of dirt and mud, remove the small branches that grew from the size and then break them into usable lengths. Once that was done, they were were evenly divided, as were we into archery teams, and we would separate ourselves off to a suitable starting distance. At first we would shoot a few arrows at each other to get our feel for distance and test each others resolve to stand and receive the oncoming "weeds of death". Eventually when we got tired of missing each other, the battle devolved into a running war where we would chase each other around the yards shooting at each other. Eventually, the yard would come too look like the aftermath of the Battle of Agincourt with arrow shafts strewn about in every direction and in every location. Clean up was a must as my father would not tolerate his yard looking a mess, so it fell upon my brother and I to clean up the debris. I don't recall any real injuries from our endeavors to hit each other these "arrows" but I recall being stunned at the potential lethality of them when I shot an horse-weed arrow at Tom Hasslebring and it penetrated all the way through two layers of his rubber mud boots. Had I actually hit him, I dare say, it would have cause a lot of harm to him. I myself, took a arrow to the chin on day in a private battle between myself and my best buddy, Mike Feller. He took advantage of me when I knelt down to pick up some discarded "arrows" and when I looked back up I saw this little black speck headed right at me. I had just enough time to turn my head slightly when it hit me in the chin, stuck there for a bit, before falling and pulling itself out of my skin. I remember Mike standing frozen with shock for a bit, but when he realized I was still alive and not blinded or seriously injured, he bent over double, laughing himself silly at my expense. I still bear the scar of that wounding.
Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war;...
Maybe I am wrong here, but I think every boy at some point day dreams or fantasizes about being the heroic medieval knight or fantasy warrior, clad in armor, sword and shield in hand, bravely facing into the eyes of his enemy, ready to do battle. It did not take long before that idea to make purchase in the fertile soil of a teenage boys mind. Remember those wooden swords mentioned earlier? All of the hard work came to fruition on one glorious Saturday afternoon when a number of us wooden weapon wielding warriors gathered on the field of battle just north of Claytonville, in what was known then as Fanning's Timber. word got out that we wanted to have large scale battle using the wooden weapons we constructed and organize teams to fight to the death, or until we got tired or our weapons broke. We broke off into two teams and separated into the woods, each side looking for the other. And just like all well thought out battle plans, those plans never survived the first meeting of the combatants. Essentially, it was a mob fight in a clearing with each side laying about them with their wooden death stick, smacking arms and legs, parrying blows, and taking hits that really, really hurt. Damn they hurt. I recall standing on a rise of gravel and dirt fight off some opponents when all of a sudden the air is knocked out of me from a blow to the stomach. I look down in to the smiling face of Ralph Teske Jr. My first thought was; "Ralph?! Where the heck did he come from?" My second thought was; "Crap! I'm dead." Oh well. Such is the life of the warrior. I waited out my allotted two minute death penalty, and then got right back into the fray.
I think the whole battle probably lasted no more than an hour. Most of the weapons we had made had broken and a good deal of us were smarting from some pretty well placed blows to fleshy parts of our bodies. We each found our way back to our homes and the next few days, discussion was made of trying to do something like it again, but it never happened. Making the weapons was too time consuming and the materials were expensive. Nowadays, they have really cool foam and latex weapons that look like the real thing, but hurt far less than what we had. Had we had something like that back then, I think we would have made it a regular thing. But at least for one glorious day, we were all Conan the Barbarian.
Hearing of these stories and many more like them, my wife often wonders how I survived my teenage years. Sometimes I wonder that myself. But I would not trade my childhood in a small little town in rural east-central Illinois for nothing. In many ways I feel sorry for kids of this generation. I am sure they have their own stories to tell, but I find something missing in their adventures. Something that seems too safe, too controlled and too easy. Maybe I am wrong, but I have scars from simply playing with my friends. I don't see that many scars anymore.
