These days it seems the only friends you have are the ones you meet through your kids. Adults connect with your kid’s teams, your kid’s schools. It didn’t used to be that way. A long time ago the circle of friends for adults had zero to do with their children. There were no such things as helicopter parents, for instance. Sports and practices were a footnote to life.
Most of my dad’s friends I didn’t know well. You had the doctor friends, like Doc Saylor, the lawyer friends like Hugh Mauch, the catholic/bridge club friends like the Holts, Niederees and Murphys. I knew those parents because they had kids my age. And they would maybe rub our heads and acknowledge us, and the small talk was small. I knew Charlotte Holt because she was our Den Leader and was the Queen of Crafts. There were some other exceptions. John Keenan and Bud Degner come to mind. But generally speaking parents and kids kept their distance.
All of this was just fine by us. We loved the freedom and took full advantage, making forts, taking day hikes, riding our bikes and carrying sack lunches with us. We were ignored, unless you forgot to serve Mass on 7 a.m. on Saturday.
But there was one friend of my dad’s who had a different approach to things. His name was Bill Peschka. Some readers may remember him. Bill Peschka was old school. He was so old they condemned the building. Dad tells me Bill was at least 20 years his senior. “Our relationship was much like a nephew and uncle” he said.
Bill told stories, had opinions, waxed philosophic and was always interesting. He had no love for Jimmy Carter, but that’s another column altogether. His son Allan was General Counsel at Commerce Bank in downtown KC and drove a Mercedes back to Barton County. Many years later when I had begun work in Kansas City I pulled up next to an expensive import on Ward Parkway and looked to my right. It was Allan.
Bill lived on 16th Street. Bill loved birds, hated cats and any other creature who threatened the beautiful call of a cardinal at sunrise. He had a birdhouse with purple martins, which ate a billion mosquitos a day. Bill was never wrong. Never in doubt. But in a good way.
Bill had a life partner, Elsie. They were like twins, cut from a Jane Austin novel. They had similar features—thin faces, boney elbows, and elegant attire. Bill wore flannel shirts purchased at JC Penney. Bill wasn’t just knowledgeable about world wars and the Dust Bowl, he lived them. He had a penchant for stories with detail and color. His stories would start with expressions like, “Matt, you need to know is that no one understood just how evil Hitler was. That may seem unthinkable today, but it was true. And one day I was sitting in my living room, and through the radio I heard Edward Murrow’s voice ... ”
Bill would draw contrasts with accepted givens and throw them out the window. He was a contrarian.
But one thing more than anything else was noteworthy about Bill Peschka. He was the first adult in the history of the world who declared to the Keenan kids out of the blue – “you can call me Bill.” This was an absurd declaration. It cut against the grain of all the social norms.
But it was symbolic of Bill’s personality. He was a genuinely nice man.
And every summer Mona would send Larry off to fishing trips. Lake Wilson was the favored venue but we took other trips to farm ponds in Russell, Stafford and Rice county. These trips all had three things in common: 1. The temperatures would always be over a 100 in the shade. 2. There was never any shade. 3. The wind blew 40 mph. Today if you sent your kids out in those conditions you’d see them again on visiting hours at the Barton County Jail.
There were other things about Bill. His tackle box and poles were of the finest quality and of course purchased at Phillips Sporting Goods. Bill had shotguns too, and I remember he had a 28 gauge. “When Bill passed away his son Allan gave me Bill’s favorite shotgun” dad told me.
And Bill loved to fish. “We would fish and fish and sometimes catch almost nothing. But invariably, just as I’d say, ‘well, I think we should go now’ Bill would declare ‘hold up Larry, I’m getting a bite.’ Two hours later we would still be waiting.”
But of all the many excursions one stands out. It was July 1972. Mona shipped dad and Bill to Lake Wilson. In tow were my two brothers, and the Holt kids went along. We got bored and went lifting up rocks for anything, live, dead, poisonous or not.
And we found it. Something you read about in the Encyclopedia. The stuff of Louis L’Amour and fantasies miles away from Lincoln County. And one glance it was clear – we’d discovered the rarest and most deadly of animals. A scorpion. It absolutely was a scorpion. Marty called it first, but then John Holt weighed in, leaning down and taking a close look. “Yes” he said, “it does appear to be a scorpion.” It had a stinger which was reared up ready to strike. It was backing up against our glare, our astonishment. This was like finding Bigfoot, meeting ET, and seeing a unicorn. In the Vatican.
We had to show Bill. We raced back. “Bill, Bill, we saw a scorpion!
Bill rejected it in an instant. “There are no scorpions in Kansas.” And that was that. If God himself appeared between parted clouds and uttered those words, they would have less authority.
But we were undeterred. We were in scouts. We knew things. This was a scorpion. But now he was not only wrong but suggesting we were idiots. Which, of course, we were.
There was only one to do. We returned to the rock formation. This took considerable effort since most of the Lake Wilson landscape looks identical. Like Mars but less attractive. But we found it, placed it in a Styrofoam cup and raced it back to Bill.
Bill stared it down. He examined it. Inspected it. For what seemed like hours, he said nothing. And then he spoke: “My God Larry come over here. I think they have found a scorpion.”
This was like hitting the Powerball, KU football winning a national championship and Nobel Prize all balled into one. We were right. Bill, for a moment, was wrong. We released the critter, went hunting for a rattlesnake but nothing would ever match that moment.
Bill passed away in 1992. He was 90. But twenty four years later I still remember his kindness, and his many stories. And should you ever find yourself at Lake Wilson and get bored, head to the north shoreline and flip over some large rocks. You might just have a story all your own.