Growing up, Larry Keenan didn’t have a lot of rules. He didn’t need them — a simple stare got his point across. But one thing all my siblings understood was this: Getting a job was a top priority. Dad’s expression, forever burned in my brain, was “You need to learn the value of a dollar.”
Whatever we could do to stay busy and be productive, we did. We mowed lawns, we shoveled drives. My kid brother Marty had a paper route — not simply throwing the paper, but collecting the monthly subscriptions as well. Getting money from blue-haired widowed ladies who had limited income but unlimited negotiating power. Think blood from a 90-year-old turnip. When Marty got pushy, his customer would drop this bomb — “Call my lawyer. Your dad.”
There was more. During the ’70s, our Scout troop ran a firecracker stand. The Keenan boys were the managers. When you sit in front of enough inventory to blow up half of Barton County, you’ve got the kind of clout reserved for school principals and police chiefs. And when foot traffic got slow we would “test” our inventory to be sure Red China had not sold us duds.
But everything changed when I returned from my freshman year in college in 1978. I had no job, and no plans, and Dad fixed that. He sent me to the city offices to fill out an application.
Three hours later I was wearing an orange vest and yellow hard hat filling pot holes in 100-degree heat. In 24 hours I went from cool guy to loser of preposterous proportions. Taking orders from a supervisor who waited his entire life to tell a “college boy” what to do. Which he did, endlessly. The asphalt stuck to your boots, shirt and hair and invaded nostrils and other body parts that defy a family friendly description.
One of the guys I worked with was Don Eargood. He made work tolerable. He knew every car, make, model. I would quiz him. “Chevy. 1974 model. Stick shift.”
Every day I went home for lunch for a nine-course meal. The whole family was there. The typical menu was mashed potatoes and meatloaf, green beans, brownies, followed by an 8 ounce glass of milk. With five minutes to spare, I hurried out the door for the afternoon shift. And then about 2:15 it hit me. Call it what you want — siesta, nap time, food coma — my brain, my body shut down. A sleep so powerful it was something from Aesop’s fable. Everything crashed to a halt. My eyelids were boulders. Ever tried to shovel hot asphalt while sleeping? And breathing pure carbon monoxide from an idling truck right in front of you?
Back then, there was nowhere to hide. Everyone who drove by was a taxpayer, looking for evidence of unproductivity, wasting time, which, prior to that job, was my specialty.
But every once in a while a bad day got a tad better. You see, there was something that happened in the summer of 1978. I suspect medical epidemiologists are still studying it. A lot of old people died that summer in Great Bend. Some were Marty’s customers, and he’s still trying to collect. But when people die in small towns, the funerals are huge. Everyone knows everyone, and they all attend the funeral. Which means long funeral processions.
When you do street crew, funeral processions were God’s way of giving you a break. We would pause, lay down the shovel, remove our hat, and find shade. We didn’t know the person. We didn’t care. We paid respects until the final car passed us by, and then continued to reflect until it was long out of sight. The relatives would see our show of reverence, and blink away tears.
And our town had one cemetery, central to the main streets and adjacent to Broadway, which, coincidentally, was asphalt, meaning it had a lot of pot holes, meaning it’s where we spent a lot of time.
One other day stuck out. It was the day Dad drove past our truck in his Plymouth station wagon. The air conditioning was blowing his hair like Hurricane Hugo. Dad knew more than the value of a buck. He knew the value of A/C.