He lived next door to us in the duplex at 2304 Ferndale in Ames in 1967. I was three years old. My sister Kate had just been born. I remember living in that duplex and seeing my newborn sister in her cradle. I have snippets of memories from inside of the unit, including the "Old West" type swinging doors that separated the living room from the kitchen.
Mr. Pike was our landlord and lived in the other unit of the duplex. Our front doors both opened onto the same small front porch at right angles to each other. The only memory I have of Mr. Pike is from Halloween---October 31, 1967. He knocked on our door and handed me a Clark candy bar. I had never had a Clark bar, and I don't think I have had since then. I just checked online and found they are still made today. Candy bars are durable brands, it seems.
That must have been close after my third birthday, which I remember. Unlike most of my birthdays, I actually had what amounted to party with friends, at least two other boys. I don't remember exactly who they were, but I think they were the sons of our Episcopal priest at St. David's, Father Blackburn, the vicar at the smaller "breakaway" parish in town that my parents had helped form right after they were married. The Blackburns lived on Ferndale in a classic split-level house across the street and hundred yards down from us, so I played with them a lot.
My mom---it could only have been my mom---had set up a folding table in the detached garage which faced out onto Furman Ave. The garage door was open. I remember sitting with the Blackburn brothers, who were slightly older than me, and there was a candle on the table, presumably part of the birthday cake, although that is not in memory. One of the Blackburn boys did something I found incredible, which is that he passed his finger quickly through the flame. This astounded me. It felt like a magic trick. I had to try it as well, and learned it was possible to do that without being burned.
As I write this, it occurs to me that perhaps one of the motivations for my mother to host a birthday party for me would have been to meet the reciprocal social obligations in regard to Mrs. Blackburn, who was her close friend. That kind of thing was expected of women with children back then, and we lived a world of lots of young families and young children.
But I knew my mother and father were different than the parents of other kids. I knew not to expect the same things that were normal in other families. I knew I was on my own, to some degree, even back then. So I never complained about what I didn't get to have, at least in that regard. Looking back I realize how much grief gave herself over being a "bad mother," and this is what I had wanted to tell her before she died, that none of that mattered. She did the right things and the right now when I needed them, and made me feel loved in other gestures, even if they didn't conform to the way other moms it.
And all the love I might have felt from such gestures as a birthday party I received from my grandmothers, especially my paternal grandmother---Grandma Lore, as we called her. Lore was short for Lorene, which is the name she went by. She was my greatest champion throughout my life until she died. But I will write about her some other time, as well as what became of the Blackburns, which is it's own interesting story too.
As for Mr. Pike, I know details about him that I did not know at the time because of my research into the digitalized online version of the 1967 Ames phone book, where I looked up our address on Ferndale and then was curious if there was a "Pike" in the neighboring address, which indeed there was. The Ferndale address was listed as "residence", and it also gave a business address on Main Street for Pike's Pizza kitchen and Pike's lounge. From this I learned his full name and that he had been born in 1915 in Kansas City, making him 52 years old when I met him. According to his obituary, he had opened a lounge on Main Street in Ames in 1962 and retired in the late 1970s. He was married and had one daughter. He had passed away in 1991, fours after his wife and their headstone in the Ames municipal cemetery is on Find a Grave. I learned this from his obituary in the Des Moines paper online.
I have a vague memory of a place called Pike's lounge in downtown Ames, but of course I never went inside. Nobody in my family would have gone into a "lounge", but I knew as an integral part of the fabric of the activities of a town. I was fascinated by commerce---by business districts. It was the earliest phase of a lifelong fascination I have with the economic fabric of the world. I have spent a lifetime trying to recreate the organic, authentic feeling of exploring Main Street in my hometown as a boy. To this day, passing through any small town or city, I can delight in walking its commercial district even if it is only a block or two. But I hate the simulacra of fake ones, which is unfortunately how much of America feels to me lately.
Finding this out yesterday I felt a great connection to this man who had given me a candy bar fifty-six years ago. It felt like a gift to know who he was after all these years.
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