Dennis Sommers

Things were different when summer arrived in Kansas during the ’50s. Kids were routinely sent outside to play immediately after a morning bowl of Cheerios and told to be home by Labor Day.

My friend Dale lived a block from us. He was cool. His bedroom was in the basement accessed only through a door in the garage. He came and went as he pleased – seeing his mother only occasionally at dinner time and his father in the rare instance he wasn’t talking with someone on the other side of the planet over shortwave radio.

One summer day, I rang Dale’s doorbell. He came to the door and stepped outside. “Hey,” he said, “let’s go sit in the kitchen. I just finished taking the label off a can of cat food and put it with the cans of tuna. Dad always has tuna for lunch. I’ll bet ya he eats that cat food and won’t even know the difference.”

We sat at a tiny kitchen table just before his dad walked in, opened a cabinet and retrieved what looked like a can of StarKist without a label. He found an opener, bent the partially attached lid back and began forking contents into his pie hole. Moments later, he belched, tossed the can in the trash then vanished for his next shortwave chat with a stranger in Timbuctoo.

Whenever his mother’s stockpile of unfiltered Camels was low and risk of nicotine withdrawal was high, Dale was sent to the corner market to buy some. A note from an adult was needed for this — if you were five or less. If you were six, no note was needed, but the limit was six cartons.

Once, leaving Carney’s Market (operated by Frank Carney of Pizza Hut fame’s father) with armloads of smokes, Dale noticed six-packs of empty pop bottles stacked up outside the Market’s back door. After delivering the cigs to his mother, he retrieved his Radio Flyer wagon from the garage, and we headed back to Carney’s. Dale heaped the wagon with as many empty Coke and Pepsi six-packs as possible at the back door, then rolled the leaning tower of glass around to and through the front door to cash them in at 3 cents a bottle. Weeks later, a fenced area out back with a pad-locked gate torpedoed Dale’s “recycle the recycled” scam that provided plenty of candy-induced tooth decay.

Not much later, Dale acquired a BB gun. At first, he set up a cardboard box rescued from a neighbor with a new washing machine to create a shooting range in his back yard. He declared it safe since, in the unlikely case a BB would miss both the bullseye and the cardboard box, it would simply slam into the side of the neighbor’s garage and fall to the ground, thereby replenishing an ammo supply. It wasn’t long before siding on the garage had more pock marks than the dart board in Ebeneezer’s pub. When the neighbor discovered collateral damage and delivered a piece of his mind to Dale’s mother, he graduated from garage mutilation to become a full-blown assassin.

Dale acquired a box of Carney’s bird seed and sprinkled some atop a backyard clothesline pole near the alley. His mother told me he was in the back yard when I stopped there one afternoon. He proudly revealed a shoe box full of robins that he planned to have stuffed and mounted.

I prayed not to be sent to prison for failing to report Robingeddon. Mom never used the preamble Dale’s Mother often did… that “This is going to hurt me a lot more than it will you.” Instead, when she learned of the avian carnage, Mother barred me from going past the end of our block, claiming there was too much to do before school started. I’m thankful now that Mother shepherded me toward better friendships.

Sommers is a retired Minot orthodontist, violinist with the Minot Symphony and author of the book, “Retirement? You Can’t HANDLE the Truth!”