Somewhere along Coal Creek east of Humboldt long ago a treasure was buried.
I didn’t grow up in a strict household, but possession of photos as racy as scantily clad girls was something just short of a mortal sin — which, as anyone once young can imagine, was no big deterrent.
Ronnie Middendorf, my best of friends in growing-up years, slipped our bonds of propriety a time or two. One etched in my memory vastly failed to live up to our expectations. We came on an advertisement in the back of a magazine that offered “a book filled with colorful pinups.”
We scraped together pocket change until we had enough, sent it off and waited — feverishly, as I recall. When the book arrived, it seemed exactly as advertised — until we opened it. Instead of pictures of pretty young things posed in two-piece bathing suits — a bit provocative in the early 1950s — the book’s pages had been cut out to form a frame and colored wooden clothes pins were glued to the back cover.
Took us a while to recover from being fleeced.
A year or so later another advertisement caught my attention, for flip movies about the size of a matchbook that made the performers — girls, of course — look as though they were dancing. The quicker you flipped, the faster they moved.
When the small package arrived in the mail I stuffed it in a pocket and, after delivering whatever else came to Mom, dashed to the only place where I could be assured of seclusion, the hen house out back. Never mind the smell of lime-powdered droppings made more rancid by hot, humid weather, I had entertainment of the first order.
I nearly wore the flips out, by watching and hiding them away in the far reaches of my dresser drawer, stuffed in an old cigar box holding baseball cards.
Being something of a worrier, reality set in; if Mom should happen onto the flips I’d be toast.
I decided the only recourse was to dispose of the incriminating evidence. What better place than along Coal Creek, not much of a walk from home and where I went to endure the doldrums of hot summer days catching perch.
The day of disposal was steeped in sadness, although I did my best to mask my emotions. I wrapppped the flip movies in some kind of kitchen foil, trudged along a dusty county road to the creek and after a brief ceremony buried them four or five inches deep beside a big oak tree. Then, in solemnity I took my pocket knife and carefully carved an “X” into the tree.
I never retrieved the flips and now, better than 60 years later, there probably is little to recover. Occasionally, I wonder if that little lump of paper and foil is still there.
Buried ‘treasure’ awaits recovery
