Life Along the Sangamon: Duke's Run

By Gregory D. Brown

What is it about small-town America that produces unpretentious giants? Is it something in the fresh country air that spurs small town boys to run for the sun long after they've left the quiet confines of their safe villages? In this autobiography, we learn the story of a small-town boy making good as he grows up along the lush banks of the Sangamon River near Mahomet, Illinois. From Gregory Duke Brown's unique and understandable perspective, we experience life in small-town America during the late sixties and early seventies. In his sequel, Duke's Run, we are then taken along for his thrilling adventures as a Golden Gloves boxing champion to a young law student teaching English in Seoul, Korea, where he meets his future bride. Then we learn of Duke's experiences as a Combat Arms Officer in the 82nd airborne and a merchant in the French Quarter of New Orleans before settling his family in Oklahoma City and entering the political arena. In his stories, we grow to appreciate how small-town values and a Midwestern work ethic can generate a life worth living, fighting, and dying for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887932286

Book preview

cover.jpg

Life Along the Sangamon

Duke's Run

Gregory D. Brown

Copyright © 2023 Gregory D. Brown

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

ISBN 979-8-88793-227-9 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88793-228-6 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Foreword

Mahomet

The Summer of '72

Wheels

Life Along the Sangamon / Duke's Run Gregory Duke Brown

About the Author

Foreword

There are those among us who dream of seeing the world. There are those among us who talk about traveling around the globe.

Then there is Gregory (Duke) Brown, who has made the journeys and retained the memories. His views, his reflections, and his experiences enable those of us not in his shoes to have a unique look at and perspective into the ever-changing world in which we live.

His words and musings are not the literary work of Shakespeare or Steinbeck but instead the open, honest, and understandable recollections of a person who has seen many venues from the inside and who possesses the savvy and moxie to know what they mean.

He is the perfect example that a small-town boy can make good. Some never doubted he would make his mark. Nearly 40 years ago, a certain Sunday School teacher couldn't stop talking about the bright, engaging youngster in her classroom.

Unfortunately, my mother wasn't talking about me, but my esteemed classmate, who grew up directly across from the church.

While many people are content to let life come to them, Gregory Brown sprints into life and has since his teenage years. How many 16-year olds would have the guts to bring a guitar to English class and entertain his enthralled peers with ballads instead of sitting still for the lesson plan prepared by the teacher?

How many people, as adults, have complained about the system yet done nothing to effect changes? In addition to his roles as soldier, merchant, husband, father—and now, author—Gregory Brown has made forays into the political arena, where his Golden Gloves boxing career has him well-prepared. He understands if you lose one round or one fight, you work that much harder to come out on top the next time. It is perhaps an old-fashioned American value, but one which has not yet slipped into obscurity.

Thanks to Gregory (Duke) Brown, the message is there for all to see and absorb. Some traditions are worth maintaining.

—Fred Kroner, July 2003

Mahomet

It happens every summer I cross the mighty Mississippi and into my home state of Illinois. Not more than twenty minutes after the St. Louis arch fades from view, the sweet smell of fresh-cut alfalfa hay wafts through my car windows, bringing with it a wonderful rush of childhood memories of life along the Sangamon River (pronounced Sang a' mon).

I was reared in a small town securely anchored amongst a sea of corn in that swath of the grand prairie that extends from the Ohio Valley through Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and eastern Colorado; the lower belt of the great bread basket of the world—the American Midwest.

It is a land of once powerful industrial cities struggling to enter the 21st century as diversified high-tech enclaves. And it is a land still dotted with many small farm towns that haven't changed much in general disposition and which continue to endure. In the case of Mahomet (Ma ho' met), Illinois, she had the good fortune of being located 11 miles west of Champaign via state Highway 150. However, when the great road interstate 74 running between Indianapolis and Peoria came through just north of town in 1968, that distance shortened to 9 miles. President Eisenhower's grand vision of a defense network of roads binding our nation together evolved into the eighth wonder of the world—the interstate system of the United States! This labyrinth of concrete shortened considerable distances between towns and cities with straight, uninterrupted, four-lane highways that mocked the old winding two lanes, relegating them to secondary roads.

Mahomet was not immune to the changes that the great new road system wrought on rural America. The allure of small-town living coupled with lower property taxes and a slower pace than the restless, heaving cities suddenly was within a few minutes reach of weary urban dwellers. They poured out of the twin cities of Champaign/Urbana and found refuge with their young in hitherto sleepy hamlets like St. Joe, Savoy, Thomasboro, and Mahomet. In a scene played over and over again as the great roads crept across the Midwest, bucolic villages were transformed into bedroom communities within a decade or so of the opening of new sections of the interstate highways.

It is on the cusp of that great era of small-town renaissance, during the late sixties and early seventies, from which I take reference and write.

Legend has it that Mahomet was named after a great Potawatomi Indian Chief. About 25 miles to the west, in present-day Leroy, Illinois, sat the tribe's ancestral capitol. It is estimated that between 8-10,000 Potawatomi lived there. In the early 1800s, they were forced by the white man to move far west of the Mississippi into the Oklahoma territory. The Potawatomi called the river that quietly meanders around Mahomet Sangamon, meaning good hunting and fishing. An apt description, for just as generations of Indian children before us had fished her, my boyhood friends and I spent our summers roaming along her lush banks, constantly seeking out the best fishing spots.

In the era that I grew up, before the wholesale warehousing of our elders, there was a full circle of life evident in neighborhoods and communities across the country. Mahomet was, I believe, typical of small farm communities where farmers retired to town along with railroad workers and various other skilled tradesmen. Their activities and goings-abouts, though limited, were as natural and accepted as the playing of children; their litany of aches and pains as timeless as the cries of newborn babes.

Otis and Mabel Young had farmed for nigh fifty years a fourth section of land just north of town. This land they passed on to their son who continued farming while the elderly couple moved to town into a small white frame house next to the Browns on Dunbar Street.

Bobby, Mike, and I were within a year of each other and the middle brood of our large family. We three spent many an afternoon under the large, leafy maple tree in Otis Young's front yard.

Us boys sat reverently around the old green lawn chair that Otis dutifully occupied and from which he entertained us for hours on end with his youthful tales. See that, young whippers, he'd say pointing to his large left thumb. Used to hunt snapping turtles by hand along the river. Well, one bit me right on this thumb years ago and give me bad case of blood poison. We shuddered at the thought as Otis slowly brought his thumb up in a full circle before our eyes. While the sweet smell of freshly baked rhubarb pie emanated from Mable's kitchen, Otis would gently place a small sheet of rolling paper on his big thumb. Awestruck, we boys watched as he carefully tapped out a measure of tobacco from an old tin kept ceremoniously in his bib overhaul pocket. To our utter amazement, Otis never spilled a shred of tobacco as he effortlessly licked the paper and made a perfect roll; years of practice behind this feat. With a wooden match plucked from behind his right ear, he'd strike it off his big thumbnail and draw slowly on the smoke. To us young'uns, the whole world seemed to come to