There was an excitement in Canton, Missouri, when the Mississippi reached flood stage.

The river would rampage nearly every year. Sometimes it simply crept across Highway 61 north and south of town and then began to recede. But other times it was more angry and bent on destruction. There was a rage about it, an indignation at the presumptions of humans. It would not be contained. It would snake out, finding new routes. It would break Nature's laws and flow backwards. A belligerent brown wraith roiling and hemorrhaging, it was a monstrous unchecked deluge propelling debris from upstream. Two-hundred year old oaks, houses and barns, dislodged barges, dead and bloated farm animals carried off and streaming by in the tidal flow -- until the river found the weakness it was looking for and broke through into the river bottoms where it drowned small towns and farmlands, washed out highways and bridges and finally came to rest , five miles wide.

As kids in high school we knew that a recess from our tedious and intolerable routine was upon us. We were let out of school so that we could join the fray and experience the cataclysm hands on.

The National Guard was in town filling sandbags and bolstering the levees. And we were discharged from school to augment their numbers and join the combatants on the front lines in this battle against an impossible and overwhelming enemy.

Also we got to hang out with men in their twenties, some of whom had actually had sexual intercourse, had struck out on their own in the world and smoked cigarettes. For us, it was less about the fight and more about maturation. We were ripe young man/boys sandbagging the levees in the company of randy citizen soldiers. It was a process of germination.

We worked 24-hour shifts shoveling sand into bags at one location, piling the flatbed Diamond-T trucks high with sandbags, roaring out and spewing blue diesel fumes into the cool nighttime air on our way to the riverfront. Then packing the bags like brickwork on the levee tops as the hungry Mississippi, robust and turbulent, lapped and swaddled our fragile defenses.

As municipalities go, Canton was not much of a town.

About 2.5 miles square the population was around 2,500. It's tucked at the foot of the bluffs in the river bottoms bordered on the east by the Mississippi, and on the west by College Hill. Culver-Stockton College, where my father was employed as Chairman of the English Department, perched atop the promontory. Canton is in the northeast corner of Missouri where Illinois, Iowa and Missouri connect, 20 miles north of Quincy, Illinois, 30 miles north of Hannibal, Missouri, and 150 miles north of St. Louis. And about 30 miles south of Keokuk, Iowa.

Highway 61 snaked through town parallel to the river. On the south side of town on 61 was the Dog 'n' Suds and the IGA food market. At the stop-sign where 61 conjoined Lewis Street was the public library. Four blocks east, on the riverfront, was the Canton Ice and Fuel Company, owned and operated by L.C. Baily -- my friend Richie Baily's father -- where I worked during my high school and college years. To the west on Lewis Street was Capp's Five-and-Dime, the pickle sorter factory and the pool hall. A half block to the north on 61 was Don's Grand Leader, where we'd all pile in after school to read comic books off the newsstand, drink nickel cokes and devour ice-cream creations like Sandstorms and Hawkshaws.

At one time the only industry in Canton was a button factory. It was on the river, in order to give it access to the mollusks that were harvested so that buttons could be punched from the shells. It had closed down after the advent of plastics, but when I was a kid rummaging around the levee and on the riverfront I was always turning up clam shells with holes punched out where buttons had been acquired decades earlier.

My closest friends in Canton were Richie Baily and Tim Blickhan. Together -- inseparable -- we grew from children to men in that small, peculiar river village.

We were connected by a mutual appreciation of music and art. Rich played the Euphonium (Baritone horn) and Cello -- he called it his crotch fiddle. Tim, the trombone. And I played tenor Saxophone. Of the three of us I was the least accomplished musician. Still, I was moved by sound and rhythm and slogged on.

We were in the school marching band. And the pep band, a small aggregation that would travel with the Basketball team and provide melodious support to the home team. And we played in the stage band.

The stage band was modeled after the big bands of the 40s and 50s. We'd cover old standards like "Moonlight in Vermont", "Mood Indigo", "Autumn in New York" and "Satin Doll". And in our spare time we'd get together with other musically inclined kids and jam, Dixieland style.

During the 50s and early 60s the folk music phenomenon swept popular music. So we learned rudimentary guitar and we'd perform as a trio doing our best to imitate the Limeliters and the Chad Mitchell Trio.

Of course we were kids and enjoyed the pop tunes and rock 'n' roll of the day. Dion and the Belmonts, Roy Orbison, Elvis, Buddy Holly. We'd tune in the 50,000 watt blowtorch, WLS, and listen to Dick Biondi (In 1963 he was the first DJ in America to play the Beatles.) cranking out the hits.

We also played in the school orchestra so we were no strangers to classical music. Rich Baily, in particular, would spend hours after school sitting in his bedroom booming Wagner and Stravinsky out onto Clark Street, frightening the home-spun citizenry and small animals.

In our late teen years we came to appreciate Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, the Dave Brubeck Quartet and others in the firmament of modern jazz.

The breadth of our musical interests as neophytes has carried over into my adult life. I can pretty much find something I like in all forms of music, from Tupac to Tony Bennett. And I certainly don't eliminate an entire genre as many people do ("I hate country music", "I can't stand banjo music", "I will not listen to Heavy Metal", etc.).

As important as music was in our lives what really pulled our chain -- particularly for me and Richie -- was art. Tim eventually followed his musical muse to the Doctoral level at the University of Illinois, but Rich and I became visual artists.

In 1961 I was 16 years old, and I was the first of the three of us to achieve "professional" status in the arts. A cartoon of mine was published in Harvey Kurtzman's Help! magazine. Tim, Richie and I had been fanatical followers of Kurtzman since his Mad comics days, so this development was not a minor event in our nascent artistic oeuvre.

The three of us set about publishing Squire, a fanzine tribute to Harvey Kurtzman. We produced three issues of Squire during our last two years of high-school. It was the culmination of our teen years artistic volition. But it was far from our first.

 

 

The three of us had painted a mural that encircled the history classroom at Canton High School. It depicted our take on the history of the United States from the Revolutionary War to the election of JFK.

And a couple of years earlier we entered the school's science fair with another "mural".

We painted "The History of Mathematics" on a window-shade. Much to our surprise we won first place. We figured we didn't have a chance with a painting against all the student chemistry experiments and scientific demonstrations.

And the accolade went a long way toward improving my miserable standing in my math classes.

 

 

It was the height of the flood season the night of the science fair. The river was in full tantrum, the National Guard was at the barricades and the town's folk were nervous about the levee's ability to hold back the flood waters.

Richie, Tim and I were elated and a bit unglued at the surprise of receiving first place in a competition where we knew we had no chance of even placing.

We were in a lather, it was after dark and we tore up and down Canton's streets holding our cheesy plaque aloft and screeching in unison "THE LEVEE BROKE! THE LEVEE BROKE!"

Seemed like the thing to do at the time.