The older I get, the less I seem to know

I was surprised to find the records of the sale of 528 Iowa Avenue, which I had always known as my grandparents Jack and Adelaide Kennedy’s house, but that sale occurred in 1950. So, dad and Dorothy had to have attended high school and college while still living in the big farmhouse west of town.

Dorothy was a star student at St. Patrick’s, graduating as Valedictorian in 1944, before earning her degree from Iowa. Dad attended St. Pat’s for two years and then transferred to University HS, Iowa’s lab school in the College of Education. Why he did so remains a mystery, and the few souls who might have known took the secret to their graves. Dad managed to graduate in 1945, which means he must have begun school early or skipped a grade. He was a smart guy, so it might have been either reason.

The story that my brother Mike and I remember was that Grandma Kennedy had been lobbying to move to town for some time. She certainly put a lot of miles on the car driving in and out of Iowa City on Melrose, if dad’s diary entries are a good indication.

A suitable house came on the market, one that Albert and Emma Dunkel owned for many years. Albert was quite a local character, and the Dunkel family added a lot to Iowa City history.

Albert was a businessman and musician (he led a small orchestra that played locally) and he was known as Punch. He died in 1947 and his widow Emma was who sold the Iowa Avenue home to Grandpa. Punch had run several businesses, including the Pastime Theater.

I mention this because dad’s diary mentions attending 11 movies just during the month of March in 1938. The Pastime is mentioned specially, along with the Varsity, Englert, and Iowa theaters. Dad went to movies multiple times a week, usually with his mom and sister.

The fact that the home of the longtime owner of the Pastime would eventually become my grandparents’ home is one of those coincidences we should probably expect in a smallish town.

The theater was located at 205 E. College, was renamed the Capitol after Punch’s estate sold it in 1947, and closed in 1960 before being demolished when the block came down during Iowa City’s urban renewal phase. I vaguely recall seeing some animated films there… maybe Disney cartoons.

I wish I had kept a diary in my youth. That would be handy in trying to reconstruct events from many decades ago. I also wish I had been as organized as dad in how he rated the movies he saw (and when you go to at least two a week, you have earned some perspective): Rotten, OK, Good, and Swell, with “swell” being the highest rank.

So why would I be surprised to learn that the family did not move to Iowa City until 1950? My explanation is that a young kid doesn’t ask questions about the past too often and that I likely was so focused on my own monumental life experiences that it never occurred to me that there had been much history prior to my entering the picture.

I thought my dad and aunt lived in town when in high school – but was clearly mistaken – and I do remember that Dorothy had a bedroom on the second floor, looking out on the street. She might have lived there through college and beyond. I would guess that dad didn’t live there at all.

The house featured a somewhat steep but quite small front yard that sloped down to the sidewalk and I remember having to ride my bike over there from University Heights on many summer days to mow the lawn. That sloped front yard was my bane and it didn’t help that their lawnmower was a manual. Turns out I was not all that strong, I guess. The backyard was perfectly square and flat and backed to an alley. Nice and easy for mowing.

The good news about being sent by my mother to mow that yard was that Grandma would always offer pop and candy for my trouble. There was also a small grocery store called Pecina’s across Iowa Avenue that was one of the few stores willing to sell an entire box of baseball cards at a time. I remember the cost as being $3 or $4, but that may be low. There were 36 packs of cards in a box.

Gene Wandling and I would bike to the store occasionally when we had each accumulated enough money from our paper routes and then revel in opening each pack of ten cards, trading them, always searching for a Mickey Mantle card or some other gem.

I read that an unopened “wax box” of baseball cards from 1960 would go for $200K today. Keeping even an unopened PACK of cards would have been unthinkable back then, and I routinely would attach cards to my bike spokes to make cool noises as I sped through the streets. 

That small grocery closed in the mid-1960s, as larger groceries took their business. Hy-Vee’s first store in Iowa City opened in 1957 and Pecina’s was an eventual victim of that major chain’s success.

And now the idea of collecting baseball cards doesn’t come up much in popular culture. I did keep a large box of my favorite cards, and it was stored when I left for the Air Force in an upstairs closet in the Woodridge house.

When I went to retrieve them in the mid-1970s, I learned that mom had made the executive decision to toss them. She did not toss my stamp collection, which I still have and which is now worth about nothing. But that’s for another tale.

I will just note that the price of a first-class stamp rose to 82 cents last Sunday. A first-class stamp in my youth was 3 cents.

But the service is better, right?