The best songs you love forever should have a story behind them. My story for this Doobie’s classic was I smoked pot for the first time while I was blasting this on my brother Mike’s massive hi-fi system in our house in Makakilo, Hawaii.
How my family ended up living in Hawaii is the first part of this story. On May 15, 1975 my crazy Mom uprooted my family from our home in Rock Island, Illinois and moved us to Makakilo, Oahu, Hawaii. Her husband and our Dad, Mike Scheck, had died of cancer a year and half prior to our move, and Mom felt we needed a new life to get us all out of our extreme grief. All our friends and family thought we were insane, and perhaps we were. I know I was.
I was the Scheck child in the deepest throes of depression and grief after losing my Dad. I was the youngest and hardest hit by Dad’s long illness and death; before he died I was a vivacious and athletic Tom Sawyer kind of kid who’d fallen into such abject despair that I grew fat and nearly comatose as I stumbled through life miserably. Worse was that I started wetting the bed nearly every night because my nightmares were so horrific. Much worse was I’d become almost obsessively suicidal, but luckily they were just thoughts upon which I’d not acted yet. I rejected god and religion, and most of my childhood friends were perplexed and frankly repulsed by what I’d become, fat and weird and depressive, though none would say anything because they at least understood my grief. Mostly they tried to help me, but I was in a deep, dark hole. I think there’s no doubt my Mom moved us to Hawaii to save me.
Remember the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy is catapulted by a tornado out of the dull, dark, black-and-white Kansas and steps into the technicolor brilliance of Oz? That’s how it felt when our United Airlines 747 jet landed in Honolulu and we first walked out of the airport and drove to our new home in my brother Mike’s Mercury convertible. It was, literally, paradise on Earth, at least to my depressed, pathetic, tubby, twelve-year-old self.
Hawaii is so incredibly beautiful when you first experience it through your senses, the sight of the lovely, lush, hyper-green mountain ranges on both sides, and in the middle the most beautiful flora and fauna you could ever imagine, all surrounded by the aqua-blue Pacific Ocean, moreover your sense of smell is literally assaulted by the gorgeous scents of the fresh plants and flowers and fruit trees and salty-sweet ocean breeze; the feeling you get is so magnificently exhilarating that you feel like you’ve died and gone to the very best version of heaven you could ever imagine. I spent my first hour in Hawaii hyperventilating with utter joy as we drove to our new home. This ain’t Kansas, Dorothy. It was 180 degrees different than the Rust Belt shithole we left behind in Rock Island, Illinois, and all the tragic memories that hung over it like a foul, tepid swamp mist.
I was saved already. That first hour in Hawaii awoke me from a dark nightmare that had lasted about 18 months and nearly destroyed me. It was like a shot of adrenalin to overdosed junkies near death that causes them to almost leap up from their deathbed. I was vividly awake with a gigantic gasp of air. Arise, you fat, depressed little bed-wetting Lazarus! You’re alive!
Our house was located on the southern foothills of the Waianae Mountain range on the western side of Oahu that overlooked Barber’s Point to the southwest and Honolulu and its ubiquitous and massive former volcano Diamond Head far (about 25 miles) to the east. Our house was about 1000 feet above the ocean and about two miles from it, and was situated on a steep hillside, with a gigantic back porch called a lanai that was on stilts about 15 feet above our back yard, with a breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean that still makes me smile some 45 years later when I think about it. There were days when we could see schools of whales in the ocean below. There was a huge mango tree in our back yard that yielded fresh, delicious fruit every few months and smelled divine. I could sit on our lanai for hours and never feel bored or sensory deprived.
My brother Mike was in the Navy and stationed at Barber’s Point Naval Air Station, and he and his Navy buddies were renting the house when my Mom visited him just after the previous Christmas. Now that they were all getting out of the Navy and leaving, the house was ours to live in, so Mom moved there and rented it for us. Mike left a few weeks after we arrived to make a motorcycle trek across America with his best Navy buddy Nick, which took the whole summer. He left behind all of his furniture and possessions, especially his massive stereo system he’d bought when he was stationed in Okinawa, with a powerful amp, turntable, reel-to-reel tape deck, and quadrophonic speaker array that created the most perfect audio experience possible. Dude, it was the shit, Moreover, he and his Navy buddies left behind all their albums, acts like T. Rex, The Allman Brothers Band, Doobie Brothers, Yes, Pink Floyd, Bowie, Alice Cooper, Little Feat, Rolling Stones, et al. It was a treasure trove of great music from that era.
They’d also, and probably not on purpose, hidden their pot stashes all over the house like a stoner’s Easter egg hunt. I literally found joints and buds hidden in every nook and cranny of the house. I was only 12 and had never smoked anything before except an occasional cigarette I stole from my Mom. All I needed was the chance to try it for the first time.
One day I stayed home alone while Mom and my sisters were out shopping and my brother John had left to play tennis. In this “Home Alone” experience I cranked the Doobie Brothers album What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits on our stereo, opened all the windows in the house, and sat on our lanai to smoke my first joint with my neighbor and best friend, Danny Cunningham, who had a Hawaiian mother and a white, retired Army Master Sergeant father. Danny too had never tried pot, so this was going to be an amazing experience for us both.
With the Doobies jamming from the house, Danny and I got higher than hell and danced around like two idiots. We were incapable of understanding the pharmacological THC effects acting on our young brains, but, goddamn, it was a blast on that sunny day in Makakilo, Hawaii. One joint became two, two became three. After three we were blazed majestically, laughing, joyful and outrageously euphoric, babbling to each other incessantly about who the fuck knows what, unable to stand any more or caring that we couldn’t, just lying on the lanai deck in a pleasant pot-induced trance, music blasting, with no care in the world. Glorious. Cathartic.
We were 12! OK, kids, don’t smoke pot when you’re 12, but I have zero regrets that I did; I’d spent the last two years in hell, so I was, to say the least, the most cynical and existentially nihilistic kid you’d ever meet, lost in grief and self-doubt and misery, a depressed misanthrope hateful of everyone and everything. Luckily my high IQ at that age afforded me space to drop a few points that I didn’t need anyhow. Maybe I didn’t attend Yale or find the cure for cancer, and I grew up to be a fairly mediocre schlub–sue me; the tradeoff was worth it as for most of my teens I self-medicated on weed and didn’t jump off a bridge like my mind was constantly beckoning me to do. Nope, I stayed alive to become that mediocre schlub. Win-win for Matti.
I wish I could have bottled those intense feelings and drank them whenever I felt low the rest of my life. It was as if those last two years of nightmares, grief, anxiety, depression, and suicidal tendencies I felt pretty much all the time were lifted and exorcized like I had been possessed by a demon and I was now free. It would take me years to be whole again, but the momentum was finally shifting; after this day I not once had suicidal thoughts or wet the bed ever again, and I was moving in the right direction to the light away from the darkness.
This is an interesting essay. I don’t think my deeply religious Mom ever really looked at me the same when I declared at 18 that I’d always rejected Catholicism and Christianity, and, actually, any “faith” in a higher being since I was about 7; I placated her for years after my Dad died and attended church with her though I was indifferent to the faith—I didn’t want to add to her pain.
Of course Mom still loved me, but at an arm’s length pretty much until the day Alzheimer’s stole her conscious being. She didn’t reject me as her son, but the fact I didn’t follow the faith of my Dad and her was never reconciled in her mind. During the early stages of Alzheimer’s she was incredibly mean to me, partly I think because in her altered state she expressed honest feelings she stifled for decades. I was lucky to have a mother who wasn’t that fanatically religious to “cast me out,” nor I so atheistically rigid to distance myself. Mom knew better from her own family history. I was sad she and I were never very close. I was a handful, of course, so it’s not like it was one-sided—I am indeed an arrogant and extremely difficult person lacking empathy and restraint. Still.
Religion can be—not always of course!—a powerfully myopic addiction in the faithful and can manifest itself with horribly irrational and illogical rabbit holes into which the faithful dive. My French grandfather was deeply Catholic and “cast out” my Aunt Marie after she came home in the early morning from a date when she was in her 20s, and Mom never saw her again. EVER. Only my brother Mike ever met Marie and her family. Tragic. Ironically, my grandfather’s brother, Marc Bernard, was one of the most famous atheists and anti-Catholic writers in French literature and journalism. I’ve no idea what grandfather thought of that fact as he died before I was born. The fact he never spoke to his daughter again was, to me, a fatal flaw in the man’s character that my Mom didn’t possess, luckily. But his powerful influence on her saddened me as we could hardly talk honestly to each other without her irrationality leading her to anger and hysterics when I presented facts SHE KNEW were correct.
I don’t slag people of faith. I’m just saying sometimes extreme faith can lead people down irrational paths in the face of reason, logic, and factual evidence. Believe your hearts out, but don’t lose touch with reality and reason. My difficult relationship with my Mom began and ended with my atheism. And I loved my mother dearly. She loved me, but I knew I could never be “good” in her eyes. And perhaps I wasn’t a very good person. Who knows what that even means? C’est la vie. I’m at peace.
In 1980 Disco was declared dead by mulleted white dorks. Along came Prince, who said, OK, right, this is Rock and Roll. He could play guitar like Hendrix and Clapton, bass like Bootsy, and keyboards like Emerson and Elton, plus he was an unapologetically black and funky front man like James Brown and Sly Stone. He was a one-man band (the other players are window dressing in this video–he played every instrument on the record) and the poet laureate of the sensual and sleazy. He made Minneapolis the epicenter of cool in Purple Rain. His opening salvo to superstardom was this 1980 masterpiece that encapsulated everything that made him a legend. Disco? Fuck Disco. This was Rock you could dance to. It took 3 years, two more albums, and MTV exposure for the general public to catch on, but in 80-81 he was already a brilliant Rock and Roll artist. Exhibit A is below. Dudes, there was nothing like this back then. Uptown. Dig it. Savor it.
I have no idea who is Ohio State Senator George Lang. I don’t live in his district or state. I wouldn’t vote for this lunatic if I had a gun to my head. But he actually said this today at a rally featuring Hillbilly Elegy Trump VP Dude JD Vance. Just listen to this lunacy.
A week ago the entire right wing howled about political violence by “loonie lefties” when a crazy kid armed with an AR-15 rifle shot at Trump, and yet to date the FBI has not been able to provide a shred of evidence that this kid held any radicalized political views from either the right or left. The right wing oh so wanted the kid to be Lee Harvey Che Mao Pol Pot Antifa McStalin. Turns out he was just a creepy loner with easy access to a dangerous assault rifle. Thank goodness he was, like Don Knots, the shakiest gun in the west.
But this nutty putz, George Lang, stood up at a public forum, a rally featuring Trump’s running mate JD Vance, and made this bold declaration. Just watch.
This is an elected official in the State of Ohio babbling this insanity.
You decide which side is hellbent on political violence. Just remember January 20, 2021, but with guns next time. A civil war led by Schmitty and his Bikers for Trump, whoever the hell that is, and a whole lot more violent and deluded morons like this creep. What shall we call it, the Douchebag Rebellion?
Kamala Harris for President. I would have voted for Joe Biden. I have never voted Republican for any public office since I was eligible to vote in 1981. In 1980 I worked on the Birch Bayh campaign for US Senator for Indiana, but he lost to Dan Quayle. Undaunted by that depressing loss, I’ve stuck to my Party since then. I voted for Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, Clinton, Biden. And now Harris. Win or lose, I stand by the Democratic Party.
The recent Republican National Convention revealed that the Republican Party as we’ve known it for so many years is totally kaput, set ablaze in 2016 and finally burned to the ground in 2024. It no longer exists. In its ashes its followers have become a cult of personality for Donald Trump, some fanatically, even religiously so. Many claim he’s been anointed by god. Which god, I do not know, since there are so many versions of this invisible, non-existent being in the USA, especially of the Christian variety. Take your pick.
I present to everyone the Trumplican Party.
Trumplicans claim to be iconoclastic “populists,” tearing down the old order to “save America from the tyranny of loonie left,” you know, their straw men of abortion-loving, trans-hugging, open-border-allowing, anti-capitalist, BLM/CRT, communist/socialist, America-hating enemies who also happen to be their fellow citizens who have the audacity to disagree with their insane and myopic fanaticism, the lowly vermin who must be defeated and eradicated. My, my, we’ve heard that before, right?
What they sounded like during their convention is that they are, in fact, fanatics for authoritarian rule based on a fairly creepy white theocratic ideology, where cruelty, hatred, and spite seem to be the greatest motivating factors. If you’re not one of them, the USA is not for you. Compromise is for losers, plurality is for traitors.
Every thoughtful, enlightened, and rational American should read this brilliant New Yorker piece on the Project 2025 insanity, how it came into being, who is behind it, how it was funded, and what this insane manifesto created by right-wing zealots and Christian fanatics wishes to unload upon our country the day Trump is sworn in on January 20, 2025. It’s the closest thing to fascism a political ideology has ever expressed in the USA, at least one that has an actual chance of being implemented.
Trump is as pliable as a jellyfish, a masterful con man, so he’s playing along because his immense ego loves the god-like, king-like adulation of these whacked-out dingbats and religious fanatics. He’s never given a shit about policies or governing. He barely grasps with any depth most intellectual disciplines and is basically an overgrown child. He just wants to be king.
So let’s dispense with calling this the Republican Party any more. It’s officially the Trumplican Party. It’s vicious, ruthless, stupid, and destructive to its very core. His fanatical followers can now use the assassination attempt on Trump as justification for whatever political violence they unleash from now on, even if the kid who shot at Trump wasn’t particularly radicalized for either side as has been revealed. No bother: To them every liberal in America wished this to happen, so they’re all guilty of pulling that trigger. Trump’s assassination attempt in Butler, PA is a combination of Kristallnacht and Fort Sumter for the Trumplican Party.
Welcome to the new political era in America. There is no turning back now. We’re truly divided into irreversible factions and it’s not going to end well.
What I’ve witnessed the last couple days after the assassination attempt on Trump is a torrent of “partisan differences are destroying the country” and very few, if at all, discussions about the proliferation of dangerous military-grade weapons in the hands of lunatics and how destructive this has been to Americans. The FBI hasn’t uncovered any evidence that the shooter was particularly radicalized politically, if at all, in fact they haven’t been able to determine just which side he favored.
What we do know is a creepy kid somehow got past a massive security perimeter and shot at a former and maybe future President of the USA. Even Trump, with immense security surrounding him, was vulnerable to a lunatic with a gun. Of course, many Americans who’ve been victims of mass shootings already knew this, but weren’t protected by a legion of armed cops and snipers on rooftops. Need I list all these horrible incidents just in the last decade? But all we see are the usual blatherings, political bickering and finger-pointing, trying to assign blame to the other side or “the press,” without any factual basis, instead just flinging unfounded accusations and wild conspiracy theories.
Firstly, let me state this: I love free speech. People have the right to express themselves openly and with great gusto, regardless if I agree with what they’re expressing or not. Truths, lies, tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories, insults, vulgarities, wild accusations, whatever. Free speech is beautiful. You don’t like it, don’t read or listen to it, but you damn sure better not try to suppress it with laws. Of course there are the yelling “fire” in a theater exceptions, or physical or terroristic threats; obviously there are limits already laid down by law. But free speech itself at its essence? Too many outstanding Americans have sworn to defend our Constitution and died or were severely wounded in that defense. Honor them and our Constitution. Protect free speech at all costs. I think people openly expressing their political differences, and loudly so, even acrimoniously, obnoxiously– maybe especially this–and no matter how repugnant to others, is a sign of a healthy democracy.
Secondly, I’m not advocating gun control or banning guns. It’s a little too late for that, America. I’m just saying, we live by the sword, we die by it too. Even our highest citizens, like our Presidents, serving and former, are vulnerable to our country’s appalling gun violence. What hope do common people have?
I also live in Spain. Know how many mass shootings there have been? Just guess. The answer is 4, with 9 fatalities and 9 wounded, since 2000, the highest number of victims killed is 4, in Olot in 2010 amid a financial dispute, while one of these in 2015 was by a psychotic kid under 14 with a crossbow at his school. In the USA since 2000, 151 mass shootings, with 1153 dead, 1639 wounded (the worst: 58 dead, 546 wounded in Las Vegas in 2017). That’s just mass shootings of 4 or more victims, killed or wounded. More than 300,000 were killed by non-suicide gun violence altogether. That doesn’t sound like a healthy, or particularly free, country to me. I love America. I lament the violence by guns.
I live in two cities: In Valencia, guess how many gun murders there have been the last decade? In Philly, 3,339 souls have been murdered by guns to be exact in the last decade, in a city with a population of 1.57 million,, compared to about 10,000 in the entire EU (447 million people) in the same period, and pay mind to the fact many of these happened in EU countries in the former Yugoslavia like Albania and Montenegro, with poor enforcement and high crime rates. Spain, France, Germany, UK, Scandinavia…not so many. From 2015-2023, 144,223 Americans were the killed by gun violence, which excludes suicides. That’s out of 330+ million Americans. So in Philly from 2015-2024, 2.3% of all gun murders in the USA happened here. CRAZY.
Are Europeans less free without guns, America? Ask them. Ask my friends in Valencia if they have to worry about getting shot at night while walking its streets. I do in Philly, every goddamn night. Or if I’m at a mall, church, school, public square, music festival, political rally, wherever, anywhere in America, red state, blue state, city, rural areas, it happens in all these places. I can show you the stats.
It’s like a creepy Shirley Jackson story, the “randomly get shot by a creep with an assault rifle” lottery. Former President Trump and three bystanders at his rally in Butler, PA, were the latest victims. I personally admire Trump for standing up and pumping his fist amid the hail of bullets he just survived. I ask him, if elected, what will you do about this rampant gun violence you too faced, Mr. President?
This is the tragic stories of “Big Mike” Scheck and Jeff Ramsey and how a lovely middle class neighborhood was damaged forever by their untimely deaths.
1048 22nd Street in 2007
I was born in Rock Island, Illinois and lived there for the first twelve years of my life. My family owned a house on 22nd Street on the corner of 12th Avenue, a massive Victorian manor capable of housing my large family, which was comprised of six girls, three boys, and my parents, plus an endless gaggle of family pets and visiting relatives and friends. It was a happy household, nestled in a peaceful and quaint middle class neighborhood, until two tragic events happened in the span of a year that forever destroyed the peace, happiness, and tranquility of two fine neighborhood families. One of those families was mine. The other family was that of my best friend, Jon Ramsey.
For many years I buried the horrible memories from 1972-73 deep inside my mind and only revisited them in nightmares. My family moved away from Rock Island when I was 12, so it was much easier to escape from the bad memories simply because everything from that era was far, far away from me; I didn’t have any daily reminders of my once ideal childhood that had been shattered by death and tragedy. As I grew older the memories slipped into oblivion and eventually disappeared for long stretches of time.
But I could never escape the nightmares.
Mike & Tess Scheck, 1949
The story begins when my father, Michael Leo “Big Mike” Scheck, a Chicago native and World War II veteran, moved to the Rock Island area—known as the “Quad Cities” because Rock Island and Moline, Illinois, and Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa were all located in what is essentially one metropolitan area—in 1947 to attend St Ambrose College in Davenport. He and his younger brother, Ed, were outstanding football players at St. Ambrose under legendary coach Larry “Moon” Mullins. Uncle Ed was so good he was inducted into the St. Ambrose Athletic Hall of Fame in 1984. While attending St. Ambrose my father met my mother, Therese Marie “Tess” Bernat, a French-American beauty and Indiana native whose French-born father, Jean, taught French and Spanish at the school around the time my father was an undergraduate there. My parents married in 1949 and eventually settled in Rock Island, where my father was a teacher and counselor for the Rock Island School Corporation for many years. My parents bought the house at 1048 22nd Street about three years before I, their last child, was born in 1963.
For the first nine years of my life our neighborhood in Rock Island was an ideal place for a family to live. The Hauberg family, wealthy scions of the local timber industry, donated their large estate to the city seven years before I was born, and their beautiful, wooded estate became the Hauberg Park and Civic Center. This lovely park and surrounding woods were located across the street from our home. For years it was the best place for a kid to play, from sledding in the winter on its many hills, to building hidden tree forts or playing Army with friends in its woods, to playing at the park run by the excellent staff of the Rock Island Parks and Recreation Department, to playing T-shirt League baseball (a sort of pre-Little League organization) on its many ball fields.
In about 1971 my father started acting strangely. At first he had memory lapses and strange blackouts that grew progressively worse until he’d forget long stretches of time. When he’d come to from these memory “fits” he had no idea how he got to where he was. Then he started having bizarre personality changes where he exhibited behavior that was not only unusual, but also completely off character for him. Then he began having violent anxiety attacks that would wrack his entire body with trembles and sometimes even mild to severe seizures.
1961 Rock Island Argus article about Mike Scheck
Dad had been born into abject poverty, grew up in the rough-and-tumble, South Side Chicago ghetto during the Great Depression, and had survived Word War II, so he was an amazingly tough and resilient guy, and thus he laughed off these odd personality changes as male menopause. But when they started to affect his work, his concerned peers and family begged him so seek medical help, which he eventually did. Some of his more malicious peers started whispering behind his back that he was crazy, which was absurd, as Mike Scheck had been known his entire life as the most sane, logical, rational, sober, stable, dependable, and decent man most people had ever met. These vicious rumors spread like wildfire and I was taunted more than once by kids for having a “psycho” dad.
When Dad finally sought medical help, to say the medical professionals he reached out to failed him would be an understatement. Gross malpractice would be far too kind a description of the horrible treatment and care he received the first year after his strange symptoms arose. First they said he had a thyroid problem. When that proved untrue, they said he was insane and had him placed in a psychiatric ward for evaluation. The shrinks who saw him declared him completely sane and back he went to the internists for even more bungling and incompetent treatment by them. They poked, prodded, and examined him relentlessly, and then, finding nothing that verified their initial diagnoses, declared his troubles were psychosomatic and all in his head.
Finally, Dad was sent to be evaluated at the Veterans hospital in Iowa City, Iowa, where the excellent neurosurgeons from the University of Iowa realized almost immediately that dad had the classic symptoms of a brain tumor called glioblastoma. A brain scan confirmed this: inside dad’s brain was a gigantic tumor the size of a grapefruit. It was only due to dad’s immense strength, resilience, and toughness that he had survived so long. The tumor was spreading rapidly and had already begun to invade his spinal column. The doctors informed my mother that dad had less than a year to live. They were absolutely in awe of him that he’d survived this long.
For the next nine months Dad’s doctors tried mightily to help ease his suffering from this horrible disease, and of course Big Mike fought it with every fiber of his immense being, but in the end his cancer defeated him, and he died at about 4:00 am on October 15, 1973. I was 10 years old.
My life has never been the same since that awful last year of my dad’s life. Most of it
Mike Scheck’s grave stone at the Rock Island Arsenal National Cemetery
remains a bad dream for me, even some 30 years later. The horror of watching my big, strong father slowly waste away and lose his mind was often too much to bear, and the worst part was knowing he was never going to get better, no matter how hard I prayed, and I prayed every day and night for nine months. I have never prayed for anything since.
I actually felt immense relief when he died, because I knew death had finally eased the massive pain from which Dad was suffering, not only from his illness, but also from knowing he was not going to be there any more for his beloved wife and their nine children, three grandchildren, and all their progeny who would be born after his death. For many years afterward I blocked all memories of my father, because every time I thought about him I’d fall into a deep depression that nearly paralyzed me for days.
But this story gets even worse. Much worse.
My two best friends for most of my life in Rock Island were Jon Ramsey and Larry “Buzzie” Phillips, both of whom lived up the hill from me on 22nd Street near 13th Avenue. Buzzie was a funny and neurotic dreamer who loved to build things and then tear them down for fun. Jon was a tiny but tough and brilliant kid, probably my one intellectual and athletic rival at Lincoln Elementary School. The three of us had been friends since we were babies. I cannot recall many days in my life that didn’t include either Jon or Buzz, or both, in my daily living and adventures.
Jon Ramsey was the first friend I told on October 15, 1973 that my father died. I have absolutely no recollection of why I decided to go to school that day, but I did, and as I lumbered out my front door for the long walk to school, Jon was the first kid I encountered. Jon, Buzzie, and I walked to school together nearly every day since we were in kindergarten, so it wasn’t unusual to run into Jon in the morning.
“My dad died last night,” I told him immediately. Jon—as will be seen later in this essay—was the one kid I knew would understand what I was feeling at that moment. We both cried all the way to school that morning.
During the dark days after my father died, Jon’s mom, Wilma Ramsey, was an incredible presence around my house. That’s what people did in my neighborhood. While my family shuffled through and attended to our seemingly endless post-death duties for my father, Wilma took care of our house, answered our phone, and cooked for us. It was an extremely selfless and generous gesture from a wonderful and caring woman.
Jeff was a rambunctious and wild kid who often tried his mother’s patience. For a 12-year-old, he lived life a little too far on the edge, always running off to places he shouldn’t have been, and in the summer of 1972 he paid the price for his Tom Sawyer-like adventures into the dark unknown.
For my friends and me, Jeff’s murder was a nightmare of horrific dimensions. One day he was there and the next he was not, and the circumstances of his death were so brutally macabre that it was almost impossible to believe. Nowadays kids get plenty of exposure to murder and horror from movies and video games, but in 1972 the idea of being kidnapped, beaten, tortured, and murdered like Jeff was the stuff of campfire tales, not of reality.
Yet it happened to my best friend’s older brother, a kid I’d known since I was a baby; a kid I played Army with in the woods (Jeff liked to re-enact Vietnam battles where he and my older brother, John, and John’s best friend, Ted Clegg, always played the Vietcong); a kid who taught me to cast a fishing rod when I was four; a kid who was probably the most daring sledder and bike rider in the neighborhood; a kid who used to torment, tease, and beat up his little brother and me because we weren’t “tough” enough for his taste; a kid who used to turn his basement into the coolest haunted houses every Halloween; a kid who had coolest bike in the neighborhood—a spiffy Stingray upon which he spent all his money he earned from delivering the Quad City Times newspaper every day since he was nine.
Jeff was brilliant, creative, funny, and, yes, very wild. These days I am sure kids like Jeff are chocked full of Ritalin and probably aren’t allowed to leave the house, which probably would have been a good idea for Jeff in 1972. For all his crazy antics, Jeff didn’t possess a molecule of malice in his entire being, and moreover I had six sisters who adored him, because above all else the Ramsey boys were beautiful and charming and girls went crazy over them. No one would have wished this horrible fate upon Jeff. Back then life was fairly innocent and these terrible things just didn’t happen. But it did happen, and Jeff suffered the consequences.
When Jeff turned up missing the first week of June, my mother and father immediately went to the aid of the Ramsey family much in the same manner that Jeff’s mother would do for us a year later when my father died. I wouldn’t say my parents and Jon and Jeff’s parents—Wilma and Dale Ramsey—were close friends, but there was a mutual respect and admiration on both sides that had always been evident. Now in their most desperate time of need, Dale and Wilma needed all the friends they had to rally to their aid.
When I think of Wilma Ramsey I always remember going to Jon’s house after school and she’d make us sandwiches while he and I watched The Monkees on television—Jon and I were huge fans and owned all their records. She was a quiet, gentle, and kind woman, but Jeff drove her crazy because he was such a wild and adventurous rascal. Jon, on the other hand, was a great son, very smart and responsible for a nine-year-old boy, the obvious leader of my peer group, and in most ways the exact opposite of his manic brother. No parent deserved what happened to Jeff, and certainly not Wilma, who was great mother, and certainly no kid needs to see this horrible thing happen to his brother as Jon did. I doubt Jon and Wilma were ever the same.
When Jeff first disappeared no one was too shocked, because Jeff had a reputation for running off and not coming home until late, for which he was punished and grounded endlessly all the years I’d known him. But after a full night passed and he didn’t show up, everyone became worried. An endless line of police and FBI agents started interviewing all the kids and adults in the neighborhood. No one knew Jeff’s whereabouts, although everyone swore to have seen him on the day he disappeared, which wasn’t unusual because Jeff was a social being who hung out with everyone at one time or another. After a week it became apparent that Jeff was probably not coming back alive. By that time the front pages of both Quad Cities newspapers, and all the local news station broadcasts, were filled with little more than the plight of this missing kid from our neighborhood, this kid who had been our very dear friend and neighbor all our lives.
They found Jeff on Arsenal Island near the Sylvan Slough, buried beneath a pile of refuse. He had been brutally mutilated, tortured, and hanged by his captor. The Sylvan Slough was a popular fishing spot for kids in my neighborhood, a place where legendary-sized channel catfish could be caught if you knew where to look. A place we’d all frequented at one time or another for years. However, Jeff went alone that day he turned up missing, which for the rest of us was unthinkable. In his case it was a tragically unlucky thing for him to do.
The police and FBI never caught Jeff’s killer. For years my friends and I tried, in the spirit of Encyclopedia Brown and the Hardy Boys, to solve Jeff’s murder. One of my friends, Jimmy Hannan, knew more about Jeff’s case than other kids because his father was the Chief of Police for the Rock Island Arsenal US Army base. In fact, Chief Hannan was one of the police officers who found Jeff’s body, and his department was prominent in the subsequent murder investigation.
Rock Island was a river town located on the banks of the Mississippi and had plenty of strange and crazy transients, losers, bums, and sickos capable of such a horrible crime. In the summer of 1973 Jimmy, my other friend Ralph Haymon, and I tried to find Jeff’s killer. It became our obsession. Jon Ramsey was our best friend, and finding his big brother’s killer became our Holy Grail quest. Sadly, we had few clues to go on other than what Jimmy glommed from his Dad, and we—like the Rock Island Police Department, The Rock Island Arsenal Police, and the FBI—never solved the crime.
My family moved away from Rock Island on May 15, 1975, and I have only been back five times since then. Eventually as I moved on with my life the bad memories faded. As the years went by I lost touch with all my friends from 22nd Street and Lincoln Elementary School. However, the nightmares would often return with an alarming frequency, forever reminding me of the pain and anguish that robbed me of my childhood.
The years 1972 and 1973 were a nightmare if you lived on 22nd Street in Rock Island, Illinois. First little Jeff Ramsey was murdered in the most horrible of ways, and then a year later Big Mike Scheck was felled by cancer at 48, leaving behind a wife and nine children and a town full of kids who missed his presence at school.
22nd Street entrance to the Hauberg Estate, 2007
The last time I visited Rock Island was in 1999, when I brought my then girlfriend there to attend a family reunion in Bettendorf, where I still had relatives from both the Scheck and Bernat clans. I took her to see Hauberg Park and the old Scheck House at 1048 22nd Street, then showed her where all my friends and I, including Jeff Ramsey, had carved our names on the giant H-Block Monolith that marked the entrance to Hauberg Park. I showed her all the cool hills where my friends and I went sledding. I showed her the ice-skating rink and ball fields where my friends and I used to play. I showed her my father’s grave at the Rock Island Arsenal’s Veteran’s Cemetery. I told her the tragic tales of Jeff Ramsey and my father. And then I finally closed that chapter in my life once and for all.
Until today; I guess I’ll never fully escape my nightmare on 22nd Street.