{"id":2147,"date":"2023-03-06T18:33:11","date_gmt":"2023-03-07T00:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/?p=2147"},"modified":"2023-03-06T18:33:11","modified_gmt":"2023-03-07T00:33:11","slug":"off-to-the-races","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/?p=2147","title":{"rendered":"Off To The Races!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Growing up Vail meant fending for ourselves when it came to recreation.\u00a0 As Marty has shared, often the fending for fun could edge toward activities parents today would find horrifying.\u00a0 Hell, for all I know, our parents were horrified too.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t have a pool, as has been told, and our efforts to cool off with water in the hot Iowa summers ran the gamut from finding a swimming hole in the Boyer River, to hiking out to Tracy North\u2019s pond, or hitchhiking 8 miles to Denison.\u00a0 I, for one, knew Dr. Flood left his small primary care office in Vail shortly after noon, for his much more profitable practice in Denison, so being at the edge of town around that time was an easy ride.\u00a0 Thumb out, and trunks rolled up in my towel, was a sure bet ride with Dr. Flood.\u00a0 He also was a car nut, so it also meant copping a ride in a pretty new Camaro or Mustang.\u00a0 Usually, a Camaro\u2026Johnson\u2019s Ford must not have like the care.\u00a0 He\u2019d always ask, \u201cdoes your mom know you\u2019re hitchhiking?\u201d\u2026\u201dyou bet Doc\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

We flirted with danger routinely, the Boyer was also the spot where all the town sewage for miles flowed in.\u00a0 Until the sewage treatment lagoons went in during the 1970s, raw sewage flowed into the Boyer.\u00a0 Vail\u2019s flowed in about a mile west of town, we knew that from ice skating the same river during the winter.\u00a0 I guess we figured the cholera risk from Westside, 5 miles to the east, was no big thing.\u00a0 That river was filled with crap, both literally and figuratively.\u00a0 Hell, the agricultural runoff alone was likely enough to cause skin to peel!\u00a0 Tracy\u2019s pond, as Marty has mentioned, had plenty of cattle dung in it\u2019s shallows, as well as enough leeches to drain a small kid\u2019s blood.\u00a0 So yeah, we roamed the area looking for anything to break the monotony.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll recall Marty mentioning we\u2019d trespass across a few places on the way to Tracy\u2019s Pond.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think anyone of us ever considered it trespassing, but perhaps some of the owners did.\u00a0 We owned Vail, and the older generation was keenly aware that their actual control was shaky.\u00a0 On the way to the pond, there was a mostly abandoned farmstead called the Doogan Forty.\u00a0 There were the government grain storage bins just inside the property, then a long low machine shed stacked full of old lumber, and finally an abandoned farmhouse.\u00a0 The machine shed filled with lumber was our own personal hobby shop.\u00a0 I think Tracy North, who owned damn near every abandoned place in town, also owned the machine shed of lumber.\u00a0 As he\u2019d demolish some of the abandoned buildings, he\u2019s salvage usable lumber and store it in the machine shed.<\/p>\n

The lumber, old full dimension planks, became the chassis for our go-carts.\u00a0 Not motorized, we let gravity and the same Presbyterian Church hill take care of the speed.\u00a0 There was a blacksmith in town, I can\u2019t remember his name, but his shop was out behind this house a block north of our house and the Ryan\u2019s.\u00a0 He\u2019d help us craft axles from scrap pieces of iron bar.\u00a0 The wheels would usually come from the dump, where we\u2019d salvage from discarded wagon wheels, rear wheels from kid\u2019s trikes, and my best score ever, wheels from a hand truck!\u00a0 They were a larger diameter, put them on back, and had hubs with ball bearings.\u00a0 Because they were larger, I put them on back and it gave my cart a jacked-up look!<\/p>\n

So picture this.\u00a0 We were not sneaking around scavenging for our lumber.\u00a0 These planks we about 1\u201d x 12\u201d siding planks and ran 10 foot long or so.\u00a0 Doogan\u2019s-Forty was on the southwest edge of town, and small scrums of us kids would trek on over, pick out our desired piece of lumber, and then carry these for blocks across town to our backyards where we would construct our racing machines.\u00a0 As if that wasn\u2019t blatant enough, we\u2019d then buy our necessary nails and bolts from the local hardware, have our axles made (usually for penny\u2019s or free) by the blacksmith, and even get some design suggestions from an adult or two who\u2019d stop to check out our projects.\u00a0 This was soap-box derby racing season, Vail Style, fueled by boredom, stolen lumber, and trespassing!\u00a0 To top it off, the local town maintenance worker would install the signage at the intersections along Church Street used during sledding season, STOP CHILDREN SLEDDING!!!\u00a0 I kid you not, our racing season would go for a few weeks until we busted all our go-carts up or just moved on to a new larceny fueled activity, and the adults would actually come out and cheer us on!\u00a0 Growing up Vail had some flexible rules!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Growing up Vail meant fending for ourselves when it came to recreation.\u00a0 As Marty has shared, often the fending for fun could edge toward activities parents today would find horrifying.\u00a0 Hell, for all I know, our parents were horrified too.\u00a0 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[422,1054,1053,1033,423],"class_list":["post-2147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boyer-river","tag-doogan-forty","tag-dr-james-leo-flood","tag-tracys-pond","tag-vail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2148,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2147\/revisions\/2148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}