Early Tragedy in my Beach Town
My childhood was spent in Long Beach, Indiana, on the south shore of Lake Michigan. In the summer months, we occupied our time at the baseball field in the morning and the beach in the afternoon.
Our home was on the beachfront. I had a brother and two sisters, and a half-sister through my father’s prior marriage. I am the oldest in my parents’ family. My older half-sister visited during the summers. The period I’m describing is from 1965 to 1973.
The cultural vibe was intense. Hippie counterculture. Moon landings and the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior. The failed assassination of Governor George Wallace of Alabama. The Cold War with Russia. The Space Race. Apollo 1, in which three astronauts burned up on the launch pad in January 1967. Yet, on July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped on the surface of the moon. A lot happened in the 1960s and early 1970s. Great music. Political movements, the first Earth Day. Multiple moon landings.
Long Beach was a great place to be at that time. An idyllic setting. It was a time and place where young children were free. Kids walked or rode bicycles around the township unsupervised.
Our next-door neighbors were a Catholic family from Chicago with six kids. The oldest, Kelly, was the only girl. Her younger brothers were Brendan, Justin, Stephen, Ned, and Danny (named after me). We counted the days for their annual summer arrival. I was the same age as Brenden. His sister was a couple of years older, and his brothers were each a year younger in consecutive order.
Mr. Powers was a former Secret Service agent who guarded President Eisenhower. After he left the service, he founded a security company in Chicago. Their house in Long Beach was a summer home. His wife was an artist, Sylvia.
The first thing she would do after settling in for the summer was to paint new art on their seawall. The beachfront homes in Long Beach often have concrete seawalls. These prevent winter storms from sweeping the homes into Lake Michigan. The Powers family has a particularly large seawall. Mrs. Powers (aka Sylvia) would create large, abstract paintings on their seawall. A new creation every summer. I loved to watch her work.
Can you imagine what it was like with 10 children aged 2 to 14? Chaos. We never went into each other’s homes by the front door. I would climb into the boys’ bedroom window each morning to get them moving for baseball. They would enter ours through the back door. Nobody knocked. Both sets of parents accepted this. When neighbor kids were sitting at the breakfast table, they got a plate.
Sometimes our adventures lead to accidents and injuries. One time, Ned, who was seven years old at the time, cut the back of his leg. I don’t recall how, but I knew he was going to need stitches. I’d had them to repair an injury over my right eye after bashing my head on the side of a shovel. I went to the hospital to get mine. This wasn’t what happened to Ned. Sylvia told Ned she would fix him up. After getting the wound cleaned, she laid him on the kitchen table and had me hold a bag of ice cubes on the back of his leg. She asked me to hold it there for a few minutes while she collected supplies for Ned’s repair.
She returned with a needle and thread and told Ned that after fixing him up, she would take us both to Ronnie’s (a local store) for ice cream. Ned was grim but compliant. She proceeded to sew the cut on Ned’s leg with her needle and thread. It took her a couple of minutes to get the job done. My mom took me to a hospital to get my stitches.
After she repaired Ned’s wound, she put a Band-Aid on it and drove to Ronnie’s for ice cream. No big deal for Sylvia. Her fearlessness and skill with a needle were impressive.
A few years later, we were all getting even more independent. That meant more injuries. Lake Michigan summers typically produce a couple of weeks of windy and cool weather. Big waves with lows in the low 50s and highs in the high 60s. Ten-foot waves, small craft warnings, and strong rip currents. We loved to play on the beach during these weeks. The waves were scary but cool.
One afternoon, during one of these windy spells, Sylvia came over to our house and asked if we’d seen Ned. He’d left the house in the morning for the beach but hadn’t returned. He was with another kid from the neighborhood. They were last seen a few houses east playing on a seawall. I knew the place well because I played there myself every day. Sylvia was concerned, which scared me.
The Coast Guard found Ned a week later. His body was floating a mile offshore and ten miles up the coast into Michigan. The entire week was horrific. The kid who was with him saw him taken out by a rip current. He ran home but was afraid to tell his parents because he wasn’t supposed to be on the beach that day. The waves were huge, and the current was strong. The next day, he told his parents when word got out that Ned was missing. That's when the search began.
It was so sad. Ned was a kind, rambunctious kid. We all loved him. His parents were heartbroken and sold their summer home on the beach. They never returned.
I loved my freedom as a child, but I knew several kids who drowned in Lake Michigan. I almost drowned a couple of times. One of those times I survived because Brendan was swimming with me. We were in 10 feet of water on a calm day. One of our dares was to swim out to the marker buoys. There were 200 to 300 feet from shore. It was a calm day, but I got tired coming back. I was in trouble. Brendan dove down, stood on the bottom, and held me up by my feet for 30 seconds till I regained my energy. We swam back to shore. If Brendan hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have made it. I would have joined Ned.
I think parents are too protective of children these days. Then, I remember Ned.
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