Where Quilt Ideas Come From

I was born a dork. When I was growing up in Ottumwa, Iowa, Allen Chickering down the block didn't only call me a dork, he added a last name.

“Hey, Dork McFork! What's new?”

Sometimes he'd come out of his house, look up the block, see me, and call out, “Doooo-rk McFoooooo-rk!” In the case of Allen Chickering, it was clearly an it-takes-one-to-know-one situation. I'm sure I earned the nickname as a result of the Clubhouse Incident.

We neighborhood kids were building a clubhouse in the Chickering's back yard. The Crick was only a block away, and occasionally people would dump stuff there. The Crick is actually a creek, but for some Southeast Iowa twangy reason, we had a different pronunciation of the word.

We'd hear the grown-ups talking about how disgusting it was that some people would dump things in The Crick, but we never really understood their beef. We thought most of what we found to be quite useful. It took us some time, but we were able to retrieve a supply of discarded boards, with nails already in them, and stacked them behind the bushes (that's booshes to the natives) near the alley at the back of the Chickering property. We had nail removal sessions, when we would carefully whack and pull the nails out the way they went in, and save them in a Velveeta® box for our own future use.

We acquired some roofing shingles, but I doubt those came from The Crick. They were nice and new, and not a dumpable commodity in the 1960's. We probably just stole those from someone's garage. Most of us had parents who had been through The Depression, so discarding perfectly good things was unheard of. The Peg re-used “tin foil” many times over, and would wash out the baggies she used for the half-sandwich lunch she brought when she taught Home Ec at Charles D. Evans Junior High. Today's recycling efforts have nothing over The Barn and The Peg.

The clubhouse idea wasn't a front burner issue. We would fit it in between whiffle ball games in the street in front of the Chickering house; or, the massive, hours-long, multi-block Hide 'n Seek team events; or, our “spying”, which meant running around after dark, hiding in booshes, and creating a world of intrigue from looking into the windows of our neighbors, as they sat, unsuspecting, in their living rooms watching TV or reading. You have no idea the number of murdered bodies we surmised had been hidden under front porches or in The Crick, as part of either a JFK assasination conspiracy, or a KGB plot to determine the location of all the Fallout Shelters within the city limits.

We didn't have a club anyway. We just wanted a clubhouse because some of the kids our ages on TV had them. We'd organized a few neighborhood General Stores whenever someone got a new refrigerator and we had the big box. We sold candy to each other from inside, after we laid it down longwise and cut a service window into one “wall” of it. That was fun, but cardboard couldn't withstand the wear and tear of the Quincy Avenue neighborhood kids. It got hot in there, too, which melted the Popsicles and the Hershey bars. A well-built clubhouse was the only way to go. Maybe we'd even air condition it, we dreamed.

This was during the years when Jimmy Carter was peanut farming in Georgia, and was perhaps gearing up for a run for the governor's office. I don't think Habitat for Humanity was even a twinkle in his eye. Our marathon clubhouse building sessions, and others like it all over Baby Boom America, no doubt prepared the country for contributing our rudimentary carpentry skills for the common good.

The final design of our clubhouse was impressive. It had two single-file rooms and a front porch, and would sit six kids comfortably. I say “sit” because we couldn't stand in it. There was at least one open, glassless window, possibly designed for potential use as a General Store. We built the whole thing ourselves, but the process was not without pitfalls.

I was up on top of the clubhouse roofing when I hollered out my need for more shingles, or boards, or nails, or whatever I needed. Everyone was occupied, so I jumped down from the roof to fetch what I needed.

EEEEEEE-YYOOOOOOOWW! The pain shot through me like a knife, which makes sense, because I landed on a nail, a long old rusty nail that had been overlooked during Phase One of the operation. It had been sticking out of a board, pointing up, until I covered it with my right white gym shoe, which had been converted to “street shoes” now that the school year was over. When I picked up my foot, the whole board was attached to the bottom of it, like a horrible farcical snowshoe of torment. All the other dorks were too shocked to know what to do, but someone finally yanked it out, and then everyone helped me limp home, as I wailed in pain and fear.

The Barn called the doctor, and we immediately went to the emergency room to have it checked out. They cleaned it up and bandaged it, but said we'd better keep an eye on it for awhile. The Barn must have been worried, because his sister Margarette had suffered a fate that lasted a lifetime when a bicycle ran over her toe. Within days the pain worsened, which necessitated a return visit to the doctor. Most of the bones in my right leg had become infected, which was what the doctor had hoped to avoid.

They admitted me to St. Joseph's Hospital, where I stayed for a week. They wrapped my right foot in endless gauze bandages, then covered it with two hot water bottles, and wrapped several towels around that to keep in the heat. They changed these bandages three or four times a day, which was a lengthy process. Because of the weight of this dressing, I couldn't move very much on my bed, but the pain in my left hip from the recent tetanus shot kept me still, too. The shots I got in my other hip each morning weren't fun, either, but didn't have the pain of that tetanus bomb.

After four or five days, the hot water bottles came off and I was allowed to explore the pediatric floor in a wheel chair. I hung out with another kid who was in for a broken leg, and we got yelled out by the nuns for having wheel chair races in the halls and leaving skid marks. Since I was Lutheran, I didn't understand the level of sin to which I had sunk, but my opponent was Catholic, and he advised me to do some concentrated praying over the matter. The fact that his dad was one of our doctors didn't seem to have earned him any indulgences. I had incorrectly assumed both his religious and genealogical heritages would have some pull when he talked me into the lark.

As far as Allen Chickering and the Dork McFork moniker, it was a traveling trophy. We returned it to Allen right after he got the headphones for his new stereo. Headphones were new to the home entertainment world in the 1960's, and we were all up in Allen's room trying them out. You could wear them while the music blared for everyone else in the room, or you could listen to music without bothering others. I'm sure Allen's mom had insisted on purchasing them the minute they came out. We were passing them around while the music blared, enjoying how far technology had come.

When it was Allen's turn, we turned off the sound in the room and let him sing loudly while air-guitaring and head banging, 1968-style, to Joe Cocker singing, “A Little Help From My Friends”. We pretended to be enthusiastically enjoying the music along with Allen, but Mark Weatherstone was secretly recording the spectacle on a hidden cassette recorder for our future entertainment. It was hilarious. Dork McFork, at the pinnacle of bufoonery. What was even dorkier was all of us little McFork wannabes replaying it for months, laughing uproariously. We were one big neighborhood of dorks, but not just any kind of dorks. We were dorks with a last name.

I haven't made a quilt to commemorate any of these events. There is no clubhouse quilt, no hospital quilt, no spying quilt. There is no Dork McFork quilt, or Allen Chickering quilt, or Crick quilt. It's only because I haven't made them, not because they aren't good ideas for quilts. These stories tell a personal history to my descendants who may never travel to Ottumwa, Iowa, but they also tell the story of what life was like at that point in history, in the Midwest, perhaps all over the country.

Stories such as these that can inspire quilts. Quilts themselves are stories, and I encourage you to think of your personal stories when you plan your designs. They are worth the telling, and the chance to be told and retold for many lifetimes.

Copyright © November 2005 Kari E.O. Burns