There’s something happening here

3/6/2024

I’m starting to wonder if guns aren’t more prevalent nowadays in the city where I’ve lived all of my life than I imagined they were in places like Dodge City, Abilene and Deadwood.

The centerpiece of my daily routine since I retired in 2020 is a long walk with my dog first thing in the morning. Besides the exercise, it’s a sort of time travel back through my lifetime. We zig all over Waveland Golf Course and zag through Greenwood Park, two primary lifelong venues, and all points in between. I guess I figured the setting for my life is a timeless one, like the set of a long-running TV series or comic strip, impervious to change.

But it’s not.

• • •

Polar Vortex 2024 called a temporary halt to that routine. On one of those bitterly cold, forbidding days in mid-January I was skimming the local newspaper when I’d rather have been out and about. A small article caught my eye about a kid getting sentenced to 10 years in prison. He and another gunslinger, who’d previously been sentenced to 20 years, were convicted for shooting up an after-prom party in the spring of 2022. The incident drew my attention at the time because it happened on Foster Drive in the heart of Des Moines’ tony South of Grand district. After Roosevelt’s prom. The 50th reunion of my Roosevelt class was just a few months away. We partied South of Grand in our day, too, but nobody was packing then. Any encounters with police were about bootlegging, illegal possession of alcohol. Nobody graduated from high school into prison.

• • •

The closure of the shootout on Foster Drive reopened a cold case filed in the back of my mind.

In the wee hours of a midsummer morning in 2016, police were called to 45th and Kingman Boulevard where they found a man lying in the street. He was shot to death while riding his bicycle. A footnote to that homicide emerged in its aftermath when it was reported that, a few hours prior, another man had been the victim of a violent assault a couple blocks away at the corner of Kingman and Polk Boulevard, an intersection where I routinely met up with pals on the way to school when we were in junior high. The incidents were unrelated except for their close proximity in both space and time.

I grew up in a house at 44th and Kingman. When we were kids, the worst thing I remember happening was the day one of our pack was hit by a car after school and seriously hurt. He, too, was riding his bike and ended up sitting out the rest of third grade. 

I wrote a book some years prior to the still unsolved 2016 slaying about growing up in that idyllic neighborhood. The opening line reads, “Kingman Boulevard was no mean street.”

• • •

Housebound by the weather and vaguely troubled after seeing that story in the paper, I took to the treadmill, earplugged into a shuffled playlist. “This Must Be the Place” by the Talking Heads, a “Naive Melody” about home sweet home; “My City of Ruins” by Bruce Springsteen (“There’s a blood red circle on the cold dark ground and the rain is falling down…”). Those tunes were just the soundtrack for the dissonance I was feeling.

I stopped walking in place and started sniffing around. Besides the killing on Kingman, there’s another cold case, another homicide just a few blocks away. A couple of months earlier, someone else was shot dead at 40th Place and Crocker, right behind the Roosevelt Shopping Center where, when we were teens, the All Center Bums (Roosevelt rascals instead of Roughriders) raised harmless hell. Those were the days of juvenile delinquency. These are the days of “tried as adults.”

Also in the local news in January was an item about foreclosure proceedings against the owner of a short-lived nightclub on Ingersoll. He put a lot of money into a spot that was the site of multiple shootings in the parking lot, as opposed to the joint up the street that my brother opened on a shoestring in the early 1980s. In the quarter century that our family owned and operated it, there were zero gunshot casualties.

• • •

Besides growing up on Kingman Boulevard, we also grew up on TV westerns like “The Rifleman” and “Gunsmoke.” (See the 1950s painting on the next page, “Young Sammy Sixgun” by John Falter, an artist who did lots of Saturday Evening Post covers during that era. That was us.) “Have Gun Will Travel” was about a hit man on horseback who passed out business cards with the title of the show printed on them. I remember feeling glad I wasn’t actually living in the Wild West where your future, we were led to believe, was only as bright as you were quick on the draw. The truth of that era in that region, though, was that there was serious gun control in force. The shootout at the OK Corral was all about some renegades who refused to disarm when they rode into Tombstone, per the local ordinance. I’m starting to wonder if guns aren’t more prevalent nowadays in the city where I’ve lived all of my life than I imagined they were in places like Dodge City, Abilene and Deadwood in the late 19th century. The reality was that all those frontier towns had stricter weapons regs on the books than Des Moines does now.

• • •

I have two sisters. One of them still lives with her family in the house on Kingman that was the headquarters of our childhoods. The other lived with hers on Foster Drive for years before moving when she and her husband became empty nesters.

Are those old stomping grounds now minefields? Is there something rotten in Des Moines? No, the city is as All-American as ever, maybe even more so. That hints at the problem. 

An NBC poll last fall revealed the highest level of gun ownership in the poll’s history, which dates to 1999. We’re heavily armed and dangerous to one another. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em” became a popular phrase during WWII. That’s what officers told the troops during battlefield intermissions. Smoking declined dramatically over the years since the dangers it poses were added to the product labels. Now it’s more like “shoot ’em if you got ’em” with regard to guns which, combined with the nation’s bad mood, are turning our streets into war zones. The old-fashioned bird flip is increasingly giving way to more aggressive and violent retaliations against poor merging technique. A report issued last year by the nonprofit group Everytown for Gun Safety found that road rage injuries and deaths have increased every year since 2018. All the more reason to walk like we do daily, weather permitting. At Waveland, shots are still fired with six-irons, not six-guns. In Greenwood Park, when the pond ice is thick, it’s hockey slapshots that ring out. The rest of the year, it’s birdsong.

• • •

“At 4:33 a.m., 24 July 2016, Des Moines Police Department patrol officers responded to the area of 45th Street and Kingman Boulevard to investigate a report of gunshots being fired. Upon officer’s (sic) arrival, they found a male victim deceased at the scene.”

Last fall, the Waveland Park Neighborhood Association posted a picture on its Facebook page looking south on 45th Street. It’s a snapshot of the maple trees that form a spectacular canopy over the block between Kingman and Chamberlain that ends at the edge of Roosevelt’s campus.

It’s a pretty neighborhood, still one of Des Moines’ best. But is our best as safe as it used to be? 

Roosevelt parents collaborate every year to host an all-night party at the school after the commencement ceremony. It’s supposed to prevent drunk driving tragedies from marring a celebratory occasion, a major American rite of passage. In that spirit, maybe the time has come for prom tuxes to include Kevlar cummerbunds and vests.

• • •

The scale of these seemingly isolated local incidents pales when you consider the epidemic of mass shootings that’s ongoing in the country at large, like a common cold versus COVID. But I came of age in an era when the killings that made headlines happened one at a time and were called assassinations. And they’re more than just local, they’re uncomfortably close to home.

Buffalo Springfield recorded a hit song in those turbulent 1960s called “For What It’s Worth.” Popularized as an anti-war anthem, it was originally inspired by young people rioting in protest against curfews in Los Angeles. It, too, came up on my treadmill playlist that cold morning in January, with renewed resonance. 

“There’s something happening here. But what it is ain’t exactly clear. 

There’s a man with a gun over there…” ♦