Alton, Illinois, was my home town for 12 years, my first venture our of Virginia after being born in Tampa, Florida and then relocated to Floyd County at age five when my mother moved back to her hometowb after the death of her husband and my father in 1949.
We lived in Floyd for four years before my mother remarried and we moved to Prince Edward County in Virginia, and lived there for five years, then returned to Floyd County to live on a farm a few miles from Willis. I had lived in three places in two states in the first 14 years of my life and had not been at any one of them long enough to consider them home.
In 1965, I graduated from high school and moved immediately to Roanoke to start college at then The Roanoke Center of The University of Virginia on Grandin Road while I worked as a reporter and photographer at The Roanoke Times. I moved to different apartments there three time in five years, looking for one that I felt could be home. None did.
In 1969, I took a reporting job at The Alton Evening Telegraph in the St. Louis metro area. The job paid $55 a week more than the Roanoke position. The Times had told me to leave because I had not fulfilled my agreement to obtain a degree and I could not do so at UVa because it required relocating to Charlottesville. They gave me a year to take a break and held a place for me at their main campus, I did not want to leave newspapers at that time and Alton also paid more.
Alton became my home. My first wife and I first lived in a circular apartment house called Lewis and Clark Tower in North St. Louis County but soon moved to Alton and bought a small row house near downtown. She got the house in our divorce and I moved a couple of times before settling into an 1815 townhouse attached to a historic sanitarium turned into apartments. The townhouse became the first home for new wife Amy and I for more than five years.
My mother, I discovered after I moved there, had visited Alton when she and her best friend went on a national tour after high school and visited various spots around the nation. They had stayed at the Mineral Springs Hotel in Alton, which featured mineral baths. It was closed when we moved there, but later reopened as an antique mall with a restaurant on the lower level and, later, as a theater for stage plays.
Alton is an historic river town located on the Mississippi just south of where the Missouri River joined it. It has the last lock and dam on the river, was the site of a Lincoln-Douglas debate, the birthplace of the convicted Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray, location of a Union Army prison that housed captured Confederate Soldiers and where Elijah Lovejoy, editor of an abolitionist newspaper, The Alton Observer, was killed by racists while he tried to save his paper’s warehouse while it burned.
A piece of Lovejoy’s press sat in the entry hall of the Telegraph newspaper, where I covered stories and took photos and wrote reviews of act appearing at The Mississippi River Festival at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.
Alton was also a river city in transition. Several factories had closed. Others were struggling. I was given a column by Telegraph editor Steve Cousley and I wrote about the hard times, the crime and drugs. Even so, Alton became home for Amy and I.
We met when I was asked to appear as the villain in a summer melodrama presented by Alton Little Theater. They would bring in “a professional actor” to anchor the cast and she was an actress who was the resident heroine on the Goldenrod Showboat, which presented melodramas on the St. Louis riverfront.
Cousley also appointed me the Weekend Editor of the Telegraph. I had to design, write articles and shoot photos of events like the shows at the Mississippi River Festival and other entertainment events. I also continued to write the column and responses drew a lot of mail and comments. I was a frequent critic of right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly, wife of anti-communist activist and lawyer Fred Schlafly. He wrote often with demands that I be fired.
As noted earlier. Alton was our home. Amy is a native of Belleville, Illinois but traveled often with her father and mother when they lived in various places while he worked on union contract jobs. She often talks labout how much they enjoyed New Orleans and we honeymooned there.
After 12 years, I was getting restless and when Rep.Paul Findley (R-IL) offered me a job as his press secretary, I accepted with a plan to work in Congress for a couple of years to learn, from the inside, on how our government really worked before returning to newspapers.
Two years became seven. Rep. Manual Lujan (R-NM) hired me away from Findley to serve first as his communications director, then administrative assistant and, finally, his special assistant on the House Technology Committee, which offered a salary hike and a lot of travel on committee work.
Then, The National Association of Realtors offered me to become Division Vice President for Political Programs. I supervised the largest Political Action Committee at the time and an independent expenditures program that spent millions to back incumbents or challenger to unseat them. But even with the big salary and extensive benefits, I also returned too journalism, when I could, to write and shoot photos for media.
I left the Realtors in 1992 and returned to media full time as a contract photojournalist for newspapers like The Washington Post, New York Times and other print and broadcast media. Amy worked on media events like a tribute to Eric Strasberg, mentor to Al Pacino and others, appeared in and directed stage plays and other projects. We both operated in and out of Washington. The National Capital Region was our home..
But 9/11 tempered our love of the area. I covered the terrorist attack at the Pentagon, then went overseas to Afghanistan and other locations, most them in war zones I came home to a Washington that seemed more like an armed camp than a home.
We had talked about retiring to New Mexico. We had good times on visits there while I worked for Rep. Lujan. But my mother’s health was failing and we felt a need to move to Floyd in 2004, buying a home five miles from the stoplight at Main and Oxford Street on town.
We knew my mother’s time with us might be short and I told Amy that, whenever we lost my mother, we would retire to New Mexico or anywhere else she might want. Mom died at age 89 in 2012. When I asked Amy what she wanted to do about a home.
“Nothing,” she said. This is home.
And it is.
I recently watched two documentaries on YouTube that presented an effort to help Alton, Illinois, my first real “home town” and our home in the 1970s. We visited he area last about 20 years ago and the videos below talk about a “small business revolution” in Alton that shows us what has changed since last visiting there.
The second video shows how much the community of Alton has come together in a time when so much of our nation is decisive and angry. If we were not happy at our home here today, we might have considered to return there.
(Videos courtesy of deluxe communications and YouTube)