The Girls from Ames (34 page)

The girls at their twentieth Ames High School reunion in 2001

The news from Ames is not always so frivolous, of course. The girls also share reports of their parents’ illnesses or setbacks in their siblings’ lives or “news” they’ve happened upon on visits home. Several of the girls have taken their kids sledding on the hill by Ames Municipal Cemetery. While the kids sled, they’ve stood silently in the snow at Sheila’s grave site, and then walked around, spotting names they know—teachers, classmates, parents . . . people they never realized were gone. Sometimes, the girls get their news from Ames on slabs of marble.

 

 

I
n recent years, it has become easier to get news coverage from home in real time. All the girls have to do is type “Ames” into Yahoo! or Google News, and the latest media reports fill their computer screens. They’re then able to email interesting links to each other. It’s a continuous sharing of all things Ames.

National news emanating from Ames picks up every four years because of the presidential races. The Iowa caucuses began getting attention in the national press in 1972, but the caucuses didn’t become full-blown media events until after the girls left town in the 1980s.

From then on, each presidential cycle got crazier than the one before. The girls would phone home and they’d be lucky to get through. Often, their parents’ phones were busy because so many campaigns were calling, inviting them to meet the candidates at teas or luncheons or cornfield rallies. “I heard from four potential presidents yesterday,” Jenny’s mother told her one morning, wearily, “and three so far today, but it’s not even noon yet.”

On his first campaign swing through Ames in February 2007, a full eleven months before the caucuses, Barack Obama told a crowd of locals that he was having trouble being taken seriously. He lamented that the media was reporting on what he looked like in a swimsuit while on vacation in Hawaii, rather than his positions on the Iraq War. According to TV news coverage that night, the Ames crowd cheered Obama wildly, which led the Ames girls to wonder about both his Iraq policies and what he looked like in a swimsuit.

Often, when Ames hits the news, the girls can’t help but be reminded of each other, their families and, of course, their childhoods.

After September 11, 2001, when someone was mailing deadly anthrax to politicians and media outlets, early news reports said the anthrax was “the Ames strain.” Researchers at Iowa State had been studying anthrax since 1928, and microbiologists there had more than one hundred vials of anthrax. Scores of news reports suggested that someone in Ames, perhaps working in tandem with terrorists, was responsible for the anthrax attacks. The girls had to wonder: Could it be an old acquaintance? Some weird guy they knew in high school? Eventually, it was determined that the anthrax used in the mailings couldn’t have come from Iowa State. Wrong strain. False alarm.

For the girls, spread around the country, such news brought back memories of the mysteries from their childhoods, when they had classmates whose parents or grandparents had secret jobs at Ames Lab, making atom bombs.

In the mid-1990s, when some of the girls called home and asked for updates, they were told that Marilyn’s father was trying to stop construction of a youth sports complex in town. The complex’s soccer field was slated to be built adjacent to a site where, in the 1950s, radioactive thorium was deposited by the Ames Lab. Dr. McCormack helped organize a citizens’ group that had the soil tested for signs of radiation. The group contended that test results showed the field would be dangerous for children. The Iowa Department of Public Health argued that the field’s radiation levels were within acceptable standards, and children would be no less safe there than elsewhere in Ames.

Marilyn’s dad had given an impassioned speech at a public hearing. As a pediatrician, he explained that infants and growing children are highly susceptible to cellular damage from radiation. He talked about cancer risks. And then, as the city council looked on, he folded his arms together as if cradling an imaginary infant. “I’ve tried to make sure that the babies in this town were raised in good health,” he said, “and I didn’t do that to have them die on that soccer field.” People in attendance that night said Dr. McCormack had tears in his eyes.

When he realized that he was suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s, he passed on leadership of the protest movement to others. He helped convince thirty-six doctors to sign a statement against the sports complex, and they also raised questions about radiation issues elsewhere in Ames. There were reasons for concern: Relatively young alumni of Ames High were dying, often of cancer, at rates that seemed high. On some streets, cancer and Parkinson’s disease were visiting almost half the homes. No studies were done, so the incidences were dismissed as anecdotal. But the reports were troubling.

Even as Alzheimer’s began stealing his lucidity thought by thought, Dr. McCormack kept lobbying against building those sports fields in that location. He talked about how dust would be kicked up and kids would breathe it in. City councilwoman Pat Brown, a friend of Jane’s and Marilyn’s families, became a vocal opponent to the sports complex. One night by phone, she received a death threat warning her to support the complex “or you’ll be sorry.” She needed twenty-four-hour police protection for a while after that.

“Dr. McCormack was a respected man,” Brown now says, “but people didn’t listen to him.”

The sports complex ended up passing in city council and the soccer field was built. Thousands of children have played soccer on it each year since.

The news from Ames. So often, it left emotions swirling.

 

 

S
ometimes the news from Ames was about one of the girls themselves.

One day in February 2007, Marilyn drove down to Iowa from her home in Minnesota to have dinner with Jane’s parents—and to venture into the Ames Public Library. This specific library visit was a planned mission. Marilyn had finally decided to go into the microfilm room, to find the cabinet labeled “Ames Daily Tribune” and, for the first time in her life, to open the drawer that contained the film for September 1960.

Holding the box in her hands, she felt a kind of unsettling curiosity, and more than a bit of dread and sadness. What would she learn by looking at it?

She sat down, spooled the film into the microfilm reader, flipped on the switch and then turned the dial to the right. Front-page photos, movie listings and sports news from 1960 began speeding by her on the screen. She didn’t stop to read anything. She was looking for the front page from September 26. The film whirred by so fast that by the time she stopped it, September 29 was on the screen. She turned the dial in reverse . . . September 28, September 27 . . . and then there it was, September 26, with the front-page headline: “Accident Fatal to Ames Boy.”

It was the biggest news in Ames that day, bigger than two major stories that were bumped lower on the page. One of the bumped articles was a preview of the televised Nixon-Kennedy debate, to be held that night. Headlined “Much at Stake, Nixon-Kennedy Debate Tonight,” the article described the debate as “an electronic suggestion of the famous debates 102 years ago between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas.” The other big story was about President Eisenhower’s arrival by motorcade for a United Nations General Assembly meeting. More than 750,000 New Yorkers had crowded the streets to greet him. That day, Fidel Castro would give an infamous four-hour speech at the UN, lambasting U.S. policies.

And yet, those two historic stories were dwarfed on the front page of
The Ames Tribune
by the large photo of two smashed cars that had met at the crossroads of four cornfields. The death of Marilyn’s brother Billy had pushed everything else aside. Marilyn was here in the microfilm room because she had decided she wanted to know as much as she could about what happened that day.

Looking at that giant photo on the front page, she broke into tears, and that surprised her. She thought she was doing research, not digging into her psyche. She had never before cried for Billy, at least not that she could recall. She knew, of course, that Billy’s death had led to her dad’s vasectomy reversal, and to her birth, and that the accident was very well the most traumatic moment in the lives of her siblings and parents. But, as she would later tell the other girls, she had always been emotionally strong about it.

She surprised herself again, there in the library, when a memory came crashing into her head, a memory of a car accident back in Minnesota five years earlier. Her husband was driving the family car home from church on a Sunday morning. She was in the front passenger seat and their three kids were in back, along with two of her sister’s kids. A car made an illegal turn at a red light and smashed into them. The airbags went off, and their car was totaled, but miraculously, nobody was badly hurt. And right then, looking at that microfilmed image of the 1960 car wreck, it occurred to Marilyn that both her son and nephew had been around the age Billy was when he died. And looking at that awful 1960 photo in
The Ames Tribune,
she thought to herself: “Maybe it was Billy. Maybe Billy put his hand down and touched the five kids in our car, and somehow said, ‘No, not them.’ ”

Through her tears, she continued to study the microfilm version of the story about the accident. It spelled out details—that the two-car collision happened at 11:45 A.M. at the intersection of two gravel roads, that Marilyn’s mother and three other siblings were seriously hurt, that tall cornstalks may have obstructed the view. The story said Billy was seven years old, though he was actually still six. His birthday was a few weeks away.

The article also gave specifics about the fifteen-year-old boy who had plowed his speeding car into the McCormack’s station wagon, and about how he had violated his “school permit,” which allowed him to drive only on a direct route to school and back. The boy had been injured also and was hospitalized. His name was in the article: Elwood Koelder.

Seeing the name startled Marilyn. She’d never known the boy’s name, though she was aware that her parents had long ago forgiven him. “He was just a boy himself,” her mom would say. And now to finally have his name in front of her, well, Marilyn decided immediately that she wanted to find him.

She wiped away her tears, printed out a copy of that article and put the microfilm box back in the drawer. That night, over dinner with Jane’s parents, she recounted her visit to the library.

“His name is Elwood Koelder, and he’d be sixty-two years old now, if he’s still alive,” she told them. “I’d like to talk to him.”

“What will you say to him?” they asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. She wondered whether he felt remorse or thought about her brother each year on September 26. How had the accident affected his life?

“Maybe I’ll tell him it’s OK. If he’s been hurting about this all these years, he can go easier on himself. I got the chance to live in this world because of what happened that day, so maybe I’m the one who should tell him this.”

 

 

M
arilyn has a letter in her hands that she printed out on her computer back home and brought to North Carolina for the reunion. Several of the girls are on the back porch with her, and she’s explaining how the letter came to be written.

She tells them about discovering Elwood’s name on microfilm and then plugging it into Google. Within seconds, she had found a small-town newspaper story from 2005 about a truck driver named El Koelder, who lived in Milford, Iowa. The story was about how he and his friends spent sixteen years trying to harvest a pumpkin large enough to win top prize at the local county fair.

Marilyn couldn’t find a listing for Elwood in directory assistance, but she did find a number for a fellow pumpkin grower mentioned in the article. She called and talked to him. “I knew about Elwood from a long time ago and wonder what he’s up to now,” she said.

The man was chatty, telling her that Elwood worked as a truck driver, had a son who served in Iraq, and was separated from his wife. He gave her Elwood’s cell phone number, but then asked, “Now, who is this again?” Marilyn gave her name and then said, “It’s been a long time. I don’t even know if Elwood would remember me or my family. . . .”

“I felt a little underhanded,” Marilyn tells the girls, as they sit on the porch, “but I really wanted his number.”

“Did you call right away?” someone asks.

“No,” she says. “I figured I’d wait until the weekend, when he wasn’t driving his truck. I didn’t want to startle him and have him drive off the road.”

Actually, three months passed before she found the courage to make the call. Her heart pounded as Elwood answered, and she began by introducing herself. Her name was not familiar to him. She asked if he was driving and wanted to pull over. He said he was in his truck, but he had a hands-free headset on his cell phone. He was fine. And so she began.

“In 1960,” she said, “my family was in a car accident and I believe you were the driver of the other car. My brother, who was almost seven years old, died in that accident. . . .”

There was a pause. “Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

“I don’t want to alarm you,” Marilyn told him. “That’s not why I’m calling. I guess I just want to tell you that after my brother died, things turned out well for the rest of my family. We’re OK. I guess I’m contacting you because I need this closure.”

He was listening. Marilyn went on. “What I’d really like to do,” she said, “is send you a letter to tell you who I am, and to ask how you’ve been since that accident. Do you mind if I ask for your address?”

“I’d like to read your letter,” he said softly, “and I will call you back after I get it.” He gave her his address.

He asked her no questions. Maybe he got the sense that she wanted to begin their dialogue with the letter, not over the phone. “This may be a lot to absorb while you’re on the road,” Marilyn said.