- Basement bedroom on Hillcrest in Collinsville in 1978 where high school parties were held.
Jeff Canull and I first met in preschool. From there we went to Jefferson Elementary School in Collinsville. I was one of the fortunate ones invited to his celebrated 6th birthday party. It was remembered years later as the party where everyone coincidentally brought Jeff a set of bow and arrows. Jeff sat and opened a half dozen of the same gift and we all ran amongst the trees in his backyard and joyously shot each other that afternoon. Our friendship was on and off in the years that followed. In first grade he and I had a disagreement on the playground. Settling the impasse with a fight, (it was more of rolling around in the dusty clay) upon our return to class we were escorted to the cloakroom where Ms. Graham took her paddle to our dusty behinds. In hindsight, I believe it was Ms. Graham who prevailed that day for we never fought again.
As we reached 8th year in school at Webster Junior High, Jeff began to spend time with older kids. They were from high school and he seemed to take a liking to partying. Other friends of mine followed suit. Not being into the scene at that time I lost track of Jeff. Yet by my junior year, I joined the crowd and began to host parties in my large basement bedroom on Hillcrest in Collinsville. I was still quite shy and felt uncomfortable extending invitations to people I scarcely knew. And so I relied on Jeff and a couple of other friends to spread the word. I figured that if I told too many people, my house would be overrun. My own insecurity paid off, as the house always seemed to fill with no more than 60 people. A fire marshall might not have approved, but it seemed to be the right amount of people for a good time. We relied on older kids to buy the barrel of Budweiser and we all got blitzed smoking, drinking and listening to my record collection. Jeff was the first air guitar master I had ever encountered. He was consumed with the music, working himself into a sweaty frenzy by spinning and jumping his way through Nugent or Jimmy Page blaring from my stereo.
After high school I went on to college at Southeast Missouri State University and would occasionally see Jeff when I came back to Collinsville on the weekends. I continued to have a few parties at a large house my parents moved to near Glen Carbon. I had no direction on what I wanted to do with my life and so after a year I returned home and started off at Southern Illinois University. By 1981, Jeff took a job at Schnucks in Collinsville. His grandfather had given him his own 1964 Ford Fairlane station wagon. The car was pristine with a spotless interior. It looked not much different than when it rolled off the assembly line 17 years before. The elderly man gave Jeff the car with one simple request. “Take good care of it.” A week after driving the car, Jeff pulled out in front of another vehicle on the Beltline in Collinsville. The car’s rear quarter panel was crushed in the accident and Jeff in an instant became the owner of a mangled car.
A couple weeks later he approached me and asked if I wanted to buy it. “I am too embarrassed to drive it,” he explained. The old Ford had 62,000 miles on the odometer and no visible blemishes, with the exception of an enormous section of twisted metal on the rear passenger side. It had fake wood paneling and a factory installed AM/FM radio. In those days the radio came with one large speaker that was recessed in the middle of the dashboard. I was to later learn that the radio was very rare and likely worth more than the car. I took him up on it.
The car was there through the good and bad times in the next couple of years. It hauled my stereo and records to my next foray in college: Northern Illinois University in Dekalb. There it traveled the rolling hills of Wisconsin in the spring of 1982 for a camping trip organized by some students in my dormitory. On the winding road we smoked a joint and sang along to Springsteen’s’ “Rosalita.” The straight folks in the car in front of us were upset that they got lost along the way. We laughed and took it in stride and basked in the sunshine and admired the dairy farms along the roadside. I was also in the car when it broke down on a trip from Glen Carbon to Dekalb one cold night. I shivered in the seat all night waiting for daylight before I approached a farmhouse. And then it hauled my belongings back to Glen Carbon after I flunked chemistry and felt my college dreams collapse. Back home, I took a job at my stepfather’s warehouse took a photography class at Belleville Area College. I began to shoot all kinds of things besides the rock concerts I had mainly focused on in the previous few years. One of those photos was of the dashboard of the old Ford. I parked it on the bluffs near Char’s restaurant in Collinsville. Overlooking the nighttime expanse before me I climbed in the back seat and captured the illuminated dashboard as the car lights below streamed by on Interstate 55/70. KSHE was tuned in for the photography and for all I knew the radio was set to the station back in 1964 when KSHE was still a classical station.
At the end of 1983 my brother came back from his Air Force assignment in Torrejon, Spain with a Spanish bride in tow. I gave him the car as a wedding gift and never saw it again. Enlisting in the Air Force in January of 1984, I left St. Louis for good. By then Jeff had married a wonderful woman named Kay. I went to their wedding and rarely saw him after that. Sadly, Jeff passed away from cancer a number of years ago. I saw him about 6 months before he died and found him to be in good spirits. This was the Jeff I always knew. He was upbeat and if there was a guy who was going to prevail I felt it would be him.
