JohnCr8on’s Snapshots

Jimmy Greason and my mom taught me what it means to be a next door neighbor.

Jimmy was an interesting neighbor with an interesting personality.  He cared deeply about our family. He could be very abrasive.  He took great interest in my brother Alec and me.  He mostly talked about himself.  He told wonderful stories of the history of Atwood. I dreaded going to his house to hear them.

Jimmy and his brother Kermit lived in the house just to the east of ours.  Their house was tiny, like several on the block.  It had a small front room, three small bedrooms (I think or was it two), a kitchen and a screened in back porch.  The yard, which I mowed, was a tangle of weeds.

Their brother John Frank had his own place, the Little Ponderosa, just west of Highway 25.  I noticed that John Frank often slept in his brothers’ house, in the afternoons.  I didn’t think it a bit strange as a boy.

Kermit was the long-time, much loved Rawlins County Clerk.  Jimmy had been a pharmacist and proprietor of Greason’s Drug Store.  My mother-in-law, Betty Mickey, worked there at one time.

I have little memory of the drug store.  He retired when I was very young.  Even though he was our neighbor I always thought of Greason’s as the other drug store.  We did all our business at Currier’s.  I have only one memory of being in his store.  I was walking downtown on my own, perhaps to my dad’s office, and decided to go in.  It was dark, crowded by large booths and dirty.  I turned on my heels the moment I entered and did a quick exit.

Jimmy is remembered by many people for many things. I remember him as a man who seldom left his house; a passionate fan of the Kansas Jayhawks, and a piano player.  Most of all I remember he suffered from emphysema.

Jimmy loved KU as much as, if not more, than anyone I know – as much as my Grandpa Creighton, as much as Irv Hayden, as much as Phil Priebe.

Jimmy was notorious, at least in our house, for never hearing the fourth quarter of a KU football game.  As we all know, KU sometimes struggled in football.  Jimmy listened to all the games on the radio.  The volume was so high we could listen in our kitchen, too.  At some point each game, Jimmy would curse loudly.  Then, we’d hear a crash followed by silence.  If I went to his house later in the day, as I often did, I would find his transistor radio lying on the floor.

One of Jimmy’s great disappointments, at least one of which I’m aware, was the time he was snubbed by John Riggins, the great Jayhawk and Washington Redskins running back.  Riggins was going to attend an event of some sort in Atwood and stay with Jimmy and Kermit.  They spent time and money to get their house in order, which was always in a state of disrepair.  New concrete was poured on the front steps, the crumbling back porch was rebuilt and the interior was almost sparkling – almost.

Riggins never showed.  Jimmy was deeply hurt.  My mom never forgave Riggins.  When Riggins led the Redskins to a Super Bowl victory, some Jayhawk fans celebrated.  My mom offered a few choice words.

By the time I knew Jimmy, he didn’t feel well most of the time.  Emphysema contracted from years of chain smoking was consuming his small body.

I seldom heard Jimmy play the piano.  I’m told he was good.  The piano was the most prominent piece of furniture in his house.  The stand-up piano always covered in sheet music, keyboard open, ash tray on the side full of butts as if Hoagy Carmichael had just played.  (I knew Hoagy as Stoney Carmichael from the Flintstones but that’s for another time.)

Occasionally, on his good days, Jimmy would play a Ragtime tune for his audience of one or two – Kermit and me.  Even on his bad days, Jimmy would tell stories – often the same ones over and over.  He told many stories about Atwood.  He was, after all, almost as old as the town itself.  His family was among the earliest  to settle in Rawlins County.

I was a young boy.  I was not a good listener.  Sadly, I remember few of his history lessons.  The story I remember most came from his drug store days.

“The teenagers who came into the drug would play the same damn song every day,” he declared in a cranky way as if it happened only yesterday.  “Every day, it was that damn Raggmopp.  Over and over again, I’d hear R-A-G-G-M-O-P-P Raggmopp.  I took the record out of the juke box, out to the alley and smashed the damn thing.”

Jimmy called our house three or four nights a week, if not more – or so it seemed to me.  I dreaded his calls.  It meant he was having a bad day.  The emphysema was getting the best of him.

My mom sent us over to help straight away.  No negotiations.

When I arrived, I refilled the coffee can with water and replaced it on his furnace stove.  It was Jimmy’s homemade humidifier.

Jimmy found relief when the gunk in his lungs was loosened up.  That was next on the nightly routine.  I would sit on the couch and work the vibrator over his back.  He was always quiet at first.  As his chest loosened, he’d begin to tell his stories.

I would gather up the day old – sometimes three days’ old – coffee grinds and egg shells out of the kitchen sink, bag them in a grocery sack and take it to the garbage can just before I left.

It was not an eight, ten, twelve year-old’s favorite way to spend an evening.

We don’t choose our neighbors.  We have to deal with whoever moves in.  We can accept them for who they are or wish they were someone else.

We are lucky in Longmont.  We have neighbors on both sides who embrace us for who we are – the good, bad and annoying, which I can imagine is a bit.  I like to think we do the same.

That was our relationship with Jimmy Greason.  He accepted the nuisances of young children living nearby – balls and stones hitting his house, shouts and screams interrupting his rest on uncomfortable days.  He never complained.  He never chased us off.  I felt as though his yard was also ours.

My mom insisted that we return his tolerance with help when we were able to lend a hand.  I am sure I complained more than I should.  But I’m thankful that she did.  I learned a lot about being a neighbor.