Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories. With Marysville and Union County celebrating Bicentennial anniversaries in 2019 and 2020, respectively, these articles help depict what life was like in those early years.
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My long-term memory is pretty good. It’s not as good as my sister’s, but it is still rather accurate. Occasionally, however, I may remember something one way, and then I later find out that things didn’t happen exactly as I thought they did.
For example, I have had a memory for many years of a day maybe 75 years ago, when I, along with several other neighborhood boys, Bill Porter, Dick Bigler, Don Asman, and a few other kids, were playing in Jim Beck’s backyard on Maple Street. We had our BB guns, and we were shooting at tin cans we had put atop the wooden fence at the back of the lot.
Then suddenly, a kind of BB gun war broke out. It was the kind of thing that parents warn their kids about, and make them promise never to do it. I don’t know how it started, or why it started, but all of a sudden it seemed to me we were all shooting at each other with our BB guns.
I think I was shielding myself behind a birdbath when Dick Bigler came around the corner of Jim’s house. He had his BB gun pointed at me, and I shot at him.
He let out a yell, dropped his gun and immediately put his hand over his left eye. Oh man, I apparently shot him in the eye. Fortunately he was wearing glasses. The BB shattered the left lens. Tiny shards of glass flew into his face, but not into his eye. His vision was spared.
I can’t tell you how awful I felt for doing something that my parents had warned me about time and again. I don’t remember what I said to Dick. I mean, how do you apologize for shooting someone in the eye? I felt miserable, and I carried those guilt feelings for a long time.
In recent years, I seem to think most about that BB gun incident around Christmas time. That’s when the movie “A Christmas Story” is shown again and again on TV. Every time I see that movie, and hear everyone warn Ralphie, “You’ll shoot your eye out,” I relive that wretched day. So I have never really been able to enjoy that movie.
Now fast forward to maybe a year or so ago. I got a phone call in the middle of the afternoon, and whom do you think was calling? It was Dick Bigler, whom I hadn’t seen or heard from in more than 70 years. He had been talking with one of his classmates – I think it was Bill McCarthy – and he got my phone number from him. Dick was calling about something totally unrelated to the BB gun incident. He wanted some other information from our childhood.
This was the perfect opportunity for me to bring up the BB gun thing. I didn’t know exactly how to do that, so when we were talking about those boyhood days in Marysville, I said something like, “I remember when you were shot in the eye with a BB gun.” I asked him what he remembered about that day.
And do you know what he told me? It didn’t happen at all the way I remembered it. In fact, it didn’t even happen in Jim Beck’s backyard. It was in Bill Porter’s backyard. And best of all, he said I wasn’t the one who shot him. It was one of the other boys.
He gave me the full story of what happened, and my version wasn’t even close. I can’t tell you how good that was to hear. So why, over so many years, did I feel that I was the culprit?
I think it was the guilt that a kid feels when he lets his parents down. I had told them I would never shoot my BB gun at a person, but on some occasion, I apparently did that. To me, I had broken my word, so I was indeed guilty. And I guess I may have been unconsciously punishing myself.
It was really nice to get that monkey off my back. And perhaps the nicest thing of all is that this year, for the very first time, I will really be able to enjoy those reruns of “A Christmas Story.” I can’t wait for December to get here.
Pictured above is Dick Bigler in the mid 1940s. Note how he is dressed.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at bill@davidwboyd.com