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A little before midnight on June 22, 1948, a silver Triumph convertible with red leather seats squealed to a stop in front of 102 Main Street in Whyatt, Illinois. When the female passenger twisted sideways to kiss the driver, he inadvertently pressed on the gas. The convertible jumped the curb, crashed into the only fire hydrant in town, and set off a plume of water that arched over the hundred-foot elm tree and cascaded down on my grandfather’s porch.

The farm town’s 902 corn and alfalfa farmers were asleep, but my eighty-year-old great-grandmother, Rosheen Whyatt, wearing a shimmery cocktail dress and heels too high for a woman her age, unfolded herself from the glider, sloshed through the water accumulating on the porch, and tottered down the front steps with a glass in each hand. 

“George Burns, you always know how to make an entrance,” she yelled at her guest in a voice so loud a sleeping swallow bolted from an overhead phone wire. “Have a drink.” 

Rosheen, a retired star of Vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Follies, offered one lemonade to the dapper young radio personality who sat chuckling at the waterfall. She gave the other to his curly-haired companion whose mascaraed eyelashes jutted out like awnings above one blue and one green eye.

George Burns tilted his head to the left and looked up. “Another sixty feet and it would top Niagara Falls,” he said with his characteristic poker face. “You could advertise it as a tourist attraction.”

Rosheen kissed his cheek. “Go inside, George. There’s a box of cheap cigars on the piano.”

“Thank goodness,” the comedian deadpanned. “Gracie’s been craving a cigar for twenty miles.”

***

Within minutes, every light in the house was on, and my relatives had gathered in their bathrobes beside the Bechstein grand piano. My blue-haired grandma Charylin—Rosheen’s last living daughter—pounded the keys while Gracie Allen crooned, “I’m Wilder than I Look.” My mother Marlene, who wore Chinese Red lipstick even in the middle of the night, swayed left and right in a chenille peignoir, shaking maracas to keep the beat. Her long brown hair oscillatedlike a metronome.

I was too young to be up in the middle of the night but so sensitive to noise I couldn’t sleep. Thirsty, I climbed out of bed holding my ragdoll, stumbled toward Mommy Marlene, and sat down on the floor by her feet. 

“Can I have a drink of water?”

“Not now, Claire. I’m entertaining important guests.”

***   

Out on the street, the fire hydrant continued to churn out a torrent of water that lofted over the elm tree and ontoour deck. But no one paid attention until the water seeped under the glass front door. 

When Grandma Charylin spotted the rising tide, she lost her composure and jumped from the velvet piano bench, her silver blue hair so full of hairspray it rose like a baby bird trying to fly and then fell back to her scalp. She pointed toward the foyer. Her ladylike voice ratcheted up the scale to a banshee shriek. 

“Don’t let it hit the Persian rug!”

My first literary prize, in 1961, included lunch with then-poet laureate Carl Sandburg. After graduating as valedictorian of UMD, I became a movie/theatre critic for seven coast-to-coast newspapers.

Writing includes: a Dystopian trilogy, The Listener of Morpho Island (winner, three pre-publication prizes; a story about rape (to be published this November); a self-help book for people with life-altering disabilities; and a WIP trilogy, The Fine Art Club of Shrimpboat Key (winner, one pre-publication prize).