Pun Salad

In 1961, when I was 10 years old, my family moved to suburban Omaha, Nebraska. Soon afterward, Gary and Judy Marx moved in next door with their young son John. Their even younger son Daniel showed up a little bit later. Gary was an on-air personality at WOW radio (590AM); he had a deep confident voice perfect for radio of the day. (My own tastes were for KOIL, up at 1290 on the dial, the local top 40 station.)

They were great neighbors, deeply involved in community projects. Eventually we moved on. I went to college in California, my sister to Iowa State, and my mom moved to her old home town in Iowa after my dad died in 1972. Gary's talents and interests career took him on an American-dream path, best summed up by his Amazon author page. We remained Christmas-card acquaintances, with me reading in awe of their travels and careers.

Gary died in 2019, and this is his final book, given to my sister by Judy, passed along to me. It's the story of Gary's early life in Manchester, South Dakota, a very small town in central South Dakota, on US 14. If you were driving from Chicago to Yellowstone or the Black Hills before they built I-90, you probably went through, and may not have noticed it if you blinked.

The book includes a lot of stories about his family and upbringing, intertwining with the history of Manchester and environs. There's a lot to tell, and Gary paints a rich and detailed picture of life in the middle of South Dakota in the 1930s, 40s, and early 50s. These folks survived the Depression, the Dust Bowl, WWII, and did so with grit and humor.

There's not much left of Manchester except memories; it was fading even when the Marx family lived there. Gary was admonished to "watch out for wells and cisterns" while wandering through town, those left behind when houses and buildingss were razed. But a vicious F4 tornado in 2003 was the coup de grâce obliterating the town. Nobody was killed, but the few remaining inhabitants moved away. What's left is a monument, erected in 2017. (Pictured here, that's Gary and Judy on the left.)