Bikes, Barbies and Beaverdale
Last week the Iowa Writers Collaborative held our first Office Lounge, a monthly Zoom gathering of columnists and paid subscribers. When Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger asked what subscribers would like to see more of, Rick Morain suggested more columns about how Iowa has changed.
It made me think of a piece I wrote years ago for The Des Moines Register about growing up in the Beaverdale neighborhood of Des Moines. That short essay centered around Bond’s of Beaverdale, one of the shopping area’s signature stores.
I dug it out of my computer files this morning, expanded it, and thought I’d share it as a throwback to an earlier time. This is for you, Rick.
Kids in striped T-shirts and dungarees crowded into the parking lot behind Bond’s of Beaverdale. It was 1962 (or thereabouts), and Bill Riley was about to draw the name of a winner for a new Schwinn bicycle. The bike stood polished and gleaming in the summer sun. I knew that if we took it home, we’d outfit its spokes with playing cards and clothespins to make a rat-a-tat-at-tat sound as we rode down to Ashby Park.
We watched Bill Riley’s Talent Search every week on TV. He was like Iowa’s own Dick Clark—timeless, the ever-gracious host, kind even to the twirlers who dropped their batons and the singers who forgot the words. This bike giveaway was a chance to see a real live celebrity.
I’d tagged along with my sister Kathy and brothers Bob and Jim. With four of us there, it seemed likely that one of us might win, and I figured all of us were thinking the same thing: Just imagine what we could do with that bike.
My siblings planned intricate bike rallies with the neighborhood kids, setting up checkpoints at the footbridge over the creek at Ashby Park, or the cinder path from the Byron Rice School playground, or the Elsie the Cow sign near Hickman.
Mr. Riley stood on the concrete steps outside Bond’s back door. All the kids stretched to see as he reached into a container, drew a number, and read it out loud. We followed along, checking the numbers on our ticket stubs.
We heard one shriek from the crowd—and felt a collective slumping of shoulders from the rest of us. As the winner rushed to claim his new bike, we all dropped our ticket stubs on the ground. No prize for us this time.
Oh, well. We could go to Reed’s for a lime sherbet ice cream cone, get a glazed doughnut from the Beaverdale Bakery, or admire the fanciest figurines at the gift store down the street. Living in Beaverdale offered everything a child of the 1950s and ’60s could need, from Barbie dolls and seersucker fabric at Bond’s to patent leather shoes from Jerry’s Shoe Store.
My first Barbie, in fact, came from Bond’s. She had long blond hair, of course, and I played with her on one of the many days when I made up a stomachache to get out of school at Byron Rice. (My siblings and I can still sing the Byron Rice song, which is so deeply imprinted from assemblies in the gym/cafeteria.)
Bond’s was also the source for the matching mumus my mom bought for my sister Kathy and me. The night of one of the Kennedy/Nixon debates in 1960, Kathy and I wore those blue Hawaiian mumus and sat in the basement rec room eating popcorn and watching the glow from the black-and-white TV. I was too small to understand the importance of the men talking on TV, but I could feel the intense quiet as my parents—one a Democrat and one a Republican—studied the snowy screen.
By the time I entered junior high, my best friend Ann and I walked to Bond’s almost daily, just a few blocks from our homes. We were in Miss McKeeman’s home economics class at Meredith Junior High, and we needed fabric for the bathrobes we were learning to make.
Ann and I sat on the stools at the counter where the Butterick, McCalls and Simplicity pattern books sat, flopping them open and trying to keep them from falling off the sloped counter as we perused the patterns for swimwear and Peter Max outfits like the ones Twiggy wore. Back home, as we sewed, we listened to the Monkees—bubble gum music compared to the Beatles—and surfed our tween years by making beanbag frogs and mini skirts.
We spent hours at Bond’s and the other stores in Beaverdale—at Clayton’s for poster board and magic markers that smelled like lime and grape. And at Super Valu, where my mom made a weekly pilgrimage, along with her trips to Dahl’s and Hinky Dinky, to use the Wednesday coupons she clipped, stretching the family budget as far as she could.
I often walked to Super Valu on my own to buy boxes of miniature Baby Ruth bars, which I hid in my room, consuming them and books at the same time. One day our dog Pepper followed me to the store—and then into the store, tracking me to the candy aisle. I had a box of Baby Ruths in my hand when she showed up, and I panicked.
In my hurry to get her out of the store, I stepped outside without paying for the candy. No alarms went off, no store manager grabbed me by the back of my neck. Pepper wandered the parking lot while I went back in and gave a cashier two quarters to pay my bill.
Our upbringing wasn’t perfect, of course. Whose is? It took place against the backdrop of intense turbulence in the world. One of my classmates had a bomb shelter in her backyard, a reminder of the nuclear threats from Russia and Cuba. When I was in second grade, our principal, Fern Thorne, announced on the intercom that President Kennedy had been shot, and we saw our teacher dissolve into tears.
We watched the Viet Nam War on the 5:30 news, eating our spaghetti and meatballs on TV trays in the living room. We woke up to newspaper headlines about Martin Luther King’s assassination…and just two months later, the murder of Bobby Kennedy. And when Nixon finally made it into office, we witnessed his eventual demise with shock, and with gratitude to the journalists who had uncovered his defamation of democracy.
But on the morning we failed to win a new bike in the Bond’s parking lot, a summer day was simply a summer day. We climbed on our old bikes and pedaled back home, off to the next adventure, the next chance for good fortune.
All our favorite stores in Beaverdale taught us early lessons in commerce and community—and they provided a hub for a neighborhood that shaped us, kept us safe, and gave us the freedom to explore.
I think that’s what the best communities do. Often in ways that we don’t even know, they instill something solid within us that we can always look back on, no matter how much the world we once knew seems to change.
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Thank you for this look back, Deb.
I grew up in a small town in Eastern Iowa. It was a lovely place to grow up.
When I got married and moved to Des Moines almost 49 years ago I always thought Beaverdale was a lovely neighborhood and would have been a great place to grow up! Thank you for confirming that for me!!