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I LIVED AT the center of the universe. The center was located at the corner of Washington and Maple streets in Urbana, Illinois, a two-bedroom white stucco house with green canvas awnings, evergreens and geraniums in front, and a white picket fence enclosing the backyard. Hollyhocks towered above me by the fence. There was a barbeque grill back there made by my father with stone and mortar, a dime embedded in its smokestack to mark the year of its completion.
There was a mountain ash tree in the front yard, and three more next to the sidewalk on the side of the house. These remarkable trees had white bark that could be peeled loose, and their branches were weighed with clusters of little orange berries. “People are always driving up and asking me about those trees,” my father said. He had planted them himself, and they were the only ones in town—perhaps in the world, I gathered. They needed watering in the summertime, which he did by placing five-gallon cans next to them with small holes drilled in their bottoms. These I carefully filled with the garden hose from the backyard, while making rainbow sprays over the grass around.
After they married, my parents lived in a small apartment in downtown Urbana, and then bought this house not long before I was born. My father took great pride in it. Not only the trees were unique. It was one of the few stucco houses in Urbana. The green awnings were handmade and were taken in and repainted every winter. We had a peaked roof over the living room, which also had stucco walls. There was a Spanish feeling, which reminded my father of the years he had lived in Florida.
My bedroom was the one with the window overlooking Maple Street. The walls were pale yellow, the ceiling red. It had a two-way fan, posing the fundamental scientific question, is it more helpful on a hot night to blow cooler air in, or warmer air out? I had better get to sleep quickly, because Harry with His Ladder would come around to look in to be sure my eyes were closed. I lived in fear of Harry and kept my eyes screwed tight until I drifted off to sleep. I can tell you even now what Harry looked like, because I saw him many times, perched on top of his ladder, when I allowed my eyes to flicker open.
Of this room as a very young child I remember only a few things. My mother putting me to sleep in a bed with sides that lifted up to prevent me falling out. A nightly ritual of love pats. My small workbench on which I hammered round pegs into round holes. A glass of water that was filled to the rim, but that I could see straight through, so obviously there was room down there for more water. My tears when I was accused of playing with water and spilling it, when I had been following strict logic.
My own little radio. I would lie on the floor under my bed, for safety, while listening to The Lone Ranger. I thought Arthur Godfrey and His Friends were friends about my age. I listened carefully to the lists of the FBI’s most wanted men, whose descriptions were read by J. Edgar Hoover at the end of The FBI in Peace and War. Caution—do not attempt to apprehend them yourselves! From my hideout under the bed I used binoculars to search for them in the clothes closet. I had a bookcase in which I carefully arranged first childhood books, and then books about Tarzan, Penrod, the Hardy Boys, and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Also Huckleberry Finn, the first real book I ever read and still the best.
When I was sick it was the best time. I could stay in bed and listen to Our Gal Sunday, which asked the question, “Can this girl from a little mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?” Before that there was a local program Penny for Your Thoughts, where people got a penny just for calling up Larry Stewart and talking to him. Larry Stewart was also “the voice of the Fighting Illini,” my father informed me. The Illini were the University of Illinois, the world’s greatest university, whose football stadium my father had constructed—by himself, I believed. It was there that he had seen Red Grange, the greatest player of all time. Also in that stadium were seen the world’s first huddle, the world’s first homecoming, and Chief Illiniwek, the world’s greatest sports symbol (“Don’t ever call him a mascot,” my father said. “Chief Illiniwek stands for something.”)
The university also had the world’s largest arched roof, over the Armory. The cyclotron, where they worked with atoms. The ILLIAC computer, in a building filled with vacuum tubes that could count faster than a man. My dad worked in there sometimes. “Your father is an electrician for the university,” my mother told me. “It can’t run without him. But I’m afraid every day that he’ll get shocked.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded almost as bad as being “fired,” a word I also didn’t understand, although thank God that had never happened to my father. There was the Natural History Museum, with its stuffed owls and prehistoric bones. Altgeld Hall and its bells, which could be heard all over town in the summer, and which my father had personally installed, I believed.
The town also contained a cemetery where we would go to see swans float on the pond. And a Cemetery Graveyard, next to the Atkinson Monument Company in a lot overgrown with trees and shrubbery, where the corpses of broken gravestones could be picked through for the rock garden my father was building in the backyard. If you got lost in the Cemetery Graveyard, the ghosts might come for you. There was the Boneyard, a creek running through town, where the Indians had buried their dead and at midnight you could see their bones. An airport where we could see Piper Cubs taking off. A train station north of town, in Rantoul, where we could watch the Panama Limited and the City of New Orleans hurtling through, the world’s fastest trains.
I attended Mrs. Meadrow’s Tot’s Play School during the day. This was because my mother was a Business Woman—in fact, the president of the Urbana Business Women’s Association. She was a bookkeeper for the Allied Finance Company, up a flight of stairs over the Champaign County Bank and Trust Company. It was run by Mr. R. V. Willis. On the first of every year they worked all day to get the books to balance. When they succeeded, Mr. Willis would take us all, including my father and me, to dinner at Mel Root’s two doors down Main Street. In between the bank and Mel Root’s was the Smith Drug Company, where Mr. Willis bought me by first chocolate soda. My parents smoked Lucky Strikes, but Mr. Willis smoked Chesterfields.
Our house had a concrete front porch on which rested four steel chairs that bounced on springy legs. My father painted them in pastel colors. On summer nights my mother would make lemonade and we would all sit out there. They would smoke and read the papers, and talk to neighbors walking past. Later you could see fireflies. The sounds of radios, voices, distant laughter would float on the air. On spare days, there were jobs to do. Pulling up dandelions. Picking tomato worms off the tomato plants in our vacant lot. A riskier job, climbing a stepladder to pick bagworms off the tallest evergreens. The paper bags containing the worms would be gathered in a pile, sprinkled with kerosene, and set alight. “Don’t worry, boy. They’re only worms and can’t feel anything.” The most exciting job, in the autumn, was putting on old clothes and swimming goggles and crawling up the big air pipes of the furnace while dragging the vacuum cleaner hose, to pull the dust out.
In winter I was awakened by the sound of my dad shoveling coal into the stoker. In summer, by the clip-clops of the horse wagons of the Urbana Pure Milk Company. The horses knew their routes by heart and stopped at the doors of customers. Sally Hopson’s family owned the milk company. In summer, the whistles of passing trains could be heard through open windows all through the night.
When you entered the house from the front porch, you were in the living room, with our fireplace. My father would place tablets on the burning logs that would make the flames burst into colors. Here we sat on Christmas Eve listening to Bing Crosby and his family. He had a son named Gary Crosby who I thought was just about my age. Off the living room was the dining room, nearly filled by the table. Most of the time the table’s center boards were out, so my mother could let down the ironing board from the wall. Then came the kitchen, where my father made his chili and let it sit in the icebox overnight.
A hallway had doors opening to the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, and both bedrooms. When Chaz and I revisited the house in 1990, a woman named Violet Mary Gaschler, who bought the house from my mom, asked us to come in and look around. I saw the alcove in the hallway where our telephone rested. We were on a party line. When the phone would ring at night, my mother would hurry to it, grab the receiver, and say, “Is it Mom?” My grandmother had heart trouble. Having a Heart Attack was worse than being shocked or fired. On that same visit with Chaz, I went to the basement and felt chills down my spine. Hardly anything had even been touched. On my father’s workbench, a can of 3-in-One oil still waited. The chains on the overhead electric light pulls still ended in toy letters spelling out E-B-E-R-T. Violet Gaschler let me take an “E.” The basement’s smell was the same, faintly like green onions, and evoked summer afternoons in a lawn chair downstairs, reading Astounding Science Fiction.
It was from the basement that I operated the Roger Ebert Stamp Company, buying ten-cent ads in little stamp magazines and mailing out “approvals” to a handful of customers, who must have been about my age. These I addressed on an old typewriter. One day two men came to the door and said they might want to buy some stamps. I proudly took them downstairs and showed them my wares. My mother hovered nervously at the head of the stairs. The men left quickly, saying they didn’t see anything they needed for their collections. Nevertheless, they seemed to be in a good mood. As they were driving away, my dad walked in from work. “What did those men want?” he asked. We told him. “Their car said Department of Internal Revenue,” he said.
On April 22, 2009, the city of Urbana honored me by placing a plaque at my childhood home. At first I resisted. Far greater figures had lived in Urbana, such as the sculptor Lorado Taft; the poet Mark Van Doren; the novelists William Gibson, David Foster Wallace, Larry Woiwode, and Dave Eggers; the newspapermen William Nack, James Reston, Robert Novak, and George F. Will; the Nobel winner John Bardeen, who invented the transistor; and the Galloping Ghost himself, Red Grange. You see that Urbana truly was the Center of the Universe.
The city fathers assured me they planned to dedicate plaques to many other worthy sons and daughters of Urbana, and so I agreed to the ceremony. As I stood in front of 410 East Washington, I reflected that this was the first and only home my parents owned. Here they brought the infant Roger home from Mercy Hospital. Here they raised me, and encouraged me in my dream to be a newspaperman, even if it meant working after midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Here my father refused to let me watch him doing any electrical wiring. Here he told me, “Boy, I don’t want you to become an electrician. I was working in the English Building today, and I saw those fellows with their feet up on their desks, smoking their pipes and reading their books. That’s the job for you.” Among the old neighbors who turned out for the occasion was Sally Ormiston, who lived across the street and used a big toy clock face to teach me to tell time.
In the 1970s, an article appeared in the News-Gazette about the restoration of the bells in Altgeld Hall. It said the crew had found a note tacked to a beam up in the tower. It read “We repaired these bells on…” I forget the date. It was signed with three names, one of them Walter H. Ebert. On that early visit to Urbana, I took Chaz to visit my parents’ graves. Close by, my father’s parents are buried. My grandfather’s name was Joseph Ebert. Joseph is my middle name. I must have noticed that many times when I visited those graves with my father, but that day, for the first time, I felt a bond with the man in that grave.