In PE Class we all had to line up in front of the bleachers for roll call and the kid next to me was named Hal Rowland and next to him was a fellow named Richard Poor so Hal always had to make a joke that he would never get ahead in life because he "was stuck between rich and poor". Every single day he had to bring it up and Richard seemed to dislike it more than I even though the ultimate irony was that the Poor’s did have more money than the Rich’s.
Hal's family was infamous for owning the cow that wandered onto the Highway and caused a terrible car crash that killed a married couple late one night. The victim's relatives sued for damages but the Open Range law said the drivers were liable and they even had to pay for the dead livestock. Talk about adding insult to injury, that made for some juicy gossip and even qualified as big news but it was an awful small town.
That same stretch of road also later claimed the life of Kim Westlake when his car hit some black ice on the way to a track meet early one morning. Kim was my first friend after we moved away from the Lake and he was the guy who showed me around Janesville school where I got to know Hal and it was Kim who first introduced us to Steve Blankenship. Steve was the one who’s Dad had a little farm near the big old empty farmhouse where we got caught shooting owls in the rafters of the barn out back and we all had to run for safety at Steve’s place but his Dad found us and made us go back, apologize and clean the barn and for the rest of the day.
The next year we weren't so lucky when we got nailed for throwing snowballs at cars from the top of the log pile at the mill and this time we had to face our parents at the police station and there were serious consequences, we had to haul hay for two days as punishment. That same Officer pulled us over again a year later and this time he had us red handed in the form of poached ducks, poached in the out of season and no license sense not the cooking poached. This time the punishment was hauling Christmas trees for the landowner and it was two full weekends of freezing cold and brutal work.
We were so sore and tired from our various chain-gang jobs we went home and watched TV where we caught the latest episodes of whatever was on which somehow seemed to ease the pain along with a hot meal and an even hotter bath. Years later there was the original TV series called Roots which spawned a bunch of copycat spinoff series and one of them was called Rich Man Poor Man. To this day any time I see or hear any reference to any of those shows it always reminds me of Hal Rowland who had to stand for roll-call between Poor Rich and Rich Poor.
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