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1 1 The Early Years Growing Up in Belleville The flamboyant years of the Roaring Twenties were nearing an end when I was born July 7, 1927, in Belleville, the southwestern Illinois city that would remain my hometown throughout my life. Actually, it would be hard to beat growing up where I did. Belleville, situated on a highland to the east of the floodplain along the Mississippi River known as the Great American Bottoms, offered a warm and secure environment for families. The city was a real-life example of one of those idyllic American towns popularized by Hollywood. It was very mainstream in regard to the activities and attitudes of its residents. As my career proceeded to take me far and wide, I gained more and more appreciation for having had the opportunity to grow up in Belleville. The rapid growth of Belleville’s German immigrant population in the nineteenth century was responsible more than anything else for putting the city on the map as a cultural and urban mecca, something back then even acknowledged by the prominent German families in Saint Louis. The so-called German element was visible in just about everything in Belleville. It was even strong enough to support a number of German-language newspapers in the 1800s. Some coming to mind are Belleville Zeitung, Der Stern, Deutsche Demokrat, Volksblatt, and Arbeiter Zeitung. Many of them were associated with the German faction known as the Greens, immigrants fleeing the upheaval in Europe from revolutions in the late 1840s. However, as World War I progressed, the German papers went out the door in Belleville because, as with some other things German in the city, they were branded as disloyal to our country. I was raised in the depth of the Great Depression in the 1930s, but nobody said much about it in my neighborhood in the east end of Belleville. My dad, 2 | The Early Years Bill Dixon, thankfully, had a little business, but most of the rest of the family, including my grandfather John Tebbenhoff and uncle Charlie Linnertz, had no work. Still, things were pretty good on Forest Avenue, where our house had two bedrooms, a full basement, and a one-car garage. Our house was one of many bungalows along Forest Avenue, and it had a high terrace facing west along the street. One of our neighbors was P. C. Otwell, legal adviser to Illinois Governor Henry Horner in the 1930s. Another neighbor was Elmer Lill, an unlicensed chiropractor. Down the block was Dr. Charles “Pinky” Baldree, who operated on my dad right before my father’s death from colon cancer. And down the alley, on Wabash Avenue, resided P. K. Johnson, a prominent lawyer instrumental in the running of Belleville. It was an eight-block walk to Douglas School, and there were no school buses. The best teacher I had during my educational experience was the Douglas principal and sixth-grade instructor, Oliver Muser. He pulled down the map of Europe over the blackboard and explained to us grade schoolers how Adolph Hitler was going to overrun Europe. He told us even then that Hitler would kill all the Jews. But we didn’t know much about that because there weren’t any Jewish kids in our class. One day in 1939, he put us on a bus and took us to Scott Field, a big army base not far from Belleville. Lighter-than-aircraft dirigibles were kept there. Mr. Muser explained how valuable such aircraft would be in the upcoming great war he already envisioned. Many years later, in the early 1990s, I saved Scott Field, then Scott Air Force Base, from being shut down when I served as chairman of the nation’s Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission. But, in 1939, I stood in the huge main hangar at Scott and felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the blimp that it housed. Across the street from us, extending to McKinley Avenue, a distance of several city blocks, was West Pasture, a small public park. Now, there was a place to play! In the spring floods, a creek that ran north and south through the pasture would fill with water to a depth of five or six feet, providing a chance to swim. In the winter, the park’s tall banks, thirty or forty feet high, would be covered with snow, the hills black with kids on sleds. The pasture was big enough for softball and football fields. Our dads...

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