YAM #6 - The Water Tower
There's an old water tower about two blocks from my old Gary home (up at the end of Indian Boundary (a name that has another story in history)).



When you climb up to its top, you get the best view in the world of Lake Michigan, particularly on a warm, summer night.




To get to the top (well, I'm telling you details from 40-50 years ago, but the tower is still there), first, all you have to do is climb over the security fence(s) (one of which is partway up the spiral staircase, which you just climb around (it means dangling over nothing for a bit, but it's no big deal). The spiral stairs eventually lead to the underside of the tank itself.



There, you find the first trap door. Once you hacksaw the lock off and open the trapdoor, you climb (hand-over-hand) up a vertical ladder that goes up a tube that goes up through the actual water. At the top of that ladder, you open yet another trapdoor and climb out and, voila! you're on top of the World!

Now, once you catch your breath, you have two further options: (a) there's yet another trap door that opens to the water itself (I crawled down this, but have always regretted not going for a swim (don't worry, being half-Swedish, we usually had about 3 baths a day)); or (b) you could crawl down a ladder that went over and down the side of the tank (this was perhaps one of the scariest (and, more importantly, stupidest) things I ever did ... you have the hard, metal surface of the tank about three inches from your face and you have absolutely nothing above you, nothing behind you and (most importantly) ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BELOW YOU! The worst scare was when I got to the end of the ladder and my foot was looking for that last (non-existant) step (ooops! I couldn't get back to the top soon enough .. I can't imagine the brave souls that could actually paint graffitic messages while hanging on for dear life while your buddies would move the whole ladder around the tank - yikes!).

I remember that I must have been taking my first physics class, because I timed how long it took pebbles to reach the ground and then calculated the height using my newly discovered equations ("ess equals one-half aaa tee squared" (in this case, aaa = gee)). Jeezum Crow! What a nerd I was!

I used to go up there quite often by myself to contemplate the Universe. I always wanted to play my flute inside of the tower down by the water (the sound inside the water tower was incredible), but, well, to do that would have put the flute in jeopardy. A few times, though, I went up with some of my friends to share my find (I just left the lock off; nobody seemed to notice that it was missing).

I will always remember one particular night, though. I think that Judy & Susan Anderson's mom (they lived right under the tower - I later dated Judy for a short while) must have called the police one night when Dave Edmundson and I were still on the spiral ladder going up to the tower. I remember that as the cruiser went around and around, Dave and I went around and around on the other side - just like squirrels on a tree. After the third circle, we had run out of tree (so to speak - we were at the first trapdoor with nowhere to go ... trap door, indeed!). I still can't believe our luck, though, in that the cruiser must have decided that noone was there and they left. Yes, our hearts were pounding like crazy. You have to understand that we had rather large expectations laid upon us since I was a kid whose mom was a teacher at Wirt and Dave's dad was something like Assistent Superintendent of the whole Gary school system (Oh, my good friend Dave - who moved to Detroit in his sophomore year - and who was allegedly the guy on the cover of Life magazine riding the horse of Grant's statue in Chi-town waving the Viet Cong flag during the 1968 Democratic convention demonstrations). Good kids, right? (well, this was pretty minor stuff, really).

I remember going to my first class reunion (I think it was our 30th) and the two people I really hoped to see were the first girl I ever kissed (I found out that she had died of a brain tumor, darn it!) and Dave Edmundson. Since he didn't graduate with us, I had no hope of seeing him, but, son-of-a-gun, there he was! It was great to see him again and I have a few other stories I could tell about him, but that's another day. We've lost contact again. I need to do something about that!