I arrived on the Solon scene in the early 1980s, fresh out of the Army and ready to make a new start as the owner of the town’s newspaper, the Solon Economist.
Between living and working on the two blocks Solon boasted as downtown, I often ran into Bob Morris of Bob’s DX fame. You couldn’t miss Bob, or more accurately he couldn’t miss you. With an equal mix of intelligence, playfulness and lunacy, Bob baked up more than one lively conversation.
“Hey Fleckenstein! Come, have a soda,” he’d say to me, making a good natured, even if a little silly, play on my last name. The soda machine on the outside vended to the general public, 65 cents a can. But insiders got access to Bob’s private stash: cola, root beer and orange crush in ice cold, 10-ounce bottles. These were only a quarter each if you got to pay for it. Mostly Bob sprang for the two bits, at least the first bottle.
As a result, I drank more than a few sodas and I got to know Bob well. I can say with some authority that he was never in a bad mood or spoke poorly of anyone. The only thing he disliked was silence, and he wasn’t shy about breaking one.
Bob opened for business early while the rest of the town was just getting up including me in my apartment just two buildings away. In these quite moments he’d walk into the middle of the street and sing with a full throated, deep chested vibrato that rattled windows clear to Short St. (the longest street in town). He sang opera, at least that’s what I think it was.
But as the cars began rolling in Bob got busy filling tanks, checking oil, airing up tires and washing windows — the DX may have been small but it was gigantic on service — the opera singer became the gas station attendant.
Besides the customers, a klatch of kibitzers, old men of the community and at least one dog, drifted over to take a spot in the shade. The men drank pop, the dog got a biscuit from a jar Bob kept in his small office. No tidbit of gossip was too small to chew for this crew. For lack of anything else, the fall back topic was weather. “Looks like rains coming,” someone would offer in no particular hurry from under their seed corn hat, and a choir of old men, gowned in bib overalls, responded with a lazy “yup, yup.” Or a “yip, yip” in case of the dog.
But it was a rare day when it would get to that because there was always plenty to gab about.
I’ve joked that there were three forms of communication in Solon: television, telephone and tell it at Sue’s Beauty Salon. But the ladies had nothing on the men when it came to hashing over the minutiae of the insignificant. And it was an easily entertained group. Bob calling me “Fleckenstein”, for example, was good for a knee slap and a chuckle.
Marijuana was the topic of discussion on another occasion. Bob claimed to never have seen marijuana much less smoked it. A farmer named Vince volunteered to fix what he saw as a deficit in his education. Vince recalled the days when hemp was grown as part of the WWII effort. And he knew the ditches where it still grew. So, one day in August he dug up a large specimen, threw it in the back of his truck and brought it to the station.
Bob stuck it in a bucket and he proved to have a green thumb. It started out big and grew bigger. If anyone challenged him for growing something illegal, he’d shrug it off, saying it was “just a sunflower that hadn’t bloomed.”
Come fall the crew’s attention turned to high school football, and the plant was unceremoniously tossed into a small square of dirt someone forgot to pave on the edge of the lot.
The seasons passed.
A few Novembers earlier, Bob offered a pizza party for ten as an auction item for the Dollars for Scholars Banquet. At first it was not a big deal but somewhere over the years it got to be famous. At least one year the bidding went to $10,000!
In December, Santa arrived at the American Legion, where Bob was the commander.
In April, Bob and spouse Kay took in a university athlete, who didn’t have the wherewithal to make it home for spring break. Besides room and board, Bob gave them a job. At least one of his apprentices, Owen Gill, went on to play pro football. “Bob and his family couldn’t have been more inviting,” Owen recalls, “And I learned so much about car mechanics, it served me well for years to come.”
Memorial Day, Bob flipped pancakes at the Volunteer Firemen’s Breakfast. It was a fund raiser Bob started, and over the years it grew into the granddaddy of all breakfasts, serving several thousand meals in one morning.
Early the next summer no one noticed at first the unusual weed that sprouted up on the grave of last year’s pot plant. But soon it grew too big not to be noticed. This time Bob identified it as a marigold, named it Mary Jane and he kept it watered all summer long. The plant grew, as did its notoriety. People, including soda-drinking sheriff deputies, asked Bob if he worried about being arrested. “Why,” he’d respond, “because of Mary Jane, she’s just a marigold?”
Then one day in late July a car pulled in and a man rolled down his window to ask directions. The license plates on the car revealed it be a government car from the state of Illinois. While Bob was flailing about giving directions, the entire soda gang could see that the wayfarers eyes were focused on the bushy, waist high plant with the distinctive fingered leaves.
Say, those are some very unusual plants you have there,” the stranger said and asked, “What is it?”
“Oh, you mean Mary Jane, she a marigold,” Bob answered.
“Doesn’t look like a marigold to me,” the stranger offered but Bob assured him it was. “It’s what they call a hybrid.”
We’ll never know exactly what the stranger thought about Bob and the “marigold”. We do know that the plant disappeared that very night. And we can only speculate that somewhere in Illinois, someone smoked Mary Jane and talked about the crazy small town gas station he stopped at in Iowa.
Bob passed away recently.
If I prove good enough to join him when my time comes, I’ll know I’m there if someone calls out, “Hey Fleckenstein, you want a soda?’