Tell me everything you remember about a radio. Go. Ten minutes.
Between the ages of six and nine, I lived on the corner of Roys and Cleveland Aves. in Elkhart, Indiana. On my dresser, I had a Lloyd brand clock radio that had been my father's in college. The radio had a faux wood finish and a "flip" style clock face. Each minute, the numbers flipped over with a loud click.
My friend Carrie had a similar Lloyd brand radio and after school we'd tune in to U93 which played top 40 hits and used "We Built This City" by Jefferson Starship as its theme song. We'd turn down the volume when provacative hits came on like "I'm Too Sexy" by Right Said Fred and "Wild Thing" by Tone Loc (that included the lyrics "She got AIDS from doing the wild thing").
I listened to the radio before bed and at least once a week, I'd hear the unmistakable voice of Lt. Dave Shock from Crime Stoppers. Crime Stoppers was a regular spot that recounted local unsolved crimes in detail, and at the end asked residents to call in with anonymous tips. Each segment ended with its theme song--"Crime Stoppers, Crime Stoppers, no one will know your name!"--and the words, "Crime Stoppers does not have caller ID."
I'd lie in bed, paralyzed by tales of cold case murders and robberies. When I finally crossed the room to switch off the radio, I'd run. One night a spot came on about the murder of Kari Nunemaker, a sixteen year old whose murder was still unsolved. Kari was a sophomore at Bethany Christian High School, the Mennonite high school in our town, and had disappeared at a railroad crossing while waiting for the train to pass.
Her body was found a week later in Bonneyville Mill County Park, near the observation tower I'd climbed many times before. Not long after my fourth grade class prepared to take a field trip to Bonneyville Mill, where we would go sledding. I remember feeling terror on the bus, afraid I would run over a body under a snow mound as I sailed down the hill on my plastic sled. Kari's murder hit the Mennonite community hard, but I was the only Mennonite in my class and I don't think that anyone else understood the significance of the place.
This year, seventeen years after Kari's death, a 58-year-old man was convicted of the crime, primarily on DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence in California for rape.
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3 comments:
powerful story, then and now. i wonder, how did you hear about the solving? (over the radio?)
It's interesting how you morphed easily from music to crime reports. I would love to hear you linger longer on how the music made you feel, what, of it, you carried in your head, your heart, and why--
I've often thought an interesting way to organize a memoir might be around songs that were important to us as we were growing up--each chapter would riff off of the song in some way--
A few months ago, I read Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time by Rob Sheffield, a former contributing editor at Rolling Stone and a current staff writer at Blender. The memoir chronicles his relationship with his wife who passed away a few years into their marriage. Sheffield uses 15 minute mix tapes that he and Renee had exchanged as a framework for the memoir--each chapter begins with a track listing from a tape.
It wasn't the best book I've ever read, but it does get me thinking about innovative modes of organizing a book of memoir...
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