The Beaverdale Hillbillies

I should have recognized the signs from day one.

We’d just moved to Des Moines, where my dad had recently taken a job at a private architectural firm after being passed over for promotion at the Highway Commission (now the DOT) back in Ames.

Our new home was a typical 1960s two-story, four-bedroom, 1-¾ bath rectangular block with attached two-car garage. The vinyl siding was painted a drab olive green, and beige shutters complemented the first-story, tan-brick facade. It was sparsely but tastefully landscaped and had a manicured front lawn. This was July of 1969, and I was nine years old.

The neighborhood had been recently carved out of a holdout farmstead in an established part of Des Moines called Beaverdale. The area featured quaint, post-WWII homes, built on generous lots and surrounded by mature oak and cottonwood trees. They were referred to locally as “Beaverdale Bricks,” not because of their shape, but from the material used to build them. But our newer neighborhood consisted mostly of two-story, vinyl-sided houses like ours, interspersed with the occasional split-level home.

The trees in our neighborhood, like the houses, were younger and smaller than those in the surrounding area. Our new front yard was highlighted by a 20-foot pin oak that dated from the home’s construction four years earlier.

The house directly across the street was a different story.

A mirror image of our own, it was painted white with dark brown shutters and a white-speckled, puce-colored brick facade. But the similarities stopped there.

The small sapling tree in its front yard was barely 10 feet high and was missing its lower branches, which appeared to have been ripped off. Most of its leaves were missing. The juniper bushes looked trampled. There were bare strips of dirt in the lawn on either side of the double-wide driveway. One of the screens on a second-story window was torn away and hung from its frame. The open garage door revealed that half of the space was filled with boxes, clothes, toys, and other various household items: There was barely room in the two-car garage to park one vehicle.

Those indications alone should have been red flags. As it turned out, they were just the tip of a runaway trailer-trash iceberg.

In the next few weeks and over the coming years, I was to fully experience the family we disparagingly referred to as the Beaverdale Hillbillies.

I soon learned that they were transplants from St. Paul, Minn. Of course, they were rabid Twins and Vikings fans. To anyone who would listen, they rambled on (in their odd Minnesota accent) about the heroics of Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Bill Brown, Fred Cox, and the Purple People Eaters.
 
They also brought a passion for professional wrestling with them from Minnesota. Religiously, the entire family sat transfixed around the television Saturday mornings, cheering on their favorite wrestlers. None of them believed it was fake. Broken furniture and gouged walls bore witness to the wrestling holds and throws the kids practiced on each other in the house.

The father worked at IBM and drove an enormous Cadillac sedan, which he parked (mostly) on the driveway (the source of the grassless dirt strips). The two-car, one-space garage held an Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser “Family Truckster” station wagon, with simulated wood-grain paneling and distinctive tinted-glass “skylights” along the upper edge of the roof line. I watched mornings as he walked to his car carrying a cup of coffee and a briefcase. He wore the typical IBM “uniform” of dark suit, white shirt, skinny conservative tie, and black wingtips. But what stood out like sore thumbs were his white socks; they were a dead giveaway to his Hillbilly genetics.

The mother – the kids affectionately called her “Minnie” – was a small, wiry, foul-mouthed woman with teased hair, dyed jet black. She was rarely without a bottle of Pepsi in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other.

There were four children in the family: a devious, conniving boy a couple years older than me; a gangly, aloof, clumsy boy my age; an athletically gifted boy a couple years younger. The youngest – a tom-boy girl who could seemingly skip rope all day long – had an attitude and potty mouth just like her mother. They all used slang and poor grammar that was out of place in our educated, middle-class neighborhood.

Minnie did her best to discipline her unruly, hyperactive brood, but with little success. I’d hear a door slam in time to see one of the boys racing down the front walk, Minnie trailing behind, waving a broom. As he disappeared around the corner of the house, she’d stop, shout “Wait ‘til your father gets home!” and retreat back inside, mumbling “Damn kids” under her breath while she locked the door behind her. The kid inevitably would climb up on the roof and pry the screen off a window to get back in the house. She was famous for declaring, “You kids are giving me a sick goddamn headache!” She’d deliver the line with the ever-present cigarette dangling from her mouth, Pepsi in hand.

Minnie kept a small broom closet in the kitchen stocked with several 8-packs of 10-oz. bottles of Pepsi: She limited the kids to a couple of bottles a day, but I suspected that nobody was counting. She baked every week, and there was always a dented aluminum pan of iced chocolate cake and a chipped ceramic jar of chocolate-chip cookies on the counter. The cake never survived more than a few neat slices before the kids started attacking it with their hands, and it became a crumbled chocolate mess by the end of the week. Same with the cookies: the bottom half of the jar was lined with broken, smashed pieces.

It seemed obvious why the kids were so out of control. Sadly, the correlation between sugar, caffeine and hyperactivity apparently was lost on their parents.

The inside of their home was decorated in “Early Montgomery Ward.” A huge acrylic painting of a multi-masted sailing ship on a pitching foam-green sea hung crookedly on the living room wall. It was flanked, asymmetrically, by two equally crooked plastic, fake-candle wall sconces. The couch had worn, stained cushions and scratched knotty pine arms. The walls of all the rooms were sloppily painted in mildly garish colors; paint splatters marked the stucco ceilings where they met the walls.

When they moved to Iowa, they’d left behind an “Uncle Willie” back in Minnesota. He was a character straight out of a Northwoods Dogpatch who eerily resembled Grandpa Munster. He made figurines out of wire clothes hangers and old Grain Belt beer bottle caps, and his tacky statues adorned the end tables in the living room.

I got my full indoctrination to the Beaverdale Hillbillies a few weeks after we moved in. My parents were going on a weekend church retreat and arranged for me to sleep over with our new neighbors.

That evening at dinner, as food was being passed around the Hillbilly kitchen table, the youngest girl reached into a bowl of creamed corn, grabbed a handful, and slapped the gloppy mess down on her plate, sending sauce and kernels flying. She then handed me the dripping bowl. Nobody batted an eyelash.

After dinner, all of us kids went downstairs to the basement, where they had a pool table. Of the six original pool cues, only two remained unbroken. None of the cues had tips. The soft acoustic tile ceiling over the table was peppered with dozens of blue chalk-colored divots where the kids had jammed the cues, when they weren’t using them as weapons on each other.

That night, I shared a bed with the gangly Hillbilly boy my age. I woke in the morning to discover the back of my pajamas were soaked all the way from my butt to my shoulders. At first I thought I’d peed myself. But the front of my PJs were bone dry. I climbed out of bed, grabbed my clothes, and walked down the hall to the bathroom, where I used a washcloth to wipe myself off before getting dressed. Soon, all the Hillbilly kids got up, revealing their morning ritual: After changing out of their wet clothes and stripping the sheets from their beds, they threw them in a pile in the hallway where Minnie gathered them up to haul down to the basement to launder.

Then they flipped their mattresses.

Given their steady diet of sweets and soda, it should have come as no surprise that they all wet the bed. Needless to say, I was never so happy to see my parents when they returned home from their retreat later that day.

That winter, I witnessed another Beaverdale Hillbilly phenomenon: The morning after Christmas, there stacked in a heap on the curb in front of their house, was a huge pile of broken toys.

I’m sure there are more Beaverdale Hillbilly horror stories from those days, but you get the picture. After my siblings and I eventually moved out of the house and went away to college, I think my “empty nester” parents were hoping the Hillbilly kids would do the same, leaving the neighborhood to a little much-deserved peace and quiet. Sadly, shortly after we left, their kids started having kids of their own, and frequently dropped them off with grandpa and grandma to babysit. The youngest girl was the last to move out: She got pregnant, got married, had a kid, got divorced, and moved back in, all in the span of a single year. And so the Beaverdale Hillbilly saga continued…

My parents sold their house and moved to the suburbs.

(c)2011 Thom Burns