AreWeThereYet
Well-Known Member
That's about when I first remember seeing them around there. I'm not sure a lot of those guys had a lot of money. The neighbors kind of liked having them around. After the practice got established for years nobody thought much about it until Brian Ferentz lived there. Once pointed out, it was clear the athletes didn’t belong, but a number of people have tried to make it into more of an issue than it was.
I am familiar with the area. My schizophrenic brother had lived in Pheasant Ridge for 25 years until he finally moved out just a few weeks ago to live closer to my sisters in Cedar Rapids. Much further back, I was in the sixth grade when our family lived there for a year, in 1974. My father couldn’t keep it together well enough to hold a steady job, and my brother was just out of University Hospital after being hit and run by a drunk driver. He was a Senior music major when it happened. At that time, they had just built Pheasant Ridge and the other subdivisions didn’t go out quite that far in the mid seventies. Lots of blank streets with no houses out there.
It wasn’t so bad to live there. Wasn’t so great either. It was new and clean at that time. Coralville Elementary was a lot better than the tiny under-funded schools I had been in before. There was a lot of community stuff you could get signed up for, through the University. I remember taking karate classes with other kids somewhere around the athletic (or medical) department.
There were some messed up people around there, even then. I made friends for a couple weeks with a kid down the hall from us. It went OK until he told me about the hole he had drilled in the bathroom wall so he could watch his mother and sister pee. That friendship ended abruptly. No I didn’t want to watch through the hole. Even in the sixth grade I was like, “umm… major problem here…” There was the Jewish family that didn’t let their little girl out to play, ever, and were never home. She would stand at the window and yell at the other kids all day long. People would stick their head out the window and say, “Could you shut up every once in a while. Just for a little bit.” The biggest fifth grade motor mouth in the history of mankind. Her parents would yell at her to shut up when they got home. The parents were hardly ever at home, just the fifth grade girl, all alone jabbering out the window all day long. Than there was my nemesis, the bus stop thug. It was a short black kid with a major attitude. His father and older brothers regularly beat the tar out of him, so he was going to take it out on somebody. My chubby country boy butt was lowest on the bus stop pecking order, so I was target practice. Problem with him was he wasn’t out to just bully, he wanted to do as much damage as sixth grader could do. The bus driver literally grabbed him by the back of the coat and hauled him off of me one morning. The kid kept flailing away at the air in a possessed rage. We eventually arranged for the bus to pick me up at the corner of Melrose & Mormon Trek. My father walked me down there, when he felt so inclined. Which was about once or twice a week. Other days I ran.
Oh, those were the days…. Sorry, got sidetracked there.
Last edited:
