I'm not the only one who remembers
Tucked away in a box on the closet shelf, stashed in a manila envelope at the bottom of a desk drawer, or forgotten in a filing cabinet of miscellaneous paper, inevitably when we sort through personal effects of an estate in this community, it is there. The stack of newspaper clippings from 1979, the kidnapping and murder of Grant Avery.
The Mister and I have been in the auction business for 24 years and I am no longer surprised to find it. Like the piles of papers about John Kennedy's assassination, the attack on Pearl Harbor, or the moon landing, it is all part of our past. We see it all — over and over again. The only difference is the articles about Grant are more personal. It is hard to believe it has been 25 years since he died.
Elsewhere in this paper is a feature story about how his family and some friends address this anniversary. I count myself a member of that group. Grant was our neighbor across the street and he was our friend. It was the easy kind of relationship that a town like Peabody affords its citizens.
He was young and single and if it got a little rowdy or loud over there, we complained. He'd shuffle his feet and say, "OK, it won't happen again." When we needed someone to keep an eye on things while we were gone, we'd asked and he'd comply. He shot baskets in our driveway with the now-Married Daughter and her friends. They were 10. He was a poor shot and broke the window in the second story of our garage. Shortly after we got it replaced, he lobbed the ball through it again. After that it was simply easier to leave it broken.
He was just a really nice kid who lived across the street. He wasn't perfect, but he was easy-going and fun, a good neighbor, and a good member of the community. He was happy to be here and be a part of things. The last summer of his life he was in charge of the July Fourth celebration for the chamber of commerce. The chamber laid excellent plans and things went well until just before the fireworks were to start. In those last moments a major storm rolled in with a vengeance. Others said, "wait," he said, "shoot!" We fired everything in about four minutes, the skies opened up, and everyone headed for the gates. He thought it was the best Fourth ever. As usual, I guess it was.
Never in my life did I expect that anyone I knew and cared about would die as he did. Never did I expect an event like his murder to happen in a town like ours. It was a great awakening for me. I grew up in suburban Chicago where this kind of incident headlined the papers almost daily. But it never touched me. To have this happen across the street from me in Peabody, Kansas, was something that really did change my life.
The headlines in the Chicago papers not-withstanding, I had believed that people who worked hard, did the right thing, and were generally just "good people" got some kind of a pass through life. Until I moved to Peabody I had never attended a funeral. My extended family was still intact. I lost no classmates in automobile accidents, no one drowned in a pool, or had a fatal disease; certainly no one was ever kidnapped and murdered. I must have lived in a fairly tale world indeed.
I was 32 when Grant was killed. Thirty-two years (and I thought I was pretty worldly back then) and I never knew the awful impact of one person's callous disregard for life. It was a hard lesson and there was no blueprint for a response. This was something for which I was not prepared. I was not alone, as those old news articles attest.
There is a reason that in the past 25 years we have uncovered, time after time, the news clippings tucked away in local homes. I used to wonder about them. Why did people keep them? What purpose did they serve? Since they were still on the premises, it's not as if anyone intended to send them to a child, friend, or sibling who no longer lived here. No, they kept them for themselves: Lucy Clausen, Floyd Depler, Mildred Windsor, Dorothy Tate, Jesse Seibel, Josephine McCreary, Louise DeForest, Grace Errett, Dorothy Craig, Ethel Johnston, Fred Smith, Nelle Slocombe, Pat Wood, Dorothy Olin, Hazel McNeil, Bernice Jessen, and the list could go on and on.
I think people saved them because they didn't want to forget. Like me, they sensed the end of a "pass" for this town. No longer was Peabody the safe secure spot we all thought it was. Murder was our wake-up call.
I can't say that I think the world has improved much in the past 25 years. It's a tougher place to be for all of us. But I do wish that the initial lesson hadn't been so brutal, so harsh, and so ugly. It was an unforgettable moment of loss for this community and I know it every time I find those faded yellowed clippings.
— SUSAN MARSHALL
