My Friend Jimmy Carroll

Jan. 22, 2022

My Friend Jimmy Carroll

Jim and I were boys together in a country valley in Missouri during the 1960s. For several years in grade school we were a trio of playmates: Jimmy, my brother Billy and myself, years I have always remembered as a perfect part of my boyhood—weekends and long summer days filled with play, most of it outdoors, and with only the simplest of toys—balls, sticks and rocks, mostly. No playground equipment. No basketball courts, ball diamonds or swimming pools. No sidewalks to walk on or candy stores to walk to. But I don’t think we were ever bored. What we lacked in amenities we made up for with imagination. And, truth be told, most of that imagination came from just one of us—not from Tommy or Billy, but from our neighbor Jimmy Carroll. Jimmy was our Tom Sawyer, the one who was always coming up with some fresh idea to build a game around. It might be an inspiration he got from a TV show or movie. Or something he’d learned from his dad or uncle, or a cousin, or a book, or who knows where. Jimmy always had something new to try. Something about the world he had just learned about and gotten excited over and wanted to tell us about it—to get us excited about it, too. And he would want to work this new enthusiasm into our lives by “playing” it.

We played on weekends  during the school year, but the best time of year for playing was summer vacation, that endless stretch of Saturdays. We would play until suppertime down in the bottom of the valley, in the big yard around my family’s old farmhouse, say “See you tomorrow,” and go our separate ways. Jimmy would climb a hill to his family’s house and Billy and I would climb a hill in the opposite direction to our family’s house. Jimmy would have a Carroll evening and we would have a Beaver evening. The five Carrolls in their new mid-century split-level house on the east hill of the valley and the seven Beavers in our new split-level house on the west hill. Home to our mother’s cooking, the liveliness of siblings, the discussions of parents, to a couple hours of TV and reading, and then to sleep. We would be nearly exhausted from a day of being cowboys, or secret agents, or spacemen, or outlaws. A trio by day, we would each go into our separate kinds of dreams, alone and thinking privately for the first time that day. But even then we had something shared between us—the cool air and musical sounds of nighttime: the whippoorwills, the frogs, the owls, the echoes, the probable ghosts, the possible Indians. Jim and I touched on many of these details when we reunited in our later years, around 2009, after forty years living in separate parts of the country and not in contact. I had been remembering that country,  boyhood life with fondness and leftover wonder all my adult life, and I discovered that Jim had been, too.

I can give a picture of the kind of boy Jim was. After a full summer day of playing and a long summer evening and night like I just described, each of us three boys us would rise gradually from our separate deep sleeps, shake off our dreams, shake off our separateness, have some more of our mother’s cooking, maybe watch some more TV and piddle at some personal hobby or reading, then be ready for another day down at the farm house. By then we were fully refreshed and fully ready for another day as good as the one before, or better.

The fun might start with the ringing of the phone. “That’s probably Jimmy,” one of us might say, and my brother would pick up the phone. And it probably was Jimmy. “We’ll be right down,” my brother would say. Or it might start with a voice ringing uphill from below. “Billllllllll-y! Tommmmm-y!” And we would say, “It’s Jimmy!” I remember the excitement of it. The way we sprang into action, like this was the one day of the year we would see our playmate. Our mother would give one or two of her usual warnings—watch out for snakes, don’t do anything dangerous, don’t play too rough, stay out of that farmhouse, don’t go in the barn—and we’d be off. Running down our steep hill, jumping through the creek, crossing the blacktop road, greeting our friend with some kind of loud call while he was still in the distance, getting his greeting in return, starting the valley echoing. All day the valley would be ringing with boys’ voices.

Here’s the kind of boy Jim was. He had only been gone overnight, the same as us, but he would somehow have filled himself back up with brand new ideas for play. Something he’d heard his dad say. Something he’d seen on TV. Something out of nowhere.

“Did you guys watch Stony Burke last night?”

“We watched Time Tunnel and Get Smart. What’s Stony Burke?”

These are real shows we really watched, but I’m only guessing at which ones we might have seen at a given time. I’m weaving this part of the story out of real details, but maybe details from different years. I do specifically remember that there was a day when Jimmy had just discovered the Stony Burke TV show, and taught us the Stony Burke world. This show aired from 1962 to 1963, when Jim would have been in Third Grade, if am calculating right.

“It’s a great show. It’s about a rodeo cowboy, traveling around being in rodeos. He wants to win the Golden Buckle. He meets all these people and he’s so neat, going from town to town. He wears black jeans, a black jean jacket, a black hat. He always has his own saddle and rope. You tie the rope to the bronco you’re going to ride.” Then a description of how to mount the horse in its corral, how the gate is flung open, the words that are used, maybe some terms for the equipment or the two different ways to hold a rope. Maybe the make and model of Stony’s truck. A mention of the blonde lady he meets. Jimmy would have picked all this up while watching one 30-minute episode. My brother and I had watched the same amount of TV last evening as Jimmy, but we’re not here at the farmhouse pouring out details. We didn’t grasp as much as Jimmy grasped. Our TV watching didn’t excite us and make us restless like Jimmy’s did. And we didn’t have the showmanship and self-confidence he did. Or the drive to see our own enthusiasm duplicated in someone else.

Next thing you know we’re rounding up materials. 

“Doesn’t your had have some rope in the barn?”

“Probably,” says my brother.

“We’re not supposed to go in the barn,” I say.

“If we just go in fast,” says Jimmy.

“We could get hurt,” says Tommy, saying what Mom would want him to say.

“In one stall only,” says Billy, the decider and authority figure among us. “We look quick and we don’t horse around.”

So we cross the creek to the barn. We open one of the outside doors and look around in that one stall for rope, and don’t find any. So we expand our agreement a little and enter a second stall. There we do find some rope. Then we horse around a little. We stay longer than we need to. We hear a car coming down the blacktop road and fear it might be William Beaver, supernaturally aware that someone is in his barn. We leave the barn in a hurry, vowing to never break the law like this again, shut the door with trembling hands, walk away shaking and making such a show of innocence that anyone would have known we were guilty. But it wasn’t my father driving past. We had gotten away with it. Our day of playing wasn’t ruined after all. I think we would have each made a vow at that moment to never do another bad thing. It would be exactly the fresh start, the refreshed joy of boyhood, that we needed to get back on track, to begin our day as rodeo riders.

We might have then hunted down a wooden box somewhere, or a hay bale, anything that could serve as the bare minimum of a pretend horse. Jimmy might have run home and gotten a pair of his dad’s work gloves, because Stony, he just now remembers, wears gloves while riding. That would have been all the props we needed. For hours after that we would have been living the life of Stony Burke, riding broncos, having fistfights, driving a truck, tipping our invisible hats to blonde ladies, riding more broncos. All along the way it would have been Jimmy saying, “What if we try such and such…the way you such and such is like this.” There would be a break for lunch, then another half day in the farmhouse yard and creek and all around the house and around the barn and back and up and down the hill and up and down the pear tree, another half day in our imaginations, experiencing this new version of the adult world, each of us contributing details, all of us actors in a movie as good as any we’ll ever see, but the main creative force of it all being Jimmy.

We had days and summers like that for years. It wasn’t a new genre of play every time. We played a lot of things over and over. I remember a lot of cowboys and Indians—running like horses, using our hands as pistols. A lot of secret agent, a lot of “war,” a lot of spaceman. We played all our favorite TV shows—Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Combat, Sea Hunt, The Man From Uncle. Jimmy would discover one hero after another, and easily make them our heroes, too. David McCallum and Vic Morrow. I can’t remember if his favorite Bonanza character was Little Joe or Adam, but I remember all of us trying to do that roll-and-shoot like Michael Landon. It’s amazing one of us didn’t break a shoulder, throwing ourselves to the ground at a run, over and over, so that we could shoot bad guys while rolling across the grass. I remember how moved Jim was after discovering the Burt Lancaster movie about Jim Thorpe. “He was an Indian, so no one wanted him to be in sports, but he was just too good. He could do everything. Run, long jump, javelin, football. He was the greatest athlete we’ve ever had.” I’m not quoting verbatim, but just catching the gist of Jim’s excitement over Jim Thorpe. As a matter of fact, I’ve never seen the Burt Lancaster movie and never read about Jim Thorpe. Everything I know about this athlete know because I heard it from a boy between the ages of 8 and 10 when I was between 6 and 8.

For awhile after Jim saw that movie, us boys were making javelins out of saplings and the long, wobbly stalks of a weed called Common Mullein. And we did a lot of long-jumping and foot-racing for awhile. In his grade school years, before he had a growth spurt, Jimmy was short. But he was fast. And it seemed to me at the time that pretending to be one of America’s great runners did actually make Jimmy faster. At another time, when Jimmy was fascinated by the Ilya Kuryiakan character in The Man From Uncle (the actor David McCallum), we all did our running like that character did, with our head titled slightly and no up-and-down movement to our stride, an ultra-focussed style of running that made you feel superhumanly fast. It was Jimmy who noticed that running style first, and got all three of us to wish we really did run that way instead of just faking it.

There was the time we made little crosses out of leftover cedar shingles and roofing nails, not because we were religious, but because other people were. We stood at the edge of the blacktop road that ran through the center of our valley and waited for buyers. A nickel or a dime per cross, I’m not sure the amount. We did makes a couple of sales. It was amazing to me that three boys who had never had religious powers before that day could take a few scraps and in one or two minutes create something holy. But we apparently could. I’m almost sure the cross business was Jimmy’s idea, too.

He introduced us to movies, too. Our mothers would take us to the Calvin theatre in nearby Washington. It was Jimmy who got wind of the James Bond movie “Goldfinger” and told us we just had to see it with him. His enthusiasm got into us, and we told our parents the same thing, we just had to see it. And that’s the first movie experience I remember where I felt I had gotten a foretaste of being an adult. If not for Jimmy, I wouldn’t have had that experience until—until I  don’t know when. And having it later wouldn’t have been as good. I wouldn’t have had those years of being a bit pre-maturely mature, a bit ahead of my time.

It was Jimmy who heard there was a Beatles movie, that it was coming to Washington, and told us we had to see it. And the three of us did see it. He had previously introduced us to the music of the Beatles—music that quickly felt like 200% my own, artists who quickly became favorites, and have stayed favorites for life—and now this was almost like seeing the Beatles in person. I would have probably found the Beatles eventually on my own, and seen that intelligently anarchic, sweetly anti-establishment movie at some point in my life, but encountering the Beatles in real time, being part of that awakening as it happened, is an experience I count as one of my formative ones, and I wouldn’t have had it if not for Jimmy Carroll.

Soon after, Jimmy heard about a movie called “Bonnie and Clyde,” and somehow us boys were allowed to see that one together, too. Our parents must have been distracted that week. A movie that might have scarred me for life, but instead just gave me a first taste of difficult art and I think my strongest hint yet, in Faye Dunaway, of what was in store for me as a male. I owe that head start, that foretaste of glory, to Jimmy, too.

We started as boys playing games of imagination, exploring creeks, walking in the woods, swinging on tree vines. Then it was movies and music we learned about and began to internalize together. At some point in the journey it was Jim who taught my brother and I the birds and the bees. I think he had gotten that gospel from his father exactly one night before he passed it on to us—his typical quick grasp and eager sharing. Another thing I would have picked up eventually, I think—but when and where? I can’t guess. 

There are other anecdotes I could share, but I’ll wrap this up now. The story I wanted to tell is that Jim had a boyhood of a certain rich kind, which I know he cherished, because we talked about those days many times after we reconnected 12 years ago. And I wanted to share that the Jim I knew in these recent years, that the friends and loved ones of his adult life knew, this man who seemed to thrive on finding and sharing interesting aspects of the world, was already remarkable in those same ways as a boy. At the time, I knew Jimmy was unusual. I thought of it as: it’s always fun to be with Jimmy. Later, when I would recall my childhood playmate and try to put my finger on what I had liked so much about him, I realized: being with Jimmy made me smarter and gave me more things to love. But it remained mysterious to me that a boy could have those qualities. I tried to understand if he had gotten them from his parents, or if I was remembering him as better than he actually was. It wasn’t until we connected again as adults that I got it. Jimmy really had been unusual in the ways I remembered, because he was that way now, as an adult. And I decided there was no origin story to figure out. Parental influence, the example of uncles and aunts—those might be factors to. But his admirable qualities, I decided were just natural in him, like the superb athletic abilities of Jim Thorpe, or like musical talent—which Jimmy also had.

Jim was gifted. He had precociously good taste—in music, in movies, in humor. He had a talent for finding the interesting detail, remembering it and knowing how to share it. He was able to do this without seeming like a showoff or being a bore. He made himself a transmitter or conductor of enthusiasm. And the way he was fun and enjoyable to be around as a boy was still there as adult. I’m drawing all of these latter day observations from what I saw in his online presence and our private messaging. Jimmy the fun, sharp, enthusiastic kid became Jim the fun, considerate, generous, gracious, wise adult. I’ll always be grateful that we reconnected 12  years ago after 40 years apart. I got to see how my childhood friend turned out, I got to reminisce with an irreplaceable companion of my early years, and I got to be with Jimmy again. It was always fun to be with Jimmy.