Novel depicts life in Old Shawneetown in the '50s

</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[William Hayes has written two documents that are significant to him and they could not be more different.

One was a report on how to accomplish a rendezvous in space he co-authored with astronaut Buzz Aldrin that figured into the July 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. The other is his recently published novel "Dreams are Forever" about growing up in Old Shawneetown in the 1950s.

"I was raised in Shawneetown in the 1950s. It was a place where a boy can see a lot of adventures, a lot of things happen and there is a lot of excitement on the river," Hayes said.

Hayes' environment changed dramatically after leaving the historic river town for Southern Illinois University, Northwestern University and landed a job with McDonald Douglas in St. Louis, Mo. That company has since merged with Boeing. With the company Hayes participated in the Gemini manned space missions, the Apollo moon landing, Space Shuttle program and the International Space Station.

He had various jobs involving parts of space craft fitting together, software development for navigation and control of the space shuttle and more recently sheduling and budgeting personnel programs.

"It was more fun in the early years with McDonald Douglas. For the Gemini program they were having trouble trying to figure out how to rendezvous and then Kennedy decided to put a man on the moon," Hayes said.

Buzz Aldrin was young pilot who attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his doctorate thesis on how to do a rendezvous in space.

"Buzz Aldrin later became one of the first men on the moon. Buzz and I wrote a paper on how to do a rendezvous," Hayes said.

"July 1969 with Apollo 11 was the most exciting time in a lifetime as a person involved in that career."

Growing up in Old Shawneetown with the river, the characters, the rough and tumble nightlife, radios playing The Platters and Elvis Presley, was also exciting to Hayes. Many of the characters he knew found a way into his new novel.

Hayes main character in the novel, Dak Leventhal, stumbles upon a mystery based on Hayes' own experience.

Hayes and a friend were poking around on a section of eroded river bank when they noticed some planks sticking out about 6 feet underground.

"We dug into it and found an old wooden coffin," Hayes said.

As teenagers, they couldn't resisting peering inside. They believed they would find a skeleton, but were surprised by what they found.

"It was filled with mud," he said.

Digging through the mud they did find a piece of skull bone, teeth, a suspender buckle and a piece of leather that bore the date of 1854.

"We thought it had been there since the Civil War," Hayes said.

The two did not report having found the grave to authorities.

"We took a little bag and took the suspender buckle, leather and teeth. I told my dad about it and he said, 'Get that stuff out there. I don't want that here.' We stuck it out in the storage shed," Hayes said.

"My friend asked if I still had it in my garage, but I don't have it any more."

In Hayes' plot the boys uncover the grave and come to the conclusion it is linked to activities of the Old Slave House where slaves were used legally to operate the Equality salt works. There are also accounts of freed blacks being held there as prisoners and sold back into slavery.

Hayes was born in 1939, just after the catastrophic 1937 flood that caused most of the town to relocate two miles west. His parents, Howard and Hazel Hayes, raised him, his brother, Jim, and sister Dorothy. He was also close to his cousin, Emma Lou Mitchell, of Harrisburg.

"It was a period of dramatic events. The Great Depression was about to come to an end, then there was the great flood when the water actually went over the levee. There was World War II and then the glorious '50s with peace and prosperity when a lot of teenage boys had opportunities for adventure. There was always something going on on the river," he said.

He remembers the luxury river cruise boats visiting and playing calliope music.

Old Shawneetown was famous for its nightlife and the trouble that happened inside them. Camp Breckenridge was about 15 miles on the other side of the river in Kentucky. It remained active until the late 1950s.

"A lot of soldiers were stationed over there. On Saturdays and weekends there were a lot of soldiers through Old Shawneetown and there were six or seven taverns. A lot of soldiers mixed with the local people and maybe the rougher element of the local people. There were a lot of fights, fights with knives," Hayes said.

Most of the fights seemed to center on a lack of women.

"The soldier boys came to Shawneetown looking for companionship of the female variety, but there were not enough females to go around. I think they ended up drinking more than finding females, drinking and fighting," he said.

One popular watering hole was Logsdon's Tavern.

"As a teenager they had the best catfish you could get anywhere. They would have a live band on the right side of the building and a large audience of soldiers," he said.

It was in the 1950s when the bridge was built over the river. Prior to that two ferry boats, the Guy Lamber and Margaret Jay took people and vehicles across.

"Children could cross the ferry for free. There was a good spot across the river to fish in and there was a spot that was good for earthworms," Hayes said.

There was a spot on the Illinois side called the Uppers.

"The Uppers was a stretch of sandy beach outside the levee north of town. It was a good place for swimming and you could walk a long way upriver, get a good, big drift log and float downstream on them," Hayes said.

The cover of Dreams are Forever is a painting of a boy at the Uppers which is a recreation place of the past. Silt began settling and grew until it began an island that then merged with the beach of the Uppers.

"Most of the Uppers is like much of the rest of the town, it only survives in the memories of the people who lived there," Hayes said.

"Dreams are Forever" is available at Amazon.com and Hayes has been in contact with Barnes and Nobles to have them available there.

-- DeNeal receives e-mail at bdeneal@yourclearwave.com.