Recipes For Living

Meet Police Chief, Marty Duffus, who tells about his life as follows:

I was born in the small community of Kellogg, Iowa, the baby of the family. My brother and sister were adults when I was born. Mom was a stay-at-home mother/bookkeeper/accountant for Dad’s Amoco tank wagon business.

I grew up in a wonderful time and place. Every kid in Kellogg could run all over town – there was no fear of being abducted. However, we learned respect because in our community most moms were at home, and each was quite capable of enforcing discipline, which had the approval of every other mom and dad. That curtailed some of our mischief.

Kellogg is built on a hill, at the top of which was the school and water tower, at the bottom was Skunk River. In the summer everybody played on the school playground; in the winter, we went sliding on Washboard Hill, which describes its surface. We broke more sleds on it than you could count. When that happened, we used hoods off cars in the junkyard. Eight of us could ride on a hood. The problem was that when we went over one of the wash-boards, we were pretty much airborne, and we’d end in the creek at the bottom of the hill. We would usually break through the ice and have to go home and change clothes. We also rode aluminum grain shovels, sitting astraddle the handle, and down the hill we’d go. That was a blast! These sessions ended when the noon whistle blew. Every kid went home for lunch.

Several kids had motorcycles. I had my first one at age 11. When there were 15 or 20 of us kids who had them, the town built us a motorcycle track. There was an old dump no longer in use, and in 1972, the city turned us kids loose to clean it up. On that land, they built a motorcycle track, probably a mile long with jumps, hills for climbing, and trails through the trees. That is where we bikers spent Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The track existed until about 1975, when the city realized it could get sued. They closed the track, which was a terrible day for us kids.