The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Alaska Bob and I were swapping stories last night, one I told about the bartender in Jeno’s (now Jimmy’s) in Stanwoodopolis calling the cops when she thought we were laughing a little loudly, something hard to do in the best of times in that town, which reminded him of a visit to Pekin, Illinois back about 1980. “I was having a beer in the Holiday Inn lounge,” he reminisced. “Only three guys at a table across the room and me at the bar. They were all agitated about the name of their mascot being changed, getting a little heated.”

Pekin apparently was named for their sister city, supposedly a direct line through the center of the earth to Peking, something another Illinois town believed had similar to its namesake Canton. Probably they had different surveyors but for the point of this story, let’s not worry about the veracity of lines through the earth’s core. The point is that Pekin had adopted for its mascot names, the Chinks. And even as early as 1980, some liberal snowflake pre-Woke yahoos had taken offense at using a racist slur for their teams’ names. The Chinks. Who’d have thought anyone would mind? Down the road the roller skating emporium was called, amusingly enough, the Chink Rink. All in good sport, eh?

The boys across the lounge wanted to know what Bob thought of this ‘mess’, changing the hallowed name of their beloved mascots. And Bob avowed as how it didn’t bother him, might even be a sensible move, times even then being what they were. This, needless to say, provoked the Chink lovers and a brief but long distance argument across the empty lounge ensued, neither backing down until finally the leader of the group who mentioned he was the mayor of Pekin, said he was going to call the police if Bob didn’t shut the hell up. Bob could see the handwriting on the wall, mandarin maybe but translatable, diplomatically stated that he would finish his beer and be on his way, nice talking with y’all.

In 1981 Pekin High School changed its name to the Pekin Dragons. Who knows if the Chink Rink bowed to the liberal crybabies? Not if the mayor had anything to do with it! As for Canton, until 1932 they were the Plowboys then the Little Giants named after an International Harvester tractor. And Peking, China? Your guess is probably better than mine but I’m hoping it was the Rednecks.

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