Putting to Rest the Ghost in the Ghost Town

I found an old crush from elementary school. I didn’t find him on Facebook. I did it the old-fashioned way. I road my bike passed his house seven times a day until one day he finally came out to get his mail and I said, “Warren? Warren Beatty? Fancy meeting you here!”

Okay. Not really. That’s the OLD old-fashioned way. I internet stalked and I found my first Asian crush with the famous American actor’s name when I was doing research for a manuscript I was writing. I was hovering over a very charged memory and I needed to find classmates from Selser Elementary who could remember our former teacher’s name. She was murdered.

I had written to the largest newspaper in the area, The Springfield Union-News, that might have the story in their archives but without her name nor a ballpark estimate on dates, they couldn’t help me. The school closed in 1972 when Westover Air Force Base closed, so I couldn’t contact school staff. They were long gone.

The only student I could remember from elementary school was Warren Beatty. I had to find Warren if I stood a chance at getting the story from the archives. Hopefully, he would be able to recall her name.

The details of our teacher’s murder are still in vivid memory, however, I’m not positive of their accuracy. I wanted to ask Warren if I was remembering everything correctly. Did the school really bring in a police officer and two school officials to our classroom and explain to us the details of how she was murdered? Did they really tell a room full of nine-year olds phrases such “estranged husband” “waited for her to come home” “hid in the bushes at night with a hammer” “pool of blood” “repeated blows to the head” “found by her son”?

How I tracked down Warren, which is hard to do on the internet when searching for someone who shares the same name as a famous actor, is that I found his father’s obituary. It was a sad and happy find. His dad died, but I found Warren. The obit listed the surviving children as Warren Beatty and Wendy Beatty. That’s them. It listed Warren’s hometown in Maine.

I searched the name of the hometown plus his name, and found a video of a town hall where a Warren Beatty was to give a presentation. I watched the video, hoping that when they panned over to the guy named Mr. Beatty, that it would be an Asian guy with no trace of an accent.

It was him! A much older version. A version I would not guess was the same age as me. A version that looked like someone older, wiser, and more successful than me. Not to mention more mature.

I “advance searched” him and found his email address. I sent him an email and finally we got to talk this morning.

I can still recognize his spirit in his voice. Time has not taken that away or changed it. He is still just as wonderful to talk to as I remember.

We talked about the murder of our teacher and how the school handled it. He remembered different parts of the story, but none of them contradicted my memories. They only jogged his. But not all the way. He couldn’t remember the teacher’s name either.

“Was it Mrs. Stewart?” I asked, hoping he’d say yes. But he said that didn’t ring a bell. He couldn’t even remember that Miss Robeck was our replacement teacher’s name. I searched all the Miss Robecks in the United States and none of them panned out.

He said this reunion opened boxes he hasn’t opened in his mind in decades. He remembered details I’d forgotten. I remembered details he’d forgotten, like the name of the big hill we used to go sledding down. Radar Hill. I told him I used to ride by his house on 44 Pendleton Road to see if he was outside playing. I’d act like I was just passing through and we would go inside and watch I Love Lucy reruns.

He remembers the walk to school being very long and uphill both ways. But I have had a chance to go back to Westover Air Force Base and the walk was short. “Couple of long blocks,” I teased him. “Flat as a pancake.”  Warren hasn’t ever been back to Westover after his family moved to another Air Force base. This phone call was his first trip back.

I described for him what it looked like the last time I went back in the late 1980’s, after the base had been reopened. I was dumbfounded to find that the street signs were not as I remembered. Davis Street was supposed to be to the left of the security gate, not the right. Surely I couldn’t have warped the map in my memory that much! But the guard explained to me that all the street signs were taken down when the base closed and put up in different spots when the base reopened.

The school still stood. Empty, but not boarded up. The houses were neglected, vandalized and all the windows and doors were boarded up. We were both frustrated that they weren’t sold as low-income housing, as was the case with other bases we’d lived on. What a waste to just let them rot.

The dirt road I used to take home to avoid being beaten up every day after school by the infamous “Leslie” was still there. (I didn’t change her name. She deserves to be ratted out.) I walked down it to find my old house and passed Spooky Trails, a patch of woods with bike trails carved through it. The bike trails were invisible in this little ghost town. These woods hadn’t seen kids’ bikes in decades.

There’s something very sweet about finding Warren Beatty, even if he doesn’t remember me. We share the same memories and experiences that are specific to a very short piece of our childhood. It was like being given an old photograph of yourself that you’d never seen because the album had been lost. All that remained was this faded snapshot that we were able to exchange with each other in this phone call.

We really enjoyed each other, as we would likely have done all these years, had we had the luxury of growing up rooted in one town.

I wanted to write about the story of the murdered teacher because it haunted me. When I returned to the place where it happened, it was a ghost town. The details of the memories have shifted around, as had the street signs. The base was closed and only part of it had re-opened. You really can never go back, as they say. Not completely.

Maybe I thought that by finding her obituary, or the news article about her murder, it would be the equivalent of seeing her dead body so that I could finally bury her. I’d be able to confirm the images, mourn the loss of my teacher, and let go of those phrases that swirled around in my nine-year old brain. I searched and I found something so much more healing than what that proof could have given me.  Thank you, Warren. For you, boxes were opened. For me, they were finally closed.

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