In Memory

Bill Jenks

Bill Jenks



 
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01/07/13 01:53 PM #1    

Terry Yocks

Billy, we had lots of good times as kids attending Bunsen Grade School, K through sixth. You were a little skinny blond haired kid....just my size!   We sort of lost touch as we grew older and went on to Central Junior High School and BTHS but I always think of you when I am walking in the old neighborhood and pass your house. We had so much fun then.........just like the LITTLE RASCALS!


01/21/13 02:57 PM #2    

Sandra Virgin (Snyder)

Billy was another classmate of mine from Bunsen school.  He was a good looking kid and of course, I had a crush on him at one time or another in my younger days!  I was saddened to hear of his passing. 


01/29/13 07:01 PM #3    

Arthur Mann

I REMEMBER BILLY FROM BUNSEN SCHOOL,WE HUNG AROUND A LITTLE ,HE WAS PROUD OF HIS OLD GUN COLLECTION,HE WAS A GOOD PERSON TO BE WITH.


02/28/18 12:32 PM #4    

Terry Yocks

I am posting this touching memory on behalf of Mark Riesenberger. This is a haibun, a Japanese genre of prose with embedded haiku.

   ON READING OF HIS DEATH

                                       the words dreaming between us,
                                        the eyes of animals upon me
                                        W. S. Merwin, "A Given Day"

I spent a lot of time with Billy in grade school though I can't say we were great friends.  I had no friends.  But he lived one street over, across the alley that was less a connection than a line of demarcation.  Still, there was proximity and a shared love of guns that perhaps onlyten-year-old boys in the 1950's had.  Billy's grandfatherlived next door to him and there were squirrel tails hanging from his porch rafters.  Apparently he sat there and shot them from the trees at the back of the yard. 

 

                   childhood house gone

           but the same old sidewalk

           still takes me there

 

It was then that I decided I would be a hunter and trapper, but in Alaska, and would have a dog named King just like Sergeant Preston of the Yukon on television.  I didn't know then the Yukon was in Canada.  But I did know what gun I would have, chosen from a catalogue Billy had and after long and debated consideration - a 30:30 Winchester Model 94, 26" barrel, polished walnut stock and checkered grip, lever action, blued steel receiver and hardware, gleaming brass cartridges. It would have obliterated squirrels but I would be after bigger game, moose and elk and caribou, and the wolves that hunted them too.

 

Thirty years later I received that gun as a birthday present and never 

once fired it.

 

                    growing old

           the hardest dreams are the ones

           we never were

 

R.I.P. Billy . . . I never knew your dream but I hope you lived yours 

better than I did mine.


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