King of Valley Junction
Book 1
Chapter 1
(January 1945)
West Des Moines, Iowa
Valley Junction
The cold northwest winds blew against the weather-beaten wooden sign hanging above the Valley Junction train depot. It was January 6th, 1945. There were no leaves on the surrounding trees and little remaining debris in the fields after harvest to stop the gusts from penetrating the consciousness of anyone left standing outside the depot waiting on a train. Valley Junction was the original name of the Iowa town founded on the west side of Walnut Creek and north of the Raccoon River. In the middle of America between Denver, Chicago, Minneapolis, Saint Louis, and Kansas City lie the farm fields of Iowa. The capital city of Iowa, Des Moines, was an ideal location for a railroad junction as it sits in the middle of all the other larger cities. Railroad tracks and steam-powered locomotives began connecting cities in the 1850s and 60s, and Valley Junction was a midway way point the various cars could be changed out, tracks switched, maintenance could be performed, and cargo loaded and unloaded. As Iowa grew into an agriculture powerhouse, tons of corn, beans, hogs, cattle, poultry, and machines of industry were carted back and forth across the state by rail. The train lines also opened up the opportunity for Americans to travel across their own country by rail as passengers with different rail lines offering services criss-crossing the country. On most lines, the passenger cars were connected towards the back, furthest from the engine’s dirty, black smoke belching from the front engine as it chugged along toward its destination. Coal was plentiful in Iowa and easily burned to heat the water that created the steam subsequently powering the engines. The steam engines and cars were loud, dirty, and labor-intensive, needing constant maintenance. It was steady work for decades for local men who mostly lived in the bunk houses south of the rail yard along Fuller Road.
Originally, the Keystone Coal Mine on the north edge of town was the ideal local fuel source for the early steam engines. The bituminous coal the trains burned was dirty. The blackish bitumen itself burns black like tar, too nasty to use except in the poorest of homes. However, every day one could see filthy, indigent children with buckets picking up chunks of coal that had fallen from the boxcars along the rail line. The dirty, black coal hunks were carted back to the shanty homes along the river that still used wood-burning stoves. The Great Depression, as the Tribune called the 1930s, were difficult times throughout America. Iowans fared a bit better than most Americans because many of the farms were self-sufficient. The rural citizens lived in close proximity to food sources. They were reliant upon each other.
Valley Junction was also a union town, and the railroad workers belonged to the Brotherhood of Local Firemen and Enginemen. When a strike broke out on the rail yard in one of the machine shops in the early days, the town almost went bust. The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific line brought in replacement workers, mostly Mexicans and negroes from down south, and fights broke out. The strike lasted months but eventually ended nearly a year later. The writing was on the wall for the members of the city council; the town needed a new image beyond the rough and tumble theme of the rail yard. During the 1930s, hobos would often ride the trains into town and beg locals for work in exchange for food. Many fights also occurred between members of the Brotherhood and bums riding on the trains or trying to set up shanties along the tracks south of town. There would be no encampments started. If the deadbeats didn’t have any money, and there was no work to be had, they were sent along to the next destination. On multiple occasions, the Brotherhood organized several men carrying pipes, bats, and chains to round up the hobos like cattle, putting them in boxcars and sending them along to bigger cities whether they liked it or not. The city council, led by Verne Poonrod, approved the name of West Des Moines in 1938, and the only thing remaining named Valley Junction would be the sign above the depot at the arrival and departure platform.
The larger and capital city of Des Moines, to the east, stretched twenty miles in circumference. It was divided down the middle by the Des Moines River. The insurance and banking industry was growing rapidly in downtown Des Moines. The industrial leaders and business executives that remained afloat during the depression years moved their homes west. Their white-collar office workers then began moving their families west of the river too and away from the railroad tracks, factories, and downtown offices. Soon there was a steady commute between Des Moines and West Des Moines down Grand Ave. There were now more families supported by non-rail jobs in West Des Moines too. These families built their newer homes on the surrounding hills of Clover Hills away from Valley Junction, which was also prone to flooding.
The rail yard property line itself extended south and was shared with Pine and Dixie Aggregates. This was the cement money. Pine and Dixie was the second largest employer in West Des Moines and a significant contributor to the local economy. The crushed-up rock from the surrounding limestone bedrock provided the gravel for rural roads throughout the county as well as all the cement for the roads, sidewalks, and new structures in town. Pine and Dixie Aggregates was also a union company with all their workers belonging to the National Plasterers and Cement Workers Union. The two unions were the lifeblood of the town in the early days. There was guaranteed work for decent wages if a guy could get on as an apprentice. Men were expected to work from noon to midnight, or vice versa, at both the rail yard and the cement plant. They were also expected to strike if it were required and fight if their lines were ever crossed by scab workers. For years there had been no issues. The war kept work steady for the remaining men, and many wives and daughters took jobs in retail and factories in Des Moines while the men were deployed.
The economic depression and rations had been rough on Americans, and Iowans were no exception. Locals traded labor and goods where they could. The farmers were luckier than most as the land provided much of the basics needed for life. The excess fruits, meat, eggs, and milk were often an accepted currency by most in exchange for their labor. The rail yard itself was not exempt from difficult times, and the union lost dozens of men before the war even started. Iowa was already one of the largest pork producers in the world, and tens of thousands of livestock cars passed through Valley Junction going to and from the stockyards of Kansas City and Omaha, further on to Denver and Chicago. Iowa now had over 10,000 miles of track laid crisscrossing the state. The commodities markets were in Chicago, and the ships would load Midwest livestock to be exported further on from the piers on Lake Michigan to the east coast and out to the European war front. The trains headed west contained the same freight that would eventually find its way to the Pacific theater.
At the time the war started in 1941, there were four different railroad companies who took advantage of the convenient geography and steady workforce at the Valley Junction rail yard. The Des Moines and Fort Dodge Railroad (DM&FD), Keokuk and Des Moines Railway (K&DM), Minneapolis and Saint Louis Railway (M&SL), as well as the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad (CRI&P), all had shops at the rail yard in Valley Junction. The Brotherhood of Local Firemen and Enginemen represented all the workers at the rail yard and on the trains themselves. This collective representation came after years of fighting for workers’ rights, strikes, riots, lawsuits, and legal rulings throughout the disastrous economy of the 1930s. The invention of the airplane and the automobile had already signaled the end of the passenger rail as a major means of transportation in America. The war, and the rations that came with it, meant commercial and automobile production stopped in America. The massive resources needed to supply the war effort, and the contracts that facilitated them, moved men and the machines of war across the entire country. It would all be coming to an end once the war concluded. The economic depression of the 1930s meant automobile usage was minimal, and plane rides were impossibilities for most families in Iowa.
The trains and rail yard operated around the clock. Passenger trains loaded with troops would be intermixed throughout the freight cars. The entire war effort could be witnessed simply by observing what was being hauled on the rail cars. The box cars carried bulk freight like corn, beans, and coal. The flat cars carried heavy weapons like tanks and howitzers from the foundry at Rock Island Arsenal. The freight cars carried anything that was dry and could be stacked. The livestock cars carried the hogs and cattle to slaughter. The tanker cars carried corn and bean oil by the thousands of gallons at a time. The figurative noose around the Brotherhood’s neck was the various newer diesel-powered engines supplanting the steam-powered engines at a rate of two to one. The new diesel engines could make it from Chicago to Denver without refueling. That meant one day the war would end, and the troops would need to be shipped back home. After that, eventually, the entire rail yard in Valley Junction would be done.
The rail yard itself lies on the southern side of Railroad Ave. It was built on the grounds where the old wooden race track used to be. Around the time of the first war, a racetrack was built of wood for the initial Des Moines 300 Race. The high-banked track had cars that could reach 100 miles per hour. It was the largest event in the history of the city with over 10,000 people in attendance. Unfortunately, a crash the subsequent year killed a couple of drivers, and the track was dismantled. The original sidewalks on Main Street and some of the buildings in Valley Junction were built with the salvaged wood from the old track. For years, the local trolley ran its one-mile route back and forth from the depot on Main Street to the last stop on Grand Avenue. It took fifteen minutes each way and ran from sun up to sun down. The trolley made sense when electricity came to town a couple of decades previously. The road was not yet paved, and the sidewalks were still made of wood. If one was not careful, they found out about the horse and dog shit on the shoes the hard way. The trolley was now obsolete with the popularity of automobiles. The last scrap metal drive meant the tracks had to be pulled up too. Scrap metal drives took place all across America with junk cars, dead farm and factory equipment, or anything else made of metal that was deemed not necessary, being hauled off and melted down. Main Street was renamed 5th Street with the new street numbering system of West Des Moines. First Street on the east side of town ran parallel with 63rd St of Des Moines. This border was sixty-three streets west of the Des Moines River. This blustery morning, only a handful of passengers stood out on the arrival platform under the sign.
Verne Poonrod was the mayor of the town and the owner of both Valley Junction Pawn and Poonrod’s Barbershop. Just looking at Poonrod, one would never know the depth of his character. He was short, almost 50 years old, still a bachelor, and now balding. He was a natural-born hustler in every sense of the word. He came from the East Coast and had a matching East Coast accent that sounded as if he stepped off the train yesterday. He talked fondly about Jersey, the Big Apple, and Philly as he called them. Sometimes he would read in the newspaper or hear on the radio about the towns, or their sports teams, and he would turn instantly on them and claim Valley Junction as home and identify the lot of them as big city shit holes and the reason he moved to Iowa. No one really knew why Poonrod chose Valley Junction as the place to set up shop.
It was also hard to tell from looking at Poonrod’s current stature that he was once a courier running messages through the trenches in the first war. In France, for all of 1917 and most of the following year, he stepped over countless bodies in every weather condition on the battlefield. It was a gruesome job. Every day he was either running phone lines, humping cans of ammo to the front lines, or carrying the wounded and dead back on stretchers. He lived behind a rifle and bayonet in various fox holes and trenches for weeks at a time in Belgium and France. Days and nights were separated by explosions and gunfire. Countless times a loud whistle would sound to indicate there were just seconds to get his gas mask over his face. The wicked chemical burns, the screaming, dying soldiers, the blood, and the stench were living hell. Firefights were so hot a head could not pop out of a trench without the risk of taking gunfire right between the eyes. The fighting eventually concluded, and it took a couple of months to get back to America after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The memories of the war would never be forgotten by neither man, woman, nor child. It was to be the final war, the great war. It was not.
Poonrod offered shaves and haircuts to veterans and some of the most important people in town among his paying clientele. Every barber shop customer got a free beer out of the refrigerator. It was a kind gesture, and most men took advantage of it and became regulars. The barbershop became the denizen of local gospel. Within the confines of the barber shop, men would smoke, drink, swear, talk about sports, politics, the war, and local affairs. It was the epicenter of activity in Valley Junction for those that mattered. The Christian members of the community despised Verne Penrod and his atheist views of community slightly more than losing than consistently losing the mayoral election year after year to him.
In the very beginning, before the pawn shop and the barbershop, it was Verne Penrod and Jesse Meade who first brought bootleg liquor from Canada and sold it in the parking lot of the rail yard by the truckload. This began the formation of the (Operation) as they boys later dubbed it. They made a small fortune on the bootleg liquor in the early 1920s after the Volstead Act was put in place in 1919 prohibiting their sale of alcohol. Poonrod quit his apprenticeship in the Brotherhood on the rail yard and became a full-time whiskey runner instead. He was a natural-born hustler. He eventually would orchestrate drivers bringing in whiskey by the barrel to Valley Junction. Poonrod then sold it by the bottle, or the mug, to keep prices the highest. He sold it in the parking lot of the rail yard on paydays and everyone in the Brotherhood was either standing in line or knew about it. The officers of the fledgling Valley Junction Police Department were also frequent customers, in plain clothes, of course. If men didn’t have cash, Poonrod would accept pocket watches, knives, and guns for whiskey. This led to lending money and soon enough, he needed a pawn shop to store and resell all the times he had negotiated for bootleg spirits.
The workers on the rail yard, local citizens, and the Valley Junction depot visitors provided a steady stream of clientele for Poonrod’s pawn shop. It became a popular place for the layover passengers to window shop while waiting on connecting trains to waste time. It was warm inside during the winter and kept them out of the rain or hot sun in the summers. There was always a radio playing in the background, and Roofus, the Staffordshire terrier, roaming around inside the store to discourage theft. Poonrod cherry-picked all the items as they came for his personal collection. The remainder were put out on the floor or under glass cabinets for sale. During the 1930s, people became desperate, and Poonrod’s shop filled with furniture, paintings, violins, guitars, tools, coins, jewelry, and guns. He paid the customers 10% of what he estimated they paid for an item new. He figured if customers spent enough time in the store, they would eventually buy something. He tripled the price of every item he paid for and allowed customers to negotiate with him to reduce the price by 10%, maximum. Most actually paid triple the price of what Poonrod paid, no questions asked.
The barber shop was unique and a prudent career move too. Two blocks down 5th Street on the opposite side of the street from the pawn shop lies Poonrod’s Barber Shop. From the exterior, the unassuming two-story building looked like any other small-town barber shop with a twisting red, white, and blue pole out front on the sidewalk. This is exactly the way Poonrod liked it. He used the pawn shop as collateral to purchase the barber shop across the street when the old tenant left the premises. His hunch was he could build up a steady stream of regular customers after finishing barber school simply because he knew so many people in town already. The location was perfect, and everyone needed a haircut. The entire business would be a write-off on his taxes. All the free haircuts he offered in town were still rung up on the cash register as full price after they left. He would add on a shave, shampoo, aftershave, hair tonic, and combs to the receipts. The transactions created many receipts that were an additional way to launder extra cash from the liquor outside of the pawn shop. The barber shop also worked out perfectly over the years and gave Poonrod’s hustling operation a more publicly acceptable facade.
Originally, it was the infamous 1919 World Series scandal between the Chicago White Sox and Cincinnati Reds fixing the World Series that gave Poonrod the idea of one day starting his own gambling book. Once the barber shop was secured, he started running numbers out of the barbershop. He paid out 30 to 1 on picking the final two numbers of the daily attendance at home games for the Chicago Cubs and White Sox games during the summer. The attendance was published in the sports section of the newspaper every day. He also created his own lines on football games in the fall and basketball games in the winter. Poonrod would also only accept bets from people he knew. If other guys wanted to front the money for someone else, that was acceptable, as long as Poonrod was on good terms with the individual placing the bets. What Poonrod understood was the dark side of men. In the good times and bad, great times and terrible, men would drink, smoke, gamble, fight, and seek the comfort of women; all of them sinners plying the trade of the devil in the eyes of the local Christians.
In 1928, Verne Poonrod was elected Mayor of Valley Junction after promising everyone a free bottle of whiskey if they voted for him. It was a close race, but the Christian candidates who crusaded across Iowa and America to ban alcohol lost the local mayoral election to a man they would rather see take his operation and efforts to another country. It was the last year the city was run by a teetotaling mayor and the first year of a new visionary for the city, Poonrod. He never married. There were various women in Poonrod’s younger life that qualified as girlfriends, but Verne Poonrod was not the marrying type. He drank too much, smoked too much, swore like a sailor, stayed up way too late at night, and had too much money for a man with such little formal education. The only women that could tolerate him, he said, were skeezers with their own baggage; too much for most men to carry. Those girls weren’t the marrying type either, but good for the soul, he exclaimed. The good girls were usually found in church or college, and most would find his lifestyle reprehensible, he believed. Poonrod, however, was not against college. It could only make people smarter. There were already too many idiots in the world, he was convinced. College and universities also provided sporting events to gamble on. The good painters all seemed to come out of art schools. The movie stars all went to some acting school somewhere. All the engineers, lawyers, doctors, insurance brokers, and bankers all went to college. The world needed these people. In the college of life, Poonrod had a doctorate in hustling.
All men know the one thing that never goes out of style is women. Not just women, naked women. Every man without female companionship knows the next best thing to a naked girl is a picture of one. Guys will pay money for a picture of a naked woman. The prettier and more revealing the woman in the photo, the more the photo is worth. It will never change. Lascivious photos of sex acts were hard to come by and usually came out of brothels in bigger cities. Many of the working girls would take topless or naked pictures for extra money. The photos would then be duplicated and sold in the brothel as mementos for male customers to remember their girl. The photos eventually made their way into other cities and towns and sold by dodgy characters across America.
Poonrod received his education in smut from Randy Bieler, the town photographer. Not only did he take the local school pictures, wedding pictures, and scenery photos in town, he also took pictures of naked men and women. Bieler lost a big bet on the Hawkeyes and wanted to pawn off one of his cameras for a partial payment. He was in a tight spot because he was in poor health, and his wife left him after she found out about his hobby. He made the big bet thinking it would be a sure win and a down payment on his final voyage to wherever, just anywhere but Valley Junction. When the Hawkeyes fumbled on the four-yard line with thirty seconds left in the game, Bieler almost shit himself. Not only was he now broke on top of his other miseries in life, he was forced to pawn off the Kodak-Graflex Speedgraph to pay for his living expenses.
Poonrod heard many stories from customers of why they were pawning something for money over the years. None of them were good news. Only the customers who were buying had good news stories. Randy Bieler confessed to Poonrod that he was selling naked pictures to an outfit in California that published them in dirty magazines. He would run an advertisement in the Tribune’s Want Ads section stating that he was a talent scout. His business card read ‘Agent to the Stars’ and he was always prospecting for potential models eighteen to forty years of age. He had a small set up with an in-house photo development lab in the back of his studio on Grand Ave. The majority of people that would show up, he would take their pictures and tell them about building a portfolio of photos for a few bucks more, and it ended there. He was an agent to nowhere. The women got some nice photos of themselves as a parting gift. Bierly had no connections, except for the smut.
However, from time to time, if the personality was right— usually broke, skinny, dumb, and credulous— women would be offered some alcohol and talk about the industry in Hollywood as Bierly explained it. Basically, it was cash to disrobe. Most would balk at the idea, except the desperate. Those who objected, he would nod his head, agree with them, and claim that is exactly why he never got involved with the Hollywood types.
Bieler also admitted to taking pictures of naked men, two naked women at the same time, and a few pictures of a guy with his cock in a woman’s mouth. The photos were then sent to a contact at Huckster Magazine in California. They paid freelance photographers for fresh naked pictures: $10 each for bare breasts and $20 for full naked. The sex picture he got $50 for. When his curious wife opened the mail from the editor of Huckster magazine, she found enclosed a copy of the magazine with his published photo and a fifty-dollar check. She walked out the door with his daughter. The big bet on the Hawkeyes would finance his attempt to woo her back with a European cruise ship vacation when the war concluded or a down payment on a car. He was desperate to keep the marriage afloat. A couple of weeks later, when the Hawkeyes fucked him, he hit rock bottom.
Poonrod saw an opportunity in Bieler’s plight. There was no shortage of guys on the rail yard or roaming around town willing to pay between a dime and a dollar each for pictures of naked women. He could sell them out of the barber shop and pawn shop. Unfortunately, for Poonrod, the issue of Huckster Magazine the editor had sent to Bieler was burned by his wife. What he wanted to see was the format the magazine was laid out in. Was it just various pictures of naked women? Were there details about the women? Could guys write letters to them or call them? Were the girls prostitutes? Bieler didn’t know. In a stroke of business genius, not only did Poonrod not purchase the Kodak-Graflex Speedgraph. Instead, instead, he gave Randy Bieler $100 cash. He told Bieler to give his wife half and forget about her coming back. His business model was going to change; Poonrod would be the owner and take over the mortgage, and Bieler would continue to take photos, but only of naked people. If previous clients would come in for family pictures, weddings, or graduations, they would be pigeonholed into a single day of the week to keep up the facade of a reputable business. The new advertisement was changed to read: Adult Female Models Wanted for Photo Beauty Contest and $50 Grand Prize. The contestants signed away their consent and any rights to the pictures in the fine print of the contest rules prior to consideration for the monthly contest. The best-looking girl got the $50, and Poonrod got his first model. She was a surprisingly attractive college-aged brunette from Des Moines with blue eyes. She mentioned her father was a dentist, and that was enough to rule her out. A dentist was college-educated and too smart to have his daughter involved in a ruse involving nude pictures of his daughter. The remaining women that showed up were told a woman had already won for the month. If they were alone and seemed like a potential prospect, Bieler would then inform them of a way to make $5-$10 in the very next hour. Bieler would then show them a forged letter he created that stated he had an agreement with the University of Iowa physiology department to provide nude human photos for anatomy textbooks for the next year. It was not sexual, it was scholastic. Some girls actually fell for it. The girls were told their faces would not appear in the photos, just from the neck down, for educational purposes. He lied.
It started with the first girl through the pipeline, a college girl named Theresa. She had an illegitimate child and big breasts. She accepted $5 from Bieler to take a picture of her big titties she was proud of. She would not take her panties off for any reason, as Bieler himself seemed a bit sketchy, but she knew another girl who probably would. Bieler developed the picture of the college girl posing topless with the big boobs and again sent it in to Huckster Magazine. A $10 check returned a couple of weeks later with the latest copy of Huckster Magazine showing the model among other women in varying stages of nudity. Their model was in one of the back pages of the issue and verified the entire process. To men, it didn’t matter who the women were or where they were from, they were naked. There would be no shortage of men willing to pay money for it. Getting caught running a pornography business could mean jail time and front-page news for the Tribune. It could put his entire operation in jeopardy so there needed to be a cut-out, voila, Randy Bieler himself. Any of the women who reported Bieler suspicious ended up in the Valley Junction Police Department and that investigation would go nowhere fast.
It was also impossible to describe Poonrod without mentioning Domino. Domino Jones was an illiterate, black child of eight or nine years old when Poonrod found him shortly after the market crash of 1929. He had been abandoned by his mother and put on a westbound box car in Chicago with the shirt on his back and his name. He believed his birthday was on Christmas Day but was not sure what day that was. He made it all the way to Iowa but was thrown off the train in Valley Junction with other hobos and free riders who managed not to jump off before it pulled into the depot. Domino was starving and started begging for food. Poonrod saw him vulnerable and desperate in the alley and took him in. Poonrod called the police to see if they could locate a parent. He was then taken to the orphanage on the outskirts of Valley Junction while the search for a relative continued. There was no birth certificate for an eight-year-old Domino Jones from Illinois that could be authenticated. Authorities were not sure if he was from Kansas City, Chicago, or St. Louis as he seemed to have apparently traveled with his mother and another black man on long car rides. He claimed he had no father, but his mother’s friends called him Little Hustler. They were all gone now. The authorities assumed the friends were imaginary and they were unable to locate any official history of Domino Jones. He was more than likely the bastard child of a prostitute or destitute negro woman named Loretta Jones in Chicago. She too could not be located.
There were several negroes and Mexicans living in the bunk houses beyond the tracks, but he was unrelated to any of the colored men. None of those men could properly provide for the child, even if it were theirs. The negro families in town were few. They too were already struggling to make ends meet. None were willing to feed another mouth, especially one without schooling. Poonrod felt sorry for the little kid. The county officials and the orphanage didn’t mind if Poonrod tried to raise him. It would be difficult to get a white family in Iowa to adopt an illiterate negro child. There were several churches in town that would have sponsored Domino, but he would have grown up an orphan until he was an adult. With Poonrod, he ate three meals a day, bathed every other day, and was home-schooled six days a week. Domino got his own bedroom, and they both resided above the pawn shop.
Poonrod had other plans for Domino. They were perfect for each other. It was amazing Domino was even alive. If there were anyone to come to his rescue, Poonrod was the perfect choice. In Domino, Poonrod felt a huge upside. He was bashful and quiet in the beginning. But he learned quickly and was a naturally curious little guy. In the beginning years, Poonrod paid for teachers, library aides, and tutors to provide Domino with a formal education at their kitchen tables. He walked all over Valley Junction with books in his hands from lesson to lesson. Everyone in town eventually connected the dots between Poonrod and Domino. This was a huge benefit to Domino as everyone gave him the benefit of the doubt for his attitude and his effort. He was way behind, but together all persisted, and Domino went from learning to count to 100 and the alphabet to comic books in a single year. He learned addition and subtraction of numbers and basic science and geography the following year. He was surely behind his peers, but making up ground fast.
In the 9th grade, Domino joined the other kids at Valley Junction High School. He learned to read, write, and do arithmetic. It was difficult. He felt inferior because there were no other negro kids in school, and he was behind everyone. The local kids, teachers, and parents all found Domino’s demeanor beyond compelling. The kid almost never stopped smiling. Indeed, Domino was behind when he was merged with the other students at first. But Domino took his studies seriously and honestly felt himself getting smarter as he grew larger. He also learned to wrestle and play football with the other boys. When Domino hit a growth spurt around fourteen, he started to grow quickly. By his junior year, he was the best athlete and the toughest kid in school, hands down. Domino was over six feet tall and almost one hundred and ninety pounds by the time he finished high school in 1939. There was talk of Domino playing football for the Iowa Hawkeyes, but the interest faded when Domino had no identification card. He should have been drafted into the war when it broke out in 1941; instead, the military declined Domino because his status as an Iowan and American citizen came into question. Poonrod never technically adopted him. After an immigration hearing in Des Moines and a testimonial from Poonrod, the West Des Moines Police, his teachers, and other residents who had known him for years as a youth, Domino was finally granted citizenship. He was eventually enrolled in the selective service, but the draft board had yet to call up his number. In the meantime, Poonrod taught Domino everything about the hustling game from the minute he set foot on the property. When he finished high school, Poonrod let Domino run the pawn shop, while he kept cutting hair and focused on the gambling. Poonrod had purchasing a house on his mind, a house outside of town. Domino was a young man now, and he was going to need some privacy. It all depended on the war and if Domino’s number would get called for the draft.
In the big picture, about twenty-five percent of the people in town paid nothing for a haircut. They deserved the compensation somehow in Poonrod’s calculus. About half the customers were regular guys who were just there for haircuts. They paid full price. The cops were in the twenty-five percent crowd that got free haircuts. Some took advantage of the offer, and some had no hair left to cut. The cops had long been customers of the barber shop and pawn shop since the bootlegging days. Most of the cops reported to longtime customer and good friend, Sergeant Fred Cobine, and were originally also from the neighborhood. The relationship worked well. If something was reported stolen and someone pawned it, Poonrod could give them a name and description of the person who brought it in. If it was a local family, the item was returned. It created trust within the community. If it were an item from out of town, the item was kept in the vault, and the cops got a description of who brought it in. If no one claimed it, Poonrod did.
The cops also knew the ancillary benefit of Poonrod’s stockpile of weapons in the basement of the pawn shop; there was a good supply of unmarked guns and knives needed to fight off any mobsters trying to set up shop in Valley Junction. The local cops couldn’t fight off the mobsters by themselves if they ever crossed over Walnut Creek or the Raccoon River on a single night raid. There were not enough guys on the force to contain a couple of busloads of Italian goons if they rolled up wanting to start trouble. If there was going to be trouble in town, it would be on the rail yard. A single call to the pawn shop in the middle of the night could open up Poonrod’s arsenal of used weapons and allow quick access to weapons for guys who would not accept the same offer from the cops. Only the union guys could be mustered that quickly to fight. The cops would need their help to quell any violence of magnitude, and weapons helped even the odds, immensely. Poonrod’s operation kept a pretty good pulse on the town for over twenty years. Through the good times of the 1920s and the bad times of the 1930s, the trains kept running, the paychecks kept cashing, and the city remained alive.
West Des Moines, like all cities and towns in America, was changed by the war. The use of airplanes was the future, not trains. American airplane factories pumped out thousands of airplanes for the Army and Navy. The Tribune had an article noting fighter planes that were currently being built for the war were now capable of going 400 miles per hour. That was almost ten times as fast as a train. Nobody complained about the removal of the trolley and its tracks that used to run down 5th Street, donated for scrap. Everyone Poonrod spoke with during haircuts preferred the new parking lines in front of the shops in Valley Junction already. The war had turned in favor of the Allies, and the likelihood of a victory on both fronts improved immensely over the course of the war. All hoped it would be over soon. When the war eventually expired, it meant the rail yard’s demise. Once there was no need for tanks, jeeps, and planes, those same companies were going to be switching over to passenger planes and cars. The diesel fuel trains would supplant all of the coal-fired engines, and the run from Denver to Chicago could be completed non-stop, by passing Valley Junction altogether. The war was still far from over. We are excited to bring you a new platform that will help you explore the world from the comfort of your own home. Whether you're interested in learning about different cultures, discovering new cuisines, or simply looking for travel inspiration, Kurt Jasa has got you covered. Our team of experienced travel writers and bloggers are working hard to provide you with high-quality content that is both informative and inspiring. Stay tuned for updates on our launch and be sure to follow us on social media!