Non-momentous moments from life in Libertyville

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Updated: January 23, 2012 4:38AM

In his book A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors, Peter Smith brings us along with him in his dad’s 1962 Chevy Biscayne as he says goodbye to Libertyville on his way to the train station in Glenview, where he’ll board a train taking him to college in Minnesota.

It’s enough to make any reader feel nostalgic for the town where he or she grew up.

“I would be from Libertyville — as much as a Chicago-born-moved-to-the-suburbs immigrant could be — but I would not be part of Libertyville anymore,” he wrote.

But, Smith, now a Minnesota resident who contributes regularly to “Morning Edition” on Minnesota Public Radio and is the author of A Porch Sofa Almanac, does bring readers back there and to the surrounding area, and we do become part of it.

He also shares memories of his first few years living on the South Side and life in Minnesota in A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors (University of Minnesota Press).

These are not the big, defining moments in a person’s life. Rather they’re the funny, awkward, head-scratching times that you think about later and realize they’re a little more significant than you first thought. Such as the warning from a stern, ultra-Catholic aunt that it’s possible to drown in a teaspoon of water.

“You know that little time right before you fall asleep in bed and all of a sudden some little incident comes back to you from years ago?” Smith said. “They’re moments that aren’t really momentous, but you’re just suddenly back in touch with them, and not personally, but psychologically. I think those are really kind of important and wonderful.”

A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors is also part history lesson. Smith describes a Libertyville that was awakening from rural community and becoming a suburb, especially in the story “Leroy.”

In it, he describes the old-fashioned drug store in town, with its soda fountain and old cigar counter, where lifer retail-worker Leroy oversaw day-to-day operations. Eventually, it would move into a strip mall after it was bought by the younger pharmacist.

But, it was the people who made these places memorable, such as Leroy, who “wore short-sleeved, bleach-yellowed, mostly synthetic dress shirts, bolo ties, those trousers guys who didn’t wear suits used to wear to work every day, and comfortable shoes, really comfortable shoes,” Smith wrote. Leroy knew what ailed everyone in town by the inventory he sold and how much of it he sold .

“He was a wonderful character,” Smith said. “That little drugstore was truly a kind of window into the soul of the town and county in a way.”

Smith, who wrote ad copy for many years before becoming an author, said he knew he’d be a writer since the seventh-grade. His inspiration came from the writing of E.B. White, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and a memo on how to write that his dad, former Chicago Daily News and Sun-Times reporter John Justin Smith, brought home for him. His dad stuck it over the wall phone in the kitchen.

Smith was writing so well early on that he received an F on a paper he wrote junior year because the teacher thought his dad wrote it. When John Smith told the teacher he didn’t write the paper, Peter Smith’s grade was raised to an A.

“I think he was impressed and embarrassed,” Smith said. “I think it may have been one of those rare A’s.”