Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6

by Paul Hutchens

  “What angels?” I asked Little Jim, looking skeptically at the Sugar Creek Gang, which certainly didn’t look like angelic beings.

  We got to the bottom then and didn’t have a chance to finish what we were talking about, not until we were in the Planetarium.

  The big room where the planetarium machine sat was round and seated hundreds of people. In the center was the craziest-looking man-made thing I ever saw, looking like a skeleton with two heads, one at each end, and with eyes all over it. It also reminded me of a giant caterpillar, ten feet long and more than a foot thick, with two heads and with eyes on both ends and everywhere. Or maybe a very large ant.

  All of a sudden, while we were sitting there, the sky, which at first had looked like a big cement dome, began to get dark. At the same time, a lady with a very pleasant voice began explaining to us all about the astronomy of the thing, using more words and bigger than I knew the dictionary had.

  Before long, stars began to come out in the dome. The “caterpillar” was throwing the stars up there, yet you couldn’t see any lights on the caterpillar at all, only on the sky. The next thing we knew, it was all dark, with stars all over the sky. It was just the way it is at night along Sugar Creek, only there weren’t any mosquitoes.

  It was a wonderful sight, with the stars all moving around in different directions. There was a moon and sometimes a sun, and different planets, which I’d read about somewhere, such as Jupiter and Saturn. Saturn looked like a white baseball with some of my mom’s white yarn wrapped around it, making what is called a “ring.” Or like a wide-brimmed white hat.

  There were maybe a zillion things to see in the Planetarium, but it was when we were in the auditorium under that artificial sky with a million stars in it that Little Jim remembered and finished what he wanted to say.

  While we were sitting there in the dark, his hand reached across the arm of his chair and got hold of mine. He leaned over and asked a question. “Jacob’s ladder reached clear up into heaven, didn’t it?”

  I whispered back, “Sure. Why?”

  Do you know what he had been thinking? He said, “I think that ladder was supposed to represent Jesus, who is the only way to heaven there is, and we can all go up on Him, and we can all go to heaven free if we have Him. All we have to do is to get on and ride, which is maybe the same as being saved by grace.”

  Imagine that little guy thinking that all out by himself!

  Just that minute, the whole sky began to move around in a strange circle. Some stars went one way and some another, all going in different directions. The big black ant out in the middle of the auditorium was slowly turning over on its side and twisting around at the same time.

  For a minute, the thoughts in my head started going around just like the stars were, so it wasn’t until afterward that I remembered a Bible verse that proved Little Jim was right, which he nearly always is.

  The only thing wrong with the pretty lady’s very interesting talk was that she didn’t mention God as having had anything to do with creating the heavens and the earth, as the Bible says.

  Barry explained that to us later, having been graduated from a genuinely Christian college and knowing all about astronomy and where the stars came from.

  As I said, I didn’t get to decide whether Little Jim was right until afterward, which was that same night when we were away down in the slums of the city where there was a famous rescue mission.

  Most of us would get the surprise of our lives that night. I’ll have to say, I guess there never was such an experience just waiting to happen to a boy.

  None of us expected to see Big Bob Till in the Pacific Garden Mission.

  6

  Right after we left the planetarium and before we had supper, which is called dinner in Chicago, we took a long, winding walk through the Field Museum. I’m glad we went there before going to the mission.

  I’ll explain why in just a minute.

  I’d rather have gone to the zoo to see if maybe Little Jim’s bear was there, but the museum was close to the Planetarium, so we went there right away. While Barry and Santa Claus were taking us through, explaining different things to us, I couldn’t help but think we were sort of like the twelve disciples following, except that there were only seven of us.

  The Field Museum has the largest and the most wonderful collection of what are called “specimens” in the whole world—animal and mineral and vegetable, Barry said.

  I wrote down a few notes about things he told me afterward, and this is what he said: “The exhibits of the Field Museum are divided into four categories—anthropology, or the science of mankind; botany, or the science of plants; zoology, or the science of animals; and geology, the science of minerals.” Sometime I’ll know more about these things.

  Well, we walked along what is called Stanley Hall, which is the main passageway of the whole thing, kind of like the midway in a dead circus. The first thing we saw was two fierce-looking dead elephants standing as though they were alive and wanted to fight. I could tell that Circus wished he could shinny right up the leg of one of them the way he does a tree along Sugar Creek and then swing around on one of the elephants’ trunks and get up on top.

  Poetry started in right away with a poem, which went:

  “I went to the animal fair,

  The birds and the beasts were there,

  The gay baboon by the light of the moon

  Was combing his auburn hair.”

  That made me think of my dad with his reddish-brownish-blackish mustache and his long shaggy eyebrows. I could see him with my mind’s eyes, standing in our bathroom before the mirror, combing his eyebrows the way he does sometimes. Mom teases him about it.

  Poetry rattled on with the poem and finally ended with nobody paying much attention to him:

  “Then just as the clock struck nine,

  The animals formed a line;

  First came the monk on the elephant’s trunk,

  And invited him down to dine.”

  The different animals we saw were all stuffed with something that made them look the way they were when they were alive. I think the name of the business that stuffs and mounts animals is “taxidermy.”

  Many animals were shown in settings that were just like the kind they lived in when they were alive. Some were from America, some from Africa, some from Asia. There were also a lot of skeletons of many different kinds of animals.

  We even saw a big water hole, which wasn’t actual water, and a lot of animals by it. “Mammals” Barry called them. A mammal is any kind of an animal that has a backbone and whose mother feeds it the same way old Mixy-cat feeds her little kittens.

  Poetry counted twenty-three mammals all ranged around the African water hole. Several of them were tall giraffes, and one was a rhinoceros with a little bird on its back.

  And then we were past the animals and in the botany department, which didn’t interest us so much, except that it showed how much human beings depend on plants for enough to eat.

  Then we went to the anthropology part of the museum. It was interesting to see the different people of the world living in the same way they do or used to or, anyway, the way they were supposed to have lived when they were alive.

  Once Little Tom stood still, looking at some people who were like people in Tibet, and all of a sudden he said, “Are all those different people just stuffed dead people, like the animals back there?”

  Imagine that!

  “Of course not!” Poetry said, astonished.

  Even Dragonfly looked across the top of his crooked nose and said, “Of course not! They made them out of plaster of paris or something and painted them the different colors!” which was the right answer.

  In the geology section, we saw skeletons of curious animals that were supposed to have lived many millions of years ago. I was glad that when I am at home and running lickety-sizzle through the woods toward Sugar Creek, I don’t have to be afraid a great big log will suddenly turn out to be a dinosaur’s long t
ail that will swish around and knock me all to smithereens.

  Over in another section, the name of which I can’t remember, we stopped in front of an eagle’s nest. It was about four feet across and was made of sticks and twigs with some soft material in the middle. Right in the center were several baby eagles, which were as big as our old red rooster at home and had fuzz all over them.

  Above the nest was the baby eagles’ great big mom with fierce-looking eyes and with wings that would measure about six feet from tip to tip. Clutched in her cruel, long talons was a snowshoe rabbit, which the mother was going to tear up in a minute and feed to her hungry babies.

  While we were all looking at the eagle’s nest and at the white rabbit in the mother’s talons, we listened to Barry explain that baby eagles were very stubborn when they got old enough to fly. They wouldn’t get out of the nest and try their wings, so the mother bird had to stir up the nest and almost push them off the edge of the cliff.

  I looked around to see if that had given Little Jim any ideas, and he was looking up at that rabbit dangling there, and there were tears in his eyes. He saw me looking at him, and as he always does when tears get in his eyes, he turned his head and shook it a little. When I saw his eyes again, the tears were gone and were lying somewhere on the marble floor of the museum. As many times in my life as I’ve seen Little Jim cry, I’ve never seen him use his handkerchief to get rid of his tears.

  “’S’matter?” I asked him on the side.

  “N-nothing,” he gulped back to me. Then he said, “It’s a pretty rabbit, isn’t it? It looks like a lamb.”

  When he said that, I knew that maybe in his mind he was spelling the word lamb with a capital L and maybe was thinking about the best Friend a boy ever had, the One who had been called the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

  After looking at the eagles, we crossed over and saw some birds that are called rhinoceros hornbills. There were two of them, one on the outside of a tree trunk and the other on the inside, with only its big twelve-inch-long bill sticking out of a small hole. We found out that the one on the outside was the dad and the one on the inside was the mom, and that all daddy hornbills always shut up their wives inside a hollow tree and plaster the hole shut except for a very small opening. The mother has to stay inside all the time she is sitting on the nest until the baby hornbills are hatched and so big they crowd her out.

  “You’d think she’d starve to death in there,” Poetry said. “Boy! I’m hungry!”

  “Starve?” Big Jim said. “Listen to this …” And he read the explanation that was printed on a sign on the display cage.

  And do you know what? That daddy bird with his yellowish bill, as long as a cow’s horn, not only carried mud and stuff and plastered up the hole so his wife couldn’t get out—and so that monkeys and other animals couldn’t get in to destroy the nest, and maybe so his wife would be sure to stay at home and look after the children—but he actually worked hard all day long for weeks to find food for her to eat.

  Well, I thought, as we all scrambled on to the next exhibit, hornbills are very interesting.

  When we walked out of the museum, watching the hundreds of people walking past or standing on the steps, we could see Lake Michigan, which wasn’t far away. Then we went down a very wide sidewalk and through a tunnel under the street and out on the other side, where we all bought some ice cream.

  The famous Shedd Aquarium was next. At the entrance, I looked up at the big electric light, and it had on it a huge starfish carved in stone or iron or something for decoration.

  Inside the mammoth-sized aquarium building there were people and people and people, and fish and fish and fish of every kind and shape and color of the rainbow. Live fish, all of them! Big, little, long, short, flat, pug-nosed, stumpy-tailed, round, with horns, without them, all swimming, each kind in its own private aquarium. It was a sight to see and made me wish I could just once catch one of them on my fishing pole in Sugar Creek.

  From the aquarium we walked on a high cement fence along the lakefront—and shouldn’t have, maybe. A long, wide, and high cement something-or-other ran out like a bent elbow far into the lake. It was called a “breakwater” and was supposed to protect the shore from the terrible force of the waves, especially if there should ever be a windstorm. There were maybe a thousand sea gulls on and off it.

  Well, we all wanted to take a ride in a speedboat, and we did. Wow! That was a thrill! Our boat shot out across the water and around to the other side of the breakwater, where the waves were high and where the spray dashed over the gunwale and made a lot of beautiful little rainbows, so close to us that I reached out and stuck my arm into the one that was flying right along with us.

  Then, just for fun, Poetry took both hands and clasped them together and said, “Here, Bill, have a chunk of rainbow.”

  I reached out and took it and ate it.

  We squealed and hollered and laughed and got a little frightened, especially Little Jim. He had his eyes focused on the edge of the rainbow, and I knew he maybe had one in his mind too. He was grinning and holding onto Big Jim, and I heard him say, “It’s nice to have a rainbow flying right along beside you.”

  And if I’d been a preacher or a minister, I’ll bet I could have thought up something interesting for my congregation next Sunday morning.

  After the ride, we walked along the waterfront and felt the cool breeze fanning our cheeks. Then we came to the boulevard. We would have walked over to the Conrad Hilton Hotel, which as I told you was the largest hotel in the world, but the traffic was so fast and so heavy that Barry and Santa made us walk all the way back to the tunnel that went under the street.

  It was a long walk, past the museum again and over a high wooden bridge with a lot of railroad tracks under it and the trains flying along under there every few minutes. Ahead were the great high buildings of the city, looking like tall, irregular lower teeth in some fierce wild animal’s mouth.

  Soon we were at the hotel and were inside, where we were supposed to write cards or letters to our folks to tell them we had arrived in Chicago without being scared to death. I wrote a long letter to my folks and told them all I could think of about the city.

  Poetry, who is an expert in arithmetic, remember, and who is also mischievous, helped me write the letter, and this is what I wrote:

  Dear Mom and Dad

  and pug-nosed Charlotte Ann,

  I am now sitting at a desk in the world’s largest hotel, a picture of which you will see on the postcard enclosed. Actually, I didn’t know such a hotel existed.

  There are 2,600 guest rooms in it, and if the seven members of the Sugar Creek Gang would decide to sleep in all of them one night at a time, each one of us having his own room, it would take all of us over a year and a month to do it. If I wanted to sleep in every one of them myself, it would take me more than eight years, and by that time I would have slept on sixty freight-car loads of innerspring mattresses.

  The dining rooms are so big that when they first bought enough plates for them, they had to buy 134,000, besides 50 carloads of other chinaware, enough to fill all the silos on maybe 25 farms around Sugar Creek. I could use 3 napkins a day, and it would take me over 273 years to use all of them.

  They have 138,000 tablecloths, and if all their 48,000 drinking glasses were filled with water at the same time and poured out in Sugar Creek all at once, it might cause a flood! They have enough silverware to fill our haymow twice. If you want to come here sometime, you can not only check your suitcases and come back for them, but you can check Charlotte Ann, and they’ll keep her till you come back.

  Not only that, but one long street in this town, Western Avenue, is as long as from Sugar Creek to Sandville, which, as you know, is twenty-four miles. They have thousands of firemen in the fire department, and they surely need them because it seems every few minutes I hear a fire engine going past.

  Poetry is sitting right beside me at the table in this very beautiful room, re
ading about the Chicago River in a book. He says it is one of the few rivers in the world that flows backward. That is, instead of flowing toward its mouth, the way any decent river should, it goes the other way.

  Well, this letter will have to close because tonight we are all going down on South State Street to a famous rescue mission, where many years ago a baseball player named Billy Sunday was converted. He was a famous evangelist and is dead now. Some people who became very important in the Christian world were born again at that mission. One of them, Barry told us, was named Mel Trotter, and he went to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and founded what became the largest city rescue mission in the world.

  In fact, I have to stop writing right now, because first we have to make a visit to the Moody Bible Institute, which is the largest Bible school in the world and where Circus has to practice singing before a microphone, with Little Jim playing for him, so he won’t be so frightened when he actually sings over the radio.

  I am having a wonderful time, which I’ll tell you about when I get home, especially about the airplane trip. Here we go now to Moody Bible Institute!

  Wonderfully yours,

  Bill

  7

  And that night we saw Bob Till.

  It was while we were at the rescue mission, though, and we didn’t get there until after supper, which we ate at the Moody Bible Institute.

  Thousands and thousands of young people have been trained there to be missionaries, pastors, teachers, choir directors, evangelists, and Christian education directors.

  We went downstairs with Barry and Santa Claus—whose real name I ought to tell you is the Reverend Don Farmer—and pretty soon we were standing in front of our plates at a long table in the school dining room. All around us were hundreds and hundreds of people, nearly all young people, and everybody was talking and laughing and smiling until some soft chimes sounded. Then somebody started a song, which was a church hymn tune, using the words