Chapter 1

Many of my stories begin when the action starts, but today we are going to have to set the Wayback machine to the good old days of 1958. Eisenhower was President, but Elvis Presley was the undisputed King.

You can’t just press the microwave button and get a baked potato in seconds in 1958. You have to do it the old-fashioned way: get married and have a wife who cooks it for you if you want a steaming-hot baked potato with all the fixings.

There is no diet sour cream, or vegan cheese substitute, it’s straight from the farmer’s barn to the supermarket, to your wife’s shopping cart, to the kitchen, to your table, and it’s the best damned sour cream and cheddar cheese with real bacon and fresh chives that you are ever going to eat.

You have to prime the pump to go on this journey and get that Wayback Machine started. It’s not an Instant Pot, a microwave, or a satellite dish with 250+ channels streaming everything you want to see, but you’ve seen it all, countless choices, but you’ve got your head in your phone or on the Internet, and you aren’t even watching it. In 1958, you had one choice, and that choice was ‘Whatever Dad wanted to watch.’

Your eyes would go bad if you sat too close to it, and you’d go blind if you touched it too much. It’s miraculous that I managed to touch mine and sit really close to the Boob Tube all these years, and I can still see anything at all.

In 1958, it was thought that the cure to men’s compulsive masturbation was marriage. I was single and playing the field as one of the most eligible bachelors in Peach Valley.

Life was good in Peach Valley.
Take this journey with me today. I promise you I’ll take you for a ride down memory lane to a place called Fort Gilead just outside of Peach Valley. It’ll be worth listening to an old man ease you into the journey, and I don’t want you to arrive with me in a hurry. Life moved slowly in 1958 – no cell phones, put that away. We don’t have those where we are going.

Your boss didn’t text you in the middle of the night. You didn’t need news updates 24/7. We didn’t know what was going on until we read the morning paper, and to be honest, it was better that way.

It is an old amusement park now - nothing but a relic of a bygone era. It’s been shut down for years, but in 1958, it was like fucking Disneyland to the locals. It used to be THE attraction, competing with Disneyland. They even managed to release their own animated cartoons based on Captain Gideon and a line of dolls that were the hottest selling toy in Peach Valley every Christmas until the Hula Hoop was introduced a few months ago. We didn’t use the word “action figures” back then. Girls got dolls, guys got toys. There were so many toys for boys that it seemed like every other week something cool had just come out. Everything from Matchbox cars, Balsa Wood planes that looked like the Red Baron, Play-Doh, Slinky, and Mr. Potato Head. I was a grown man, and I bought HO Train sets and the board game Camelot when it came out. Cap guns, bottle rockets, lawn darts - back then, if it couldn’t explode or put out an eye, most boys wouldn’t want it.

A staple in Peach Valley at Christmas was official Captain Gideon muskets, Beaver hats, handcuffs, lassos, cap guns, BB guns, and Captain Gideon official merchandise of all kinds. Merchandise was one of Fort Gilead’s main revenue streams!

There was stuff for girls. Dolls, obviously. Doll accessories, doll clothes, doll houses, and plastic cars for dolls to sit in. Toy vacuum cleaners, toy stoves, toy teacups, and the classic “Jezebelle”.

Girls only got presents if they weren’t on Santa’s naughty list. That’s another unique tradition that I won’t get into, but suffice to say that fathers traditionally keep naughty lists for their wives and daughters all year round, and they have to behave and earn their way off. Girls on the naughty list are way down on the social ladder, and peer pressure keeps them behaving like dutiful daughters with a smile on their face.

Good girls get dolls – and if they volunteer over the Holiday Season down at Fort Gilead as a Jezebelle – they come away with the latest greatest Jezebelle doll.
{c}

You may be asking yourself why I would bring that up in a story like this. The first reason is that every girl in Peach Valley had a Jezebelle, or she wanted one really bad. They were THE toy for girls. Jezebelle was ingrained in the culture in Peach Valley just like the Gallant Captain Gideon was. He was as dashing as Errol Flynn, as swaggering as John Wayne, and in recent years had begun to look a lot like Elvis Presley.

The original founders of the park have been dead for years, but they were part of that whole “The Noble Southern cause” thing, and a lot of the goal was to normalize the placement of southern monuments and make them sound like fallen heroes who died for a lost but noble cause. They liked the idea so much they created two volunteer groups - the Gallants for boys, and the Jezebelles for girls.

Civic duty was a big deal in 1958, and I was on my way to pick up some volunteers to go to Fort Gilead for their holiday “Der Tussenschmaus” festival. It always kicked off the day after Thanksgiving. The holiday was something they invented based on their understanding of the history of the fort, and the fact that they were probably huge perverts.

I am not saying being a pervert is a bad thing - all the best people are. I know; I am certainly one.

This year, they weren’t just giving away dolls. They were giving away Wham-O Hula Hoops. They were basically like Taylor Swift tickets and Apple phones combined back then. You couldn’t get one in the toy stores, and every girl wanted at least one – but she absolutely HAD to have six, because the girl next door had five. It was that kind of thing. It was almost as big as the mania for Elvis – almost.

It was so simple, it was brilliant. A plastic hoop! What color did it come in? It didn’t matter. If they had one in the toy store, someone would buy it immediately.

Boys liked them, but girls LOVED them.

When your only toy is a doll and a light bulb that you can bake a cake with – it’s a whole shit-ton of fun.

This year, turnout among Jezebelle volunteers was expected to be high because the makers of the Hula Hoop were one of the event sponsors, and, traditionally, all volunteers were rewarded for participating.

The Jezebelle doll was originally named after some of John F. Kellogg’s favorite forty-two foster daughters. He was one of the guys who bankrolled Fort Gilead and who had some of the weirdest ideas. He lived in an Insane asylum where he tried out all sorts of wacky health and therapy ideas - a lot of them on those foster daughters.

Kellogg believed in daily enemas and that Graham crackers could curb a girl’s desire to masturbate. He also believed very strongly that spanking girls was good for them. He once wrote that “The application at least once a day of maintenance spanking keeps the young ladies full of vim and vigor to get up and not procrastinate.”

He was a major influence in shaping the holiday, but over the years, the park had become far tamer and more conservative. This year proved to be interesting because there was a brand-new park manager who just moved to Peach Valley from Ireland, named Drew Peacock III.

His Grandfather was basically the Walt Disney of Fort Gilead - he was the high mucky-muck of the seven guys who put the whole thing together. The Peacocks ended up going bankrupt after some bad investment decisions with Charles Ponzi, so it was good to see his son back in control.

I had never been to Fort Gilead, and as one of the designated chaperones for the Gallants and Jezebelles, I was already running behind to meet him and get started.

Traffic was pretty bad - not as bad as it is in whatever year it is now when you are reading this. I am talking, sometimes you had a guy who was in the passing lane when he should have moved over.

Eisenhower was building Interstates left and right, and one had just recently been completed, connecting Peach Valley to the rest of the world in ways nobody could have predicted. It was one of the reasons the Coppertone factory had set up in Peach Valley - they knew it’d be a central location for their logistics in this region.

People came from miles around to bask in the authentic colonial fort. Fort Gilead was captured, burned down, and rebuilt so many times that it probably looked nothing like it did in 1958 when the Puritans first settled in Peach Valley.

The local history books make it sound like nobody was living in this Garden of Eden-style paradise where all you had to do was kick your foot and catch a rabbit, and you could reach in the stream and grab a fish to feed yourself.

There were local Indian tribes living here, and they were some tough motherfuckers too. What remained of them were living at Injun Joe’s Big Wampum Trading post just outside of the stockade made of solid oak, peach trees, and stone. Now, from what I gathered, most of the people who worked at the trading post were white people in black wigs.

I don’t want to offend any original Indigenous Native Americans by portraying them as stereotypes, but back then, nobody cared about offending any ethnicity, and this is when they MADE UP those stereotypes. It’s a good thing no actual native people worked there anymore.

The fort was filled with stereotypes, bawdy pirates, naughty tavern maids, drunk and lazy injuns, all sorts of cosplaying a version of history that never actually happened anywhere except on your Television set.

You see, the Peacock Seven and the people who dreamed up this entire Fort’s mythos took bits and pieces of what sounded good from History and jumbled them together to make a coherent narrative of something that never happened. It’s kind of like if you learned all your history by going to the Renne Faire and just walking around for a few minutes and saying, “Okay, so basically it was like this, then?”

The Confederates had a garrison at Fort Gilead during the Civil War. It never saw any action from Union forces, but according to the mythos, Gallant Gideon led charge after victorious charge to drive them back while wild savages came at them from the other side, and then he took on the river pirates and whipped them so bad that Cap’n Sluggo of the Fishy Susan joined the Confederacy to fight on his side.

Now, what are the chances that a Paddleboat that is perfectly set up to function as a seafood restaurant and Canne-Canne stage would be operating on a landlocked lake just outside of a Confederate Stockade? The locals consider slugs from the lake a delicacy. One of the founders discovered that you could actually eat the slugs, and they tasted excellent when you dip them in coffee grounds and fry them in bacon grease. The slugs grew big, fat, and juicy, and the founders wanted to sell seafood. Shipping fresh seafood in was way too costly, so they built a slug farming operation. They also thought they’d get rich selling beaver fur, and since you could sell the meat, they packaged it up as a type of hot dog.

As for the history lesson on Fort Gilead, it’s part of our walk into the past. We’ve got a Fort without much of a storied past, and they wanted people to come there. They made up a bunch of reasons, myths, legends, and bold faced lies - one of them was that the slugs could cure anything that ailed you, and that Beaver meat was a delicacy. Another was that this was a pivotal location for the South because it never fell to the Union.

It’s pretty easy, since it wasn’t strategically important. It was so safe that in the early days when they still thought they could win, the South turned the stone prison that the Puritans had into a women’s prison. It may have actually gotten its funding because one of the Confederate politicians would only pledge his support if they arrested his shrew of a wife, locked her up, and threw away the key.

Their logic for choosing it was that the Puritans used it sort of like their version of the Spanish Inquisition for disgraced women to atone, and they called them “Magdalenes”. It was too small to be viable for prisoners of war, so that’s what it was for about 12 years, even after the war ended.

So, the founders decided to call it the “House of Magdalene Museum” and make it a tourist attraction - sort of like a wax museum, except when they have volunteers, they have them be living displays. You can find places like Historic Jamestown or Amish trading posts where they churn butter and walk around talking Pidgin Shakespeare. Fort Gilead has been doing that since 1931, when it opened.

Drew Peacock was the guy who started it all. He was the Walt Disney of the Peacock Seven, the man with the vision. They say he was a gangster during prohibition and profiteer during World War I. He eventually got shot down while flying as a co-pilot with Prince George, Duke of Kent, during World War II. He’s revered in Peach Valley, seen as larger than life.

He assembled the strangest bunch of rich weirdos and eccentrics that may have existed back in the 1930s. There was the inventor and health nut John H. Kellogg. He brought a mill to Peach Valley, but he also brought his 42 foster daughters from his insane asylum in Battle Creek to work and live at Fort Gilead. He eventually built a plantation house on the site, with plans to construct a massive health facility.

His biggest rival and closest friend was Bernarr Macfadden – the original Mister America. He was a health nut and a free-sex advocate. The fishing wasn’t so good in Lake Duncan, but it had an abundance of slugs and beavers. He found ways to make both taste good enough to eat, and people around Peach Valley find it an acquired taste. In the early days of Fort Gilead, they used to make film shorts about Captain Gideon’s adventures, and Bernarr actually played him until Clara Bow’s husband Rex Till took the role a few years later.

Clara Bow became associated with the Fort as its first spokeswoman, and over the years, many actors or actresses have been associated with Fort Gilead. Drew Peacock’s first wife, Tallulah Bankhead, is another fantastic example.

There was also Joseph Evolva. He’d eventually turn traitor and work for Adolf Hitler in World War II. There was also Robert Ripley, a student of the odd and macabre, and a world traveler who searched the globe for oddities to bring back to Fort Gilead. He had the bright idea to put contraptions on each pedestal in Magdaland where you could put in a nickel, wind something, or turn a screw, and only then would the live-action mannequins come to life and interact with you. They used to use real women when the mechanical parts didn’t work correctly.