Among the members of the Dirty Dozen was Willis Calkins. He was called “Bohunk.” Around the turn of the twentieth century the word was used in a derogatory manner to describe immigrants from Bohemia and eastern European countries. Who knows why it was attached to Willis and why it stuck.

 

Willis was a descendant of Hugh Calkins who was born in Monmouthshire, England, and came to Massachusetts in 1640. His grandfather, Albert C. Calkins, came to Knox County in 1836 from New York. He purchased a quarter section of prairie land in Section 2, Sparta Township. When he first came, the county was sparsely settled and “the hand of civilization was hardly visible.” Most of the other settlers purchased land in the timber for protection from the weather and the food stuffs it provided.

 

The parents of Willis Calkins were Leroy and Fannie Reed Calkins. His father was a motorman on the street railway in Galesburg. Mrs. Calkins was a dressmaker. Willis was their only child. They lived in a house at 382 South Pearl Street. Fannie died of tuberculosis in 1899 and was buried in Wataga Cemetery. His father later remarried and moved to Moline.

 

Young Calkins gave Carl Sandburg much of his musical instruction in the 1890s. During the evenings and on Sunday afternoons, when the Schultz cigar shop was closed, the boys would gather in front of it. John Hultgren and John Kerrigan sang the tenor parts while Calkins and Sandburg sang baritone and bass. They sang tunes from minstrel shows, old ballads, songs which were popular during the Civil War and folk songs. Calkins taught Sandburg to play the banjo and the chords to accompany singing.

 

One summer Calkins and Sandburg walked many times to the pond on the Booth farm, about three miles outside the Galesburg city limits. The water was up to the shoulders of the boys, which made for good swimming. There was another pond which they frequented. It was not nearly so deep as the Booth pond. In one respect it was more dangerous, as the police picked up seven of the Dirty Dozen boys, including Calkins, for skinny dipping within the city limits on a Sunday afternoon. They were taken to the police station and put into cells for several hours.

 

On the way home from the Booth farm, they would stop at Farnham Street and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad tracks to decide on the best way to go toward home. One path led to the Lombard College campus and a drink of cool water from the tin cup chained to the pump. The other was longer but it went past the apple orchard of Jon W. Grubb, of the Lombard faculty. There they could pick apples to eat and to carry home.

 

Along with Sandburg and a number of other young men from Galesburg, Calkins enlisted in Company C, 6^th Infantry Regiment, Illinois Militia, in 1898 and participated in the Spanish American War. Later, at the age of 21, he enlisted in the United States Army on May 2, 1900. He was stationed in China and the Philippines.

 

Forty years later, Carl and Bohunk met in the lobby of a hotel in Minneapolis. Calkins' first words were: “What'll it be, Cully, a short cut and a drink or a long walk and apples?” Time had not dimmed their memories.