This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Forget those pearly gates, golden streets, crystal fountains, and harps. I'm hoping for a heaven exactly like Peanut Charley's at the corner of Third Avenue and 21st St. in downtown Rock Island. For more than sixty years until 1983, it was heaven on earth to a shifting assortment of students, faculty, professional men and women, and street people.Charley and Lucy Circello came to Rock Island from Italy in 1920 and opened their place in the east end of downtown. It grew into a world apart. The bar was scrunched into one corner, but it was plenty room for the small assortment of wines, gin, and whiskey they sold. Next to the bar was a small grocery, with several canned soups and some breakfast food. A walled-off west corner housed a saw-sharpening shop.
The middle of Charley and Lucy's place was occupied by several tables and assorted chairs, a long shuffleboard with fine sand to make the pucks run smooth, and a defunct television set used as a stand for a shrine and a statue of the Virgin Mary.
The centerpiece of Charley’s place stood just inside the corner door: an antique peanut roasting machine which had given Peanut Charley his nickname. Gunny sacks full of green peanuts from Georgia were piled high along the wall, waiting their turn in the roaster. Charley sold bags of unsalted green peanuts as well as fresh roasted ones.
Over this world, Charley and Lucy presided and kept order. They were each about five feet tall, but their combined ten feet was more than a match for the occasional drunk patron who hadn't realized he'd wandered into heaven.
Here, at Peanut Charley’s, during the upheavals of the sixties and seventies, several students and faculty from Augustana College often sought sanctuary Friday afternoons after classes, looking out the north windows at the rain, safe, for a time, in Charley and Lucy's world.
I have few illusions about heaven. They're probably right about the harps and the streets paved with gold. I'm sure that for me there will be no Peanut Charley’s in the clouds. I haven't been that good.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
