28 By: James NeedhamHistoric Photos Courtesy of WIU Special Collections

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As this issue of Western Illinois Magazine was going to press, we received sad news. Neal Gamm, the subject of James Need-ham’s article unexpectedly passed away on November 16. According to his obituary in the McDonough County Voice, Gamm, 65, died in his home in Ipava. His friends say he passed away in his sleep. The story noted that Gamm was a U.S. Army veteran of the Vietnam War, serving from 1967 to 1969, who attained the rank of second lieutenant with Battery C, 6th Battalion, 11th Artil-lery, 11th Infantry. He was a member of the Ipava Masonic Lodge, a life member of the VFW Post #1643 in Bend, Ore. and a mem-ber of Ipava American Legion Post #17.

“He was also the governor of Forgottonia,” the article noted in passing.

Searching for Neal Gamm, Governor of Forgottonia

After hearing all the stories about Neal Gamm, to say I was nervous about meeting him would be an

understatement. I’d heard he was a recluse and a burned-out Vietnam War Vet who didn’t suffer fools. I’d been told he was wary of the media. It was even whispered that he would explode if he thought your questions were stupid or if he didn’t like you.

Nearly everyone I had talked to described him as not only volatile but maybe, accord-ing to one source, even “bi-polar.” Plus there was one other thing: he didn’t know I was coming.

And yet I wanted to meet him. I knew that when he had been in Vietnam and later, as a Western Illinois University student, was the frontman of the whimsical 1970s campaign to create an independent republic in West-ern Illinois, which he had called “Forgotton-ia. He was named the benevolent governor and created his own money, stationary and official symbols. He’d named the tiny ham-let of Fandon, located a few miles south of Colchester, as the capital.

I had read in a newspaper article that Neil was back in town. He had returned to Western Illinois after a 40-year hiatus. No

one seemed to know where he had gone or what he had done in that time. His fame in the 70s had faded just as quickly as it had appeared.

The only pictures I had of Neal were a recent mug shot from his own webcam on Facebook and one of him in front of a bridge in 1972 donning his signature long-tailed coat with boutonniere. He sported shaggy, dark hair and was holding up a toll sign in front of a bridge.

“Welcome to Forgottonia, region of little return on tax dollars. Please have your visas ready,” it read.

I heard rumors that he hung out at the local bar in Table Grove, Sharee’s Place. He was retired and had moved back to his old stomping grounds. Sharee’s Place had a shaky reputation. Every time I would talk about going out there to meet him, people would say, “Good luck. Don’t get in a bar fight.” So, you can understand my reticence at looking for him there.

I pulled into the town “square,” which, it turns out, is home to the bar, a tiny post

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It was rumored that Neal hung out here, at Sharee’s Place in Table Grove. The search

here would later prove to be fruitless.

office and a few abandoned businesses. My colleague, Josh, was waiting for me when I arrived. We made small talk in the parking lot before reluctantly approaching the front door.

When we opened it, a plume of cigarette smoke slammed into my eyes, making them water. Loud ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll blared and a woman, who looked to be in her late 50s, danced wildly while five other men drank domestic brews and shouted at each other in a slurred dialect.

Time stopped. Every eye was on us. It was obvious from our clothing, ages and unfa-miliar faces that we were outsiders — naïve students who had stumbled into the wrong address. I swallowed hard.

Ok, just act like you know what you’re do-ing, I thought.

We made a beeline for the far end of the bar, where there were seats open, and sat – feeling very ill-at-ease. A man sat by himself there. He, like nearly every other male pa-tron, had a long, unkempt, white beard and sort of worn and faded clothes.

Without any prompting, the man spoke.“Don’t worry, I’ll be nice,” he said with a

chuckle.“Well, I guess that means I’ll play nice

too,” Josh said. That seemed to suffice.The bartender, not a day over 22, worked

her way over to us and soon we had drinks in our hands. I looked around, even though I already knew Gamm wasn’t in the room. None of the men matched the photo I had been studying.

Maybe he’s just not here yet, I thought.Josh looked tense. He didn’t have to say it.

I knew what he was thinking. ‘Now what?’The truth is, I didn’t have a plan. Hell,

I’d been going over in my mind what I was going to say to the man for a couple months and I still didn’t have an answer. After more fruitless thought on the matter, I turned to the bartender.

“Do you know Neal Gamm?” I asked.

“Neal who?” she said. “There’s a Neal that comes in here every once in a while, but his last name’s not Gamm.”

My heart sunk. “Neal who?” That wasn’t the answer I was hoping for. I was starting to doubt the whole quest. What were we do-ing here?

I explained to her who I was and why I was asking for a stranger. She looked per-plexed at first, and then a light came on.

“Let me ask Jimbo,” she said.Who the hell was Jimbo? I wondered.The girl wandered over to the other end of

the bar. She exchanged some words with a man wearing a Vietnam veteran’s cap —who had yet another white beard of impressive length. She looked at me as she talked, then

back at the man. Jimbo followed suit. He waved at me. I waved back. She returned.

“Jimbo says he hasn’t been in, in a while. He’s been working part time at the ‘4Js’ in Ipava,” she said.

What the hell is the “4Js?” Where the hell is Ipava? Who the hell is Jimbo?

I thanked her for the information, even though I felt a bit deflated. What now? I still had half a beer, so I took some time to look around the room. The bar was stocked strictly with a select few domestic beers — a sign of a patronage with very specific tastes — all cans, no bottles, as the bartender had revealed earlier.

There was NASCAR memorabilia hanging crooked on the walls and a well-used pool

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A tip from one of Neal’s drinking buddies pointed to this small bar in Ipava. This photo

was shot on the day of his funeral. The small note on the door tells of Neal’s passing.

It reads, “Closed for a funeral. Will be back at 11:30.” Later that day, the bar would be

filled with some of Neal’s closest friends and family sharing stories, playing his favorite

songs and drinking his brew of choice, Coors.

table in a small space to our right. One of the recent presidential debates was on TV, with the volume turned off so it didn’t con-flict with the country music that had begun to play.

I looked again at the locals. I realized that everyone was wildly drunk.

I know this place, I thought. I’ve been here before.

Well, I hadn’t. But I knew its kind. To an outsider, there are a million places like it. Lonely hearts clubs where everyone drinks away his or her worries. But to an insider, it’s a place to gather with your own breed and relax into an alcoholic murmur — at least for a night.

The bartender returned.“Jimbo wants to know why you want to

know where Neal Gamm is,” she said.I looked down at Jimbo who was glaring

at me. I started to explain but felt foolish. So, I swallowed my pride and trotted over to meet Jimbo. He looked like a nice enough guy. I found out through the bartender that he practically lived on his stool – but it was obvious he was among family. So, I thought, why not?

I explained that I was interested in writing about Mr. Gamm and I heard that he hung out in the bar. I wasn’t able to decipher a lot of his responses but what I did understand was this.

“Neil – he’s a real interesting guy. But I wouldn’t cross him,” Jimbo said.

Another warning; I almost expected it. I thanked him for his information and re-turned to my seat. The man who earlier promised to “play nice” with Josh was now coercing him into a pool game. It would have been all in good fun if he hadn’t pref-aced it, again, with, “I’ll play nice. I just like to fight, that’s all.”

So, deciding to dodge that bullet, we left Table Grove Bar empty-handed. But as I parted ways with Josh, I just didn’t feel ready to abandon my journey.

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‘4Js,’ ‘Ipava—the name kept rolling around in my head. So I headed east.

Table Grove has 400 people and one bar. Ipava has a hundred more people, which apparently meant it had gained the right to have a second bar.

Still, I wondered: What the hell is “4Js”? I passed a gas station. Is that 4Js? No. I

pulled up to a bar. A mercury lamp over-head shed just enough light for me to read the side of the building: “4Js.” This was the place.

I walked through the door a little more con-fidently in my second visit to a local den of purposeful inebria-tion. As expected, time stopped again and everyone stared at me. There were people along both sides of the L-shaped bar. I strolled to an open seat at the elbow and ordered a beer.

I scanned the room. Damn. I didn’t see him. Where the hell was Neal Gamm? Was this going to be strike two?

Not wanting to waste any more time speculating, I called to the bartender.

“Does Neal Gamm work here? I heard he works here,” I said.

Without a word, she raised her eyebrows and pointed to a man sitting right next to me with a can of Coors and a pack of Marl-boro Reds in front of him. Could this rosy-cheeked, plump man with a bushy, grey mustache and overalls be him? Damned if it wasn’t him. The bartender walked away. One-time Forgottonia Governor Neal Gamm turned to me, and I extended my hand.

Whatever happened to Neal Gamm?

The jovial man who met my hand with an amiable and firm handshake that night couldn’t have contrasted more with the things I had heard about him. He was im-mediately happy to chat, and talk he did — for two hours — sometimes leaning forward on the bar with his fingers interlocked and other times turned toward me with one el-bow bent and his fist planted in his hip with his other arm resting on the bar. He was

just another guy on a bar stool that night, looking to reminisce about the good ol’ days. And well, that was the best part. Neal Gamm was a re-markable storyteller.

“I got to runnin’ my mouth,” he would later say about our conversa-tion.

In his slight southern drawl, Gamm “ran his mouth” like it was still his job — sometimes breaking out into laugh-ter until his eyes were just two slits, other times nodding his head firmly and somberly.

Today, Neal drives a truck for a fertilizer company in the area. He works long hours and on his off time, he plays Xbox with his nephew. The tiny, dimly-lit bar in Ipava is his hearth and home, the first place he ever had a drink and, as Neal whimsically referred to it, his “natural habit” — which made me wonder, why did he leave for all those years?

Well, it turns out, Neal’s story started in a way that’s all too familiar with men in every corner of the world—with a girl. Neal fell sweet on a girl named Sandy who, he beamed, dared him to go to college and be

the first in his family to graduate. So, Neal later did just that;; twice (first a with Bach-elor’s in theater, then with a Master’s in history). They fell fast in love, and the two spent much of their time together. But as Neal watched all of his college-aged friends and neighbors drafted off to war, he got antsy. He wondered when his name would be pulled. So, to avoid being drafted into a battalion full of strangers, he joined the U.S. Army with one of his best friends on the buddy system. If he had to go to war, at least he could do it with a friend by his side. With a promise that so many American war couples have made, Neal and Sandy got engaged, and he left for war.

He and his friend went through artillery school together and soon found themselves in the staging barracks awaiting orders to depart to Vietnam. His company would leave in two waves -­ his friend in the first and Neal in the second. They said their goodbyes and Neal watched his friend pack off overseas. It would be the last time they would see each other. Before Neal arrived in Vietnam, his friend had been killed. It was an experience that his lifelong buddy, Jack Meyers, said created some “demons” inside Neal. Nev-ertheless, he did his job amiably earning a bronze star for his efforts.

Neal returned home. But, as was the story for many Vietnam veterans, there wasn’t exactly a welcome party for him. In addition to his stripes and medals, it seemed Neal would also bear a scarlet letter when he came back.

“For years, you didn’t want anybody to know you were in Vietnam,” he said.

It was 1971. Protest and disapproval of the war were both wide spread.

The confusion Neal felt after he returned transcended into his love life. He decided he wasn’t good enough for his longtime girl-friend.

“Once I got home, you know, what can I of-fer? I mean, you have nothing,” Gamm said.

A picture of Gamm taken by one of his 4Js companions.

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This Western Illinois barn still bears a symbol of Neal’s 1970s tongue-­in-­cheek campaign to form a 51st state, Forgottonia.

“I just kind of dropped out of sight and went back to college. I’m sure she’d have stuck with it, but I wasn’t going that route.”

So, the two parted ways and Neal — thinking he was imparting the tough love that she deserved — went to Springfield to work as a bellhop at the St. Nicholas Hotel.

Now, before we go any further, some-thing you need to know about Neal is that, through no fault of his own, he’s always had an affinity for politicians. His grandpa was a county board chairman who also ran for state senate. On several occasions, Neal would wine and dine with state senators

and congressman. Through coincidental circumstances, he would end up with the remaining contents of a $5,000 bottle of wine from Chuck Percy, a U.S. senator. He would develop an arch-enemy —“Walking” Dan Walker – a governor who earned his nickname by taking to foot during reelection season. But Neal’s preferred nickname for him was “windbag.”

As things would go, Neal’s connection to elected officials didn’t stop there. One day, as he went through the daily grind of car-rying bags and parking cars at the “old St. Nick Hotel”, as he called it, Secretary of

State Paul Powell pulled up. Powell was a well respected and trusted politician. He pulled strings for a lot of people and was well-liked by his constituents.

But unbeknownst to the people even closest to him, Powell was accepting bribes and checks, some for license renewals and other state fees, all addressed directly to him. He was hoarding cash and personal checks—some $800,000—in shoeboxes for safekeeping. Neal said that his hotel duties called him to Powell’s room one day where he nearly had the chance at the gubernato-rial salary he never earned.

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“He had all this money in his god damn closet. I stood right there by this closet and hung up his dry cleaning,” he recalled.

The closet was home to a tower of the infa-mous shoeboxes.

“I thought they had shoes in them! If I’d ever known them things were full of money, there’d have been two things missing the next morning,” Neal continued. “That’s me and the shoeboxes.”

No matter how many senators, congress-men or money laundering officials he came in contact with, his grandpa would be the most influential politician in his life. He gave Neal a piece of advice that would soon ring true for him.

“You can call these politicians all kinds of a son of a bitch and they don’t do a damn thing,” he said. “But you laugh at them, and they can’t take that.”

Since Neal never discovered his would-be

shoebox fortune and he wasn’t making very much money in Springfield, he moved back to Macomb and started school at Western Illinois University in the theater program. It was a move that ended up changing his life forever.

So began the portion of Neal’s life that’s most familiar to the public. Neal became a broke college student, still trying to forget or deal with his war experiences. But he was happy. He loved his classes. He loved the campus. He loved theater and starred in many productions in his college career.

One night, after a wrap party for “South Pacific,” three men approached Neal from local organizations. They had an idea. It was a publicity stunt. They called it: Forgottonia – an tongue-in-cheek independent republic that Neal was to govern. Soon, they would declare war on the US government, imme-diately surrender then apply for foreign aide — all to one end.

“To find out what the deal was with the de-plorable state of the infrastructure in West-ern Illinois,” Neal said.

He humbly accepted his appointment as governor of the new nation. It was a deci-sion that would sweep him into a national media frenzy for three months where he would meet with local dignitaries, hold press conferences and appear on national television.

“But the dumb thing of it all was that it got serious. You know, people were pretty desperate at the time and they were grasp-ing at straws,” he said. “The bad thing about that is I did all these public appearances and people were asking questions that were hard for me to answer. It was serious stuff. Then I realized that, hey, people are really looking for someone to represent them . . . and boy, I felt so inadequate to do that.”

But Neal did his job with vigor. Friends said he spent hours studying the part. He went from podium to podium donning his signature boutonnière, silver badge and a double-breasted swallowtail coat he got from an undertaker. He talked about the crumbling roads and the shameful state of the economy. He even found himself at a podium in front of the Illinois legislation. He came bearing gifts.

“I went out there one night and gathered up pieces of (Route) 136,” he said. “I just dumped them out on the speaker’s rostrum and said, ‘Look you guys. This is what we’re driving on up in Forgottonia. That’s embar-rassing.’”

All the commotion he was causing caught the eye of his old sweetheart Sandy who, coincidentally, was working for three state representatives. She got back in contact with Neal who said “all was forgiven” and six months later they were married. The two were married for six years before they split up again.

After their divorce, Neal decided he’d had enough of Western Illinois. He’d rubbed

Fandon (above) was named the capital of Forgottonia during Neal’s political ruse. He would later say that he named it the capital because it had recently been stripped of its zip code because of its size. It was an abashment that Gamm called “the ultimate cut.”

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elbows with Senators, he’d been the center of camera flashes and aggressive journal-ists, he’d seen the beginning of highway construction and the return of the passen-ger railway system when Amtrak reinstated regular train service to the region and he’d been part of a complicated love story. It was time to move on.

He went out to Montana to visit a friend—and he stayed for 17 years. He worked at Yellowstone Park. He went into the hunting business, tried his hand at horse wrangling, then worked at a gold mine for eight years. While Neal said he loved gold mining, it wasn’t enough to keep him in Montana. One day, he got a call from his friend on a ranch just outside of Elko, Nev.

“He said, ‘How soon can you be down here?’

I said, ‘Well how far is it?’He said, ‘Oh, it’s about 500 miles.’I said, ‘How’s tomorrow night, about sun-

down?’”Neal threw his head back into a laugh that

started out as a raspy huff and turned into a guttural, booming — “HA HA HA.”

This was the rest of Neal’s life — the other part. The part only his closest friends know. From his days deep in the mine to the saddle and cinch life of a cattle rancher for $600 per month under his “Rock of Ages” manager, Johnny Vasquez. Neal wandered from Montana to Nevada and Oregon; a gypsy, as his friends described him. But soon Neal tired of the life out west and de-cided to tell Vasquez it was time for him to hit the road, once more.

“When I left, boy he had tears in his eyes. There are few people you run into in life that just…”

Neal trailed off.While he becomes reacquainted with his

Ipava-paced life, Neal said he still has a cause. While he isn’t speaking to crowds, declaring war on the U.S. or slamming concrete chunks down on a capital-building

podium anymore, he is a huge supporter of veterans. When I mentioned a friend who recently returned from Iraq, Neal went into motion.

“The one thing I will say, boy, tell him to hang in there. Hang in there. It does get bet-ter, god damnit,” he said.

It was easy to tell he had given the speech before.

“I don’t envy these guys now coming back from that shit,” he said. “I don’t want to see them treated like we were treated. I think we owe them. We owe them a lot.”

And while Neal stressed the importance

of a warm welcome for now-returning war veterans, there was something he didn’t mention. He didn’t allude to the words the people of Western Illinois should have said when a young, bright-eyed but confused Neal Gamm returned home from Vietnam to a forgotten land. These were the words he was owed when he returned home and then later when he decided that Ipava was the town where he wanted to grow old. He was too modest to say what should have been said to him a long time ago:

Welcome home, Neal. Welcome home.