Holmes High School . . . Lest We Forget Kenny Unkraut
I first met Kenny in Kindergarten. But I really never took much note of him until the first grade when I was gathered with a crowd in an alley on Short Main Street between 7th and 8th streets in Covington, Kentucky, in 1952. This day was going to be a watershed moment for our first grade class for the next several years.
Kenny was a diminutive kid with what we called a burr haircut on his round blonde head. He was distinctive in many ways. First, he wore horn rim glasses. He had these things on his skull in kindergarten. By the time he graduated from high school, he sort of had a Drew Carey-ish look. Secondly, he had muscles that none of the rest of us first graders had ever seen on anyone but Charles Atlas and Joe Weider who appeared on the back cover of the comic books we read trying to sell their weight-lifting crap to us 35 pound weaklings. We would gather around Kenny in first grade, and Kenny would expose his bionic right arm and flex for us. Our eyes would expand as we beheld a small mountain that looked like a surgically inserted baseball that appeared on his bicep, capped off on top with what looked like a steel plate. We would lift our hands to touch it, and it felt like an iron ball on a Reese hitch. At 6 years of age, even then Kenny looked like a mini Man Mountain Dean. Whenever I went home and looked in the mirror, with Kenny in mind, I lifted the string that dangled from my shirt and contracted what I called my muscle. A small rise no higher than an ant hill on a desert plane seemed to elevate.
Another feature about Kenny was that it seemed like everybody in the school had the same last name as him. That was because Kenny had 16 brothers and sisters. His mother's womb could have been in the Smithsonian.
The Unkrauts lived down on Craig Street in a brick house that backed up to the railroad depot and elevated tracks. The home fronted a narrow street that looked like a canyon because of the 3-story brick buildings on either side of the street that ran almost up to the curbs and blocked the sun. As the years went by, I avoided walking through that gauntlet because all the Unkrauts seemed to be in the confrontation business in one way or another. All the ones I knew could bark the foul language dialect as if they had memorized every word. They were all tough customers and very intimidating. All of them. Girls and boys. Some were big and broad. Some had those sinewy muscles with well-defined bodies that made them look like prize-fighters. And they all seemed to have this disposition for making war. You had to be a one man Army to pass through the the Unkraut cartel. If the Bible is true when it says, "Iron sharpens iron," then we can only imagine what the inside of that house must have been like, a den of cage fighters.
I was an only child. My father had died when I was a baby. Mom was working most of the time. So I had a life of peace. The Unkrauts had no peace. Conflict was as close as their nearest pugilistic-trained brother or sister in whose face they tormented and annoyed each other day and night in the small house in which they lived. They were raised on a battlefield, probably punching, tormenting, threatening, and harassing each other everyday as they climbed into the ring. But here's the thing. The Unkrauts were not bullies. That is not what they did. They were a Fight Club.
Just across the street, catty-corner to the Unkraut compound lived a family that had the unfortunate lot of living within sight of the Unkrauts. They ran a little store out of their house. These were the Parrots. They had 2 boys - Jimmy and Gary. Jimmy was a year or two ahead of me, but Gary was in my grade. The Parrots were forced to become gladiators at an early age. Of the two of them, Jimmy unfortunately became well prepared for the battlefield by no choice of his own. Before I had met him, he had been one of those poor kids in the 40s who had somehow contracted polio before the vaccine had been discovered. So Jimmy from early on had been cast upon crutches. All through school, I saw Jimmy limp his way through his life. But for his proximity to the Unkrauts, those sticks he walked upon enabled him to stand tall in the kick-ass line of work. As Jimmy leaned upon and pushed himself up and stiffened his arms to walk with those crutches, his appendages, hands, shoulders, and chest hardened into a powerful physique.
He might have been on crutches, but whenever Jimmy was challenged on the playground by someone that thought he was easy prey, I can still hear those crutches clatter to the concrete even today as he dropped those things like a hot iron on the spot and decided it was time to reach up on the shelf and pry open a fresh can of Whoop-Ass. His V-shape from the waist up, chiseled by years on his steel legs, made him look like he was wearing a Batman costume. As soon as the crutches were free from his arms, he commenced to wave his iron bar arms around like nunchucks. We who saw Jimmy use his arms like baseball bats and lock them around somebody's neck like a python decided to withdraw our applications from contenders for playground strong man. Many a normal kid learned that a polio victim was more than formidable. Of course, this kind of reaction to threat alerted some of the Unkraut capos on Craig Street. As they hung outside around their stoop like John Gotti and his soldiers and glared across the street at the Parrots, the day was coming when they would do more than measure one another. Both Jimmy and Gary had days when they were forced to take up arms against the Unkrauts.
The other thing I will never forget about Kenny is a quote that I often heard him say as long as I knew him, "I would rather fight than eat." Though it refers to what he loved to do, it was also indicative of a part of his nature that revealed itself in other ways when he entered into any activity. He was full-throttle on everything. At Halloween, my homies and I would stalk down the street door to door with a BAG. Unkraut would CHARGE through the neighborhoods like a Watts looter, racing down the streets with a PILLOWCASE bulging with candy and pushing people out of the way. He was an October 31 bandit.
When it came to baseball, he was obsessive. At recess, we would all blow through the school house doors and charge onto the baseball field for a quick game. As we chose sides, Unkraut ALWAYS got first pick. Unkraut'ts team also always batted first by design. Unkraut threw an upside down bat to the other captain. When he caught it, alternating hands went up the bat to the top. The top hand chose sides first and batted first. Kenny's hand always rested on top, or one could challenge him and have part of his own hand extending beyond the top. If it did, you would have to submit to a process called "pounds. " Pounds" was administered by none other than Unkraut himself. As the opponent gripped the bat with part of his hand beyond the end, the ball in Unkraut's hand now became a blacksmith's sledge. He would coddle the bat and your hand between his legs like he was going to shoe Mr. Ed and then hammer down on your flesh as if he were driving a wagon wheel onto a prairie schooner. If you could hold on without letting go for 10 blows, you batted first. No one did. Either you dropped the bat - and let Unkraut bat first - or every time you threw the ball to first base you stained the ball with your own plasma or a piece of meat from your paw went with it.
While Kenny's team always batted first, so did Kenny himself. He assumed the lead-off batter position with his verbal announcement heard by all, "I''m first bat." He was a miniature Babe Ruth.
One time I seized the bat, stepped into the batter's box, and made the mistake of declaring my intention of batting first before he publicly made known his entitled assertion. He walked up to me, locked his iron fist around the stick, glowered at me with a scowl like Tony Soprano and authoritatively corrected me with, "No, I'm first bat."
Well, that was it. I had finally had enough. Right then and there I decided I wasn't going to take that crap from him. He had reigned as this Mighty Mouse Godfather long enough. I towered over him. Who did he think he was? I was just about to seize him by the throat and wax the playground with his backside when I was suddenly - lucky for him - accosted by a more charitable frame of mind because my response was, "Of course. What was I thinking?"
Now the reason for all this acquiescence on the part of all first grade boys was because of that event in that alley on short Main that I mentioned in the first paragraph. It took place after school. Somewhere along the line that day my good buddy, Charles Whaley, who lived on the same street as the Parrots but a few houses down, had crossed Kenny Unkraut, and the two of them were about to lock horns for the title of 1st grade Master and Commander. I don't remember how I got there, but I came upon this unruly crowd of kids who were shouting and pushing each other like the sadistic fiends who jammed into the Roman Coliseum. They surrounded Unkraut and Whaley who were staring each other down and preparing to square off. Unkrauts siblings circled him like cornermen at Madison Square Gardens.
Kenny's fights always began the same way. Hospital tape was perpetually wrapped around the bridge of his owl-like glasses, no doubt from the Unkrauts beating the hell out of each other. So the first thing he always did was remove those things. Now this was a 3-step process that the unsuspecting were never prepared for. First, he would nonchalantly say, "Let me take off my glasses." The second thing he did was turn around and hand off his specs to one of his brothers by saying, "Hold these." That was the last conscious thing anybody standing across from him ever remembered hearing. As soon as those glasses touched his brother's hand, Kenny heard something that unfortunately no one else did. A bell. A silent ring-side gong sounded in his mind signaling the opening salvo of the first and last round of a one-sided melee. Because when the victim looked up, he instantly saw a large knuckled ball that looked like an alternator from a tractor come out of nowhere and find its home right in the middle of his face. Unkraut had spun around like he was on a lathe and in one slick, lightning-fast move brought his fist around as if he was swinging a car battery and sucker-punched Whaley's mug like he was driving a 2x4 through a plaster wall. Though it would be another 17 years before man entered space on his way to the moon, Whaley became one of the first people in the 1st grade of the Class of 1964 at John G. Carlisle to enter the space program and see all the stars in the galaxy without leaving earth. That was pretty much it for Charles.
In those days, the 50's, there were lots of commercials on TV about Wonder Bread and how it built strong bodies 12 ways. To illustrate the point, they always showed some cartoon kid being bullied by some thug. But then one day his mother brought home a loaf of Wonder Bread. As soon as he ate one slice, a knot the size of a bowling ball appeared on his biceps. The next thing you knew, the Wonder Bread eater and the bully were in a boxing ring on the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. The bell rang and the former weakling wound up and slammed his nemesis through the floor.
When I saw that commercial, I immediately though of Kenny Unkraut as Bluto and saw myself as a 1st grade Popeye lifting Unkraut up off the school playground with an upper cut behind which was a right-handed forearm the size of a cinder block of concrete and loaded with a steel anvil in a leather glove. So I told my Mom, "Next time you go to the store, buy me a loaf of Wonder Bread."
The moment it appeared in the house, I took a slice and wiped it with mayonnaise and a wedge of cheese. As soon as it was in my belly and obviously moving toward my muscles like a can of spinach, I went to the mirror, tore off my shirt and flexed, expecting to see a world globe sitting where my bicep usually appeared and my pecs and abs bubbling like a witch's cauldron all over my frail frame.
What I saw was . . . nothing. That's when I realized all that advertising was crap to get fools like me to beg their mothers to buy some faux kick-ass bread.
Through the years, Unkraut's reputation loomed large, and many a kid from near and far - intra and interstate - had heard of him having never lost a fight and came to go a few rounds with him. But there were never any rounds. Plural. In fact, there wasn't even A round. It would be more like a fraction of a round. Maybe 10 seconds. Many years after high school I would visit him at his liquor store when I came into town, and he would tell me the silhouettes of gunslingers were still showing up in the saloon door looking for a fight while he was in his 50s.
But his tactics had changed. Rather than performing a beat-down in his store or grabbing him by this collar and the seat of his pants and throwing him into the middle of Pike Street, he would usher the contender out the exit and 2 doors down to the alley. Whereas in the old days an iron ball to the face that jiggled the cerebrum like cold tapioca and brought the sensation of midnight in the Mammoth Cave to the dupe's senses, Kenny was now just using his open paw. He was short but stout, wide like a fullback and packed with solid muscle like a bull. After high school he used to load semi-trucks by lifting and lugging 100 pound sides of beef into their holds. His hand was thick and broad. Many years of numerous opponents who had been notches on his gun had given him absolute confidence in the outcome. From his own prior experience as a tough guy, the adversary probably anticipated a one-punch knockout and then a triumphant ride home. Nevertheless, he warmed up for a knock-down and drag out brawl that he thought of as a worst-case scenario that might end up with the two of them kickin' and gougin' in the mud, the blood, and the beer. So I can see him bobbing and weaving and shuffling his feet back and forth around the alley like Muhammad Ali while also simultaneously bolstering his own courage and adrenalin by calling up some trash talk. But Kenny just stood there like a silent fire hydrant, a robotic droid, unmoved and waiting for the right moment to arrive. That moment finally came when an open hand the size of a serving platter came from somewhere out of the starboard bow with a brain-jarring slap across the side of the face that sounded like the crack of a bullwhip amplified with loudspeakers. It was as if the victim had been smashed across the side of his head and ear with a cymbal. And that was the end of it. It was all over. One unforgettable slap to the countenance from which Unkraut's fingerprints could have been lifted.
In spite of all this, Kenny was a generous man. He wasn't a thug, a hooligan, a hoodlum, a tough, or mean. He didn't threaten, terrorize, or intimidate people. He just loved to fight, and there were many others like him who happened to find each other and express their common interest.
As he grew older, many people also knew him as one who helped countless people who were down and out. I know personally of one girl in our Kindergarten class who had been paralyzed by a stroke and became pathetically poverty stricken. She told me of Kenny's liberal aid to her in her need. But he went far beyond this. This was probably due in part because a family of 17 kids is acquainted with a dearth of privileges and material things. I know Kenny and his siblings were afforded benefits they probably would not have had through the generosity of the Kiwanis Club, and he never forgot that or what it was like to be in that situation.
I used to tell one of my sons about the legend of Kenny Unkraut, stories like you have just read. One day I took him to Covington and told him we were going to go down and see Kenny. I know he walked into that store with quiet, almost reverential awe and wide eyes expecting to meet a mortal Superman. It was a day he never forgot.
Sometime late in 2005, I heard that my Kindergarten friend had passed away on October 5.
His obituary in the Cincinnati Enquirer on 10/29/2005, in part, said:
Kenneth "Kenny" Unkraut was one of 17 children and an entrepreneur who liked things done his way.
A passionate man in everything he did, Mr. Unkraut loved to golf and help those in need.
One way Mr. Unkraut helped people was through his 28-year-old business, Kenny's Liquor and Delicatessen in Covington.
Occasionally, he would hold something he called "F Camp," where if anyone at the store used an expletive, they would pay a "fine" of 50 cents or $1. "F Camp" raised over $3,000 last year and Mr. Unkraut donated it to the Ruth Lyons Children's Fund.
Mr. Unkraut died Friday, October 28, of cancer at St. Luke Hospital in Fort Thomas. He was 59.
Born in 1946 and raised in Covington, Mr. Unkraut married his neighborhood sweetheart, Rose.
It was Mr. Unkraut's passion for people that kept him going to work every day for 28 years.
"He was extremely passionate about going to work every day," said his son, Bill J. Unkraut of Hebron. "His whole goal in life was to meet and help others. He was extremely passionate about helping others succeed.
"Every Christmas he would adopt a family and encourage others to do the same. He would take care of you if you were down on your luck and never expected anything in return. He loved life and people. He was a true father figure."
Kenny was a diminutive kid with what we called a burr haircut on his round blonde head. He was distinctive in many ways. First, he wore horn rim glasses. He had these things on his skull in kindergarten. By the time he graduated from high school, he sort of had a Drew Carey-ish look. Secondly, he had muscles that none of the rest of us first graders had ever seen on anyone but Charles Atlas and Joe Weider who appeared on the back cover of the comic books we read trying to sell their weight-lifting crap to us 35 pound weaklings. We would gather around Kenny in first grade, and Kenny would expose his bionic right arm and flex for us. Our eyes would expand as we beheld a small mountain that looked like a surgically inserted baseball that appeared on his bicep, capped off on top with what looked like a steel plate. We would lift our hands to touch it, and it felt like an iron ball on a Reese hitch. At 6 years of age, even then Kenny looked like a mini Man Mountain Dean. Whenever I went home and looked in the mirror, with Kenny in mind, I lifted the string that dangled from my shirt and contracted what I called my muscle. A small rise no higher than an ant hill on a desert plane seemed to elevate.
Another feature about Kenny was that it seemed like everybody in the school had the same last name as him. That was because Kenny had 16 brothers and sisters. His mother's womb could have been in the Smithsonian.
The Unkrauts lived down on Craig Street in a brick house that backed up to the railroad depot and elevated tracks. The home fronted a narrow street that looked like a canyon because of the 3-story brick buildings on either side of the street that ran almost up to the curbs and blocked the sun. As the years went by, I avoided walking through that gauntlet because all the Unkrauts seemed to be in the confrontation business in one way or another. All the ones I knew could bark the foul language dialect as if they had memorized every word. They were all tough customers and very intimidating. All of them. Girls and boys. Some were big and broad. Some had those sinewy muscles with well-defined bodies that made them look like prize-fighters. And they all seemed to have this disposition for making war. You had to be a one man Army to pass through the the Unkraut cartel. If the Bible is true when it says, "Iron sharpens iron," then we can only imagine what the inside of that house must have been like, a den of cage fighters.
I was an only child. My father had died when I was a baby. Mom was working most of the time. So I had a life of peace. The Unkrauts had no peace. Conflict was as close as their nearest pugilistic-trained brother or sister in whose face they tormented and annoyed each other day and night in the small house in which they lived. They were raised on a battlefield, probably punching, tormenting, threatening, and harassing each other everyday as they climbed into the ring. But here's the thing. The Unkrauts were not bullies. That is not what they did. They were a Fight Club.
Just across the street, catty-corner to the Unkraut compound lived a family that had the unfortunate lot of living within sight of the Unkrauts. They ran a little store out of their house. These were the Parrots. They had 2 boys - Jimmy and Gary. Jimmy was a year or two ahead of me, but Gary was in my grade. The Parrots were forced to become gladiators at an early age. Of the two of them, Jimmy unfortunately became well prepared for the battlefield by no choice of his own. Before I had met him, he had been one of those poor kids in the 40s who had somehow contracted polio before the vaccine had been discovered. So Jimmy from early on had been cast upon crutches. All through school, I saw Jimmy limp his way through his life. But for his proximity to the Unkrauts, those sticks he walked upon enabled him to stand tall in the kick-ass line of work. As Jimmy leaned upon and pushed himself up and stiffened his arms to walk with those crutches, his appendages, hands, shoulders, and chest hardened into a powerful physique.
He might have been on crutches, but whenever Jimmy was challenged on the playground by someone that thought he was easy prey, I can still hear those crutches clatter to the concrete even today as he dropped those things like a hot iron on the spot and decided it was time to reach up on the shelf and pry open a fresh can of Whoop-Ass. His V-shape from the waist up, chiseled by years on his steel legs, made him look like he was wearing a Batman costume. As soon as the crutches were free from his arms, he commenced to wave his iron bar arms around like nunchucks. We who saw Jimmy use his arms like baseball bats and lock them around somebody's neck like a python decided to withdraw our applications from contenders for playground strong man. Many a normal kid learned that a polio victim was more than formidable. Of course, this kind of reaction to threat alerted some of the Unkraut capos on Craig Street. As they hung outside around their stoop like John Gotti and his soldiers and glared across the street at the Parrots, the day was coming when they would do more than measure one another. Both Jimmy and Gary had days when they were forced to take up arms against the Unkrauts.
The other thing I will never forget about Kenny is a quote that I often heard him say as long as I knew him, "I would rather fight than eat." Though it refers to what he loved to do, it was also indicative of a part of his nature that revealed itself in other ways when he entered into any activity. He was full-throttle on everything. At Halloween, my homies and I would stalk down the street door to door with a BAG. Unkraut would CHARGE through the neighborhoods like a Watts looter, racing down the streets with a PILLOWCASE bulging with candy and pushing people out of the way. He was an October 31 bandit.
When it came to baseball, he was obsessive. At recess, we would all blow through the school house doors and charge onto the baseball field for a quick game. As we chose sides, Unkraut ALWAYS got first pick. Unkraut'ts team also always batted first by design. Unkraut threw an upside down bat to the other captain. When he caught it, alternating hands went up the bat to the top. The top hand chose sides first and batted first. Kenny's hand always rested on top, or one could challenge him and have part of his own hand extending beyond the top. If it did, you would have to submit to a process called "pounds. " Pounds" was administered by none other than Unkraut himself. As the opponent gripped the bat with part of his hand beyond the end, the ball in Unkraut's hand now became a blacksmith's sledge. He would coddle the bat and your hand between his legs like he was going to shoe Mr. Ed and then hammer down on your flesh as if he were driving a wagon wheel onto a prairie schooner. If you could hold on without letting go for 10 blows, you batted first. No one did. Either you dropped the bat - and let Unkraut bat first - or every time you threw the ball to first base you stained the ball with your own plasma or a piece of meat from your paw went with it.
While Kenny's team always batted first, so did Kenny himself. He assumed the lead-off batter position with his verbal announcement heard by all, "I''m first bat." He was a miniature Babe Ruth.
One time I seized the bat, stepped into the batter's box, and made the mistake of declaring my intention of batting first before he publicly made known his entitled assertion. He walked up to me, locked his iron fist around the stick, glowered at me with a scowl like Tony Soprano and authoritatively corrected me with, "No, I'm first bat."
Well, that was it. I had finally had enough. Right then and there I decided I wasn't going to take that crap from him. He had reigned as this Mighty Mouse Godfather long enough. I towered over him. Who did he think he was? I was just about to seize him by the throat and wax the playground with his backside when I was suddenly - lucky for him - accosted by a more charitable frame of mind because my response was, "Of course. What was I thinking?"
Now the reason for all this acquiescence on the part of all first grade boys was because of that event in that alley on short Main that I mentioned in the first paragraph. It took place after school. Somewhere along the line that day my good buddy, Charles Whaley, who lived on the same street as the Parrots but a few houses down, had crossed Kenny Unkraut, and the two of them were about to lock horns for the title of 1st grade Master and Commander. I don't remember how I got there, but I came upon this unruly crowd of kids who were shouting and pushing each other like the sadistic fiends who jammed into the Roman Coliseum. They surrounded Unkraut and Whaley who were staring each other down and preparing to square off. Unkrauts siblings circled him like cornermen at Madison Square Gardens.
Kenny's fights always began the same way. Hospital tape was perpetually wrapped around the bridge of his owl-like glasses, no doubt from the Unkrauts beating the hell out of each other. So the first thing he always did was remove those things. Now this was a 3-step process that the unsuspecting were never prepared for. First, he would nonchalantly say, "Let me take off my glasses." The second thing he did was turn around and hand off his specs to one of his brothers by saying, "Hold these." That was the last conscious thing anybody standing across from him ever remembered hearing. As soon as those glasses touched his brother's hand, Kenny heard something that unfortunately no one else did. A bell. A silent ring-side gong sounded in his mind signaling the opening salvo of the first and last round of a one-sided melee. Because when the victim looked up, he instantly saw a large knuckled ball that looked like an alternator from a tractor come out of nowhere and find its home right in the middle of his face. Unkraut had spun around like he was on a lathe and in one slick, lightning-fast move brought his fist around as if he was swinging a car battery and sucker-punched Whaley's mug like he was driving a 2x4 through a plaster wall. Though it would be another 17 years before man entered space on his way to the moon, Whaley became one of the first people in the 1st grade of the Class of 1964 at John G. Carlisle to enter the space program and see all the stars in the galaxy without leaving earth. That was pretty much it for Charles.
In those days, the 50's, there were lots of commercials on TV about Wonder Bread and how it built strong bodies 12 ways. To illustrate the point, they always showed some cartoon kid being bullied by some thug. But then one day his mother brought home a loaf of Wonder Bread. As soon as he ate one slice, a knot the size of a bowling ball appeared on his biceps. The next thing you knew, the Wonder Bread eater and the bully were in a boxing ring on the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. The bell rang and the former weakling wound up and slammed his nemesis through the floor.
When I saw that commercial, I immediately though of Kenny Unkraut as Bluto and saw myself as a 1st grade Popeye lifting Unkraut up off the school playground with an upper cut behind which was a right-handed forearm the size of a cinder block of concrete and loaded with a steel anvil in a leather glove. So I told my Mom, "Next time you go to the store, buy me a loaf of Wonder Bread."
The moment it appeared in the house, I took a slice and wiped it with mayonnaise and a wedge of cheese. As soon as it was in my belly and obviously moving toward my muscles like a can of spinach, I went to the mirror, tore off my shirt and flexed, expecting to see a world globe sitting where my bicep usually appeared and my pecs and abs bubbling like a witch's cauldron all over my frail frame.
What I saw was . . . nothing. That's when I realized all that advertising was crap to get fools like me to beg their mothers to buy some faux kick-ass bread.
Through the years, Unkraut's reputation loomed large, and many a kid from near and far - intra and interstate - had heard of him having never lost a fight and came to go a few rounds with him. But there were never any rounds. Plural. In fact, there wasn't even A round. It would be more like a fraction of a round. Maybe 10 seconds. Many years after high school I would visit him at his liquor store when I came into town, and he would tell me the silhouettes of gunslingers were still showing up in the saloon door looking for a fight while he was in his 50s.
But his tactics had changed. Rather than performing a beat-down in his store or grabbing him by this collar and the seat of his pants and throwing him into the middle of Pike Street, he would usher the contender out the exit and 2 doors down to the alley. Whereas in the old days an iron ball to the face that jiggled the cerebrum like cold tapioca and brought the sensation of midnight in the Mammoth Cave to the dupe's senses, Kenny was now just using his open paw. He was short but stout, wide like a fullback and packed with solid muscle like a bull. After high school he used to load semi-trucks by lifting and lugging 100 pound sides of beef into their holds. His hand was thick and broad. Many years of numerous opponents who had been notches on his gun had given him absolute confidence in the outcome. From his own prior experience as a tough guy, the adversary probably anticipated a one-punch knockout and then a triumphant ride home. Nevertheless, he warmed up for a knock-down and drag out brawl that he thought of as a worst-case scenario that might end up with the two of them kickin' and gougin' in the mud, the blood, and the beer. So I can see him bobbing and weaving and shuffling his feet back and forth around the alley like Muhammad Ali while also simultaneously bolstering his own courage and adrenalin by calling up some trash talk. But Kenny just stood there like a silent fire hydrant, a robotic droid, unmoved and waiting for the right moment to arrive. That moment finally came when an open hand the size of a serving platter came from somewhere out of the starboard bow with a brain-jarring slap across the side of the face that sounded like the crack of a bullwhip amplified with loudspeakers. It was as if the victim had been smashed across the side of his head and ear with a cymbal. And that was the end of it. It was all over. One unforgettable slap to the countenance from which Unkraut's fingerprints could have been lifted.
In spite of all this, Kenny was a generous man. He wasn't a thug, a hooligan, a hoodlum, a tough, or mean. He didn't threaten, terrorize, or intimidate people. He just loved to fight, and there were many others like him who happened to find each other and express their common interest.
As he grew older, many people also knew him as one who helped countless people who were down and out. I know personally of one girl in our Kindergarten class who had been paralyzed by a stroke and became pathetically poverty stricken. She told me of Kenny's liberal aid to her in her need. But he went far beyond this. This was probably due in part because a family of 17 kids is acquainted with a dearth of privileges and material things. I know Kenny and his siblings were afforded benefits they probably would not have had through the generosity of the Kiwanis Club, and he never forgot that or what it was like to be in that situation.
I used to tell one of my sons about the legend of Kenny Unkraut, stories like you have just read. One day I took him to Covington and told him we were going to go down and see Kenny. I know he walked into that store with quiet, almost reverential awe and wide eyes expecting to meet a mortal Superman. It was a day he never forgot.
Sometime late in 2005, I heard that my Kindergarten friend had passed away on October 5.
His obituary in the Cincinnati Enquirer on 10/29/2005, in part, said:
Kenneth "Kenny" Unkraut was one of 17 children and an entrepreneur who liked things done his way.
A passionate man in everything he did, Mr. Unkraut loved to golf and help those in need.
One way Mr. Unkraut helped people was through his 28-year-old business, Kenny's Liquor and Delicatessen in Covington.
Occasionally, he would hold something he called "F Camp," where if anyone at the store used an expletive, they would pay a "fine" of 50 cents or $1. "F Camp" raised over $3,000 last year and Mr. Unkraut donated it to the Ruth Lyons Children's Fund.
Mr. Unkraut died Friday, October 28, of cancer at St. Luke Hospital in Fort Thomas. He was 59.
Born in 1946 and raised in Covington, Mr. Unkraut married his neighborhood sweetheart, Rose.
It was Mr. Unkraut's passion for people that kept him going to work every day for 28 years.
"He was extremely passionate about going to work every day," said his son, Bill J. Unkraut of Hebron. "His whole goal in life was to meet and help others. He was extremely passionate about helping others succeed.
"Every Christmas he would adopt a family and encourage others to do the same. He would take care of you if you were down on your luck and never expected anything in return. He loved life and people. He was a true father figure."