A New Decade

This has been an unusual end to the decade.

This past week I drove my mother to our hometown, Albert Lea, in southern Minnesota. We were both born there. My mother, at 91 (almost 92), is the youngest of four sisters, two of whom remain active. Lilly was staying with her next oldest sister, Vi (93), and they planned to have Christmas dinner with the oldest surviving sister Alice (96). Helen died two years ago at 98. Many holiday plans were changed by the winter storm that bore down on use with forecasts of 20" of snow but the sisters did get together, and they enjoyed each others company as much as three Norwegians can. The dinner review noted that the "coffee was good."

Thomas, my son, rode along to drop off Lilly. He's in his second year of graduate school at Northwestern (Phd Political Science 2012) and has been slumming at the homestead since Thanksgiving. He's been a delight to have at home. He did finally learn how to use a snow shovel. Lilly was staying with my aunt Vi who lives at Knutson Place, a senior apartment building adjacent to St. John's Lutheran Home. Melvin Knutson was the thirty plus year head minister at First Lutheran Church. He finally left First Lutheran to become a bishop. I left First Lutheran during the Vietnam War. We had a nice chat with Aunt Vi. She complemented me on my short haircut. She and her deceased husband Don were critical of my long and later shaggy haircuts for years. It still annoys me. She then told me three times that I looked really nice for '75'. My birthday is the day after Christmas and it is not a good time for birthdays. So I was annoyed because of the hair comment and the comment that I looked good for 75. These trips are always sort of a test to see which of the 'old ladies' has lost a few more marbles. Finally Vi said "oh, what am I saying? You are not 75, you are 60." I said "I will be 59 on December 26th." After another thirty minutes of chit chat we emptied her vacuum cleaner and replaced some light bulbs and decided to hit the road. It was then that I told Vi "what's with this mothball stink." Her walk-in closet and apartment in general reeked. My mother has asthma and has lost her sense of smell and I could see an ER trip coming on. "I put mothballs in my outside flowers to keep the squirrels out of the pots." "Well, you don't have any wool clothes to protect and I can hardly breath in here." We double or triple bagged the mothballs. They'll be there for her 94th summer. Breath deeply squirrels.

After dropping off Lilly we decided to head back north under the pretense of beating the northern-bearing storm. We were, however, hungry. The original plan was to hit Taco King in the old Rexall Drug Store on North Broadway. Broadway and Clark would be the epicenter of the long ago prosperous downtown Albert Lea. Some of the luster was lost in the 1960's with the building of the 'Skyline Mall' on the west side of town which contained a Ben Franklin's, Penny's, a large grocery store and a number of small retail stores. In the early 1970's a WalMart was built adjacent to the Skyline Mall with the obvious and oft-repeated demise of local businesses. The Skyline Mall is empty. WalMart built a new store on the east side of town near the I35 & I90 intersection and now centers retail three or four miles east of the vacant Skyline Mall and the vacant WalMart store and about two miles east of the formerly robust downtown retail stores. So my intent in going to Taco King went far beyond my openness to a cheese and onion enchilada.

At the last minute I turned to Thomas stating "Taco King" is really not all that great, let's go to the Asian buffet. Part of my fickle change was to avoid telling him for the zillionth time that Taco King used to be the Rexall Drug and that there was a barber shop in the basement and that a dwarf who was a graphic artist and who drove a Porsche used to live upstairs. So we headed to the Asian Buffet (name forgotten) on East Main. It's actually quite good and is only $6.00 for lunch. It was formerly a Country Kitchen, part of the 1960's expansion east on ... East Main and there is no other history than that, including no dwarf's. Albert Lea was home to two dwarfs in the 1950's including the preceding male dwarf and a woman dwarf who did hand photo tinting at the Christenson Photography Studio which was in what used to be Stieler's Meat Market on Clark Street. The old guy Stieler was a butcher. One of his son's became a dentist who had a daughter and a son. That son, Jim Stieler, was a good friend of mine in junior high.

Aunt Alice was a great cook. Here coleslaw is famous. Her husband Mert hunted ducks from October until the lake froze on Bear Lake about ten miles southwest of Albert Lea. After the freeze-up he chased pheasants in IA until the end of the season. He died of a heart attack hunting pheasants in his late 60's. That's another story. Alice prepared a lot of pheasants and ducks over the years. Mert was a Navy cook in the south Pacific during WWII and later owned two small restaurants in Albert Lea. They both knew their way around a kitchen. Alice now lives in a memory care unit. She recognized me and acknowledged Thomas but the names are gone. I talked about Thomas and Anne and my wife, Linda, and she followed the conversation and seemed interested but I think she forgot Thomas was there when he was not talking. As we wound up the conversation I asked her "Alice are you 96?" She responded "I must be at least that" and chuckled, chuckling like the Alice I've always known.

We drove through the 'Ginkel Addition' which was constructed after WWII on the east side of town for returning servicemen. There were several hundred homes, all identical, and for the most part, they remain identical. I was born while my parents, Lilly and Bud, lived on Columbus Avenue. My grandfather, Addison Leeper (A.C.) owned a home on Columbus and had an empty lot next door. After four years in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, my father returned to Albert Lea with the other remaining members of Company G of the 135th Infantry Division and he and his father (A.C.) built a small home on Columbus. After marrying Lilly the two of them lived in this tiny house which they had build and which my grandfather had financed. Bud worked nights at Wilson and Company meat packing plant. My mother remembers that he made $25 per week and they thought they had it made. When I was born They added on to the house. Even with the addition it could not have been more than 600 square feet. It had a partial basement and was heated by a centrally located American Gas Machine space heater. Coincidentally Alice and Mert's oldest daughter married the grandson of one of the founders of American Gas Machine. AGM invented the first practical 'regulator' for natural gas heaters and furnaces, invented the 'Coleman' stove, and the Coleman lantern.

As I drove down Columbus I tried to remember all the names of the people who lived in each of the houses in the 1950's. No one moved out of their houses in those days. They lived there until they died. If you've ever notice my MIA bracelet it bears the name of Barry Olsen who lived across the street. He stole all my marbles when I was a kid and disappeared while sitting on a pile of Claymore mines that was hit by an NVA RPG. I noticed a man in the driveway of 611 Columbus, my home. As we approached he headed into the garage. The original garage was replaced by one build by Vi's husband, Don, his brother Russ, and their hired man Leo during the off season. They owned Nelsen's Brothers House Moving but needed work in the winters. I turned to Thomas and said "I'm going to talk to this guy" and indicated to Thomas to follow. Walking down the driveway was strange. The last time was 1963. At the garage door I introduced myself to a guy about my age and his teenage son. The floor of the garage was strewn with tools and an partially disassembled snowblower. Thomas seemed to sense what was coming.

"My grandfather and father built this house and I moved out in 1963 and I just thought I'd stop and say hello." The guy was reserved but nice enough and said that he had bought the house about a year ago. I told him that it had sold in 1963 for $4000 and was built in 1948 for $1000. We talked about the neighbors. The Olsen's still live across the street and Evelyn Beenken still lives two doors away on the other side of my grandfather's old house and Dorothy Kirsch still lives directly across the street. Dorothy's husband Tony worked for the railroad but was great for the neighborhood kids. There was always time for building snow forts and putting fifteen kids in the car and finding somewhere to play ball and always buying popsicles and always making sure there was at least one bat and ball for the neighborhood kids in this crappy little neighborhood and making sure that everyone got to bat, big kids, little kids, boys and girls alike. My sandbox used to sit about ten feet from where I was standing. A.C. was the head engineer for the school district and every spring a school truck would back down the driveway and put new sand in the box. That was the way things worked in those days. A.C. would make up a big pot of soup on Sunday mornings and bring it down to the 'hobo jungle' where the down and out men would sit and talk. A.C. could barely afford soup for himself but that was who he was, thankful for the little he had and thankful that his sons and son-in-laws and the men of the neighbor houses of Columbus Street had all come home from WWII, and willing share all that he had. He moved a small house behind his garage and brought his parents to live there when they were old and in need. After they passed away he used the "Little House" as a workshop and would lend any of his tools to the neighbors. This was long before Home Depot made us all so tool-needy and tool-rich. So I'm standing here in a garage that my parents used to own, recognizing the handwork of my uncle and my grandfather's wiring, thinking about A.C. having his Toro power reel mower torn apart and the tools all about and standing next to an elm tree that my father planted the year that I was born and now I was standing in their space, my father's, my grandfather's, and my great grandfather's, and nicely enough, I was standing there with my son. I've already forgotten the new owner's name but I shared a few more stories until I could hear my wife (a hundred miles north) saying "you talk too much" and I wrapped it up.

We drove north back to the cities ahead of the storm to spend Christmas with our family, their girlfriends, friends and ex-friends, our neighbors, and it was all good and I'm looking forward to a new decade.