Category: Minnesota Life

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How I Learned To Read

I was six years old when I walked into Sister Doyle’s first grade classroom. It was my first year at St. Peter’s School. The school, a big brick building with lots of windows, was on the corner of a busy street, two houses down from where my family lived.

Kindergarten was a long six blocks away. I walked with my best friend, Betty Ann Lennon, holding hands all the way. I was short and extremely shy. Betty Ann was tall and brave. Walking to school made me feel a little braver, too. 

While kindergarten was mostly devoted to listening to the teacher read stories to us, taking a nap, and going outside to play, first grade was serious business.

Sister Doyle had sixty-four students in her classroom, sitting eight students to a table. Sister was small and pretty. She smiled all the time but, to us,  she seemed very old. Looking back, I think she had recently graduated from the Franciscan convent. She had probably just turned twenty-one.

The first day of class, Sister Doyle asked us to stand up by our desk and say our name. “My name is Mary Lynda Jones,” I whispered. 

The boy sitting next to me, jumped up with a swagger and announced, “My name is Dennis, zip up your barn door, Kelly.” The class laughed. Sister Doyle did not. We weren’t in kindergarten any more.

None of us learned to read in kindergarten. Nobody did. None of us learned to read at home. Nobody did. We didn’t have books at home and we didn’t go to a library. We were little kids. We played outside. My Dad read comic books to us, but it never occurred to me that I could learn to read, too, until I got to first grade.

The second day of school, Sister Doyle told us we were going to learn to read. She promised that all sixty-four of us would be reading by the end of the year. I still remember the magic of it.

Every day Sister Doyle read us a story about another letter and the sound it made. It was the Sesame Street approach before Sesame Street. I still remember the letter M. A monkey told us that the letter M said, “Mmmmm. The sound you make when something taste really good. Mmmmm, milk.  Mmmm, macaroni.”

At the end of the story, we sat at our table for thirty minutes with a plain piece of paper in front of us and a big bucket of crayons to share. We practiced drawing the letter M. We drew pictures of all the words we could think of that started with Mmm.

It worked. All sixty-four of us learned to read, except maybe Charles Gott. For months I thought his name was Child of God. Charles often came to school with no lunch. When I told my mother, she started packing an extra sandwich in my lunch bag to give to Charles. Because Charles couldn’t remember all the letters of the alphabet, he got to stay in first grade another year and listen to Sister Doyle’s stories all over again. 

My only other memory of first grade is that when a child broke a rule, Sister Doyle would take her paper punch and punch a hole in the paper he or she was working on. Parents and Sister Evangelista, the Principal, could look at the child’s paper and know they did something bad.

I got in trouble only once the entire time I was in school and it was in Sister Doyle’s class. We were coloring pictures of snow. I was using a crayon to color each dot of snow. Sister Doyle thought she heard someone knock on the door. When she went to answer the door, no one was there. She turned to us and asked who had been knocking on their desk so loud that it sounded like someone knocking on our door. 

Mark Robertson, a boy at my table, raised his hand and said, “Sister, it was Mary Lynda. She’s coloring her snow so loud it sounds like someone is knocking on the door.”

I was mortified. I’m sure I started to cry. Sister Doyle came to me and explained to the class that this time she wouldn’t punch a hole in my paper. Instead, she took out a straight pin, and pricked a tiny hole in the upper corner of my paper. I learned my lesson. 

But most of all, I learned to read.

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A Minnesota Fourth of July

I checked with my brother to make sure that my memories of the Fourth of July, growing up in Minnesota, were true ~ not some made-up Norman Rockwell picture in my mind. While I had some of the basic facts straight, Bob’s memory for details was razor sharp, as usual.

The Fourth of July was an all-town celebration in North St. Paul, a town of 2000 people that covered one square mile when I lived there. Early in the morning, while my parents were drinking multiple cups of coffee and smoking cigarettes, we kids washed our bikes and decorated them with crepe paper. We wove crepe paper through the spokes and tied streamers onto the handle bars. The boys put playing cards on clothespins and pinned them to their wheels. Riding up and down the block, the noise from the playing cards sounded like motorcycles. Or at least the boys thought they did. We didn’t organize an actual parade. We just rode up and down the street, until our parents were moving and something more exciting happened.

One year there was an actual parade down main street, that included the North St. Paul High School marching band, a group of men from the VFW and the American Legion, and a float made by the Silver Lake Store. Because Leo Fortier’s uncle owned the store, Leo got to ride on the back of the float. He wore a straw hat and dangled a paper fish from the end of stick. My brother and other neighborhood boys walked beside the float, along the two-block parade route that stretched from the VFW club to Sandberg’s Mortuary. Bob remembers being exhausted by the time the parade was finished.

The family picnic began at lunch time. Before Highway 36 cut the town in half, the picnic was held in a large, beautiful park next to the railroad tracks. Later, the picnic moved to Silver Lake where, if you went early in the day, you could snag a picnic table. My mother packed a lunch of potato salad, coleslaw, jello, potato chips and brownies. Men from the American Legion grilled hamburgers for sale in the parking lot. Our cooler was filled with bottles of soda “pop” for the kids and lots of beer for the adults. 

Sometimes my grandmother joined us at the picnic table. Adults visited with one another while we swam, chased each other in the sand, and fought over trivial matters. So much for Norman Rockwell. 

VFW members sold raffle tickets as they walked through the crowd of families. Hal Norgard stood in the back of a truck and, in his booming basketball-coach voice, announced the winners of the hourly drawings.

At 3:00 the Bald Eagle Water Ski Club put on a spectacular show of beautiful girls in modest bathing suits, performing all sorts of amazing tricks on water skis. Since we didn’t know anyone with a boat, I never learned to water ski. Given my athletic ability, it’s probably just as well.

As the sun went down, we pulled out a bucket of worms and tried fishing off one of the docks until it was time for fireworks. Huge, loud, booming, once-a-year fireworks! Maybe they pale by comparison to today’s pyrotechnics, but to us they were absolutely magical.

Later, sometime in the 1960s, the Fourth of July picnic became an Ice Cream Social in August. My Dad’s Dixieland band, the Polar Bearcats, played for the crowd from a platform on the side of a truck, as the Ladies Auxiliary sold ice cream cones. By August the lake had turned green from algae and “dog days” had arrived. Gone was the smell of hamburgers on the grill. . Like most things, the Fourth of July would never be as much fun again.

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Identical Uncles ~ Double Trouble

I loved all of my uncles, my mother’s brothers, and especially my twin uncles, Ray and Len Hunt. They were devious tricksters. Always full of mischief and seldom thinking of the consequenses. Everyone said they were “full of the devil.” It was an apt description. They teased my mother and her brother, Bob, unmercifully and my mother adored them. 

Ray and Len were identical, “mirror twins.” It was impossible to tell them apart, without looking to see which hand they used. Uncle Ray was right-handed and Uncle Len was left-handed. They got their names before their hand-dominance was established, but it certainly worked out well for those of us who knew them.

Beginning in first grade, Ray and Len often switched seats in school and the nuns couldn’t tell them apart. They walked the mile and a half to school each day, dreaming up tricks to play on their teacher and their only classmate, a boy they named, “Rabbit Tracks.”

One morning they came to school, excited to  tell their classmate they had captured rabbit tracks in their hands.. Their classmate, naturally, was eager to see such an unusual sight and only after they opened their empty hands did he realize he’d been tricked again.  The poor boy was known as Rabbit Tracks for the rest of his life.

The twins were thirteen years older than my mother. They called her “Dolly,” but treated her more like a rag doll that the china variety.  My grandmother told me she didn’t think my mother would live to be six years old, with those two brothers around. They liked to hold her upside down by the ankles and listen to her scream as the blood ran to her head. They taught Bob to steer a car when he was five years old and my mother, the passenger, was three. 

When they were older, Ray and Len took my mother and Uncle Bob all over the farm with them ~ milking cows, inspecting their traps, delivering eggs and working in the field. They named the cows after their girlfriends. They taught Uncle Bob to drive the hay wagon, pulled by two big draft horses, Duke and Nellie, while they rode alongside in the Model T.

On one terrifying occasion, Bob was driving the team of horses, when he lost his grip on the reins and fell between the two horses. My mother hung onto the side of the wagon, screaming, while Bob wrapped his arms and legs around the single tree between the two horses. The twins saw what happened and turned the Model T around in time to stop the horses. Of course, my grandparents never knew about any of those antics. My mother and her brother were threatened and bribed, and never said a word.

By the time I was old enough to recognize my uncles, Uncle Len had a son, Dick Hunt, who was as mischievous as Ray and Len. For a long time I thought they were triplets. Dick died young, but before he died, he helped the twins carry out one last mad caper. 

Uncle Ray had knee surgery and was recovering in the hospital. Len and Dick went to visit him. They wheeled Ray into the bathroom and undressed him down to his underwear. Len put on Ray’s hospital gown, and climbed into the bed, leaving Ray sitting in the bathroom. Dick went to fetch the head nurse and insisted she come to see the surgery, 

“I’ve always heard that the surgeon was a miracle-worker, but you have to see this. That doctor didn’t even leave a scar,” Dick told her.

When the nurse pulled back the sheet to inspect Ray’s surgery, she saw Len’s knee with no stitches or any sign of surgery whatsoever. Only after she went back to the nurse’s station, did the two brothers and my cousin, Dick, find her and explain how they had tricked her. 

By the time they died, Ray had lost his wife, Betty, and a daughter, Joan. Len lost his wife, Mary, and his son, Dick. But my uncles, Ray and Len, never lost their sense of humor or their playful spirit. 

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My Grandmother, Julia Schmitz Hunt

My family lived with Grandma and Grandpa Hunt from the time I was one year old until I was eight. After Dad returned home from the Navy, we lived on the farm with my grandparents. When Grandpa sold the farm, we moved to a duplex on Sixteenth Avenue, across the street from St. Peter’s Catholic Church. Grandma and Grandpa lived in a one bedroom apartment upstairs and we lived in a two bedroom apartment on the lower floor. There was an indoor toilet, but no bathtub and no hot water. The stove was an “old fashioned wood stove” in the kitchen which, of course, wasn’t considered old fashioned back then. It was considered normal. 

Grandpa Hunt was a big, imposing man who seldom smiled. I avoided him whenever I could. But I loved living downstairs from Grandma. She was a small woman with a soft, billowy chest and huge arms, the result of baking bread every day on the farm, where she raised eight children ~ six big boys, my Aunt Fran (second oldest child) and my mother (the youngest child.) Snuggling with Grandma was the most comforting moment of the day.

Our neighbors on Sixteenth Avenue were Old Man Grunke and the Courneyour family. Grandma was a friend of Mrs. Grunke, but Old Man Grunke was a skinny snake of a man, who hated kids. He especially hated my brother Bob and I because we used to swing on the chain he stretched across his yard, dividing our property from his. He told us to stop swinging on his chain but, naturally, we didn’t. One day he coated the chain with motor oil. Bob and I went home covered in slimy oil. My mother was furious at Old Man Grunke, but he really didn’t care. The war between our families went on for years.

On the other side of us lived the Cournoyer family. They had a garage in their backyard, built over an open pit. They threw all their garbage in the pit, including tin cans and broken bottles, which attracted rats. Huge rats. Some of them as big as small cats. One day, Grandma Hunt was hanging wash on the line when one of the rats ran across her foot. She swore in German, grabbed the pole she used to prop up the clothesline and beat the rat into a bloody mass, swearing at the rat the whole time. Grandma was small, but she was fearless. As I stood there, staring at the dead, bloody pulp that used to be a rat, Grandma turned to me and told me to get the shovel out of our shed and throw the dead rat into the alley. She quietly went back to hanging her freshly washed clothes on the line.

Eventually my family moved to a different house, two blocks away. My grandfather had a stroke and went to live with my Uncle Bill, who was big  and strong enough to take care of him. My grandmother continued to live in the house on Sixteenth Avenue and my Aunt Fran moved in with her. I often walked to Grandma’s house, especially in the quiet hours after dinner. I loved sitting at the table as Grandma finished her coffee, slathering a piece of bread with butter and jelly for dessert. She would tell me stories of her life on the farm. I still have two of Grandma’s coffee cups. I warm my hands around them, as she did so many years ago, and I smile.

My last memory of Grandma Hunt was at the nursing home, where she spent her final days. I had moved to Denver to go to school, and went to see her when I came home on vacation. By that time, Grandma had wasted away.  She weighed less than eighty pounds. Most of her marbles were gone, but she recognized me as I walked into the room. She grabbed my hand, with tears in her eyes, and pleaded with me to go to the kitchen and take her name “off the list.” 

Grandma was convinced that even as she lay dying, there was work to do. She believed that she was “on the list” of people who had to report for duty to prepare the next meal and then wash the dishes.

“Of course, Grandma. I’ll take care of it.”

I didn’t try to tell Grandma that there was no such list. Instead, I walked out of the room and came back a few minutes later. I told her that I scratched her name off the list and told the cook to never put Grandma’s name on the list again. I told Grandma she never had to prepare another meal or wash another dish again. Grandma was happy. It was the least I could do.

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Remembering The Boys Of Summer

When I was growing up in the 1950’s, we lived across the street from St. Peter’s Catholic School and playground. There were a lot of boys around my age who liked to play baseball and by late morning, we usually had six or eight kids ready to play ball. 

Leo Fortier was not available until after 11:00. Leo’s dad worked for the post office and had to get up at 4:30 in the morning. Leo’s mother, on the other hand, was a night owl. She made Leo stay up every night until midnight, watching the Jack Parr show. Leo would tell us the next day everything that Hermione Gingold or Charlie Weaver said. We couldn’t have cared less.

Since we only had three or four kids on a side, we had local rules to make the games competitive. Any hits to right field was an out. Each team had a pitcher, a shortstop and a left fielder. Since there was no first baseman, if a fielder threw the ball to the pitcher before the runner got to first base, the hitter was out. This was known as “Pitcher’s Hand Out.”

The batting team supplied the catcher and also the back-up catcher. The playground was higher than the street, and if the catcher missed the ball it would roll down the hill about a quarter of a block.

There was always a lot of arguing about balls and strikes, and if the pitcher caught the ball before the batter got to first. Did the catcher drop the ball on purpose when there was a play at home plate? The arguments were endless.

St. Peter’s had a baseball team and it was usually pretty good. Tryouts were during Holy Week (Easter vacation) and in 1956, I tried out for the outfield. Since I was a short, skinny sixth grader, a slow runner with a weak throwing arm, and seldom caught a fly ball that was right to me, I didn’t make the team that year.

The next year, 1957, I tried out again. I was still short and skinny, slow with a weak arm, but now I could catch most of the fly balls that were hit right to me. That was not enough. I didn’t make the team that year, either.

North St. Paul had a summer league. The St. Peter’s team was the Dodgers. The local American Legion Club sponsored the Braves, and I decided to try out for the Braves. I didn’t make that team, either, because my father was not a member of the American Legion.

Hy Ettle was the Braves coach. He told us kids who didn’t make the team that we should come to all the practices and if someone quit, we could get his uniform and be on the team. Hy was a local realtor so he was able to call practices during the day. These were usually on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, at 1:00.

We would all ride our bikes down to the field behind Main Street and be waiting for Hy at 1:00. Hy never showed up for these practices, so we would then jump back on our bikes and ride up the alley to the American Legion Hall. We went in the back door and there was Hy, sitting at the bar with a shot and a beer in front of him.

“Oh,” he said. “Is it 1:00 already? The gear is in the trunk of my Cadillac. Take it to the field. I’ll be down in a half hour. If I don’t get there, just leave everything and I’ll pick it up on my way home.”

After the third game of season, Craig Longfellow didn’t show up. Hy said to me, “Do you know where Longfellow lives?”

“Sure,”  I said.

“Looks like he quit. Go over there and pick up his uniform. You’re on the team.”

Our pitcher that year was Don Arlich. He was a big left-hander who could throw the ball harder than anyone in town. He had a curve ball that no one could hit, and he hit the ball a mile. We won every game until he left for New York and the Boy Scout Jamboree. Mike O’Reilly was the catcher and he went to New York, too.

That left my friend, Leo Fortier, as the catcher, and I was the defensive replacement in right field in the last innings. Hy Ettle had a rule that if one of your parents came to the game, you would get to play.

Leo was short like me. He was fat, while I was skinny, but he could still run faster and throw the ball farther than I could. But he still couldn’t throw the ball from home to second base if a runner was stealing the base. The plan was for him to throw the ball back to the pitcher, who would then turn and throw to the short-stop for the out. It never worked. The runner was always safe.

In one of our games, there was a pop-up behind home plate. Leo flipped his mask off and started running to catch the ball. Unfortunately, he stepped  into his mask and fell flat on his face.

Hy told Leo, “ Next time this happens, stand up and find where the ball is, then throw your mask the other way and go catch the ball.”

Luckily, Leo had another chance in the next game. He stood up, saw the ball, but in his haste he threw off his glove and stood there with his mask on.

We didn’t win a single game when Don Arlich was gone. When he came back for the last few games of the season. Mike O’Reilly had quit and another kid got his uniform. Leo was a permanent replacement as catcher. He came back to the bench after every inning with tears streaming down his cheeks, his left hand all red and swollen from catching Don’s fastball and curve.

In 1958, now in the eighth grade, I finally made the St. Peter’s baseball team. Leo Fortier never played baseball after seventh grade. He concentrated on golf and tennis. I haven’t seen him for over fifty years, but I understand that he is realtor, much like our coach, Hy Ettle.                                                         ~Bob Jones

Bob Jones is a retired dentist. He still plays softball in the Roseville Senior Softball League. He has played on a team every year since 1962. Bob is still short, but not skinny any more. He still roams in right field. He’s still a slow runner with a bad arm, but he catches most of the fly balls that are hit right to him. 

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The Woman Who Lived In a Little House

My mother, Marianne Jones, grew up in North St. Paul, Minnesota. Her father, my grandfather, was a huge, strong German man ~  the oldest of eight children. His parents were early pioneer farmers in St. Paul. When his father died at an early age, my grandfather was left in charge of the farm and the younger children. He valued hard-work and saving money. He was a distant, loud, often difficult man.

Grandpa and Grandma were married when he was twenty-six and she was eighteen. He started a successful sauerkraut and pickle factory that same year, but his heart wasn’t in it. After sixteen years of running the factory, he sold the business and bought a farm. By this time, he had six strong sons and two daughters, including my mother, who was the youngest.

My grandmother was the sixth oldest of ten children. Her brothers were fun-loving, charming, and often irresponsible with money, which infuriated my grandfather. My grandparents argued a lot of the time, usually about money and raising children.

My grandfather worried constantly and was a harsh disciplinarian. My grandmother was in poor health, and often worn-out from cooking, cleaning and raising eight children. Although there was always enough food and warm clothing, the children learned to look elsewhere for attention and affection.

My mother reported  that her early life was good, however, because she enjoyed being with her brothers and playing with all the animals on the farm. She liked to roam the fields and pretend she was running away from home.

When my mother was ten years old, her older brother, Frank, age sixteen, died of a ruptured  appendix. My mother wrote: After that everything seemed to change. Frank was a sensitive, intelligent boy whom everyone loved. My mother grieved a great deal and my father became morose. He seemed to feel that everything was against him.

As was typical at that time, my mother’s family never referred to this tragedy.  My mother felt especially guilty when she remembered that one time she took a nickel from Frank’s piggy bank. 

My mother was a good student. She loved being in school plays and had a beautiful singing voice. She was outgoing, with a good sense of humor, and she had a lot of friends.. She remarked that she could have done better, academically, but knew that college was out of the question for her, so she concentrated on having fun instead.

This is my mother’s memory of meeting my father: When I was seventeen, and a senior in high school, I met the man I was to marry. He was playing his trumpet in a three-piece combo in one of the local hangouts. I can picture him now as I saw him then ~ on a platform high above us, magnificent in his black tuxedo with a blue cumber bun, blowing his trumpet and setting the pace for the Saturday night celebrators. I was out with his best friend and we were making our last stop of the evening. Is there a fate that destines our future? I think so. Is there love at first sight? I know there is. This particularly beautiful human being was the answer to my prayers.”

My father’s family was very different from my mother’s. Dad was raised in a middle-class family, in which every child went to college. My mother’s family were farmers, often with dirt under their fingernails. My father’s family were gentle people, while my mother smoked cigarettes and swore like a sailor (but never in front of my grandparents!) Dad was emotional, and cried easily. My mother wouldn’t shed a tear.

My parents loved each other and never argued. My mother appreciated that my Dad worked hard and gave her a good life, filled with thoughtful gifts and trips to interesting places. But she knew that my father’s family never truly accepted her. The fact that my personality was more like my father’s and not much like hers, created friction between us.

My father died when he was seventy-nine and my mother was seventy-five. From that day forward, she considered herself old and frail. She went to the doctor and asked for handicapped license plates. When the doctor said, “Marianne, I don’t know what your handicap is,” she answered, “put down that I’m old.” She was younger than I am now!

Mom taught me a lot. She taught me to work hard, to cook and to sew. She had an exceedingly fine mind for politics. She loved watching the news, especially CNN and C-Span.

Mom was supportive when I told her I was moving to Denver. She came to visit me every year and my boys spent summers in Minnesota while they were were growing up. Mom was excited when I told her I was moving to Mexico, and twice she came to visit me while I was there.

My mother died of pneumonia at the age of 96. She knew she was dying. She told her doctors to take her off antibiotics and let her die in peace. By the time I reached her, she was already unconscious. I hope she was able to hear me when held her hand and told her I loved her. I always will.

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Subversive To The End

I’ve written before about some of the more colorful branches on my family tree. Probably my most famous relative is Jeanne Audrey Powers, the first woman ordained an elder in the United Methodist church. 

Unlike my wild Irish uncles, Jeanne Audrey will be remembered for her many good deeds. Unlike my Irish uncles, she never went to jail, was never chased by the FBI, and was, frankly, not nearly as interesting.

Born in 1932 in Mankato, Minnesota, Jeanne Audrey was eleven years older than I was. We have the same great-grandfather, Evan David Jones, who immigrated from Wales. Our grandfathers were brothers. Her mother and my father were first cousins, but they didn’t see each other very often.

Jeanne Audrey lived with her mother, Florence Powers, her two unmarried aunts, Edna and Grace Jones, and her grandmother, Lizzie Jones, in a big house in Mankato, MN. I don’t know what happened to her father. Now, with a renewed interest in genealogy, I might try to find out.

One of my only memories of Jeanne Audrey was at the wedding of my Aunt Shirley. My brother, Bob, and I were part of the wedding. I was six years old and Bob was almost five. It was a large, beautiful wedding. Shirley carried  a huge bouquet of peonies as she walked down the aisle ~ flowers picked from my grandfather’s huge peony garden. Bob and I were both dressed in white and looked cute, except for the black eye on my brother’s face, the result of me slamming the front door on him the day before the wedding. 

The wedding reception was at my grandparent’s home. Bob and I were playing in the back yard, swinging on a big four-person swing that went back and forth, faster and faster, higher and higher, until Jeanne Audrey came to tell us that we needed to stop. She reprimanded us for misbehaving at a wedding. And, to make matters worse, we were having fun all dressed up in wedding clothes. 

Jeanne Audrey must have been wicked smart. After getting her bachelor of science degree at Mankato State University in 1954, she studied theology at Princeton and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She also took graduate courses in England, Switzerland and Boston University School of Theology.

I didn’t follow Jeanne Audrey’s career. My family didn’t talk about her very much, although she lived nearby in Minneapolis. I recently read that she was nominated to be a bishop in the Methodist church in 1972 and 1976. Although it was considered an extremely rare honor for a woman to be ordained a bishop, Jeanne Audrey declined both times. She didn’t want people to scrutinize her private life.  

Rev. Jeanne Audrey was a volunteer with The United Methodist Commission on the Status and Role of Women. Throughout her life, she was committed to feminist issues and was a champion for LGBTQ rights. She was well-known for insisting that all language be gender-neutral. She relished the idea of being a “she-ro.”

Jeanne Audrey was a driving force in the Reconciling Ministries Movement. In her final sermon at its national gathering in New York City in 1995, she declared that she was lesbian. The church elders were horrified and Jeanne Audrey was immediately ex-communicated. 

According to a 2018 article, “Wrestling With The Angel of Death” in Sojourners magazine, Cathy Lynn Grosssman wrote, “Jeanne Audrey Powers, 85 years and counting, wanted to stop counting. She felt herself growing more frail, less clear-header. She was losing her sight. Worst of all, the woman who once spoke on international podiums was losing her words.”  

Jeanne Audrey was technically not terminally ill, in spite of a series of mini-strokes. She was not a candidate for hospice but “she was dying to herself, as she knew herself to be.” 

Jeanne Audrey knew that the doctrines of the United Methodist Church included one against suicide, just as it included a doctrine against homosexuality in 1995.  And yet, she bought herself a one-way ticket to Switzerland and died, according to her friends, “at peace with her decision.” in a euthanasia facility. Her final wish was that these words would be etched on her tombstone: Subversive to the End.

Jeanne Audrey declared in her obituary, that her death ended the lineage of the Jones and Powers families. I beg to differ. My grandparents had nineteen grandchildren. We are all still here. 

Rest in Peace, Jeanne Audrey. I’m sorry I never knew you.

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A Minnesota Monster Storm

It was March 1, 1965. My friends and I were looking forward to graduating from college in St. Cloud, Minnesota. We were studying for our third quarter finals when the blizzard struck. We were used to snow, but totally unprepared for what was coming. 

I lived in an off-campus house with five other women. Most of us had turned twenty-one, the legal drinking age in Minnesota, and we liked going to the local college bar, about a mile away. It didn’t take much for us to take a study-break and head for the bar, to eat hamburgers and sometimes have more to drink than we probably should have. 

That night it started snowing while we were at the bar. I was the only person with a car, but I left it at home. We were used to walking a mile and usually we weren’t in any hurry to get home. Besides, I knew I would rather spend money on bourbon than on gasoline. The bar was crowded and noisy. We were having a lot of fun, when my roommate came and yelled in my ear, 

“We’ve got to get Sonia home.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s in the bathroom, throwing up. She’s so drunk she can’t stand.”

Oh, my! We looked outside and saw that the weather was getting serious. We bundled Sonia into her Minnesota parka, hat, scarf and gloves, and started the trek toward home. Sonia kept falling into snowbanks. No amount of cajoling could get her to walk more than a couple of steps. This was 1965 in rural, college-town Minnesota. There were no cell-phones. Everyone was hunkered down inside their homes, as the blizzard howled and quickly covered everything in snow.

That’s when we spotted a toboggan on someone’s porch. We weren’t going to steal it. We just wanted to borrow it. We needed to get Sonia home. We pulled the toboggan off the porch and into the street. We dumped Sonia onto the toboggan and she immediately passed out. 

By the time we reached our front door, we were wet and cold. We knew we were lucky to have made it home. It took four of us to drag Sonia off the toboggan, into the house and onto her bed. We peeled her out of wet clothes and  into warm pajamas. We covered her up in extra blankets and knew she was going to have a terrible hang-over the next day.

Meanwhile, the blizzard was getting worse. I went outside, tied a bandana to the antenna of my car, and hoisted the antenna as high as it would go. That was a signal to the snowplow that there was a car buried in the snow, in case drifts covered my car. Which they did.

That weekend, it snowed twenty-two inches, with drifts over three feet. The following weekend, it snowed again ~ another eighteen inches, with drifts again over three feet. And on St. Patrick’s Day, the third weekend in March, there was a third blizzard. School was cancelled. My car was hopelessly buried and even snowplows couldn’t get down the street. One of the drifts was higher than our front door.

A few resourceful students managed to cascade out second-story windows on sleds made of cardboard. They walked to the liquor store ~ the only business open ~ to buy cases of beer. They sold it to thirsty students who tunneled their way to the street to celebrate that finals were cancelled. 

The National Guard was called to load snow onto trucks and pile it in vacant lots. That year, St. Cloud went sixty-six days in a row without seeing the sun.

That was the last winter I spent in Minnesota. By September, I was on my way I way to Denver, where even when it snows, we know it won’t be long before the sun shines again.

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My Godmother ~ Margaret Jones Maher

Not everyone is lucky enough to have a godmother like my Aunt Margaret. The oldest of my father’s three sisters, she was the picture of love and patience. She was thirteen years older than my Dad and she doted on him. When I came along, the oldest of her nineteen nieces and nephews, she doted on me, too.

Like all four children in my father’s family, Margaret was programmed to go to college. She studied to be a teacher, but her career came to an abrupt halt because she couldn’t discipline even one child, let alone a whole classroom. So she left teaching and went to work as a secretary for the Northern Pacific railroad, the same railroad where my grandfather worked. From all accounts, she was a good secretary because she didn’t have to discipline anyone but herself.

Margaret was a great cook and an exceptional knitter. I have pictures of clothes that she knit for me and my brother ~ skirts and shorts with matching sweaters. Margaret’s knitted afghans sold for the most money at the church bazaar. To my knowledge, she never dropped a stitch.

Margaret, like my Dad, didn’t say much. She was content to sit quietly, smile and murmur her approval of whatever was being said. I loved sitting next to her on the couch, holding her hand, and resting my head on her arm. I know she liked that, too.

Margaret didn’t marry until she was in her late-forties. (More about that later.) She never had children of her own. Given her inability to discipline anyone, that might have been a good thing. 

As I was going through old family photos last summer, however, I stumbled on a batch of pictures showing Margaret with a man, labeled only as “Margaret with her Gentleman Friend.” The pictures show a young, very happy Margaret, with a very handsome man, on vacation somewhere in Arizona. I will never know who he was, where he came from, or what happened to him. I believe he gave her many happy moments. I wish there could have been more.

As I mentioned, when Margaret was in her forties she met Patrick Maher. They were both members of the St. Paul Hiking Club. They shared a love of the outdoors and both could walk for miles. They fell in love and wanted to be married. 

Grandma and Grandpa never approved of Uncle Pat. They were genteel. He was uncouth. They were intelligent and valued education. Pat never fit in. He was a savant. A man who knew the statistics for every sports star and sporting event ever held. My brother would ask him questions that no one knew the answers to, like:

“Uncle Pat, who won the World Series of 1938?”

Pat would answer (trust me, I looked this up!) “The Yankees beat the Cubs in four games in the 1938 World Series.” Then he would go on to recite the statistics for every player in the game. He was a walking encyclopedia of sports. My brother loved it. Pat put the rest of us to sleep.

Margaret and Pat were married in 1952, without the approval of my grandparents. I was at the wedding. Margaret and Pat were beaming. My grandparents were not.

Margaret and Pat rented their own small house after they married. They lived there for only a few years, however. When Grandpa died in 1954, they moved into my grandparents house to take care of Grandma. Grandma died two years later and Margaret and Pat were the new owners of the house at 731 Delaware Avenue.

I stayed in touch with Aunt Margaret when I was in college. She sent me letters and money. Every holiday she sent me boxes of Fanny Farmer candy. 

Margaret’s life took a turn for the worse when she retired from her job with the railroad in 1967, at the age of sixty-two. By this time Aunt Ruthie, had moved into the house with Margaret and Pat. She, too, had little tolerance for Uncle Pat, but she appreciated having a place to live and learned to tolerate him.

I moved to Denver, was married and had my first child when I got a call from my mother.

“Margaret isn’t doing well.”

“Oh, no. what’s the matter?”

“She’s in the mental hospital.”

“For what?”

“For being scrupulous.”

Who ever heard of such a thing? I looked it up. It’s called scrupulosity and Margaret had it. She was convinced she was an evil person, when in fact she was a saint. She was convinced she would go to Hell and there was no way for her to repent. The treatment for scrupulosity, at that time, was electric shock. 

I came home from Denver as soon as I could. I went to see Margaret in the hospital. My sweet, smiling godmother was not smiling. She was in tears. Constant, copious tears. She grabbed my hand and pleaded with me.

“Please, you’ve got to get me out of here. They’re going to give me more shocks. They are going to kill me. And then I’m going to Hell.” There was nothing I could do. There was nothing anyone could do.  

Margaret died when I was back in Denver. My Dad got a phone call from the hospital. He turned to my mother and said “Margaret is dead. I need to go to the hospital. You stay here.” 

Margaret was buried in the Catholic cemetery. I wasn’t able to come home for the funeral to say goodbye to the sweetest, most loving, tender-hearted godmother anyone could wish for.

Rest in Peace, Dear Aunt Margaret. Rest in Peace!

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Here Comes Santa Claus

Christmas in Minnesota was a mixed-bag. Although my childhood seemed normal at the time, now as an adult, I’m not so sure.

My parents had two different approaches to Christmas. My mother didn’t like Christmas at all, for very good reasons. Every year she told us kids the same stories of her childhood in an attempt, I suppose, to make us appreciate “how good we had it.” 

Mom grew up poor, on a farm with six older brothers, including identical twins, who teased her unmercifully. On Christmas Eve, the twins would go outside with their shotguns telling my mother they were going to shoot Santa Claus out of the sky.

“Here he comes,” Len would shout, as my mother cowered in the living room.

Bang! Bang!!  

“We got him!” Ray would yell. And they stomped off the porch and ran into the yard, pretending to search the bushes for Santa’s body, while my mother sobbed in my grandmother’s arms. From then on, my mother never trusted Christmas.

My father, on the other hand, grew up in a middle class, suburban family. He loved Christmas. He loved buying and wrapping presents, He loved sending and receiving Christmas cards. And, most of all, he loved Christmas music. 

Dad was such fun at Christmas. I can still see him hanging giant silver snowflakes from the ceiling in the living room, to the chagrin of my mother who didn’t want people to focus their attention on the ceiling before she had a chance to wash it. Dad patiently hung tinsel on the tree, one strand at a time, while the rest of us “helped” by tossing handfuls of tinsel at the tree, hoping it would land on the branches.

We always celebrated Christmas Eve with my mother’s family ~ Grandma Hunt, Aunt Fran and my cousin Lori. Occasionally we would go to Aunt Fran’s house for dinner, but usually my mother made a big dinner for all of us before we opened gifts and went to bed.

One year Aunt Fran said she was bringing “the baby Jesus” to our house for dinner. We didn’t know what to expect, but I was hoping for a real baby. Instead, Aunt Fran showed up with a young Black man, Elija, who had just been released from prison. I had never seen a Black person before in snow-white Minnesota of the 1950’s. The man was quiet and pleasant. I wonder what he thought of us. We never saw him again.

I remember gifts I got as a child, mostly dolls and ice skates, coloring books and art supplies. The best gift of all, however, was the year my father came home from work on Christmas Eve, with a kitten in his pocket. The kitten was crying outside the drug store when my father locked up for the night. Dad didn’t have the heart to leave the kitten there, meowing in the snow, so he brought him home. Because Dad had already left the store (and, of course, no one had a cell phone back then) my mother was as surprised as we were. I’m not sure she was pleased.

The best Christmas memory, the one I will never forget, however, is the year Santa Claus actually came to our house on Christmas Eve and delivered our toys early, before we had to go to bed. 

As Santa turned to go out the door, my Dad said, “Santa, do you have time for a shot and a beer before you go?”

“I sure do, Bob,” said Santa, as he sat down at our kitchen table. 

Dad opened two bottles of Grain Belt and poured a shot of bourbon for both of them. So much for milk and cookies. Ho Ho Ho! It was a very Merry Christmas, Indeed.