Tag: North St. Paul MN

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Silver Lake Store

I grew up in a small town in Minnesota during the 1940’s and 50’s. Children of that era were raised in a parental style that is best described as “benign neglect.” 

My family lived in the lower half of a duplex. My grandparents, my mother’s parents, lived upstairs. We didn’t have a car or a television. We had indoor plumbing but no bathtub. We took our baths in a big wash tub, filled with hot water from a tea kettle heated on a wood stove. My mother and grandmother washed clothes in that same washtub and hung them on a clothesline in our backyard. We had a telephone, with multiple families sharing the same line. My mother listened to news on the radio all day long. I remember it as a time of great joy and tremendous freedom. 

Looking back on it, no wonder mothers didn’t have time to entertain their children. No wonder we were told, “You kids go outside to play. I’ll call outside for you when it’s time to come home.”

There were not many girls in my neighborhood, so I mostly hung out with my brother and his friends ~ Leo Fortier, Davey Cournoyer, and Carl Olson. At least once a day my mother sent me to the Silver Lake Store, about a block away, with a note and some money to buy whatever she needed ~ a can of coffee, a package of Kool-Aid, maybe milk or a box of Jello. A pack of cigarettes was also often on the list. Occasionally, Mom would let me spend a penny or two on penny candy.

My favorite candies were root beer barrels. At two for a penny, they were a bargain. My brother and I were always hunting for pennies dropped in the dirt or behind couch cushions, so we could buy candy that cost more than one penny ~ wax lips for me and baseball cards for him.

One day, Bob, Davey Cournoyer, Leo Fortier and I were especially bored and looking for something to do. One of us suggested forming a club. We wanted to call it the Be Bad Club. We were tired of being good and we wanted to see how it felt to do something bad. I was about seven years old and the boys were all six. As the oldest, I should have known better but it sounded like fun.

We hatched a plan to walk into Silver Lake Store and throw all the bread on the floor. When the owner saw what we were doing, he yelled at us and we ran out the door. We raced down the alley to Leo’s backyard, laughing all the way.

Later, we couldn’t think of any other bad things to do so we formed the Be Good Club. The Korean War had just started. We considered ourselves practically angelic as we knocked on people’s doors and asked them if they wanted us to tell them about the war. Most people just shook their heads and said, “No! Go find something else to do.”

When I was eight years old, we moved to a new home, about two blocks away from my grandparents. Our new home had a bathroom with a bathtub. My mother had a wringer washing machine in the basement. She spent all day Mondays washing clothes and hanging them on the clothesline by the side of our house. On Tuesdays, she ironed. It’s what most mothers did. When I was nine years old my father bought a car and later we got a television.

During the summer, my brother and I continued to roam the neighborhood, often the two blocks between our new house and my grandmother’s house, where we used to live. My brother rounded up his friends to play baseball in the open field next door. I helped my mother do the laundry and I learned to iron. My mother sent me on errands to Silver Lake Store at least once a day. I loved it.

One day Dad came home from work with a canister and asked me to take it to the store. The canister was meant for people to donate money to help people with cerebral palsy. I needed to ask the owner if it was ok to put the canister next to the cash register in his store. I was horrified. I was so painfully shy, I was later diagnosed as an “elective mute.” I could talk to people my age, but never to an adult.

I was terrified at the thought of actually having to speak to the owner. I had been coming to the store daily for years, but for all those years I just handed the owner my list and he filled my order. The day I took the canister to the store, I wanted to talk but I couldn’t find the words to say out loud. I came home with the empty canister and told my Dad that the owner said “No.” I felt terrible. I went to confession and told the priest that I lied to my father. 

A couple of weeks later, we were out for a drive when we saw a young man struggling to cross the street. He was on crutches and he shuffled his way across the street. 

“What’s the matter with that guy?” my brother asked.

“He has cerebral palsy,” Dad answered. 

To this day, I wish I had been able to talk to the owner of the Silver Lake Store. I wish I could have done something to help the man on crutches, trying to cross the road in front of our car.

Silver Lake Store was never the same for me again.

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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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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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Sister Kathleen

People ask me where I learned to write. I tell them, “In Sister Kathleen’s classroom at St. Peter School.”

Sister Kathleen, my seventh grade teacher, didn’t just teach me to write. She taught all sixty-six of us to write that year ~ 1955.

We were World War II babies. Not officially Baby Boomers but a huge class, nonetheless. I can still see the classroom. Six rows across, eleven desks deep. The tallest students in the back. The most troublesome ones in the front. My desk was somewhere in the middle.

Sister Kathleen, a tall, skinny, Franciscan nun, was one of the older teachers ~ maybe forty years old ~ and 100% Irish. A lot of the nuns who lived in the convent were Irish. Unlike some of the more dour, German nuns, the Irish nuns were funny and smart, dedicated, creative teachers. They taught us to square dance and do an Irish  jig. They let us play Bingo. They went ice skating on the playground, wearing their habits late a night, when they thought no one could see them. 

St. Patrick’s Day was the biggest holiday of the year at St. Peter School. It was the only day we were allowed to come to school in something other than our uniforms, as long as we were wearing green. There were treats in the cafeteria and a dance after school. 

Looking back, Sister Kathleen was a remarkable teacher. She taught a love of learning, especially history and geography, to all of us. She divided us into reading groups. I was lucky. I was in a group of (mostly girls) who didn’t require much instruction. I’m sure there were groups  (mostly boys) who required all the resources she could muster. 

Like the rest of the Irish nuns, Sister Kathleen was known for her quick temper. Disaster struck whenever Sister Evangelista, the principal, called her into the hallway for a meeting. Sister Kathleen put her finger to her lips as she left the room, admonishing us to be quiet and keep working while she talked with Sister Superior. 

Good behavior lasted less than five minutes. Of course, we didn’t keep working. Of course, we didn’t keep quiet. Soon the classroom was total chaos. The bolder girls flirted with the popular boys, who mostly shouted to each other across the room. The bravest boys got out of their seats and yelled out the windows. We knew what was coming but we didn’t care. For that moment in time, in our seventh-grade minds, it seemed worth it.

In an instant, the classroom door flew open, Sister Kathleen ~ her face bright red, her hands shaking, her veil whooshing behind her. She walked to the front of the class, picked up a piece of chalk and wrote in giant letters: 2000 WORDS ON RESPECT (or obedience, or trustworthiness, or whatever popped into her head) BEFORE YOU GO HOME TONIGHT. ON YOUR KNEES!! WITH PERFECT HANDWRITING AND SPELLING. NO REPEATING!

We scrambled to get notebooks and pencils out of our desks. We dropped to our knees ~ much easier for the boys, after all, because they wore long pants. We girls knelt on bare knees, which only made me more determined to write faster and in my best handwriting.

These “writing lessons” happened at least once a week. My mother got used to me coming home from school late and merely asked, “What did you write about today?”

I know a lot of people have horrible memories of going to Catholic school. I felt sorry for boys who were often in trouble and were physically punished for what they did. 

But for me, a girl who was extremely shy and wanted to avoid the spotlight at all cost, a girl who loved school and who especially loved to read, it was a good experience. I learned to write.