By Richard
Conklin '59M.A.
By Richard Conklin '59M.A.
For years, successful men have reckoned
By this system, trained the self
To follow Lyndale and hang a Ralph
At Fiftieth, into a neighborhood
Where homes are stable, children good,
Earnings are high and soundly invested
In products Consumer Reports has tested,
Where life is not paranoid, moody or radical,
But Republican, Lutheran and Alphabetical.
That is the way Garrison Keillor of A Prairie Home Companion
once gave directions to my old Minneapolis neighborhood, where
the north-south avenues followed the alphabet, the largest Lutheran
parish in the world held sway, and the 13th ward voted for conservatives
(and against on-sale liquor).
For almost a half-century, my folks owned a home at 50th and
Xerxes, in a far southwest corner of the city, bordered on two
sides by suburban Edina, once known as having more two-car garages
than any place in the United States. You always knew where you
were in my section of town if you could count and knew the alphabet.
At 5032 Xerxes you were between 50th and 5lst streets and between
Washburn and York avenues. In northeast Minneapolis, you had to
know the presidents in the order in which they served to locate
your street, and across the Mississippi River in Saint Paul, it
was hopeless. There was no alphabetical order in the state capital,
and house numbers changed in the middle of the block. A recent
Minnesota governor who was once a wrestler caused a ruckus when
he said Saint Paul was laid out by drunken Irishmen.
I have lived half my life elsewhere, but my memory of where
I grew up has a density of specificity. I remember the way the
tractors came every other year to tear up and regrade Xerxes,
and I can smell the midsummer tar as keenly as the apple pies
my mother would cool in the open kitchen window. The streetcar
no longer wyes at the corner, but I recall exactly how it parked
next to Hanson's Pharmacy. Mr. Hanson spent long hours in a back
room, wielding mortar and pestle while surrounded by oddly shaped
bottles and wooden drawers containing old prescriptions, an archive
of neighborhood maladies. He still metes out pills in my mind's
eye, and over at the soda fountain Alice's thin fist is on the
phosphate lever. And in the drugstore's sidewalk window is summer's
harbinger -- plaster-of-paris replicas of sundaes and banana splits,
each concoction revolving slowly on a lazy susan against the backdrop
of a multifaceted mirror, hummocked whipped cream cut by painted
rivulets of chocolate sauce.
About the only remaining business still on the corner is the
barbershop, a two-seater where high school sports were discussed
with the seriousness later transferred to such professional teams
as the Minnesota Twins and Vikings. There once were two bakeries,
one Catholic and one Protestant, as well as a Hudson dealership
with cars you stepped down into. A dentist was above the five-and-dime,
and there was a hardware store, a plumber, a shoe repair shop,
two grocery stores and a hamburger joint whose french fries have
yet to be duplicated. The vacant lots of youth are gone, too.
I could walk to Saturday matinees at the Edina Theater through
vacant lots, each of which had its own character, with only one
backyard to traverse. Antique shops took over the corner, but
in recent years the robin of gentification -- a coffee house --
arrived, and a few blocks south on Xerxes a French-menu bistro,
Cave Vin, is getting good reviews. The family house we sold for
$90,000 in 1991 came back on the market a decade later (albeit
with some improvements) for $250,000. The neighborhood is doing
well, but none of the dozen lawns I used to cut look as good as
when I mowed them.
I could take you today to the Linden Hills library, right to
the spot in the basement of the English Tudor style building where
in the 1940s I discovered marvels like Edward Eggleston's The
Hoosier Schoolmaster and the sports books of John R. Tunis.
Libraries are sacred places, especially branch libraries, the
smaller venues where the geography of the imagination is first
mapped and nurtured, before books and where they are kept come
largely to mean research and learning. Going to the Linden Hills
library meant biking up a steep three-block hill in the days before
10-speeds, but coming back with books nestled in the wire basket
was a comfortable coast for a boy excited by his discovery of
the delight that lay in words.
Christ the King School is a block from the family house. The
Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondolet, some of them without a
college degree and facing classes with as many as 60 pupils, toiled
against ignorance there. I fell in love with such writers as Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe in this brick building, with its
wintertime odor of wet galoshes drying next to classroom radiators.
And there I began to speak my native language of Catholicism,
although it happened to be the Latin of altar boys. Father William
P. Driscoll was the pastor who, in the coolness of the sacristy
following early morning Mass, would press a half-dollar into my
hand and gruffly invite me to buy a soda. He would then light
up a cigar and head for breakfast. No one in those days expected
a theologian in the pulpit, an educator in the school, a psychologist
in the confessional, a social worker in the neighborhood, a CPA
in the rectory.
The Lakes, the Lakes
What gives southwest Minneapolis its character -- and what drives
its real estate prices -- are Lake Calhoun and Lake Harriet, reminders
that one in four of the city's 6,385 acres of parkland is under
water. Harriet, 2.75 miles around, and Calhoun, slightly larger,
are the quality of life for surrounding residential areas -- two
watery lungs. There is a poignant time of year when the faint
perfume of spring brings hundreds of citizens onto the lakes'
walking paths, released from the prison of a Minnesota winter.
The lakes look remarkably the same over the years; the park service
tends to them carefully, knowing how important they are to the
collective urban psyche. As for the weather, meteorological spring
comes a week earlier than it did when I left in 1967, another
sign of global warming. However, there continues to be very little
street crime in January.
I did a lot of growing up on the shores of Harriet and Calhoun,
and every time in my 36-year adult absence that I would visit,
I would walk one or the other. It would be like running a reel
of my life backward. On Harriet, I knew the spot where the children's
beach used to be, where the trees from which we speared carp hung
over the water, the location of the spring-water pump where the
family would fill huge containers when city water turned brackish
in August. Calhoun occupied older memory banks. There was Thomas
beach, our hangout as young adults; the Calhoun Beach Club where
our high school prom was held; and Uptown, a once-funky, now-chic
commercial area just off the lake where one of my sons would later
have an apartment. I courted my wife in a rented Calhoun canoe,
paddling into adjacent Lake of the Isles on hot summer nights
when the quiet could hurt your ears and dusk came late and splendid.
Calhoun and Isles were within walking distance of my two grandmothers'
homes, located a block apart on Colfax Avenue (still in alphabetical
Minneapolis, between Dupont and Bryant). In addition to the childhood
memories of both their homes, I had a bachelor's flat for a time
in the duplex owned by Claire Keeler, my maternal grandmother.
So my grandmothers' neighborhood, known as "The Wedge," is also
imprinted in my brain tissue. No matter where I am on Saint Patrick's
Day, I always recall Irish whisky neat, shared with Claire every
March 17. Deserted by her husband many years before, she lived
alone. It would still be cold in mid-March, often with snow on
the ground, but muted sunlight would sometimes slant into her
kitchen. We drank Power's because, she said, Bushmills was distilled
in Northern Ireland and she heard Protestants owned Jameson in
the South. We talked baseball; Claire was always worried about
Twins' pitching. In a few months, she would be listening to baseball
on the radio, sitting in wicker furniture on her screened-in porch,
serenaded by crickets.
Grandmother Gert lived down the street, and she and her husband
had boarders. One was Ray, a sad, taciturn man who lived in the
furnished attic. He did not have a job, receiving checks for a
mysterious wartime disability, and he played classical piano.
As a boy on a summer visit, I would slip up to his garret and
invariably find him bent over an upright piano under the east
window, playing I know not what, being unable at that age to tell
Beethoven from Bartok. The verbally inchoate Ray communicated
by music, sending elegant passages of sound out over The Wedge.
We never talked on these occasions. He played. I listened, arriving
in silence and leaving the same way. Years later, in a canoe on
Lake of the Isles, I sometimes wondered whether his music ever
reached that far.
When it came time to move back to the Twin Cities after retirement
to rejoin family on both my and my wife's side, the question arose:
Do we live in Minneapolis, where I grew up, or in Saint Paul,
in whose environs my wife had been raised? There is only one place
in the metropolitan area where one can see the downtowns of both
Minneapolis and Saint Paul. It is a bluff above the Mississippi
River sacred to the Dakota Indians and once useful to boats plying
the waters below. It's called Pilot's Knob, and it's located in
a first-ring suburb called Mendota Heights. We moved to Mendota
Heights.
It is the first suburban experience for us, and we are a little
nonplussed when our daughter in New York City asks what a "berm"
is, when our Saint Paul son complains about no sidewalks, and
when we read in our neighborhood association covenant that no
political signs are allowed. But our suburb, originally called
Friendly Hills, went to school on Minneapolis' respect for land
and carved out hiking trails, nature preserves, set-asides for
woods and ponds, and built what seems like a tennis court for
every 10 residents. We have enjoyed re-entry into the calendar
of family life -- weddings, funerals, births, birthdays, First
Communions. Our niece responded to a First Communion gift of a
children's Bible thusly: "I have started to read and am up to
Sodom and Gomorrah."
Thirty-two years ago, Time magazine lauded Minnesota
in a cover story, noting that "if the American good life has anywhere
survived in some intelligent equilibrium, it may be Minnesota."
Things have held up well in the land of 11,842 lakes and many
more loons. Either the state or its largest city rank near the
top in crucial quality-of-life indicators -- educational level,
literacy, culture and the arts, personal income, health, clean
government, business entrepreneurship, electromedical technology,
corporate philanthropy, and so on. One survey even voted Minneapolis
as the "most fun city" in the nation; Las Vegas was 25th. As for
"Minnesota Nice," my son Marc became a believer after witnessing
a waitress in a downtown mall restaurant lose all her tip money
while serving an outside table. Patrons scrambled from their seats
to recover the bills and then waited in line (emphasis
his) to return them to the grateful waitress. However, we also
rank high in things like taxes, inadequate transportation infrastructure
and prison population growth, not to mention Jello desserts and
passive-aggressiveness.
So home is now a palimpsest. Where most people see what is on
the surface, I see what has been erased underneath.
This was perhaps most evident last fall when I attended the
50th reunion of my Minneapolis DeLaSalle high school class. The
school is located on Nicollet Island, which in the 1950s was part
of a lower-loop skid row featuring flop houses, panhandlers and
shattered muscatel bottles, presided over by a pickle factory.
It is now upscale-urban with a nice park, posh restaurant and
horse carriages. DeLaSalle, true to its urban mission, stayed
on while Catholic high schools sprouted in the suburbs. It now
wants to build its first home athletic field and is opposed by
residents who, by and large, moved in after the island was tarted
up, some settling into rehabbed brownstones rumored to be brothels
in our day.
And on my way to Lake Harriet, where I still walk on nice afternoons,
I drive past an empty lot on the Lyndale avenue mentioned by Keillor.
But it's not an empty lot to me, and never will be. It's where
my dad took me every year to buy a Christmas tree. It always seemed
the coldest night in December. The "Y's Men's" tree lot was framed
in white light. The men wore heavy boots and the wool-lined parkas
favored by deer hunters. The snow had been trampled to ice-hardness.
If you stood too long in one spot, the cold gripped right through
your overshoes, threatening to root you next to the $3.50 balsams.
When the purchase was made, the money was passed from exposed
hand to exposed hand in the flickering light of a flaming barrel.
Sometimes, a flask was passed, too, but I do not think the YMCA
ever knew.
Dick Conklin retired as associate vice president of University
Relations at Notre Dame.
(January 2006)
