Homage to Glady

I guess she could best be described as this mirage I can’t get out of my head. But not really! And homage is probably a bit overblown for someone I hardly even knew. Nevertheless, Gladus (last name unknown) was one of those iconic figures that came into my life for a very brief period of time then disappeared just as quickly.

She was a woman far removed from my social-economic-educational background and career aspirations. Yet for some strange reason during those early cold months of March and April, we connected on a level quite different from my old romantic entanglements that I used to bench-mark as true love.

Even though she was ten years older than me, I found in Glady a kindred soul on a level I hadn’t experienced before with other women. The sad thing was that Glady had dried up and aged well beyond her years. Her eyes were a sometimes sad brown and there was a hint of early onset gray in her hair. It didn’t help that she favored thin cotton sweaters, even in the summertime, and thought of herself as long past a favorite with the boys.

It was spring of 1967. I had just returned from my short expat life in Europe. I was living in a depression era hovel on University Avenue, driving a used VW and had just started my first real job as a writer at the Minnesota Department of Public Health on the University of Minnesota Minneapolis campus.

Glady was the first woman who made me feel mature. She was attractive even for a middle-aged matron and we could talk easily about almost anything and everything. The problem was that in our office setting it was always awkward for casual chats under the constant radar of our boss, the notorious Dr. Marie Ford. Dr. Ford, was always on the lookout for fraternization among the troops.

On the University campus, Marie Ford had a storied history as the wife of a renowned college professor. She would occasionally talk about their life, living in Prospect Park, attending University functions and traveling with only the most accomplished of other college couples. It was after the war and the University was a buzz with ex-service men anxious to get a good education and ready to absorb all the information her husband could throw at them.

Marie had a stellar career in public health and held her own prominent place within their circle of intellectual health professionals. She and her husband were one of the post-war golden couples at the University.

Sadly, by the time I arrived on scene in early 1968, Marie’s husband had long since passed away. Marie had become an old, tired, chain-smoking relic of an era long since passed. She seemed to regret its passing and, almost like Glady, she had seen her future slowly come into focus. Both knew what the next decade held instore for them. An enthusiastic, energetic young man suddenly in their midst didn’t help when thinking about the future.

The fact that Glady was ten years older than me didn’t seem to matter to either one of us but our background did. Glady had grown up in a world totally different from mine. I was from tony Highland Park. She was from Northeast Minneapolis.

Around the turn of the century, the community of Northeast Minneapolis began to grow as an ethnic enclave supplying workers for the factories that lined Central Avenue and batched them in clusters throughout the neighborhood. There was a strong Eastern European influence in religion, social standing in the community and family obligations.

I knew little about Glady’s background growing up other than she had graduated from high school in NE Minneapolis and gone to work immediately. Like almost all of the young women her age, Glady still lived at home with her mother and would eventually became her mother’s primary care giver. There was never any thought as to her moving out and living on her own.

Her Eastern European roots and upbringing meant she was locked into a lifestyle she couldn’t break away from, even if she wanted to. It was understood that she would never leave home until both her parents had passed.

And I thought to myself: what then with little education and marginal secretarial skills? Glady was probably destined to spending the rest of her life in the secretarial pool at one University department or another.

In retrospect after reflecting on our casual verbal encounters, I think perhaps Glady was living her life vicariously through my many inane, sometimes sophomoric antics with fellow hippies, college dropouts and wandering young adults still unsure of themselves and their future endeavors. I remember she asked me a lot questions about living in Europe, my time in the service, who I was dating and other general ‘get to know you’ probes. She seemed to really care and that just fed my expanding ego.

One Monday, Glady told me in confidence that she had gone to the Triangle Bar and thought she might run into me there because I had talked about it so often. It never occurred to me that her venturing so far from her comfort level was anything other than a bar visit. What were her real intentions, if any, I have no idea?

I only lasted about a year and a half at the Health Department before getting my dream job at KTCA and ‘getting out of Dodge.’ I never saw Glady again. Her image and memory slowly faded away until some fifty years later when Sharon began taking art classes in Northeast Minneapolis. Once again I found myself in the neighborhood where Glady used to live.

But this time it was different than in 1968. Fifty years after the West Bank of the University of Minnesota harbored the disenfranchised, the hippies and other malcontents of a similar ilk; their decedents had now migrated to the Northeast part of Minneapolis. In an unplanned, almost organic metamorphosis of a cityscape, this unwashed morass of creativity had moved west. Old Nordeast, an eclectic enclave of blue-collar Eastern European nationalities, has become the new West Bank. It felt like Deja-vu all over again.

As I once again drove past those tired old dilapidated houses in a neighborhood with a church on every corner, I thought about Glady and whatever had become of her. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to assume she continued on as a secretary at the University and eventually retired to her mother’s home in NE.  Perhaps she became the classic ‘church’ lady or ‘cat’ lady and lived out the rest of her life as her heritage had dictated.

There’s a part of me that would love to believe that she finally found someone, after her mother passed, and she created a new life for herself outside of the drab, dreary lifestyle handed down to her by past generations. I guess I’ll never know. But I can imagine.

Of course, I’ve already outlined a story about Glady. It could be a play, a novel or a short story. It involves a man much younger than her. They fall in love but things don’t turn out as they had planned. The story is, at once, happy and sad, poignant yet realistic. A slice of life that might have occurred in a tired old building on the University of Minnesota campus between two lost souls; each seeking clarity in their patchwork lives.

Back on Campus

It was one of those strange ‘ah-ha’ moments that crept into my brain as the speeches droned on amid the clinking of water glasses being refilled. Sharon and I were guests at a University of Southern California alumni funding raising event Down Valley at the Classic Club in Palm Desert.

Sharon and I with Jake

A good friend had invited us there to hear an outstanding young man named Jake Olson. Jake had been blind almost since birth. He gave a fascinating talk about his experiences growing up blind and his close affiliation with the USC football team. As Jake shared his inspirational story, it became a siren call for my mind, once more, to go wandering back in time.

The USC alumni event was similar to others I’ve attended like Notre Dame Parent events on campus, the Father-Daughter dance at the College of Saint Benedict and the St. Thomas Law School Parents Invitational. Collegiate alumni events usually follow a similar pattern of sharing school pride, loyalty, and hope for the future.

Therefore, of course, with my over-active mind already soaking in the sights and sounds and under-current of collegiate comments swirling all around me, I couldn’t help but go back in time when I was enmeshed in a collegiate experience of my own.

The realization came pretty quickly that I’d been ‘back on campus’ before. In fact, on four different occasions. Each one more radically different than the one that preceded it. Four different cauldrons of life experiences from which to draw up collegiate images from my past.

Unlike our children for whom Sharon and I insisted they have the full ‘collegiate experience,’ I never felt really comfortable around the campus quadrant. I was like a fish out of water; too hung up on getting good grades and paying for that opportunity. For one thing, I was always working. I still lived at home and there was never continuity to my existence there outside of the classroom.

St. Thomas 1961-63

My first campus venture was from 1961 through 1963 at the College of Saint Thomas. As documented in my novel ‘Love in the A Shau.’ St. Thomas was a private, all men’s Catholic college set in middle class Catholic tradition. Sports played a prominent role in campus life as did sorties to the All Women’s College down the road. For those who could afford to live on campus, it was the idyllic early sixties campus experience. A stroll through the campus parking lot reminded me that a lot of my classmates had well-to-do parents.

U of M 1963-64

My second collegiate experience doesn’t really count very much if at all. It was two brief quarters at the University of Minnesota, 1963 to 1964. I left a classroom of thirty students at St. Thomas to find myself squeezed into Northrup Auditorium with twenty-six hundred other ‘Intro to Psychology’ students.  I was lost on that sprawling campus even before I parked in one of their multiple parking lots and started wandering the crowded streets to find my classroom. To say it was a calamity even before it began would be a real understatement. Uncle Sam rescued me from that certain educational disaster and gave me a two-year reprieve.

St. Thomas 1966-67

A return to the St. Thomas campus in 1966, thanks to the GI Bill, proved a pleasant return to a more normal campus lifestyle. I was still living at home but now there was more time for campus events and Yearbook involvement. A lingering romantic entanglement made for pleasant distractions from work and studies. After that period of love and lust crashed and burned, I graduated and moved to Europe. College had been diced and sliced and chopped up into divergent life experiences but overall it was satisfying, gratifying and earned me a college degree. I was done with school or so I thought.

Writing ‘Love in the A Shau’ proved a cathartic return to campus one more time. While researching my storyline, I went back in time to capture the sights and sounds and visceral experiences of a freshman on campus. After my protagonist returns from military service, I tried to capture the emotional roller coaster he felt being once again back on campus.

It was for me an emotional and cathartic roller coaster return to what might have been. It was a chance for me to paint a picture of my hero (in truth, myself) back on campus and create events as I chose for my hero to experience. It was a chance to encapsulate all those pent up emotions I had back then and expose them for my readers and in turn, to purge them from my soul. It was painting an idyllic ‘Playboy Magazine’ image of campus life as seen in their glossy air-brushed versions of real campus life. In turn, it was fun, fulfilling, foolish, and quite satisfying if only in my imagination.

They were four different tours of campus life at four different times in my life. Each passage was radically different in their approach, their outcome and their reflective abilities to peak my imagination. Three have been captured in yearbook photos. The fourth in a storyline of my own making.

Ode to a Broken Down Palace

Everyone wants someplace to call home. But for me back then the house on Randolph Avenue had long since ceased being my home. After living in Europe it was simply a place to crash while I waited for my life to take some semblance of order. It was where I was raised but no longer belonged.

So finding that sad old relic of better times on University Avenue marked the beginning of another world I was about to enter. A cauldron of cast-offs and bottom feeders which accurately reflected where my head was at and where I was going…in no particular order. Disheveled, messy, chaotic and rudderless yet always angling for a better direction.

The Twin Cities has a long history of collecting enclaves of immigrant families and other bottom feeders who haven’t yet assimilated into modern day society. This apartment building was just such a place. It was Swedes Hollow, the Bohemian Flats, Little Italy and the West Side Flats all wrapped up in a half dozen squalid cut-up apartment units. As time progressed that area around the University of Minnesota, especially around Dinky Town and the West Bank, became my own microscopic version of Greenwich Village.

And as the song lyrics go ‘most of my changes were there.’

It’s become part of my lexicon now. Not because of some foolish notion that it represented my ‘glory days’ or the ‘best years of my life.’ And hopefully not because it might sound like the musings of an old man. It was, instead, a moment in time long since gone but still captured in a few faded photographs and dusty vinyl jackets which help poke probing fingers of inquiry into that slowly fading memory bank cached inside my head. For those places and people and events all help define who and what I have become…and strive to be.

That white ghetto came to represent all those individuals I knew and loved and lost touch with over the years. It was the silly and foolish things I did and thought. It was all those wild aspirations and stumbles I took in the right direction. It was accidents that didn’t happen and a few that did. It was all those seemingly innocuous events that changed my life and laid the groundwork for a lifetime of story-telling in one form or another.

So while some oldsters may lament their sometimes checkered past or lost years I choose to embrace them as a reflective exercise. While some may scowl at rekindling the past by saying ‘it’s best not to look back’ and ‘let the past be,’ it is for me very personal.  It was a time of my lost years.

That’s a lot of accolades to pile on a rundown hulk of a building in a poor part of town. When first constructed around the turn of the century the building was reflective of an expanding and prosperous Minneapolis. The huge structure was home to a prominent businessman and his growing family. By the time I moved in it was owned by a shady real estate investor from Saint Louis Park who would never dare venture into that neighborhood at night. I had to go to his ethnic enclave of real estate ‘bottom feeders’ to sign my lease.

My unit on the second floor had been carved out of a once spacious master bedroom. The building had been chopped-up, divided and then subdivided into probably illegal apartments for whoever could afford the cheap rent.

There was a group of graduate students from Pakistan below me and odd assortments of humanity in the other units who seemed to come and go with the seasons. The building was, at once, a rundown hippie hangout, a nightly excuse for under-age drinking and sexual affairs and a sketchy abode for a wandering soul.

The overall mantra of the place seemed to be “Say Hi,” don’t ask questions and ignore what’s going on unless you think the place might burn down. In retrospect, I think I was nuts to live in such a dump but it suited my lifestyle back then and my frame of mind. I thought of my place as bohemian chic. Visitors might have had a different impression. Shortly after I moved out, they tore the building down and left an empty field.

Three women encompassed my frame of reference for that period.

First there was Sheila who had moved on with her life by that time while I was still trying to find mine.

Then there was Susan who was seeking the holy grail of life’s direction just as I was. She needed focus in her life and together we helped one another search for that shining light. Susan and I used to sit on her creaky front porch and waxed philosophically about life and love and what the future might hold for us.

She was significant in my life for several reasons, not the least of which was that we were both seekers. It was a collision of my time and space with hers. For a long time we were in the same orbit, thinking and living life alike, and traveling that strange road to maturity. We were both hungry. And with similar family backgrounds, we both found ourselves struggling to grab a handhold on that slippery ring called a career.

And finally there was Sharon waiting in the wings until such time as fortune brought us together at KTCA; the Public Television station.

After a couple of months working/writing at the Public Health Department, I ventured down Como Avenue to the studios of KTCA. They weren’t hiring at the time but they were glad to use my volunteer services in the evenings. I learned the craft of television from the ground up. It became my first real job where I never felt like I was working.

As significant as that old television building was in my life, even more prominent was a bar on the West Bank. That den of ear-busting music, sweet-smelling haze and questionable characters figured prominently in one of my first novels entitled “Love in the A Shau.” On the surface the Triangle Bar was a rundown three-two joint with intoxicating music, cheap beer and loud crowds that came to see, be seen or just smoke a joint in the corner. Beneath the surface it was my baptism into another life

During its heyday, the Triangle Bar became the flash point for a burgeoning music scene centered on the West Bank. Since they didn’t card, the bar attracted a lot of U of M students. I’m guessing the term ‘jail bait’ was first coined there.

But beneath that surface melting pot of hippies, junkies, college drop-outs, undercover cops and other assorted flotsam from civilization came a wonderful collection of lost souls and seekers. Every night brought another stimulating conversation with some colorful character who usually gave a false last name, lied about their background but presented fascinating suppositions on life and love and war and college and our future in general. It was a true college education outside of the classroom.

They’re all gone now. Removed like push pins off a bulletin board of icons long since dis-appeared. My apartment on the avenue, the Triangle Bar, the old Public Health Department building on campus, crumbling Dinky Town, Newman Center with its folk music, the Grandview Theater and its foreign films and a dozen other sad-eyed structures all razed by a bulldozer called time. It was a sometimes conflicting confluence of attitude and interest, circumstance and focus, goals and objectives. And ultimately it led me to the stability I found in another human being who was opposite of me in almost every way.

Isn’t life strange that way?

Everything is History Now

I am a casual interloper in this early morning world of iron riders and rail thin runners. These mostly white middle-aged athletes are gearing up for several races this fall.  They’re early morning vagabonds who need their cup of Joe to kick-start each day. It’s an eclectic group of support crew, racers, runners and neighborhood hangers-on gathered together to taste the first bite of dawn and forthcoming self-induced punishment. I’m here to look and marvel and suppress my envy.

After they leave I’ll begin my Saturday morning meanderings through the Twin Cities. There won’t be an agenda or route to follow. My imagination and ever elusive recollections of times past will point me in some direction.

There has been some interesting feedback on my nostalgic trips visiting old haunts around the Twin Cities. Some readers like the trips down memory lane. Others question why I keep going back almost as if I’m trying to relive my past. I thought I had touched on that in my blogs entitled My Bootleg Years or I Found Susan’s House. There have been others too.

It used to be that during the summer months I’d take long bike rides to peruse my old haunts for changes or as a way to recap old memories still lingering there. But something happened this year that altered that perception.

Surprisingly it wasn’t the old haunts that had changed. Instead it was something that clicked differently inside my head this time around. I came to the sobering realization that not only were the old places gone but now they were relegated to the dust bins of history.

The Twin Cities had become a wasteland of relics from my past. A time long since forgotten except in black and white photos and old vinyl recordings. Time has that tendency to erase most vestiges of a period and in its place leave only vapid memory vapors that drift in and out of our consciousness from time to time.

The changes were all around me but I didn’t see it until this summer.

I first discovered the Midtown Greenway many years ago. It’s a four and a half mile old railroad bed that had been converted to a bike path. That route begins on the Mississippi River Boulevard and ends around Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles. It became my gateway to downtown Minneapolis, Nord East, the Mississippi River and many points North and East.

The intoxicating smell of soap weed and other noxious plants permeate the air. It brings back poignant memories of delivering newspapers past weed-choked empty fields those warm summer mornings.

An old black man is sitting outside his public housing unit. He’s smoking the first of many funny cigarettes. He waves and shouts: How ya doing? I answer “Just great” as I fly by with a casual nod. He smiles back and takes another puff.

West Bank

The West Bank is where drunks and druggies and the homeless used to pester me outside the Triangle Bar. Now there are new groups of immigrants taking over the streets. The crowds used to be white. Now, not so much. The Triangle bar was shuttered decades ago and with it a visible reminder of my youthful days of hopes and dreams and wild aspirations.

New Vikings Stadium - Minneapolis, MN

I wander downtown before our newest edifice to professional mayhem. Before Sunday afternoon begins this is where the bruisers and the brawlers gather for yet another party celebrating their ‘glory days.’ It’s a modern day rendezvous of rabid fans and modern-day hucksters.

East Bank

A couple of blocks from my first apartment there used to be a seedy rundown strip mall with a Red Owl Grocery store where I got my meager staples and tins. Progress erased any and every vestiges of that old neighborhood.

A grassy corner is all that remains where my squalid apartment building used to languish.

I heard about a new film that was just shown by the U of M Film Society called the ‘Dinkytown Uprising.’  It was written, directed, filmed and produced by a fellow student I took some film classes with way back in the late 60’s. He was a radical back then and hasn’t changed his colors much since then.

If rubble could talk it would speak volumes about Dinkytown. But those voices are mute now. They’ve been replaced by developer’s fact sheets and city planner’s visions for a new student hometown. Dinkytown today isn’t even close to what it once was. Now that they’ve ripped the soul out of the place city fathers want to make it an historic district. What a joke.

Wandering through the U of M campus did little to regenerate old memories. The closest I came to old mindset was the U of M School of Journalism. That was before I dropped out, got drafted and began the rest of my life in earnest.

The Dew Drop on the campus of the University of St. Catherine’s was a fount of old memories. There were a couple of girlfriends back then and toe-dancing with romance as if I knew what I was doing. When that failed I began tripping around the globe until that ended in matrimony.

My wife was one of the first of her post-war generation to escape small town America. There are condos and a marina on the river now where the old Robin Hood Flour Mill used to stand. It’s a new generation that has discovered small town America and the ancient lure of the river.

Driving out to the old Schumacher farmstead I see that Dumfries tavern is gone now. It’s been replaced by several double-wides with ATVs parked in front.

Then glimpses from the road of the old farmstead. The farm house is gone now and only the barn remains as a relic to someone else’s past. I’ve got more than thirty-four years of history there.  Strange to see it gone.

I don’t think I’ll be retracing my old bike routes anymore. It won’t be because of bad memories. Rather the absence of visible landmarks makes it harder to reconcile memories with recollection, nostalgia with history and reality with a reflective glance at my past. It’s a gravel road that has long since been paved over.

Yet time is on my side. I still get to look back through old photographs in awe and amazement at what once was while still listening to those old familiar musical refrains. I’m still reliving so much that others can’t or won’t see or feel themselves.

Come next spring new adventures wait. Charlotte, my youngest granddaughter, is now a two-wheeler like her brother. Perhaps I can enlist them as my posse and together we can discover new routes and adventures around the Twin Cities. I’ll be a younger man then and hopefully still eager to blaze new memory trails for that younger generation.

Perhaps I’ll cross trails with some old memory haunts yet undiscovered.

That wouldn’t be a bad thing either.