The Vanishing Classroom

In one of my past blogs, I shared my best effort to put together an All Class Reunion for my grade school. The Little French Church, May 31st. Unfortunately, that effort has fallen flat and only a half dozen folks have responded.  At about the same time that I decided to put that effort to rest, my old high school sent me a notice of a quasi-reunion of sorts.

It’s for an unofficial (but much welcomed) 61st class reunion for the Cretin High School Class of 1961. It’ll be held at a bar/restaurant in the nearby neighborhood. It’s more of a group effort by several classmates of mine than an officially sanctioned school affair. The reality is that many of our classmates have already passed and waiting another ten years for another class reunion probably isn’t too realistic unless it’s held in someone’s living room.

At about the same time I got the notice for this 61st class reunion, two books came to my attention about my old high school. Both were written by graduates of our all-boys military institution in Saint Paul.

The first is called ‘Cretin Boy’ by Jim Landwehr, a graduate of the class of 1979.

The second book was written by a classmate of mine who collected all the content for a book of memories of our class of 1961. Both books paint a vivid and honest portrait of that time period in my life as much as ‘they’ can remember it. Unfortunately, my own memory bank of my educational years is low on credit and almost in default.

The classrooms have vanished in all of my past halls of learning. From St. Louis Grade School to Cretin High School to the College of Saint Thomas, nothing has remained the same. Time, social changes and the inevitable march of progress has altered, erased or radically changed the face of education as I once knew it.

My earliest recollection of my formal education came from foggy brown-tinted photo plates nestled in the back of my head. There were fleeting images of creaking old wooden steps, the smell of old classrooms, wary nuns watching our every movement and poverty; even though we couldn’t recognize it at the time. It didn’t help that down the block were rows and rows of run-down tenements housing indigent and homeless people.

I don’t remember much about first or second grade when my sister and I walked to St. Louis Catholic Grade School each day. By third grade our mother had built a home in Highland Park, a half hour streetcar ride away. Each morning we would take the trolley to downtown St. Paul with our mother. Each night, my sister and I would take the rickety transit back home again alone.

Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society

Unlike a lot of the schools around our home in Highland Park, St. Louis Grade School was anything but vanilla and main stream. Students came from the surrounding neighborhoods like Irving Park, East Saint Paul, West Saint Paul, and the projects behind the capitol. It was an eclectic, mostly poor, somewhat mix-race group of students; clearly reflective of their communities of origin.

The teachers were all nuns. They were tough-minded, serious, no bullshit kind of instructors who had the full backing of our parents. We understood that punishment at school was always favored in lieu of a call to our parents. Catholic doctrine had a firm grip on our young lives and followed us home as well. The grade school closed in 1962 and the building razed in 1966.

photo credit: Jerry Hoffman

For many of us, high school proved to be a pivotal point in our lives. Even more than college, it was where the stumbles of youth were corrected by the realities of our teenage years and finally solidified into the more mature footsteps that carried us through our collegiate and/or skill building future.

Reflecting back on that time period in Minnesota history and my own historical tracks, I realize now that attending Cretin High School back in the late 50’s and early 60’s was a unique learning experience. The idea of an all-boys military school seems strange today with the sensibilities bubbling up from younger generations. Back then, it was our reality and not far out of line with the general mood of the country and our parents.

photo credit: Jerry Hoffman

In retrospect, it was a turning point in the history of our country. The beginning of the end of that idyllic plain vanilla existence our parents loved so much and wanted us to emulate. The old neighborhood was morphing through all kinds of changes just as we were. It was end of Doris Day and her’ Doggie in the Window.’ It was Frank Sinatra and his version of cool slowly being drowned out by the heavy drumbeat and bass guitar of Rock and Roll. It was hot rods and tail fins and poodle skirts that only hinted of secrets underneath. The Cold War was inescapable but it hardly permeated our existence the same way Rock and Roll and the first warm feelings of affection for the opposite sex did.

Cretin High School was a different kind of school but those of us attending it really weren’t any different from our friends at other schools. We came from all walks of life but for the most part were solidly middle class. Back in the late fifties, Cretin’s tentacles spread out across the Twin Cities in one last grasp at prospects before newer Catholic High Schools in the suburbs started to pick from the litter.

Cretin was a molder of men, a change-maker, and a foundation upon which to build one’s own values, aspirations, judgements, and creative hunger. Like ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream,’ my rag-tag group of Cretin friends have scattered with the winds of time. There are only a couple of guys left that I’ve managed to string together with a loose fitting web of memories that we can cling to. It was the best of times…most of the time. Now in retrospect, it seems even better than that.

Following in my cousin’s footsteps, the College of Saint Thomas was the next step in educating myself. It started out normal enough with two years of learning then hit the preverbal bump in the road. Two losing quarters at the University of Minnesota prompted an invitation from the administration to take a break. Ever watchful, Uncle Sam welcomed me into the United States Army, sent me around the country and left me with the GI Bill to finish my college education back at St Thomas.

Then living abroad, starting a career in writing and television, and I was finally taking my first tentative steps toward a lifelong career in what I loved to do.

All my old classrooms have now disappeared into that dark, murky pool called fast-fading memories. Along with a few scattered classmates, all I have are some old photos and mind-pictures that keep morphing from vapid to vague. Thankfully, the lingering effects of hard work, focus and determination, long since hammered into my soft core brain, hasn’t gone away. Even if the classrooms have.

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.

Retracing Cobblestone Steps

Many of the streets in downtown Saint Paul were made of cobblestone pavers long before the turn of the twentieth century. Gradually as the streetcars were discontinued and replaced by buses in the early 1950s, the streets were paved over and make smooth with asphalt.

This little known and totally inconsequential fact pricked a memory bubble in my mind not long ago. Those cobblestone pavers were some of the first that I stepped on as an infant. I was born and raised in Saint Paul and even though I now find myself in a third tier suburb out of the city, the memories are still there. I can go back and find connections all over the city. I’ve watched the curious and sometimes neglectful changes the city has gone through in mostly subtle but profound ways. Twin Cities Public Television captured it best in their ‘Lost Twin Cities’ documentary series.

I think where you grew up to a certain extent defines who you are and what you’ve become. It can be a reflection of your values, interests and affiliations. I have no problem being defined by my mid-western roots. And old Saint Paul isn’t a bad place to be from. While you can’t go back home again figuratively speaking you can revisit those times and places that impacted your life in many unnoticed and yet profound ways.

The first home I don’t remember was on Smith Avenue. It was a tired old duplex that never survived the demise of the Smith Avenue Playground and creation of United Hospital. Then there was a six-plex apartment near Irving Park. That structure also succumbed to the realignment of the neighborhood. Finally we created a real home on Randolph Avenue where I grew up.

For eight years, St. Louis Catholic grade school was a streetcar then bus ride to downtown Saint Paul. In the afternoon, my sister and I would park ourselves outside the the W.T. Grant Department store and wait for the Highland Park bus with ten cents in our pockets.

Our gang in the photo booth (photo by Jerry Hoffman)

Cretin Track & Field (photo by Jerry Hoffman)

Randolph & Hamline (photo by Jerry Hoffman)

Cretin High School was six blocks away from our home and a world apart from what I knew growing up. A paper route during those formative years got me up at 4:30 each morning and taught me the value of real work. Then the John Wood Steel factory just off of Como Avenue reinforced the need for more education to keep me out of that factory setting.

The College of St. Thomas was yet another world apart from the middle class world I grew up in. It was a hint of the future for those with a college education.

KTCA Television on Como Avenue wasn’t my first job. That first exposure to the work force was with the Minnesota Department of Public Health on the University of Minnesota Minneapolis campus. Run down housing on University Avenue just south of Dinkytown was my first foray into independent living and away from the security of home.

The Annual Catholic Appeal in the Hill House on Summit Avenue was the draw that got me back from the east coast. Telstar Educational Corporation on Prior Avenue was the next step along the way. Then back to KTCA Television on Como Avenue and finally TPT relocated to Lowertown in St. Paul.

Then it was working in public television, running my own business and managing two apartment buildings on Portland Avenue that kept me in St. Paul for many more years to come. It finally culminated with my running the Twin Cities Marathon with my daughter and a move back to my home office in Apple Valley.

Now my daughter and her family have moved to Highland Park, just two blocks away from my old paper route. Funny how some things change and yet others remain the same.

Long Rider

My Mother's statue of the blessed Virgin Mary in my backyard.

Walking on hard-packed snow at twenty below zero feels like crunching bubble-wrap with your feet. Crawling out of a warm bed at 4:30 in the morning can be just as unnerving and traumatic. Even the Blessed Virgin Mary was buried under three feet of snow.

The cold air nips at your cheeks and stings your skin until the clothes pile on and almost by rote behavior you begin the arduous task of delivering newspapers once again. It was my first fleeting taste of entrepreneurship starting in seventh grade.

The one saving grace to that morning ritual was my salmon-colored transistor radio and the wonderful story-songs it painted in my brain. A world of flashy cars with long fins and beautiful young maidens. The intoxicating sound of rock and roll and all those rebellious images it conjured up in my malleable mind which in turn only lent more fuel to an already rampant imagination.

I thought about those deep winter sojourns when I took my first of many long distance bike rides early Saturday morning. It has long been a summer ritual for me before writing, yard work and the grandchildren’s athletic schedule steal time away from such casual pursuits.

There is something very special about those springtime rides that bring back a plethora of memories. Growing up on Randolph Avenue, Cretin High School and the College of Saint Thomas. Warm summer romances. Late night excursions along the river. Walking hand in hand with that someone special who will probably be replaced by another someone special the following summer.

I guess in our youth such shameful girlfriend swapping is all part of the teenage roller coaster of life; a portrait of angst and pathos switching places with love and lust at seventeen. Living and loving and learning all within a couple of square miles of one another.

Riding down Summit Avenue this morning before dawn is a challenge. I haven’t had my coffee yet and there’s no iPad and quiet time before the rest of the world wakes up. Later on in the summer it’s a more relaxed ride because the morning air doesn’t creep under my layers to bite at my skin. I don’t have to wear long pants and gloves to ward off the chill and the sweat comes more slowly.

There are few runners out this early in the season unlike later on when everyone is training for Grandma’s or Twin Cities marathons. The Tour de France wannabes haven’t yet begun to cluster around my coffee shop before their race down Summit Avenue. Today it’s only the hardcore die-hards or marginally insane who are out exercising this frosty morning. Crossing the bridge, I see the U of M rowing club is out before barges crowd the waterways.

Much like another blog At the corner of Fairview and Summit, this ride will take me past a lot of my old haunts and a retracing of my other lives. Most of those old places are now generations apart from where I am today. But they still bring back a boatload of memories, most of them good and a few very poignant.

 It’s so early on Summit Avenue the governor is still asleep. My first romantic breakup after Sunday mass took place just down the block. At this point in my three marathons I was pretty much a walking, jogging zombie; each step as painful as the last. I worked briefly for the Catholic Archdiocese in the James J. Hill Mansion. Sharden Productions, Inc. and related real estate ventures were conceived in those oak-paneled halls.

The Little French Church. Eight years of Catholic education. Daily mass because we had to and public transportation before it became hip.

  

Moved with public television down to Lowertown when it was still empty warehouses and parking lots. Now it’s a hip thriving ‘happening’ place for millennials. Nearby the Mississippi River has long been a magnet for the land-locked before Laguna Beach and the PCH fueled my own latent surfer’s imagination.

1158 Randolph Avenue. Built for Eight Thousand Dollars by my Mother and Uncle Joe in 1948. A comfortable nest for a wondering wandering mind, blind ambition and soaring expectations. Eight years traveling by bus to grade school in downtown Saint Paul. By high school, I couldn’t wait to escape a dying downtown.

  

Cretin High School. A pivotal point in my life and solid respect for education. The first taste of love or whatever it was back then. A thirst for knowledge that hasn’t gone dry after all these years.

Courtesy of Jerry Hoffman

Senior dance Cretin High School - Courtesy of Jerry Hoffman

Myself and Joyce at the Senior dance - courtesy of Jerry Hoffman

Melanie’s home is just two blocks off of my old paper route. Here the latest rage is teardowns and larger homes because the neighborhood has gotten so hot. Who knew? Fifty years ago we couldn’t wait to ‘get out of Dodge.’ Now they’re flocking back to raise their families in my old backyard.

There’s something about this place that still draws me back even in the chill of early spring. And it has nothing to do with the images that corporate and government Minnesota want to paint for outsiders.

Forget about what the PR hacks are saying or the Chamber of Commerce’s latest spiel about the glories of living in Minnesota. Forget our professional (subsidized) sports teams or even dare I say, Garrison Keller’s Prairie Home Companion as a folksy homespun version of Grandma’s tales of yesteryear.

Instead I’m talking about a culture of intrinsic family values, a creed of hard work and an unapologetic pride in being from here. They say our cold weather leaves just the strong of heart behind. I touched on this in my blog: Going Home Again. Whether it’s true or not, it is a moniker I subscribe to.

 

Some might argue that I’ve abandoned my state because I spend winters elsewhere. While it’s true I’d much rather hike a mountain in January than shovel snow, I’d like to believe I’ve earned the right to escape when I can.

Delivering newspapers at twenty below zero was a tough way for a kid to get started in business. But there were valuable lessons learned back then.

And besides I always had Buddy and Ritchie and the Big Bopper to show me the way.