Minnesota Tough

Minnesota endured two polar vortexes this last winter. It was hardly a new phenomenon; just another Minnesota season with a new label and dire warnings of impending doom. Call it the enthusiastic effort of news directors to get as many eyeballs glued to the television screen as possible…media rating wars and all that. Why not be honest and just say it was another cold winter with a polar ice cap nestled snuggly over Minnesota’s crown. Any veteran of the cold wars will tell you there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing. It was hardly the first harsh winter and certainly not the last that Minnesotans have endured.

For the uninitiated, the polar vortex is a persistent, large-scale cyclone located near either one of the planet’s geographical poles. They usually span less than 620 miles in which the air circulates in a counter-clockwise fashion. They’ve been around forever but are a bit of a headache when they spill down over the states. I think it’s their length and the depth of their freezing temperatures that rankles even the toughest of Minnesotans. Combine those serious below-zero temps with constant snowfalls and it was a very tough time for most Minnesotans this last winter.

As a friend back home described the weather to me, he simply stated with a shrug: “It was either snowing or it was below-zero. Those seemed to be our only two weather options all winter long.”

Of course, everyone bitched and complained about the brutal weather because that’s what most Minnesotans do during the heart of winter’s assault. But they endured and persevered and survived the cold and white-outs and accumulating snow. And they will do so once again starting next December.

I endured Minnesota winters for almost seventy years and wouldn’t want anything less for my own children and grandchildren. It’s what makes Minnesotans…Minnesota tough. I love Southern California during the winter months but four seasons beat plain vanilla temps every time.

When I was younger I’d heard the cliché that where you are born and raised leaves an indelible mark on your consciousness no matter where you end spending the rest of your life. I personally experienced that phenomena first hand when I was in the service.

Back in 1964, San Francisco was a pretty spectacular place for a young, untraveled, hungry soldier stationed just outside of civilization. Not far beyond those military gates were more than the Seven Wonders of the World. It was the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, North Beach, Stanford, Sausalito, the North Coast, Half Moon Bay and Big Sur....just to name a few.

I was forever struck through conversations that where a person is raised imprints a pull back home no matter how strong their wanderlust might be. Many a night over pizza and beer my comrades and I would reminisce about our ‘life back home.’ It was nostalgic, exaggerated and ripe with fond memories, real and imagined.

If given a choice, I would have returned to Minnesota in a heartbeat. My buddy Danny wanted to go back to standing on a street corner in Brooklyn; not doing much of anything except just watching his life passing by. Joe wanted to go back to the Southside of Chicago where he and his buddies would also just ‘hang out.’ Johnson wanted to go back to Mississippi to be with his family. Cruz wanted to go back to East L.A. So there we all were in this glorious cornucopia of entertainment but like sailors on shore leave every man one of us would rather have been back home.

Certainly part of it was homesickness, missing our girlfriends, missing out on what our friends were doing. For me, it was a combination of a girlfriend back home and college which I left as a dropout; both now out of reach for at least two more years.

But what was it that was drawing my mind back to that hinterland of snow and ice and cold and long winter nights. Simply stated, I guess it was my origins. It was what I knew best and what ultimately had and still does define me. 

Growing up in Minnesota wasn’t so much an exercise in toughness as it was simple survival. You did what you had to do to earn, learn and play. And you don’t let the stupid weather get in your way. Earning was a paper route starting in seventh grade that included sub-zero winter weather at 4:30 in the morning, wearing galoshes and walking uphill both ways. Learning was shuffling across campus during a white out without hat and gloves because it wasn’t cool to wear them. Play was the pure pleasure was hiking the woods for the serenity there. 

I got a harsh reminder of Minnesota winters three times this season. We were drawn back home to help Melanie with her campaign for State Representative. It was truly Four Weeks in Purgatory.

We first returned in December for Christmas which wasn’t too bad, weather-wise. Then in January in the midst of their polar vortex and again in March for more cold weather and snow storms. Even the birds and squirrels were on hiatus during the coldest days. It was a cruel adjustment from t-shirts and flip-flops to layered clothing and hats and mittens.

So this year I was once again greeted with that old familiar chorus of complaints about record-breaking snowfalls and 60 plus days of below-zero weather. The polar vortex was camping overhead for days on end and the darkness of winter days was playing havoc with one’s mindset. 

On the flip side of that frozen coin, the first day of 30-degree weather brought out the t shirts, an abundance of runners, bikers and convertibles with their tops down. It’s what Minnesotans do when the sun comes out and the temp is above freezing. It’s seen a taste of spring even in February.

Both my kids have grown up in Minnesota. Melanie still runs outdoors year round and Brian, having moved to Colorado, is usually on some mountain top, skiing or climbing almost every winter weekend…with his family following right behind him.

The grandkids in Colorado are as comfortable on a mountaintop as are the Minnesota grandchildren sledding in sub-zero weather or playing king of the hill when Papa is back in town.

Forget the lame attempts of ‘Fargo’ clichés such as ‘yeah, you betcha’ and other Scandinavian accents to define a Minnesotan. If you were born and raised here and even if you’ve moved away, the toughness that helped Minnesotans endure Minnesota winters is ingrained in your very psyche. 

Once Minnesota Tough always Minnesota Tough.

Hanging Ten in Sixty-Five

The Presidio of San Francisco was a new experience for me back in 1965. I’ve blogged about my past life there…the goods times and the bad. The longing for loved ones back home and the wonderment of a strange new world just down the block on Market Street.

It was a surreal existence away from the tired old vestiges of a life back home that had stumbled once too often and a storybook college romance that had now had been postponed. Even setting aside the yearning for a life outside of khaki and KP and less than brilliant non-coms shouting at you, there was still something special in the air.

I started hanging out with an odd assortment of eccentric characters who had dropped out of school, quit work or just plain got drafted. We were camped in a disheveled barracks room that had few inspections, hidden caches of liquor and who knows what else on weekends. The lives of those young men could fill a dozen storylines alone.

But even stranger and more fascinating people were gathering in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Despite my military buzz cut I was allowed to wander the streets and observe the strange goings-on without as much as a second glance. My motor scooter took to the hills and crests and dirt roads that even the most ardent hikers hadn’t discovered yet. The Larkin Art Theater introduced me to foreign films that showed more flesh and exposed more thoughts than I’d been ever allowed to feel back home. It was like the Land of Oz without the characters three.

Past blogs have waxed philosophically about my life in the service in San Francisco with

Young Heart by the Bay and Gold Coast – The Wild Coast. But none of that compared to the world of sand and surf and soft brown skin that I was soon to experience. It was one weekend of pure fantasy. A journey into a world of the real and imagined that truly set my mind to wander-ing. Back in ’65, the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean and other beach music troubadours were introducing the world to the surfing scene. I was about to live it.

Unfortunately, I never did meet the big Kahuna or Moondoggie or even Gidget for that matter.  This new tribe of beach culture aficionados opened a whole new world to me and as just quickly slammed it shut. Now all I have left are my memories.

Early that summer, a new bunk mate had come into my life. I can’t remember his name, only that he was still in college, had taken a leave to complete his active duty in the reserves and was just winding up his short tour of duty.

He was from Los Angeles and went home almost every weekend to see his girlfriend and attend fraternity parties. His parents had just bought him a brand new candy apple red Corvair, one of Chevrolet’s first compact cars. He had souped it up with enough steroids in the engine to make it an improbable sports car that he still drove like it was a corvette. No matter, it had a four-speed Hurst shifter on the floor and enough horsepower to curl the toes of both driver and passenger.

We’d ride up and down the hills of San Francisco and he would regale me with stories of life on the beach, his blond girlfriend and hanging ten on twelve foot curls. It was enough to churn up images of hedonistic wonderment in the mind of a Midwestern twenty-one year old. I guess it really didn’t matter how much of his stories were real or imagined. I loved the images he was painting in my brain and the immature thoughts that sent me to sleep.

Shortly before his discharge, he suggested I come down to see him after he got out of the service. He promised we could hang out at the beach, drink cheap wine with the surfer girls in those illegal thatched huts that surfers constructed in wayward coves and live the life of a surfer dude.

I was in. By that afternoon, I had my airline ticket and my bag packed. I was going to L.A. for the weekend. It would be my first flight on an airplane, first time hanging out at the beach and first time pretending to be free once again.

The trip to Los Angeles began with a short flight in a four engine prop commuter between San Fran and the City of Angeles. It was also my first time staying in a typical upscale tonie L.A. neighborhood (no kidding, people live like that) and hanging out with the beautiful people just like the ones who haunted the pages of Playboy magazine. My old jeans didn’t quite fit in with the madras shirts, chino pants and boat shoes of this ‘in’ crowd but I tried to fake it anyway.

The weekend was pure fantasy. It was my first taste of civilian life after I had gone into the service. My buddy hooked me up with a friend of his girlfriends. She was a nursing major, quite pleasant and just a nice companion for a fantasy weekend.

Huntington Beach was my buddy’s favorite hangout beach. I struck gold while researching this blog with two web sites. The first was a site devoted to the photography of Leroy Grannis who had so aptly captured the spirit of the Southern California beach experience in the mid-sixties.  The second site is the Surf History of Huntington Beach. Both were perfect mind-joggers for me.

The details of that weekend have grown hazy over the years but the essence of that experience is still prominent in my mind.

My friend tried to teach me to surf…with disastrous results. My balance was off, I couldn’t see without my glasses and I swallowed enough salt water to remain buoyant for years. The water was freezing and even a wet suit couldn’t stop my chills. His friends said nothing but I’m sure they regaled each other with bouts of laughter once I left the scene.

At times it seemed my friend was just slumming with his surfer friends. Most of them had dropped out of college and were leading a nomadic life, just chasing the waves up and down the coast. Some of them seemed very smart and weren’t the least embarrassed by their (my) perceived lack of ambition. I think my friend liked to hang out with them for the excitement of a weekend of surfing before returning to the safe sanctuary of his polished life back on campus.

The surfer girls fulfilled every cliché under the sun. They were all bronze-skinned, beautiful, built like models and strikingly aloof to anyone who wasn’t like them. Any boy with white skin, glasses and little sense of balance had no place on their radar. Only my weekend date seemed to have a little symphony for my losing battle with the sea and my surf board.

After my disillusioning introduction to the surfer’s world, we toured my friend’s college, the campus of USC. That proved to be another step back into civilian life and depressing as hell. The grounds were full of stereotypical college types; men and women. There were the jocks in their letter jackets, the cool kids in the latest fashions, the pseudo hippies in drag and every beautiful co-ed this side of the Mississippi. For one randy service man on the loose, it was like discovering a stack of Playboy magazines.

A visit to my friend’s frat house and his girlfriend’s sorority house only reinforced the realization that my life back in San Francisco was another world that was nothing like theirs. The weekend was a blur of fast-swirling images; headlights on the interstate that went for miles, his parents who were always polite but very reserved, a collegiate life that even so different from mine back in the Midwest and a world outside of the military that was like overdosing on hedonistic endeavors that were actually legal. It was hard to leave my friend at LAX but the promise of a return trip did a lot of boaster my spirits as I boarded that commuter prop and my life back in the service.

Over too many beers and fantasy thoughts my friend promised that I could return the following month. We would go surfing again, hang out at the beach, attending one of his fraternity parties and live the live the life of a surfer dude. I was elated, excited and full of wondrous ideas for my next trip to paradise.

It never happened.

Over the next several weeks, my friend never returned my phone calls and gradually it began to dawn on me that he never would. In retrospect it wasn’t really surprising. He was out of the service, back on campus and still hanging with his surfer friends on weekends.

What he and I had in a friendship was fleeting at best. It was a convenient connection while he was away from home and in foreign territory. Once back on familiar turf, my friend wasn’t interested in having some wide-eyed kid hanging around with him anymore.

At first, I was hurt and disappointed but gradually began to realize just what a wonderful world my friend had introduced me to. It was a world far different from the one I had either at the Presidio or back home. It wetted my appetite for more and steeled my determination to see just what was outside of those Presidio gates. Snow White and the Seven Seekers.

I’ve been searching ever since.

Young Heart by the Bay

 I’ve been criticized sometimes for dwelling in the past, focusing my writing energies on that long forgotten period of lost youth, unrequited love, wandering ambitions and unfocused goals. That theme has crept into two of my novels and a number of my blogs. Sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant but always present.

I plead guilty. And after observing some of the lives around me, I am more than content to continue fighting that long slow slide toward mediocrity. Without dwelling there, I think I can revisit my past, reflect on the good and the bad planted there and still relish my present situation.

I thought about that when I read Scott McKenzie’s obituary in the San Francisco Examiner a couple of weeks ago. It’s a heck of a thing when one song can perfectly encapsulate the soul of a city. San Francisco has two such songs.

The first was “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” by Tony Bennett. Tony’s song, although great make-out music, was really for the old guard. The more mature, three-piece suit and formal dress folks who sipped martinis and talked race horses. That was their world. Mad Men, anyone?

On the other hand, Scott McKenzie’s song helped define my generation. Or at least a large part of my generation. It gave San Francisco its moniker as the epicenter of the 1960’s counterculture. The city has always been a kind of border town, attracting both freaks and fearless alike. It still harbors that open, accepting attitude for folks of all kinds. Boulder, Colorado, boasts a bumper sticker which reads, “Keep Boulder Weird.” San Francisco has been weird since its gold rush days.

Scott’s song was able to capture that very brief period in 1967 when flowers were in bloom and flower children captured our imagination. The sixties was a magical time at the Presidio of San Francisco and San Francisco in general. I was very lucky to experience both of them briefly when I was in the service and stationed at the Presidio.

Without really knowing it, I was experiencing the whole pre-hippie era, mixing and mingling with hippies and diggers, black panthers and anti-war activists, Berkeley intellectuals and disciples of the Age of Aquarius. All from the security of an army bunk at the Presidio.

The Presidio of San Francisco (originally called El Presidio Real de San Francisco) is a former military base located on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula.

Originally built as a Spanish Imperial Outpost from 1776 to 1821, the Presidio was the Spanish empire’s northernmost military outpost. In 1821, the Presidio changed from Spanish to Mexican sovereignty. Then during the Mexican-American War in 1846, the army took over the post and occupied it until 1972 when it was included within the boundaries of the Golden Gate National Recreational Area. In 1996, it was formally closed and transferred to the National Park Service.

I only spent a very brief period of my lost years at the Presidio. It was between the summer of 1964 and spring of 1965. I had just left basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri (affectionately known as the armpit of the army) and was being transferred to the Presidio of San Francisco (romanticized as the country club of the army, which it was!). I would later be transferred to Fort Polk, Louisiana (correctly known as the a…… of the army).

As an Information Specialist in the Command Information Office, I had a nine to five job and plenty of spare time to explore my newly adopted cityscape. The view from my office was spectacular. For the relatively brief time I was there, I managed to pack in a lot of experiences. Unfortunately I only captured a few of them on film.

Before the service, I had never been out of Minnesota, flown in an airplane or done a cross country road trip. San Francisco opened my eyes to a wondrous new world all around me. It defined the beginnings of my wanderlust and a quest to answer those long dormant hunger pangs.

In a very short time, I became one of the wealthiest men in my barracks – in service lingo. I had a library of over 100 paperback books available for lending out, a record collection of: 45 rpm hits, a Vespa motor scooter and most importantly, a second job at an art theater.

That job earned me almost one hundred dollars a month after taxes. I was saving my army pay of eighty dollars a month and only spending part of my secondary income. I was the classic big fish in a small khaki pond.

The Larkin Theater was an art house theater that specialized in foreign films. Most of the time, two girls and I ran the place. At least the owner let us believe we did. My job was ticket taker, usher, janitor, Saturday morning phone secretary and overall gopher. The two ticket takers (whose names I’ve long since forgotten) were high schoolers working part-time until they could squeak through 12^th grade and move on to cosmetology school. Our backgrounds were similar and we became comrades in the arts.

I absolutely loved my job. It was my first introduction to foreign films, which I love to this day. Ninety percent of my films from Netflix are foreign films.

In 1964, Haight-Ashbury was just a nondescript street corner in a rundown part of town. I went there many times to hang out with a couple of ex-servicemen. They had girlfriends upstairs and weed in the fridge. And a lot of very strange visitors. A quiet night was lounging in their hammocks, drinking cheap wine and listening to jazz or pre-psychedelic rock and roll.

When we were buzzed enough, I’d climb aboard my Vespa and weave my way back to the Presidio, hoping that neither cop nor curb would curtail my long ride home. I’m embarrassed by my actions now but back then it was all part of the lifestyle of any service man on the loose in the big city.

With my Vespa under foot, I began exploring the city. Flying up and down the hills, I rode through the Marina, the Palace of Fine Arts (before restoration), Nob Hill, Market Street, Golden Gate Park and the beach. Just to name a few. Back then, I was probably riding too fast, drinking and driving and never wearing a helmet. Fortunately, I survived the stupidity of my youth.

I traveled up and down the coast on weekends, south down to Half Moon Bay and north up to Sausalito, Stinson Beach, Mount Tamalpais and the numerous World War Two fortifications across the bay from the Presidio.

Back then, Sausalito was just a small town across the bay. It began as a ship repair yard during World War Two and grew exponentially after that. By the early sixties a lot of the Beats had migrated from San Francisco to Sausalito. They hung out in the dank dreary bars and coffee shops that dotted the waterfront.

Everyplace I’ve lived, visited or hung around has had its fair share of characters. The Presidio was no different.

My entrepreneurial skills were nothing compared to the young dark-skinned fellow who always had several girlfriends in his posse. He lent them out to friends and associates-for a price. We thought he was quite a businessman back then. Today you’d just call him a pimp.

There was the natural born hustler who worked evenings attending to the mainframe (pre) computer in company headquarters and then did other people’s KP duty (kitchen patrol) five days a week. His going rate was $25.00 dollar cash per day, non-negotiable. He always had willing takers lined up outside his barracks door. That’s $500.00 cash per month – back in 1964. And he didn’t pay taxes on it either!

I befriended an angry black man who hated whites. Go figure. He liked me because I wanted to be a writer. He was a writer and felt a kinship to my vernacular struggles despite my pale skin.

I envied the two GIs whose sole job was to travel each day to Sausalito to maintain the general’s yacht docked there. They were even allowed to take it out for a cruise just to test the engines. I begged to go along but they always refused my request. Something about their Golden Egg.

There was a German immigrant who got drafted and meant to better his English while serving his new found country. While he practiced his diction on me, he introduced me to the arts in San Francisco. Together we attended numerous plays, art gallery openings and museums. We saw “Fantasticks” and the song “Try to Remember” broke my heart thinking about someone back home. My friend was a lot smarter than I was but I think he found in me a willing student to learn about the arts.

We had an illustrator in our barracks. He and I would get into heated arguments all the time because he hated Joan Baez. Who doesn’t like Joan Baez? Other than that, he was an incredibly talented artist and great guy in his own right.

I befriended the intellectual of our group of malcontents. Evenings and weekends, he was flipping Victorian houses, ‘Old Ladies,’ before it became trendy. He invited me to join him in his real estate ventures. Like an idiot, I said no because I had a real job. Besides, who makes money by fixing up old houses in San Francisco and then selling them for three to four times their purchase price?

We always laughed at the fellow who got blind drunk every weekend. We thought it a bit obsessive but not particularly out of character for the characters around us. Strange how attitudes change over time. Now I feel nothing but compassion for him and wonder what must have become of him.

But most memorable, was the young female recruit in my office, who was working her way up through the ranks (literally). She preferred officers, especially the married ones whose wives were in other states. She had no shame. She was a working girl. And very good at what she did. Mind you, her typing skills were atrocious. Not that it mattered very much.

My stay in San Francisco ended all too quickly with marching papers to Louisiana and an end to the wonderful fantasy world that had been all mine for that brief period of time.

I’m grateful I was able to capture on film some of those moments if for no other reason than to use them as screen savers and as an excuse to reflect back on a time when peace and love ruled the world and a kid, full of wild ideas, lived briefly in that city on the bay.