Persistence

Walter Gabrielson Painter

Chapter One

First Life: eighteen years, 1935-1953, Orr, Minnesota

Born Eveleth Minnesota, grew up in Orr, Minnesota until I was 18, of blue-collar but proud people, first generation from immigrants in a frozen, lake-infested leavings of former glaciers. Went to school for 12 years at the same school across the road. I was a member of the secret society known as small town folks out in the boonies who don't trust anybody who won't stay up there and subject themselves to the winters and other travails of being Minnesotan.

If you are crazy enough to be driving up Route 53 from Duluth, Minnesota to International Falls (often coldest reporting station in entire USA) you can slither through Orr almost without noticing. No lights, one tiny intersection. You would see Wally's garage on your left as you slowed to 35, the Pure Oil Station, then some stores, train depot on the right and some boxcars loading pulpwood, have a glimpse of a blue lake on the left, some cafes and the lumberyard and you have run out of town faster that you can say all this. There isno movie theater, newspaper, radio station, courthouse or evidence of advanced civilization.

Orr is a village, It is still there.

Before we knew of extended families, Orr was mine, all 280 imperfectly conservative of them. They are of Scandinavian (Swedes, Finns, Norwegian) descent (tirty svedes ran tru duh wedes shasing vun Norviegan), some East European and some Chippewa Indian.

Minnesota life is HOUSEKEEPING, KIDS, BUILDING, FIXING, FOOD, HUNTING & FISHING, DRINKING and a tad of religion. The real religion of Orr is coping with everything. Orr squats amidst a grand stage of millions and millions of trees and thousands of lakes (some 11,000 in the entire state), snow, more snow, cold and overheated houses. Lots of green and gray and black trees. Trees create canyons at the bottom of which you live. Only time you get away from the canyon walls is when you get out on a lake and then they assume a fringe on the edge of the water. Our lake was invariably green-yellow with algae (we called it bloom or frogshit), the border lakes were a cold bottomless brown. The water has a fishy pungency to it and mirrors the blue sky in the summer with tall, white cumulus buildups that dump rain in torrents, and becomes gray-blue icy and white in the winter as the snow piles up. People go out and cut a hole in the ice and put a shack over it and sit and fish and freeze for sport. One time I fell through the ice while skating and went completely under. Fortunately, I came up where I went in, although there was a current. I got pulled out and ran home with my clothes freezing on me as I moved through the cold air. I got home, stacked my ice-armor into a corner and took a hot bath with no ill effects.

The folks are somewhat dour. They wear outfits from Sears or the Monkey Ward catalog, which varies from gray to green pants and shirts with hats and flaps and glasses with brown plastic on top and imitation gold on the bottom. They walk carefully putting one foot in front of another as if they were pacing off something they are going to buy. Garrison Keillor has adequately identified the species in a group he calls Norwegian bachelor

farmers. This outfit also includes from my town Swedish and Finn bachelor lumberjacks and farmers. The ladies are well turned out with republican cloth coats and an emphasis on hairdos which are done at Ruby's beauty shoppe, or shop (I think shoppe would be a little racy for Orr) once every two weeks and tweaked up in between. Big part of the woman deal in Minnesota is the:

having of kids,

talking about kids,

dragging them to every family dinner and boring social affair, (that they can think of),

the eventual planning of their marriages,

their future, and of course,

intruding into their lives forever.

Same as everywhere.

Kids are conversation pieces, starters and enliveners. This from a people who don't like to talk about anything at all. The kids get it going for them. Kids are little packages that are tolerated for their museum value but no back talk is allowed. Kids find this out fast. This is grown-up country with grown-up rules and values and kids violate them at their peril. They don't sass, they do whatever backbreaking, joy-squashing labor is assigned. They come with the visits to be admired, talked about and aren't supposed to get out of line after dinner. They work like everybody else. At ten I was walking a four mile paper route in blizzards and 40 below zero. That's what Minnesota kids do.

Praise the lord.

The people are friendly as long as you aren't a stranger. If you are, it's much better to be vouched for by a local, preferably somebody who didn't move there sooner than twenty years ago. They are good people. They are of you and they are a part of you. Without your compliance they form a conspiracy of how things are, how they are going to hell, and/or what way things should be going along, and you go along or eventually get out. Independence, uniqueness, individuality are not treasured, they are despised, laughed at, derided. A guy who has lived there his entire life can start a fire in the back of his jeep and drive backwards into town saying that it is his new heater and get away with it but everybody will now know he is a nut. When you are growing up it seems all very natural. Later if you come back after an absence it appears weird. But you miss them and if you go back for a visit don't stay more than three days. They will drive you crazy.

My earliest memories of Orr are of water or snow. We were wallowing in one or the other within hours of leaving the womb.

With snow:

You have instant building materials for forts, houses, ski runs and jumps in inexhaustible supply. Minnesota never runs out. We built sled runs and poured water on them to increase the slipperiness and danger factor, ride down them billy hell. We would wind up on the regular roads amidst traffic, dodging logging trucks and cars. Nobody in my generation ever got a scratch. Snowplows would throw up hugh berms which could be improved upon for whatever violence you had in mind. All day long we looked out the school windows calculating many kinds of building projects. Sometimes the snow came in big flat pieces that were terrific building modules for forts. King of the hill. Very exhilarating stuff, ought to teach it at the military academies. Everybody got in on it, big kids, little kids, girls. Get on top and beat off the opposition. Snowballs, iceballs, columns of snow-covered kids raising hell. Little kids who got whacked and started crying were ignored after one look to see if their nose was still on. Nobody had time for sissies. Sissies were those who couldn't take it and ran home and told mom, one of the most serious crimes a kid could ever commit. You NEVER ran home to tell. I shudder to think of it.

When it was warm:

We lived around the water, in the water, under the water. We were little fishes. We took Red Cross lessons in swimming and lifesaving and how to feel up the girls underwater legally when you were saving somebody. We got little badges and cards to put in our wallets. One Jed Hejda, instructor from Eveleth (my birthplace) in watermastery and science, came up in his Aeronca Chief and buzzed us on the dock low enough to put us into the water. Good thing he taught us how to swim. Later he landed in Tony Puckernich's pasture but couldn't get out so we had to haul the plane down the road to a bigger pasture so he could take off and get over the trees. During the summer we had Water Carnival. Rides, candy, Indian dances, Indians puking, airplane rides, boat races, a water carnival queen, swimming races. It was terrific. One year a car drove over my foot but didn't hurt anything and I got my name in the Cook paper. Slow news day.

The big deal were the changing houses, which were connected by a fence you could walk on in the park, just north of the lumberyard. There was a boys' and a girls'. Naturally, we wanted to peek into the girls' through knotholes we had loosened up or go along the fence to the top which was open to the sun at the roof. Girls all screamed when we did this. Later on I learned that many liked this game. Some even checked us out, see a little eyeball in the wall. The changing houses always smelled of pee. At night we would play along the lumber with rubber guns which we made out of innertubes and wood and shot a one-inch wide by six-inches long piece of innertube tied in a knot.

About everybody had a nickname, even me.

I won't tell it because it belongs back in Orr.

Kid next door was thrashing around in a mud puddle one spring, Ed Erickson came by and called him a mud minnow. His name is Ray Ruhou, fifty years later he is still known as Mud. Nobody thinks anything of it. We had an old Swedish bum who did work on our house for free booze my father got from the liquor salesman, his name was Oscar the blue-eyed bunny. I don't ever recall hearing his real name. One kid grew up to be a gawky tall person and walked slower, is still called Speed. My sister reversed Haven Stageberg's name during one of her stages, he was still known as Grebgats by the time he died. Once you are categorized in a small town, you stay that way for eternity or longer.

My two best friends were Marshall Johnson and Ronald Palmquist. Their fathers were both capitalists. Marshall's father ran one of the two exploitative, gas-gouging gas stations in town, the Pure Oil. Palmquist's father ran a logging camp out in the woods someplace off the Nett Lake Road. Marshall's father was a big hulking guy with tinted glasses (racy for the time) who sported a red, beefy face and trudged around looking important, seemed to spend a lot of time making sly digs at his workers. I don't know if that is Scandinavian torture or not. His employees were all family men with kids, guys who pumped gas and sold tourist stuff, fixed outboard motors, got you minnows and ice and knew all there was to know in the universe. Ronald's father Helge was Scandinavian-huge and renowned for some toots that I never witnessed but were local history. He ran his camp way out in the woods, drove Ron like a peon, we would go out and partake of a bunkhouse dinner and maybe a candy bar from the little store his mother ran and then go out into the woods and fire up a bulldozer and knock over some trees until bed time.

My father was an employee, he managed the Municipal Liquor Store and Bar for the Village of Orr, its primary source of income and good times.

They were all republicans. Curious, Minnesota is a democratic state. Guess enlightenment didn't get up that far north.

I saw a movie couple of years ago about a kid who could have grown up in our town who lusted after a Red-Ryder BB gun rifle, was discouraged by his parents that he might shoot his eye out. Marshall and I never did, we had .22 rifles and shot off telegraph glass insulators, phone insulators which would create a hugh ZOWIE if you were on the phone at the time. We would go to the dump and shoot rats, hold up license plates and have the other shoot out the middle of the zeros or dot the ones. Fortunately, we were good shots. Go hunting for partridge or duck. Guns were not a problem, getting shells were. Cost money and created questions. Luckily, Marshall had an inexhaustible supply at the Pure Oil if he played it right.

Drinking was big in Orr.

Having a toot, getting sauced, becoming a soak was all very natural and encouraged. Everybody drank except the women and kids.

The wives were all scared the kids would turn out like their fathers. Any evidence of a bottle of beer or likker was very severely tended to. There were few women drunks, it was considered extremely bad form. Among Orr women there were three castes; Indian women, women who drank, women who didn't drink and kept up their house immaculately. The women seriously kept house. The lumberjacks would come into town with their monthly paychecks, get their groceries, get a nip for the road and wind up on their faces in a snowbank, or occasionally on the railroad tracks which was guaranteed to terminate their lumberjack days by a snorting steam monster of the DW&P Railroad. One time a guy came into town in his canoe for supplies and Marshall and I bored a hole in the bottom. He returned later, weaving a bit and put in his groceries and started paddling off until he simply paddled himself under water and left his hat floating on top. OF COURSE we rescued him!

Indians from the Nett Lake Reservation would come into town to buy likker, it was illegal to officially sell booze to the Indians at the time because their systems were so relatively pure, and they would strongly and violently react to alcohol (which has not subsequently stopped the booze industry's successful campaign to change the law). Orr people never thought it was illegal to exploit the Indians as much as they could get away with and sold them all the beer and likker they could stand and then stayed indoors until the Indians were gone. In the fall the Indians would have ricing money, the lake on the Reservation banned outboards so wild rice grew in profusion, they would harvest and sell it as the leaves turned. Meanwhile the Orr people would fix up and paint old cars and sell them to the Indians as well as sell them likker. The fall tended to be very exciting on the road as you were at any time quite likely to encounter a drunk Indian in a vehicle with dubious steering on the way to exact retribution to the Orr people by shooting off guns and racing back to the Reservation where only federal cops could touch them.

Here we all were, stuck in this zoo of nature and toys and predictable characters and unpredictable weather. Before they settled down, kids would dynamite beaver ponds, creeks, and postboxes, drive on the ice in cars and fall in, run boats into islands in the middle of the night. We found that outdoor toilets (plenty of them then) were immense fun, on Halloween they were fair game for tipping, many times with their owners aboard and blasting away with shotguns. Biggest game on Halloween was to play with the Midnight Special, sole passenger train of the DW&P Railroad that came up from Duluth to Canada and passed through hell town about 11:30 p.m. We would attempt or succeed in unhitching the passenger car, hitch up the section crew outdoor four-holer to the end of the train, grease the tracks to facilitate the train whipping through the station or put the section crew outhouse out on the tracks so the train would hit it, the variations were only limited by your imagination.

What I came to eventually realize was the dearth of mind stuff.

Orr was a playground for kids and it all peaked out at High School graduation. After that, you replayed your honors and that was it. The only newspaper commenting on Orr stuff was from Cook, 12 miles south, it had a Put your Oar in for Orr column and was paragraphs about who was visiting who from Oregon, who went down to the cities for shopping, who just had a log fall on them. Change was illegal. What people lived for escapes me. They lived to cope with just being there, to make a living, surprised that they were surviving in one of the most godforsaken, cold and windy places on earth as the storms flew down from Hudson's Bay. It is hard to figure out. They like nature a lot but seldom would admit it. Picking berries in the fall is big, buying a new car is big. Buying a truck is even bigger.

But the events of a small town don't necessarily describe what it's like to be there. For instance, vast solitude is available any time by going in one direction on a road or lake instead of another. The endless miles of trees and sky and weather permit you to get away, become isolated. The extreme weather isolates you even more. You can be in places where your puny voice wouldn't have the least effect and a cry for help or assistance would be answered by the wind. You could drift off the end of the human support system in an instant and easily perish. You could walk out your back porch into a wilderness that goes for hundreds of miles. When you reentered civilization you came back from another planet but you also needed to reestablish with your fellow humans the fantasy that things were really all right, that your fears were only temporary. I think this is why Orr people tend to be so insular; they want to recreate a conspiracy of security because the alternative is simply too awful. When you go outside there are bear and wolves and moose and muskrat who don't necessarily like you. It is a hugh unknown precipice that is always there, luring you on in the name of fun but ready to dispatch the unwary or unprepared. Everybody in Orr knows this.

In the winter people obviously spend most of their time indoors. Some of the older houses are quite pungent, particularly those built by first generation immigrants who have lived in them almost their entire lives. They are farm houses or shacks in the woods that have tarpaper and cardboard insulation, sometimes linoleum tacked to the walls. Lit at night by the kerosene lamp which comes off with a hissing yellow glow that barely gets to the floor which is worn and sagging. Storm doors, storm windows, keep the roof swept off so the snow won't crush it, heavy woolen clothing and parkas on pegs near the door, boots on the porch. Barn smell inside the house, old linoleum in the kitchen near the wood stove, sometimes a phone for the newer ones (three longs, two short, everybody listens in to get the news). Odor of milk from the separator. Wife losing the battle against the elements and the cows. Offers you coffee. They pour their coffee into a saucer to cool, slurp it up through a sugar cube held between the teeth. My grandmother Gabrielson always had her coffee that way. Layers of heat inside the rooms. Look outside and not much there. Gray and black trees with white or gray snow, gray sky. Nothing moving. Snow squeaks when you walk on it. Heavy quietness of forest of stunted jack pine, spruce, tamarack. Tangles, gray branches in thick underbrush that walls off the house in a clearing. Blue smoke coming out of the chimney. Some still have outdoor toilets, a real test of fortitude is when you have to go, position your warm, tender ass over a stinking pile of history, read the Monkey Ward catalog and then use it for paper, feel of the slick stock not doing a very good job.

Buildings, houses are constructed in the looks-about-right school of architecture. You start with the basics and keep adding on if you have more kids. If you didn't want to build, you could buy somebody else's place dirt cheap or buy a house hundreds of miles away and have it moved. In the Midwest and Minnesota houses are travelling all over the place, you meet them on the roads all the time. My Uncle Ed was a housemover. He bought some surplus Army trucks after WW II and was in business. He could move anything anywhere. Bring in a crew, saw the house loose from its foundations, jack it up, put huge timers under it, put wheels under them and off he'd go, one guy on top of the house to pull up the power or phone lines.

One day I went out on a job with him and observed the whole process. The county guy posted a small bridge with lower load limits so in case they went through the bridge and broke it Ed would have to pay. Didn't happen. Whipped the house down a road and on to a resort at the west end of Pelican. Ed was capable but a real blockhead which was typical of the Gabrielsons, all my father's brothers and sisters were like that. They had this damnable, irritating CONFIDENCE that whatever they said was fact. You could never talk them out of it.

My primary support system was my mother.

Overall, the mother class is what keeps the world on the rails. Orr is no different. Not only did my parents strive for basic material sustenance, but my mother supported me in my dreams, my ambition even if it was not focused or defined. She tells me that my father was supportive too but it was hard to tell. I felt his ambition was to turn me into a republican.

He made me stand up and read the entire issue of TIME out loud each week. Talk about revolting. This was allegedly to improve my public speaking abilities (later when I had become a teacher he gloated over his previous work on my speechifying), I saw it as a sneaky way to get me to think like Henry Luce. Since those halcyon days I have never been able to abide the publication.

He DID attempt to teach me basic carpentry but I was too damn foolish to take him up on it and missed out until later; when I was going to art school I assisted him on jobs in Inglewood which got us a lot closer and taught me a lot. It became his priceless legacy to me. He was a marvelous carpenter and cabinetmaker and built our entire house. I still have many of his tools.

They started us on piano lessons. I took for four years and eventually came to enjoy improvisation and jazz. My sister continued and became a music major in college, and taught later and played for churches for years and hundreds and hundreds of weddings and funerals. I first took piano from a rather stiff lady in Cook and then from Agnes Louma who was pretty hip stuff, the wife of a local teacher who was the most boring guy we ever had and completely lost control of his classes. "Now cut that out", didn't go too far with the Orr boys. We went to Virginia for piano lessons and then concerts at night at the Junior College auditorium. I can still remember the fullness of those events, the officialness of culture versus the lifestyle we led in the boonies. There was a richness and majesty to it which raised questions and contradictions.

The only thing I regret about piano lessons (now you'll be able to play and meet people wherever you go in the world, sure, wherever they have a piano and want you to bring a dead party to life and a drunk bimbo comes over and breathes--play temptation) is that I had to practice every day and thus lost out on sports. We played baseball when I was younger, hardball only. I still can remember the joy of being hit in the head with a baseball or it burning into my glove like an asteroid. We didn't have any grotesque thing around like little league, uniforms, and moms and pops hanging around making themselves crazy. Our games were deadly serious and choosing up sides was clear and present liturgical evidence of your standing in the kid world. Never to become the dreaded kids at the end that nobody wanted on their team. Sometimes we had to draft little kinds at the end to flesh out the team, there weren't enough to go around. Or, we would play a game whereby you rotated through all the positions. Trouble with that game was that nobody wanted to stop batting.

Being a married lady carried immense responsibilities which could be listed as (1) having dinner ready for the old man when he came home, (2) keeping an immaculate home---maybe this was No. 1, it is a tough call, (3) shaping, defining and isolating the kids from the cares and woes of the old man, and (4) keeping the running negotiations with all the in-laws and relations about where to go for Christmas, Thanksgiving and other holidays. Considering that my father had six brothers and sisters, and my mother about the same, and both grandmothers were alive and they were scattered all over Minnesota, this was no easy task.

I still think the housekeeping was the biggest deal. Couple of years ago, Nancy and I stayed at my Aunt's house for a few days. Nancy came

back from a visit to the linen closet with saucer eyes. "You won't believe, everything is folded and stacked as to color, size, function." (I should have added who gave it as a present, who was now visiting who would remember all that, and how worn it was so it could be deaccessioned or strategized for a replacement present on the upcoming Christmas list!!!)

I knew. We intimately lived all that stuff.

My mom was involved with something call Study Club. They would get together to read a book and discuss it or something like that. The real agenda was to scope out the quality of the hostess's housekeeping and hostess skills. There would be eight or ten ladies over for lunch. After they went home, they would proceed to tear apart with microscope and white gloves the whole event. Quality of presentation. Freshness and never seen before recipes of cookies. How did the hot dish go over? Coffee? Still using that old blue pot that leaked? Hot on the trail for evidence of recidivism, backsliding in housekeeping. Slip upstairs to the biffy for a quick check of the linen closet. Kids beds made so you could bounce an anvil off the covers. Sometimes they played bridge and stayed all day and you had to figure out a way to get by them without performing or showing off or hearing all their kid stories you knew were big lies. To this day my mom, bless her, still keeps an immaculate house. She is out in California, 1,500 miles from Orr but always ready for a surprise visit from Gladys, Evelyn, Ruth, etc. They won't find anything on her.

As a kid the main event of the year was-----summer vacation!!!

For the first couple of days we didn't know what to do, our structure, our meaning, out battles with those who would try and whip us into some kind of shape were gone. Invariably we were drawn to the lake, it was so potent once the ice had gone out. NO longer a big skating rink it was wet again. Marshall always had boats and big motors, and we would blast all over Pelican Lake which was on the edge of town. We got to intimately know every rock, every deadhead, every shallow, about every tree and the best fishing holes and all the reefs and disasters the lake held. Pelican has 52 islands and is nine miles long. It's height is determined by a small dam in Pelican River down from the lake near Glendale and what used to be Fosters Tavern, now burnt down. Most islands had nothing on them, some had summer houses from people on the Iron Range. Along the south shore there were resorts, which consisted of a few main buildings and ten cabins, a dock, rental boats, minnows, and fishing tackle. People would come up from the cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul or Chicago) for the big North Woods vacation and then it would rain all the time they were up and they would sit around with their gear and smoke and get drunk and go back home and lie about all the big ones and be back the next year for more mosquitos and beer.

My dad had boats, our first was all wood, heavy, with a flat bottom and had a Johnson five horse we strapped on the back that I was given instruction in and ultimately able to solo around Pelican. We kept it in a boathouse in back of the lumberyard, there was a rock just outside theboathouse so it was tricky getting in and out. Later, we got an aluminum boat from Roy Johnson, and a JOHNSON 22 HORSE OUTBOARD MOTOR!!!! My father built a trailer with a wooden box to house the Johnson 22 and put the boat on top of it. To launch the boat you had to lift it off the trailer and put in by hand into the water, then lift off the wooden box on to the ground, then lift the JOHNSON 22 out of the trailer and put it on the boat andfinally, lift the heavy goddam wooden box back on to the trailer and padlock it on in case anybody every wanted to steal this treasure. After the entire shemugula was in the water and we hadn't goofed too much along the way and we had all our extra gas, propeller, shear pins, people, fishing gear, minnows, anchor, lunch, my father assumed command and off we went.

I should mention some of the peculiarities of the JOHNSON 22. It was not exactly in the early days of outboard engines but not exactly the princesses they drive around today either. For it's time the JOHNSON 22 was serious outboarding and the choice of guides and natives for its dependability and power. However, it did have its little quirks, for instance, starting the damn thing. There was no electric starter. You were the starter. The procedure was very simple but critical. It was a two cylinder engine with a flywheel on top and a gas tank in back you had to fill learning over the engine almost falling overboard. You primed one cylinder with gas and advanced the spark level. You opened a lever which made the other cylinder not work right away. You twisted open a little throttle (critical skill here), wrapped a four-foot rope around the top of the flywheel and pulled it smartly towards you. That was your first try. She didn't always go off and sometimes the starting adagio got quite intense. The ensuing sputtering and cussing of the human starter of the JOHNSON 22 was a point of much pride. If you got it going, you started steering immediately with a long steering handle because normally in the process of all this pulling, the motor had twisted to one side or the other and you were now head for the rocks. Setting a course that got you out of trouble, you moved the lever which brought in the second cylinder on line (the reason you didn't start with both is that there was normally too much compression to pull against with them both working so it had this little lever gadget to make your life easier), advanced some spark, twisted on some gas on the steering lever and stood up in back which was the only manly way ever known in Northern Minnesota to run this beast. The big steering lever or handle also had a blip button on the end that would kill the ignition and stop the engine, hotshots would come steaming smartly up to a dock, hit the button and stop the engine from full blast to nothing, the bow of the boat would come down and you would drift neatly to dock, catching oh's and ah's from the assembled multitudes unless the damn blip button forgot to work and you then were in big trouble.

Having said all this, it must be apparent that operator malfeasance was a part of the JOHNSON 22's bag of tricks. Who could always get it right? The best trick it had was to lure the operator into attempting a start with both

cylinders on line and the throttle inadvertently half open or better. When the rope was pulled in this configuration, the JOHNSON 22 would ALWAYS start with a vengeance, with such authority that it simply flipped the operator over the transom and into the water as the mighty beast caught full power from point zero, resulting in a runaway boat and motor with extra gas, minnows, fishing gear, anchor and lunch, charging out of sight. Many is the time on the lakes we encountered these unmanned phantasms at great speed going wherever they were going until they disappeared. I say all this having almost, yes almost done it but never really. They don't have that on me.

So we would go up on the border lakes and chug all over hell and gone. I would normally sit up in the bow to keep it down which could be a rough ride on choppy seas, my mother and sister would stay in the middle,huddled under a slicker trying to keep warm and not wet, and father would be standing up in the rear, proudly in command of the steering handle of the JOHNSON 22. These lakes split Canada and the US down the middle. We could enjoy the transcendental illusion of crossing back and forth between another country, and occasionally slip to one side or the other if we did not have the proper fishing license. My father was a superb navigator, captain and orderer-arounder. He never got lost, never got us in danger. The lakes are so vast after a while they all look the same. It took me years to figure out where to go. You don't use a compass. It becomes a knowingness of the land that becomes a part of you, a particular tree here, lining up some islands there, go this way between two islands and suddenly a huge lake opens out before you. It was the greatest, perhaps the only freedom we experienced in Minnesota.

We fished for Walleyed Pike, a worthy bottom feeding adversary and tasty fish. It was hard to find. You could sit for hours in the boat rocking up and down with tiny waves lapping at the hull. Other boats would come up and try out your spot, disturbing the water and the solace of watching the bobber and not catching anything. Thing strangers and tourists don't understand is that for the locals fishing is serious business, for dinner and bragging, and you just don't give away all your secrets to the uninitiated. You don't even give them away to the initiated because then they will go up and fish your hole out. It was in dealing with these matters that I learned to become a Minnesotan. You learn to glower or stare at them, failing that to discourage the interloper talk about you failures (a big Minnesota skill), suggest other parts you just came from where they are hittin' good, this worked real well unless THEIR women were too tired and windblown after charging around the lakes and wanted to stop for a while and "visit" or have some lunch. Like the locals class everywhere, we both loathed and depended upon and exploited ruthlessly the outsider. Now, I am both an outsider and insider and when I go up there they look at me strangely because they can't figure out whether to hug me or exploit me. The bond is there but the trust is gone. You see I haven't stuck with it. I haven't continued to SUFFER the prescribed woes of being up there and the indignities of whatever they have in store for me to whip me back into line.

When we got back to the dock we had to reverse our entire process, unload the boat, take off the motor, drive the car and trailer close, lift off the wooden box, put the motor in the trailer, put the big goddam heavy wooden box back on, put the fish, minnows, extra gas cans, anchor, pine cones, empty minnow pails, coats and other detritus in the trailer, and finally lift the boat back on the trailer and cinch it down. Then we would drive back to Orr, get the trailer off the car and push it under the trees, take the fish and clean them which was either my mother's or my responsibility, then, being totally exhausted, cook the fish and truly enjoy them after this wonderful trip. Always slept good after.

Our family was pretty good. My father and I hunted ducks and partridge together, tramping around in the woods or sloughs around the lakes or walking into beaver ponds from a road or through the trees. We would get up in the dark to go out to a duck blind and then watch the sun come up and the ducks coming around, warily checking out our decoys, sending in one duck alone to draw fire, those were very smart ducks. One time I stood up in a blind and a duck ran into the back of my head as he was all flared out for landing and on final over the blind into the water, went head over tail and bellyflopped into the water, very embarrassing for the duck, kind of strange for me too.

I can't recall much before WW II but I can during the war. My father was too old for the draft, getting close to thirty by then but volunteered anyway, went into the Army, with Patton's spearheads and was captured in eastern France at Metz, spent a year in a German prison camp near Munich and later on a prison farm. I remember the day the depot man Joe Spike came up the road and gave the telegram to my mother. We were celebrities for a while. Finally, we began to get POW mail from him and he was no longer missing in action but still alive somewhere. When he came back he was very thin. He had been given a second life. But I always wondered later whether he really appreciated that much afterwards, he seemed somewhat bitter about the war. I have not experienced it so I should not judge.

During WW II we had models of fighter planes printed on cereal boxes that we could cut up and make toys with. People were rationed stuff so we had ration books for food and red cardboard "points" for buying meat. You couldn't buy tires or gas very easily, we had a sticker in the corner of the windshield noting our priority. Occasionally we could get down to the Cook show, the Comet theater which had real popcorn and a room upstairs for mothers with the kids who were making too much noise. The grownups would sit in the back, all us kids would go down front to be closest to the magical screen. The program included endless "business brevities", commercials for local businesses which were shot one time and run forever until you could lip synch any one in your sleep, a news reel, coming attractions, a cartoon, sometimes a patriotic message from the president or bond drive and finally, the feature.

I figure now that I have seen over 2,000 movies in my lifetime but none are as powerful as those at the Cook show. They were invariably black and white except musicals which I didn't much like, it seems that they were better crafted than now. Those movies were TIGHT! They were such terrific illusions they seemed real. But I was also within the gullibility of youth. I loved the city scenes with large buildings and great crowds of people, that was so strange to us. Things happened to those people, they were smooth, urbane, layered, complex, unpredictable--all the things that Orr people weren't. Fascinating. Like watching life on Mars. Of course, it created an intense desire to go where they were and check it out. Later I did, and found it not so urbane. But back to the movies. One thing I now realize about all the movie magic is that it created a way of behaving for many generations, perhaps even now for kinds with violence. But we learned how to be funny, hip, snappy with the patter, lots of stuff. And the character actors, they were the archetypes of a kind of person that forever iced your opinion or view of a kind of individual----like Franklin Pangborn, he plays the bank examiner in WC Field's Bank Dick, J. Franklin Snoopington or something. A whiny little bureaucrat you see a whole lifetime in those movies; in westerns he is the guy who runs a store and hires the sheriff and later on tries not to back him up when times are tough. That kind of guy! On and on.Grady Sutton, wimpy uncle. William Bendix who became the first archetypical blue-collar guy in the movies, later on TV. Hey Babs. The strange part is those characters gave us information which became material for the next movie they were in, which eventually became information we used for understanding life.

Should mention a John Wayne story. The John Wayne saga is pretty clear, drawl, hero, makes things right, special walk (he worked on it I hear), essentially a character actor who became a star playing the same role all the time, the good guy who went in harm's way and made it better and persevered. We saw him in westerns and WW II movies doing the right stuff with clenched jaw, squint and drawl all over the place. The Japanese didn't have a chance with Duke on the job. Of course, he was a draft dodger to be able to do all this hero stuff, no dodging real bullets for this guy. The real story of John Wayne's persona for me lies in Vietnam. It was another two generations up the pike and the Duke was still making war look good. I have read about 200 or so novels and accounts of the Vietnam war, and in PRACTICALLY EVERY DAMN ONE of them he is mentioned. And not in a good light. The story goes how these kids had grown up on the John Wayne movies and when the call or draft notice to Vietnam came the guys went along for patriotic reasons, fear of not going, but believing, believing that from our general cultural information (John Wayne et al.) that fighting for your country is the right thing and it will be tough but it will all work out. What these kids say, these people who were there and did it for real, is that they saw that the John Wayne version of war was just about a total lie. They felt the stunning realization that you have been played, that you have played yourself for a sucker in going along with a palatable fantasy. The word John Wayne became surrogates for the LIES that they had bought about combat, about patriotism for all that shit that old men put together to get young men to go to war for them. If you don't believe me, go and read the books yourself! It is all there.

This is something culture creates so it is important. Like all kids, I saw the movies as culture and reality at the same time, and it forms a good deal of my sense of the narrative, even though I am not a moving picture or many-pictured narrative artist now. But I continue to be fascinated with the illusions that medias and stories can create. It is not small.

After the show was over, we would drive home, many times through a snowstorm, driving into an eternal cone of white lines in the lights coming at you through the cold. We carried a box of sand, blankets, towrope, shovels, and chains all the time in the winter. You could easily slide off the road and if nobody found you it could be curtains. Happened.

Orr had a pretty good war. We did paper drives, rubber drives, metal drives, piled all this stuff in the center of town until it rotted and finally got hauled away. In school we had bond drives and would paste appropriate pieces of paper we purchased over large posters of Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini until they were eradicated. Us kids, the boys I mean, would do drawings of fighter planes, tanks and ships in action. I don't think the girls got in on that. I remember when Roosevelt died. People said we would fight the Chinese next. Lot of foreign policy experts in Orr. A guy from Orr who became a pilot came up in a B-26 and buzzed the town many times, getting a lot of laundry up in the air. We had a 10 o'clock siren to get the kids in, it was located on top of the lumberyard and was turned on at Patten's Cafe. One cold night it let go right in the middle of the run and went zinging out into space with a strange sound. Town couldn't afford another so it wasn't replaced. Another time, Patten's Cafe had to give away all its ice cream because the power went out in the freezer. People are still talking about it.

My real passion was not the movies or the outdoor life, but the library. It was small. There was a small building in front of the place the Volunteer Fire Department kept its hoses (a truck was purchased later). Inside this building was a dark room and on one end was an American flag (I think people voted there too) and a card table. Sitting at the card table was Minnie Gerber, a large woman with solid, straight piano-like of legs, rimless glasses, equipped with the library stuff of a cigar box for cards, a stamp and a pencil. That was it. There were two small rooms in the back, one held chairs and church supplies and the other was the library. It was about 12 feet x 12 feet and had shelves for the books. They were occasionally replenished from a truck from St. Louis County. I don't know how many books there were in this library, but I do know I read every one of them. Many times. I particularly like the travel books and stories of distant lands. At the time there were books by Richard Halliburton, a 1930's adventurer and traveller whose gig was to take a swim in whatever river or lake or sea he visited. Ultimately he was lost at sea. Coincidentally, while at UCLA I had to take a survey and knocked on a door in Brentwood which was opened by his brother and I stepped in and listened to more Halliburton stories. There was also Mark Twain, all the usual American classics and the occasional new book. The library was open every Wednesday from three to five and had a great library smell.

Years later I came back to town on a Wednesday and walked over to the library. Minnie Gerber was still behind the card table. The flag was still there. You still couldn't get more than three people inside the library room. A former classmate of mine came in with her sister and started looking at some new books and held one up. "Don't bother with it." she said "It's all about niggers." By this time I had grown a beard and it was about 12 years since I left, and I was unrecognizable to the people. I didn't realize it initially. I would go into the stores and people wouldn't talk to me, treated me like a hippie tourist, kind of a cockroach who was scuttling around. I stood right next to Ole Anderson who had worked at Pure Oil, unrecognized as he told a vicious ethnic joke. Discovered that this business of being invisible was very interesting, for three days I was amidst all my people and they didn't see me, they saw a stranger, an outsider. Yet, I was an insider. I could watch it all going on, I could see the entire Orr small town act bisymetrically! How many times in your life do you get to be invisible? I loved it. Of course, when they found they were mad. Why didn't you tell us? Some red faces. On that trip I talked to Bill Purdy, an old friend, about

gun control and he wasn't for it in the least even after a pistol had gone off and almost killed one of his kids. Marshall had disappeared into being a businessman. Mrs. Stageberg forcibly tried to yank off my beard, she was serious. Heard plenty of snide comments about artists, ARTISTES they would say. I knew.

I went to the same school for 12 years, grade one to twelve.

Your walked into first grade and everybody was with you for twelve more. You sat next to the same person for twelve years. My seatmates were like heaven and hell. On the left was a stunning blonde beauty who broke a thousand hearts and could have been a model or a movie star and gave new meaning to the concept of stone aches; Francis Hoffer. On the right was Joanne Glowaski who was cheated like hell by life, she had acne, bad teeth and never the right answer. Some kids would come and go but for 12 years, we were stuck. Indian kids had to go until they were sixteen and then they could drop out or stay on. If they were good at sports they would stay on. We were the Orr Braves. The school population was about 300 for all grades, slightly large than the town. I don't remember learning much in school, we were just there all the time. After school, it was a big rush for everybody to put on their snow clothes and get on the busses and, for some of them, drive thirty miles or so and then a two-mile walk through the woods and chores later.

I lived across the road from the school and enjoyed a short commute.

We had assemblies in the gym. Little kids had to bring their little chairs with them, an important rite of passage occurred when you got to sit in the regular folding chairs. Our assemblies were for moves or a Lyceum. Lyceums were various culture that the State school system dreamed up. They were travelling entertainments that went around and did stuff for about two hours, ex-vaudeville acts, carnival turns. We had magic shows, ping-pong demonstration, trained otters, science shows, musicians, acrobats. They came about one a month and we all loved them. It was the outside and you got out of class! The gym was the only useable auditorium in town, when the FVW came in, it did multi-duty. It was one row of chairs wider all around than the foul lines of the basketball floor. If you came later to a game you stepped on toes or got out on the playing field. There was a stage at one end with colored lights that we would turn on to upset visiting teams. Of course, all the schools in the county were the same so they would do the same to us. You could stack three chairs on top of each other and have a great view until you fell over backwards with a great crash and created much excitement. The place had a great school smell, coal-fired furnace, spots where kids would sneak smokes, a concrete sidewalk on one side you could use for marbles, big lawn to run around on or get into fights. Everything in a small town gets insider your genes and cells and blood. I went back a while and they had expanded the school, altering its character and size dramatically and I am still upset about it.

Marshall, Palmquist and I became fast friends, we were dubbed the "Three Muskrats Rears" by our history and homeroom teacher, Walter Salmi. Salmi was a bright guy addicted to fishing and hunting and the sauce. He awakened the intellectual in me. He was a questioning, restless, provocative teacher, an intellect clothed with the passions of the outdoorsman and had it both ways to a degree. The teachers mostly lived in the " Teacherage", a large building on top a hill across Buyck Road and from the school itself. It used to be the original school, it is torn down now. There are small schools out in the woods and they are of this model. The first floor was for married guys, which included Arnold Ahonen who taught math, typing and shop. He was a thin, acerbic guy with one shiny blue suit and was a reputed tightwad. It was said that he sent last year's Christmas cards back to the sender with a note same to you. In shop he was terrified that someone would saw their arm off. Jesus, by that time, most kids could build a shopping center in their sleep. We built birdhouses and goofed off in the corner.

The girls did Home Ec. Nobody every knew what the hell they did in there. If girls didn't know about or already have a PHD in housekeeping by the time they hit school and Home Ec they must be some losers. One time all the guys were invited to Home Ec to attend a class in personal grooming. Was this a hint? Francis Hoffer had the floor and talked about pimples and zits. Since she was perfect she didn't have any. Anywhere. So, she demonstrated on Joanne Glowaski, who had plenty and was again humiliated to an unspeakable degree. I think her nickname was Meathead and her father was known as Meathead's Father. Kids are really cruel.

Eventually my mother came to be school secretary, a position she again worked at after moving to Inglewood. She worked for the Principal, Herman the German Kiland. He replaced the rather roly-poly David Hill who got canned after rolling the driver's training car after a toot. He took us up to International Falls one day so we could find a street to learn to parallel park. Honest to God. In Orr parking was wherever you stopped. Some of the old guys would indicated a left turn by opening their left hand doors! Herman was all right but distracted. He ran a resort on Lake Kabetogema and worried about it. Under his reign there were established various paperwork tyrannies that had to be stamped with his signature. I would drop by to see mom and stamp up some blanks and solve any administrative problems my friends might have. One of my best was to knock out an all day pass for us boys to go fishing. We also ran the candy counter, a bit of small business administration near the hot lunch for a half hour, eating up most of the profits and learning to cook the books. Marshall taught us that. Salami was the advisor and could be bought off with some new fishing lure Marshall would lift from the Pure Oil.

Miss Talvite was a noon drinker, we almost got her square with a snowball when she wobbled late into class.

Miss Baudette was a lovely brunette who could only handle Orr for a year before bugging off and restoring her sanity.

Leonard Ojala was a dynamic young guy, later told me that Orr was considered a hardship and training post for teachers of St. Louis County. I can believe it. He eventually became a Dean at University of Minnesota at Duluth where he put his warden and intimidation skills from Orr to good use.

Anne Bodas was assigned the unenviable task of teaching us English. I did poorly, and later at UCLA had to take dumbbell English to get in. From there I went to writing for the newspaper! One time in Bodas' class, a new kid from Chicago tried to impress us by putting lighter fluid into his mouth, blowing it out and flicking his lighter at the same time. A very spectacular flame would erupt. This was done behind Bodas' back who would turn about in anger at our reaction to the act, finally suspected and bent over the miscreant who unfortunately had just taken a bit of lighter fluid into this mouth. "Whassamatter, John Cat gotyer tongue?" she asked as she slapped him on the back of his head which was the wrong thing to do. He spit out the fluid and inadvertently flicked his bic and both their heads disappeared in a fireball of some proportion. Fortunately, nobody got burned badly. Bodas lost some eyebrow and now we were REALLY impressed.

Helen Helps would tell us of her trip to Brazil garnishing the talk with a display of interesting souvenirs.

Janet Boyer was the toughest girl in school, as a 15 year old, she could lick all the boys. Later went on to become a lady wrestler in Chicago. She died in the ring.

Donnie Ostlund was a grade below me, a beautiful kid who later went into the Army. Got too close to the Atomic tests in Nevada, died a painful death later.

We never travelled much around Minnesota except around the town we lived in or on the lakes surrounding Orr. We went to Duluth once to see the Freedom Train, the government had put the Declaration of Independence and all the famous documents on a train and ran it around the country for people who couldn't get to Washington D.C. We stood in line for hours, then got zipped through so fast I can't recall much about it. We went to Minneapolis once and I rode on the trolley car which was terrific but it was just too big a city to be comfortable in for long. Otherwise, the only big town we hit was Hibbing. Hibbing is built next to a monster open pit mine which kept expanding and eating up the town. Our favorite town was Virginia which was a three-movie-theater town, the MACO, the GRANADA, and the STATE. We went in the morning. I went to the dentist, then to the five and dime and to the shop that sold models, got the blue plate for lunch, went to the movie, maybe had an ice cream, and drove the 43 miles back home.

At one time in my mind I could recreate the entire journey from Orr to Virginia, every turn, every house. On the way we might stop in at the Rollo's in Britt which was off of Rt. 53 about five miles. He was the station agent for the DW&P Railroad at a railroad crossing in the middle of nowhere. The station and their quarters were all one building and these structures were all the same up and down the railroad. They were about five feet from the tracks. When we visited or stayed for dinner, a train would inevitably pass through. I don't know if you have ever eaten dinner ten feet from a sixty car freight pulled by a huge steam engine going by atforty miles an hour, but it is quite an experience and must have prepared us for earthquake life in California later on. The plates and glasses and silverware jumped around all over the place. When you heard the train coming, everybody grabbed a hold of everything until it was gone. Years later I came up Rt. 53 with Nancy and took her to the road to the Britt crossing to see if the station was still there. It was, but it had been moved away from the tracks and out near the woods and was painted a dirty white instead of its majestic railroad red. We walked inside, I was amazed how small it was, totally functional though, two stories with a telegraph room, a waiting room, a storage room, living quarters on top. Like a miniature depot.

I did own a lot of tooth cavities and our collective journeys often weren't enough for my needs so I was able to take the Greyhound alone to Virginia and back to see the venerable Dr. Rowell whom I later learned by other dentists was somewhat incompetent and really did a job on my mouth. I would go to his building and take an elevator run by an elevator guy clanking up to his floor and walk down the corridor which smelled of dentist, to the frosted glass with DR. ROWELL - DENTAL SURGERY on it with a hand pointing to the next door. The chair was in a room at a corner with a cupola so you could watch people down below walking around who didn't need to be at the dentist. Many times my family agreed that novocaine was too expensive so I had to do the whole dental trip without it. This has put me off dentists for the rest of my life. Afterwards I was free if not sore and would hit the movies and take the Greyhound back to Orr, arriving in time to deliver the papers which had been on board all the time.

Back home, the seasons changed and marked our lives; Fall was hunting, fishing, ricing and back to school, then it was instantly Winter in late October or early November, school, gray, white, cold, car freezing the tires on the bottom when you stopped for a long visit and felt like a tank until they flexed out, Steve Gheen flying around in his Piper Cub, sometimes he would go up above the town and find a good wind and throttle back and would appear motionless for five minutes at a time, people talked about it for days. I loved that Piper Cub, I would wash it and wax it and be given a ride and I can remember every instant of every ride I've had in that damn thing. It was on floats in the summer and skis in the winter. He would lash on canoes, outboards, guns, so forth and take people out to the boonies and pick them up later. An outstanding pilot, he could land so smooth on water it appeared that water started growing out of the floats.

I got a radio one winter and listened into WHO from Iowa and stations in Kentucky and Chicago, XERF Viacuna Mexico, right across the border from Del Rio, Texas, and after one in the morning which was tricky because my father could see my light from the liquor store, get KNX from LA after stations in between went away. I put an antenna out to a pine tree outside my window and brought in the world.

Spring hardly existed. Winter went on forever, sometimes to May or June. It would get warm, all the snow would turn to gray slop then freeze again in strange shapes and it would snow again, then it would unfreeze and on and on. Orr is winter with a bit of summer. Winter was cold, cold, cold and cold. Interrupted with snow and cold with an occasional sunny day. Best thing about spring is that the ice would go out of the lake. One time Steven Gheen waited too long to put the Cub on floats and it went through the ice, fortunately the struts and wing held it up and we pulled it out. Summers were rain, rain and rain and in July and August, hot as the hinges of hell. September and October are the best months of the year. Minnesota is heavenly and gorgeous and showing her best stuff. Better go then. Never will get any better.

Big entertainment in Orr was to point out the foibles of someone else. Everybody came in for some form of joshing or kidding around, which was a way of getting away with being cruel with one another and practicing a form of one upmanship. You had to learn to take it and dish it out too. Take the Mayor. His name was Elmer Herhusky and he was drunk much of the time, used to spend Saturday evenings in the town jail, playing cards with whomever dropped by. His real passion was reading western novels in the paperback form. He would buy them at Patten's Cafe and I would trade them to Pete Peterson after reading them myself. Since Peterson and Herhusky were sincere alcoholics with the memories of sea slugs, I could trade them back the same books after a suitable period, say two toots. Pete worked for Roy Johnson (Marshall's father) as a flunky who did the dirty work. About every fourth month he would spring loose for Duluth for a major binge and get into jail. Roy would have to go down and get him out, cuss him out and bring him back home. I think it was an enjoyable ritual for both of them.

For entertainment it was grim. There was no TV. Radio was static-filled because of the Iron Range and you could only listen to so many polkas. There were, in order, the following official entertainments in Orr:

1. Drinking.

2. More drinking.

3. Wedding Dances. Dancing and drinking.

4. Cribbage night at the VFW Hall. You paid a buck at the door, (maybe it was 504), went partners at a table of four and worked yourself up to the top table and got a prize. I won a knife once.

5. Movie night at the VFW. Infrequent, lot of serials and western on 16 mm with reel changes you could go outside and take a leak.

6. Go to the Cook movie show.

7. Winter Carnival

8. OHS basketball games.

9. OHS class play, Christmas play.

10. OHS graduation.

After these, you had to make your own entertainment or go some place else.

My big fame in Orr was that I became--the paperboy!. It is a high office in such a small town. Getting the paper each day is a big deal, and in the forties when I did it, the paper was a primary source of information and distortion about the outside.

I never solicited the job. I must have been nine or ten when it happened. I remember standing near the frog pond with Marshall when my mother came up and gave the pitch: so and so is quitting and nobody else wants it and you could make money (so we wouldn't have to pay you allowance any more) and I really said that you would do it so what do you think? That is a typical small town pitch; practical, opportunistic and you can't get out of it anyway. Little did I know what that was getting me into. I have never had much of a post college stress dream. My stress dream is that the papers came in and I had forgotten about them and the whole damn town was after me and I had to deliver them in person at the door at midnight and every customer was standing there glaring at me. Try that one on as a little kid. I even had it when I was a little kid.

The cold realities of the job were at 3:30 p.m. every day until eternity the Greyhound would come up from Virginia on the way to International Falls, coldest place this side of the other side of the moon. Sometimes we were, but nobody found out. These papers, the DULUTH HERALD & TRIBUNE were dropped off at Patten's Cafe. Bruce Patten was a friend of mine, who in later life joined a religion that requires him to change the spelling of his name so now that he owns the cafe it is called Pattenz or Patttens, or Paaatens or something different every year. The waitress at Patten's would take fifteen off the top for local sales. I would take the rest, about 66 papers and hand deliver them door to door to all the businesses and houses in town in rain, snow, blizzard, freeze, my birthday, Christmas, the next coming of Christ, forever. In the summer I could use my bike, in the winter I used feet, snowshoes, or skis as the terrain demanded. My first business lesson came when I mistakenly thought that I would take my profit off the top and send the rest to the DULUTH HERALD & TRIBUNE COMPANY. But no. no. That isn't how they had it figured. THEY would charge me for the papers that I delivered AND collected for them and I paid my bill to the DULUTH HERALD AND TRIBUNE COMPANY and whatever pittance was left over was---mine. How unfair! After being the PAPERBOY for five years and later working nights and weekends for Stageberg at the lumbermill I left Minnesota with a grand total of $812 to start college. That was how good I was at the paperboy business, financial- wise I mean.

I got a canvas sack and a canvas covered receipt book and a list of the current customers and a load of papers and I was off. It is very tempting to recreate the entire paper route but I shall forego that hidden pleasure for just some excerpts. First one is about how being a good samaritan is not always to your best interest. It is told in the gripping, dramatic style more natural to the Northern Minnesota youth who submitted the tale to English class. The unusually high grade is probably due to the fact that anything less would result in the teacher's paper winding up in the snow for the next month.

My most least enjoyable customer was Tom Sattela who ran Sattela's Tavern, a boozy genus that infests the North Woods. They are low-ceilings, affairs with intense old beer smell, beer company ads that are lighted and move around (who is the artist that winds up making these celluloid, plastic and cardboard pieces?), packages of beer nuts and chips about a century old, punchboards (in the old days you paid a quarter and punched a piece of paper out of the board that was a prize or money and were eventually outlawed as being gambling), some bored guy behind the bar who was probably the owner, stools with old guys bent over their nooners or keeping their toot lit.

The terror of Sattela was his dog. He was a gray apparition from hell about thirty feet long, ten feet high, speed of a runaway truck and yellow fangs about eighteen inches long just ready to put me away. This son-of-a-bitch dog made his day waiting for me to come by. I would look everywhere for him before I got near the tavern, he would hide out, milking the suspense. Couldn't see him. Try a couple of steps in. Nothing. Gonna get away with it today, he didn't go for it every time. Almost to the door when he would explode out of somewhere, barking, snarling, growling and wind up about two inches in front of me, just enjoying the hell out of it. You could see it in the dog. I would freeze, absolutely paralyzed. Remember, I was about ten years old. After going through this so many times I don't care to think about it I finally told my father that I wasn't going to deliver a paper there any more. He saw it as a test of my courage and put me back at it. I did it for some more months and I thought I would die and they would all be sorry. I told Sattela about it and you can guess the response, Sattela was a dog person you know, he's just a puppy, maybe a little excited but a good dog, nice dog, look at him over in the corner, does he look like a mean dog to you? I was caught between calling Sattela a liar or having my father see me as a coward. I chose coward. Learned a lot about choices, they are mostly between bad and worse. But I knew I had had it with the dog and so I took my father's crap about it and I never went near Sattela's Tavern again. Couple of years later Satella was killed on the highway, we came upon the wreck after the bodies were gone, Sattela's lifeblood all over the vehicle; he had gone through the windshield. Outlasted HIM! Never discovered what happened to his dog.

One clear winter day when I was just about up to the Co-Op store I looked back and saw black-greasy smoke pouting into the sky. It was Wally's garage on fire, just between the Phillips 66 and Lammi's store. I ran back to get a better look. The Volunteer Fire Department hadn't yet volunteered so it was a fire going full blast by the time I got back down by the depot, it looked like Lammi's and the Phillips 66 would go too. Herman Lammi, straight from Finland was also standing on the tracks furiously jiggling his balls and talking in Finn-english. He's the one who named the telephone the Whoostat box because when you answered the phone you said, "Who's that?" Or in Finn: "Whoostat?" Herman's propensity for jiggling his balls was probably involuntary but a well-observed trait by the local ladies. He would put his hand in his pocket and jiggle the whole side of his pants up and down which would also jiggle his balls. We could see that. Never turned anybody on. He also had a Chris Craft speedboat he would take out to his island after work in the summer. The boat was known as Herman's RisRaf. He would go like hell in it and make big waves which would tend to swamp the unwary in his path. We all prayed he would hit a deadhead but he never did. Knew the lake too well.

Herman was in a big sweat about his store, urging on the Volunteer Fire Department--all of whom he had screwed, cheated or bested in business some time or the other and he knew that too. So did they. Herman was tight with a dollar, parsimony could have been his religion. There were only 22 grocery stores in town though, so if you wanted to buy stuff you didn't have much choice and each of the merchants kept a gimlet eye on where you traded. The Volunteers were in lather of whether to demonstrate serious fire suppression or let the whole thing go up. Of course, there would only be 12 grocery stores in town so there wasn't much choice. You let Lammi's burn down and the ladies would hate that very much. So they went to work and Lammi's store, its contents and his balls were saved. Wally's was a total loss. He later rebuilt south of the Pure Oil and that is where it is today. We had a train fire south of town once, some bar fires but that was the biggest town fire. The water tank fell over with a big sploosh when too much ice got on it but it was rebuilt with likker money which was the only right thing to do.

I think I was defined and began to define myself with this curious job. I had to do it every day, which is a terrible discipline for a kid. In the summer I could do it fast and use my bike, in the winter it was slower and I had to slog through the snow on foot or skis if it got too bad. It was dark when I picked up the papers at Patten's Cafe to start out around four in the afternoon and it got darker and many times, stormier. At the end of the route I had a solitary walk home, I would find myself passing the occasional street light and watching in my mind's eye for my body to enter the cone of light and walk out of it. Later on, that facility helped me in art school. I did this job for over five years so I must have gone through the whole movie around one thousand, eight hundred times! I can still put myself on the road home in the winter, in the dark with thousands of stars or the aurora borealis shining down as I squeakily trudged home with the empty paper sack now limp off my shoulder. I would get home, peel off all the clothes and socks and boots requisite for the winter, have my dinner, practice the piano or read TIME for the old man if it just got in. With the paper route I had become a necessary part of the fabric of the place. It is an eminence that I have never surpassed. I was the village jester, carrier of news, papers, and stories and trivia from house to house, keeper of the information system and a thread binding parts of it together. I was a primitive UPS and postoffice. I would stop in and talk with most of my customers every day and that is why it took me so long. I was terrible at collecting money so I just got by. My mother would occasionally help me on Sundays and that was a blessing, my sister would help during the summers when I went to summer camp and I truly appreciated it. I became a part of these people's lives. Whenever I go up there they still remember me. After all, I was the paperboy.

Continuing my impressive work resume, after paperboy I worked four years at Stageberg Mills as a grunt laborer. My job initially was to go over after school and take lumber off the trucks that had been sawed that day and pile it into piles with air spaces in between so it would dry off during the winter. I think the pay was $1.12 an hour. During Saturdays I would get up at 5 a.m. drive way out into the woods where his mill was set up, start a fire for warmth, start putting blowtorches on a starting motor to get it warm enough to start and then blowtorches on the main diesel motor until it could be turned over to start the mill for the day. When this whole arrangement was working right, a guy would roll logs onto a carriage and keep them coming. Stageberg would move the carriage back and forth past an immense circular saw which would saw boards off the log. The boards would come to a trimmer who would put them through two adjustable saw blades to get the maximum board out of the plank. I would stand on the other hand and grab the results, pulling the edges onto a conveyor belt that would dump them into a tailing fire or would pile the finished lumber onto the truck in lengths and widths until it was loaded. When we had two trucks full we would go home, generally after dark. Sometimes I would get to drive the cats through the woods knocking over trees and skidding logs. After a day of this I would stagger home and flop upstairs. Some people did this kind of work their entire life.

Haven Stageberg was considered a bizarre gent. Drove a Studebaker (everybody else had Plymouths from Zick or Chevys from the Cook dealer), strapped a Mercury on the back of his boat. Practically a communist. Conformity didn't know Haven. He was kind of reckless though, almost backed a truck onto me once, another time he forgot to engage a pin locking a trailer I had been loading all day and drove off without it, the whole thing hanging in the air for an instant before it crashed into the ground and almost dumping the lumber all over me. I slid under the bed. He backed up moments later, amazed at the fickleness of machinery. Another time I was following him in a truck across the bridge when he went though it into the water. Had loaded the bulldozer onto the truck and it was too heavy. He almost sawed his hand in half one day and my father drove him forty miles to the hospital.

I cannot recall High School being the consummate, crowning achievement of my entire life but what did I know then? It appeared WE were just going along taking useless (algebra, history, social science, history of Minnesota) classes---that HISTORY OF MINNESOTA class has really helped---with other classes above us and one day they were all gone. By this time all the kinks among us had been worked out. Everybody knew where they were. I have heard the horror of a city school from Peter Plagens, who once related his poignant lunch story to me. You came out into the courtyard with your lunch sack. You drifted by the IN crowd hoping against hope they would give you a tumble. Hey Pete come on over. But no. Didn't want to appear too sucky, actually, you didn't want to eat with those turkeys anyway. Past the jocks, past the geeks, wind up eating alone. Every lunch period the same gauntlet of rejection or temporary redemption. Everybody went through it.

Our lunch deal was that each class would be dismissed at ten of twelve or earlier depending on how old the kids were. There would be a long line coming out of the lunch room. As we got older we learned how to get in back of a girl and allegedly get "pushed" from behind and squeeze your vitals up against her tushy. Always a bit of luck how much you could get away with. Oh RO-land, STOP that!!! Maybe one day it would become Roland, keep on a-coming but you never knew. Later on, Marshall, Ronald and I ran the candy counter so we got to get our early to set up and missed out on a lot of this. Businessmen seldom have fun.

As with the hierarchical stuff (don't write nothing you can't spell) the biggest, absolutely biggest decision in school that was made independently by each class some time during the day was for the girls to figure out whether or not to wear skirts or jeans the next day. I am not fooling. The way it worked was for Joanne, Maxine, Francis, Beverly, Marilyn and a few others depending to get together and talk it over. You can imagine that it would take some negotiations because in the winter it was so cold in the damn busses that the girls had to wear snow pants to keep warm. When they would get to school they would go to their lockers in the main hallway (actually there was only one) and take them off which was no big deal. The problem arose at the end of the day. Everybody would be rushing around to get out of there and the girls would have to put the damn snow pants on OVER the dresses and get them wrinkled or UNDER the snow pants. We guys coolly lolled around ready for a flash of the pink, very exciting stuff. So it was a dilemma of how much of that nasty prurient stuff they wanted to put up with. Spring or fall was no problem, but during the school year spring or fall hardly existed. The people with problems with this were the OTHER girls who weren't allowed into the decision-making process but had to be exactly in tune with the herd. Tyranny of fashion. They would hang around the fringes of the IN crowd waiting for the decision to drop out of the sky and then that would be rapidly disseminated. Sometimes when a class of girls got to be very powerful they would make this decision for the entire top four grades and it would create immense communications problems. Somehow, it all got figured out every day, word got passed around, and EVERYBODY came to school the next day with the right outfit on. It was awesome to watch. You think the Supreme Court has it tough.

Suddenly, we were seniors, Gods. Wisdom dropped from our lips. Everybody was younger. For an entire year we didn't touch the ground. Does anybody? Everybody should be a God for one year only. I was in both class plays. I played an older guy in one (good casting). Our plays always had a run of two performances: one for the school and one for the town. SRO both times. During the first play during the Junior Year, Joanne Perala kept whispering "between the sheets" and breaking up the rest of the cast. I took time figuring out what she meant. Next play I wore my father's suit and during a pause put my hand in the jacket pocket, felt something strange and pulled out a rubber. Consternation. I think we all survived. We didn't date in those days. A few did but they were looked upon as strange characters. Hang out with girls and cut down on your fishing. No way. Take them along and they would probably go EEK and fall overboard. But they were developing strange little bulges here and there and would make insinuations like why aren't you interested in kissing me? Very strange. I felt a bit of an urge but not much. We had been around these girls for so damn long they were more SISTERS than potential steadies. Go out with your SISTER? Gag. By Junior Prom time things were getting desperate for the girls. They want the boys to get interested in them, there wasn't any other material around so they were stuck with us bumpkins. Both proms, my mother conspired with the girls to get me to ask them out. They had figured out ten years ago who was supposed to ask who, the problem was, how to get us in line to DO it. Then on top of all this, we were supposed to spend MONEY on them! The humiliation of it all. For prom we went to the gym which was loaded up with crepe paper so it didn't look much like a gym any more. Band (accordion, sax drums) played slow polkas. Guys spiked the punch. Bunch of guys got in fight outside. Guys threw up. We went down to a lunch place for after-prom diner, sat there wilted. Everybody all dressed up eating burgers. Went to Billy Purdy's after for a party. Somebody claimed to have made out in a car. Man, I was tired. This is what being an adult is all about?

My 12 year old family was breaking up. Half got out of town, half are still up there. I am not in touch with them any more but I always remember that I am from Orr. One of those Orr boys. There is something about coming from an insulated, insular, intense, nature-bound place which never leaves you. I became a city boy, but I can call up any time waves lapping at the boat or a frozen winter. I don't know what it is, I don't try to analyze it, I accept it.

AND NOW THE ENTIRE 34-PERSON OHS GRADUATING CLASS. I thought there was only 28.

But some didn't make it. Francis got pregnant and married Bernie Novak. Vera Wakemup and a number of the Indian Kids dropped out years before graduation. Duane Krambeck, Audrey Novak, Len and Loretta O'Leary, Carol Sokoloski transferred in towards the end. Tough luck. Jim Sweet is putting candy counter on his resume? Well, so was I. Even got a letter for something but no letter JACKET, so what was that worth? Supposed to put in on my overshoes? My little attribution refers to an event not of my making. I was (literally) kidnapped one evening by a car full of girls. They attempted to no avail to get me to kiss them. I successfully fought them off in the back seat. Some things you just wish you could have back. Stanley Lumbar came out to LA trying to make it as an Indian for western movies. He was actually discovered while working in a Hollywood market as a box boy. Took a test, things looked good until they found out he couldn't ride a horse. Took riding lessons but could never master it. Career in movies down the tubes. Later on I would get a phone call from him from a street corner somewhere, pick him up and drive him down to my parents in Inglewood and we would have dinner. Then I would bring him back to the street corner and he would disappear. Did this for years. Stanley had a gorgeous face, a low and wonderful silky voice, he was bright and Indian and mysterious.

What is astonishing to me is that at one time I was close beyond belief to these now-frozen faces posing for the yearbook. It is with them that I was formed as a person as I pushed out from my immediate family. We knew each other better than we would know anybody else because we changed so much for the first time. Even then, Roland Chrianson and Rodney Flake were on the edge of criminality. You had the feeling Bixby would do poorly, he did. Ernie Langren was a star, but he was also an Indian and so constrained by the accident of birth. He went in the Army for 20, and came back to be the leader of the Nett Lake Indians. He is a modern man and outspoken for his people. I am so proud of Ernie. The girls married and had families, some, professional lives as nurses, etc. Maxine Hall Purdy is a Minnesota feminist, step behind but still up there, now the school secretary and doesn't take any crap off anybody. Here we all are in our glory in the spring of 1953. Just as powerful and young and naive as anybody else at that time. Full of our dreams. Nobody would ever fail. We all would do right. It was the beginning of life.

Graduation was in the Spring of 1953. I had already set in motion my release from Minnesota, I knew there was no future there for me, I was pointed to California. For the previous two years summers I had taken the Greyhound from Hibbing to LA to stay with my uncle Whitey in Inglewood and bum around town, go to Hollywood, hit the beaches, go bowling. So when I returned from the last summer in California in the fall of 1952 I baldly announced that I was MOVING to California after High School graduation to seek my fortune. This kind of independence by a minor child was considered heresy by the standards of Orr, precipitated a substantial family crisis and the famous call to Whitey was made. Famous, because people up there don't call out much, easier to call Venus as California. The Whitey call was of the "What the hell is going on out there?" variety. Guess my announcement surprised him as much as them. What it did accomplish was that my father, one of your olympic level procrastinators was moved to admit that the liquor store had played out its song, the bloom was off the flower. He decided that HE would immediately depart for California, get a job and "provide a home for us to move to". Now they were all moving out there. Fine. He went out and got a job pumping propane into pickups, later got work with the Inglewood City Schools as a cabinetmaker at which he excelled and became a highly respected and valued member of a job team.

Meanwhile, my mother, sister and I soldiered on for the last year. After school I would take the bus out to my grandparents' old farm and do the shovelling cowshit thing. Minnesota justice. We sold off our house, theboat, motor, trailer and big wooden box, and off we went in a blue Plymouth which had replaced the red Plymouth. I didn't look back as we drove out of town. I was ecstatic. I was grown up, I was going to California, I was going to college--whatever that was. About a mile before we got to the Iowa border we stopped for a stop sign and were rear-ended by a farmer. I saw it as a form of final Minnesota gesture, a cosmic whack of farewell. My mother and I drove this time and the territory was becoming familiar: trees, flat farmland, mountains, desert, rain, more rain. San Bernardino orange stands and finally being sucked up into the freeway maw of LA somewhere, sandwiched between monster trucks and spit out in Inglewood. We rented an apartment by the racetrack, I started UCLA in the fall and the next year after much dithering, my father agreed to buy a house on 94th Street in Inglewood.

We were in California.

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