CANADA

I was born on April 20, 1946, in the hospital in Pembroke, Ontario, Canada, a few miles from the family's hometown of Deep River. While the other children in our family were all born at home, with Dr. Wilford Park, our father, doing the delivery (at least that was what I was told--possibly other family members know differently), for some reason I was relegated to the hospital for delivery. I have no idea whether or not there was an anticipated complication, which never happened. Do other family members have any info on this? Maybe our mother Catherine just wanted the security of a hospital setting for once. I was born into a family with four older siblings: Betty and Douglas from Dad's first marriage, and Robert and James from his second.

I lived in the Deep River house until we all moved to Minneapolis just after Christmas 1949. I was not yet four but I still remember the beautiful scene out our back door, opening directly onto the Ottawa River. It was often peaceful and sunny, as I recall. I remember Mother pointing across the river to the other side telling me, "That's Quebec." All I could see were the hills covered with evergreens so I lived under the assumption that Quebec meant trees, not a place of some kind. Dad had a pretty fancy wood-sided motor boat that we would take out onto the river occasionally. We had a little dog named Wickie that I liked to play with. We were acquainted with many of the neighborhood families, but I played mostly with Gene, our housekeeper Eve’s little boy. They lived in our house (9 Beach Ave. in Deep River) for two years or so, before we moved to Minnesota.

A frightening incident on the Ottawa River was entirely my fault. The summer before we moved from Deep River, (when I was three years old), Dad took Mother, me, and a neighbor lady out in our speedboat. I had rarely been permitted on the boat before this. We were traveling very fast across the water, and I thought the surface looked quite solid now. Smooth and uniform, with no wind, as I recall. I suddenly and unexpectedly stood up from my mother's lap and leaned out over the water. I remember clearly being suspended a few inches over that fast surface, actually out of the boat altogether. It was by sheer muscle power and determination (and some balancing help from the neighbor) that Mother was able to get me back into the boat before I fell. "But I wanted to walk on the water!" I protested. I recall that distinctly. It had looked so different than water had before. "You can't walk on the water. You'll sink!" The terrified look on Mother's face and the face of the neighbor lady turned my thinking around. We got Dad's attention (he, up in front at the wheel, had not seen any of this) and he slowed down and turned around. I spent some time sitting on the shore with Mother, while the boat went out again for a spin without us. Her expression was a mixture of jittery alarm and relief at the same time. What a trouble-maker I was. This has been a memorable experience for me ever since.

Another terrifying incident happened in 1950 when we returned to Deep River for a visit. Gene and his mother Eve were there. Also, Robert and James were able to see several older kids they knew. Mother and I were walking near our family's former house when we came upon a big pile of dirt from some road work. Mother asked if I wanted to play on the pile for ten minutes instead of going with her to visit one of her old neighbors. I said yes and off she went. I saw some other kids about my size down at the next corner, just 100 feet or so away. I didn't know any of them but thought I'd say hello. There must have been about ten neighborhood kids of various ages. We started to play around together without getting too wrapped up. There was a single-axle trailer sitting by itself in front of a lady's house. (None of the kids there were hers, though). We thought it might be fun to mess around with the trailer. There was one boy (the oldest, a bossy type) who kind of took over. "Hey, let's see if we can move it." Several of us tried lifting together on the fork of the trailer and to our amazement, it actually lifted up and swung to the side a little. I was a little scared of this development. The big boy, who may have been six or seven, wanted to see what would happen next. I did not help anymore with this project; I felt nervous that there was some danger in playing with this unpredictable thing.

I knocked on the door of the house. A nice lady answered and invited me in past the doorway a short way. She was talking with a man at the door who appeared to be leaving. I asked if the kids should be playing with her trailer. Is it okay? Just at that moment we heard a loud clattering sound from outside. We all looked out the window to see the trailer start to roll away from the surprised children who were lifting the fork, just as I had been doing a minute earlier. It careened into the ditch and rolled downhill for a short way, with the kids no longer holding onto it. The two adults gasped and the man ran out the door because a small girl in a white dress, probably less than three, was lying in the dirt, face down, not moving, not making any noise, but with no signs of injury. She had not been able to avoid the rolling trailer. I did not want to see any more, and I ran back to the pile of dirt I was supposed to be playing on. A short while later, an ambulance arrived from the nearby hospital. I did not leave my spot.

Several minutes after the ambulance left and the subdued kids went back home, Mother returned from where she had been visiting. She looked very somber, and she asked if I knew about the kids playing with the trailer down the street. I told her that I had seen it happen, and that I was very scared. She knew more than I did. "Did you see the little girl?" she asked. I told her I had seen her lying in the dirt, not moving. White dress, three years old. Mother said, "She was killed." The news shot through me with a horror I hadn't felt before. That possibility had not entered my mind. "She didn't look hurt, just knocked out," I argued. But it was true. In that short moment of playing with the trailer, a girl had died. I cried and my mother held me and rocked me a little--we both were shocked and saddened by such a terrible accident, and we both knew how easily that could have been any of the kids, including me. She asked if I helped to roll the trailer, and I said I helped to move it at first, but that the big boy wanted to roll it, not me. I didn't help him. She accepted that. But in fact, I felt a tiny bit responsible just by being involved in the first contact with the trailer. Even now I wonder who that little girl in the white dress was, and who she may have become. And how lucky I am to have made it to adulthood at all.

* * * * *

We took the train from Canada to Minnesota, on a cold, dark night. I remember sitting in the station eating some cookies that someone (probably our housekeeper Eve) gave me for the trip. I was told by Dad that I couldn't have the cookies on the train, so I had to eat them ahead of time. It was an overnight train that took us through Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. We slept in two sleeper car berths, Robert and James in one and me stuck at the other end of Dad and Mother's berth. It was complicated to visit the bathroom because a porter had to come over with a ladder whenever anyone wanted to get out of their high-up berths. I tried to avoid asking to go very often.

HUMBOLDT AVENUE IN THE 1950'S

I remember pulling up into Minneapolis during the day, moving around a huge train station, and taking a yellow cab to 1804 Humboldt Avenue South. My first impression was that it was a great big house and that it was going to be fun to live in it. Our family lived there for 12 years but it was a very crucial 12 years for my development; it now seems that this house, in the Kenwood neighborhood in West Minneapolis, was my most important home. I became close friends with two boys that lived on the next block, Dale and Dewey. We remained friends for as long as they lived nearby, playing baseball frequently in the vacant lot at Girard and Summit Avenues, or making the six-block walk to Kenwood Park itself. We always were at each other's houses, playing board games like Texas Millionaire, Monopoly, cards, or goofing around with games in the yards or the street. Dale and Dewey moved away toward the end of the 1950's, so I lost contact with them. But we were so often on the phone with each other to arrange play stuff that the phone operators sometimes would hook us together even before we said out loud what number we wanted. Our phone number was Kenwood 6314, and Dale's was Kenwood 5837. I started school in 1952, at Douglas Elementary School (grades K-6), within a few blocks from our house. Then I started walking or biking to Jefferson Junior High (grades 7-9), and eventually I attended West High school for one year (an even longer walk). James and Robert both graduated from West, but in 1962 my family moved to 36th St. and West River Road, which was in a different school district. (Robert had already moved to Madison to attend grad school at the U of Wisconsin by then.) I ended up attending a nearby protestant high school, Minnehaha Academy, for my junior and senior high school years.

Music was a regular part of my life in that Humboldt Ave. house from early on. Dad had a small classical music collection of 78 rpm records that I would listen to whenever he played them. I was first introduced at an early age to classical favorites like Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, Variations on a Theme of Haydn, by Brahms, and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. We also had an old Heintzman upright piano that we brought from Canada. Mother and Betty played it often, and Mother was very anxious that I learn to play piano as soon as I could. I gather that Robert and James didn't have much interest in it, so I was her last hope. I had a real interest in piano and eventually took a few months of lessons at the McPhail School of Music downtown. The teachers insisted I at least try to play things accurately, but I had a lot of trouble fitting in with that kind of discipline. I ended up quitting, much to Mother's dismay. But, of course, I did become a piano player, in part because of my mother's hopes for me and her very impressive skills as a pianist herself. Her example got me hooked, I think. The old upright piano was in the living room until late 1955 when Evelyn, our dad Wilford's third wife, moved in with her own piano, a Winter Co. spinet, which took up residence in the living room, pushing the upright into the back porch family room off the dining room.

When I was in grade school, Dad presented the family with a special gift that I was initially forbidden to mess with: a new cornet in a blue case. I felt pretty left out being once again relegated to the status of too young to be trusted with anything valuable. James ignored it, and Robert had already started playing the French horn in junior high school, so by the time I entered 7th grade, I was the one who took up the cornet and learned to play it well. By the time I graduated from high school I was quite a good player, helped especially by an inspired "Mr. Holland"-type band director at Jefferson Junior High (Mr. Fischer) and the world class band program at my high school, Minnehaha Academy, where Miss Foote was also an inspiration. More on that later.

A few memorable incidents stand out during my years at the Humboldt Avenue house. I still have dreams about life there, set in the rooms of the house and the neighborhood streets nearby. I remember getting a kick out of jumping from the landing of the main stairway to the floor of the front hall (about 8-10 steps), which always caused the pipes under the floor to jangle rewardingly. In the winter the static electricity would build up to remarkable levels. We three boys would rub our feet across the carpet to build up the charge and extend out our fingers toward the radiator by the front door to discharge the sparks, often an inch long or more. It felt very tingly. It even worked through pencils held in your hand. There were plenty of exciting things that happened there during the first five years, before Mother's death from cancer in January 1955. The exploded pressure cooker left a very impressive lumpy meat stain on the kitchen ceiling. Once someone's beautiful home-made birthday cake was spoiled by an incredible trail of big black ants that led to behind the refrigerator. What a parade! (We had left the frosted cake on the kitchen table for only about 15 minutes.)

Christmases at Humboldt were always exciting for me, especially when additional relatives celebrated with us. They included our older half-siblings Douglas and Betty, Betty's husband Murray (studying for a PhD in insect pathology at the U of Minnesota), and their baby Linda. With so many in attendance, the pile of presents under the tree grew astronomically. Our tree was always bought at the farmer's market nearby, and we would spend a couple of hours decorating it after we got it set up. There were always too many tinsel icicles but they were fun because they would be drawn towards you if you held out your hand, due to the ever-present static electricity.

We had a nice fireplace that had been converted to gas, with a large fake log loaded with tiny gas jets. The chunks of asbestos (not yet known to be dangerous) sitting on the surface of the log were designed to glow colorfully when heated up. I would stare at those glowing shapes endlessly when listening to the classical 78s Dad played in the old reddish console record player/radio that stood on the living room floor next to the fireplace. We had an old-time ice box in the pantry with a lining for the run-off from the melting ice. There was a small door that could be opened from outside of the house for the ice delivery man to stick the block of ice in. This box was no longer used since we had an electric refrigerator for keeping food cold. We had a regular delivery of milk in quart bottles for a few years. It was quite a change in buying patterns when people started to buy their milk with the groceries at the store.

In the basement we had a storage room ('fruit cellar') where long-term food could be kept (canned things, potatoes, squash, etc.) and also where we hid things, since people didn't go into it very often. This was where Murray once showed me James' birthday present, to be given to him the next day. I assured Murray that I could be trusted not to tell. Of course, I was so excited about the present that I ran to tell James immediately, forgetting my sworn secrecy way too easily. James had the bedroom at the end of the hall upstairs, which essentially was a back sun porch with windows on three sides. It must have been very cold in there some winter nights. James loved (and still loves) to grow plants due to all the sunlight available in his room, so it was all the hanging vines and tall plants that inspired Betty and Murray to buy James, as a birthday present that year, a small, live salamander, complete with a miniature terrarium to live in. When I blurted out excitedly to James what he was going to get, I couldn't even remember how to say 'salamander' so he couldn't figure out what it was until he saw it. His first comment was, "I don't want a lizard." So, Betty and Murray's carefully considered gift was blown before the birthday party even happened. But James and the rest of us warmed to the little creature nearly immediately, and it lived happily in James' jungle for a couple of years (there may have been more than one newt in succession).

Our basement furnace was big and old, with lots of huge pipes leading from it, all covered with thick white insulation. Originally it was a coal furnace (we still had the remains of a coal bin), but it had been converted to fuel oil before we bought the house. Sometime in the early 1950s, Dad decided to convert the furnace once again-to natural gas. There were a few glitches at the beginning of this change-over to gas. I remember a very dramatic moment before the workings of the automatic pilot light were mastered. I came down the stairs to the basement to see Dad with a five-foot long piece of bamboo, lit at the end, reaching carefully into the furnace grate. Douglas was standing there helping. Suddenly a huge tongue of flame whooshed out to engulf them both. Very loud. It was much taller than them and possibly about ten feet long. It was gone in a second, with the furnace apparently burning properly after that. Dad came rushing over towards me, sputtering and amazed, with singed eyebrows and wide eyes, unhurt. Douglas, also unhurt and unfazed, had thrown his arms up around his head; I don't remember the state of his hair, but he had a lot more of it than Dad at that time, so it probably got singed too. But I recall that Douglas thought it was an exciting surprise, sort of like a thrill ride. (He loved motorcycles at the time.) He laughed nearly uncontrollably, in heavy contrast to Dad, who thought the whole thing had been a fiasco. I still have no idea what went wrong, but Dad never took chances with trying to light the furnace manually after that. The experts from the gas company soon came back. They adjusted the air intake and turned up the pilot light a little so it would not go out any more. No more problems ensued.

The household was lively and exciting-a warm, special place to be with all the older teens/early 20s siblings. Betty and Douglas were leading lives much more exciting and exotic than mine. Betty lived with us for about a year and went out with a few boy friends who took her to parties. Before long she settled on her old flame from back home in Deep River: Murray. She moved back to Canada, and before long they were married. Maybe a year later, Betty and Murray (who was drawn to a PhD program in insect pathology at the University of Minnesota) came back to Minneapolis and lived on the third floor of the Humboldt house for a while. Betty served as sort of a housekeeper and baby sitter for us. Then baby Linda was born and charmed everyone who came by. Douglas lived with us for a while and studied at the U of M, too, earning a two-year degree. Douglas was an interesting brother to live with because he had a really exciting motorcycle that he rode everywhere. Occasionally I even got some rides. He started to wear a leather jacket and a black leather cap that made him look rebellious. Dad was dismayed but tolerated it. During the early 1950s, Douglas was drafted into the army for a couple of years, getting his training in Colorado. After he completed his service, he moved to Colorado to marry a young woman he had fallen in love with. Ruth and he were married in July of 1954.

My younger older siblings, James and Robert, and I each had our own room in the Humboldt house for the whole twelve years. We all were happy to be part of a busy household. Sometimes Dad, Mother, and we three boys would go on long camping trips that were the highlights of my childhood. I especially remember a two-week trip to South Dakota to see the Badlands and the Black Hills (with Mount Rushmore). Because I was the youngest of the family, Robert and James often teased me for being behind in everything. They enjoyed taking advantage of me, too. Once in while at dessert time, our I-divide-and-you-choose process led to laughter from the older ones, and a quick snapping-up of the portions that I accidentally had cut unevenly. The timing and sequence of events during that whole period is hazy to me, but it was fun. After Betty's marriage, it was interesting to have the baby, then toddler, Linda around. I remember patiently teaching her how to steer and ride a tricycle. The basement was the main training area.

I also remember being very proud of Betty when we all attended a performance of a play in the sanctuary of our church (Hennepin Avenue Methodist), in which she had the lead role. The performance was very crowded, but our family was able to find seats in the center balcony. Before the play started, I was excited to see Betty come out onto the stage. She looked lovely and glamorous in a white dress. I blurted out, "There's Betty!" It must have been kind of loud because it elicited smiles and laughter for several rows of people around us. I have no idea what the play was about, but Betty was impressive. She didn't blow any lines and garnered a lot of applause afterwards.

The electrical system in our house was always a little quirky. Dad, (who was always looking for ways to save money), often tinkered with the wiring to improve things. One problem I remember was the light socket installed in the old gaslight box overlooking the driveway. Once, Dad was trying to test this light and the way the box connected with other circuits in the house. I still don't understand how he rigged this, but I recall sitting in the hall closet under the main stairs holding a socket with a test lightbulb that Dad had somehow connected to the outside light. This test bulb had also been wired through the light in the hall closet, which was controlled by a push-button on-off switch by the front door. Dad instructed me to let him know when his test light bulb came on. At first it was dark, then it lit up only partially. "Is it on yet?" he asked from the next room. "Sort of." Then he pushed the switch by the front door to “on” and the bulb with me in the closet came on full force. "NOW it's on," I called out. "But you said it was on before!" The implication was that I was showing myself to be an unreliable assistant. He pushed the switch again and the light bulb went back to the dim, partially-on state. "It's still on but not as bright." "What are you talking about?" he called. "It's either on or it's not!" I was able to pull the bulb on its wire out from the closet far enough for him to see it for himself. Finally, he believed me, and the surprise and frustration on his face were easy to identify. But he wasn't mad at me anymore, just with this crazy circuit that was on full when the wall switch was on, but was dimmer with the wall switch off. Where was that extra juice coming from? The outside light eventually had to be disconnected altogether. It wasn't that important, and who knows how much hiring the proper electric repair would cost?

Another time Betty was outside hanging laundry on our metal clothes line, when she mentioned that she could feel a little electric shock through her wedding ring when it touched the clothes line. I also wanted to feel what that was like (fascinated as I was of things that weren't doing what they should). "Now be careful, that's a valuable thing," she warned. When I put her wedding ring loosely on my finger and touched it to the clothes wire, the shock so surprised me that the ring went flying into the grass somewhere. Murray had to hunt through the grass on his knees for ten minutes to find it. Apparently, the hook for the clothes line, when drilled into the side of the garage, had hit an electric wire in the wall.

I remember Dad sometime later going through the entire house turning off everything electrical anywhere, including fridge and all the clocks. The electric meter was still slowly turning, and it would only stop completely when the circuit to the garage was turned off (even though nothing was on in the garage either). Conclusion: electricity was just leaking into the ground on its way to the garage, and the only solution was to kill the power to the garage altogether. Somewhat later, I remember the lights in the garage were working again. Dad must have strung another, better-behaved wire to the garage when I wasn't watching.

One time before Betty was married, she was in charge of us three boys while Mother and Dad went out to someone's house. I was about five, chasing James down the upstairs hall for some reason. (We were just goofing around.) He rushed into his bedroom and slammed the door, which consisted of about nine glass panels. I wanted to stop him so I held my fist out and the door closed right through it. The bleeding that resulted was pretty remarkable. Betty was quite beside herself as to what to do. She tried washing my arm in the sink but the long slice from wrist to mid-arm was spouting profusely. She wrapped it in a towel and told me to hold it tight. She ran next door to our neighbor, an older surgeon named Dr. White, who, as luck would have it, was home. He came over with his bag, and, as everyone watched, we sat at the dining room table as he calmly stitched up my arm. There was only one chunk of skin that needed the stitches, and I watched in fascination myself. I don't remember crying, but I do remember it hurt. The rest of the wound was closed up with strong tape and covered with cloth dressings. I still have the scars on my left arm from that incident. When Dad and Mother came home, there was a lot to show and tell.

Another very dramatic incident occurred when I was in second grade. I was seven or so. My friends Dale, little his brother Kent, and I were all playing around in our garage hayloft. James tells me that he was there as well, but I don't recall that. I thought it would be a fun thing to haul my scooter up to the hayloft, just so it could be up there. I can't imagine why; there was no room to ride it. (I had earlier tied it to a rope, and I had thrown the end up to the others in the loft before climbing the ladder to the loft again.) I was in the process of pulling on the rope when the heavy scooter caught in the garage doorway below. Of course, I had to try to free it so I leaned out and began pulling harder. I went headfirst out of the loft doorway, about twelve feet above the cement driveway. As I disappeared, I remember Dale looking up from what he was doing and asking, "Where's Warren?" And I even said, in a state of detached confusion, "I'm right here," as I flew into the air and down to the driveway. I landed on the side of my head. I recall what must have been a very dramatic scene for my mother: I came around enough to cry as she came rushing out the back door toward me, my friends with her. Then I collapsed, passed out completely, and didn't wake up again until that evening. I found myself in my own bed in my pajamas with my father doctoring me. I had a serious concussion and had been bleeding from my ear.

I was home for a month recovering from that fall. I enjoyed the vacation until I heard somehow that I might need to repeat second grade now, having slipped so far behind. That idea was a horrible one to me so I worked very hard to catch up once I got back to school. Luckily, I was able to go on to third grade, and stay with my classmates and friends. I was much more careful with heights from then on, and I even developed a little phobia about being upside down. I had a lot of trouble learning how to dive in the water at Y camp years later, but I did eventually learn how to do a basic head-first dive. However, I was not able make myself do trampoline flips in gym class at West High School, despite really wanting to.

I remember well the autumn of the year when Robert, James, and I had the task of installing the fifty or so wood-frame storm windows on our house. At first, I was too little to get up on the ladder, so I was relegated to the task of washing the windows with the hose car-washing brush, before they were hung on the house. It wasn't a lot of fun, but it needed to be done, and we all worked on it together. In the spring, the stored screens needed to be rinsed off before being hung, and the storm windows had to be returned to the garage. Each window had a number and each screen or storm window had to be installed in the right place. (The sizes varied quite a bit.) Dad was not interested in getting involved other than to show us what to do. That became our task, thereafter. These were the heavy, old-fashioned wood-frame screens and storm windows. Each installation on the entire second floor involved moving the wooden extension ladder under each window and sliding the storm window up the ladder in front of you. Then the storm window had to be lifted in the air and hooked onto the pair of holders above each window frame. The remainder of the process took place inside of the house, where each storm window had its own window props to slide into place. In closed position the storm windows were tight and snug in their window frames; open position allowed the bottom of the windows be extended out about nine inches for ventilation. The screens did not have any props.

Each fall, when we worked on changing the window screens to storm windows on Saturday afternoons, we would listen to the University of Minnesota Gopher football games. This was during the time when the legendary Murray Warmath was the coach. The U of M football team was nationally prominent, winning two Rose Bowl games in successive years.

Much later when I reached my early teens, Robert and James had left home to go off to college. With all the main manpower of the house gone, it fell to me to take care of the storm windows all by myself. I was up to the task, with all that training behind me, but I missed the comradery of the three of us working on the ritual seasonal process. In the spring of 1962, I took care of the whole job again-storm windows off and stored in the garage, and screens installed-for the last time. We moved that summer to a new home within sight of the Mississippi River. I hope my replacement worker at the Humboldt house was up to the task.

Another part of the memory of window work on chilly fall Saturdays was the rich scent of leaves burning beside the curb. This was how everyone, including Dad, used to get rid of the leaves on their property. A burning ban instituted around 1960 stopped that practice. Now, the only time I get to smell that aroma is when I happen to be out in the country in the fall near homes that still handle their leaves that way.

In the winter I thought it was exciting to use our toboggan at Kenwood Park. This multi-acre park had a high, long sliding hill on the west side, nicknamed Kenwood Hollow because of the hills surrounding a large open space. When it snowed enough to cover the hills with several inches, the sledders would flock to Kenwood by the dozens. The main hill was long enough for a ride of probably ten seconds or more.

One year, Robert and James (with some help from Dad, no doubt) constructed a toboggan slide from a pretty tall pile of snow in our side garden. I think it may have been as much as four feet tall at the starting point. The hill was reinforced and the sides were banked up enough to keep the toboggan from sliding off course. The run was made slippery by a hose from a tap in the adjacent laundry room. It was a very short ride, but exciting the whole way. The toboggan slide must have extended around twenty-five feet, ending safely at ground level in our back yard. Some years we attempted to put a small skating rink in the back yard, too, but it wasn't really big enough to do much skating. The closest real skating rink was at the north end of Lake of the Isles, across Franklin Avenue from Kenwood Park, a short walk of about eight blocks for us.

I have a few other memories of the five years in Minneapolis before Mother died that are worth mentioning. When I was five, I remember both of us watching a professional sculptor working on the stone figures above a small door at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. This lovely old cathedral faces Loring Park near where we lived. The sculptor was from Europe and didn't like people watching him, but we stood far enough away to avoid disturbing him. He was a remarkable artist. Those carved figures are still there above the doorway, and they are still beautiful.

Loring Park used to be bigger than it is now, with ball fields and much more hiking space adjacent to the park across from Walker Art Center. Only a small strip of land, which held the Plaza Hotel, separated Hennepin and Lyndale Avenues. Then the I-94 freeway was constructed, and Hennepin and Lyndale were re-routed. Where the Sculpture Garden is now, in front of the Walker Art Center, there used to be a city park with flower gardens and a nice fountain with lily pads in the pond around it. I remember being fascinated with the tadpoles living in that pond, some of whom had already started to grow legs!

One sunny afternoon, Mother and I were walking in this park beside Walker, and we wandered by a large, colorful tent that had been set up in the open field. It was not designed to be a public attraction. I thought I was so clever when I was able to climb through a hole at the bottom of the tent near where the posts held it up. To my great surprise, there were two elephants inside! I crawled out again to excitedly tell Mother (who had begun to wonder where I had gone so suddenly) about the elephants. Although she tried to prevent me, I dove back through the hole. This time I found the animal keeper waiting for me, with my mother outside calling to me to climb back out again. She was angry about my disobedience-she had told me to stay with her. The man was nice, but said I should be listening to my mother. Then he said that, if it was okay with her, I could see the elephants if I used the regular door like a normal person. The animal keeper told Mother where the door was, about twenty feet down, and she soon came through there to finally catch me. I must have been pretty hard to keep in line at age five. We all looked at the elephants together then, with full permission. They apparently were in town for a small circus showing downtown. We exited through the door like normal people.

Dewey and Dale were the friends I spent most of my time with, when school was over for the day, and on weekends. I remember lots of board games, pickup baseball in the vacant lot nearby, and football games in the street. At age ten, I got Dewey in trouble once when we were in his house with Dale and another boy. I accidentally said a bad word that I had picked up at school. Dewey's dad, in the next room, heard the word and thought it had been Dewey who said it. Dewey nobly took the fall for me. It was he who washed his mouth out with soap, a rule in his household. I saw him apply some hand soap to a paper towel and wipe the inside of his mouth with it. Yuk. I was super careful about what words came out of my mouth after that. I felt bad that I had put him through that punishment, and told him “Sorry” when we were alone again.

Dewey's family lived on the corner of the next block, and their family garage faced Dr. White's backyard. From our backyard it was easy to see Dewey's garage. One day, Dewey's father proudly drove home in a great-looking Ford Model T car. This Model T had no roof, and the windshield had a hinged top section that needed to be folded down before the car would fit in his standard-height garage. About a week after he bought the car, many of us in the neighborhood heard a rending, shattering sound coming from his garage. When we looked around, we could see that the top section of the windshield--which he had forgotten to fold down--had caught under the top of the garage doorway as he drove the Model T in. He was mad but too embarrassed to say much. A few days later he returned with the fixed-up model T, which he really enjoyed tooling around the neighborhood. Not long after that, with me and others watching, the same thing happened again! He had again forgotten to fold down the top section of windshield. Another horrendous crash! This time the entire windshield was shattered from being jammed in the doorway. Dewey's dad kind of went crazy, swearing and jumping around and kicking things, including his Model T. I understand that the car got sold, as was, the next week. It had been very cool to see it chugging down the street, and I was sad to see it go.

Being the littlest one in the family usually is a good thing, but for me it held some real drawbacks. I recall one year that I was shunted over to a neighbor's house down the street while my parents and two older siblings went to MEXICO(!) for a vacation. The powers-that-be had decided I was simply too young to go along. I remember well a photo of James and Robert having the time of their lives somewhere on the ocean shore in Texas or farther south. I felt gypped, I'll tell you. They were gone in the car for two weeks! I stayed with a neighbor family, who had two boys, Billy and Donnie, who were more Robert and James' ages, and Susan, just a toddler, so there was no one my age to play with. Their mom tried her best to keep me occupied, and it all worked out well enough. I remember, right after Friday's supper, being completely blown away when the dad of the family put on his black tails and pulled out his violin! He was a member of the first violin section in the Minneapolis Symphony, and when he warmed up with his rapid-fire scales and patterns and sweet lyrical tunes before leaving to work, I was truly impressed. I guess music clicked with me even then.

That house had a little crawl space on the second floor, under the eaves, next to the bedroom of an elderly woman we called Aunt Rose, who was the owner of the house. James, Robert, Billy, and Donnie showed me how to get into this storage space accessed by a half-sized door. By crawling on our hands and knees for about ten feet, we could reach a space big enough to stand up in, at the very front corner of the roof. The bigger boys had a light in there, and it was a cool secret place to be in. One time, Billy and Donnie's dad found us there, having awkwardly crawled partway into it himself. He was a lot bigger than us so it was much harder for him to manage. He told us to stay out of there. (I'm not sure we did.) We all got incredibly dusty whenever we went to this secret place, and I once made the mistake of crawling across Aunt Rose's bed afterwards. That brought some scolding from the mom, who immediately pulled the bedspread off the lady's bed and washed it.

A long time later (probably in 2000), I returned to that house for an estate sale. It felt familiar to be there again. The basement still had multiple storage rooms filled with things. It must have been another family's stuff, though, since the family I knew hadn't lived there for forty years. They had moved to a nice new house over by Lake of the Isles long before my family moved away.

In the summer of probably 1954, our family left for a vacation camping trip to the Black Hills for two weeks. Our packed-up Nash, with everyone in it but me, took off down the street as I watched in horror! I was locked out of the house and they were going to be gone for two weeks! I cried this news to Ole, the old gardener for our next-door neighbor, Dr. White. Ole was a friend to all of us. He assured me that they would be right back, not to worry. And, sure enough, the car pulled up again about five minutes later. The front seat people had assumed I was in the back seat, and vice versa. Of course, I was too short at the time to be seen over the top of the seat. They told me that they had made it to Lake of the Isles before discovering their omission.

A little later, on our way to South Dakota, a highway patrolman pulled Dad over for speeding. We were at the outskirts of a town, so it may have been unclear what the speed limit was. Dad had a way of trying his best to impress people with his status of being a doctor and a professional, which he hoped would save him trouble when it came to traffic tickets. The first thing he said to the trooper when he came up to the window was, "I'm a doctor," a stunningly irrelevant thing to say. I don't think this impressed the cop very much. He looked over the car with three boys in the back and a ton of camping equipment tied to the roof, and said, "You're not on a call right now, are you?" "No," Dad admitted. "Well, you should watch your speed, then," the patrolman said with a smile, issuing a simple warning ticket. Dad must have felt pretty foolish, but he did stay under the limit the rest of the day.

Another time we were all in the car on a memorable camping trip to the mountains of Colorado. We visited many truly scenic places (like Pike's Peak and Estes Park), did a lot of rock climbing, and hiked down long beautiful trails. We stayed at a camping ground located at about 8,000 feet, so it was chilly at night, even in July. Dad and Mother slept in one tent, and we three boys had our own (which Dad set up with us). After we were all settled in our sleeping bags, I called over to Mother, requesting a drink of water. No one had collected any fresh water in one of the jugs, so this turned out to be quite a demand, larger than I had anticipated. Mother agreed to get her shoes on and go off to the nearby creek with a cup. Ten minutes later she returned to find me fast asleep. She was peeved with me, but luckily Robert and James wanted some of the water, once it became available. I woke up enough to have one swallow, and then I was out like a light once again, after a tiring day.

Those vacation trips in the car always felt special-family bonding and endless excitement, meals around isolated picnic tables. I loved watching out the window for deer and moose, and a crazy number of exotic birds. One Saturday morning on the road somewhere, we were able to pick up the radio station that broadcast a CBS network kids show, named something like "Saturday Morning Story Time." I remember listening to that show on many previous Saturdays at home and really enjoying it. This time, when the show ended, there was a long pause, and then the rich-voiced announcer said, "Are we off? That ought to hold the little bastards for a while!" Then there was silence as the mic really was cut off, followed in a minute by a profuse apology, explaining that he thought the mic was dead, sputter, sputter. Finally, he invited us to tune in next week! I felt wounded, and cried a little because I believed he was a nice man up until then. I didn't even know what the word 'bastard' meant, but I could tell by the way he said it that he wasn't really a friendly guy after all. Disillusionment!

* * * * *

Yet another memory I have of the period when I was living on Humboldt Avenue in the 1950s happened when I was six and waiting for the bus to take me downtown. (Yes, kids were given more freedom at a younger age back then.) I was standing on the corner of Humboldt and Douglas Avenue, where the city buses stopped. I watched a car pull from Humboldt right in front of another car traveling down Douglas, a through street. Both the man and the woman in the first car were looking to the left (the direction in which they were turning), and I had to yell, “Look OUT!” They stopped short just in time as the other (completely surprised) driver barely managed to veer out of the way. The driver of the stopped car looked at me with both shock and gratitude. “Look both ways!” I called out, shaking my finger at him. He nodded and told me that I was completely right. He and his wife were a bit lost in our part of town and were trying to find their way around, and that had caused the lapse that almost got them into a big wreck. “Thanks for the warning,” they told me. I was pleased to think that my parents' training paid off.

Another day a year later, I was biking with a friend on the sidewalk on that block a little way down from the same corner. Also on the sidewalk were a four-year-old girl and her dad, whom I didn't know, on separate bikes. The girl and her dad were coming towards us; my friend was ahead of me. Suddenly, the girl, a bit wobbly on her bicycle, clicked pedals with me accidentally, and went sprawling into the street on her back. Her Dad was amazingly athletic as he jumped off his bike and swooped her up out of the street in two seconds. She was crying hysterically but was quickly safe in her dad's arms, back on the sidewalk. She was bruised but not injured from the fall. Then the dad and I both noticed a city bus that had stopped about ten feet from the girl's bike. Dad put the girl back on her feet and, in a relieved, less hurried manner, retrieved the bike from the street, exchanging meaningful and grateful looks with the bus driver. No, it was not a very close call, but we all thought of what might have happened if the contact of our two bikes had been five seconds later. I was really alarmed and sorry that I hadn't been more careful. I said so to the dad, a little tearful myself. It was really scary for me. He was kind enough to squeeze my shoulder gently and say, “It wasn't your fault.” They were able to wheel their bikes back toward home together. The whole incident still gives me the willies. And I still think I should have given her a much wider berth.

In the fall of every year, after the leaves had mostly fallen from the trees and been collected along the curbs of every street, we kids loved to jump into the huge piles of leaves. It was a lot of fun to be engulfed in them. When I was about seven years old, I had a close call on Humboldt Avenue that was entirely my fault. I wanted to take the leaf jumping game a little further. I thought it would be exciting to climb into the pile of leaves at the street corner and hide. Although I had my back against the curb at the corner of Humboldt and Summit, the leaves were deep enough to completely cover me, when a middle-age woman drove through my pile--with no idea that I was in it. I remember seeing the wheels of the car roll past me no more than six inches from my nose. When she saw in her rearview mirror that a couple of my friends had come running over to see if I was injured or worse, she jumped out to investigate. Thoroughly chastised, I emerged from the leaves unscathed as the woman came up to me, her car idling in the middle of the street. “Do you realize how reckless and stupid that is? No one could see you there!” I was very contrite, and apologized to her. The friends I was playing with were on her side. I think the lady was satisfied and drove off. “That was really dumb,” one summarized. I nodded and moved on, suggesting we move the leaf pile into the yard right beside the corner. Throughout my life from then on, I have continued to do dumb things that I have regretted afterwards, like slipping and sprawling on rocks beside a giant waterfall. Combining that with close calls on my bike or in the car on the highway, I'm surprised I survived at all.

Life on Humboldt Avenue entailed playing football in the street. By myself, I practiced kicking our football as high into the air as I could. By the time I was ten years old, I was able to kick the ball high enough for it to go over the phone wires that stretched from pole to pole at the corner of Summit Ave. My friends and I also played football games in the street, learning to time our play between approaching cars. I learned to pass and catch the ball pretty well while running and dodging, when my side was on offence. On defense, I could knock passes out the hands of the would-be receivers. One time I fell on the pavement and hit my head pretty hard. I had caught the ball at least, and got up fast enough to make it to the boulevard, so cars could go by. Then I lay down and got woozy. The game was over at that point. After a brief lie-down I made it to my house a block away with the help of a friend. Dad had just come home from work, and I reported to him that I had landed on my head on the street. He diagnosed a mild concussion, which I recovered from within a couple of days.

The most traumatic event of my childhood was the death of my mother on January 21, 1955, when I was eight years old. I was ill-prepared for it, having never been warned that it was coming. Apparently, my family thought it was best for me to be protected from the stress of her illness. I think it might have been healthier for me to have had a chance to talk to her with the knowledge that she would be dying soon. Perhaps I would have been able to cope better. Many other people knew in advance: Certainly, my father, sister and brothers were aware of it. She had been (secretly, to me) fighting cancer for many months prior to her death. I do remember being alarmed by her being in pain. She would bend over in an odd way sometimes, even as she continued to prepare our supper, for example. I showed my concern more than once, but she kept reassuring me that she was okay. Possibly she was one of the main “protectors” of my finding out about her cancer.

I remember vividly attending a performance in December 1954 at Northrup Auditorium on the University of Minnesota campus. We three boys and Mother went to see a short modern Christmas season opera designed for children and adults, called "Amahl and the Night Visitors." It is still popular today. It tells a story about the Three Kings, on their way to Bethlehem, stopping off to rest at the home of an impoverished widow shepherd and her young crippled son. Menotti wrote the music, which has been a special favorite of mine ever since. We listened closely to the perfect-sounding orchestra (playing from the pit in front of the stage), and the many fine singers, including a little boy a couple of years older than me. There is one spot in the opera where the kings are asking about where they might find a special boy, the Christ child they are looking for ("Do You Know a Child?"), and the mother of the story sings to herself that she knows where to find such a unique, special child: It is her own son. During this song, I noticed that Mother was crying silently and looking at each of us in a very tender way. I don't think the others noticed, but I did, and I leaned my head on her shoulder. It was a memorable moment of connection that we shared before she died, less than a month later; although I did not know she was in any danger until it happened. After Mother's death, I felt quite at sea for the longest time. It was hard for me to cope with not having her in my life; I had relied on her for just about everything during my eight years of existence. A few weeks later, I thought that Dad's interest in a woman doctor that he worked with was a good thing for us. They began going out with each other in the late spring of 1955.

The following summer, we three boys were sent to stay with our mother's siblings in Canada: first for about a month with Uncle Etheridge on a farm near Winnipeg, then another month with Aunt Alice in a Winnipeg suburb. (See the Summer 1955 story I wrote in 2008.) It was near Aunt Alice's house that I once was caught walking through a huge vegetable garden that was on private property. I had been through it before with my cousins and assumed that it was okay. But the time I was caught, I was alone, about two blocks from Aunt Alice's house. An angry woman came out of the house and wanted to know what I thought I was doing. I was still reeling from my mother's passing, and felt vulnerable and unable to explain why I was cutting through the garden. I said I didn't know anyone cared. Then she demanded to know where my mother was, and I could only break into tears, saying, "I don't have a mother." The lady softened then and said she wanted to talk to whoever was taking care of me. Later that day the lady and Aunt Alice, who recognized each other, I gather, had a cordial talk, which resulted in all us kids being told to stay away from that garden and take another way after this. The summer came to an end and we three brothers found ourselves back in Minneapolis in time for school in the fall. We rode back with our Uncle Clifford (Dad's brother), who by pre-arrangement was driving to Minneapolis for a visit. He lived in southern Ontario, not too far out of the way.

LIFE WITH EVELYN (aka Mom)

So. When we returned to Minneapolis after the summer in Canada, it turned out that Dad had decided to get married again. I was so emotionally needy that I thought this was a great idea. Evelyn seemed nice enough, and professed at least to like us, and in her own way she probably did. But once she moved in, it was very rough for all of us. We boys had never encountered someone so authoritarian before, someone so rigid and set in her ways. She was in her mid-forties and had never been married before. We had some very strong run-ins with her about all the things we were used to doing that she disapproved of. I remember that she thought it was vulgar to squeeze the juice from our grapefruit halves into our bowls. This was the way we learned to do it from Day One. Evelyn thought card playing was sinful and forbid it for our family. This news was very disappointing to all of us, even Dad, who was in a bridge club he enjoyed. Evelyn knew exactly how much of our morning orange juice could be made from one container of frozen juice. One time I came home from school on a warm day and felt thirsty. I decided to have a smallish glass of juice from the container waiting in the fridge. I think Dad would not have seen anything wrong with this-after all, it was a healthy drink to choose. Evelyn found out that the glasses of juice came up short the next day and demanded to know if I had taken some extra juice on my own. I told her I did have a glass after school the day before. “Never do that again!” she commanded. After that, I was smart enough to have my drink sometimes after school anyway, but I always replaced the same amount of water in the juice pitcher, so she would not notice. She never caught on.

Evelyn had an especially controlling way of dealing with me. I think this was because, as the youngest, I was the least able to defend myself One year, in junior high school, I had to go through the humiliation (among many) of owning only three different shirts to wear to school, two of which had the same design, but differing colors. "Warren has wash and wear and wear and wear shirts," I heard too often at school. My parents were moderately well-off, so there was no feeling that they could not afford better clothes for me. Evelyn thought the shirts she chose for me (I had nothing to say about the choice.) looked good, and I thought it would be safer not to rock the boat, so I went along with her. I didn't have the self-confidence to speak up for myself, being just a helpless kid. I should point out here that I righted myself as I grew older, and by the time I was in high school (an important stage in the self-esteem department), I did have a greater variety of clothes to wear, which I chose myself at the stores.

We had our moments of fun and contentment, but generally all three boys were at odds with Evelyn much of the time. This was not how she had envisioned her new life with us, which made her even more sour. Dad was stuck in an awkward position, too, not wanting to displease her but also recognizing how hard things had become for us. Only rarely did it seem that he stuck up for us. Even after we all grew up and Dad and Evelyn moved to Arizona to retire, she still had a very controlling way with Dad, setting the rules for everything. Not wanting to cross her, he generally acquiesced, and maintained an equilibrium that way.

I gather that her transition to family life after living her adult life entirely alone, combined with tension at work (she was the director of Maternal and Child Health at the Minneapolis Public Health Department.), put her under a lot of pressure. She was tense almost all the time during the first few years she was married to Dad. One example of this was the time when she was irate about damage to her refrigerator, which had been moved to the Humboldt Avenue house when she closed her apartment. It was a small, well-used Kelvinator fridge that we set up in the basement as a backup for our main fridge in the kitchen. Evelyn accused the three boys, but especially me, of scratching nasty messages inside the door of the fridge on a metal trim piece above the middle shelf in the door. She couldn't read what they said, but was sure that they must have been deliberately scratched there with malice. Dad had a look at the damage and determined that the scratches were caused by the sharp metal caps when pop bottles were slid into place in the door shelf. Not guilty! was the verdict, and she had to apologize to us.

My step-mom, from the very beginning of her marriage, had an odd view of her husband's former wives. She never wanted to be reminded of them. Wilford's marriage to Evelyn was the most important one, in her view, and the marriages to Lila and Catherine should be ignored and forgotten forever. Our Leonard relatives (our mother's family) were not to be mentioned. She even barricaded herself alone in her home office for a while when she accidentally heard some of us talking about the Leonard aunts and uncles. Dad knew about this strange psychiatric quirk and, in his own memoir, avoided mentioning any of his previous marriages and children. Evelyn was the only wife referred to by name in his writings, as per her wishes.

Across the street from us at Humboldt and Summit lived two boys in wheelchairs, one after the other. Billy Engdahl lived there first, then the Sam Build family, who had just emigrated from Norway. Their older boy was also wheelchair-bound; I got to know them all in passing. They were a nice family with a girl my age and another son who was younger than me. The father eventually started a home-based business with a delivery truck. He would bring home big bags of dirty diapers from people's houses for his wife to wash in their basement. I remember once talking to the three kids from Norway, new to the country and the language (they did remarkably well, I now realize), and straightening them out about the sound of the mourning dove's call. "My dad says owls go 'hoo, hoo', those are owls, right?" "No," I said to them, "The owl's call is different. Those birds on the wire there are mourning doves. That's their sound." The younger boy was the first on our block to start wearing his hair in a duck tail, sort of like Elvis. Evelyn was shocked by this and thought it was just awful. Once James was cutting my hair in the basement (we all were taught by Dad to cut each other's hair, not always very successfully) and I said to him, rather loudly, "No, leave it long". I didn't like anything close to a "heinie," a really short haircut that I had to put up with a lot when I was even younger. Evelyn, up in the kitchen, overheard me and yelled down the stairs, "You're not having a ducky haircut!" Both James and I rolled our eyes and called back saying that's not what I had in mind, just a longer cut.

After our step-mother Evelyn joined the household, Betty, Murray and Linda moved (were asked to, as I understand it) to an apartment nearby. Evelyn worked full time and needed help with the housekeeping and some of the cooking. This led to a succession of cook/housekeepers living on the third floor. One was a nice, older woman from Norway or Sweden with a very strong accent, named Mrs. Glime. From her we first heard things like 'strawberry yam,' 'yinyer ale' and 'oof da.' It was Mrs. Glime who gave me some consideration and comfort when I was eight. I think the other boys would have been too old to be receptive to it. A couple of times I recall feeling very lonesome for Mother, and this kind old lady would give me a sweet hug as she said, "A little boy needs his mother. I'm so sorry for you." This made me cry, but it was healthy and cleansing, and I appreciated it.

Whenever she took on the cooking, Evelyn wasn't especially good at it. She introduced a few new foods to our suppers. I remember James in particular was unhappy with some of them: shrimp and liver, for example. Also, she used to make an odd Finnish soup which seemed to me to consist of too much water, a layer of grease on the top and some chunks of beef and vegetables on the bottom. (Years later at a special dinner in a park on the North Shore for a Finnish church club in Duluth, I was served the same traditional Finnish soup, and it was just as bad then.)

Evelyn brought with her some fascinating history. Her parents were Finnish, living in the US, where she was born. When she was about 12 years old, the family moved in Finland, where her father resumed serving as a Lutheran minister. (Her brother Kaarlo's children and grandchildren still live in Finland.) As a young medical student in Finland during the second world war, Evelyn was pressed into service as a medic. She had many traumatic experiences with bombings and fighting in and around her city. After the war was over, Evelyn finished medical school, graduating from the University of Helsinki around 1950. She returned to the US after graduation and moved to Minnesota when she was granted a fellowship to study pediatrics as a specialty with Dr. Benjamin Spock (the famous children's health author) at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Upon completion of the fellowship, she was hired to be the director of Maternal and Child Health by the Minneapolis Health Department, where she met Dad.

Evelyn was an entirely different type of person than our mother, Catherine, and this really took some getting used to. She was an established and respected professional woman, which was unusual at that time in history. At home she maintained the feeling that she was the one in charge. Also, it was strange to have people living in our third floor who were not family members. Evelyn preferred to hire older Scandinavian women as housekeepers, so Evelyn's arrival, including the series of Norwegian and Swedish helpers, was quite a change of life for us.

In Minneapolis, in the mid 1950's, she was still jumpy when jet airplanes caused new sonic booms to hit the city, making the dining room glass doors rattle ominously. They really did sound like bombs dropping a few miles away. More than once, Evelyn panicked at the sound, yelling, "What's that?!" We told her about the new jets now flying over the speed of sound, causing those booming sounds. (After a few years, jet planes were required to lower their speed to below the sound barrier near cities.)

Our Humboldt Avenue house was not far from Minneapolis' Parade Stadium, where high school football games were played and where the Aquatennial Parade originated in the middle of every July. A remarkable incident happened near me there in 1959, or 1960, when I was a young teen-ager. I had walked over to Parade Stadium to enjoy the torchlight (night time) Aquatennial Parade as it emerged onto Wayzata Boulevard. For over an hour, I watched the long, colorful floats, a few clowns showing off, and the noisy marching bands all roll by me as the parade got going on its two-mile trip through downtown Minneapolis.

I happened to be standing next to an overweight middle-aged woman in a brown dress, who was very pregnant. Her husband stood closer to the parade, about ten feet in front of her. Suddenly, I heard a baby crying out, and I looked around only to discover that the noise was coming from under the lady's dress! She looked at me with a shocked expression. "Did you hear that?!" I said yes, and smiled. I was too naive to know that this sound could not have come from within the womb. I ducked away in a hurry, as the woman called to her husband, “Pete, the baby's coming!” She quickly lay down on the grass boulevard nearby. Five minutes later an ambulance (standing by anyway) arrived, and I saw that the lady and her baby were getting helped onto the ambulance cart. A neighbor in the crowd mentioned that a baby had just been born. Thus, out there in the world somewhere, someone in their sixties is the very baby whose first cry I heard from under its mother's dress. She must have had several babies before, for this one to come so quickly! Wow.

BOY SCOUTS

All three Park boys who grew up at the Humboldt Avenue house were, in turn, members of the boy scout troop that was affiliated with our church, Hennepin Avenue Methodist. For many years there was a “scout hall” building for Troop 7 in the middle of the large parking lot at Hennepin Church. It was a rickety building, basically one medium sized room about 25 or 30 feet long, with a small stairway that led to a partial basement where scout equipment was stored. For such an affluent congregation, the building was a shambles. It had electricity but no running water or toilet.

I remember well coming back by bus from Camp Many Point (one of our enjoyable scout summer camp trips). I needed to head into the church to go to the bathroom. This was later in the afternoon and it was time for the church janitor to close up the church for the day. I had no idea that what happened next was possible, but I heard a man’s voice call into the bathroom (three stalls in a row) –it sounded like “Whoa!” I had no idea what was happening and did not make any response. The janitor could not see anyone in the bathroom, and since I did not call back after about five seconds, he locked the door! From the outside, in the main hallway. I finished up and was shocked to discover that it was now impossible to get out. He was gone in a moment. I pounded on the door and called out, but no one was nearby.

That bathroom, in the Sunday School wing of the church, was on the main floor, which was about six feet off the ground. There was one window, which could be swung open with a crank. I was a Boy Scout! And I needed to “Be Prepared!” In fact, I was still wearing my scout shirt with the distinctive red bandanna draped around my neck. I climbed onto the window sill and turned around so that my legs were dangling outside. I looked down—six feet down. That was rather a long drop, but what else could I do? A lady in a car that was stopped in traffic nearby was watching me make my escape. She honked to try to stop me from jumping, but I had no other choice. I pushed my way out and landed on my feet, rather athletically. Soon I was taking the two-minute stroll around the Sunday School wing to the Scout Hall building. I rejoined my fellow scouts and set to the task of locating my sleeping bag and duffle.

I was about to walk home (just a few blocks away) when a man we didn’t know came into the Scout Hall. Apparently, the lady who had honked to get my attention had pulled around to the parking lot. She wanted to report to the church staff (who were all about to leave for the day) that one of the boy scouts had just jumped out a church window, and she wondered if he was all right. The guy asked around trying to find the boy who had to jump out of the bathroom window. I thought about not speaking up, but I decided that I probably should show him that I was not injured. It turned out that he was the very janitor who had locked me in. He apologized profusely. “Why didn’t you say something when I called in?” I answered that I had no idea what was going on. My mind had jumped to the warnings all us boys received about grown strangers trying to corner us vulnerable kids. The janitor was not a predator, clearly. He was relieved I was okay, and ended our little interaction with another interesting observation: “What’s the point of locking all the bathrooms in the first place?” My thoughts exactly. That sure didn’t enter my mind as something I needed to be wary of. He looked contrite enough to probably forego the door-locking from then on.

I spent about five years as a Boy Scout, and basically learned a lot about knots, building a campfire, handling a canoe, dealing with random challenges, and helping fellow scouts in their own development. We followed the Boy Scout Handbook, which gave us useful advice in many situations. The main attraction this whole scouting kit and caboodle had for me was the fun I had with my scouting peers. Some of these scouts were already friends from school, and social contacts were important to me then.

I remember, during my testing for First Class Scout, I was called upon to prove I could cook a baking powder biscuit on a campfire. I could make the campfire easily enough, but the dough for the biscuit (prepared at home and wrapped in tin foil) just would not cook on my fire. After a while, it was partially baked, and the adult tester checking my work told me, “If you can eat it, I will count it as a pass.” I did manage to get it down my throat, although it was an ordeal, and the doughy parts tasted terrible. Another requirement of my first-class testing was being able to follow a trail that had been set up by another scout. I asked brother James, (five-years older than me and already a first-class scout) to set up a trail using standard indicators made with sticks, twigs, rocks, and other special signs that scouts should understand. We did the test in nearby Kenwood Park, and I successfully followed the trail markers to the conclusion. It was kind of fun for both of us. James signed the paperwork to authenticate that I passed this part of the qualifications.

Among many random recollections, one that sticks in my mind concerns a partially deaf boy who joined our troop for a few months when I was in sixth grade. This kid was a year younger than me. He was a friendly boy, trying hard to fit in. One time we were examining a boy scout hatchet, and I noticed he pronounced the name of the tool as “hat-thet.” I turned him slightly so he could see my mouth. “It’s a 'hat-chet'.” He said it back perfectly, having watched my mouth say the word, and he remembered it clearly thereafter. He was grateful that I made the effort to get him to say it correctly. He spoke quite well in spite of his hearing problem.

My final Boy Scout camping experience took place just after my ninth-grade year in school. This was a full-fledged wilderness canoe trip to the wilds of northern Minnesota, near Ely, close to Voyagers National Park. There must be dozens of lakes, large and small, within a twenty-mile radius of Ely. This was the trip of a lifetime for scouts aged 12 to 15. Our four camp councilors already knew a lot about taking boys on canoe trips. There were about twelve of us scouts, and we were each expected to do our share of the work. We took a bus to Ely, way north of Duluth, and then transferred all our stuff to a couple of smaller vans, one of which pulled a trailer with canoe racks. We made our way to the camping outfitters and rented several aluminum canoes. We also acquired a large pile of supplies, in various carrying bags, which included rented camping equipment, our canvas tents, cooking pots and lots of food.

This was an exploration of the wildest, most pristine territory I had ever seen. There was a launch area at the edge of the lake next to Ely, and many canoers from everywhere were using it. The four men in charge of our bunch knew where we were going over the course of our seven-day trip. The maps were very clear and detailed, and luckily there were a lot of signs posted everywhere so people could see where they were. We learned from the signs that the portage to Lake Whatever was 1.1 miles down this path. We (three of us at a time) all learned how to carry a canoe over our heads while walking down a twisty dirt path that wound around trees, bushes, and big boulders. I knew what portaging meant, but I was not prepared for how much muscle power it entailed. The men with us were quite athletic and could carry most of the gear and bags of supplies without too much effort. All the boys had to carry their own sleeping bags and backpacks while carrying their canoes. We must have done at least two portages each day. A portage sign that read 300 yards to the next lake was always welcome. Everyone became a lot more fit on that trip.

There were many fishermen and fisherwomen out on the water. Some of them were catching really big northerns, walleyes, and other game fish. We scouts had already been told that we wouldn’t be doing any fishing this trip. (Too much extra equipment would be needed.) Every day, we would try to keep to the schedule the planners had in mind. We worked hard to win the distance we had to cover. The food was basic, but good, with some fresh things that we ate up the first few days. Then, cans and packages of dehydrated foods were all we had left. I learned during the week that powdered scrambled eggs cooked over the fire in the wilderness tasted much better if we made sure nearly all of the water added to the mix was cooked off before eating the eggs.

We saw lots of fascinating, true wildlife of all sizes: large (e.g. black and brown bears, elk, moose, deer), many medium-sized animals (like badgers, racoons, and bob cats) and small ones (chipmunks, squirrels, bunnies, mice). All the animals were used to seeing people, but reluctant to stay around. We were exhausted, but thrilled, as we went from place to place. Every day, as the sun started to get low in the sky, we would choose an island to camp on. There were dozens around. We got good at setting up our tents and building our campfires, cooking what we needed before diving into our sleeping bags for the night. Sometimes we would sing campfire songs and talk about what had happened that day, such as the time our three-scout canoe came within four feet of a brown bear swimming between islands. He saw us and whoofed at us, but couldn’t do anything threatening because he was too busy swimming. One guy whacked his paddle on the water in the bear’s direction, but a counselor nearby yelled to let him be.

We all got very used to each other, and we bonded in varying degrees. Some people tended to be slackers, others turned into leader-types. Some kids were known to be stronger, others were clumsier, but we all liked each other. Littler kids were not expected to be able to do too much, and we worked as a wordless team to make sure everyone stayed healthy. We all survived unscathed. We had a snipe hunt once, after which everyone knew those hunts were just jokes to trick the younger kids. No one caught any snipe, although we were told that they were a very quick bird that often got away.

Not all canoe and water experiences were on lakes. There was one fifteen-minute thrill ride that involved white water on a river. Our trip planners knew about a small river that led from one lake to another on their route. They decided that this stretch was safe enough for all of us to take. It saved us a portage, and it was rapid enough to provide a little heart-acceleration for first-timers like me. I was in the front end of a canoe, and one of the counselors who was an experienced canoeist was in the back (steering) end, with some supply bags in the middle. I was really nervous as we got into the fast water of the river, and he smiled encouragingly at me, reminding me that I should watch for rocks. I did not do as well as I should have, but I was a greenhorn, after all, and had never been charged with this kind of responsibility. My job entailed using my paddle to push us away from rocks—some were boldly sticking out of the water; others lurked just under the surface. I was poised with my paddle, waiting for the chance to deflect the front of the canoe away from the black jagged stones in front of us, but I was often too slow on the draw to make it work. Without warning, a rock would suddenly strike the bottom of the canoe right under where I was kneeling. Every time, I was amazed that it didn’t tear a hole in the bottom. Those aluminum canoes were built to flex, and we would breeze on down the river nearly instantly. I got a little better at avoiding the worst rocks as we progressed downstream, surrounded by white water, and finally, after several tense minutes, the river took a bend to the left and widened out by several feet, calming the fast water into a much lazier flow pattern. The young man in the back of my canoe (who could have been a gymnast) had his hands full the whole ride down and probably saved us from swamping about a dozen times. I was very impressed and thanked him for saving us. I was also glad we didn’t lose any of the gear, still nestled in the middle of the canoe.

I was asked to bring my trumpet to use in my role as the bugler for the troop. (I didn’t want to lug its case around, so I carried the horn inside my pillow case, using the pillow as a protective cushion.). Early every morning, I was awakened by one of the counselors to play Reveille to wake everyone up. I was a pretty good trumpet player by then, having gone through three years of middle school band. Sometimes, that early, I would not be in very good shape to play yet, and the notes came out sour. More than once a suddenly awakened counselor would call out, “Somebody wake up the bugler!” Anyway, my loud and harsh sounds would always get everyone moving, even if the notes were not well played.

One evening, the troop was getting ready to turn in, and the dusky lighting on the sunset horizon was as lovely as any calendar photograph or artist’s painting. I decided to play my trumpet for a little while. I was able to figure out in my head what notes and fingerings I needed to play one of my favorite songs: Over the Rainbow. After I started playing, I was amazed by the way those notes could carry across the water and through the trees and hills, each note echoing on for at least two seconds. The reverberation there was a real thrill to hear. I played through the whole song twice. My compatriots really liked hearing it, and I can only assume that other folks within a couple of miles didn’t mind it either. Perhaps, lodged in the memories of a couple of dozen fisher people and other travelers in that neck of the woods there remains the surprise of faintly hearing that soaring melody floating through the air at dusk in the north woods of Minnesota.

Further, the entire population of wildlife within earshot must have lifted their heads and perked up their ears, hearing something remarkably different. Not a threat, just a surprising departure from the sounds they already knew well. I like to think it might have done everyone with ears some real good for a little while. [My wilderness trumpeting’s origins are explained in more detail in the following chapter, My Musical Beginnings.]

The next morning, I got up early for a short walk around our island The thick underbrush tried to trip me at every turn. I came across a wide variety of wild birds who were already up, making a whole lot of joyous noise. But then I was totally surprised to see a pair of white cockatoos flying by who spotted a human (me) and came right over to a very close branch. They were excited to see me, in their way, bobbing around and staring at me with curiosity. I gathered that they were familiar with people, but not lately. They must have escaped from somebody’s open window. They looked healthy and happy, fending for themselves, and they had each other, too, after all. I was really pleased they had come over for that short hello. Other birds were less daring, probably thinking of me as a suspicious stranger in their world, while, it seemed to me, the cockatoos and I liked each other.

At the end of the week, all our canoes, equipment and canoeists arrived back at the boat landing near Ely. It was already quite dusky, so we could not have our final time of singing around the campfire. In the morning, the canoes and other rented gear were returned to the outfitters, and all the counselors and scouts jumped onto the school bus with their sleeping bags and backpacks and headed back to the Twin Cities, about five hours away. The whole trip probably left some vivid, treasured memories for us all. It must have made a lasting impression on me, because, look at me now: at 79 years old, I’m still fondly reminiscing about it.

MY MUSICAL BEGINNINGS

Within the world of music, which was continually evolving inside me (as I mentioned before), I took piano lessons for six months when I was six years old. I was too squirrely and uncooperative to do well, which was a disappointment to my mother, who thought I showed promise. I made up for it by learning a lot about piano on my own. I could read music at an intermediate level when I entered college. I finally took real lessons again during my junior year at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where I picked up important skills that I had skipped over during my self-training years.

Another factor that was huge for me was picking up the trumpet. I started cold in seventh grade at Jefferson Junior High (now an elementary school) in the beginner's band. Mr. Fischer was a fine teacher to whom I owe a lot in my personal development as a musician. Our family had a cornet that Dad and step-mom Evelyn had bought for the older boys, but I was the only one who took an interest in it. Mr. Fischer's work paid off, and by the time I reached the high school band during my sophomore year at West High School (in Uptown in Minneapolis), I had become the leader of the first trumpet section. That was a special place to be, and I enjoyed showing off a little.

I spent three years at Jefferson Junior High, grades 7-9. It was much bigger than my grade school, Douglas, named after Stephen A. Douglas, who had a famous outdoor debate with Abraham Lincoln. It was about twice as far to walk there from our home on Humboldt Avenue, but I was bigger and stronger then, and it turned out to be pretty routine. This school building had a huge bomb and bad weather basement which was big enough for the whole student population to fit in, if necessary. The floor was covered with sand, and took up nearly the whole footprint of the school building. Most students never got to see it though. It was off limits in general, but sometimes a few of my friends and I went down those special stairs to look around. The janitor break room was down there and we'd see workers who we knew on sight, and they didn't care if some kids were just curious about it.

I got to know a whole crowd of new people there, and a few old friends from Douglas would turn up in the halls sometimes. Two interesting things I remember about Jefferson, besides the band experience which was very rewarding for me. Once there was a real fire in the wood shop room. Somehow the wood chips and shavings in the saw machine's waste bin caught fire and it produced enough smoke to be visible in the hallways. The wood shop teacher pulled the fire alarm for the school, and had the office staff call in the city fire department. I recall well how all the students heard that dreaded alarm go off; it always made us just during fire drills. We'd drop everything and head down the closest stairway and out closest door. Each class would stay together. Once all one thousand of us were outside on the sidewalk, basically loading the sidewalk around the whole block, our ears perked to the sound of sirens in the distance. Everyone started to jump up and down, since most of us did not know until then that was not a fire drill. Many of the guys were waving as the trucks noisily rounded the corner to pull up by the side of the building nearest the wood shop. Most of them were yelling, “Let it burn!!” which made all the firemen laugh and wave at us. But they still put out the small fire in about ten minutes.

The other thing that happened was a crazy accident in basic science class (likely one of several over time). Our science teacher had a second job at a chemical supply business. One day, for educational purposes, he brought to school a big bottle of actual mercury, about as large as a quart-size jar of mayonnaise. That bottle was amazingly heavy, like seven pounds or so. The teacher passed it around the classroom for all five of his science classes that day. Everyone was impressed and surprised by how hefty it felt. One hotshot reckless showoff in the last class tried to toss it from hand to hand to impress his classmates, in spite of having been warned to be extra careful with it, since it was worth $400 (probably about $4000 today). Of course the inevitable happened: the glass bottle slipped off his hand and shattered on the classroom floor. I regret I was not in that particular class period that day, but I heard the story retold repeatedly by those who were actually there. The teacher was furious and yelled lots of colorful swear words that some of the kids had never heard before. The showoff boy was railed against repeatedly. Several students were recruited to attempt to scoop up the very slippery shiny fluid with card stock paper and dump it into a big plastic bowl the teacher found. “Don't let any of it get on your skin!” he warned. People already knew that mercury was toxic. The silver stuff ran everywhere and many students had to get out of the way. Desks were shoved around and noble efforts were made to corral every drop. After about 15 minutes, virtually all of it was collected from the floor. This was a terrible thing to have happen to the teacher, who was a fun teacher almost all the time. I heard the supply company was not at all pleased.

I attended West High School at 28th Street and Hennepin Avenue during my sophomore year, in 1962. West High was built sometime around 1900 and has since been torn down. About three blocks away there was an old indoor skating rink with bleachers on three sides called the Minneapolis Arena. It seated about 5000+ viewers. (After the rink was torn down, the Lagoon Theater and the Cub Foods store were built in that spot.) It was used a lot during hockey season for high school games, and I think it may have been a public rink during other times of the year. It was certainly convenient for West High students to attend any of the hockey games scheduled there. I remember being at a game during the high school playoff series toward the end of winter. West had a pretty lousy team that year but was lucky to face Vocational High school as their first-round opponent in the tournament. Vocational, the city's smallest school, was widely known to have terrible teams for all sports, so West's chances were very good. During the game, our clueless band director, there in the crowd, retrieved a wayward puck from the seats near him and almost threw it back onto the ice. The teams were already under way with another puck in play, so that would have been a really bad idea. Just about everyone was watching him and not the action on the ice, and called out collectively, “NO!” The band director caught himself just in time, standing with his arm cocked and ready to throw. His smile disappeared as he finally saw that the players were already skating after another puck. West's team did well that night, winning 11-1. When Vocational scored that single goal, the rest of the team and the 90 or so Vocational fans acted super happy for some reason. The guy who scored was patted on the back over and over by all his teammates. West played their next game a few days later and lost badly. Everyone at school knew by then that the goal Vocational was celebrating so wildly earlier was the only goal scored by Vocational all season.

In the summer of 1962, just before the start of my junior year, our family moved from west Minneapolis to a house on Edmund Boulevard next to the Mississippi River, six blocks south of Lake Street. My new high school, Minnehaha Academy, was a private school four blocks away from our new house. It was a religious school, affiliated with the Covenant Church, which was much more conservative and fundamentalist than Hennepin Avenue Methodist, the church our family attended.

The best part of Minnehaha Academy for me was the remarkable high school band. It was a huge step into prime time for me. I thought I was pretty good when I arrived there, but I was surprised by how much more advanced the repertoire was. I took my place amidst the second trumpet section and learned music by quantum leaps thereafter. It was very exciting to be part of this band. Everyone was really serious about sounding polished and unified. Miss Foote was a great conductor who managed to take this school band to a level of cohesiveness and musicality that was way beyond what I had experienced before. She suggested that I get a better instrument than my original cornet, which improved my tone quality noticeably. Each autumn, during football season, the band learned quite a few rather complex marching patterns on the football field. It was tricky for me and my band-mates to play music while marching around, but we managed well enough after we got the hang of it. We were often rewarded with applause and cheers at half-time from the crowd, even when we played for other schools. I remember an incident when we were performing for a home game. We did our marching patterns for a while, then ended up in rows behind our group of cheer-leaders, playing a longer tune as the cheer leaders did some coordinated spins. When the routine came to an end, our drum section stopped, too. Then, like falling dominos, the band members also dropped out. None of this was planned-just spontaneous reactions. The song still had one minute to go, so I kept playing; I knew we were not supposed to just give up on the song quite yet. The cheer leaders picked up their standard prance-in-place routine as I played on as a soloist. After several seconds the band picked up the song again and we all finished together. When we had band class the next morning, Miss Foote talked about the weird mix-up on the field. “When the cheer leaders finished their routine, the drummers quit playing. Then everybody else followed them. Warren was the only one smart enough to keep the tune going. Good thing we have at least one leader who uses his head. Never stop playing until the song is over!”

By the time I graduated high school, I had evolved into the leader of the trumpet section and the whole brass section. I garnered a lot of compliments, which helped my self-esteem at an awkward time in my teen years. The band performed on a couple of tours around the Midwest (churches and other religious schools), and I was even chosen to be the leader of the school's trumpet trio, which performed by ourselves during the band concerts on the tours. And it is a warm memory for me to think about how six self-confident players from the band, section leaders all, with me as the leader, could form a really energizing pep band for sporting events. We would sit in the corner of the gym in the bleachers during pep fests at school, where the sound would project like crazy throughout the whole room, and play our hearts out. We all knew what we were doing and enjoyed showing off. The instrumentation was trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, trombone, French horn and snare drum. All the following week, people in the halls told us we sounded really good.

When I started attending the University of Minnesota the following fall, I was blown away by how well some of my fellow students could play. I was intimidated and felt that I could not compete at this level. I decided to move away from the trumpet (with mildly regrets) and into the area of music that really held my interest on a 'primal' level: composition. It is my main field of interest even today, as a retiree. My trumpet was much later put to good use by our son Jonathan, who played it well. He made it into the concert band as a junior in high school. My wife Patty and I bought him an even better trumpet in the middle of that year.

HIGH SCHOOL LIFE

Minnehaha Academy, despite being socially conservative, did condone several high school social events, and I attended both my junior and senior year proms. During junior year, another guy drove to and from the event for our double-dating foursome It was awkward and tense for all of us mid-teens, but the other three in the car were more relaxed than me. As an introvert who was inexperienced with girls, I had a lot of trouble coming up with anything at all to say. Tongue-tied in the extreme. The event was a beautiful banquet at a hotel in St. Paul. We guys rented tuxes and the girls had on wonderful rented gowns that were quite intimidating. My parents were alarmed by how much it cost to attend. The senior prom was held at the school cafeteria; it was less expensive and more casual. (I was confident enough in my driving skills to be the driver that year.) There was musical entertainment, and students invented and performed funny skits. As a fundamentalist protestant school, one thing that was missing at Minnehaha Academy proms was this: No one ever danced. (Dancing was considered immoral.) Social events for my church youth group at Hennepin Methodist Church did include dancing. The girls at my school were amazed and alarmed when they heard that dancing was accepted at my church-sponsored gatherings.

It was hard for me to fit in well with all my classmates. I felt “out of it” a lot of the time. Some guys only tolerated me even though I worked at trying to fit in, with limited success. But I did have enough friends to make it through the day. I was not known as a humorist, but I remember one time I came up with a good line when several of the boys were talking with one student in the lunchroom who had just returned from a week off because of a strange surgery. Due to some unexpected malady, he needed to have one of his testicles removed. Of course, this led to some off-color teasing. One friend reminded the guy that he shouldn't worry, though-he'll still be able to have kids later. I quickly added, “But only half as many.” This brought on a burst of laughter from everyone and a bit of satisfaction for me.

During the summers while in high school, I followed my brothers' tradition of working at the Minneapolis Park Board refectories. I sold popcorn, ice cream cones, and hot dogs at Lake Calhoun, Minnehaha Park, and (towards the end of my “career”), Lake Nokomis. During the late spring between my first two years in college, I called the Park Board boss of all the refectories, wondering about whether I could work at Lake Nokomis again. He surprised me with the news that he wanted me to be the manager at that location. My final year as a food seller was the summer of 1965, at a slightly increased rate of pay and additional responsibilities: keeping track of the income and inventory, and preparing deposits for the bank, which were picked up nightly by a park police squad car.

High school life included occasionally going on dates with girls. During my senior year, after passing my driver's test, I was lucky enough to be granted permission to start driving the family's second car, Evelyn's old 1954 Chevy. It was a nice car for me, and it allowed me to date a girl I knew from the “University of Life” youth group at Hennepin Church. Midnight was the time I had to be home, no matter what (Evelyn's rules). I found that I could drop off my friend at her house near Kenwood Park (my old neighborhood), and speed home to Edmund Boulevard in just under fifteen minutes. Traffic was light, and I knew the quickest route. I generally made it back by midnight, if the stop lights cooperated.

A few other memories of the Edmund Boulevard house stand out to me. It was a comfortable house, more average-sized than the Kenwood house, and quite a bit newer-made in perhaps 1945 or 1950. James lived there for a couple of years before going off to grad school in NYC. It had three bedrooms on the second floor, one for my parents, one for me and one that served as a home office.

I liked to keep fit by jogging around the block after supper, sometimes a bit late. One evening, I came upon a rough section of sidewalk that I couldn't see in the dark. I fell head over heels and limped home to report that I had hurt my ankle. Dad diagnosed a cracked angle bone.

At a clinic the next day, my whole ankle and foot were put into a plaster cast. For at least a month, I had to walk everywhere with that cast on, including all my classes at school. No fun.

Perhaps two years after we moved to Edmund Boulevard, a huge spring wind storm blew through, taking down our lovely tall maple tree in front of the house. This was one of the main features that drew Evelyn to his house when they were house hunting. She was distraught and deeply sad about this lost tree for many months afterwards. There was a shorter tree in the front yard that stayed up in the wind, and this tree grew into a handsome maple after a few years, which helped Evelyn feel better.

Two near-emergencies happened at the house during my time there. Once, I was reading in the basement rec room while my parents were outside working in the garden. The gas clothes dryer was on, but I ignored it…until it suddenly went 'wham'! I ran to the laundry room to check it out. Flames were curling out of the top by the filter slot. Not normal! I had not used the dryer before, but after about six seconds I found the sliding knob that controlled how long it was to run. I slid the knob all the way back to zero and the whole machine turned off-including the tumbler and the gas feed. That was a relief-no more flames and no more dangerous heat. I ran outside and told Dad and Mom that the dryer had caught fire, but it was now off altogether. They came in, felt how hot the top had become, and worried about it, considering options. Two days later, I was present when a professional repairman arrived to examine it. He wondered if the gas was leaking into an area where it was not supposed to be. With Dad and me watching, he cautiously turned the dryer on again. The tumbler started, and the gas turned on and ignited as normal. As the worker bent over to see if he could smell any leaking gas, the machine suddenly went “whump!” (a slightly different sound this time). The same wild, out-of-place flames shot up and hit him in the face briefly. He quickly turned the machine off the same way I had, while Dad gave him a wet washcloth to wipe his face with. His eyebrows were singed, but there were no burns. A new part was ordered, and the repairs were completed in about a week, by the same repair guy.

A couple of years later, it was water rather than fire that caused a household emergency. One night, as I was headed upstairs to bed, I noticed a slow drip coming from the pipe leading to the cold water tap for the bathroom sink on the first floor. My parents were already asleep. I put a rag around the pipe and a bowl underneath it. I left a note for Dad to have a look at it in the morning. At about 7:00 AM, a little before I had to get up for school, I heard a screech from Evelyn down in the kitchen. “Wilford! Come quick!” We both ran down the stairs to find the whole kitchen floor covered with water half an inch deep. A glance at the bathroom sink next to the kitchen showed us that the slow drip had turned into a complete line break, with water spraying down from the pipe. Dad raced to the basement and turned off the water pipes for the whole house. Mom was really flipped out about the potential damage to the floor as well as the basement, where some of the water had seeped down. Apparently, the pipe had burst just a few minutes before Mom entered the kitchen. Dad directed us to scoop up the water with plastic food storage boxes and dump it into the sink. After about ten minutes of work, most of the water had been removed from the linoleum floor. We got out the rag box and wiped up whatever water we could find anywhere. Dad read the note I had left while Mom turned her ire toward me. How could I let that happen? We went into the basement where some of the water had filtered down through the floor into the furnace's hot air heating ducts. The sides and bottoms of the heat ducts (attached to the basement ceiling) were made of cheap material and the water had caused them to warp and wrinkle noticeably. (It was spring so they were not in use at the time.) Mom thought they looked awful and couldn't believe the damage that had happened, probably because of my negligence. Dad was more conciliatory and told me it could have happened to anyone. There was no way for me to know that the slow leak I had noticed the night before would escalate into a burst pipe. Mom went off to work with Dad, but unexpectedly returned home at lunch when I was home from school, and told me she was sorry that she acted so angrily. I gather Dad and Mom had talked this over on the way to work. I was pleased that Evelyn was no longer quite so hostile to me. I had done what I thought was right at the time. With the shut-off valve for the bathroom sink turned off, the house was mostly back to normal. The broken pipe got replaced a couple of days later by a plumber Dad knew. The heating ducts along the basement ceiling soon dried out and returned basically to their original condition. There was no need to replace them.

* * * * *

For the last few years before the move from Humboldt Avenue, Mom had discontinued the live-in maids system and hired an African American lady who came to our house to clean once a week. This worked out well as we boys got bigger, more self-reliant, and able to take care of most of our own cleaning. Her name was Lucinda, and she was quite overweight, but managed to do the housecleaning thoroughly over the course of the day. When our family moved to the Edmund Boulevard house, Lucinda continued her weekly housekeeping visits. She and I got along quite well. She was frequently at home alone with me after school until Dad and Mom came back from work about 5:30 pm. Lucinda took care of all the normal house cleaning projects, and often lots of little things, too. One time I noticed that our bay windows in front (which consisted of many little panes of glass about 8” x 6”) had developed some obvious streaks after she had dusted them off. I asked if that was how they were supposed to be, and she was totally surprised to see the streaks so clearly once the sun hit them at different angle. “I better get out the Windex,” she told me. An hour later, I wandered through the living room again and she pointed to the windows. I was surprised. What a transformation! They were now spotless and streak-free. “They're perfect!” I told her. She was pleased to hear that.

I seldom commented on what she was doing. I didn't really pay much attention at all. But I'm very glad I told her the windows were perfect that time, considering what happened later that year when she bid us goodbye for the last time. Lucinda had grown older, weaker, and less able, so Evelyn had decided to “let her go” at the end of Fall. The two women agreed that it was harder for Lucinda to come to the new house (which was farther away) and that they should draw the cleaning visits to an end.

This situation turned out to be a life lesson for me, as a casual witness-a lesson in diplomacy. Things were already settled between Evelyn and Lucinda, and Lucinda had gotten a little send-off bonus. As they spoke at the front door, with her husband waiting in the car in front and both Dad and me watching and smiling cordially, Mom told her, “Thanks for all the years you helped us out.” She answered, “It's been a pleasure working for you. Thanks so much. And yes, it's getting to be a little far for me to come.” Ever the professional decision-maker and manager of her employees at work, Evelyn never wanted any inaccuracies to linger in a discussion. She clarified, “And your work has been slipping a little.” Lucinda was wounded, turned, and left with a simple, “Bye.” As the door closed, I spoke up first. “You didn't need to say that!” I told her. Dad was surprised with her and chimed in, “No!” Mom immediately looked contrite and acknowledged her error in judgement. It was an enlightening experience for me; this was clearly not a very diplomatic way to handle Lucinda's last day.

As time went by, Evelyn mellowed and worked at trying to make life more pleasant for me. When I was 17 years old, Dad, Mom and I took a car trip right after school was out in the spring. We travelled through southern Ontario, taking in historical family landmarks, then drove on to New York state. We visited Niagara Falls, Fort Ticonderoga, and other tourist draws throughout New England as we motored on to Betty and Murray's new home in Fredericton, New Brunswick. For a week, I stayed with them while Dad and Mom drove on to a sea island hotel off the coast. Murray had told them that the colorful nature of North Atlantic fishing life was on display there. For me it was a treat because I got reacquainted with my nieces Linda (whom I had known in Minneapolis when she was very little) and Jennifer, then ages 10 and 6. Sweet, entertaining kids. An exciting time each day was Murray's return from work, when he often did something active with us all, like throwing the frisbee around. It was a fun trip for me.

After graduation from high school in 1964, my days at the Edmund Boulevard house wrapped up as I went off to college. I stayed two more summers there, and lived in my own places thereafter. My parents became empty-nesters.

DULUTH

My first experience of living away from home was when I went off to college at the University of Minnesota in Duluth, in the fall of 1964. My freshman and sophomore years were spent there, while summers were back home in Minneapolis. I learned a lot about the world in those couple of years. Dad and Evelyn were good enough to allow me to bring the family's 1954 Chevrolet with me to Duluth; it made life much more workable for me while I was at school.

During my freshman year, I roomed at a home that was walking distance to the UMD campus with a couple of other young college students. Pleasant guys. The owners had rules that called for some adjustments for me. The renters were usually not allowed to take showers in the house. The only place a shower/tub was installed was in their first-floor bathroom. The owners told me that the other students always showered at the UMD athletic department, since they were on various athletic teams. I had no access to those showers because I was not involved in any sports. I set up an arrangement with the owners to use their shower once a week when they went off to Sunday night church. That span of time was also the only time I was permitted to play my console stereo record player that I brought with me from Minneapolis. It was set up in their basement-the only place where there was space for it. I shared my room on the second floor with a roommate, and there was no space for anything big. I played my records after my shower for about an hour on Sunday nights.

During my second year at UMD, I moved to a different place, where I rented a room with some other students on the second floor of a family home. I ended up spending virtually no time at this new place. I preferred to live with my girlfriend, Doris. Doris and I rented a small, inexpensive place of our own on the third floor of a rooming house near downtown Duluth. This kind of arrangement was strictly off-limits according to my parents' rules, so I had to keep it secret. We later moved to a place along East Superior Street, closer to campus.

An odd event happened while Doris and I were living on Superior Street and both attending UMD. The people from whom I was renting the parent-sanctioned residence reported me to Wilford and Evelyn. I only occasionally dropped in there to pick up my mail. I was definitely breaking the rules. My leaving home for the first time gave me a feeling of emancipation I never thought I would experience, and my relationship with Doris was a wonderful next step. When my parents found out that I was not living in the residence they were paying for, they began to wonder about whether I was still in school. They called Robert one evening, revealing that they were planning to drive up to Duluth the next morning to check on me. Why was I living at a different address? Was I just pretending to be in school?

I had no phone, so Robert had no way to reach me. Nobly, he and a friend drove from Madison, Wisconsin to Duluth overnight to give me a heads up. My entire funding for college may have been at stake. They arrived in the early morning, a couple of hours before our parents were likely to show up. Doris and I hurriedly rearranged the space to make it appear that a male roommate lived there with me. She rushed off to a friend's house for a while. I talked a guy I knew into sitting at the kitchen table before my parents turned up. I introduced him as my roommate, and we all chatted for a while. My anxious parents were soon reassured that I was still attending classes at UMD, while choosing to live in a different apartment. My “roommate,” a member of the UMD theater crowd, did a convincing job and soon left to “get someplace.” My parents and I visited for a while. (“What a surprise! What's up? Well, I've got a test on Monday that I need to study for.”) Then they left and drove back home to Minneapolis. Nothing bad came of this near disaster, thanks to Robert's quick thinking and selfless contribution of time on the road, sharing the driving with his buddy. I am still grateful for his rescue. I told my parents about my relationship with Doris a few months later.

* * * * *

Duluth was a pretty city to live in, but it got really cold in the winters. Occasionally I had a terrible time making it across the frozen tundra to get to the campus buildings. The temps would be well below zero with wind chills sometimes pushing minus 50 degrees F. People had to dress absurdly warmly and cover their faces to protect them from the winds. In my case, on my treks to campus, besides wrapping a heavy scarf around my face, I needed to hold up my briefcase to block the deadly wind. Driving in the winter in Duluth is always risky because many of the streets are built on the hillsides with several back streets unnaturally steep. Some streets are abandoned during the winter due to the impossibility of driving on them. One time I turned onto a downhill street that was so slippery that I skidded through six intersections, block after block, until I reached a main street with traffic crossing in both directions. The first six intersections had no cross traffic as I whizzed by, basically out of control. But when I approached Superior Street, the main drag, I had to steer directly up onto a tall snow pile by the corner to bring the car to a stop. Those piles left by the snow plow were about three feet higher than the car. I felt lucky to be able to arrest my skidding. I did everything I could to control the car on the way downhill, including pumping my car brakes over and over, which had no impact whatsoever.

Winters in Duluth can have their bright spots, too. After one of Duluth's heavy snowstorms, in front of the Old Main building at UMD, I watched a crazy and amusing event unfold. As a man came out of the building to walk to his car, a group of five burly and athletic students figured out he was headed for a small foreign car parked by the curb nearby. The five thought it would be fun to pull a trick on him. They made it to his car ten seconds before he did, and collectively lifted the whole back end of it off the ground. Everyone guessed that the guy was not going anywhere until they let the car back down. The driver glanced over and smiled faintly. Then he calmly took out his key, unlocked the door, climbed into the seat, started the car, put it in gear, spun the steering wheel….and drove off. All five of the guys had to suddenly let go, and three of them tumbled harmlessly into the snow in the street and on the bank. “What the f…?” they all sputtered. The big surprise was due to something that was not very common back in the 1960s: This car had front-wheel drive. For some reason, I fell in with the theater crowd at UMD and formed several good friendships with student actors. Many of the plays being performed at colleges across the country were also mounted at UMD, including Death of a Salesman, A Street Car Named Desire, Three Penny Opera and other popular musicals, and some of Strindberg's plays. I was even pressed into a walk-on role (without any lines) in a show. I played a soldier in uniform back from a war, pushing a wounded, wheel-chair-bound colleague across the stage for a minute.

No Exit, a tense, existential, bleak play by Sartre, was also performed. The ending of the play was memorable because the director deemed it useful and dramatic to suddenly turn off all the lights on the stage and throughout the theater itself after the last line was spoken. The feeling of there being “No Exit” for anyone was driven home sharply-except, of course, (as the reviewer in the student newspaper humorously pointed out later) for the room's many EXIT signs, which remained lit up. (“Oh, no! No exit!” we all felt to our cores. “Wait a minute! There's one there…and over there, and, oh, back there. Well, that's a relief.”)

During my first two years of college in Duluth, I learned a great deal about music theory, which was very helpful to me. I also took all the required courses for a liberal arts degree (sciences, math, history, social studies, etc.). I found these less interesting than my music courses, although I did enjoy a creative writing course. I remember sitting in a lecture hall with a couple hundred history students when, just a few days before finals week, our professor announced a reminder about our required final projects. “If you haven't turned in your final project yet, it's just about too late.” I knew about the project, which called for library research, and I had been whipping mine together already. About six members of the football team, who always sat in a row together, all gasped at the same time, looking at each other with utter and complete surprise. The teacher rolled his eyes and continued, “Yes, you know about this. It's right on the first page of the course outline, under requirements.” Many students hurried to find that page in their notebooks, read for a few seconds, and all groaned together. Welcome to college, everyone.

The music department at UMD was good, but it focused entirely on classical music. Jazz or other non-classical styles were frowned upon. There were many very capable musicians with whom I became acquainted during my music studies. I was able to recruit some of them for student performances of my music a few times, which was a real thrill for me. Some of these players already had been hired to perform with the Duluth Symphony Orchestra, even though they were still undergrad students. I was really interested in composition by then and picked up essential information in school that paid off later, as I learned how to write music. I also learned how to copy out the parts for the musicians (by hand, painstakingly-this was before computers). Arranging enough time for page turns was always a complication.

The college music scene was a nice place for me to be and I made several long-term friends there. My main music theory teacher was a fine pianist who performed a very difficult piano concerto by Dmitri Kabalevsky, backed capably by the UMD student orchestra. I was really impressed.

Since I had already picked up some good general knowledge about music, (especially classical and jazz styles), I decided to join the volunteer radio staff for the student public radio station, KUMD. (This was way before the formation of National Public Radio.) The student hosts each had their own shows and selected records within their preferred styles of music. I hosted a one-hour show on Wednesdays at suppertime that featured classical music-and some other surprises I liked to sneak in. There were quite a few listeners because there were no other classical music stations available, except for one that was hard to tune in, many miles away in central Wisconsin. In addition to my regular time slot, I put in an extra shift on the afternoon of Thanksgiving Day during my freshman year. The station manager, a faculty member, had told all of us, “Now, don't leave the studio for a drink of water or something without propping the door open. It will swing shut on you, and lock.” Guess what? That's exactly what happened to me that day. I forgot to block it, it locked up tight, and I had to go hunting for the student janitor-the only one around with a key to that door. It took quite a while to find him. But I did get back in, after about 15 minutes of the radio listeners hearing the “click-swish, click-swish” of the needle at the end of the symphonic record I had left playing. Another time, when I subbed for a guy on a night shift for an hour before sign-off, I played a jazz record by Charlie Mingus. The final track of the LP was a very jumpy tune called Haitian Fight Song. I changed the turntable speed as a joke, moving the setting to 45rpm for just that piece. It sounded crazy fast and very exciting, with all the players doing their thing at impossible speeds. When it was over, I did tell the listeners that I had moved the setting to 45 rpm to “save time”. The next day, a couple of people told me in the hallway that hearing that tune was a pretty cool surprise.

During my years at UMD, I often joined a handful of other students in demonstrations protesting the war in Viet Nam. Only a small handful of student protestors participated, while larger crowds of red-neck students taunted and laughed at us. It was not comfortable. Following one demonstration, an undercover FBI agent interviewed me, one-on-one. This was 1965, and he was trying to gather information about some meetings across the bay in Superior, Wisconsin, where plans to promote communism were apparently underway. The assumption was that people who were opposed to the war in Viet Nam must love communism. I was able to correct the investigator, with assurances that I knew nothing about any special meetings and that all of our protest group members “hated communism.” Soon after that, the anti-war movement really took off across the country, and for years there were protests staged everywhere until the war finally ended in 1975.

The student center at UMD was the venue where major performances took place. (The student playhouse/theater at the time was too small for events that featured nationally known musicians.) I was able to attend some memorable concerts there, including appearances by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, and various folk acts. (Right before one performance, I remember sitting with friends after supper in the hallway outside the main door to the student center. One of us was singing and playing the guitar. She suddenly stopped her song and kept repeating the G chord over and over, still in rhythm. The rest of us turned around to see what was distracting her. Judy Collins, carrying her guitar, walked right by us into the main room.) I also attended an insane speech by right-wing white supremacist George Lincoln Rockwell (a very controversial guest to invite). He was really scary.

After finishing sophomore year in 1966, Doris and I got married in a little outdoor ceremony in August. With about 25 friends, we said our vows right beside Lake Superior, just across the road from Doris' family's house a few miles up the shore from Duluth. My brother James, an ordained Methodist minister, officiated. Right afterward, we all had an amazing feast at Doris' house prepared by many helpful volunteers.

RETURN TO MINNEAPOLIS

I transferred to the University of Minnesota's main campus in early fall. My new wife and I rented a small second-floor apartment in southeast Minneapolis, across from a fire station. My parents allowed me to move the family's old upright piano (bought in Canada before I was born) from the rec room at the Edmund Boulevard house to our apartment. When the movers arrived at our new place, they assessed the situation: a tight turn at the bottom of a narrow, rickety stairway to the second floor. It took them ten seconds to decide that the move upstairs was impossible. I reluctantly agreed that the piano could be placed on the first-floor outdoor screened porch instead (on the other side of the first-floor tenant's living room). And that's where the piano stayed until we moved again in the spring. I played that piano regularly during our stay (especially when the guy downstairs was at work). After a while, whenever I sat down at the keyboard, about eight idle firemen across the street lined up chairs on the firehouse lawn to sit and listen. They liked what they heard and applauded me when I finished. It was pleasing to be “popular.”

Doris was quite pregnant by that fall, and we had a baby daughter, Catherine, born in November 1966, when I was 20 years old. As students at the University, we were signed up for the health plan they offered, so Catherine was born at the U of M Hospital, fully covered by insurance. In early 1967, we rented a first-floor apartment in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, near Cedar Avenue and 5th Street South, next to the U of M's west bank campus. (More about that old house later.) I occasionally tuned pianos while attending school full time. Doris took on a few part-time jobs, some related to animal care, especially dogs. We owned a couple of Great Danes, who soon became eleven Great Danes. We sold all the pups to people through the newspaper. We also had several cats in our two-room apartment, and at one time or another, we included a fox pup and a squirrel monkey as pets. The fox would laugh at us with his distinctive high barking yap from between the back-to-back couches. The monkey climbed all over everywhere whenever he was loose in our place. He especially liked to perch on the tops of doors. Putting him back into his cage involved speed and gloves.

MY SUMMER OF PART-TIME WORK

The year following Catherine's birth, Doris and I were exceedingly poor. I struggled to find any work to keep the rent paid and food on the table, piecing together a few jobs that paid hardly anything. I was still taking classes at the U, which complicated things even more.

In the spring and summer of 1967, my employment included working in a warehouse that shipped out big boxes of women's nylon stockings. (Each box held 66 dozen pairs.) The days when a rail car was pulled up in the back of the hosiery warehouse were heavy work days. That was when the warehouse guys (usually three of us) spent a few hours unloading boxes from the rail cars. The shipping of these nylons began in Yugoslavia, where they were made. They were transported by ocean freighters to the US. During the span of time I was an employee, I participated in emptying out three of these train cars filled to the ceiling with shipping boxes. We had to pile them high in the warehouse and keep the various sizes sorted. Some boxes had a full assortment of sizes, and they had to be kept separate. Our hosiery company then shipped out (by truck) nylon stockings to all the Osco Drug Stores across the country, and hundreds of other retail outlets. Truckers from all the major companies were always picking up shipments at our back door. One trucker got in big trouble by offering us workers bottles of whiskey at half the regular price. Obviously, someone had managed to swipe a crate of booze from some liquor warehouse and was trying to sell the ill-gotten goods on the sly.

Another part-time job I had was driving for Yellow Cab. Over time, I learned a lot about where everything was located within the city and the best routes to take to get there. I often worked at night and on occasion learned that I was driving the only Yellow Cab in the city at that time (very late at night). I once was asked to report to a hospital on the West Bank where I was to deliver a special medical bed to another hospital. The staff nurses knew how the parts of this dissembled bed would fit best in the trunk of a Yellow Cab. At the destination, I was asked to drive up to a certain entrance where staff people were waiting for me. At 2:00 A.M. in the morning, cab delivery was the quickest way to get this emergency equipment to the patient who needed it. I was paid by a special voucher that the hospitals and Yellow Cab used for this type of service.

This was the era of phone operators working downtown at the Northwestern Bell Telephone headquarters at all times of day and night. All were women. NW Bell had an arrangement with Yellow Cab to give its employees a free ride home when their shift ended at 11:00 PM. Payment was handled by special vouchers for these employees, too. About fifteen available Yellow Cabs would line up just before 11:00 outside the main door at NW Bell to wait for the flood of operators to swarm out. In a remarkable feat of organization, each cab received three or four women who all lived in the same general neighborhood. Some of the destinations were in rather far-away suburbs. The ladies all knew each other well and chatted up a storm during the ride to their homes. They were cheerful and happy to be done with work. They ignored me and talked about whatever subject they wanted to, and some subjects were occasionally off-color girl-talk. Everyone knew exactly where I should be turning to get to the next drop-off. I and all the others would wait and watch to see that the woman made it safely inside. Safety was a big deal for everyone, and I was happy to accommodate them. I think it was really smart for NW Bell to realize that if these women were going to want to work for them, they would have to be well taken care of after work.

If anyone met with any trouble (which never happened in my experience), I was the one with the instant connection with the authorities via my cab radio. The dispatchers were (and still are) in direct contact with the police by hot line all the time. Once I remember hearing a live car chase take place in the streets of Minneapolis with a cab driver as the source of info. Our dispatcher told everyone to stay off the air, while one cabby reported in (following from a safe distance) about where the robbery suspect's car was located right then. All of us could hear: “He just turned north toward downtown on Park Ave., now he's just passing Lake Street doing 60.” This info was passed on to the police instantly and many squad cars were involved in tracking the suspect. He got caught after about five minutes. Great to see cooperation like that. It's also true that cabbies need to have police backup once in a while, and the radio is always on. One time I drove by a major intersection in north Minneapolis well after 1:00 AM where a serious car wreck had just happened, with some injured victims lying on the street. I told my dispatcher the location and within about ten seconds, I heard the siren of a nearby patrol car racing to the scene.

Driving cab at night means that when closing time at all the bars happens (1:00 AM), many inebriated people need to take a cab home. Once I gave a ride to a sweet middle-age lady who gave me her address and in about ten seconds fell asleep. When I pulled up in front of her place, she woke herself up. I asked if this was where she lived. She looked out the window, smiled and said yes, and handed me the exact amount on the meter and plus a respectable tip. She must have taken that ride a few times before. I sometimes gave rides to the same people on different nights. One guy always told me the same story on the way home. “Yeah, my bride of ten years took off not long ago. She says I'm a hard-drinking man. Yeah, I guess that's true, that's what I am.” And so on.

At about midnight one night, I was dispatched to a duplex in near-north Minneapolis, where a 50-ish lady was talking with a friend out on the sidewalk. Apparently, the woman truly thought I had made a mistake with the address. “There's no one home here but a teen-age boy upstairs. And he wouldn't be calling for a cab.” In a few moments, the front porch door slowly opened and out came a tired-looking middle-aged woman, taking her time, who was dressed in a rather suggestive outfit. The women on the sidewalk kind of gasped and dropped their jaws. The teen boy looked out the window from the porch, saw the neighbors on the sidewalk, and instantly disappeared. The woman who had just come out of the house sauntered past them as casually as you please. She glanced up and quietly mumbled, “You two just mind your own f'kin' business.” She climbed into the back seat of my cab and off we went.

Once I picked up a rather confused old gentleman who didn't know where he was going. He was a nice guy in general, but totally disoriented. He said he could give me directions from landmarks he knew, but that proved to be a huge waste of time. “Go down Johnson Road here” and he'd gesture wildly with his hands. “But this is Broadway, sir” I answered. He'd looked surprised and told me “It IS? Well, it used to be called Johnson Road.” His long-term memories must have been more solid than current ones. We drove around for quite a while, and he showed me that he had “plenty of money, not to worry.” He flashed a wad of cash. Perhaps he had just been to the bank that day. He directed me towards a nearby suburb to see if he recognized any of those buildings. After about 45 minutes of random searching, he seemed to sober up a little and was able to remember the name of the man he was renting a room from. I stopped at a saloon to look up this man's name in the phone book beside the pay phone inside. This was the way things were done back then; no one had ever heard of a cell phone or the internet back then. I found the name of the old man's landlord, wrote down the address, came back out to the cab where he was still waiting patiently, and told him the address. “Yes!! That's it! That's where I live now. Thank you!” I drove back into town and ended up no more than three blocks from where I had first picked him up, nearly an hour earlier. He was contrite as we made our way up to the front door of his place. “Sorry, my memory isn't what it used to be. Thanks for taking care of me!” he told me sincerely. He handed me the money for the fare, which had climbed quite high by then. And he insisted on giving me a $75 tip (a huge amount to me).

Another time when I was working on Saturday during the day, the Yellow Cab dispatcher asked me, “How do you like dogs, driver?” I told him, “I like them fine; I've got some at home.” “How about Great Danes?” I was surprised and told him, “That's the kind I have!” “Perfect! Head to (he supplied the address) and pick up a Great Dane. He's travelling alone.”

This was a new situation for me, but it all worked out great because the dog was such a gentleman. The situation turned out to be a couple who had broken up and now lived in different houses about a mile apart. But they still shared their dog, apparently. It was a black Great Dane, just like one of my own dogs. These dogs are very sweet-dispositioned in general, and this one had taken this trip several times before. He sat in the back seat with his front paws on the floor, gazing out the window as we drove down the street. He didn't make eye contact with me, but just watched the scenery as it flowed past. After a few minutes, I took the turn that he knew was the street where the other owner lived. He perked up and got kind of excited as I pulled up to the address. I opened the door for him and he charged out to the guy waiting on his front steps. Cheerful reunion, with lots of hugs and kisses. The man already had in his hand the exact amount I was due, plus a tip. Everything went smooth as silk.

“Thanks. Some people get weirded out by this,” he said with a smile. “No problem,” I said. “I raise Great Danes.” He chuckled. “If you're still out on the street in about four hours, you may be back here.” I drove around to many places, crisscrossing that area, and forgot about the dog as I went through my routine day.

Sure enough, after about four hours, our dispatcher put out a call for drivers in that area, and I answered. He must have recognized my voice. “Are you the same driver who dropped off a great Dane a while ago?” I told him yes. “Well, it's time to pick him up again and bring him back to the first place.” When I returned to the second home, the dog jumped back in the cab and made himself comfortable as we drove back to where we started. Once again, the other owner had in hand the exact amount of the fare with a tip for me. Nice couple. I concluded that if you have to live separately, this is a good solution for the co-owned pet. It seemed to work well for everyone concerned.

ALASKA

I had heard from friends that most jobs in Alaska paid a lot more than in Minneapolis. In early summer of 1968, with few employment opportunities in Minneapolis that paid over $1.25 per hour, I took an eventful hitch-hiking trip to Alaska to find work to help pay our expenses. After about three days of short and long rides from Minneapolis, I made it to the Canadian border, where the dubious Canadian authorities stopped me. I did not seem to be the type of young riff-raff they wanted in the country, looking for work with hardly any money to my name and no responsible relatives I was visiting. I asked if it helped that I was born in Canada. I presented my birth certificate ID card that proved I was telling the truth. The agent's demeanor changed completely. “Of course you can travel into Canada; you are always a citizen here. I'm so sorry.” He gestured toward the car that had just left me behind. “Now you've lost your ride.” There happened to be a Greyhound bus waiting at the border stop and I bought a $3.75 ticket to Winnipeg from there, about three hours away.

After staying with a couple of hippies who were used to hitch-hikers from the US, I headed west along the Trans-Canada Highway, staying wherever I could along the way, through Saskatchewan to Calgary, Alberta. Then I headed north, away from the Trans-Canada to Edmonton. People were very friendly along the way. The car traffic was quite a bit thinner after that, so I decided to take the Greyhound from Edmonton to a town called Dawson Creek in British Columbia, where there was a single road heading north towards Alaska. From there I hitched rides through the wildest territory I had ever seen. I remember once a big truck driving by with a sign on the front that read, “Alaska or Bust.” Of course, I waved and jumped but they probably had learned by then to ignore hitch-hikers, and drove right on.

The attitude towards hitch-hikers seemed to shift a bit after that. Cars were rather infrequent, and a guy at a café along the way chatted with me about hitching rides. He told me in passing that in northern Canada and the Yukon Territory, the law says that if anyone in a car sees people walking on the road in the wintertime, they are required to pick them up. It's clearly a safety issue-it's too dangerous to leave someone on foot on the road in winter. So hitch-hiking is easy on the roads when it's cold out.

In northern BC, I got a ride with a couple who were going to Alaska in a big truck, towing a huge travel trailer to a place in Anchorage that sells them. They had a car with them, too, driven by the guy's wife. After getting acquainted with me, they took up my offer to drive their car so that the two of them could ride together in the truck. We drove together all the way to Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory, where they traveled on and I stayed in town. (They had a deadline to meet.)

Later that night, outside a bar in Whitehorse, I witnessed a wild fight between two drunk guys. They were throwing heavy punches rights and left, surrounded by about twenty gleeful observers. That was more than enough excitement for me, so I found a cheap hotel for the night, not classy but comfortable. I hit the road in the morning.

I got another ride with a guy in a classic Cadillac who was very talkative. After a few hours, we came across a couple of young guys in an old Saab that had broken down. The Caddy owner offered to tow them to Fairbanks, a couple of days away, where it could get repaired. They jumped at the offer. That night at about 1:00 a.m. we pulled over at a campground to sleep--and the sky was still light. This was the “land of the midnight sun.”

Towards the end of the afternoon the next day, we made it to Fairbanks, and I began to get the lay of the land. It looked like fertile ground for finding a good-paying job. I lucked out by finding a cabin in town where three other travelers also had found a place to “crash.” The permanent residents liked the company, so I stayed there about three weeks, rent free. I had a good time meeting young people like me. Exploring this small city was fascinating. It had experienced a severe flood the previous summer-lots of damage remained. Several houses nearby were still in shambles. Some taller buildings downtown still had water marks near the second floor. I was told that people had to use boats to get into the second-floor windows.

Busking: “The activity of playing music in public places for voluntary donations.” During the first part of my stay in Fairbanks, I was arrested and spent a Saturday night at the city jail with about twenty guys who had been making trouble in their own individual ways, due to too much alcohol. A few like me were not drunk at all. We slept on the cement floor with no bedding, but the cell was not too hot, so we survived. The floor was crowded, and the guys had to lay down carefully to not overlap at all. There was one toilet for us all. I had been arrested for panhandling, which was the official term for begging for money on the street. However, I was not begging but busking, a concept that had not yet reached Fairbanks, So, my little wooden recorder, on which I played pleasant tunes for the public (with a paper cup for coins sitting beside me), was confiscated.

We jailbirds all had a rare Sunday morning courtroom appearance which took about an hour for all of us. The judge was generally good to the guys who were apologetic about being drunk. They were let off with a warning. When my case came up, I tried to explain that I was playing music for donations, and the judge told the room that the law does not make any distinction between busking and panhandling. He was ready with a killer line which he knew would be a big hit with this crowd. “Many of us wish that the flower children would wilt!” This was hilarious, and I could only smile and go along. I was released and given my evil instrument back, with the prohibition that it could not be played in public in the city for a period of six months. I was happy with that; I wanted to get out of town long before then. When my recorder was returned to me, it bore a strange and serious-looking white label which, in bright red letters, identified my flute as “Evidence - Fairbanks Police Department. I had never thought of myself as a flower child, but I guess discrimination goes in a lot of directions. I was part of a category that was different from what any of those people considered themselves. (My coolly, uniquely-labeled recorder was a great souvenir for me, but it was lost on my way home, in Winnipeg, when my backpack was lifted. Sigh.)

I had been looking for work for three weeks around Fairbanks, but I had no luck until I saw a flyer on the wall at the post office offering jobs at the Eielson Air Force base, 30 miles outside Fairbanks. I applied for one, and four days later I was hired for a job as a civil service worker at a construction site at the end of one of the runways. This was being built on the base's grounds a couple of miles from the little town where the air force workers lived. Lots of giant airplanes and long stretches of crisscrossing runways were all around it. I stayed at a barracks where a few other civilians lived. I came across the Cadillac driver who I rode with to Fairbanks; it turned out he had work at the base, too, which he had been hired for a few months before.

My job (with three or four other guys) was to help build an outdoor experimental sewage treatment site. There were no buildings yet, but a series of about seven large vats had already been dug Sewage would soon be traveling from one to the next, getting cleaner and more wholesome with every step. Under the supervision of specialists from the Alaska Water Lab (a governmental agency that was part of the University of Alaska.), our crew performed a variety of tasks. For example, we were taught to look for leaks in the rubber seals that lined the walls of each giant vat. This was done by filling the compartments with water, swimming around with a breathing snorkel and squirting colored die all around the edges to see where the water leaked out. We would circle (with white waterproof markers) the approximate locations on the rubber where the die was flowing away. After a while, with the water drained out of the compartments, the leaky spots were sprayed with waterproof plastic coating to seal them properly. The water we swam in was drawn from an adjacent pond which happened to be loaded with swimmer's itch. Each of us had to take a shower right away when we got back to the dorm.

That summer, I met some interesting co-workers, learned about various construction tasks, and got quite fit. We installed a number of plastic one-inch-diameter pipes that we needed to cut to fit specific spaces. This left scrap pipes of various lengths to be tossed. Many of the scrap plastic pipes were up to three feet long. By using connectors at different angles, I was able to assemble a musical instrument of sorts in my spare time. The other guys were surprised and entertained when I played a few simple tunes by using my trumpet-trained lip to blow into one end and stopping various open pipes with my thumbs, making different notes sing out depending on which length of tube was utilized. Practical? No. Fun? Well, it broke up our day, anyway. The scenery was vivid and beautiful, and on some days, we could see the top of Mount Denali (at that point named Mount McKinley), about 160 miles away. We sometimes saw moose, elk, and other wild life in the woods. I became acquainted with the Alaskan mosquitoes, which were larger than the ones back home, but slower and easier to swat.

During the off hours, I was often able to go into Fairbanks and hang out with my new friends. There was a free school bus for the base's civilian workers and the air force guys who wanted to travel the thirty miles into Fairbanks. The bus left the base before suppertime and returned at about 11:00pm. My friends and I stopped for meals at inexpensive eateries, looked at display windows, sat around in a park by the river, and sometimes went to the bars. Some of the saloons had chaste female dancers wearing bathing suits who flounced around on a stage to recorded music. Often, they did not take any interest in the rhythms or tempos of what was blasting from the record player. The noise was punctuated by the sound of smashing beer bottles, which was the way the bartender handled empties.

I stayed the whole summer of 1968 in Fairbanks except for one four-day stretch when I hitched to Anchorage for a side-trip. I stayed with my brother-in-law, Doris' brother John, who was staying there that summer. The year before, Anchorage had suffered a very destructive earthquake. A great deal of damage was still obvious. The whole front half of downtown (toward the ocean) was located at a level about 20 feet lower than the rest of the city, and tennis courts still had their cement sections jutting at right angles to each other. About a half mile away from the harbor, John and I visited a new section of Anchorage that featured several beautiful new churches built after the earthquake.

John took me to visit a family (for about half an hour) while touring the town in his car. (What freedom!). I remember a moment of panic that hit the 14-year-old girl who lived there. A street cleaning truck drove by the front of the house while we were sitting and talking. The truck produced a low grinding sound and shook the house for a few moments. The girl reacted like the apocalypse was hitting the city again. But, no, the sound and rattling stopped as soon as the truck finished cleaning that part of the street. I empathized with her-I would not want to be inside a major earthquake, ever. Back in Fairbanks at the dormitory, I experienced a few mild tremors on occasion and once, for a few seconds, even saw the earth undulate up and down by a foot, over and over in a series of waves. Apparently, this was commonplace.

While I was in Alaska, I was surprised to read a giant headline in a newspaper which screamed OIL DISCOVERED ON NORTH SLOPE. The North Slope is located just offshore near the northernmost part of Alaska. This meant a huge bump in the economy of the state for many years, which continues today. Also,1968 was an election year, and a lot went on in the world of politics: the riots in Chicago at the Democratic Convention, and the nomination of Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota as the Democrats' choice for president. I told an acquaintance in Alaska that I had served as an alternate in the Minneapolis democratic convention that spring, as a supporter of Eugene McCarthy, also a Minnesota senator, but much more liberal than Humphrey and an opponent to the Viet Nam war. I told my pal that I thought that either one of the Minnesotans would be good, but I hoped that McCarthy would win. He said, “Naw, Nixon will win the election, easy. The Dems are mixed up.” I was alarmed to hear this view, but he was right for sure.

It was already starting to get cold in the evenings in Alaska when I began my hitch-hiking trip back home to Minneapolis in September. It was uneventful except for a moment in Winnipeg when I carelessly left my backpack (containing all my belongings) unattended for a minute-it disappeared in seconds. The loss included about ten undeveloped instamatic camera rolls that would have documented my entire summer's trip. Sigh.

BACK TO MINNESOTA

I returned to our house on the West Bank in Minneapolis to a happy reunion with Doris and baby Catherine, who had become very talkative. My summer job had earned me the amazing wage of $3.42 an hour, which I was able to bring home as a lump sum of around $375-a lot of money in those days. I spent very little for groceries and supplies during my time in Alaska. I had become a wage-earner!

Now I needed a new job. Life for the three of us in the late 1960s was really difficult due to our very meager earnings. The apartment in the West Bank area was cheap but awfully worn out. The entire space was heated in the winter by only one gas space heater. The insulation for the ancient three-unit house was terrible. In the winter, the bathroom (right next to an alley) was usually cold enough for a thin sheet of ice to form in the toilet bowl.

On the other hand, there were advantages to the location. We lived in the same building as a pair of classical violinists, one of whom was a member of the Minnesota Orchestra string section. We enjoyed knowing them and hearing them practice. We occasionally babysat for their one-year-old boy. Also, it was a fifteen-minute walk to the U of M east bank campus where I had my classes and where our violinist neighbor had her Minnesota Orchestra rehearsals and performances (at the U's Northrup Auditorium). The West Bank neighborhood was a hopping place. The Cedar Theater was on the same block, for example, and several live-music venues were close by (including Dania Hall on the corner).

About a year later, Doris, Catherine, and I rented a rustic farm house near Buffalo, Minnesota (about 40 miles west of Minneapolis). Doris, over time, populated it with a herd of dogs, cats, and several other animals. We lived in a very drafty five-room, one-story cottage. (It did have a handy storage attic.) A space heater in one room and a wood stove in another provided just enough heat. It was a bit rustic. The outhouse was about twenty feet from the front door-a very cold trip outside in the winter. We packed snow against the house for insulation. There was a pump outside for water, and a single sink that drained to the ground below the house. We often ran the car's gas tank very close to empty, since my income was still surprisingly low. The nice neighbor who lived across the road was always willing to help when our car wouldn't start in the winter. (Sometimes the temperature dropped to minus 40 degrees). The farmland was left to go wild, producing only some hay for the owner when the fields got enough rain. The dogs liked the freedom to roam out there, but mostly hung around the house and the adjacent woods. The cats got along fine with the dogs and passed the time chasing the mice in the grasses nearby. We also had a raccoon who had been a pet at a home in Roseville, so she was accustomed to people. The previous owners wanted to find a place for her out in the country, and Doris said yes. She was a soft touch for animals looking for a place to stay. The raccoon stayed with us for three months before taking to the woods for good.

One memorable event at the farm was the day we baked a ham in the oven. The fine aroma spread throughout the house. Doris and I were in another room when we heard a huge ruckus in the kitchen. We rushed in to find the following scene: a herd of dogs and cats was surrounding the ham that was slipping around on the floor, causing a lot of competition. Our pet raccoon had used her hands (egged on by the others who were not so gifted) to pull open the oven door. Chaos! I waded into the crowd, snatched up the ham, and placed it back in the roasting pan, to every animal's disappointment. Some of our four-legged ones had gotten a taste of that fine ham and wanted more. Virtually all the ham was still there, luckily. If we have been out of the house, only the bone would have remained. I carefully trimmed off the meat that had been bitten or had been rolled on the floor. Thus, Doris, Catherine, and I still had plenty of ham, while everyone else was granted an equal-sized, individual pile of meat scraps as a treat.

There was a lake over the hill that had a few cabins beside it. Doris and I sometimes swam there in the spring with two-and-a-half-year-old Catherine, who thought the lake was really special.

While I was in Alaska, I began to learn about tuning pianos, and I practiced with the tuning hammer I brought with me. I tuned about half a dozen pianos while in Fairbanks and at the air base, for $10 each. It was the start of a very long career. After I returned to Minneapolis, I continued to tune a few pianos here and there with the guidance of a tuner's handbook. I got a little better each time. In addition, I took a part-time job at a small factory that made wooden pull-up window shades. I was trained to dye the bare wooden slats after they were strung together with strong string by a team of women who ran the weaving machines. Most of the shades were dyed green in large troughs where I pulled the shades through the liquid and rolled them up again. It was messy and yucky work. Traveling from the farm in Buffalo into town to work and to attend classes at the U of M each day was quite costly. Some days I would tune a piano in the afternoon and ask for cash so I could buy gas to get home to the farm. I lost my job at the factory two months later after being late too many times. (It was a ninety-minute drive in from the farm).

After less than a year, we left the farm and returned to the city. In early fall, we moved into a house on the West Bank around the corner from our first place. Our new home had already acquired the nickname the 509 Zoo from the previous tenants. Our collection of animals fit right in. The name was even painted on the house by the front door. Catherine turned three years old there, and we had a little party for her with three neighbor moms and their own preschoolers. I recall that the moms were totally floored this wasn't Catherine's fourth birthday due to her amazing language skills. She could discuss things in fine complete sentences using a vocabulary far advanced for a two-year old. She has always been very articulate.

I continued at the U of Minnesota, taking class underloads when I could, which allowed me to earn a B.A. in Philosophy and Music in March of 1969, two quarters longer than usual. The only memory I have of the last quarter of college is my German class, which I took to satisfy my B.A.'s language requirement. I had studied German for three years in high school but had not passed my proficiency test. (I had been out of touch with German for over four years). The event I remember within that class was a series of little skits that pairs of students put together in German. Each skit was no more than five minutes long. My partner (a guy I had never met before) and I clicked pretty well and came up with a story about a pianist on his way to a performance in another town. I was waiting for a train and ducked into a little café for a bite. I had some Debussy sheet music with me and was pretending to practice on the café table. That was the only prop we had. I ordered a bowl of soup and a glass of Schnapps. The waiter was alarmed that I wanted soup and Schnapps together, and I snarled at him, “Why not!?” He waved his hands and shook his head, implying “Whatever you want, weirdo.” When I had the invisible bowl of soup placed in front of me, I examined it suspiciously and called the waiter back to my table. “There are little black things in this soup!” I complained. And so on. The teacher, after we were finished, asked the class questions about the story. “What was in the soup?” Everyone spoke up: “Kleine schwarze dinge.” The teacher went on, “Of course, we don't know exactly what the little black things are.” Every word of this was in German, and we all did well. That little excursion into acting was the highlight of the class for me; we got some strokes and applause from the other students. After graduation, I continued to study music composition as an adult special, off and on for three more years. I felt privileged to study with my favorite professor, Dr. Paul Fetler, an established composer I admired very much.

By mutual agreement, Doris and I split up after about four years of marriage. In spring 1970 I moved into an old rooming house in the neighborhood (at 6th Street and Cedar Avenue) with about four other musicians. That building became the West Bank School of Music later that year. More details to follow.

NEWFOUNDLAND

During the summer of 1971, I decided to take a solo travel adventure to the part of Canada that had always intrigued me: the Maritime Provinces. (Luckily, I was able to leave the West Bank School in capable hands while I was gone.) My sister Betty and her husband Murray (who I knew from the days when he, Betty and their daughter Linda lived in Minneapolis), had gravitated to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where they both worked at the University. Fredericton was a great springboard to one of the wildest and most remote locations I could think of-Newfoundland. After leaving Betty's house, I spent a few days taking in the fabulous scenery on Cape Breton Island, the northernmost section of Nova Scotia. I was on my way to the northern tip, where the car ferries headed out to Newfoundland. I was traveling in a compact GMC van that served me very well for the entire trip. It was equipped with a sleeping mattress (full-size, covering the floor in back), a portable cook stove, pots and a fry pan, a cooler, dishes, a sleeping bag, and other camping supplies. I never needed to set up a tent because my van was waterproof and comfortable. I loved being able to just pull over and sleep when I felt like it.

The morning of my scheduled departure from Sydney, NS, I pulled up beside a public park, just across from a picnic table that looked inviting. I had what I needed to cook some scrambled eggs, so I set up the little blue cook stove on the picnic table, and carried my cooler to the space beside it. Before I got very far into the food prep, I was visited by the local police. Apparently, someone had called to warn them about an out-of-province vagrant with a giant beard setting up in a major park near the ocean. The two policemen were friendly enough, but wanted to know about my plans. I told them that I had a reservation for the car ferry to Newfoundland that morning at 11:00 AM. That made them relax quite a bit. “Be sure to clean up everything when you're done,” they reminded me as they walked back to the squad car. I left the site spotless. I suppose they did not want a questionable stranger planning to set up residence there for any length of time.

I made it onto the giant ferry boat, big enough for about two hundred cars on two levels. The trip was scenic and refreshing, but when we got into the open Atlantic Ocean, the ferry began to undulate on some rather massive swells. It was not a rough day on the open water, but the rise and fall of the waves started to make me a bit queasy. I made my way into the main sitting area inside the top observation deck. To my surprise, I saw over a hundred passengers arranged in deck chairs in various poses of splaying, sitting and lying, with heads propped and cushioned in inventive ways. The crossing of the ocean to Newfoundland's main port closest to Sydney took about seven hours, and some of the time involved quite a lot of up and down and side-to-side swaying. Many of the folks were groaning miserably, much worse off than me. I found a chair to relax in with a book, but I soon joined them with some quiet vocalizations of my own. It was funny to hear the crowd's tone rise in pitch and volume when a particularly large swell sent the boat rocking askew. It sounded as if something alarming was happening at a football stadium, like when the quarterback gets viciously sacked.

After several hours of sea sickness (the first and last time I have experienced the full-fledged variety), the ferry pulled off the ocean at St. Pierre, a quaint French island located beside mainland Newfoundland's south coast. For an hour, about half the passengers made their way unsteadily down the gangplank to visit the happy little shops that faced the ocean and have a nice walk on solid ground. Back on board the ferry, the next hour and a half provided great scenery and smooth sailing along the coast.

The terrain was the most rugged I had ever seen. Everything was solid rock with many tiny bushes and trees struggling to make a life where there was barely any soil to root in. It was easy to tell that every plant was under stress. Summer must be their favorite time of year, with sunlight and a little warmth working its magic. During the other seasons, strong wind, bitter cold, hard rain, and extreme discomfort were what the world offered. Very few areas in Newfoundland can grow anything close to a forest. Scraggly bushes with badly twisted branches were very common. But it was all beautiful to behold. There were many well-worn fishing boats all around the shoreline and tiny settlements that sometimes had no roads at all in and out of town. If there was a little shelter in a tiny cove somewhere, that's where a dozen or so shacks and cottages would cluster around each other, like guys in an ice-fishing house huddling together.

The ferry arrived at the docking area where the passengers and their cars, trucks and campers disembarked. Most of the travelers made their way to the paved highway a half mile away. From there, they headed down the road for a couple of hours to the provincial capital, St. John's, the most populated city on the island (about 100,000 people). Consulting my map, I stayed on the highway for half an hour. Then I turned onto a narrow dirt road that was the only connector to a series of small hamlets along the coastline. I tanked up at a gas station, using my always reliable Amoco card, and headed down a road that was only wide enough for two cars side by side. It was all surrounded by the same crazy vegetation and complete wilderness. Once in a while, I'd see a waterfall or a place to pull off to admire the ocean.

For the next month or so, I drove those backroads, pulling into areas that were sheltered enough to spend the night. Occasionally I would find a spot that had a picnic table to park beside. Many of the small settlements had kids of all sizes playing beside the roads-walking up and down the car path was the most common pastime. For the teen-agers, meeting along the road in and out of town and chatting in clumps seemed to be the only fun thing to do. The littler kids would get excited to see my white van with a decoration of old fishnet strung across the front. Then they'd see my license plate, Minnesota! They were as amazed as if it read Argentina.

One of my biggest challenges was finding enough ice for the cooler. I couldn't keep any food for long without it. The gas stations were few and far between, and most were not connected to stores. No ice to buy anywhere. Occasionally a store keeper would give me some ice from the fridge in his own house (attached to the back of the store), where his family lived. My food sometimes had to be tossed out because I could not find ice to keep it from spoiling. The stores I came across did not have much to offer, just basics like canned veggies, some eggs, cans and bottles of soda, bread, and crackers. I could get water at any brook I crossed-the water there was as pure and clean as any bottle of Perrier.

Once, in my foolish, hopeful innocence, I bought a small bottle of mayo to make a little tuna salad. It tasted good in the evening, and when the sun came up, I ate a little of the leftovers with some bread. The ice I had in the cooler the night before had melted, but the cooler seemed to have retained barely enough of its saving coolness. Trusting it was a really bad idea. I was violently sick for three days. I stayed in my van, isolated from people, near the seashore. The whole time, I never went anywhere, except to the woods for my frequent throw-ups and diarrhea. (Luckily, I had toilet paper with me.) I was more cautious after that and always avoided any food that might be spoiled. I should have known better.

In the back of my truck, I had a small electric keyboard I used to help me with my music writing. (I wrote my whole 3rd woodwind quartet, nick-named Newfoundland, while traveling there.) The keyboard itself needed to be powered to function, so I had a special electrical connector that plugged into the cigarette lighter. In addition, the sound of the keyboard was specially adapted to play back through the car radio-a special trick an electronically knowledgeable friend managed to hook up for me. Thus, using the keyboard drew power from the car battery in two ways. More than once, I drained the battery to nearly dead by playing that keyboard. (At least once, I had to get the van started again by rolling it down a little hill, running beside it to jump into the driver's seat to turn the key and pop the clutch.)

My travels on those rural roads were fascinating and educational. One time I heard some music in the air played by a teenager with an electric guitar and a small amplifier. He was outside, displaying his moderate skills, and I pulled over. The guitarist was friendly, and he had three friends there listening to him. We decided to do a little jamming and, for about ten minutes, we found some common ground, playing chords for a couple songs we both knew. It was a fun break for me, since my travel in isolation was sometimes short on human contact.

One place on the trip was a little surprising because my map showed there was a road through a barely-visible-on-the-map fishing hamlet. But when I drove across the shoreline through a sandy area where the road surface was barely harder than sand, the only way to continue was to take a turn up a slight hill that looked like someone's driveway. I worried I had gotten off the regular roadway somehow, but at the top of the rise, I turned right and found a one-block-long street with buildings, shops, and homes on both sides. That was the main and only road. After a short distance, it took another turn and transformed back into complete wilderness

Another slightly larger town was built around an inlet where a dozen fishing boats were tied up to a wharf. There were several empty mooring places-boats out at work, I presumed. Shops along the way where the cars could drive often were small shacks no wider than fifteen feet. The only signs on the shacks were the owners' names, with no explanation as to what they did or sold there. I gather that everyone knows what Clive Wilson, for example, does, so there is no need to explain anything further. I parked the van beside the shack that had a Canada Post sign. I went inside to get some stamps for my postcards, and, halfway through the transaction, I heard a car honking over and over again outside. The driver was unhappy about finding my van in his private parking spot, next to his business. I hurried outside and moved my van to directly in front of the post office, and he raced his car into the gap I had just vacated. How was I to know that was his personal place? I went back into the post office to finish my purchase, and the clerk told me, with a smile, “He's always doing that.”

Sometimes, I got lucky in my search for ice. Newfoundland, it turns out, has several whale processing factories along the coast. I drove through three towns with factories like that. In one village, I could see giant rib bones drying in the sun beside the road. They were thirty or forty feet long! I'm not sure what the locals would do with these huge bones, but they were not the sort of artifacts you'd find anywhere else. Sell them to visitors? Probably not-how would you transport something like that? I approached one of these whale processing plants to see if they might spare some ice. I could see huge racks of dark rich meat inside, so I assumed the company might use ice to protect the meat when it got shipped out. I stopped a worker walking by and asked if the factory could spare some ice. He gestured for me to come with him. I picked up my cooler and followed him into a building with a room about fifty feet high and eighty feet long that was completely full of huge piles of ice cubes. The factory had ice makers going almost non-stop. “Help yourself,” he told me. “No charge.” It was like manna from heaven. It probably cost them two pennies to make enough ice to fill my cooler, so I didn't feel like I was putting them out at all. Now I had enough ice for three or four days.

One late afternoon I chanced upon a winding dirt road beside a long inlet in the ocean. A sign read, To the lighthouse. The road was about four miles long, but I stopped at a pull-off about halfway. This place was at the top of a beautiful hill overlooking a body of water that was no more than 200 yards across. It was rugged territory with some dramatic rocks along the shore, which was an easy walk away. High waves were coming in. It was an exciting experience to see those curling breakers crash into the rocks, spraying seawater magically into the air. Toward evening the fog came in, settling all around the whole point. Soon an array of foghorns started up, starting with the distinctive (and loudest) double-note high-lowwwww sound from the lighthouse, over a mile down the road. Then, to my amazement, another horn started up that had a different distinctive noise, just across the water from me. This was followed by four other horns pealing their own pitches and patterns. These odd beepings and dronings were obviously marking the places on the coast line that stuck out perilously into the water. Anyone coming inland to the harbor in the fog or the dark would know where they were by listening and could envision what to avoid. It was a very sensible and remarkable spread of loud noise makers up and down the whole inlet. With no organization to the timing of the horns, what resulted was an amazing symphony of six foghorn voices, each noticeably different than the others, some more in the distance. What a lucky spot for a musician to land!

In another, larger village down the road, I saw a remarkable sight. In the harbor just about a hundred yards from the shore was an enormous iceberg jutting into the air, stuck on the shallow sea bottom. I thought about my cooler again, and parked my van near the water to look for ice. (Also, so I could take some unique photos.) To my surprise, the water was filled with many various-sized chunks which had split off from the iceberg and were floating around everywhere. I brought over my cooler-it had no more ice in it that day. I struggled to lift a reasonable-sized ice piece out of the water, but it was too slippery for me. A passer-by, a healthy middle-aged Newfoundlander, saw my plight (including my open cooler) and helped me fish a fine lump of iceberg out of the North Atlantic and dump it into the cooler. It took up about half the size of the box. Bonanza!

I found a good place to park my van the next day, in a public area near a waterfall, just a couple of miles outside of a village of probably 3,000 people. I loved to watch, from the cliff above, all the schools of tiny fish, swimming in masses of several thousand. They must have been sardines or anchovies or the like. In a school like that, with no leader, the fish kept folding around each other and changing direction like a giant thousand-armed octopus. I wished I had a video camera with me. My instamatic camera could not do justice to the scope of the panoramic spectacle.

Occasionally on the road I would come across small herds of free-range goats. They were friendly but liked to stay together. I don't remember seeing any other animals, except for one or two at a time. Perhaps the climate was too cold too much of the year.

One day in my travels, outside a fairly large city (perhaps 20,000), I sort of lost my way. I don't know how it happened, but I missed the road through town that I was supposed to follow. Instead of sailing through without any confusion, I ended up stuck in a sudden parade of cars all headed the same direction down a side road. A traffic jam in Newfoundland? Impossible! But I was stuck with them and had to follow the herd until I could right myself and return to the main street. The line of cars proceeded across an actual airplane runway, turned around a hill and there it was! The place where everyone was headed. This was the time of morning when the work-shift changed at an enormous fish processing plant, where about three hundred people worked at one time. It may have been a cannery too. I knew I was not on the work schedule that day, so after while I was able to break away from the procession and turn around. A few other cars were leaving the parade, too, so I was not alone in my purpose. I was just about back around the bend again when workers on foot stopped all the cars in both directions. So, we had to wait. Why became obvious as the noise of an approaching propeller airplane came out of a cloud. Soon, a small, single-engine plane appeared, growing closer and closer to the runway. The cars looked awfully close to their flight path, but the workers knew what they were doing, and the plane landed safely in front of us, then taxied to a warehouse down the way. The workers motioned us to go on again, and soon there was another traffic jam, with most of the cars coming at me. There were lots of fish plant employees yet to arrive, and I was pleased to get free of them all. In town again, I found where I should have followed a different street through the three-block downtown area. That was about 45 minutes out of my day which I could never recover.

Toward evening on another day, having found a nice open space in the woods to park my van for the night, I happened to meet a group of four travelers who were staying at a nearby campground. They were nice people from Ontario and were pleased when I told them that I was born there. I later found myself in a rented boat with them, not far from shore. Although the boat had a small outboard motor on it, it was just drifting in the water for what we were up to. We all had in our hands strong fish lines attached to substantial sharp hooks about three inches long. We were all learning how to catch ocean fish by “jigging.” This is a simple process where people hang the lines overboard and repeatedly yank the lines up about two feet. The fish get curious and swim up to the shiny, fast-moving objects. Once in a while, they get impaled by someone's hook. I caught a flounder that way, my first. It was about a foot and a half long! No one else caught anything that time, so we took my flounder back to their campground and fried it in a pan on their fire. It was big enough for us all to have a meal, with some fried greens. What an exciting event for someone who had never before been on a small boat on the ocean.

A couple of days later I was invited by the same people to go down to the shore and meet a young, genuine Newfoundland fisherman. This guy had been born into this life-he, his parents, and his brothers all made their living this way. With encouragement from the Ontarians who had met him a couple of days before, we were given a demonstration by a real pro of how to clean and fillet a fat, freshly-caught codfish (over two feet long) in record time. At about age 22, this guy's strength and skill were amazing to behold. He had everything set up already: the fish on a clean table with plates, knives, and a bucket to contain the non-useable fish parts. One of the onlookers looked at his watch and suddenly yelled, “GO!” The Newfoundlander surprised everyone by bending the fish's head completely backward and snapping it off with both hands. The fish spine made a big, broken-branch sound as he performed this move. Then he dressed the fish, getting rid of all the innards with skillful knife thrusts. Soon, he was, with lightning speed, delicately cutting through the skin and folding it back to get at the flesh inside. He produced what seemed to be about ten fat fillets from each side of the fish, probably at least fourteen pounds of codfish for the open-air market in town. His time: 2 minutes and 15 seconds. It was the most amazing fish filleting demo I had ever seen. Wow. Okay, I may not have seen many of those, even on TV.

Newfoundlanders talk with a strong accent, sort of an off-shoot of Irish with a twist. It was mostly understandable, but some people were unintelligible to me when they talked fast. I once asked a store clerk how to get to a nearby town called English Harbor. He said, “Angleesh Harba?” He pointed in the direction I was to drive. “Ye go bock to ta meen rood, fur aboot three moiles…” (“You go back to the main road, for about three miles…”). I once picked up a hitch-hiker in his early twenties who had an interesting way of making all his verbs in third person, apparently a common practice in some parts of Newfoundland. I asked what he did for a living, and he told me, “I works for the provincial schools. I travels around from school to school helping set up during summer, and in fall, I teaches.” Fourth grade kids, it turned out. He asked me, “Did you land in Newfoundland?” by which he meant did I move there. “No, I'm just visiting,” I told him.

On another day, I stayed overnight on the top of a ridge overlooking the sea (great sunset), near a settlement that was down on the shore on the other side a cliff. I explored a little while after I settled in where I was parked. I came across an odd sight: all across the rocky surface where I was standing (at the top of the hill) was a whole field of television antennas, possibly 30 or more. Each had its own wire trailing down to a home below. All were facing one direction, presumably toward a distant broadcast tower some miles away. This was way before cable TV existed, so people had to do whatever they could to get a signal. I turned around and went back to the van. I didn't want to disrupt the reception for all those watchers hidden below the cliff.

Once in a while the road would come to the top of a rise and the vistas that appeared were a wonder to behold.

As I mentioned earlier, I was on the road this way for about a month. I saw some remarkable sights, including parts of a wonderful national park on the west side of the island. I stayed at the end of a several-miles-long peninsula that came to a stop facing west, with no land in sight beyond the ocean. Great place for a few more photos of the sun setting, from a high overlook this time. I met fellow travelers sometimes, but, for most of my time, I was alone with my thoughts, relishing and communing with the wild nature around me. The roads were dusty and rough, and the residents genuinely unique characters. It was a great experience for me, and, as I mentioned, I got some interesting music written, good books read, and mental health improved.

I circled around almost the entire coast of Newfoundland during that month, wherever there were roads to follow, and ended up back at the same ferry launch where I had arrived. Then I made it back to the mainland, this time with less sea sickness, and before long I was back at my sister's place in Fredericton. A few days later, I returned home to Minneapolis to pick up my life again. Newfoundland will always be a special place for me.

THE WEST BANK SCHOOL OF MUSIC

As a graduate of the University of Minnesota in 1969, I was quite familiar with what I considered short-comings of college music departments in general. It seemed to me a shame that colleges had so little regard for non-classical music. Spurred on by this disparity, I founded the West Bank School of Music (WBSM) in Minneapolis in September 1970. WBSM was a non- profit, “grass-roots” arts organization which stayed in operation until 2017 (47 years). During that time, WBSM welcomed thousands of students of all ages, interests, and levels of ability. A wide spectrum of instruments and styles of music was available. Students were not burdened by any academic trappings. WBSM’s philosophy was always: "Pure learning is available here. Study whatever interests you, and go at your own speed. Music is its own reward." One of the most appealing aspects of the West Bank School’s approach was the absence of grades, testing, prerequisites, credits or certificates. While music lessons were available from other sources, the wide variety of instruments and styles of music available set the West Bank School apart.

The West Bank School of Music building was an old rooming house at 6th and Cedar Avenue near the West Bank Campus of the University of Minnesota. We rented the building and converted the space into an office and several lesson and class rooms. At that time in the early to mid 1970s, a few of the instructors lived there as well, including me. The building became a lively place for musicians to gather to play music together after hours. Sometimes well-known traveling performers would come by when they were in town to “jam” with faculty members and other Minneapolis professional performers. WBSM grew its reputation as a place where musicians of various styles could gather in a creative atmosphere and find common ground. Over the years, the faculty grew in size and in the variety of instruments they taught, eventually including over forty part-time instructors at a time, providing training for many common and uncommon instruments. Many of them brought unusual and unique specialties.

The Music School became a popular place for casual music education for several hundred students every year. Group classes, private lessons and even performance ensembles became common. As instructor-residents moved out over the years, as many as eight of the building’s ten rooms were used entirely for music instruction. (The other two rooms were the school’s office and our general-use kitchen.)

At certain times of day and evening, things got very crowded, but it was always a small thrill to open the main door to the West Bank School and hear a cacophony of musical sounds pouring from everywhere. Some of the students were children learning to play piano or sing, but most were adults. Most of them were studying for their own enjoyment, but some teen and adult students were aspiring professionals who were hoping to make a career out of music. Some rock, folk and bluegrass bands arose from those many classrooms to proliferate throughout the community as popular performing groups.

In 1975, the West Bank School Music was granted non-profit status by the IRS. This opened opportunities for grants from organizations, corporations and foundations interested in supporting music education. An eight-member board of directors was formed, made up of dedicated volunteers who shared in the vision and goals of our community arts organization. The board members who cycled through over the decades must have totaled nearly two hundred people. The number of instructors who taught there during the forty-seven years collectively could have reached several hundred. All these individuals made the Music School what it was. The total number of students who availed themselves of the Music School’s services during its operation can safely be estimated to be over 20,000.

Many well-known performers served as faculty members during the Music School’s 47-year history. I chose three to highlight.

Dave Ray, guitarist from the folk trio Koerner, Ray and Glover, was a long-time faculty member as well. Always cheerful and friendly, he had many devoted students. Koerner, Ray and Glover were internationally renowned in the folk music world.

The West Bank School of Music has many stories to tell, but one event stands out in my memory. An annual community happening for the Cedar-Riverside area of Minneapolis over the years was a special neighborhood celebration called Cedarfest. Musical performances of all types were held all day long on three stages. Some of the musicians were WBSM faculty members. Local businesses held open house events.

One of the favorite features for the thousands of visitors was the Cedarfest parade, which took place on Cedar Avenue. One year in the mid-1980s, the West Bank School of Music made a big splash with its Marching Guitar Orchestra. This event, featuring guitar instructors at WBSM and their students, was organized by the long-time head of the guitar department, Dale Dahlquist.

Parading down the street in rows were at least eighty volunteer guitar players. As mentioned, many were WBSM students, but many community players joined in. They performed several basic, well-known folk songs with surprising synchronicity. The players were kept together by three people standing in the back of a pickup truck at the head of the orchestra, holding four- foot-tall signs with giant chord names on them. The signs were bouncing with the rhythm of the songs, with only a single sign facing toward the marchers at any given time, showing everyone what chord to play during those beats. It was a magical experience for participants and viewers alike. There were two marchers in front of the pickup truck holding a giant banner displaying the school’s name and the Marching Guitar Orchestra title. The strumming of the guitars was sweetly accompanied by everyone’s singing voices joyously raised. More-advanced players were able to include some picking patterns, and other more sophisticated accompaniment. For several years following, people talked about that part of the parade as the “show-stopper” highlight.

‘Spider’ John Koerner, of Koerner, Ray and Glover lived on the West Bank about three blocks from the Music School. John knew about WBSM and was supportive of the work it was doing. He and I were casual acquaintances for several years during my time as the Music School’s director. Once on a Saturday afternoon, an intermediate guitar class was about to start. Five students were already in the main class room, guitars in hand, waiting for their teacher to arrive. As the instructor walked through the front door, I said hello to him, and at the same moment, I spotted John Koerner walking by the front of the Music school, carrying his guitar. Inspiration struck me. I asked the guitar teacher what he thought of the idea of John Koerner doing a guest class with his students that day. The teacher, who knew the Koerner, Ray and Glover group well, widened his eyes immediately. “For sure!” He seemed to be thrilled with idea.

“Hold on, let me ask him!” I ran outside and cornered John on the sidewalk. “Hi, John! How would you like to earn some good money for an hour of time with our intermediate guitar students?” He thought for a moment and then said, “Wow, sure, why not?” As John headed for the Music School’s front steps, the teacher and I walked into the classroom ahead of him. “We have a surprise guest teacher today!” I announced. And in walked Spider John. The expressions on all their faces were remarkable to see. Everyone there knew who he was, and all were excited by his sudden appearance. For an hour, their teacher and the five students learned about the tricks John had devised for himself on the guitar. He had a distinctive style and everyone, including the teacher, was interested in finding out more. That chance encounter with a famous performer was a memorable event for them. Things clicked just right that day.

I served as the executive director and taught music at the West Bank School from 1970 until 1984. Aside from teaching private lessons in piano and composition, I also led small classes (4-10 people) in the basics of music, music theory and ear training. As director, I worked hard on publicity, grant writing, design and printing of literature (with help from pros), and general administration duties. I was also responsible (with great volunteer help) for planning, publicizing, and producing dozens of special concerts a year to showcase our faculty members and other local performers. I (and subsequent directors) worked hard at choosing capable performers as faculty members, especially people who were good communicators—those able to explain and demonstrate the details of good performance skills.

After I retired as the director, grants from major foundations allowed me to organize and produce a multi-year (1986 through 1994) series of concerts--about seven a year—which became somewhat ‘legendary’ in the Twin Cities jazz world. I named the program the West Bank School of Music Jazz Composer Series. Many of Minnesota’s established jazz pros participated—as composers with their own bands or as side-players for other composers. Performances were held at concert venues at the University of Minnesota (nearby on the West Bank), Augsburg College, (only a few blocks away), the Cedar Theater (just around the corner), various churches in south Minneapolis, and the Walker Art Center (near downtown). This concert series developed quite a following during those nine years. Many concerts were videotaped for local broadcast on community access television.

I served on the West Bank School’s board of directors from the beginning through April, 2000, when I retired completely from WBSM, handing over the reins to other dedicated leaders. Around 2012, the Music School moved from its West Bank location (near 6th St. and Cedar Avenue) to an arts warehouse complex in St. Paul near Hamline University. The West Bank School of Music closed its doors for good during the spring of 2017, after 47 years, having served well all those thousands of people, young and old. Everyone seemed to have had a fine time learning to get around on their fiddles, mandolins, banjos, guitars, saxes, flutes, pianos, singing voices and whatever else. I will be forever grateful for the vast crowds of music lovers who shared my unusual vision for a music school. They included all the inspired executive directors over the years who led the way forward, the dedicated board members who brought their essential special skills to us all, and the amazingly capable instructors who carefully shared their precious performance secrets. Now the West Bank School’s service to the world is echoing through history.

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PIANO TUNING AND REPAIR

In 1970, around the time that the Music School was established, I apprenticed part-time with an established piano tuner for a few months. With a few years of practice and experience, I became a professional piano tuner/technician myself. On-the-job training was my best teacher. Facing new challenges taught me new things over my whole time as a piano tuner/technician. Occasionally I found myself needing to improvise a solution for a necessary repair. I sometimes hunted through the piano supply catalog to find a part or tool that would help me solve a problem, and quite often I would discover an item that was designed for that very issue. After all, I was part of a long line of piano repair people who had faced similar situations. One such tool was a special handle with a spring pin that allowed the loop end of a bass string to be wound tighter and easily re-hooked onto the hitch pin. This sometimes would improve the sound of the lower range on an old upright piano whose strings had lost some of their clear tone quality.

My career as a piano tuner/repairman was an important source of our income for over fifty years. In addition to going out to people's homes, various churches, and schools for piano tuning and repair, I worked during the warmer months in my “shop” (our garage) on the reconditioning and resale of used pianos. During good years, I was able to sell a dozen refurbished pianos. I continued working on pianos until my full retirement at the end of 2022. Several stories describing my experiences during my career as a piano tuner/tech can be found in my book, In Tune with the World. Our parkscrapbook.us family website includes several of these short accounts in the Recollections section of Writing by Family Members. Here is a sample vignette.

Take the Ice Road to the Island

When we visited Bayfield, Wisconsin some time ago, I remember reading about an adventure involving the winter ice on Lake Superior and the moving of a whole house. The plan was to wait until the ice was as thick as it could be, then use tow trucks to slowly skate the house on sled blades two miles across from the mainland to a nearby island. Several other houses were already on the island. It had been done before, apparently, and ice fishermen, cars, trucks, and those little ice houses had been going out on the ice for years with few consequences. But, as newspaper articles of the time explained (with photos), the ice gave way about a mile out from shore, and that pretty house and the tow trucks disappeared into the deep. Fortunately, all the workers escaped, but the house was swallowed up.

I was thinking about this event when I was asked to drive my car out onto the ice of Lake Minnetonka. I was following the vehicle of the guy who wanted me to tune the piano for a family member who lived on an island nearly a mile away. This was the first time I had tried that, and I felt a little nervous about it. Thousands of adventuresome souls drive on the ice every year, but this was my maiden voyage. The home was one of about a dozen that were safely standing on the island in splendid natural isolation. I gathered that boat travel was the most common mode of access to these houses, but during certain periods of winter, when the ice houses gathered out beyond the island’s point, it was perfectly safe to drive cars there. In fact, this mode of transportation was quicker and more efficient in deep winter than motor boats were in summer. A winding track led across the lake, worn into the ice by frequent traffic. It must be safe, I figured.

We arrived without incident, but my heart rate had elevated. We parked by the boat launch/dock area and hiked in about 80 yards on a footpath that ascended through a forest of dramatic bare branches. I carried my tuning box with me, and soon, after a turn in the path, we came upon a picturesque house from about 1920. My recollection has painted a picture of gingerbread decorations around the front door. The widow in her late 60s, who lived there alone, came out to greet us with a smile; she was the man’s aunt, and he was gifting her some much-needed piano care. By prearrangement, she had lunch on for us, with tasty hot-beef sandwiches and cocoa. This remarkably independent woman was a real naturalist, who, when drawn out, had some expansive ideas about environmental and scientific subjects that most people never hear about. I had noticed an animal pen as I came near the house, empty at the time. I asked her if she possibly kept goats during the warm months, and she launched into a colorful description of her three “darlings,” who were spending the cold months at a boarding farm nearby. I mentioned that I had heard of a scientific experiment involving the use of goats to cultivate in their systems some sort of medicine that people could use to treat a rare malady of the blood stream. Or some internal organs, maybe? I don’t remember. (Could it be a chemical that clarifies a person’s memory? I could use that.) She laughed at that revelation, new to her, and commented happily that “finally modern science has found a way to put goats to use.”

The piano itself was sadly neglected. It needed not only a tuning but some repair of the soundboard, which had developed some remarkable cracks in the annual dry winter season. (Wood stoves are terrible for piano soundboards, I’ve found). We hunted around the work area of her dearly departed husband (probably mostly untouched for ten years), looking for an electric drill, some drill bits, and some appropriately-sized screws. On old pianos, the separated ribs of the soundboard can be carefully pinned down to stop the buzzing sounds, helping the piano to resonate properly when played. We found everything I needed. The repairs yielded moderate success, and the piano sounded fairly normal once the tuning was done. I recommended that she put a big jar of water in the bottom of the piano, beside the pedal levers, to keep more humidity in the piano during the winter.

It was a sweet encounter for me. This bright woman and her cheerful nephew made my time there go easily. Interesting people really can make life more stimulating, and as I headed my car down the ice road back to shore (no need for a guide anymore) I thought about how rich and rewarding this kind of profession can be. Thank you, lucky stars!

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WARREN PARK, COMPOSER

After graduation from college in 1969, I worked hard on developing my ability as a pianist and composer. I cultivated my skills as a pianist during college and afterward for a couple years, especially by accompanying dance classes for Loyce Holton at the Minnesota Dance Theater and for Nancy Hauser with the Nancy Hauser Dance Company. This taught me the skill of immediate improvisation. After all, dance accompanists cannot stop and think what to do next, they must continually invent music spontaneously, and keep the rhythm pumping steadily for the dancers.

I have written several pieces for various ensembles that have been performed professionally, and I continue to write to this day. Because I developed my own style of piano playing (as a largely self-taught pianist), I became much more secure playing piano in public as an improvisor. I have always told people that I stayed away from other people’s music since I did not want to attempt to match the skill and perfection that capable pros employed, playing all those classical Chopin, Liszt, Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann pieces. When I only play my own music, I feel freer. My style is distinctive because I have always tended to favor modal harmonies rather than traditional major-or minor scale writing, while remaining tonal. I enjoy trying to create a sound that simulates the encompassing immersion of an orchestra. If you listen to some of my piano recordings (all of which began as improvisations), you’ll see what I mean. Please visit my website (www.warrenparkmusic.com), and click on the button labeled Compositions Without Sheet Music, For Listening Only. Within that area you’ll find several solo piano pieces I have written that are reminiscent of an orchestra (performed by yours truly). Among many other settings, I once played a solo concert years ago in the atrium of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, performing only my own pieces. People in attendance there and at other concert performances have complimented me for my unusual and unique style of writing.

In the mid- 1970s, as a mildly successful composer, I joined the Minnesota Composers Forum, later renamed the American Composers Forum. One of the perks of this membership was sometimes being invited to attend the rehearsals of the Minnesota Orchestra when contemporary music was included in the programs. We special listeners were able to sit near the front of Orchestra Hall and listen to the orchestra perform, with stops and starts as the conductor carefully went over certain aspects of the music that needed improvement. Occasionally, the composer would be there discussing with the conductor various musical elements that called for slight changes. It was a fascinating process to witness, and I was permitted to attend two or three rehearsals a year for three decades. The music was often exciting and unusual, with curious surprises especially in the percussion department, and intriguing sounds blending wonderfully from various orchestral sections.

On one occasion, we rehearsal attendees were able to break the rules of how an audience could listen. This new composition was an amazing piece that called for antiphonal brasses in four different locations in the side balconies above us, playing along with and in complete contrast to the full orchestra on stage. It was brilliant writing, and we ten composer-witnesses in the seats were able to stand up and turn around to listen, with the orchestra at our backs. It was a great way to hear the four separate brass ensembles (five or six musicians in each) playing towards us from the higher reaches of the auditorium, with the Minnesota Orchestra surrounding us from behind. This experience was available only for us on this occasion. It was even better than listening to a multi-channel stereo system with the highest fidelity. This was something that the full-house crowds on Friday and Saturday nights would not be able to hear quite the same way, due to the constraints of being expected to stay in your seats.

I have been active with the music program at First Universalist Church, over many years, where several of my compositions have been performed by their fine choir. My music has received performances by student groups and professional ensembles alike. In 2017, I received a major commission from the Minnesota Sinfonia chamber orchestra. That piece, drawn from other music I had already written, was named Three Musical Flavors. It took nearly six months to compose and to prepare the necessary instrumental parts. This composition was performed twice in the fall of that year as part of a larger program. 500 people came to each performance. My music has also been performed in different locations in the US, and occasionally beyond, through the Delian Society, a casual collaborative organization with composers from around the world, all with the common goal of writing accessible tonal music for today’s music lovers. Nearly all my compositions have recordings anyone can listen to on my website: www.warrenparkmusic.com.

Some the recordings are from live performances, the rest are played back accurately by computer-based synthesizers, using sampled instrumental voices, which sound quite convincing. Several of my pieces were written for various dance and puppetry shows, to be played at specific times in the story. Most of the music from those shows is available to hear on my website, within the Listen Only button. Half of these compositions were written and designed to be “performed” by computer synths from scores I created, while the other half of the tunes were recordings of specially-composed piano solos which I taped at home on my concert grand piano. I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to write music for these wonderful performances, some of which were collaborations with the Eclectic Edge Ensemble dance troupe (Karis Sloss, director) and the Mad Munchkins puppetry company, directed by Laura Wilhelm.