So it's fairly obvious that I'm not going to update this very often. But that's okay, the intervals give me time to think about what I want to say next.
A little while ago I was using the Google blog search to see if I could find people writing about stuff that interests me. (Duh.) And a lot of what interests me has to do with the Stillwater, Minnesota where I grew up back in the sixties. Stillwater is a lot bigger place now—more a bedroom community for the Twin Cities than a self-sustaining town (or a tourist destination for those who still live over in the Cities)—and there are a heck of a lot more people living there than I could have imagined back then.
But somehow Stillwater seems less substantial to me now, certainly less cohesive than the place I remember, when I've gone back to visit. As I said to a guy from the Washington County Historical Society (if you aren't a member yet, JOIN!), I'm not even sure the town that I grew up in exists anymore, except maybe in people's memories and in the history books.
But the history books seem to be more interested in the early days of the community than in the Stillwater where (and when) I grew up, so I have to work a little harder to find information about things and places that I remember.
Back to the blog search. I grew up on the South Hill. So I Googled "South Hill" and "Stillwater" and nothing came up. No one has written about it. I guess that means it's my job.
Back in the sixties, a lot of local people still seemed to define themselves by where they lived—the South Hill, the North Hill, downtown, Dutchtown, whatever. The subdivisions were just beginning to sprout up—part of my paper route back then included all of Forest Hills, behind the cemetery and the "new" high school (which is now the junior high, because there's a new new high school) but for the most part the town I knew was still built on the grid of streets that started at the river and sort of faded away west of Owens or Sherburne on the west. Anything on the other side of Lily Lake or Lake McKusick was pretty much the wilderness, as far as I could tell. Those places were on the outskirts, the frontier. The same was true with Orleans Street on the south (although they built Oak Park School out in the middle of a field there, surrounded by tall grass and dirt paths) and probably Wilkins on the north, although being a South Hill boy I can't say for sure where civilization ended up there.
It seemed like everyone knew everyone else, that our parents and grandparents had all gone to school together, and that you couldn't go anywhere in town where someone didn't know your mother or grandfather. There were cousins or aunts and uncles about every half mile it seemed, so screwing up out where anyone could see you was not an option. The good news was that there were plenty of places a kid could go that were out of the public eye, starting right on the block.
In those days, there was usually a network of paths through the interiors of blocks where kids lived, between houses, behind garages (and sheds and even barns!), from back yard to back yard, sometimes from garage roof to garage roof. There were steps made from piled stone, cuts through shrubs and bushes, gates in backyard fences, all kinds of ways to get just about anywhere on the block without having to set foot on a public sidewalk or street.
And we could run those paths in the dark of night as easily as we did in the light of day—and often did when we played "ditch," a night-time version of hide-and-seek that encompassed the entire block, all of the back yards, gardens, weed patches, climbable trees and open garages. You'd win if you hid yourself so well that the other side couldn't find you and eventually gave up and went inside. When I think back, I suppose we could have saved ourselves a lot of running around in the dark if we'd just gone inside, watched TV and said we were going to hide. But there were only 4 decent TV stations then (WCCO 4, KSTP 5, KMSP 9 and WTCN 11—in those pre-Big Bird days, no one watched the "educational channel," KTCA 2) , and since winter seemed to last about nine months anyway, we spent time outdoors when we could.
The climbing trees were something as well. I got my start when I was only 4-5 years old, back when we were still living with my grandparents over on 4th Street, before we bought the house on 3rd. Down the block, across the street from South Hill Hooley's (which I also Googled and got no hits, so I'm going to have to say more about that place later), someone had a big pine tree in the back yard. It could have been Jack Anderson's house (his mother, Doris, was a cashier over at Hooley's), or it might have been David Belideau's house next door. This was more than 45 years ago, so you'll have to excuse me if I can't be more precise.
I don't think I was even supposed to be down there, and I'm pretty sure my parents would have had a fit if they knew I was climbing a tree for the first time, but that was the direction the sidewalk took me, there were other kids down there, and what child of 4 or 5 could resist such temptation?
Anyway, after watching some of the bigger kids do it, I climbed up the interior of the pine tree, which was as easy as climbing stairs. I discovered two more things about pine trees that day: one, it's really fun to get up high and swing the top of the tree back and forth (they don't break, they flex, but the belief in the possibility that they might break makes the whole experience even more fun); and two, that the branches are full of pine pitch that gets all over your hands and legs and clothing and pretty much announces to your parents what you've been doing. So it was a while before I climbed that particular tree again.
But there were other trees to climb. One thing that you realized early on was that oak trees were NOT among the climbing trees. The branches started way too high up, so you'd pretty much need a ladder to reach the lowest ones. Maple trees were good for the bigger kids—you'd have to get a boost to reach the lowest branches, then pull yourself up, and they seemed to offer lots of substantial limbs to sit on. The elms—before the Dutch elm disease got them all—were a mixed bag. Some of them (like one in our back yard) had branches low enough that you could swing on them like Tarzan (not that we cared much about Tarzan—that was my dad's generation), while others were these towering things that formed a cathedral-like ceiling high above the streets that they lined. Apple trees (which were everywhere in our neighborhood) or the odd ornamental plum were much better for a young tree climber.
That's not to say that apple trees weren't without their hazards. We had a scraggly one back in the far corner of the yard (where all the mosquitos lived) , and every year it looked worse. Around the time I was eight years old, it fell over with me sitting up in it. I probably was no more than eight feet off the ground, but it knocked the wind out of me when I landed, and I thought for sure I was going to die.
Probably the favorite tree in the neighborhood was "The Mape," a middle-sized maple tree in the front of Danny Swanson's side yard. It was right over where home plate was when we played kickball in his yard—baseball was off-limits, owing to some half-forgotten accident or event when his older brothers were playing out there—but the grass was worn away there and The Mape kinda stood by itself. We used to sit up there to hide from the little kids, we'd pick up books of matches at Reed's Drug Store and "shoot" them at the sidewalk below, and when we were (almost) old enough, we even climbed up there to drink a beer or two.
I'm hoping it's just my 50+ year-old brain misremembering, but it seems to me that the last time we were up in Stillwater I saw that they'd cut that tree down.
There are a lot of trees that were around when I was a kid that aren't around anymore. I already mentioned the apple tree and the two elms that were in our front and back yards. There was also an oak over where the shortstop would have played if we ever had enough kids to play full teams out in the side yard at my house, a smaller maple or elm that was along the property line in what would have been foul territory on the third base side that blew over in a thunderstorm and landed on the neighbor's car, and a birch that just fell over one day, on the other side of our "field," nearer first base and the house.
That birch was also next to where our dog was buried. Or one of them. During the time I lived there we had three: Kritzer (a fox terrier my parents got in Germany who was shot by a cop, tossed in the dump out on County Road 12, and eventually buried in an old bread box under the birch tree after my dad found her there); Ole, who was Kritzer's pup and part beagle; and Casey, my brother Peter's untrainable white dog who eventually wore away all the grass in the back yard and ate I don't know how many fence pickets.
It always surprised me that Mom and Dad let us play baseball in that side yard. I don't think a year went by when we didn't have someone hit a ball through a window. But they just replaced the glass and I don't remember anyone ever bawling us out for that—they just sort of took it in stride.
Of course I don't think we ever actually played nine to a team out there. Most of the time it was two against two, with one guy pitching (overhand, but soft toss) and one covering the whole field, while the other two batted. We'd do ghost runners if we needed them, but with only one fielder, we weren't stopping a heck of a lot, so the runners made it around pretty regularly. Looking back, I don't know how we ever got anyone out.
Sometimes our neighbor to the south, Kenny Campbell, would get in his bedroom window and act as a combination announcer and umpire. He was a few years older than us, and most often that would end with Kenny telling us we were cheating, which meant we vociferously argued rules we didn't understand or even know existed.
Kenny also liked to play a variation of home run derby in his back yard, and when there were no other "big kids" around, he'd let us play. He was probably 2-3 years older than we were, and he seemed like a giant because he was so much taller. I saw him years later, working in an auto parts store, and was stunned to discover I had at least 3-4 inches on him as an adult.
Anyway, the way it worked was Kenny pitched a worn tennis ball at a strike zone he'd chalked or painted on the end of a shed at the back of his house, and we'd try to hit it, using a cut-off broom stick with electrical tape wrapped around the handle. Kenny threw hard and he called balls and strikes on you. You got three outs. If you walked, you got a ghost runner. If you hit the ball over the hedge behind him it was a home run. No other hit counted. Most of the time Kenny stuck us out—it was probably two years out there before I ever actually hit the darn thing, and I don't think any of us ever beat him.
It didn't seem odd to me at the time, but that shed was one of two or three ad hoc additions that had been made to the back of Campbell's house in years past, one after the other, each one built off the previous one. They extended well beyond what was the property line in other yards, because Campbell's owned the property all the way from the 3rd Street side of the block over to 4th Street. On the 4th street side there was a small, box of an apartment building, built right up against the sidewalk with no yard, 4 units in it and room to park four cars in the dirt driveway behind it.
On the other side of our house was another bigger than normal yard with more unusual buildings. It belonged to Frank Aiple (of Aiple Towing fame) and was a corner lot. Besides a big house, there was a two-story grarage that looked to me to be as big as a lot of the houses in the neighborhood. That had a shed attached to it and attached to that was what seemed to be almost a lean-to barn, that extended all the way to the back of the Aiple property and that was never intact as long as I lived there.
Some of the subsequent owners tore the lean-to barn down, but as kids we enjoyed climbing on the roof (which came down to about waist height as we'd walk along the edge of the retaining wall between Swanson's and our yards—who could resist that?) and occasionally sneaking inside for a look. It was also a good roof to skip apples off (they'd go all the way to Hancock Street) and at one point one of the neighborhood kids—his name was Earl—went on kind of a rampage and tore off a bunch of the roofing.
We had what was probably once a free-standing garage and a shed, connected by what we called a rain shed—basically a flat roof built on some two-by-fours that ran between the sides of the shed and garage, just below the eaves, with a corrugated metal back. We'd park bikes in there sometimes, but mostly we'd climb up through that roof onto the garage and shed roofs. For some reason we enjoyed getting up on the roofs wherever and whenever we could. And because the elevation of Swanson's property was a couple of feet higher than ours—hence the retaining wall—we could jump from the low edge of our shed roof, over the white picket fence that was on top of the retaining wall, and into Swanson's yard. Probably no more than four feet vertically and a couple horizontally, and miraculously no one ever got impaled.
There's more to talk about. Each thing I write about here makes me think of something else I want to say. I've already blown past half-a-dozen digressions that I could have made in order to end up here. So I guess next time I'll try to pick up this thread again and see where it takes me...
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