Silver Bay and a Dog Named Boots, Part 2

Certainly someone else in the Kelley Class of 1969 remembers this grand event held in the Silver Bay Shopping Center, 1958 or 1959.  (If it was in 1959, perhaps businessmen or the City council or a group of Silver Bay citizens were trying to take our minds off the Steelworker's strike that seemed to go on forever and sent my family back to the farm.  I will certainly write about that later.)

As far as this animal contest - Daddy convinced me to take Boots.  And we spent the morning of the competition making the Pomeranian look as beautiful as possible.  We bathed him and brushed him and he actually seemed to like all the attention. Mom did a lot of sewing, in fact she was apprenticed to a dressmaker in Minneapolis in her teen, so she had all kinds of ribbons in a sewing basket. We we chose red and tied a big bow around his neck so you could barely see his collar.Boots was as handsome as I'd ever seen him.

We lived on Charles at the corner of Banks so the Shopping Center was just up the hill, past the woods and the green steel municipal building.  I think we may have walked up to the event for I recall walking through the parking lot that was nearly full.  There were a lot people with their pets. There were probably cats. Maybe rabbits, too?  Hamsters? Tropical fish?  Turtles? But I only remember dogs. There were so many of them.  And this sense of hopelessness came over me.  Boots would never win a prize. Not with this many dogs competing for a prize. 

The judging took place on the cement walkway in front of the line of shops.  I stood with Boots on this sidewalk, near the entrance of the Rexall store.  There were many dogs on either side of me.  Most were with adults owners.  Daddy stood behind me.  The judge was a lady I knew.  She was one of my Sunday school or Bible school teachers.  Her name started with an R.  Maybe Mrs. Reimer?  Roemer?  She went down the line of dogs, slowly, looking at each carefully and asking questions... (to be continued)

Silver Bay and a Dog Named Boots, Part 1

This is my sister Karen's dog, a Pomeranian named Boots.  He's the second dog in my life, the first dog was a working Shepherd mix that herded cows and lived in our barn in Harris, Minnesota.

I don't think people bought beds for dogs then.  We couldn't just go to a Walmart or Target and buy one, spending time deciding the size, color, softness, etc. Boots napped and slept in a cardboard box.  When he was bad, someone would say, "go to your box" and he obeyed.  He weighed no more than fifteen pounds.  The box was maybe 14"X 24".  The important detail was the depth, the cardboard sides were no more than 7 inches high.  He would jump into the box on command or on his own.  But when he wanted to get out?  Someone would have to lift him out. 

He's not much to look at in this photo - it's cropped from another photo and the only one I could find of Boots. But in the spring or summer of 1958 or 1958, the Silver Bay Shopping Center hosted a "Best in Show" animal competition. Entering Boots in this contest was Daddy's idea... (to be continued)

In Hollywood Thinking about Silver Bay, Writing, and Life

Just feel like writing something on the blog even though I don't have any Silver Bay stuff on my mind.  Went to BevMo today to look for soda chargers - we like fizzy water but not the idea of transporting all that glass and plastic around the globe.  Anyway, we bought a soda siphon awhile ago and we're almost out of soda chargers.  While waiting in the check-out line I was reading the walls  - the store is decorated with quotes about eating and drinking and its joys.  Have to look at Ecclesiastes as they had a quote there about enjoying life - that sounds upbeat compared to much of the Bible quoting I hear these days.  But I digress.

It was a Kierkegaard quote that jumped out at me from that wall.  The computer couldn't read the scan on the box of my soda chargers so I had time to read that quote a few times and think about it - "We must live forward."  Wow, I thought.  And here I am spending hours thinking and writing about my childhood.  Somewhere I have to reconcile that - I do not want to live in the past as that's... well, it's past, isn't it?  But, then, should I trust the graphics on a BevMo wall?  And is that really what Kierkegaard said?  Maybe the translation is a bit dicey.

I remember another quote which I cannot credit as I don't remember where I heard it or read it or who said it.  "The past isn't over.  The past isn't even past."  Interesting. After all, our backgrounds are who we are - using background as a HUGE thing that includes who we know, have known, where we live, have lived, what we've seen, read, done, etc. etc. etc.  So maybe memoir is about the past and also about the future.

And then, what about "living in the now?"  Eckhart Tolle's  The Power of Now is a best-seller. I'm guessing he's sold more books than the Dane I mentioned above.  I've read most of Tolle's book and it's easy going compared to Fear and Trembling.  

Good grief.  And to think I was planning to write about a stray dog that was wandering in my neighborhood on Wednesday.  But here's the photo I took with my phone camera so I could post notices on the telephone poles.
(Updated 8/15 - Below WAS a photo.  No idea what happened to it or why)

She had a collar but no name tag. But her name, Luna - I wouldn't know this except the story has a happy ending.  My neighbor's vet discovered she had a chip and the owner was contacted.  Yes, he'd lost his dog. Until then, I was wondering and worrying - should we, could we keep her?  Did I know anyone that might want her?  For a day and a half I could barely think of anything else. I was, I think, living forward.

An Autograph Book...

The pic of an autographed baseball is in my last posting.. I must say I long to still possess the pink vinyl autograph book that one of my three sisters gave me.  Inside was a slip of paper with the autograph of Frank Camacho.

So many of us had parents and grandparents that were European, mostly Scandinavian, that when I saw a photo of Frank Comacho - I think he was the high school's first exchange student - when I saw his picture in the Silver Bay News I thought, "what a dreamy guy."  I believe he was from Guam.  I know he was a basketball player because that's the reason I have his autograph - or, I should say HAD his autograph.

It was a tournament game, probably on a Saturday afternoon. And for those of us who went to Campton Elementary, attending an event at Kelley High was more of a big deal than for those who went to Mary Mac and Kelley during grade school.

In any case I went to this game - and most likely with my friend Susie.  And Frank must have played a heck of a game  (also don't forget his dreamy looks and those short-legged uniforms the guys used to wear.)   We asked him for his autograph.  To me he was a celebrity - even more than Duluth's Dottie Becker! My little heart pounded as we walked up to him. He signed his name on a slip of paper, he smiled.  Ahhh...

It was after that game that I yearned for an autograph book.  No doubt I assumed that in the future I might need one.The only autographs actually on the pages were written by my girlfriends after I brought the book to a couple of slumber parties.  Some wrote little verses.  I just flashed on one that Carla Schultz wrote:

"On your wedding day,
It's going to snow.
And don't tell me
I didn't tell you so."   

And she was right.  There was an enormous snowstorm on the weekend of our wedding.

If  I could find that autograph book again... I'm sure the folded slip of paper would still be in there. But, alas, the book's gone missing. The memento is only tucked within my childhood memories.

A Toy Bought in Silver Bay... and Made in the U.S.A.

One of my first days in Silver Bay I took my first trip to the Silver Bay shopping center!  Daddy needed something at the hardware store and I went with him.  This was late August or early September, 1956.  At that time the shopping center included S & Q Hardware - on the end farthest from the I.G.A. Foodliner. Later Rexall Drug store knocked out a wall and expanded into this S & Q space.  But on that day there was no post office yet and no famous Rocky Taconite statue.  While we were in the store Daddy said I could pick out a toy.  Either he told me or I knew that it couldn't anything too big or expensive.  In any case I chose the policeman on motorcycle below:

The policeman and his motorcycle is made of hard rubber so it's got some weight to it. It's durable or it would have broken many decades ago. The wheels actually roll on steel axles. But what's interesting to me and puts the toy in a particular time:  it's stamped Made in USA, Auburn Rubber Company.   In a previous blog I wrote that our Silver Bay Class of 1969 witnessed the change in America from farm to industry to service economy and I use this as a personal example.

I keep the motorcycle on one of our bookshelves. Just for the photo I moved a baseball from a different shelf so you get the idea of scale. (The ball is on our shelf because it was autographed for Bill by former Dodger Steve Garvey one day when Garvey visited the "Young and Restless" stage at CBS.) The toy is front of a class photo, Mrs. Jauhola's fifth grade at Campton.


Perhaps it's strange that a four-year-old girl would pick out this toy and not something cute or cuddly but I loved playing with cars and trucks. I think it's because, until I landed in Silver Bay, the only children I'd played with were boys - cousin Jeff from Minneapolis and a boy named Dean who lived on a nearby Harris farm.  The first Christmas in Silver Bay I asked Santa for a gas station.

The Campton Gym - Shot Clinic and Dance Recital

Good, Bad and Ugly - the Campton Gym was a universe in itself.  One memory - lining up in kindergarten to enter the gym at Campton.  Then, smelling something strange - alcohol fumes.  It was a shot clinic - maybe booster shots for whooping cough and diphtheria or possibly polio shots - before it was oral vaccine.  In any case I had forgotten about that slip of paper pinned to the front of my dress, a permission slip signed by my mother that I could receive the vaccine.  I had no idea why we were going to the gym that day.  But I felt bamboozled.  I hated shots.

One of my better memories of Campton is a dance recital, first or second grade.

Cheryl Thompson is at the left of the photo, I'm next to her.  We must be figuring out what we're supposed to do next.  The girl next to me appears confident, that she knows exactly what she's doing.

Our dance teacher was Mrs. Baum.  She lived on Horn Blvd., I think.  Mrs. Baum put an ad in the Silver Bay Shopper.  She taught gymnastics, tap and ballet.  In the photo above we younger students are doing a dance with an Asian theme - our mothers made black pants and the shirts were blue - both of a shiny acetate I believe - something to give a hint of silk.  Our fans were cardboard, covered with the same fabric as our mandarin-collared shirts.  We wear white socks.

Mrs. Baum only taught for a few year, then became ill.  I think she died very young.

I want to express my gratitude that she shared her joy of the dance to young girls in Silver Bay.  I used what I learned from Mrs. Baum when I was in my twenties and a chorus girl in Moorhead State's GUYS AND DOLLS.  One of our Moorhead friends recently mailed us a CD with some of Bill's sets and a few of my stage pics. This photo has both - Bill's set of the musical and me, standing far right.

Flap, flap, flap, ball-change, Hop, shuffle, step, flap, ball-change. Those tap combinations were still in my muscle memory all those years later.. "I love you a bushel and a peck... " Hey, they're still with me today.

Charles Circle, NBC and the Three Stooges

Today - a little more about watching TV oh so many years ago.  In the last blog I wrote about my first color TV experience. My family lived on Banks.  Now, I'll go back to second grade when we lived on Charles Circle, our first house in  Silver Bay after leaving the trailer court.  (I will no doubt write in the future about why I lived in not one but three Silver Bay houses.)  Oh, how joyful it felt to be in an exclusive club because I had watched the Cartwright family in color.  Oh, but when you're not in the TV club.. what sorrow!

Now I'll take you back to 1959-1960. Here is one of the few pics I can find that shows our home at 37 Charles.  It was located - and I assume still is - at the corner of Banks and Charles nearest the shopping center.  The other end of Charles was nearest Campton.

The Tweeto family lived next door and the Varneys were across the street.  I think that Harold Varney (my class) or his brother Mark (one year older?) might be the boy on the bicycle.

But back to my sad story about television at 37 Charles. No matter how many times Daddy adjusted the aerial on the roof, we could not get reception from Channel 6, the NBC affiliate in Duluth.  We only had two stations in Silver Bay then.  The WDIO tower in Duluth wasn't built until later.

So, I would go to second grade, Mrs. Sarf's class.  And my classmates, especially the boys, would be goofing around like the Stooges and I did not know who these Stooges were!  Captain Q. included short films with the Stooges on his show - and this was on Channel 6 which we did not get at my house.  Of course I pretended to know all about the Stooges.  I did not know how to put it then, but certainly I felt culturally deprived. Simply put - I was out of the club. And when you're seven, it feels awful. Which Stooge is your favorite? someone asked me. I could barely swallow from fear that the truth of my Stooge ignorance would be revealed. I think I said Moe because it was the only Stooge name I could remember.

That's all for today.  Cheers to all and a special thanks to Silver Bay friends who have e-mailed.