Remembering Friend Julie and Happy Days

Both pictures in Silver Bay - June 1969.  Top one - Julie with many friends.  Julie is down front - in green sweater.   During a Friday night slumber party years earlier ... She laughed so hard she snagged her braces on a pillow case... the next day she had to travel to her orthodontist in Two Harbors.

The bottom photo:  Julie and Susie - both my bestest high school buddies.

Silver Bay - Trailer Court

My family moved to Silver Bay in 1956 - not long before school began.  My first years were spent on our farm in Harris, Minnesota. (Remember, we all came from somewhere else.) While we waited for a house we lived in the trailer court.   The trailer court was on the lake side of Highway 61, not far from the Reserve offices.  I have a booklet of photos with 1956 printed on the side of each - probably taken up to Rexall Drug for processing.

When we drove off 61 and into the trailer court on that first day, Mom said she'd never seen me "act so wild" before. Until then I'd only played with one or two children at a time.  And on the trailer court's playground that first day, there were dozens of kids - I ran from the car whooping and shouting.

In addition to trailers, the "court" included rustic lake cabins, moved from Lake Superior tourist resorts. The land was purchased to build Reserve Mining Company, the reason Silver Bay was created.

 

Here's our first S.B. home:

 
Unlike our farmhouse, the two-bedroom cabin had running water and a bathroom.

The Sankers lived next in a cabin next to us and Joan became my first girlfriend.  Families that lived in the trailers included the Jensens and the Fitzgeralds, with boys who, if my memory is correct, were in Mrs. Firmhinac's kindergarten class with me. As was Joan. In 1969, they all graduated from S.B's Kelley High School with me

This photo booklet includes this picture, taken on one of my Red Letter Days: first day of school.
 

Mom sewed my dress and "pinafore."  The dog is Boots. (I may write about him later.)
I still haven't found my kindergarten class picture!  Luckily there's one in 1969's Silver Log.

Reading Matters - Campton School, 4th grade

The other classrooms at Campton were along the main corridor of the school.  Mrs. Mattson’s fourth grade room was tucked midway between the library and the cafeteria.  Maybe it designed to be a place for choir/band/orchestra practice? Unlike the other classrooms the space had no lockers for coats and boots and no sink where we could up clean up after messy art projects.  Its small size and location made it seem cozy.  

I recall magical afternoons while we listened on the installment plan, one or two chapters per session.  Sometimes a book would take weeks. Our teacher often chose thick books. The intimidating page count might keep us from checking these books out of our school or public library. Not wanting to wait until another afternoon to hear what happened next, we would sometimes beg her to continue reading and, because she was easygoing, she sometimes agreed.  Mrs. Mattson’s eclectic mixture of fiction and non-fiction introduced me to genres that I might not have otherwise read, and by the end of the year my favorite characters were Dr. Doolittle and Marie Curie.

She encouraged us to read on our own, too. Each week Mrs. M would lead us around the corner from our room to the Campton School library.  Every month we’d receive a newsletter from the Scholastic Book Club to order slim, inexpensive paperbacks for our personal collection.  Our purchases helped earn free, bonus books for our classroom.

And she instituted a contest.  Mrs. M. gave us each a sheet of paper with the picture of a block house that she had hand drawn and copied with the ditto machine in the school’s office. After printing our names at the top we thumb-tacked the sheets onto our classroom’s bulletin board. After reading a book we would use crayon to color one rectangle, starting from the bottom of our house, and write down the book’s title in a column to the side of the paper. The first one to color in every block of their house won the contest.  I did my best, but Harold read a slew of books.  He beat us to the top of the chimney first. Harold, did you win a prize?

Some of the books I checked out of the Campton library in 4^th, 5^th and 6^th grades to read at home:

A series about the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron

A series with the main character Mrs. Piggle Wiggle

A series with the main character Mr. Pickerel

A book about Johnny Tremaine by Esther Forbes

All of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books

Landmark biographies about Alexander Graham Bell, Luther

    Burbank and George Washington Carver

Books I checked out from the library (at least once) but for some reason never managed to read:

Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder

A book about a horse named Smokey

Fairy Tale Collections of various colors: green, red, yellow, etc.

My hometowns - Silver Bay and Los Angeles

People here in LA often refer to it as a series of small towns.  My family often asks if  I live in Hollywood or Los Angeles. Hollywood is not a city of its own but part of Los Angeles.  If you know Silver Bay you  might not think that these two "towns" have anything in common.  Au contraire.  When I moved to Silver Bay in 1956, all my friends came from somewhere else.  Silver Bay didn't exist until 1955 or 1956 (I have research in a file somewhere which gives the exact date).  And in Los Angeles - nearly everyone comes here from somewhere else, too.  It's an old joke - if you've lived here a year, you're a native.  So maybe that's why Los Angeles seemed familiar to me when I moved here.

For my Silver Bay friends...

Not long ago I saw my class picture from kindergarten - Mrs. Firmhinac's class. Now it's gone missing. Instead I scanned my personal photo.

So, why this blog?  I spent several years in a storytelling group in North Hollywood.  Told many stories about life in Silver Bay and then began to write them down.  At some point I was reading "Angela's Ashes" and came to a quote about a happy childhood not being worth your while.  Then on a visit to Duluth my Duluthian aunt told me, "Silver Bay?  You can write a whole book about that?"  You can't hear her inflection.  Let's say the subtext I heard was: "How in the world could anyone write much of anything about a dinky little town which was never interesting in the least and who in the world would want to read such a book."

My original title - FROM THE TACONITE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.

A good blog is a short blog.  Enough for today.

UPDATE 5/24/14
I still plan to write my Minnesota childhood memoir one day.  I honestly believe the town gave its young people a place to feel safe and secure - that ultimately made us more contented as adults.  I leave it to a sociologist to do a study of the early days of Silver Bay.  One of the possible titles of my S.B. memoir is Days of Wonder.   I would appreciate any comments if you happen upon this or other blog entries.  Cheers, L.


 

Do You Know the Way?

1987. Hollywood, California

Walking on a street in our new neighborhood I heard a car behind me. The streets in the hillside area where I live are narrow, with no sidewalks and, sometimes, no curbs and gutters. I tucked myself closer to the edge of the road to allow ample room for the vehicle to pass. The sedan slowed, then stopped beside me; the woman in the front passenger seat lowered her window. “Can you tell me where I can find the Hollywood sign?” she asked.

It was early morning and unusually clear. In 1976, when I moved to Los Angeles, the frequently cloudy mornings surprised me. The sunny California that I had expected often didn’t arrive until after eleven. Sometimes my husband and I carried umbrellas with us. After a few weeks, however, we began to trust that the clouds and fog, what the TV weather people called the marine layer, would dissipate and that, eventually, the sun would shine.

“It’s behind you,” I said. With a sweep of my hand I pointed to the famous white letters, high on a hillside, beyond the car’s rear window, that spelled out Hollywood.

The lady turned her head and craned her neck. “There it is, Hon,” she said to the man behind the wheel.

He leaned across the woman towards me. “How do we get up there?”

I hesitated. Although people had in the past (one time, just before Easter, someone had climbed up and covered an “L” so that the sign said HOLYWOOD), I didn’t think you could get up to the sign anymore. Even if you could still get up to the sign, I didn’t think you were supposed to. I didn’t want to encourage these tourists in any illegal venture. Their out-of- state license plate indicated they were from West Virginia. Wasn’t that one of those tobacco states? They were probably heavy smokers. Smoking was banned in the hillside areas because of the fire danger. Maybe I’d send them up near the sign, they’d light up and I’d be responsible for the destruction of a neighborhood.

“I don’t know if you can actually get up there,” I told them. “But if you turn around, you can get up to the Hollywood reservoir. That’s a good place to take a picture of the sign. And across the lake you can see a house that someone told me Madonna owns. But I don’t know if she’s there very often.”

We were only a half-mile away from the reservoir, but the streets wind this way and that way and the street signs are often obscured by palm fronds and bougainvillea. If they were lucky they found someone else to direct them to the reservoir. New to the area, unsure of the street names, I may have given them directions with one too many left turns. Fussing about my poor navigational help, I walked home. Suddenly an eerie feeling percolated within me. Being asking for directions… it was déjà vu...

1964. Silver Bay, Minnesota

Riding my blue Huffy bicycle along Banks Boulevard on a warm summer afternoon, about halfway home, I stopped. I had been at band and orchestra rehearsals at Kelley High School, and my violin and clarinet each dangled from a handle bar. I was at the point where the boulevard began a steep, downhill grade. You could pick up considerable speed on descent which was why Silver Bay’s local Soap Box Derby competition used this section of Banks as its race course. I still had scabs on my knees from an earlier incident when I had skidded on the gravel near this same spot. The violin, being longer and heavier than the clarinet, had unbalanced me. Unable to regain equilibrium, the bike had crashed and pavement had peeled layers of skin from one elbow and one knee. As I readjusted my cases, I heard a vehicle behind me. I turned as the station wagon slowed and rolled to a stop beside me. The woman in the passenger seat rolled down her window.

“Can you tell me where we can find the business district?” she asked.

I hesitated.

“We saw a sign… business district ahead…”

I knew the sign on Outer Drive. It wasn’t far from the junction with Highway 61. Driving into town they had actually seen the shopping area they were searching for, but gone on by. Eventually, on their way back towards the highway, they had spotted a twelve-year-old girl on a blue bike and asked her for directions.

“This is it,” I said, sweeping my hand toward the nearby parking lot and shopping center below us. It was a gesture stolen from Dinah Shore when, on her weekly TV show, she presented the features of the latest models from Chevrolet. The Silver Bay Bank was just down the hill which anyone who has been on Banks above the shopping center in Silver Bay will tell you.

The woman looked disappointed. The man in the driver’s seat leaned across his wife, craning his neck to see what he could see. He shook his head. Maybe he felt snookered for turning off Highway 61 and driving into the City of Silver Bay. As the station wagon sped away, without turning toward our Shopping Center, I tweaked the positions of my violin and clarinets cases for balance, and then coasted down Banks Boulevard toward home.

Another Year almost Over

Hard to believe so many months have passed since I wrote my previous blog entries. But here I am again. I recently finished the 4th draft of a children's book. Although the first agent I queried (including the first 10 pages with my letter - oh, how I reworked those first 10 pages) passed on my project, it was certainly a positive rejection. Since my book has a Christmas theme of hope, I remain full of cheer and (mostly) optimistic. I continue to send out queries. I keep reading that a writer must build a presence on the web and (hopefully) I'll be blogging more often in 2011. As a rule I only make one New Year's resolution each January - and always the same one - not to overcook the pasta. Last year I added "write more." I think I'll keep those same two resolutions for 2011.
Cheers!