Recalling Yesterdays

Recalling Yesterdays

Mary Joy Breton

North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.

St. Cloud, Minnesota

Copyright © 2014 Mary Joy Breton

All rights reserved.

Print ISBN 978-0-87839-754-9

eBook ISBN: 9780-0-87839-839-3

First Edition: May 2014

Published by

North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.

P.O. 451

St. Cloud, Minnesota 56302

northstarpress.com

Dedicated

to my Celtic ancestors

and

to their descendants, including

my three daughters

Contents

Preface

1: Surviving the Great Depression—Plunged into Poverty

2: Birth and Early Years

3: Elementary School Angst

4: Celtic Lineage

5: World War II and High School

6: Courtship by Correspondence

7: Working toward My P.H.T. Degree

8: Tears and Triumphs of the 1950s

9: More about My Parents

10: Pungent Pennsylvania

11: Marriage

12: Career Stories

13: Children

14: Midlife Metamorphosis

15: Dwelling Dramas and Joys

16: Hobbies

17: Travel Tales

18: Celtic Consequences and Other Calamities

Preface

Of the many aphorisms of my grandmother, Lydia Ann Webster Armstrong, one that she often repeated to us was, It’s better to wear out than rust out. So far, I am grateful to say, I have been able to avoid both. But as I approach my ninth decade, I would like to record some of my life experiences.

My life has spanned one of the most event-packed and rapidly changing periods in our nation’s history—multiple wars, depressions, inflations, unfathomable technological advancements (some good and some ill-advised), cultural shifts, and the coming and going of fifteen presidents. Future descendants may be interested to know about how I coped with these changes.

I am happy about the course of my experience, and I thank those who have helped to make it memorable. Sophocles said, One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.

I hope my family and anyone else who reads my autobiography will enjoy these glimpses into the yesterdays I have experienced.

Mary Joy Breton

St. Paul, Minnesota

2014

1: Surviving the Great Depression—Plunged into Poverty

I’m bid 900 dollars, now do I hear 950? Will ya give me fifty? Nine-fifty, nine-fifty? I hear 950, now 975, will ya give me 975, now 975?"

On a scorching August day in 1932, our house at 3701 Twenty-fourth Avenue South in Minneapolis came up for auction. I huddled halfway up the stairs of our two-story bungalow, waiting for a glimpse of the bird that lived in the cuckoo clock hanging on the wall above the landing. My father’s nightly routine, after emptying the drip-pan under the ice box, included raising the cuckoo clock’s pine-cone-shaped weights up to the cuckoo’s house with the pull chains. As I watched and fantasized about the cuckoo bird—I liked to pretend it was alive—and listened to the auctioneer’s chant to the crowd on the front lawn, I sensed a huge change was about to take place in my life. I didn’t know what would happen to us. At eight years old, I was scared of the uncertainty. Clutching my skirt to my face, I swabbed away the sweat and tears and masked my nose against the stench of cigar smoke.

My birthplace, 3701 Twenty-fouth Avenue South, Minneapolis, 1932.

William and Mary Dean with their family, 1928. Children, left to right: Bill, Johnny, Sandy, and me.

The stairway was not walled, and I could peek through the balustrades, catching glimp­ses of the goings-on out front. In the winter we hung brown velveteen curtains in the stairwell and across the landing to confine the heat from our coal-fired furnace to the downstairs. The second-floor bedrooms were always cold. On special occasions my three brothers and I used the landing as a stage for entertaining our parents and other relatives and guests. My oldest brother, Bill, who always managed the show, had rigged a system of pull cords by which, from a spot up a few steps, he could open and close the curtains like a real stage. Another brother, Sandy, played the violin or his harmonica, while I danced free-form style in a costume made of scissor-blade-curled pink crepe paper petals sewn to a muslin base. My mother had created it for me to wear for a kindergarten performance of the Wedding of the Painted Doll. I played a ­bridesmaid and performed a between-act dance to a phonograph accompaniment of Tiptoe through the Tulips.

The curled crepe paper on muslin costume that my mother created for the kindergarten production of the Wedding ofthe Painted Doll.

Three of the family’s four children were born in the upstairs front bedroom of this house that my parents bought in 1921. From this room on national holidays, my father could step through the window and edge himself along the gable of the front porch roof to slip the flag and its flagpole into a holder. He never missed a holiday.

From this open window on Election Day in 1928, my younger brother, Johnny, then two and a-half, shouted to the neighborhood in his baby voice, Hooray for Hoover.

During the early 1930s, the iceman and the milkman still made home deliveries. The ragman in his horse-drawn wagon, the umbrella repair man, and the scissor and knife sharpener called out their hardscrabble occupations as they made their way through the neighborhoods. Repair services and recycling businesses became growth industries during the Great Depression.

In the Minnesota winter mornings, we found the cardboard lids on the glass bottles of milk left on our back stoop perched atop a column of frozen cream an inch above the bottle. We sometimes mixed a bit of vanilla and sugar into the frozen cream for an ice cream treat. A quart of milk and an ice cream cone each cost five cents.

My father, William James Dean—five feet tall with a deep, resonant voice—had been deprived in England of an education beyond the fifth grade. He was tubercular and not expected to live to maturity. In 1898 when he was twenty-one, he immigrated to the United States. The Presbyterian Church sent him to Sisseton, South Dakota, to be a Presbyterian missionary to Dakota people. He soon abandoned that and began selling Bibles. Finally, he settled on practicing a trade—paperhanging and painting. He remained a bachelor until, at forty, he married my mother, fifteen years his junior. The four of us arrived between 1920 and 1926—just in time to be clobbered by the Great Depression. Soon after the October 29, 1929, stock market crash, my father lost his steady job at the Andrews Hotel in Minneapolis. Redecorating became an expendable luxury.

Having exhausted our savings and unable to make the mortgage and tax payments on our home, the mortgage holder was foreclosing, selling our house and most of our furnishings at a sheriff’s auction.

I loved every room in that house. As I sat on those stairs, I recalled the fun we had had in the steamy warm bathroom when my father gave us our baths before story time. He would often knock on the side of the claw-footed tub as though knocking on the door of a house and then carry on an animated and comical conversation with a mysterious Mr. Smith, who lived somewhere in the drainpipes. Mr. Smith originated as a tiny doll that had fallen off the handle of Johnny’s new toothbrush and vanished down the tub drain.

After our baths, we scampered downstairs to sit on the floor around my father’s easy chair while he read to us. Sometimes he read a Chapter a night from Little Women. Or it might be a poem by Tennyson, Longfellow, or Dickinson. Two of my favorites were Longfellow’s The Children’s Hour and Dickinson’s I’m Nobody, Who are You? My father had a way of making the stories and poems vibrant.

My parents read to us every day from the time we were infants. My mother read the poems in our favorite early childhood books so often she knew them by heart and could recite them to us as she went about her housework, while we tagged along beside her, holding the open book.

As the auctioneer’s voice rang out, my mind traveled back to the way my mother had decorated our dining room for a Halloween Party she arranged for us: orange and black crepe paper streamers, hand-made pumpkin-shaped place cards and paper Halloween hats for our small guests. We played pin the tail on the donkey, blindfolded of course, and we kneeled on a chair and leaned over the back to drop clothespins in a milk bottle.

We amused ourselves in that house in other ways too. I remembered lining up the dining room chairs to play train. I stood on our large Bissell carpet sweeper for the fun of a ride as my mother pushed it over the rugs. I also recalled our summer games on the sidewalk out front: tag, hopscotch, skip-rope, and marbles.

And I saw myself sitting on my father’s lap as he pushed and pulled my two main front teeth into the right position. One adult tooth had emerged in my upper front gum, and the other toward the roof of my mouth. Pushing and pulling nightly with his fingers, my father made my two upper front teeth straight and close together in only a few months’ time.

Summers in Minnesota could be sweltering. Our bedrooms upstairs were always the hottest part of the house. We had no air conditioning, of course, only small floor fans. Sometimes we slept on our screened porch floor. Our bedrooms turned frigid in the winter. To warm our beds, my mother heated bricks in our gas oven, then wrapped them in newspapers and in cloth rags, pinning the rags in place with safety pins. One time, an overheated brick in Johnny’s bed set fire to the newspapers and rags. Smelling smoke, my mother discovered Johnny huddled in the corner of his crib, crying while his bed smoldered. No more bicks for me, two-year-old Johnny declared. Needless to say, henceforth she did not put hot bricks in our beds. She switched to heated soapstones.

* * * *

Sold! for one thousand dollars the auctioneer bellowed, jolting me out of my reverie.

With our home gone and scarcely any money, my parents had to figure out what to do, where to go. While they were deciding on a plan, they rented a sparsely furnished house for the winter on Vincent Avenue in what was then a rinky-dink outlying community called Bloomington.

In Minneapolis we had traveled everywhere on foot or by trolley car. Knowing we would be without public transport in Bloomington, my folks bought an old Chevrolet. My father, already in his mid-fifties, had to learn how to drive. One day while practicing, he drove the Chevy into the alley behind our house and couldn’t find—or couldn’t reach—the brake pedal. The car shot straight into the lilac hedge. Certain he had killed himself, I ran screaming to the neighbors for help.

He never became a good driver. In Bloomington, if he were late arriving home after job-hunting all day, we would push the soup pot to the back of the wood-burning cookstove and stand at the window watching for our car. We could recognize its headlights turning off the main road onto the dirt one leading to our rented house. On more than one occasion, he arrived home late with a different Chevy junker than the one that he had driven away that morning. We knew then he had been involved in a mishap. One time he came home with a replacement Chevy sporting a small chrome airplane on the radiator cap. My brothers and I thought the airplane really nifty. Evidently someone else thought so too and took it, perhaps to pawn.

One frigid night, our pump pipe in the well pit froze. The next morning, my father lowered himself into the well pit to thaw out the pipe. He wrapped the pipe in rags, soaking them in kerosene and then setting fire to the rags. The rags exploded, burning my father’s arms and hands as he struggled to scramble back up out of the well pit. He bore the scars of the burns the rest of his life.

The folks across the road from us in Bloomington neglected and indeed abused a little dog that hung around outside their place. Feeling sorry for the dog, we began feeding and sheltering him. He soon became our pet. We named him Victor. With his cocked ear and markings, he resembled the image of the trademark dog inside the lid of our humpback model Victrola phonograph player.

Hoping to live off the land, my parents made a down payment on a small tract of land. Before finalizing the purchase, however, they discovered that the plot was almost solid rock and not tillable. Even so, they lost their down payment.

Early the following spring, 1933, my parents bought one acre of land for $450 from dairy farmer Willard Anderson in rural Eden Prairie Township. At that time, it was an isolated sleepy settlement on the far fringes of the Twin Cities with a population of 1,000 people. Our acre on Highway 169 sat opposite a huge Sherwin Williams Paint billboard showing paint flowing over and enveloping the Earth.

Our Eden Prairie dwelling with a field of zinnias in the foreground.

In 1853 a prominent woman author of the time—Elizabeth Frey Ellet—had suggested the name Eden Prairie to officials in St. Paul. She had taken a trip up the Minnesota River and described the area as the garden spot of the territory. When the virgin prairie was in full bloom, she had climbed the river bluff. Struck by the beauty of the prairie flowers and the panoramic view of the Minnesota River Valley, she commented to a companion that the Garden of Eden could not possibly have been more lovely. The Mdewakanton Dakota, whose homeland Minnesota has always been, call the area Wa-se-cha, land of plenty. I remember climbing the same river bluffs as a child with my mother to look for wild flowers, especially the pale lavender crocuses with their furry petals.

Our one-acre plot in Eden Prairie had been planted with oats. Mother surveyed the scene, We’ll grow our food right here. It looked impossible to me. And I wondered where we would live. Even so, the prospect of a challenging new life experience somehow energized me and lifted my spirits.

A generous friend—Mr. Lathrop—who owned a lumber yard in Minneapolis, let us have enough lumber on credit to build a crude one-room shoe-box shelter and outhouse (where we recycled old Sears Roebuck catalogs for toilet paper). But we had to pay cash to the building contractor as well as to the well driller. During construction, we slept in the rental house in Bloomington. By day, we worked on clearing the weeds and oats from our acre in preparation for planting vegetables. My two older brothers—Bill and Sandy—took turns being the horse, pulling a hand-held plough/cultivator through the sticky clay soil. Even after plowing and harrowing the ground and pulling out the oats, though, the grain kept coming back up. The task seemed overwhelming to my brothers and me, and we wanted to give up and try again the next spring. But raising vegetables meant food for the coming winter. So all of us pitched in and continued working. The sticky clay made gardening extremely difficult. Worse yet, we were inexperienced gardeners. Of the two thousand strawberry plants my mother set out, only five hundred survived the dry spring. Until we had an operating well, we hauled water in milk cans from a neighboring farm to water what we had planted.

Squatting beside my mother, I dropped seeds into the soil channel we had made with a hoe. We were creating a large bed of annuals—mostly zinnias. Fresh-cut flowers will be our cash crop. We’ll sell them along the highway.

Kind neighbors who had started a nursery business further down the highway gave us Lombardy poplar tree seedlings and small shrubs including miniature climbing roses. Roses were my father’s favorite flower. His father had been a gardener on a gentleman’s estate in Cornwall, England. On Sundays when my father dressed up for church, he liked to wear a red rose in his lapel. One of those heirloom rose bushes—after being transplanted numerous times from the garden of one descendant to that of another—thrives today under the care of my daughter, Jeannine.

We worked to enrich and aerate the clay soil on our plot by adding manure given to us by neighboring farmers. We also hauled peat from the bog in an adjacent valley. We buried our organic kitchen garbage between our vegetable crop rows and maintained a compost pile. During the summers when my mother worked in the garden, much of the housework and cooking fell to me, the only girl.

We cooked on a three-burner kerosene stove, and we used a portable metal oven over one burner when we needed to bake.

During late-summer harvest