I have never moved to a warmer climate—never gave it a thought—because, after the brutal winter of 1951, every winter since has seemed mild and pleasant to me, especially with the advent of thermal underwear and heated steering wheels, which didn’t exist back then. Nowadays you can plug your car into an electrical outlet to keep the radiator warm so the car starts instantly in the morning. Ice choppers are better, snow boots, emergency medical care: progress on every hand. People complain about winter and I tell them, “It could be worse,” which I happen to know something about, having been around in 1951.
I was nine years old, the invisible middle child in a family of eight. We had been a family of ten but little Ralph had been carried away by coyotes and my twin sister, Gertie, had been perforated by a giant icicle. She was going to school and slammed the door in a fit of pique, and the icicle, which had been suspended from the eave and was the size of a Sidewinder missile and pointed at the end, split the child nearly in two.
This was before we moved to town. We lived way out on the county road, in a rickety frame house at the old Crandall farm, eight of us in three bedrooms, plus Aunt Cooter and Uncle Dud, who weren’t related to us. Mother took them in because they had nowhere to go and we were Christians. They lived in the living room, wrapped in horse blankets, gumming their food and conversing with historical figures such as Ulysses S. Grant or Mrs. William McKinley. When they weren’t complaining about their troubles, they were muttering dark prophesies: “It’s a-coming! The big one! Who can withstand the power of the Lord God Almighty if He shall set His Hand against them!” Demented elderly people do not make good houseguests but peach brandy made them manageable: Dad poured half a cup for each of them at eight every night and they were out cold by nine. All in all I’d say that with them living with us, I always looked forward to school, so that was good.
• • •
Unlike today, there was no accurate weather forecasting back then. America’s radar was focused on defending us against Soviet attack, not on locating high-pressure fronts. All we had from day to day was a general sense of foreboding. Blinding blizzards came sweeping suddenly down from Alberta and Saskatchewan without warning. Thirty below zero was considered moderate; fifty below was cold, eighty below darned cold. At a hundred below, school was canceled and everybody stayed home. Years later it came out that the chief meteorologist at the U.S. Weather Bureau was on the take from the Chamber of Commerce and that temperatures and snowfall were “adjusted” so as not to harm “public morale,” but we knew how cold it was. When you dumped boiling water out the back door, it hit the ground as ice crystals. The snow was ten feet deep—the downstairs of our house was dark from January on and we had to exit through a tunnel. You could walk on the hard-crusted drifts. Our furnace burned coal, and when we ran out, it burned tree stumps, old tires, furniture—we burned the entire twenty-four-volume C. H. McIntosh Commentary on the Ephesians one night, which was Grandpa’s wedding gift to my parents but he was dead and they were still married so it wasn’t a problem.
• • •
One night, engrossed in a Hardy Boys mystery, I lay by the heat register while my sisters and Mother listened to Jack Benny on the radio, jawing with Rochester and Mary, trying to save a nickel on a necktie. Mother asked me to go out and bring in the clothes hanging on the clothesline. I put on my coat and buckled up my overshoes.
“Put a scarf over your face,” she said, “and remember to breathe through your nose, not your mouth.” We knew that mouth breathing would lead to frosted lungs, which would lead to pneumonia and then death.
I walked out into the bitter cold and found the laundry frozen stiff as lumber on the clothesline, the world silent and frozen all around. Blue light flickered from the Wicks’ Muntz TV across the road. We did not have a TV—there were Hollywood movies on TV and Hollywood was a polluter of the minds of young people—so I sometimes snuck over and stood around watching I Love Lucy. The Wicks were always piled in around their old TV with the rabbit ears antenna like a den full of dogs curled up, each dog in his spot. Once when their picture got snowy, I stood and held the antenna and the picture got clearer. They paid me a quarter to do this.
As I took the frozen laundry off the line, I thought about putting my tongue on one of the clothes poles, where it would freeze to the iron instantly and soon the volunteer fire department would come rolling up, sirens screaming, red lights flashing, to rescue me, the very nice boy with glasses, and Mother, weeping with her arms around me, at last would realize what a prize she had. But it was only a thought.
• • •
That night I lay in my cot in the attic and could see my breath. I always slept in my clothes, never wet the bed, never even considered it. I lay quietly, warming up my little trough, and soon after I fell asleep, Mother was thumping on the door. Five a.m., time to rise and shine. I went to the kitchen and took a bowl of Hot Ralston, which tasted like sweeping compound, and a cup of Folger’s coffee, and put on parka and gloves to go help Dad start the car, which was frozen solid in the driveway. We had burned the garage for fuel the winter before.
It was a 1946 Ford coupe, a good-looking car, and my job was to get behind the wheel while Dad pushed. The windshield was heavily frosted, so I put my bare hand against it to clear a little peephole. Dad yelled, “Ready?” and I said I was. “Pump the gas,” he yelled, and he gave a big heave and the tires came loose from where they’d been frozen to the ground and the car started to roll down the slight incline of the driveway. I clung to the wheel and strained to see out through the peephole as the car picked up speed, jolting and bucking over the bumps, the shock absorbers frozen solid. At just the exact right moment, I was to pop the clutch and throw the car into second gear; if I had pumped the gas pedal just the right number of times, the momentum of the car would turn over the engine and it would start firing, and if I hadn’t done everything right, the car would jerk to a stop and Dad would have to call up Mr. Wick to come over with jumper cables and start us. Dad did not care to be beholden to a Catholic, so there was a lot at stake. The car was rolling fast now, and when my foot came off the gas pedal and Dad said, “Now! Now!” I popped her into second and the engine roared and I stepped on the brake while pushing in the clutch to slip the car into neutral, and stopped at the end of the driveway, engine idling at high speed as Dad came running up. “Shove over,” he said. I slid over, and he put the car in reverse and backed her up the long driveway to where the garage had been, and we were all set to go. I don’t remember that he said “Good job” or “Well done, son”; I suppose he may have, but I doubt it. Dad didn’t believe in praise; he felt that it contributed to a prideful attitude.
• • •
Nor did he believe in driving his children to school in town. It was almost half a mile from the Crandall farmhouse to the county road where the schoolbus would come and Dad had strung clothesline from our porch railing to the telephone pole at the end of the driveway and on, pole by pole, up the township road to the county road. On blizzard mornings we grabbed hold of that rope and followed it through the blinding snow. You could hear other children whimpering in the whiteness and sometimes hear wild animals growling—of course we thought of little Ralph, who had been small for his age and easy prey for coyotes. When we came to the county road, the girls huddled inside a snow fort that we boys had constructed; we boys stood on the outside and peed in the snow to keep coyotes at bay until the bus came—or if the bus didn’t come, then a sleigh came, pulled by a pair of black horses and driven by a man named Snead. A man with enormous eyebrows and a big mustache, he was said to have fought in the Battle of the Bulge and spent two years in an Army psychiatric ward. But he had a sleigh and a team of horses and the superintendent was deathly opposed to canceling school—“Once you start canceling school, where would you stop?” Mr. Bye liked to say—and so Mr. Snead got the job when the roads were too treacherous for motorized vehicles. We kids tumbled into the sleigh under the buffalo robes and he cracked his whip and off we went to school. It took almost two hours to get there, crossing the river over the ice, taking a detour around the woods where the coyotes dwelled, and avoiding the rocky ravine where the desperate O’Kasick gang had holed up in a sod hut after robbing the First National Bank of Anoka and shooting a teller in cold blood. I suppose Mr. Snead was trying to shield us from harsh reality by avoiding that ravine but we already knew all about the O’Kasicks and their bloody end, as we knew all about the grave-robber Ed Gein and the rampage of Charlie Starkweather, who shot his girlfriend’s parents, and the merciless deeds of Dillinger and Ma Barker and Alvin (Creepy) Karpis, not to mention the James-Younger gang.
We knew that not far from the Crandall farm was the house where Confederate bushwhackers holed up in February 1865, on a foray to kidnap children for ransom to buy explosives in Canada—only it was bitterly cold and they were not properly dressed, so after they had ridden around and whooped for a while, they were happy to be taken into custody in a warm jail.
Mr. Snead drove his team past these scenes of violence and despair and we could smell the smell—so strange to a child’s nose—of the raw whiskey he was nipping from a flask in his big hairy bearskin coat. Soon he was singing about the halls of Montezuma and the caissons rolling along, which moved him to depths of emotion and he wept and at the same time he lifted up a corner of the buffalo robe and yelled at us, “You kids know nothing. You think the world is peppermint candy and chocolate cake. Well, it isn’t. Just ask me.” One of my sisters said, “Mr. Snead—” And he said, “If any of you tells Mr. Bye that I’ve been hitting the bottle, I will kill you and burn your house down. Hear me? Don’t think I won’t. I was Jimmy O’Kasick’s best friend. Him and me went way back.” And then we were at school. None of us told on him. Who would we tell? Grown-ups always stood up for each other. It was them against us. Nowadays Mr. Snead would be locked up for psychological harassment and put into a treatment program, but back then he drove a sleigh and eventually was hired as a janitor when there was an opening at the grade school. Most janitors back then were shady characters with a seedy past but as long as they washed and waxed and kept the furnace lit, they were allowed to stay around. The O’Kasicks could’ve gotten janitor jobs if they hadn’t shot that bank teller.
• • •
Winter was cruel but it was beautiful, too, the snow drifted against house and barn, ice on the bare limbs of trees, the orange winter sun low in the sky. Cold as it was, we got out our sleds and knelt on them and opened our jackets for a sail and let the wind blow us across the crusted snow. That was how I met the Jacobson family who lived south of town, eleven miles from our house as the crow flies or as the sled blows—I got going fast and it felt like such an accomplishment, steering around houses and barns by dragging one foot or the other, zooming along in ditches and across open fields, and I just plain lost track of how far I’d gone.
The Jacobsons had one daughter but they had always wanted a son and there I was, nine years old, bright as a penny, and I loved their house, which was warm and well furnished and had TV and no demented elderly persons in residence. My mother called the sheriff a few days later—the absence of a quiet, polite child is not noticed right away. He said I had turned up at the Jacobsons’ and eventually she got in touch with them, by which time they and I had become rather chummy. They’d given me the nickname Buddy. I had yearned for a nickname for years and now a wonderful family had bestowed one on me. They were Methodists and very lighthearted and given to playing cards and singing around the piano and telling jokes, none of which was big in my family.
Mr. Jacobson called up Dad and invited me to stay with them for a few weeks and what with money so scarce Dad said yes and the few weeks turned into four months and by that time I had been pretty well corrupted. The Jacobsons gave me forbidden books to read, fiction and the like, and allowed me to taste red wine. They encouraged me to talk at the dinner table. They listened to my harebrained notions and didn’t scorn them outright. They lent me a typewriter. I wrote stories and showed them to the Jacobsons and they said I had a lot of talent. “A ton of talent” was what they said. “Talent to burn.” That was what did it.
When I returned home, I was a different person, or so I thought. It was May, the lilacs were in bloom, I was a writer. For some reason, my dad called me Harold for a few weeks and nobody seemed to notice except me, and back then a kid didn’t correct his elders. So I was Harold for a while. I didn’t mind.
• • •
The winter of 1951 made every winter since feel like a Sunday school picnic. Some Minnesotans head for the sunny South after Christmas, and let me tell you—they are the ones we’ve always wished would move away. Complainers, malcontents, people who never shoveled their sidewalks. Good riddance.
I live in St. Paul now, which is beautiful after a fresh snow, the old streetlights, the lights of houses through the trees, the walkers out, the headlights moving slowly. I have a car of my own and after I start it (instantly, no rolling) the heating pad in the front seat gets warm and so does the steering wheel. I still write stories now and then. Life is good. It could be worse, and it was in 1951, and now it isn’t. That’s as good as it gets.