Evelyn Frances Powell. Born March 14, 1923, in her grandma Crandall’s bedroom in Anoka. Fourth child of Frank and Susan. Ruby, Frank Jr., Florence, Evelyn. Her dad farmed 140 acres near Holding-ford. She grew up gardening and feeding chickens and then the farm went under. Her dad bought a tractor to replace his team of horses and the tractor sparked and the barn caught fire and the hay in the loft went up like a torch and the cows perished and that was the end of them. The bank took over and they moved to Lake Wobegon. Uncle Ev owned a machine shop there. Her dad felt “liberated” by the farm failure and pursued his true calling, which was invention. He invented a double-flange rotary valve trombone, a hawser spindle for a capstan whelp, and though his patents found no takers, he was a happy man, a fount of innovation. “Work,” he told Evelyn. “That’s the secret of happiness.” He had a lathe, a drill press, a forge, all he needed. He invented a bifurcated grommet for an oarlock, and a two-way spring-forced sprocket. He invented the two-bit drill chuck, the semi-rigid rear-mounted eyelet, the twin-turret baffle effector. The sheepshank fish hook. Although nothing he made had immediate applicability, he went to his work-bench every day with a song in his heart. Evelyn took after him.
In 1938, he went through a bad episode, hallucinations and restlessness and vocal outbursts (he shouted things like “Clear the decks!” and “Get ’em off me!”) and Florence and Evelyn moved in with their maternal grandparents on Cedar Avenue in south Minneapolis.
When she got to Minneapolis, she took the name Eve for a few years and got a taste of stardom at Roosevelt High School. Eve played center on the 1937–38 Rosies basketball team who went to State, and she recited “The Raven” in speech tournaments, dressed in a long white gown, long wild brown hair, barefoot, and according to her sister, she was mesmerizing.
Eve had a future in Hollywood. Many people thought so. She was a natural. Like Garbo. She shone. You couldn’t take your eyes off her. At the 1939 Minnesota State Fair, she was sculpted in butter. She recited “Invictus” on WCCO’s “Stairway to Stardom” broadcast at the Aquatennial, and Randolph Scott, who was Grand Marshal of the Torchlight Parade that year, told her she was the genuine article and she should come to Hollywood and he would get her a screen test at RKO, but nobody encouraged her. In any decent fairy tale, someone would have offered her a ride out west and dropped her on Sunset Boulevard with her cardboard suitcase, squinting into the setting sun, and she would’ve caught the eye of Jack Warner, driving by in his yellow roadster, and he’d stop and offer her a small part in Babes Ahoy. But instead she clerked at Dayton’s and then went to nursing school. Three months later she got a boil on her butt that popped, which, in those pre-antibiotic days, almost killed her. She lay in General Hospital for two weeks with a 104 degree fever and came home to Lake Wobegon to recuperate.
The brush with death derailed her, and she sat discouraged in her mother’s dim parlor, reading pious novels about goodness rewarded, and listened to the moaning that passed for conversation in that house, and that was when Jack Peterson walked into her life. He was the nephew of the next-door neighbor. Simple as that. He came over and shoveled the walk. He was a dark Norwegian in Navy whites, due to report for duty in thirty days, and in a burst of patriotism in the wake of Pearl Harbor, she married him.
She felt sorry for him, said Florence. He was all torn up inside about the futility of war and he believed he was going to die. He was sure that Hitler would be marching down State Street in Chicago by Labor Day and the Japs would invade Los Angeles. The Wehrmacht would blitzkrieg west across the Plains, just as they had rolled over the Poles and the French, the Luftwaffe leaving cities in smoking ruins. America was full of Germans—New Ulm, New Munich—look around you—and they formed a fifth column of spies and saboteurs. The end of the world was at hand, there was no God, how could there be? He was soaked in defeat, death was waiting for him in some stinking jungle. He wept on her hand. She fixed him a chocolate malted and he said it probably was his last. There was a Last Visit to the old high school, and a Last Ice Fishing Trip, and a Last Movie. They sat in the back row. He clung to her and she allowed him to slip his trembling hand up inside her shirt. She just wanted to bring some sunshine into a sailor’s life. But some town girls saw what happened and they told and back in those days necking was sex and sex led to marriage—No U-turns Permitted—and the next day he threw himself at her feet and said she was the only ray of hope in his life, and she felt obliged to go ahead and do it. February 7, 1942, at 11:30 in the morning. The two of them and the wooden-faced minister and his cross-eyed wife and Mother and Florence. Jack looked whipped. Evelyn wore a lovely shimmery green dress that had been Mother’s. The couple drove away in Jack’s rattletrap Model A, and Mother and Florence burst into tears the moment the car disappeared around the corner. They cried their eyes out.
“He’s not good enough for her,” said Mother. “So why did we let her go?” They were blinded by the uniform, said Flo. The starched cap and the gold braid. Evelyn was sacrificed for the war effort, as if she was scrap metal.
Mr. and Mrs. Peterson drove toward the Wisconsin Dells and he was half-asleep and ran the car off the road and onto a frozen pond in River Falls and they skidded to a halt and the right front tire sank in a hole in the ice. Jack tried to lift the right front end and couldn’t and he flopped down on the ice, sobbing, “Nothing I do ever turns out right.” They spent the night with an old bachelor farmer named Wilf who towed the car out with a team of horses. Evelyn lay on a filthy couch, her husband on the floor, and considered having the marriage annulled. But what if he died in the service? She’d feel horrible. He was going off to fight for his country in three days and she would make those days the best days of his young life. She imagined his ship would be torpedoed. She would stand by his bier in the cemetery as the bugler played “Taps” and the honor guard saluted and she would grieve for him. That was what Jack expected, and she did too. But he was sent to Los Angeles, taught Morse code, and assigned to a spotter’s station at the end of the pier in Ventura where he watched for Japanese planes that never came, his finger on the telegraph key. Three years of staring at the horizon. She wrote to him every Sunday, though he seldom wrote back, cheerful letters about Minneapolis and Vocational High, where she trained as an auto mechanic and her friends there, Ina and Margaret and Grace and Ruby and Marian and Elsie, and the family they had bonded with on Oakland Avenue, the streetcar rides to Excelsior Amusement Park, the picnics in Annandale and Medicine Lake. The gas coupons they pooled to drive to the North Shore in Ina’s car, the sing-alongs, the gaiety of it all, and then he came home. He walked in the door and said, “I made it.” And he had. There he was. And she was married to him.