Baseball and Guns

In looking up what baseball games the kids would have been listening to on the radio in 1959, I came across amazing connections between Minnesota and Cuba in that year. Although the Cuban revolution was successful in January, 1959, with Fidel Castro driving out Batista and setting up a revolutionary government, at that time he said he was an anti-imperialist, not a communist. Until the embargo against Cuba enacted in October, 1960, there seems to have been quite a lot of coming and going.

At a baseball game in July between the Rochester Red Wings and the Havana Sugar Kings played in Havana, gunfire celebrating the beginnings of the Cuban revolution got into the stadium, wounding two! This could have ended Cuba’s minor league involvement, but Castro loved baseball. He intervened, assuring everyone that teams that came to Havana would be safe.

The Minneapolis Millers were their league champions that year and in the Little World Series played the Havana Sugar Kings. After a couple of frigid games at the end of September in Minneapolis, the series moved to Havana, playing five games. Castro attended every game along with 3,000 soldiers with guns and bayonets. The Minneapolis players were somewhat unnerved by this, but they still tried their hardest. Nevertheless, they weren’t too sorry that in the end they lost! You can read the whole wild story, including Castro’s threats, told here by a historian of the Millers, Stew Thornley: http://stewthornley.net/millers_havana.html. I found it fascinating!

Polio

Though polio had been around for thousands of years, a combination of factors gave it a significant impact on the early 1950’s. Paradoxically, better sanitation and water supplies had resulted in the fact that many kids hadn’t developed an immunity to it. Although 90% of infectious viral attacks of polio act like some version of the flu, in acute cases nerves are affected, causing paralysis, with the greatest risk of this in children from 5 to 9 years. If there is respiratory paralysis, the victim may die. The polio epidemics of the early 1950’s were the worst seen in the United States. In 1952, 58,000 cases were reported, and in 1953, 35,000 cases.

Intensive care and rehabilitation therapy as we now know them, had their origins in the years of these great polio epidemics. The widespread funding of campaigns to find vaccines and cures also began with the race to find a polio vaccine. Jonas Salk developed an injected vaccine, which required years of testing, but began to be widely administered in 1955. By 1957 the number of polio cases was down to 5,600 and in 1961, only 161 cases were reported in the U.S. Based on testing, oral vaccines developed by Albert Sabin were chosen for worldwide distribution. According to the Global Eradication Initiative, 1,349 cases world-wide were reported in 2010.

The story of the campaign against polio has been widely told. Paul, one of the characters in “The Pastor’s Kids”, contracts polio in 1952 when he is about four years old. The story of how his illness affects the family, including years of rehabilitation and painful reconstructive surgeries are part of the book. In my research, one of the things I have been struck by is the stoicism induced in the kids who had it. One woman who had polio said she still has difficulty crying. It was a powerful message to be told at age four, “Don’t cry. It will make your parents feel bad.”

Kids taking oral vaccine, about 1960

Rehabilitation was long, slow, hard work. But victims of polio were encouraged to overcome disability, “triumph over adversity”, and become independent and productive people. An important part of rehabilitation was learning to accept gracefully the successes achieved, and to compensate for the disabilities that remained. Some people who had polio, after years of working parts of their bodies harder than other parts, are now faced with post-polio syndrome. As a part of coming to terms with this, they are re-visiting their childhood memories of being little kids, isolated from their families and confused about why they were ill.

Once polio vaccines were in place, the disease receded in the collective imagination. This is probably a good thing, but for people of my age, polio was a real part of childhood.

Amana Freezer

In the late 1950’s, Dad and Mother accepted their fate (seven kids and another to follow) and bought a giant freezer made by craftsmen at the Amana Colonies in Iowa. The Amana Colonies [www.amanacolonies.com]  were established by a group of German Pietists who came to America seeking religious freedom, arriving in Iowa in 1855. Until about the 1930’s they lived a truly communal life, but then had to adapt to more family-driven work with profit-sharing for their farmland and larger businesses. They have always been known for their craftsmanship, and are still known for the refrigeration appliances they manufacture.

Several towns in east central Iowa near Cedar Rapids are part of the Amana group. In the early 1960’s they already understood that tourists might be interested in their way of life and crafts. We visited the communal kitchen, a general store stocked with old-fashioned items, the meetinghouse and the blacksmith shop. And for almost the only time I can remember, Mother and Dad bought a restaurant meal for all ten of us. It was served family style at a long table, with many dishes of wonderful home-grown meats and vegetables, great bread and salad. I no longer remember exactly what we ate, but I have a mental picture of my proud father at the end of the long table, treating his kids to an experience he probably could ill afford.

The freezer was at least six feet long, three and a half feet high and opened from the top. It could hold a great deal! I remember it stocked in the fall with sweet corn after we had spent an entire day in our big farmhouse kitchen, parboiling cobs of corn and then cutting the kernels off them and putting them in freezer bags. We did the same with some of the other produce from our half acre garden. Dad sometimes bought part of a cow or a pig and had it butchered and frozen, available for future meals. Occasionally Dad's congregations would give us a “pounding”, i.e. contribute pounds of food which we gratefully stored away for use by our big family. This would often include frozen meat.

During hunting season, I remember gifts of whole pheasants and wild ducks in the freezer, something Mother wasn’t too happy about! Us kids weren’t very used to gamey-tasting meat either. But when Dad shot a deer with a bow and arrow, the venison that resulted filled the freezer for some time.

Rather than canning, in the late 1950’s and 1960’s, people believed in frozen food. And we certainly ate plenty of it. At Christmas, each of us girls chose a favorite cookie recipe and baked up huge batches of them, to be frozen for unexpected guests. The essence of hospitality at the time was Norwegian gasoline (weak coffee) and cookies, and it might be needed at almost any time of day. The freezer was a great help in living up to this social norm! At this very moment I am recalling how delicious a chocolate chip cookie just pulled from the freezer was, though none of my chocolate chip cookies are around long enough to need freezing these days!

Sitting With It

At this point, I’m finding that writing isn’t so much an act of crafting sentences, but a matter of sitting with a mound of material and carving the path of my characters through it. It’s a matter of time and place for three kids close in age, who were born in the late 1940’s. I am terribly interested in context, in the circles people saw themselves as part of, and the way in which each of the kids grows, plant-like, into the particular flower they were meant to become. They were all lucky. The soil was fertile, they got a lot of what they needed in terms of nutrients, and as they reached up their hands, sunshine and rain in goodly measure came to them.

But as I have been thinking about writing, and whether I am actually doing it or not, I remembered Henry Miller’s voice from Tropic of Cancer in 1934: “Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.” Of course it didn’t stop him, and it certainly hasn’t stopped the rest of us! He wrote the book of the present, of the complete and total appreciation of the moment of life he happened to be in. Of walking beside the Seine in the evening, he writes “For the moment I can think of nothing - except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world. All along the banks the trees lean heavily over the tarnished mirror; when the wind rises and fills them with a rustling murmur they will shed a few tears and shiver as the water swirls by. I am suffocated by it. No one to whom I can communicate even a fraction of my feelings …”

None of us can compete with the book of the present. And no writer would want to. If anyone is sitting in the eye of the present, he needs nothing. What a writer can do, and Miller certainly did, is help peal back the layers and crusts that we put between ourselves and the present so we can stand it. Many of the things that allow us to cut through them are tough. For Miller, the poverty and uncertainty of his Paris years helped him break on through, though I doubt if he would have chosen them.

I believe it is a contemporary fallacy though, that only if you are an individual, embattled, poor, alone, can you feel the present. In the lives of my kids, as they grow, it will be possible to sense many moments when they are gripped by the hand of the present, often in choruses of people, in beautiful woods and fields or beautiful buildings, sometimes in meeting terrible demands, sometimes in tragic circumstances. The present speaks to us as individuals, whispers to us or shouts, and we are never the same. But the ways in which we sense it are without limit.

The Driftless Area

A quite large region of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa along the Mississippi River is now called the “driftless area”, an area which escaped the last glaciation period. In this area the glacier was diverted by an uplifted area of rock which prevented the deposits of silt, clay, sand, gravel and boulders that glaciers usually leave. Thus the towering limestone and sandstone bluffs, rolling hills and streams on both sides of the Mississippi in this area have a ruggedness not softened by drift.

The names in the area reflect its cultural history, from the native Americans names (Ojibwe-Chippewa, Wyandot-Huron, Sauk, Pawnee, Ioway, Dakota-Sioux and Omaha), to those of the French explorers and missionaries, such as Father Jacque Marquette and Louis Jolliet, who first came down the Mississippi from the north. Competition between the French and the British for the fur trade drove much of this early exploration. The French controlled the land along the Mississippi River.

When we moved into the “driftless area”, it was called “the Little Switzerland of Iowa” because the hills and bluffs weren’t common to the rest of the state. It began to be farmed in the mid 1800’s when European settlers moved in. Farming and grazing practices contributed to erosion and flooding, but quite early on this was recognized and attempts were made to control it, especially to keep the Mississippi shipping lanes from filling up with silt! Along the Mississippi itself, much of the land is maintained as parks, forests and wildlife management areas.

My parents were amateur naturalists and quite curious, so we did quite a lot of sightseeing when we first moved into the area. We investigated the caves, springs and palisades along the river, and watched the operations of the locks on the Mississippi, which allowed vessels to "step" up or down the river from one water level to another. We went to see the mounds near the river in the shapes of bear and birds, ceremonial and sacred sites built by the Effigy Mound Builders more than a thousand years ago. We visited the Bily Clock museum in Spillville (see detail of carving by Frank and Joseph Bily) and the Villa Louis, a home first built by a wealthy fur trader and maintained as a museum in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.

The “driftless area” was a stark contrast from the Red River Valley in North Dakota, the floodplain of an early glacial lake, flat as a pancake and open to the wind and weather systems of the Great Plains.

A Move in the Offing

The Mikkelsons are moving from North Dakota to northeast Iowa! The kids don’t like it much, and I’m not sure I do either, after these months being immersed in North Dakota. For all its harsh weather, it is a beautiful place with interesting politics. But Dad used to say that the only way for a pastor to get a raise was to accept another call. And the Mikkelsons probably need the raise. They have a new little sister, and Ellie, the eldest, will soon set off for college. Actually, the kids are too young to suspect what a move will mean to them. They have never done it.

The subtle differences between the small towns in the Midwest are not inconsequential. Because of their geography, sometimes their history, and certainly the individuals who put their stamp on them, these towns have personalities just like people. If you move into a town you didn’t grow up in, you may understand more of that personality than the long-time residents, but also you will probably never understand the deep intricacies, the layers of relationships, the palimpsest of its culture.

What this lack of deep understanding does, is put you in a class of outsiders, whose loyalties will probably be more to other communities, perhaps not geographically defined. To a community of faith, an extended family, a profession or a nation. You might thus feel more free to move around than a person who is born in a place.

But geography is very powerful. Each of us wants to be related to a piece of soil, to the smell of sunlight on that soil, and to the weather that travels over it, the plants that grow in it. It took me at least seven years to become Californian, specifically a resident of San Francisco and its environs. I knew by then how much I loved the hills covered with golden grass, the sage color of the native trees and the Pacific blue of the sky. After that, several powerful episodes of homesickness confirmed that California was home.

The story of the pastor’s kids, particularly as they grow up and are bent by historical tides and personal winds, is, at least in part, a story of deep geography. We may think, in our technological dream world, that we can move freely, live wherever we like. But our bodies, our deep selves, want a home. Our growth and success in life is partly dependent on our adaptation, or the lack of it, to place and culture. Some of us are, perhaps, genuine wanderers, but not many. And certainly not the kids, Line, Marty and Paul.

Against Cynicism

It isn’t hard to know why we’ve become cynical about people in public life, contemptuous of their motivations and altruism. We’ve seen so much lying, so much selfish posturing, and recent laws have contributed to the fact that only a few of us are getting much richer, while most of us falling behind. During last week’s silliness among presidential candidates, Don said: “America is becoming a joke!”

I’ve been studying the Eisenhower years, and this has not always been the case. The mood was quite different at the time. World War II had leveled the playing field for women and non-whites, but in the Fifties we were busy getting women back into bouffant skirts and aprons and re-erecting class and race barriers wherever possible. Eisenhower was a moderate, however, who supported the social reforms begun during Roosevelt’s New Deal, and sent troops to assist in desegregating schools. He tried to reduce military spending, while at the same time not giving ground to Soviet expansionism.

I’ve also been reading Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” which is really a study in fighting the cynicism within himself, while negotiating the heritage of his African father and his white American mother. We all know where his honesty and courage have gotten him, and how he still needs it every day!

Don and I are culture workers, and we have our own fights. Don tries to get Hollywood filmmakers to see the folly of upping the number of frames per second in movies, just because technology allows it, or filming everything in 3-D, just because they can. He would like to see a return to character-based movies. At this moment, he and his producing partner, Anna, are valiantly trying to inject some professionalism into a motley film crew making a movie which gets better at Don’s insistence. Engagement is a way of fighting cynicism.

I’m writing a series of novels which, in the current conditions, stands no chance of getting published. Without a targeted audience (Young Adult? I don’t think so) or a niche market (cooking, anyone?) or celebrity (and who, exactly, did you say you were?), or a clear genre (romance, perhaps?), it is hard to get anyone to look at what you are doing. This is partly because book publishing is being rocked by forces it barely understands. Although people are reading, free web content is probably more likely than books purchased at a bookstore. None of it stops me. By the time I’m finished, perhaps things will have settled down!

Ways of fighting cynicism:

1)      Engagement. Work with every opportunity that does come your way to up the ante. Avoid the tendency to laugh things off, paying attention only to what is funny. Humor is the refuge of the disengaged.

2)      Talk to real people. Most of us can’t avoid it in our working and consuming lives. We learn more than we expect to. No one is exactly as you hoped, and many are better.

3)      Look to history. Things have not always been this way!

4)      When all else fails, retreat to the garden, to the quiet bravery of trees and plants, which never quit looking for water and sunshine, determined to fulfill their destinies in supporting us.