Neighbor Strikes It Rich

When I was growing up on Goodrich Avenue in St. Paul, my mother befriended a woman a block north on Lincoln Avenue. Unlike my mother who had five kids, her friend had only one son and an older reclusive husband. The supermarket was close by, but without a car, the woman could buy only what she could carry home. She and my mother managed to coordinate grocery shopping for big trips, so they could use our car. Soon they were playing bridge with other neighbor ladies. Bridge may have been what brought them together initially. It was a long time ago and unimportant

Also unimportant, but maybe not—how does one really know—my mother was attractive and educated. She joined the Navy in 1942, interrupting her University of Minnesota education when my grandfather joined the FBI and was sent to Miami. She served at Balboa Hospital and at Pearl Harbor. She finished up college after the war. As to her attractiveness, a girlfriend from school got jealous when she saw my mother and me together on the street, not knowing it was my mother instead of a love interest.

My mother’s friend was not attractive or educated, but she was a nice person and had difficulty with her curmudgeonly and miserly husband who spent a great deal of time alone in an attic he kept locked. Her son, a few years younger than I, got a lot of my hand-me-down clothes. Their household was unhappy.

A few years went by, and not much changed until the woman’s husband died. The story came out that during the Depression the man had run a bar on the East Side near The Mining, as we called 3M those days. When McKnight ran out of money, he paid his workers in stock certificates. The opportunistic husband accepted the stock certificates as legal tender. He had squirreled away a whole trunk of the certificates in his attic, more than a million dollars’ worth.

The woman sold their rundown house and moved to 740 Mississippi River Boulevard, a newly constructed, spiffy high-rise in Highland Park. The rich tend not to hang around with the middle class, not that “class” has anything to do with it. Contact was lost for many years. Then one day, my mother informed that she had run into the woman. Shortly after, they were playing bridge again. It was one of those groups hosted by a different participant each week. When it was the woman’s turn, she held it at Lost Spur, a country club across the river in Mendota, just south of the city. The woman treated her guests to lunch, but not booze—perhaps something to do with her late husband. Each player got a party favor in the form of a tightly wrapped hundred-dollar bill next to her plate. My mother never missed a bridge game.

The son went off to school at Colorado College, I was probably in Vietnam by then. He and I had never been friends. Too many years separated us. In elementary school, three years may as well have been a decade. Also, we attended different high schools. Then there was the money. His mother did complain to my mother that her son seemed to major in skiing.

While the woman certainly acquired a better life after the death of her husband, she wasn’t a particularly happy person. She buried her next two husbands. I expect she was lonely most of her life, and the men she attracted were perhaps attracted more by her money—something I have no knowledge of. Her son remained a problem, appearing to have found a new degree program that required seven years of study to graduate. His mother was able to get his attention when she informed him he was disinherited until he graduated.

He did graduate, but he was too busy skiing to attend his mother’s funeral. My mother was livid. That was the end of the story until recently. I was telling a few people the tale, when one of the women present spoke up, shocked that I knew the man who had been involved with one of her friends in what I gathered was not a happy union. The woman informed me the boy-man had died. I guess the story reached its conclusion, unless I run into offspring or the lawyer who handled the wayward son’s estate.

SUMMER OF LOVE

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It occurs to me that today kicks off the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love. Funny how daydreaming about a long-ago summer of sex, drugs, and rock and roll resulted in an essay that chose a turn-off that had little to do with sex and drugs, included only a smidgen of rock and roll, but a lot about death and automobiles. I attribute it to two realities: writing is a way of thinking; remembering is different from reminiscing.

The iconic summer got off to a bad start. It was my fault, putting in a lot of hours at my part-time restaurant job instead of paying attention to my classes. I did that to pay for my new ride, trading in my 1963 Austin-Healey 3000 for a 1966 Lotus Elan. Emma Peel of the Avengers drove one, as did two-time world champion driver, Jim Clark. Playboy named it the best-handling production car in the world. Gordon Murray, designer of the F1 McLaren supercar three decades later (an auto notably owned by George Harrison and the Sultan of Brunei) reputedly said that his only disappointment with the F1 was he couldn’t give it the steering of the Lotus Elan.

My Humanities final was scheduled for eight a.m., information gleaned from the student newspaper. I showed at the designated hour, the only student who did. Berating my laxity, I wandered around campus for an hour before I found a classmate. He explained the exam was a take-home final, assigned three weeks earlier by Dr. Livingstone. He fanned the spiral notebook as he spoke. His essay on Plato nearly filled it. I hadn’t been feeling particularly good about my predicament before, but this revelation cut me off at the knees.

I found the weary and unkempt professor an hour later, and he gave me twenty-four hours to come up with verbiage that would account for the semester’s grade. It probably goes to explain why I never became a fan of Plato—not that I could imagine living in a republic like The Republic—preferring the pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Empedocles. The professor gave me his home address and instructed me to deliver the essay at ten the following morning.

Badly in need of sleep, I showed at his door at the appointed hour. The two-story 1920s house sat on a large wooded lot, some of which probably belonged to the Short Line, the little-used, nearby railroad tracks that ran through the residential neighborhood below grade, so no visual pollution ruined the lush greenery. A matronly African-American woman in a white nurse’s dress greeted me, along with old newspapers and dust bunnies, but mostly the aura of resignation that settled into every cubby and crack.

Due to some warp in the space-time continuum, I aced the course, but within a few days of getting my grade, I spotted a newspaper article that reported my professor had hanged himself from a backyard tree.

About that time, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper. I remember working that day. After numerous calls to the record store to get an update, we finally got word the album was in. We sent the dishwasher over to buy five copies for employees. When I got off work, I headed to Muntz’s stand-alone store on University Avenue, two albums in hand.

Madman Muntz was an entrepreneurial character—riches to rags to riches to rags to riches. One year, he sold cars worth seventy-two million. Five years later he sold TVs worth fifty-five million. In 1967, he sold car stereos and tapes worth thirty million. He had come up with the four-track cartridge and player—state-of-art car audio until Lear developed the eight-track.

The really cool thing was nobody gave a shit about intellectual property or piracy. I left the store with a new cartridge loaded with Revolver and Sgt. Pepper and went cruising. I-494 westbound was a trip until my engine started missing. I checked the tach and found the needle hovering at the red line. The speedometer needle was just south of one twenty, scaring the shit out of me. I slowed down and headed homeward at the speed limit.

I ended up on Mississippi River Boulevard, one of my favorite drives, at least until I heard a siren and saw flashing lights in my rearview mirror—it’s difficult to go really slow after going really fast. In a short car chase, the curvy road got me out of my pursuer’s vision just long enough to allow me to make a hard right-hand turn. Two additional right-hand turns got me chasing the pursuing squad.

At the end of July, my buddy and I headed for Road America at Elkhart Lake. We got a late-night start, arriving in time to grab a burger before the Sunday race. I parked on the street behind two Shelby Cobras and in front of another. The big boys from Chicago were in town. It was cool and we were, too. My Lotus was a big attraction at the track. Skinny people actually crawled under it—it sat pretty low to the ground—probably to check out its unique “backbone” chassis.

Because we hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before, we found a motel in Milwaukee and crashed early, before it was even dark. Monday morning we heard about the riots the night before and learned the city was closed down, nobody in or out. The motel owner gave us the word we were a couple of blocks south of the city limits. We decided to continue on to Chicago. Driving all by your lonesome on a six-lane interstate is a bizarre experience, like living in an end-of-the-world sci-fi flick.

I fought the urge to drive fast, especially as the guy in the next seat once drove us across the entire state of Utah, averaging more than one hundred mph, just one leg of a trip west that covered eight thousand miles in three weeks.

A friend came home from Vietnam, all jittery. Then others didn’t come home. Especially glaring was the loss suffered by identical twins. Two had become one, something that couldn’t be forgotten, as the survivor became a persistent reminder. Worse, the survivor, losing his other half, was never complete again. Family and friends weren’t either.

I no longer remember getting any love in the summer of 1967, especially not from my auto insurer. The outfit did not recognize my car as a “two-door coupe,” which is how I described it when I took out the policy. They refused to acknowledge it was a sports car, instead classifying it a “racing car,” which they refused to insure. The four-cylinder Ford block did have a Lotus head that housed double overhead cams and two Webbers that bolted directly to it without benefit of an intake manifold—four lovely velocity stacks. The header junction glowed cherry red. There was lots of performance, and the car weighed under sixteen hundred pounds, almost a go-kart on steroids.

Bugging me all summer was the backyard hanging of a middle-aged man who may have been ill. Still, he gave it up, not like the friends who would be forever young. It wasn’t as if I believed that knowledge led to suicide, but I found no enthusiasm for returning to school. I risked taking some time off from the classroom. That decision got me a quick slap upside the head, a letter from my favorite uncle intimating a study program abroad, the other half of the double-whammy.

While not exactly bracketed by the suicide and selective service, the summer of love segued into a winter of discontent.

I put in fourteen months or so in Vietnam before hitching a ride to Long Beach on the slowest boat in the US Navy—three weeks at sea. Finished up my degree. The Lotus is still on the road. It was a few years ago, anyway. Ran into a Lotus driver while gassing up, and we got to talking. He knew more about my car than I remembered. I miss that car terribly. And I miss the boys who didn’t come home—another set of broken twins among them. I wonder sometimes about the men they might have become. I wonder sometimes about the man I might have become.

LIFE IMITATES ART

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Jimmy Buffett and Herman Wouk

Bibles of all colors and flavors abound. In the Virgin Islands the bible is Don’t Stop the Carnival, written by Herman Wouk, in 1965. Paperman, a middle-aged New York publicist, retires early from the rat race to operate a hotel on Amerigo, a fictitious Caribbean island that suspiciously resembles Hassel Island, located in the harbor of Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, where Wouk once worked.

Like all Continentals fresh off the airplane, Paperman is clearly out of his depth. In the islands, it’s not so much what you don’t know. Instead, it’s when you realize the utter irrelevance what you do know. Water still runs downhill, but not happily or with the same enthusiasm. Paperman wasn’t the first to experience it.

In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt appointed William Hastie to the United States District Court of the Virgin Islands, making him America’s first African-American Federal judge. A magna cum laude graduate of Amherst and Harvard Law graduate, Hastie was eminently qualified for the new post, except that when the Admiral of the Ocean Sea named the archipelago on the feast day of St. Ursula, she of the eleven thousand virgin martyrs, no St. Tennessee could be found in the canon, a definite vocational handicap in the Antilles.

In one of those small-world coincidences, I became friends with Hastie’s long-ago clerk—also Harvard Law, who worked in the Minnesota Attorney’s office and served as a Minneapolis councilman. In 1946, Harry Truman appointed Hastie Territorial Governor of the United States Virgin Islands, making him the first African-American governor of the territory.

During his tenure, the islands, purchased from Denmark, in 1916, were in the process of updating the electric grid from direct current to alternating current. No one was happy, and Hastie couldn’t understand why. Finally, a West Indian on his staff pulled him aside, reputedly telling him the people preferred DC, Danish Current, to AC, American Current.

Despite dodging and weaving West Indian attitudes, Paperman took a lot of shots before learning to roll with the punches. The punches weren't all from West Indians. The real world also intruded. In order to get the attention of the of the captain who skippered the barge that ferried fresh water from Puerto Rico to St. Thomas, Paperman needed a real-world solution to ensure he could get his hotel's cistern filled before the barge emptied all its water on St. Thomas. A female employee standing on his dock with her skirt raised proved effective.

The raised skirt worked for Paperman, but the cistern did not. Filled with fresh water, the aged cistern collapsed under the pressure. Easy to see how Paperman’s difficulties were laughable, especially when they weren’t happening to you.

Almost twenty-five years later, when I arrived, water was still barged over from Puerto Rico. Likely, it was the same barge, now condemned. After each shipment was unloaded, the Daily News printed a warning on how many minutes that particular shipment of water had to be boiled before it was potable. Water was precious those days. Public housing only got water during a few specified hours per day.

Desalinization plants were built on the three major US islands during my tenure. On St. John, they goofed up. Instead of taking the water directly from the ocean, they pumped it from a saltwater well. The salinity was seven times saltier than the sea, pretty much destroying the machinery. Years later, in one of life’s small ironies, my best buddy from college provided the island fresh water from a reverse osmosis system packed into a forty-foot container.

Before moving to the Virgin Islands, I read Don’t Stop the Carnival, never imagining myself in Paperman’s shoes. I figured that if I worked hard and kept my nose clean, things would work out. I wasn’t looking to get rich. You go to Hong Kong for that. I looked for an authentic life in paradise. The Economist categorized St. Johnians as lotus-eaters. What could go wrong.

The first thing to go wrong was Hurricane Hugo, a Category 5 storm. I boarded up the house I was working on for owners who lived in the Twin Cities—a job that provided housing in an adjacent building. Then, remembering the tail end of a typhoon I experienced in Vietnam—no dry clothes for days—I threw all my clothes into the washing machine, figuring to let them ride out the storm in the clothes dryer. About a half hour later, at high noon, WAPA, the Water And Power Authority, pulled the plug on the island. You don’t feel particularly bright when you blunder, but you feel downright stupid when you outsmart yourself.

It was a blue-sky, sunshine afternoon. The hurricane was still hours away, but I’d succeeded in accomplishing exactly what I’d hoped to avoid: my clothes were soaking in a tub of water. I buttoned up the wood shutters on the building I was living in. About three pm, it started to drizzle—the sky doesn’t turn black like it does in the Midwest, just gray. While I sat a couple hundred feet up on the mountainside, under the covered portion of my deck and waited, I watched a big old sailboat enter the harbor. A restored Chevy panel wagon from the late ‘40s or early ‘50s sat on its deck. The hundred-and-ten-foot Great Lakes Pilot Schooner built in Thunder Bay (my neck of the woods), in 1899, was to play a key role in Greater Trouble in the Lesser Antilles and Low Jinks on the High Seas.

I didn’t know a soul on the island, so I was surprised when one of my few neighbors stopped by and asked if I wanted to spend the night in the concrete cistern of a house he was building. Our tiny neighborhood, Little Plantation, had attained notoriety, our steep access road, specifically. Several accidents had occurred—one, fatal. I declined the invitation, not imagining anything less comfortable than spending the night in a concrete cistern.

The hurricane that was supposed to hit at five pm hung around St. Croix, toppling trees and knocking down concrete-block buildings. It was after midnight when I felt and heard the explosion. I jumped out of bed and headed for the bathroom, which shared a wall with the concrete cistern. My flashlight revealed whitecaps in the toilet bowl. On the lowest level, I couldn’t be sure what was left of the building overhead. There was no way I was going to look. I did hear a lot of furniture moving around.

I ended up applauding my decision to load up the washing machine before the storm. My clothes were about all I owned that didn’t go littering the mountainside when the roof on my neighbor’s guesthouse blasted through my bedroom wall (a bedroom I abandoned for the storm) and blew out the patio doors on the adjacent wall.

The next day, after I collected my stuff from the mountainside, my neighbor helped board up the damaged wall. I waited for the power to come on, sweeping out a three-inch-deep pile of leaves and debris on the floors, admiring minuscule shards of glass imbedded in the cypress wall paneling that sparkled in sunlight—glass that had once been windows. The effect was walls of diamond dust.

Boats littered the shoreline in the bay below. One was a seventy-foot ketch. A couple of days later, a tug and barge showed up. Using the barge’s crane, the captain plucked the seaworthy boats from shore. The ketch sat in a sling most of the day (half the money—we speculated five grand—got the boat in a sling, the other half floated it). As soon as the ketch was floated, which was at dusk, the man and his young son snatched another five boats from the shore and lined them up on the barge’s floodlit deck, so the owners could repair them overnight. The derelicts still littered the shore when the captain pulled out the next morning.

Downed trees blocked roads. I don’t know how much rain fell. My device only measured the first foot. Enough fell that it destabilized soil in the road cuts, toppling more trees and sending rocks tumbling onto the roads. Sandy beaches were strewn with rotting succulents and cacti, as if Gallagher had smashed watermelons. A lot of homeless critters—termites, bees, and rats—wanted to share my digs, but that’s a long story. FYI: rats are a lot smarter than you think, and they pass on information to the next generation.

What did I do? I waited for the power to come on. It was a long wait. Almost three months. We did have a little power during the day, thanks to a kind-hearted soul who donated a generator that was set up nearby and wired into that part of the grid where the conductors conducted. I still have the T-shirt: MOFPC—My Own Fucking Power Company.

What did I do next? I got a job working at a beachside restaurant a couple miles down the road. The operator, a road builder (specializing in jungle roads) had run the place with his girlfriend. She had split weeks before. His cook never showed after the storm. Searchers found his cottage duct-taped tight from the inside, windows and doors, but he was gone. Some weeks later, when an opportunity from the World Bank came along to build a road in Borneo, he inquired if I was interested in taking over his lease. It had almost ten years to run, so I agreed. During our negotiations, he queried whether I’d read Don’t Stop the Carnival. I said I had. He asked what I’d thought of it. I said I laughed. He suggested I read it again. When I did, he quizzed me a second time. I told him I cried. We shook hands to cement our deal.

Oscar Wilde said that life imitates art more than art imitates life. About that, as about many other things, Wilde was absolutely correct.

The business was a success from day one. The owner—who lived next door, raised goats and drove a taxi—got a monthly rent payment plus a percentage of the gross sales. She was shitting in high clover, but insisted on cutting off her nose to spite her face. Unhappy with her previous tenant for splitting up with his girlfriend (after he assured me he and the landlord were great friends), she took me to court.

President Reagan appointed my attorney to the federal bench. Despite being African-American, she wasn’t a Virgin Islander. Unlike Hastie, she never got through the door to her office. One of her underlings sat in the courtroom with me while my landlord held the lease up to the light and pronounced it a forgery. The judge almost fell out of his chair. I saw it as a good sign. Was I ever mistaken. I’d have been better off hiring an obeahmon than a lawyer. The trial lasted the entire day, interrupted by other cases. The judge was a reasonable man, but his reasonableness was limited to giving me several months to exit the premises instead of the several hours my landlord demanded.

On my last day of business, I threw a party. Several long-term residents claimed it set a new high-water mark. We ate up all the food and drank up all the booze. What didn’t get consumed went home with the guests. I gave one West Indian couple the barstools they courted on. Some women got premoistened T-shirts. Meanwhile, the landlord sat under a nearby sea grape tree, chanting and shaking the bones—not a physical exercise, but working the obeah.

The exercise didn’t work well for her. Her next tenant didn’t last, and the building stood empty for months at a time. She likely made more money in a month or two from me than she did in the next several years. Me, I found a job managing another bar and restaurant closer to home. It was a new operation, but the owners were not suited to operating it. A sign in the kitchen proclaimed: “No Eating Allowed.” When employees started bringing their own food from home, the sign changed: “No Chewing Allowed.” The owner simply was not going to allow employees to eat the restaurant’s food or their own food on her dime, never mind that she refused to give them lunch breaks.

Paperman struggled to get his world under control. It took him a while, but step by step he succeeded in constructing a life in the islands. It took me a while, too, but I succeeded in the same way. Just when he seemed to achieve immunity from the carnival, two senseless deaths among his acquaintances sent Paperman packing for New York.

One of my waitresses was diagnosed with cancer. We decided to throw a party at the restaurant and raise some money for her. Booze. Live entertainment. Hors de’oeuvres. A friend sold a calendar of near-naked girls he had filmed underwater, donating the proceeds. A big deal. Then came the phone call. An irregular patron, rumored to sell drugs, looking for his girlfriend.

Admittedly, the guy was a jerk, at least a jerk toward me. On the occasions I forgot to serve his Cuba Libre without a lime wedge, he’d toss the lime at me. His girlfriend was with another man. He told her that if she didn’t come home, he would kill himself. She didn’t and he did.

Across the bay, at another bar and restaurant, which had closed early because of our shindig, the body of my dishwasher was found the next morning, a bullet in his head. Due to the suicide on the other side of the island, the police were not prompt in arriving. It is difficult to open your business with a corpse blocking the entry.

Unlike Paperman, I got both deaths on the same day. Like Paperman learned, death does, as John Donne pointed out, diminish one. The bell always tolls for thee. What’s funny about your life imitating art is that you can realize it as it’s happening, but you can’t really do anything about it. It’s sort of like a recurring dream. You live through it, realize it’s a dream, but you go to bed the next night and it’s déjà vu all over again.

Police did not solve the dishwasher’s murder.

The one-hundred-two-year-old Wouk published Sailor and Fiddler, his last novel (according to him), at age one hundred. He is acclaimed for The Caine Mutiny, Youngblood Hawke, Winds of War, and War and Remembrance. In 1997, he collaborated with Jimmy Buffett to create a musical based on Don’t Stop the Carnival.

O CANADA!

All my life, I've loved you so. Never dreamed, I'd miss you so.

The Canadian border has never been more than two hundred fifty miles away most of my life. So unlike most Americans who—Margaret Atwood claims—think of Canada only as the place where the weather comes from, its existence goes beyond meteorology for me. I have had my fun on Highway 61, which keeps going after leaving the US. Been over the border here and there, summer and winter, time after time, but not for some years. Tennessee Williams noted that the longest distance between two places is time. It’s the reason there’s no time like the present and the reason I’m going back to Canada on a journey through the past.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau walked out of parliament in Ottawa, ten feet away, unguarded, red boutonniere in his lapel, waving to a gaggle of camera-toting women—why in crowds just a trace of my face could seem so pleasin'—before climbing into a nondescript Ford sedan, his driver wheeling away from the curb, off to lunch.

Driving up to Sioux Lookout—if not in the middle, on the edge of what everybody knows is nowhere—the fish tales were incredible. Lunkers just jumped into the boat. They wanted to be caught so badly, you had to fight them off with oars. Our party of eight sat in boats on Lac Seul for a week in pouring rain. In the lake’s defense, it is large, like a hundred and fifty miles long, plenty of places for the fish to be without being within attacking distance of your bait. The total catch for the entire party was a single walleye, weighing in at about one ounce, smaller than my hand, about the size of a fish called “Wanda.”

A Sunday night in Banff we were drinking in a hotel—a round for the bright red devil who keeps me in this tourist town. Like most large hotels, the building was located at an intersection. Aside from the main entrance, there were two additional entrances for imbibers. On one street was an entrance for men. On the intersecting street was an entrance for ladies and escorts. Both entrances led to the same basement where rows of wooden picnic tables filled the room. A yellow line was painted across the floor. You had to stay on your side of the line. You also had to order two beers at a time from the male waitstaff to ease their burden. Then at 12:01 am Monday morning they started dancing. I fell in love with Jane Carlson from Edmonton—I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way. I guessed you didn’t dance on Sunday in Banff. A year later I learned it was against the law for a woman to sit at a bar in Seattle, so the West was probably not the best. A few years after that I learned you couldn’t get a drink in Tulsa unless you were a member of the Petroleum Club, operating a vehicle with an internal combustion engine didn’t qualify you for membership.

Once only a single hotel stood on shore of Lake Louise. Waiters delivered meals in covered chafing dishes by bicycle at Jasper. The biggest thing in Calgary was the stampede. With the oil tar sands, I don’t expect to be Alberta bound again, even if the red pines will bow their heads and the rivers and the watersheds will carry us along.

I got my first view of a post-apocalyptic world in Sudbury. The nickel mining and smelting business had turned the landscape into something from a nightmare. They took all the trees and put ’em in a tree museum, leaving behind plump stumps several feet high, jagged crowns evidence they had not been cut but poisoned.

Cruising the Trans-Canada Highway between Ottawa and Montreal or maybe between Montreal and Quebec, there was a band playing in my head and I felt like getting high. All the bakeries in all the towns along the way sold cognac-filled chocolate bars. What a great country. I could drink a case of you, darling.

The waitress in a hotel dining room in Montreal brought me an English-language newspaper. And apologized. I blame the woman I was with. She spoke a lot with her hands, perhaps expecting to fly, on the edge of her feather anyway. If only I could pass for French in Paris.

I was disappointed when I drove up to the park from Quebec City, a long drive that went nowhere else. Laurentian or Laurentide, it was called back then. It was a destination on that particular trip. A single cop car blocked the entrance. It was, after all, the day after Labor Day, but it was only castles burning. Hanging out in Bar Harbor for a week, eating lobster everyday, mitigated some of the regret, but consumed enough capital I couldn’t afford the ferry to Yarmouth.

Our timing was bad the first time my buddy and I headed up Highway 61 to Thunder Bay to ski. “Thunder Bay” was new to me at the time. I knew it to be two towns, Fort William and Port Arthur. The timing was bad because the ski resorts operated diesel-powered lifts and because they were expensive to run, the resorts were only open on weekends. Of course, it was not the weekend. We asked around and heard about a new resort, Little Norway, which had electric lifts. My buddy and I had the slopes to ourselves and the sky—green, yellow and red the North Lights swept in bars. The owner allowed us to camp out in the chalet. I had only skied once. It was at the end of the previous season, but I’d thought hard about it, and watched Redford’s Downhill Racer. Some say you find zen at the top of the mountain. Others say you have to bring your own zen to the mountain. I did find it or it found me. In two days it all came together, as simple as riding a bicycle

The Mounties always get their man. I don’t know if that’s true, but they did get me. Another buddy and I headed for Thunder Bay in a dune buggy I built from a shortened VW-bug chassis. It was emerald green metallic with chrome wheels and big tires. Cold at night with no top, we got hold of a couple sheepskin-lined, leather aviator caps with the requisite goggles. Looked Errol Flynn studly. Rolled into Thunder Bay the next day. I pulled up at the first stoplight. Had to quickly shut off the engine because moving parts were exposed to the gaggle of girls that climbed aboard, left, right, and rear.

Cartwheels turn to car wheels thru the town, but the girls wanted the wind in their faces and hair. I headed for the highway. Great ride. Great breeze. Big birds flying across the sky, throwing shadows on our eyes. Then red lights flashed in my rearview mirror and a siren screamed. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police stole our girls and kicked me out of Canada. Who the fuck could ever imagine mudguards on a dune buggy?

Emperor of the Badlands

Marquis

The Marquis de Morès was probably the most colorful character to pass through St. Paul, Minnesota, if not the entire Midwest. He wasn’t just colorful, but kaleidoscopic. Army officer, duelist, adventurer, rancher, gunslinger, the handsome and dashing Marquis made a splash wherever he landed.

Born in 1858, he graduated in 1879 from St. Cyr, France’s leading military academy, where he was a classmate of Philippe Pètain, WWI general and WWII leader of the Vichy government. Next it was on to Saumur, France’s top cavalry school. Sent to Algiers to help quell an uprising, be began his swashbuckling career, fighting his first duel, on his way to becoming a notable duelist of his era.

In 1882, he met the lovely Medora von Hoffman, daughter of a wealthy New York banker. She was a couple of years older than he was and accomplished. She spoke seven languages (three more than he did), played piano, painted, and rode.

Medora

He resigned from the cavalry, married Medora in Cannes, and moved to the US. After working a short time for his new father-in-law, he got an idea. Whether the idea was his or his father-in-law’s, or someone else’s—it was bold. He set out to bust the Chicago “beef trust.” His plan was to raise his own cattle, butcher them, and send the meat to market in refrigerated railroad cars, bypassing the Chicago stockyards. He needed a headquarters, a ranch, and a railroad.

He chose St. Paul as his headquarters for good reason. It was the gateway to the Dakotas, Montana, and the Pacific Northwest. New England and New York investors financed the growth of the burgeoning city, known as the last eastern city. Others viewed it as the Boston of the Northwest. Boston’s Endicott brothers, for instance, hired Cass Gilbert to design several downtown buildings. The crown jewel was the Italian-Renaissance-themed Endicott Building, an architectural and financial success, a building lampooned in the 1950s by Max Schulman as a running gag on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis—c’mon, Dobe, let’s go watch them tear down the old Endicott Building.

The Marquis and his wife lived in a residential hotel on the site of the present-day Ordway Center on Rice Park, the jewel of downtown St. Paul today. He opened a butcher business in Lowertown. He bought a cottage on White Bear Lake, the fashionable lake for St. Paulites. Even Mark Twain was impressed by the lake. Scott Fitzgerald probably was, too, but he disguised it in his “Basil” stories by calling it Black Bear Lake. After being introduced by General Herman Haupt, general manager of the Northern Pacific, the Marquis hired Cass Gilbert to remodel his lake cottage. Medora apparently spent only summers in North Dakota. Both seemed to play more than work, suggesting the Marquis wasn’t the best overseer of his enterprise.

St. Paul was becoming a center of manufacturing. At the height of the boom, Conrad Gotzian employed five hundred workers to make shoes, and his company wasn’t the only shoe manufacturer. The city was the head of steamship navigation on the Mississippi River and was fast becoming the second largest rail hub after Chicago. In 1881, Henry Villard devised the “blind pool.” Fifty investors including the Endicott brothers, no-questions-asked, loaned him twenty million dollars to take over Northern Pacific Railway. In1883, just after the Marquis arrived, Henry Villard organized a three-train procession to Gold Creek, Montana, to celebrate the railroad’s connection to the Pacific Ocean. General Grant was along to hammer in the symbolic spike. It was a long time coming. Abraham Lincoln chartered the railroad in 1864.

Triumphal arches were erected in St. Paul. Celebrations were held along the way. One stop was Bismarck, North Dakota, where Leroy Buffington, a Minneapolis architect who patented the skyscraper, was building the state capitol. Sitting Bull, looking fat and unwarrior-like, was brought from the reservation for entertainment. General Grant was a huge attraction at every town along the route. Maybe the Marquis didn’t need his own railroad. After he founded the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, the Marquis perhaps wrongly believed he needed only locomotives.

The Marquis set up his ranch on a six-square-mile area of Little Missouri River bottom in North Dakota. Shunning the citizens of nearby Little Missouri because they opposed him and his barbed-wire fences, he founded his own town named after his wife, Medora. He built a twenty-six room clapboard-sided house, sometimes known as Chateau de Morès, a beef-packing plant, a hotel, a church, a brickyard, a stage coach line, and a freighting company. And he bought cattle. Today Medora is the number-one tourist attraction in North Dakota.

His neighbor was Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt settled in North Dakota to get away from his tragedy back home. His wife and his mother both died on the same day. Later in life, Roosevelt claimed that if he hadn’t gone to North Dakota, he would have never become president.

Once settled in Medora, the Marquis settled into his old habits, killing a cowboy, Riley Luffsey, in a shootout in 1883. He was arrested, but not charged. Over time his wife gained something of a reputation as an Annie Oakley, having shot three or four bear on a Wyoming hunt. Sometime later, a friend of Roosevelt’s lobbied the sheriff to put the Marquis on trial for killing the cowboy. He was tried and acquitted in 1885 (some suggest he was tried and acquitted for the same crime three times). Because the agitator was a friend of Roosevelt’s, the Marquis suspected Roosevelt had something to do with instigating the trouble he found himself in and challenged Roosevelt to a duel.

The situation was defused when Roosevelt assured him he was not an enemy, and the two men became friends again, even traveling to Miles City, Montana, together to attend a meeting of cattlemen. Disappointed there was no agreement to fight cattle-rustling in the Badlands, both men attempted to join the Stranglers, a vigilante group organized by Granville Stuart. Stuart turned them down because of their high profiles. Another proof of their friendship was the inscribed watch Roosevelt gave to de Morès, for sale on eBay several years back.

Quick to anger, the Marquis wasn’t one to stay out of trouble. Other instances of gunplay were reputed to have occurred, but the big trouble was in his losing battle against the “beef trust.” His father-in-law, stuck with one-point-five million of debt, cut him off. The business collapsed. There were lawsuits. As the winter of 1886 arrived, the Marquis and his wife packed up and headed off to India to hunt tigers. The town of Medora never recovered. Drought and a frigid winter killed half the herds, completing the destruction.

Whatever his feeling towards Jews was before the collapse of his business, the Marquis became hostile toward them after. He blamed the failure of his business on a Jewish plot, claiming Jews dominated the “beef trust.” He was correct about a plot. The “beef trust” negotiated a better deal with the railroads, in the same way Rockefeller managed to have all other shippers subsidize him. There may have been one, none, or a hundred Jews. It was business as usual for the Gilded Age. Also, the public showed a preference for corn-fed beef as opposed to range-fed. His virulent anti-Semitism, fueled by the failure of his business, governed his behavior, leading to his downfall and death.

In 1888, the French army commissioned the Marquis to build a railroad from the Chinese border to the Gulf of Tonkin. The British were building a railroad from Burma to China, so the project made sense to him. He even cautioned the army to be kind to the Vietnamese. “The colonization of Tonkin will not be accomplished with rifles, but public works,” he wrote.

Political intrigue and the shifting of power killed the railroad. A year later the Marquis was recalled. He attacked Jean Constans, the undersecretary of the navy, who opposed the railroad and demanded his recall. He joined an anti-Semitic organization. He challenged a Jewish journalist and member of the Chamber of Deputies, Ferdinand-Camille Dreyfus, to a duel. Dreyfus fired first and missed. The Marquis shot Dreyfus in the arm.

In 1892, Captain Armand Meyer, a Jewish army officer challenged the Marquis to a duel. The Marquis picked swords. The Marquis reputedly killed Meyer in three seconds. An investigation followed. Meyer may have had a bad arm (because the Marquis was challenged, he had the choice of weapons and picked swords over pistols). Nothing came of the investigation.

His inflammatory behavior in France got the Marquis sent to Algeria. He continued his anti-Semitic harangues, claiming African Jews and the British were conspiring to take over North Africa. The British, since General Gordon literally lost his head to the Mahdi, weren’t doing all that well in North Africa. Even so, the Marquis determined to meet the Mahdi in Khartoum to forge an alliance.

A conspiracy in the French army sent the Marquis to Berresof where he was to meet Taurag “guides.” The guides assassinated him a few days later. Two men were later found guilty of murder, but no one in the French government or army was convicted. The Marquis was thirty seven when he died.

In 1903, Medora traveled with her three children back to the Badlands for a last visit.

In 1905, Teddy Roosevelt busted the “beef trust.”

During WWI Medora opened up her Cannes house to wounded soldiers. She died in 1921.

In 1936, son Louis donated the Chateau de Morès to the State of North Dakota.