ST CLOUD, MINNESOTA

1958 - 1961:
During the summer of 1958 our family moved to St. Cloud. I still do not know why we moved so far away from the Twin Cities because my father's job was in Minneapolis. During the week he stayed with my aunt and uncle in the cities and only came home on the weekends. On holidays we would get to take the train to visit relatives in Minneapolis which was always exciting to us. Can you imagine one mother traveling with 6 kids?
We rented a big house at 531 Wilson St. S.E. (Strange that I can remember that address after all these years).

It was a beautiful home with a spiral staircase, a gorgeous built-in china cabinet in the dinning room and a grand walk-in pantry off the kitchen. There were four bedrooms upstairs. One my brother got all to himself and the 5 girls shared two of the rooms. Only one of those two rooms had a door to the hallway. You had to walk through that one bedroom to get to the second one. The 4th bedroom was always locked. Only the owner of the house had the key to that room and we always wondered what was in it. The owner would come over every so often, go up to that bedroom, spend about a 1/2 hour in there and then leave.

One day, after he left we discovered that he had forgotten to lock the door when he left! We went into the room to discover that it was full of boxes and trunks packed full of old antiques (Oh, to have those today!) We found out later that the man who owned our house had actually inherited it from his brother and right before he rented the house to our family, he had put everything his brother owned in that one room.

We lived down the street from the Hoover family. My mom would take me with her when she would go to their house to have coffee with Mrs. Hoover. I thought our family was large, but I was in awe of their huge brood. At that time they had ten children and for the longest time after we moved away we would get a Christmas card from them with a family pic on it and each year there would be another new baby in the pic. (Can we say Catholic?) Mrs. Hoover did everything by hand. When we would go to her house, she never sat at the kitchen table to have her coffee; she was always sitting at a sewing machine making new clothes for her children.

We lived only about two blocks from the river, but we were never allowed to go near it, so it was a big treat to have mom take us to the river bank each 4th of July so we could watch the fireworks. We spent most of the time huddled under a blanket trying to protect ourselves from the bats and watched the fireworks from under the blanket.

For a while the neighborhood was having a problem with a man peeking in windows at night. The police were called, but of course the man would disappear by the time they arrived. It got to a point where all the men in the neighborhood got up on their roofs with shotguns in hand waiting for this guy to show up. They figured it was someone in the neighborhood because he seemed to know what was going on and would never show up when the men staked out the homes. Finally, one night, Mrs. Born (a neighbor about 3-4 houses down from ours) was in her bedroom getting ready for bed. She had put on her nightgown and was sitting at her vanity brushing her hair. The vanity was directly opposite the bedroom window, so when she looked in the mirror she saw the man looking in. She didn't panic so he wouldn't become alarmed. She calmly called her husband in and told him to call the police. This time he told the police to come, but to not come in a squad car so the guy wouldn't see them. The idiots showed up in a dark car, but it had the word 'police' painted in white all over it. He got away again.

I do not remember how they finally did catch him, but it turned out to be the man that lived right next door to us. No body really knew him. All we knew was that his wife had died and he was raising his children by himself. His kids were not allowed to leave their yard, or to play with any of the other kids in the neighborhood. I can only remember seeing them once or twice in the three years we lived there.

We had a candy shop about two blocks from our house and it was always fun to be able to go there and pick out our penny candy. In those days, penny candy was 1 cent! I remember that store perfectly. Every shelve in every aisle was filled with glass jars full of candy. It probably was a tiny store, but to me it was huge. The lady who ran it lived there too, which I thought was so cool. She was old in my eyes (probably in her early 40's at that time) and she was so nice. She asked me once what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had never really thought about that since I was still so young, so I tried to come up with something that would sound impressive. My mother was a piano teacher, so on the spur of the moment, I blurted out that I wanted to be a 'penis'. This poor lady was shocked and I didn't realize until I saw the look on her face that I had mispronounced the word 'pianist'. I wanted to curl up and die! I never went back to her store.

St. Cloud also had a wonderful museum. Every once in a while my older sisters would take me. It was right on the other side of the bridge, on the out skirts of downtown. The museum was full of all sorts of old things. I think it was probably the first time in my life I had seen an actual human skeleton.

I spent three years in St. Cloud and didn't go until I was an adult. My how times change things. The little road that led to the downtown area is now a major freeway, and the house we lived in has since been converted into apartments.