Minneapolis, Minnesota
When fans of the Minnesota Twins baseball team swarm to opening day ceremonies at the new Target Field on the north edge of downtown Minneapolis, Apr. 12, few will have any notion of the area's complex connections to people and pivotal events in the city's history.
Mere steps from the stadium's northwest corner once stood the Oak Lake subdivision, platted in 1880 near Olson Highway (6th Avenue North) and Lyndale Avenue with curving streets and some cul-de-sacs. The lake and its genteel neighborhood are long gone, as are the Jewish, black, and working-class white families that took up residence in successive waves as the original cachet waned.
Larry Millett, in Lost Twin Cities (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1992), described the neighborhood's evolution and how, by the 1930s, the city had cleared Oak Lake and re-located the farmers' market there.
In Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century: The Growth of an American City (242 pp, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010), author Iric Nathanson describes the role of land covenants and other implicit understandings that restricted minorities' residential choices to certain parts of the city. The experience and proximity of Jewish and black residents in the larger Oak Lake and Glenwood Avenue sector had important implications for the civil rights movement that unfolded in the second half of the 20th century in a city once known as the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States.
My affinity for the area's history has a personal basis. The families of both my parents resided there at various times, and I was born at Glenwood and Penn avenues.
Earlier, on Jan. 23, 1937, when my grandparents lived at 506 Girard Avenue, my grandfather, Harry Hayden Peterson, was shot and killed a few blocks away at the Fresno Cafe, 1007 Sixth Avenue North. Joseph Taylor, the man who shot him in self-defense, lived a block away at 506 Fremont Avenue. Taylor was properly acquitted on Mar. 2, following a speedy trial. The case was a sensation in the newspapers because Taylor was one of the city's few black entrepreneurs and served as a role model in his community. Life was never the same afterward for the Taylors or for my grandmother and her four children.
By the early 1950s, according to Millett, the city regarded the area as its worst slum and, in 1954, demolished more than 660 structures in a 180-acre area between Glenwood Avenue and Olson Highway.
The intersection of First Avenue North and 6th Street, one block south of Target Field, was the scene in May 1934 of a strikebreaking confrontation between members of a Teamsters union local and 1,000 police deputies backed by commercial interests of the Citizens Alliance. Nathanson recounted the event as "one skirmish in a summer-long strike that provoked full-scale class warfare." The strikers eventually won the sometimes bloody struggle, breaking the monopoly of business interests on the city's power structure and balancing it with the interests of organized labor.
Nathanson includes chapters on more than 100 years of controversy about the structure of Minneapolis' city government; periodic bouts of corruption and indictment of mayors, council members, and police officers; and efforts to redevelop downtown, the neighborhoods, and the riverfront.
Baseball fans who will arrive and depart Target Field via the light rail trains may appreciate Nathanson's last chapter with its mind-numbing detail of how light rail mass transit arrived in the Twin Cities. Folks who have followed or fretted over the 13-year saga of the Shubert Theater's salvation and rehabilitation two blocks from the stadium don't know from nothing about perseverance in pursuit of civic goals.
For decades, municipal and state planners tried to build a freeway along Highway 55/Hiawatha Avenue, following an old route south from downtown to Fort Snelling and the airport. For more than a decade in the 1970s and 80s, hundreds and thousands of residents in south Minneapolis fought those efforts at city hall, at the legislature, and in congress, arguing in favor of an at-grade parkway that allowed for the possibility of light rail transit.
One dramatic confrontation occurred in the lobby of the downtown Federal Building late on a January evening in 1975, when 200+ residents took Congressman Donald Fraser to task for his vote in favor of funding freeway construction along the route. I was there! What Nathanson did not relate about the incident was the fact that residents chartered buses to the event at their own expense after Fraser's office had refused to schedule a meeting at a more convenient time and place. Light rail began running on the non-freeway, Hiawatha Avenue on June 26, 2004 – 29 years later!
In all of "Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century," I found but one factual error. On page 196, Nathanson relates that Rudy Perpich was elected Minnesota's governor in 1976. In fact, as lieutenant governor, Perpich assumed the office of governor on Dec. 29, 1976, following the resignation of Governor Wendell Anderson. Perpich then appointed Anderson to fill the United States Senate vacancy created by the election of Walter Mondale as vice president. Both Perpich and Anderson were defeated for election in November 1978.
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Showing posts with label Harry Peterson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harry Peterson. Show all posts
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Sacred places, divine faces: A Memorial Day meditation
Minneapolis, Minnesota
I believe in ghosts, and sought their company for two weeks in the waning days of August 2000. In particular, I was seeking my paternal grandfather, Harry Hayden Peterson, whose Kansas origins had been lost in the mists of time and space following his death in Minneapolis in 1937.
While my ultimate destination that summer was Meade County, bordering the Oklahoma panhandle in the southwest corner of Kansas, I first spent three days at the Kansas History Center in Topeka, with a side trip to the Lied Center for the performing arts in Lawrence. Penciled notes made from microfilmed copies of pioneer newspapers and the 1895 agricultural census started my forensic investigation of times and people I had never known.
Heading west from Topeka on Interstate 70, I visited the campus of Kansas State University in Manhattan before resting overnight a few miles on, in Junction City. There, I encountered the first ghosts, maintaining their vigil and bearing witness at the entrance of Fort Riley, Home of America's Army.
Fort Riley was established on the Kansas River in 1853, and since has played a role in all of the nation's military undertakings. As I drove onto the grounds, I was attended by the spirits of thousands who reached this crossroads from all walks of life and participated in the great leavening experiences of American democracy. The 1st Infantry Division left Fort Riley in the vanguard of the American Expeditionary Force to France in 1917, led by Gen. John "Blackjack" Pershing. During World War II, the 1st was sent to England, and participated in the D-Day storming of France's Normandy beaches in 1944. In 1965, its people answered the call to duty in Vietnam.
Continuing westward for 25 miles, I arrived in Abilene, site of the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. On the grounds of that complex, a visitor can wander through the house where Dwight David Eisenhower – Ike – grew up, and meditate in the chapel where he and his wife, Mamie, are buried. In between, one can study his career as a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point and subsequent rise to the rank of five-star general, Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, director of the invasion of Europe, first Supreme Commander of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and service as the 34th president of the United States.
My own, sole encounter with West Point occurred in 1978, and consisted of lodging for a single night at The Thayer Hotel, a historic, Gothic structure overlooking New York's Hudson River at the south entrance to the Academy.
From Abilene, I continued along I-70 for 93 miles to Russell, Kansas. I wanted to see the community that had shaped the early life of former U.S. senator Bob Dole, a man whose character, and not his politics, had gained him my vote when he stood for the presidency in 1996. Dole was one of many injured during the Allied campaigns in Italy during World War II; his
injuries left his right arm paralyzed for life.
Traveling south, by way of Dodge City, I made my first stop in Meade County at the Meade County Historical Museum. Thousands had flocked to that county in 1884-85 from points East, lured by the promise of free land through homesteading. Arriving in Dodge City on trains, they transferred their persons and worldly goods to horse-drawn freight wagons for the 43-mile cross-country trip to Meade.
Centennial books, published in 1985, recorded the stories of many who had made that journey west and created the principal towns of Plains and Meade. Their indices contained the entries that connected with my grandfather and the extended family that had arrived in Kansas before him, by way of Delaware, New Jersey, Ohio, and Illinois. One of the entries noted a contemporary resident, a second cousin once removed, who had been drafted in 1965 to serve in the Vietnam War. My brother, who had joined me for a few days, and I presented ourselves at the cousin's doorstep with the announcement that we were relatives from Minnesota.
From this encounter, we came to know of our grandfather's eight siblings, their parents, our Peterson forebears reaching back to the 1600s, and of the succeeding generations that were scattered further to the four winds. We have become acquainted with many of their ghosts as we have walked the flat, sun-drenched quarter sections that had been the original homesteads in Meade County, and the quiet, hillside cemeteries on the outskirts of Meade, Kansas, and Pineville, Missouri.
During that first Kansas visit, we met a second cousin who had enlisted in the Army Air Corp, was shot down over Germany in November 1944, and was held as a POW. He returned home to pursue his American Dream as a farmer and raise a family with his wife of more than 60 years. I have since met many other Peterson descendants, some of them veterans of military service. In particular, one of my grandfather's sisters, who settled in Washington state, produced several generations of service people. I have met two of them; one lives now in Florida, the other in Colorado.
Closer to my Minnesota roots, my maternal grandfather, Hjalmer Anders Linman, served in the navy as a young man at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, during World War I. He re-enlisted in his 50s and served in New Jersey during World War II. My father, Paul Emmett Peterson, served in the U.S. Army at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the early 1950s. My step-father, Kenneth Jacob Vetsch, served in the U.S. Navy's Signal Service Group, with assignments during and after World War II in the Pacific Theater and at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. These three men, and Harry Peterson, are buried within 500 yards of each other at Crystal Lake Cemetery in Minneapolis.
I set eyes on the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, a few times in 1971 and 1972. After more than 30 years, memory yet lends it a romantic, wind-swept image set on Chesapeake Bay. It was a point of vicarious pride for our family when my second cousin, Jeffrey Tuset, was accepted there as a midshipman. One of my most idyllic memories of summers in Minnesota is of the reunion, picnic, and afternoon of water skiing in Big Lake, Minnesota, before he left to take up his studies.
The ghosts from that afternoon continue to visit me. It may not have been the first time all of us were together, but it was the last. After his graduation, Capt. Tuset died when his helicopter stopped working and crashed in the Sea of Japan, May 6, 1985, an event reported on the front page of the Minneapolis newspaper. Whether he knew it or not, Jeff's service followed, at least indirectly, in the footsteps of his grandfather, John Gunderson Tuset, who served in the U.S. Army during World War I and is also buried at Crystal Lake.
Whatever their particular antecedents, wars confront the generations called to their conduct with the need to make keenly-felt moral judgments. For much of our history, men and women have served in the armed forces of the United States by choice, while for significant periods, conscription has been used to fill the ranks in the numbers needed. Not all agree, however, that every war – or any war – should be fought.
The Vietnam War of ~1964-1975 – a war whose premises the then-Secretary of Defense has since said were wrong – caused much turmoil in hearts and homes throughout the land. Upon receiving his draft notice early in 1971, my partner, James Davies, was resolved to insist on his status as a conscientious objector, even if it meant imprisonment for refusing induction. This caused great distress for his parents who had come of age during World War II. James' father had enlisted in the U.S. Navy at age 17, served in North Africa, staffed the first mine-sweeper in the Bay of Naples on the coast of Italy, and had shipped to the Pacific Theater for the invasion of Japan that did not happen.
A dynamic scene of great emotion played out in the courthouse of Rice County, Minnesota. Before a draft board comprised of war veterans, James' father voiced his profound disagreement with James' beliefs, while vouching for James' sincerity in holding them. Consequently, James performed two years of alternative service as a conscientious objector, working in the mental health unit of a hospital in Tucson, Arizona.
For many of us, resolution of the moral issues happened more by chance than choice, which begs the question of whether we ever resolved them.
When I visited in Meade County two years ago with the cousin who had served in Vietnam, he described his efforts to survive in that conflict and the community of people that embraced him warmly upon his return. He then asked whether I had worn the uniform.
No. After relinquishing my student deferment in 1971, I was classified 1-A for induction for more than half a year. On Aug. 5, 1971, the draft lottery drew number 228 for my birth date. That meant the chances of my involuntary service would be very low.
I have looked back on occasion. On Oct. 11, 1987, I studied the names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington. Earlier that day, I had attended the unveiling of The AIDS Memorial Quilt on the National Mall, memorializing those who had fallen in a different war.
More recently, after 9/11, I was ready to enlist. If they needed me and wanted 50-year-olds, the cause was just and worth the fight. Talk, however, is cheap. That is why I have little patience or use for the rantings of those on both the right and the left of the political spectrum who have not worn the uniform or walked the talk. The daily diatribes of some of them about how their freedoms and liberties are being abridged or denied ring hollow in my ears.
In February 2006, I attended a national arts conference in Washington, D. C. Our activities included a reception at the residence of the ambassador from France to the United States, Jean-David Lévitte. At the time, France had been pummeled for three years by leaders of the U.S. government and others throughout the land for its refusal to share in the erroneous belief that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11 and was amassing weapons of mass destruction.
In his greetings to us, the ambassador recounted poignantly the 200+ year relationship between the two countries, saving his greatest eloquence to acknowledge the ultimate sacrifice made by ordinary people from all corners of America to liberate his country in 1944: "For this we shall be forever grateful," he intoned. "This we shall never forget!"
Lévitte's sincerity was diminished only a little when I learned later that he used that speech regularly while doing his job of representing his country and making what friends he could. In fact, France and its people are grateful and, because they have seen the U.S. at its best, have been critical when we have failed our better selves.
The British people also are grateful. Near Downing Street and Whitehall in London, the underground Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum testify to the close working relationship between the World War II prime minister, Winston Churchill, and President Franklin Roosevelt. A memorial plaque to Roosevelt resides prominently in London's Westminster Abbey.
Since 602 AD, a church of Christian worship has stood on London's Ludgate Hill. The medieval old St. Paul's Church was one of the largest structures in Europe. After The Great Fire in 1666, Christopher Wren designed the current structure and dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. During the German bombing Blitz of 1940-41, much of London and the English countryside was laid waste. Although the survival of St. Paul's dome stood as a symbol of British resolve before the U.S. entered the war, a bomb in October 1940 destroyed the cathedral's eastern apse and, with it, the High Altar.
In post-war rebuilding, the High Altar was repositioned. In its former setting was created The American Memorial Chapel. Dedicated Nov. 26, 1958, the chapel is one of the most emotionally arresting sites for an American visitor. Opposite the altar, the American Roll of Honour, presented by Eisenhower, holds the names of the 28,000 Americans who went to Britain and died in World War II; the roll is kept under glass, and a page of names is turned each day.
The chapel's three, stained-glass windows represent Service, Sacrifice, and Resurrection. Wood carvings represent flowers and fruits from the American heartland. The altar's ironwork shows the Burning Bush of Moses and the Tablets of the Law on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed as a memorial to America's Jewish soldiers who died.
Speaking in the House of Commons, June 18, 1940, Churchill asked his country to let the coming struggle be its finest hour. While the U.S. has known many fine hours in the creation and maintenance of its experiment in democracy, its response to fascism in World War II still stands as its finest hour in the defense of its principles, values, and beliefs.
I do not seek the living among the dead, but I feel deep love and gratitude to the ghosts of those who have gone before. We are the heirs of their faith, the instruments of their hope, and the products of their love.
I believe in ghosts, and sought their company for two weeks in the waning days of August 2000. In particular, I was seeking my paternal grandfather, Harry Hayden Peterson, whose Kansas origins had been lost in the mists of time and space following his death in Minneapolis in 1937.
While my ultimate destination that summer was Meade County, bordering the Oklahoma panhandle in the southwest corner of Kansas, I first spent three days at the Kansas History Center in Topeka, with a side trip to the Lied Center for the performing arts in Lawrence. Penciled notes made from microfilmed copies of pioneer newspapers and the 1895 agricultural census started my forensic investigation of times and people I had never known.
Heading west from Topeka on Interstate 70, I visited the campus of Kansas State University in Manhattan before resting overnight a few miles on, in Junction City. There, I encountered the first ghosts, maintaining their vigil and bearing witness at the entrance of Fort Riley, Home of America's Army.
Fort Riley was established on the Kansas River in 1853, and since has played a role in all of the nation's military undertakings. As I drove onto the grounds, I was attended by the spirits of thousands who reached this crossroads from all walks of life and participated in the great leavening experiences of American democracy. The 1st Infantry Division left Fort Riley in the vanguard of the American Expeditionary Force to France in 1917, led by Gen. John "Blackjack" Pershing. During World War II, the 1st was sent to England, and participated in the D-Day storming of France's Normandy beaches in 1944. In 1965, its people answered the call to duty in Vietnam.
Continuing westward for 25 miles, I arrived in Abilene, site of the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. On the grounds of that complex, a visitor can wander through the house where Dwight David Eisenhower – Ike – grew up, and meditate in the chapel where he and his wife, Mamie, are buried. In between, one can study his career as a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point and subsequent rise to the rank of five-star general, Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, director of the invasion of Europe, first Supreme Commander of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and service as the 34th president of the United States.
My own, sole encounter with West Point occurred in 1978, and consisted of lodging for a single night at The Thayer Hotel, a historic, Gothic structure overlooking New York's Hudson River at the south entrance to the Academy.
From Abilene, I continued along I-70 for 93 miles to Russell, Kansas. I wanted to see the community that had shaped the early life of former U.S. senator Bob Dole, a man whose character, and not his politics, had gained him my vote when he stood for the presidency in 1996. Dole was one of many injured during the Allied campaigns in Italy during World War II; his
injuries left his right arm paralyzed for life.Traveling south, by way of Dodge City, I made my first stop in Meade County at the Meade County Historical Museum. Thousands had flocked to that county in 1884-85 from points East, lured by the promise of free land through homesteading. Arriving in Dodge City on trains, they transferred their persons and worldly goods to horse-drawn freight wagons for the 43-mile cross-country trip to Meade.
Centennial books, published in 1985, recorded the stories of many who had made that journey west and created the principal towns of Plains and Meade. Their indices contained the entries that connected with my grandfather and the extended family that had arrived in Kansas before him, by way of Delaware, New Jersey, Ohio, and Illinois. One of the entries noted a contemporary resident, a second cousin once removed, who had been drafted in 1965 to serve in the Vietnam War. My brother, who had joined me for a few days, and I presented ourselves at the cousin's doorstep with the announcement that we were relatives from Minnesota.
From this encounter, we came to know of our grandfather's eight siblings, their parents, our Peterson forebears reaching back to the 1600s, and of the succeeding generations that were scattered further to the four winds. We have become acquainted with many of their ghosts as we have walked the flat, sun-drenched quarter sections that had been the original homesteads in Meade County, and the quiet, hillside cemeteries on the outskirts of Meade, Kansas, and Pineville, Missouri.
During that first Kansas visit, we met a second cousin who had enlisted in the Army Air Corp, was shot down over Germany in November 1944, and was held as a POW. He returned home to pursue his American Dream as a farmer and raise a family with his wife of more than 60 years. I have since met many other Peterson descendants, some of them veterans of military service. In particular, one of my grandfather's sisters, who settled in Washington state, produced several generations of service people. I have met two of them; one lives now in Florida, the other in Colorado.
Closer to my Minnesota roots, my maternal grandfather, Hjalmer Anders Linman, served in the navy as a young man at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, during World War I. He re-enlisted in his 50s and served in New Jersey during World War II. My father, Paul Emmett Peterson, served in the U.S. Army at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the early 1950s. My step-father, Kenneth Jacob Vetsch, served in the U.S. Navy's Signal Service Group, with assignments during and after World War II in the Pacific Theater and at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. These three men, and Harry Peterson, are buried within 500 yards of each other at Crystal Lake Cemetery in Minneapolis.
I set eyes on the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, a few times in 1971 and 1972. After more than 30 years, memory yet lends it a romantic, wind-swept image set on Chesapeake Bay. It was a point of vicarious pride for our family when my second cousin, Jeffrey Tuset, was accepted there as a midshipman. One of my most idyllic memories of summers in Minnesota is of the reunion, picnic, and afternoon of water skiing in Big Lake, Minnesota, before he left to take up his studies.
The ghosts from that afternoon continue to visit me. It may not have been the first time all of us were together, but it was the last. After his graduation, Capt. Tuset died when his helicopter stopped working and crashed in the Sea of Japan, May 6, 1985, an event reported on the front page of the Minneapolis newspaper. Whether he knew it or not, Jeff's service followed, at least indirectly, in the footsteps of his grandfather, John Gunderson Tuset, who served in the U.S. Army during World War I and is also buried at Crystal Lake.
Whatever their particular antecedents, wars confront the generations called to their conduct with the need to make keenly-felt moral judgments. For much of our history, men and women have served in the armed forces of the United States by choice, while for significant periods, conscription has been used to fill the ranks in the numbers needed. Not all agree, however, that every war – or any war – should be fought.
The Vietnam War of ~1964-1975 – a war whose premises the then-Secretary of Defense has since said were wrong – caused much turmoil in hearts and homes throughout the land. Upon receiving his draft notice early in 1971, my partner, James Davies, was resolved to insist on his status as a conscientious objector, even if it meant imprisonment for refusing induction. This caused great distress for his parents who had come of age during World War II. James' father had enlisted in the U.S. Navy at age 17, served in North Africa, staffed the first mine-sweeper in the Bay of Naples on the coast of Italy, and had shipped to the Pacific Theater for the invasion of Japan that did not happen.
A dynamic scene of great emotion played out in the courthouse of Rice County, Minnesota. Before a draft board comprised of war veterans, James' father voiced his profound disagreement with James' beliefs, while vouching for James' sincerity in holding them. Consequently, James performed two years of alternative service as a conscientious objector, working in the mental health unit of a hospital in Tucson, Arizona.
For many of us, resolution of the moral issues happened more by chance than choice, which begs the question of whether we ever resolved them.
When I visited in Meade County two years ago with the cousin who had served in Vietnam, he described his efforts to survive in that conflict and the community of people that embraced him warmly upon his return. He then asked whether I had worn the uniform.
No. After relinquishing my student deferment in 1971, I was classified 1-A for induction for more than half a year. On Aug. 5, 1971, the draft lottery drew number 228 for my birth date. That meant the chances of my involuntary service would be very low.
I have looked back on occasion. On Oct. 11, 1987, I studied the names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington. Earlier that day, I had attended the unveiling of The AIDS Memorial Quilt on the National Mall, memorializing those who had fallen in a different war.
More recently, after 9/11, I was ready to enlist. If they needed me and wanted 50-year-olds, the cause was just and worth the fight. Talk, however, is cheap. That is why I have little patience or use for the rantings of those on both the right and the left of the political spectrum who have not worn the uniform or walked the talk. The daily diatribes of some of them about how their freedoms and liberties are being abridged or denied ring hollow in my ears.
In February 2006, I attended a national arts conference in Washington, D. C. Our activities included a reception at the residence of the ambassador from France to the United States, Jean-David Lévitte. At the time, France had been pummeled for three years by leaders of the U.S. government and others throughout the land for its refusal to share in the erroneous belief that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11 and was amassing weapons of mass destruction.
In his greetings to us, the ambassador recounted poignantly the 200+ year relationship between the two countries, saving his greatest eloquence to acknowledge the ultimate sacrifice made by ordinary people from all corners of America to liberate his country in 1944: "For this we shall be forever grateful," he intoned. "This we shall never forget!"
Lévitte's sincerity was diminished only a little when I learned later that he used that speech regularly while doing his job of representing his country and making what friends he could. In fact, France and its people are grateful and, because they have seen the U.S. at its best, have been critical when we have failed our better selves.
The British people also are grateful. Near Downing Street and Whitehall in London, the underground Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum testify to the close working relationship between the World War II prime minister, Winston Churchill, and President Franklin Roosevelt. A memorial plaque to Roosevelt resides prominently in London's Westminster Abbey.
Since 602 AD, a church of Christian worship has stood on London's Ludgate Hill. The medieval old St. Paul's Church was one of the largest structures in Europe. After The Great Fire in 1666, Christopher Wren designed the current structure and dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. During the German bombing Blitz of 1940-41, much of London and the English countryside was laid waste. Although the survival of St. Paul's dome stood as a symbol of British resolve before the U.S. entered the war, a bomb in October 1940 destroyed the cathedral's eastern apse and, with it, the High Altar.
In post-war rebuilding, the High Altar was repositioned. In its former setting was created The American Memorial Chapel. Dedicated Nov. 26, 1958, the chapel is one of the most emotionally arresting sites for an American visitor. Opposite the altar, the American Roll of Honour, presented by Eisenhower, holds the names of the 28,000 Americans who went to Britain and died in World War II; the roll is kept under glass, and a page of names is turned each day.
The chapel's three, stained-glass windows represent Service, Sacrifice, and Resurrection. Wood carvings represent flowers and fruits from the American heartland. The altar's ironwork shows the Burning Bush of Moses and the Tablets of the Law on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed as a memorial to America's Jewish soldiers who died.
Speaking in the House of Commons, June 18, 1940, Churchill asked his country to let the coming struggle be its finest hour. While the U.S. has known many fine hours in the creation and maintenance of its experiment in democracy, its response to fascism in World War II still stands as its finest hour in the defense of its principles, values, and beliefs.
I do not seek the living among the dead, but I feel deep love and gratitude to the ghosts of those who have gone before. We are the heirs of their faith, the instruments of their hope, and the products of their love.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Walking with ghosts
Minneapolis, Minnesota
My father's last-surviving first cousin was buried in Kansas on Tuesday at age 102. This cousin's mother, who was one of my grandfather's older sisters, was born in Illinois before traveling with her parents by train to Dodge City to take up homesteading in Meade County KS in 1885. Many years later, this county was ground zero for the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Although it remains one of the country's most arid regions, the land continues to produce winter wheat and corn in great abundance.
People in olden times did not make life changes and set out to endure the natural or man-made challenges of the frontier because they expected anything to be easy. They had a hope that life could be different and better. Instant gratification was an unknown concept.
Every remembered detail and nuance of their lives is information, caution, and inspiration for how we might take action, engage change, and assume risks in order to make life in our day different and better.
My father's last-surviving first cousin was buried in Kansas on Tuesday at age 102. This cousin's mother, who was one of my grandfather's older sisters, was born in Illinois before traveling with her parents by train to Dodge City to take up homesteading in Meade County KS in 1885. Many years later, this county was ground zero for the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Although it remains one of the country's most arid regions, the land continues to produce winter wheat and corn in great abundance.
People in olden times did not make life changes and set out to endure the natural or man-made challenges of the frontier because they expected anything to be easy. They had a hope that life could be different and better. Instant gratification was an unknown concept.
Every remembered detail and nuance of their lives is information, caution, and inspiration for how we might take action, engage change, and assume risks in order to make life in our day different and better.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Ridgely's Delight: Remembering
Baltimore, Maryland
For some reason, I remember her shoes.
My niece, Bernadette, was wearing "flats" on the sunny spring morning when I drove her and my brother to the Minneapolis airport.
As they got out of the car and walked to the terminal, I saw her shoes and how she carried herself, and thought how "cool" and cosmopolitan she had become at 26.
She was headed back home to Baltimore, and my brother to Denver, following the graduation and party of my mother from college in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
That morning was the last time I saw Bernadette. She made a round trip drive from Baltimore to Minnesota and Wisconsin that summer, but I was somehow too busy to see her, although I did talk to her on the phone from my mother's house while she was en route.
She died in late October that year of 1999, when she fell under the wheels of a train near her townhouse in Baltimore's Ridgely's Delight neighborhood.
She was the first born of my 10 nieces and nephews. A couple years before 1999, she had graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts. At the time of her death, she had applied to medical schools and was working on medical research in Baltimore. You can still Google and find a study for which she was co-author in 1999.
She was the first of what we hoped would be many prides and joys. Being first did not diminish those who followed.
Dealing with her death was, and remains, the worst experience of my life.
In a round-about effort to try and make sense of it all, I set out in the summer of 2000 to tour Kansas for two weeks to find the roots of my grandfather, Harry Peterson. I might have made the trip eventually in my life, but never so soon if Berni had not died.
What I found restored a measure of balance and hope.
I found a wealth of living relatives, and stories of others passed, stretching back to Delaware and the 1600s and, somehow, to Sweden before that.
However, that is all its own separate story.
I knew that if the opportunity ever came my way, I would visit Berni's haunts in Baltimore.
My work at Baltimore's Convention Center ended at 5pm today. I walked back to the Mt. Vernon Hotel to change clothes and set out to walk the 1.2 miles to Berni's last residence at 605 S. Paca Street.
The walk is pleasant enough. Past the University of Maryland Medical Center, past Oriole Park at Camden Yards. In fact, Berni's last home was only three blocks from where baseball is played for 80 games every summer.
You would never know it. South Paca Street is such a quiet oasis, lined with trees, townhouses built to the edge of the sidewalk. A red brick, three-story walkup. Around the corner and a block distant is the dog park where Berni played with her dog. Two blocks away is the gas station. A block further is the pub, Pickles.
Six tenths of a mile further south is the 1300 block of Ridgely Avenue.
Three sets of rusted railroad tracks make a crossing next to an abandoned warehouse.
Two blocks away is the relatively new M & T Bank Stadium where the Baltimore Ravens play football. In between lie acres of surface parking lots.
It is almost absurdly simple to visualize the scene late on a night in October 1999. A car of young people stops short of the railroad tracks on the right side of Ridgely. Berni and a friend get out and wait for a train to come by that is moving slowly enough to try and jump aboard.
The scene is so innocuous now. So ridiculously ordinary and benign.
I have sometimes encouraged the nieces and nephews to dream big and reach high.
Berni had always held a dream of riding the rails. That night, her dream exceeded her reach.
Standing in the middle of the middle tracks, I could feel the possibility of chasing the dream for no more than 30 feet before falling short. I could see the feet touching the ground, running to make it happen.
I saw the shoes.
Oddly, it was not as emotional at the tracks as I had thought it would be -- as it had been when I set out from my hotel in the Mt. Vernon neighborhood.
I stood by on Ridgely for 45 minutes thinking of this and that.
Although I had the sense that Berni was no longer at this scene, whether or not she had lingered for a time, I told her of the amazing stories I had been prompted to learn after she lost consciousness here. I told her I would rather have learned the stories later and in some other way.
I told her she had been the maid of honor at her sister's wedding, and was now an aunt. I told her another sister was now living in Madrid and she would never recognize the cool dude her brother has become.
I told her that her grandmother had had heart surgery a couple years ago but was now standing for election to the Minnnesota Legislature.
I told her we missed her, and that as long as we all lived, so would she.
I told her that she may never have known how much Irish was in her blood, and related the Irish blessing:
The train that came by as I walked away had the most mournful whistle -- heard for blocks away. I have heard that train's whistle on the plains of Kansas, next to the childhood home and presidential library of Dwight Eisenhower in Abilene, and next to the homestead where my grandfather was born in Jasper.
For some reason, I remember her shoes.
My niece, Bernadette, was wearing "flats" on the sunny spring morning when I drove her and my brother to the Minneapolis airport.
As they got out of the car and walked to the terminal, I saw her shoes and how she carried herself, and thought how "cool" and cosmopolitan she had become at 26.
She was headed back home to Baltimore, and my brother to Denver, following the graduation and party of my mother from college in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
That morning was the last time I saw Bernadette. She made a round trip drive from Baltimore to Minnesota and Wisconsin that summer, but I was somehow too busy to see her, although I did talk to her on the phone from my mother's house while she was en route.
She died in late October that year of 1999, when she fell under the wheels of a train near her townhouse in Baltimore's Ridgely's Delight neighborhood.
She was the first born of my 10 nieces and nephews. A couple years before 1999, she had graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts. At the time of her death, she had applied to medical schools and was working on medical research in Baltimore. You can still Google and find a study for which she was co-author in 1999.
She was the first of what we hoped would be many prides and joys. Being first did not diminish those who followed.
Dealing with her death was, and remains, the worst experience of my life.
In a round-about effort to try and make sense of it all, I set out in the summer of 2000 to tour Kansas for two weeks to find the roots of my grandfather, Harry Peterson. I might have made the trip eventually in my life, but never so soon if Berni had not died.
What I found restored a measure of balance and hope.
I found a wealth of living relatives, and stories of others passed, stretching back to Delaware and the 1600s and, somehow, to Sweden before that.
However, that is all its own separate story.
I knew that if the opportunity ever came my way, I would visit Berni's haunts in Baltimore.
My work at Baltimore's Convention Center ended at 5pm today. I walked back to the Mt. Vernon Hotel to change clothes and set out to walk the 1.2 miles to Berni's last residence at 605 S. Paca Street.
The walk is pleasant enough. Past the University of Maryland Medical Center, past Oriole Park at Camden Yards. In fact, Berni's last home was only three blocks from where baseball is played for 80 games every summer.
You would never know it. South Paca Street is such a quiet oasis, lined with trees, townhouses built to the edge of the sidewalk. A red brick, three-story walkup. Around the corner and a block distant is the dog park where Berni played with her dog. Two blocks away is the gas station. A block further is the pub, Pickles.
Six tenths of a mile further south is the 1300 block of Ridgely Avenue.
Three sets of rusted railroad tracks make a crossing next to an abandoned warehouse.
Two blocks away is the relatively new M & T Bank Stadium where the Baltimore Ravens play football. In between lie acres of surface parking lots.
It is almost absurdly simple to visualize the scene late on a night in October 1999. A car of young people stops short of the railroad tracks on the right side of Ridgely. Berni and a friend get out and wait for a train to come by that is moving slowly enough to try and jump aboard.
The scene is so innocuous now. So ridiculously ordinary and benign.
I have sometimes encouraged the nieces and nephews to dream big and reach high.
Berni had always held a dream of riding the rails. That night, her dream exceeded her reach.
Standing in the middle of the middle tracks, I could feel the possibility of chasing the dream for no more than 30 feet before falling short. I could see the feet touching the ground, running to make it happen.
I saw the shoes.
Oddly, it was not as emotional at the tracks as I had thought it would be -- as it had been when I set out from my hotel in the Mt. Vernon neighborhood.
I stood by on Ridgely for 45 minutes thinking of this and that.
Although I had the sense that Berni was no longer at this scene, whether or not she had lingered for a time, I told her of the amazing stories I had been prompted to learn after she lost consciousness here. I told her I would rather have learned the stories later and in some other way.
I told her she had been the maid of honor at her sister's wedding, and was now an aunt. I told her another sister was now living in Madrid and she would never recognize the cool dude her brother has become.
I told her that her grandmother had had heart surgery a couple years ago but was now standing for election to the Minnnesota Legislature.
I told her we missed her, and that as long as we all lived, so would she.
I told her that she may never have known how much Irish was in her blood, and related the Irish blessing:
May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back,
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
And the rain fall gentle on your fields.
And, until we meet again, may God hold you
In the palm of His hand.
The train that came by as I walked away had the most mournful whistle -- heard for blocks away. I have heard that train's whistle on the plains of Kansas, next to the childhood home and presidential library of Dwight Eisenhower in Abilene, and next to the homestead where my grandfather was born in Jasper.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
New Orleans: Coda and Capo
New Orleans, Louisiana
Six summers ago, my brother and I wept in each other's arms in Dodge City, Kansas.
We were parting at the end of a journey where we had found our grandfather's roots, roots that extended back to Delaware and the first Peterson's arrival around 1638.
Our lives had been changed on the hot plains of southwest Kansas, and we wanted to hold on and savor the grace of the moment.
Different ones had tears at the end of last night's performance at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in New Orleans.
We all wanted to hold on.
Yet, it is time for this tour to end. As someone remarked, “It feels like we've been down here forever!”
In five minutes, a third of our group will leave for the airport and Minnesota. The rest of us will follow tomorrow.
Finding a New Orleans venue - any kind of venue - had been problematic until very recently. Fifteen churches had said “no” before The Rev. Susan Gaumer at St. Andrew's said, “Yes, of course.”
Afterwards, Susan told James Davies that it all came together for her with a single image: 102 singers massed beneath a 16-foot figure of a resurrected Christ, arms raised in blessing.
In many ways, this was the best performance even though the venue imposed technical limitations.
In one of the week's countless sweet moments, the mother of tenor Michael Lahr flew down to hear his solo in “Michael's Letter to Mama,” by Armistead Maupin.
Several other Minnesotans joined us for the finale.
Acts of creation are acts of faith. This is what gives the arts their intrinsic value.
Some of us are called to create human life. All of us are called to live life daily.
In an interview on the bus on Thursday, Richard Long observed that “When a part of you is smothered, a part of you dies.”
Large portions of New Orleans were smothered, and much of it will die. Many people who left will never return. Those who remain have a hard journey.
However, I feel no guilt about our boutique hotel digs in the French Quarter: we are bringing much needed cold cash to a place that will need tons of it for decades.
The city will grow again. What was not broken will be stronger.
The Great Southern Sing Out Tour has been eight days of collective worship, of living life daily. The grace of the moment, the faces, names, and places, will abide with us always.
Six summers ago, my brother and I wept in each other's arms in Dodge City, Kansas.
We were parting at the end of a journey where we had found our grandfather's roots, roots that extended back to Delaware and the first Peterson's arrival around 1638.
Our lives had been changed on the hot plains of southwest Kansas, and we wanted to hold on and savor the grace of the moment.
Different ones had tears at the end of last night's performance at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in New Orleans.
We all wanted to hold on.
Yet, it is time for this tour to end. As someone remarked, “It feels like we've been down here forever!”
In five minutes, a third of our group will leave for the airport and Minnesota. The rest of us will follow tomorrow.
Finding a New Orleans venue - any kind of venue - had been problematic until very recently. Fifteen churches had said “no” before The Rev. Susan Gaumer at St. Andrew's said, “Yes, of course.”
Afterwards, Susan told James Davies that it all came together for her with a single image: 102 singers massed beneath a 16-foot figure of a resurrected Christ, arms raised in blessing.
In many ways, this was the best performance even though the venue imposed technical limitations.
In one of the week's countless sweet moments, the mother of tenor Michael Lahr flew down to hear his solo in “Michael's Letter to Mama,” by Armistead Maupin.
Several other Minnesotans joined us for the finale.
Acts of creation are acts of faith. This is what gives the arts their intrinsic value.
Some of us are called to create human life. All of us are called to live life daily.
In an interview on the bus on Thursday, Richard Long observed that “When a part of you is smothered, a part of you dies.”
Large portions of New Orleans were smothered, and much of it will die. Many people who left will never return. Those who remain have a hard journey.
However, I feel no guilt about our boutique hotel digs in the French Quarter: we are bringing much needed cold cash to a place that will need tons of it for decades.
The city will grow again. What was not broken will be stronger.
The Great Southern Sing Out Tour has been eight days of collective worship, of living life daily. The grace of the moment, the faces, names, and places, will abide with us always.
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