The Rake Magazine

Month: November 2004

  • Jack and Jill Moved Up the Hill

    In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, farm animals overthrew the evil Mr. Jones and created a utopia where “all animals are equal.” However, the pigs, who led the uprising, gradually began acting more like the hated Jones. By the book’s end, the pigs had morphed into porcine Mr. Joneses and the farm into a place where “some animals are more equal than others.”

    Orwell’s classic tale was an allegory about the 1917 Russian Revolution, but it was also aimed squarely at the very human tendency to create a pecking order based on perceived differences in status. Over the years, African-Americans, tired of fighting for social acceptance, have created their own groups in which they can feel comfortable. However, critics claim that some of these African-American groups have become as exclusive—some would say as discriminatory—as the white organizations that once spurned blacks.

    One institution often singled out for excluding the “wrong” kind of black person is Jack and Jill, a social club for upper-crust African-American children. Jack and Jill was created in 1938 so that young African-Americans could “network with each other and meet each other,” as alumnus Lawrence Otis Graham, author of Our Kind of People, put it. Founder Marion Turner Stubbs Thomas said she wanted a “means of furthering an inherent natural desire … to bestow upon our children all the opportunities possible for a normal and graceful approach to a beautiful adulthood.”

    When it comes to joining Jack and Jill, it is not who you know, but who knows you. Potential members must be sponsored by a current member. And not all who are called upon are chosen. In fact, not so many years ago, the biracial children of a well-known Minneapolis barrister were nearly rejected because their mother broke an unspoken taboo by having a white spouse. Even to this day, the local Minneapolis chapter doesn’t include any biracial families with a white mother as a member. When I asked a Jack and Jill member if my decidedly non-African-American wife would be welcome, she told me that she would support it, but she conceded that some of her sisters might be a tad lukewarm about bringing a white woman into the fold. And despite its billing as a family organization, this is a group run by women. (The role of men, who are relegated to an “auxiliary,” is made clear by their “under construction” page on Jack and Jill’s web site.)

    However, Murvyn Baker Kelsey, the organization’s National Recording Secretary, claims that Jack and Jill is much more “receptive to today’s culture.” Yet even she concedes that old habits die hard. “We are not a racist organization,” she told me recently. “We just want to make sure that our children have contact with other quality black children. Class, more than race, is the dividing line.” Kelsey said that she had seen white moms at a Jack and Jill function once on the West Coast, though she could not tell me which chapter they belonged to.

    She also asked plaintively, “You aren’t going to write something bad about us, are you? You sound like a professional, educated man. Don’t you want your sons around people that are going to uplift and support them?”

    Indeed, I do. I have to admit that there are certain kinds of people with whom I do not want my sons to associate. My wife and I have candidly discussed whether we have the gumption to continue our Northside “urban adventure” once my youngest son starts school in three or four years. Like others, I do notice where people went to school. And I usually find some discreet way of asking my oldest sons about the parents of their new friends, what they do to put bread on the table.

    Martin Luther King Jr. dreamt of an America where his four young children would be judged not by “the color of their skin but the content of their character.” However, his dream tacitly acknowledged that it was entirely appropriate to judge children, as long as it was for character using criteria that they could control (or perhaps more accurately, that their families could control).

    Maybe Jack and Jill is just honest about what the upwardly mobile of all races have always secretly believed: People may be created equal, but when it comes to shaping your children’s character and hence, their future, some are more equal than others.

  • Terry Iacuzzo

    We fell asleep listening to stories about how Grandma passed her psychic ability on to our father. While he lay in his pram, Gram clipped his pinkie fingernails, boiled them in horseradish sauce, then poured the compound on a patch of dirt behind Fluffy’s doghouse. Father told us that to complete the transfer, he was later ordered to visit Transylvania and make love to a chubby, pale-skinned woman. (When our mother was nearby, he left out the sex part.) None of this compares to Terry Iacuzzo’s family ghost stories. The freakiest thing isn’t even the half-human, half-spiritual apparition that would show up to warn the Iacuzzos about impending tragedies. It was that their family pet never, ever died. Funny, our Fluffy is still alive, too, sixty years after Gram’s ritual.

  • Umberto Eco

    In advance of a new novel from Eco (The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, due next summer), we are treated to a compilation of essays in which the renowned novelist and heavyweight scholar wrestles with the universe of language and writing. At once scholarly and sardonic, On Literature collects eighteen essays on everything from syntax and symbolism to fantasy and fairytale. In each, Eco comes at his subject with a different head. Writing as an Italian, he considers history’s place for fellow countrymen like Dante and Calvino. In other pieces he flexes his considerable critical muscles, as when grappling with the works of Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce. The bulk of this material was derived from myriad symposia, conferences, lectures, and such, so it tends toward formality. But in the final essay, “How I Write,” Eco gives us a silvery glimpse of his addiction to writing.

  • Beauford Delaney: From New York To Paris

    How does it happen that one of the major creative forces of the twentieth century has gone mostly unnoticed by the art world? Painter and personality Beauford Delaney inspired artists like Georgia O’Keefe, Louis Armstrong, and James Baldwin, and his own expressive and distinctive modernist works capture the blues aesthetic of his time. Though Delaney’s story ends sadly, he left behind gorgeously wild street scenes, piercing portraits, and joyous concert scenes that show why the Jazz Age was such a crackling moment in American art and history. 2400 Third Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-870-3131; www.artsmia.org

  • Survival Skills

    By the time she turned sixteen, there was little that Laurie Novak had not learned about survival. The many life and death lessons that a girl needs to know growing up in South Dakota were told to her by her father. The short, clustered buildings of her medium-sized hometown offered only a little protection from the dangerous weather of the prairie, and Laurie was barely walking when he first started talking about how to not be killed by its extreme weather. Over the years and in many different locations, with each lesson putting a new strain on different muscle groups and aching the different parts of her heart, his lectures came to her in a steady stream.

    At five she learned that if there was an electrical storm with blue flashes swallowing up the stars in their chemical soup, she must immediately squat down.

    “Put your hands on your head, Laurie!” her father yelled. “And both elbows need to touch both knees.”

    That position made her body a continuous conduit for the lightning to blast right through her, like a pinball, and shoot down into the ground, dodging all her vital organs. Her father had spent an entire May morning drilling her on it in their sloped backyard.

    “It’s like leapfrog, Laurie.” He egged her to mimic his own crouched frog position.

    “Why don’t you have her pretend that an atomic bomb is being dropped? It’s the same position.” Her mother ridiculed him, her face a chiseled black cloud hovering out of the kitchen window, her blond hair floating like smoke around her face. “Keep those teeth in your head, sweetie,” she yelled to Laurie before slamming the window shut.

    Laurie blushed. Her mother didn’t talk quietly like the other women in the neighborhood. Her voice carried like fire across dry prairie grass through the neighbor’s chainlink fences. Laurie’s mother didn’t look like the other moms, who wore culottes and baggy T-shirts. In the summer she wandered around town in summer dresses without collars or cuffs or pleats and in the winter she wore tight jeans.

    In the first grade, Laurie overheard the other mothers talking about her mother’s jeans in their adult huddle near the orange drink.

    “She must have a constant yeast infection,” Mrs. Demaris said. Mrs. Demaris lived in the red, white, and blue split-level house on the north side of the Novaks.

    The houses on their block had only thin ribbons of lawn so the housewives on either side of Laurie’s house had witnessed the lightning lesson. Laurie had seen both of their pale faces pressed against their window screens, eyes as wide as quarters.

    “He had that girl squatted down half the morning,” Mrs. Demaris phoned everyone to report. “Her poor little thigh muscles. She’s only six.” Too young to imagine how pathetic she looked to them, with her boy’s haircut the color of raw cotton, her legs shaking from exertion and her eyes squinting in the sun, she had thought they were watching out of an interest in lightning safety.

    “Snakes,” he said the year she turned seven, the year he got hard contacts and always had a red, irritated rim around his blue pupils. “Jesus Christ, all the snakes.”

    They were parked at the Big Sioux River parking lot, waiting in the air-conditioned car while he decided if it was safe enough to walk the Indian trails that tagged along the river. Laurie looked out her window, scanning the bottom of the riverbank, expecting to see a hissing carpet of calico-backed snakes just lying in wait for a taste of thin leg.

    Laurie had learned all about snakes while visiting her grandmother’s house that perched on the banks of the Missouri River. Her grandmother Marie lived in a dusty tourist town called Chamberlain. According to her father, Chamberlain was a hotbed of poisonous snakes, and seeing all the rattlesnake wallets and belts that were available in the gift shop of the local café, Laurie found that easy to believe. It was Chamberlain where she learned that if she accidentally stepped on a snake’s patchwork body and its fangs found her doughy calf, she had only minutes to cut an X into her skin and have someone suck the venom out of her blood before the poison began its quick progression to her heart.

    “Like this, Laurie. Right over the fang marks.” Her dad held her leg firmly on his lap while he drew a small, black X on her skin that looked like a cross-stitch. “Instead of a marker, you would use a knife. You understand that, Laurie, right?”

    Her mother rocked away in grandma’s recliner.

    “I don’t have a knife, Daddy,” Laurie said. She didn’t tell him that she wasn’t allowed to play with knives.

    “I have one. And until you are old enough, I’ll carry a knife for you.”

    Her grandmother, who even though she was Laurie’s mother’s mother, acted more like she was the mother of her father, appreciated his lessons. Her own children, including Laurie’s mother, had learned all about polio, dust storms, tornadoes, and tractor safety in a similar, urgent tone.

    “I knew a girl who was killed by a snake,” her grandmother bragged. “She reached in a bush at school to get a ball and the damned thing was waiting. Got her hand.” She held up her own shaky hand to look like the head of a snake. Laurie felt weak. She crossed the living room to sit on her father’s lap. “Her parents, they were Finns, they asked all the little girls in her class to be the pallbearers.” Her grandmother added a third pair of socks to her feet, bending over in her chair. “That was a good summer to be a mortician. We lost half our class to scarlet fever and one of the Anderson boys to rabies.” Laurie pictured a boy foaming at the mouth and his scared family cowering behind their living room furniture.

    “Summers in South Dakota are no place to have kids hanging around,” her grandma added. Nobody had to say that South Dakota winters were no place to have a kid either.

    In the winter, Laurie spent all day under fluorescent lights at school and in pitch darkness any time she stepped outside to run to a warm car. They ate their family supper in front of a television set as anchorpeople talked about everyone who had died that day of hypothermia or by falling through the ice.
    “See?” Her father would raise a blond eyebrow at Laurie from across the table.

    Laurie knew all about falling through the ice. She knew that there was only a second to get out of the cold grip of the water before her body began demanding sleep. “Always fight to get out, no matter what. Or you’ll fall asleep and die,” the old people warned, tapping on the ice with a stick.

    “Die, schmie,” her mother taunted when Laurie told her about dying from hypothermia. “You’d probably have it worse than that, your limbs would turn black and we’d have to cut them off. You’d spend the rest of your life going to work as a head and shoulders on a skateboard.”

    Laurie avoided the river in the winter while all of her friends went there to ice skate. And in the summer she stayed far from the edge.

    “You can’t chase the turtles, sweetie. The turtles around here are snapping turtles. They can snap off a pinkie finger like it’s a pretzel.” He held up his own, hairy and white, not pink at all. They were in the car again, looking at the river.

    “Really?” She tried not to be disappointed that the only water she was getting close to that day was the sweat on his forehead.

    “Laurie. That water is too fast for you to go near, anyway.”

    That spring the Big Sioux rolled slowly by their parked car through its eroded path, as sluggish as maple syrup. Other springs, after a winter full of snow, the water was freezing cold and rose to flood a mile around. The river grew into a grabby hand of water just waiting to rip a small girl right out of her tennis shoes.

    It hadn’t rained all month and Laurie was already at the Guppy level in swimming class. She felt that her dad was overreacting. Even her mother had commented on her improved swimming. “You’re not bad, Laurie. You even swim faster than some of the bigger kids with longer arms.” Laurie wondered what she knew about swimming, since her mom only ever dangled her legs in at the pool.

    “I can’t dive, though. I just jump in feet first.” Jumping was scary enough. Any time her head was submerged in the pool, Laurie panicked. It felt like she was being suffocated in a water coffin.

    “God. Who cares if you can dive? You can dive when you’re a Minnow.”

    Laurie’s dad didn’t ever want her to dive, but if she did, he had lessons about diving, too.

    “Feet first, first time. That’s your diving mantra,” he always said. Necks were snapped all summer long in Sioux Falls parks and pools, and the kids that dove without checking the water’s depth wound up dead or wearing itchy metal halos.

    Even though there was more diving at the lakes than the rivers, Laurie’s father was calmer at the lakes. At least at Lake Alvin, even though her feet could get caught up in weeds and drown her, the water couldn’t sweep her away. At the lakes it all came down to a girl’s ability to tread water. It all came down to thigh muscles.

    To increase her stamina, her father held water-treading practice sessions anytime they stayed at a hotel with a pool. Never getting anywhere near the water himself, he yelled down at her waterlogged ears through cupped palms.

    “Hang in there, Laurie. You don’t want to drown, do you?”

    When Laurie was eleven they stayed at a Ramada Inn in Omaha. It had a big outdoor pool shaped like a kidney. They had a two-hour practice session that was observed by an older girl who was lying out on a lawn chair, slick with baby oil. She had buck teeth and red hair, and Laurie guessed she was in high school.

    When Laurie climbed out of the pool the girl called to her. “Hey, is that your dad?”

    “Yeah.” Her leg muscles burning, Laurie dried herself in front of the girl.

    “He’s a sick bastard,” the girl said and picked up her magazine again.

    “What?” Laurie’s dad was across the pool, gathering up their things. “Why?”

    “It’s pure pee in there. That pool is toxic. It’s like swimming in a toilet bowl.” The girl shook her head. “What the hell was he yelling at you about?”
    “We were practicing.” Laurie blushed. “Treading water.”

    “Whatever.” The girl snorted.

    “How long can you tread water?” Laurie asked her, inching towards her father, who was holding open the door to the hotel.
    “Who cares? It’s the goddam prairie. There is no water,” the girl said.

    By the age of twelve, the frequency of the lessons increased and Laurie’s world felt even more dangerous. She began studying on her own at the library. She studied books on alien abductions, the killer bees that travel up from Mexico, and cases of spontaneous combustion. She memorized field guides of poisonous plants and snakes and she sat at the microfiche machine with tired eyes and a notebook full of stories of kids who were mutilated in freak farming accidents.

    The August 23 paper had the story of a gangly teenage boy who was knocking apples out of a tree with a tennis racket when he was so precisely struck by a lightning bolt it was as if he was made out of metal.

    Sobbing through the screen door, the father somehow managed to give a quote to the newspaper reporter: “What a waste.”

    When her mother picked her up at the library Laurie tried to imagine her in grief. Laurie asked what she would do if she drowned.

    “Cry,” her mother said, pulling out into traffic. “I’d do a lot of crying.And depending on whose pool it was, talk to a lawyer.”

    “What would dad do?” Laurie didn’t have to ask.

    “Leave,” her mother said.

    Her parents never spoke about their past, and all Laurie knew was that they had met at Concordia College in Minnesota where he was on a singing scholarship and her mother was, according to her, just killing time and breaking hearts. In the early photos they made a happy, handsome couple, held together by big groups of equally handsome friends. The photos of her parents dwindled after she was born and most of the remaining ones were taken by her mother, of Laurie and her father. Laurie knew that marriages fell apart and people ran out of things to say. But Laurie knew that in this particular situation, she and her dad were to blame. Her mother couldn’t stand the lessons and Laurie and her dad couldn’t stop them.

    In the seventh grade, after a lesson on what to do if a stranger grabbed you, Laurie heard them fight. Her dad finished showing her the elbow to the solar plexus, and her mother screamed at him in their bedroom upstairs.

    “It’s not normal! She’s so scared of the bleachers collapsing that she won’t go to basketball games!” Muted by the thickly insulated walls and wall-to-wall carpeting, Laurie could not hear his softer response.

    Laurie had been thinking, How would I survive if he stopped?

    The lessons continued, and by the time she entered eighth grade she could start a fire with two sticks, a magnifying glass, or a damp match. She could make snowshoes using the floor mats of a car and two safety belts. She could tie a tourniquet, make an inflatable dummy out of her own clothes, and with a toothpick she could remove a splinter or a bullet.

    Around the lessons, the seasons dragged by and the animosity between her parents grew larger until there seemed to be no oxygen in the house anymore. Her father must have felt breathless in the house, too, because he talked of moving to a bigger house in a roomier, more exclusive neighborhood.

    “I’m sick of being eyeballed by nosy neighbors all the time,” he complained.

    Laurie grew into a teenager with slouched shoulders and dirty blond hair. She made a few friends, and at the beginning of ninth grade, she had her first dry and disappointing kiss. Then she was tangled up in her own discarded clothes in the back of Chris Larson’s Suburban like a kitten caught in yarn.
    Laurie had waited for the lesson about sex to come but it never did. The only advice on sex and dating was what she received from her girlfriends.
    “Just don’t tease,” they warned. “Guys hate a tease.”

    When she turned fourteen, she got her learner’s permit. That winter, before she was allowed to drive a car unaccompanied, her dad took her out back and showed her how to dig a hole in a snowdrift for protection. He directed her to dig a hole the exact size to fit a freshman girl who was wearing a pink, puffy down coat and told her to climb in and pull her legs up to her chest.

    “If the cave opening is against the wind,” he counseled, his words muffled by the snow as if spoken through a pillow, “you can survive any snowstorm for a night.” He talked to her with his face poking into the small opening and Laurie could just make him out through her foggy, frozen breaths.
    “You know what to do if your car breaks down in the winter?” he asked.

    Laurie knew not to get out, no matter what. You turn the car heater on for little periods of time and conserve the gas and batteries, but you never leave the car. People who left their cars got disoriented and found themselves lost in great, seamless acres of snow.
    “You don’t get out,” she mumbled through frozen lips.

    “That’s right. This snow cave is a last resort, only if you have to get out. Like if your car has burst into flames,” he said.

    After the snow cave was finished, they went inside the warm house. As she unzipped her coat and took it off, she felt her father’s eyes on her. The heat of all the shoveling had made her sweat and her shirt was sticking to her chest. Laurie usually hid her breasts under large sweatshirts and bad posture so she wasn’t surprised that he was confused by the sight of them. She had suspected for a while that he had no lessons for this.

    For the next two years her father worked late and on the weekends. He barely spoke to Laurie, avoiding her eyes and asking polite questions about school. She asked polite questions back about the promotions and prizes he was winning as a result of his new focus at work.

    A month before her sixteenth birthday, he moved them into the dream house with all the room and lots of lawn to separate them from their neighbors. For her birthday, he gave her a cellular phone.

    “Just remember to keep it charged.” He was bashful with this final lesson, and he left that same day to move back to the Rhode Island coast where he had been born.

    Her mother broke the news to Laurie on the giant cedar deck that hovered like a space ship over their huge lawn.

    “Your father left, honey,” she said.

    It was a day so hot that it was hard to imagine any future at all, so Laurie didn’t ask if he was ever coming back. Below them the neighbor’s dog was panting in circles around his own tree-less yard.

    “You know how we can tell we really moved up in the world, Laurie?” her mother asked, looking down at the gray dog. “That dog is inside a cedar fence instead of chainlink. That’s the big goddamn difference.”

    “Did he say why he left?” Laurie asked.

    “He said his work here was done.” They waited for the dog to either go inside or just lie down to die in the brown grass. “You know that kid you told me has a Nazi quilt hanging up in the living room?”

    “Yeah.” Laurie had a quick flash of that kid, Randy, pushing her up against a washing machine with his hands as quick as two tumbling dragonflies to her zipper in the dark, the whole room smelling of Tide.

    “That was being raised by wolves,” her mom said. “That kid had it bad. It’s a hundred times worse to learn the wrong lessons than to learn no lessons at all.”

    That night she was at a party in a fancy house in the Tuthill development. There was a below-ground pool glowing in the dark and lightning flashed far off in the distance. There was a boy at the party that Laurie had liked for months. She had even written him a note and signed it, “Love and other indoor sports, Laurie.” But now he was in the pool with his shadowy hands under the water undoing some other girl’s wet bra.

    The thunderclaps came closer and the kids in the pool cheered at the sound of them. Laurie couldn’t get in the water with the lightning that close, so it was nothing personal about the boy she liked and the other girl. She stayed at the edge of the house, protected under a thin aluminum overhang, as the kids started pairing up and disappearing together into the dark corners of the pool.

    Laurie stayed by herself with her back against the house, her thin halter top no protection from the sprayed gravel on the wall, counting the space between the lightning and the thunder.

     

  • Artworks of He Qi

    If you’ve got some religion in you, but find the standard holiday depictions just a tad predictable (Mary in the blue robe, Mary taking orders from angels, Mary in the bathtub), check out Chinese painter He Qi’s cubist visions. China’s most popular Christian artist has a wild and playful style that is more hedonistic than holy. His off-balance, raw, emotive characters are straight out of Picasso, channeled through traditional Chinese folk art techniques, and infused with gorgeous, saturated color. It’s glorious stuff, even to non-Christian eyes—not least the idea of an Asian Christ. Cool! 141 S. Seventh St., Minneapolis; 612-338-4541; www.premiergallery.com

  • The Aamerican Presidency: A Glorious Burden

    Pondering presidents past may help some of us to blot out the current administration. The Smithsonian, that repository of weird keepsakes and relevant ephemera, has sent us this traveling exhibit of presidential history, comprising some 350 doodads and artifacts. Some are breathtaking (Jackie O.’s ball gown), some impressive (Lincoln’s inkwell, used to write the Emancipation Proclamation), and some intimate (Warren G. Harding’s red silk jammies); collectively, they add up to a fascinating, voyeuristic look into the personal behind the political. 345 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul; 651-296-6126; www.mnhs.org

  • The Twelve Months of Christmas

    In State Center, Iowa, a town of barely a thousand people that, in fact, occupies the state’s center, there’s a small white house whose owners deck the halls with an extravagance that verges on the fantastic. From the beginning of October to the week after New Year’s, the home of Dwayne and Janet Pundt (they like to be called “Old Man Pundt” and “Old Lady Pundt”) is a carnival of lights, choo-choos, and smiling, waving Santas. Passersby are sadly oblivious, however, because the Pundts, unlike their flashier neighbors, keep all the decorations inside their home. Standing on the front stoop, stomping away slivers of boot snow, visitors glimpse not a single light. The shades are drawn tight to prevent the leakage of even the tiniest twinkle or gleam.

    It’s an approach that both builds curiosity and maximizes impact, explains Old Lady Pundt, who’s standing in her kitchen, a mélange of Christmas melodies pinging away in the background. Keeping their sizeable yard empty and sign-free (tours are by invitation only) also serves to force people inside, where jocund smiles and a keg of beer awaits. “When you walk in, it’s instant Christmas! I like to see their eyes brighten.” She sees that look—of surprise, of wonder, of complete shock—a lot. Regular visitors include school kids, members of the ladies’ club, and gawkers from nearby towns. “One time, a gal wanted to bring a whole busload of people,” recalls Old Man Pundt. “That was a bit too much.” The Pundts’ own family of two kids, a handful of grandchildren, and one great-grandchild celebrates the holiday each year smack in the middle of this spinning, blinking wonderland.

    The effect is nearly impossible to describe. Every wall is covered with gauze and lights and hand-painted mountain peaks. Every surface is populated by angels and light-up miniature houses and reindeer. There are more than three hundred and fifty elves alone. Things move. Lights sparkle. Music plays. It’s like a carousel that has spun off its base.

    The project started modestly, twenty-five years ago, when the couple simply hung up some crepe paper. Now they’ve built a wing dedicated exclusively to Coca-Cola-related Christmas items. “We started looking at things in the stores,” says Old Lady Pundt. “We started building.” Her husband chimes in, “We bought a Santa Claus, a Danbury, a solid, not a porcelain. From there, every year we got something else and something else.” The wife interrupts (they talk like this, one after the other, back and forth, adding here and there, just as they decorate their home): “And we’d get stuff for Christmas from our kids. We don’t like clothes or anything. We like toys.” Most of it comes from Menards and Lowe’s, she says—“Anyplace that sells Christmas.”

    A visitor might wonder how the two, who are now reaching their seventies, manage to live in a fully transformed Christmas House three months out of the year with only a bed, a dining table, a couple of easy chairs, and a big-screen TV as remnants of a more routine, non-Christmas life. But for the Pundts, the season really begins in August, while it’s still hot and green outside. That’s when they start pulling down boxes and stringing lights. And because some of the Christmas trees are too giant to stash away, they sit year-round in various corners, wrapped in plastic. “It’s just ordinary to us,” says Old Lady Pundt. “It’s just common.” Adds the Mr., “Everybody, our friends who come, the big question is, when we go in the bedroom: ‘You sleep in here?’”

    Old Lady Pundt confesses that she was the driving force behind the emergence of the Christmas House. The couple met in high school, on a bus in Iowa Falls. They became sweethearts, married, and moved to State Center, where they owned a Jack & Jill grocery store for thirty-four years. “This started as a hobby to get us away from the store’s problems,” she says.

    “At the start, I was a humbug,” says Old Man Pundt.

    His wife explains. “After he got in to start helping me, then he got to be more Christmassy.”

    “I had to,” he adds.

    Old Man Pundt’s darling project, the thing that cemented his interest in the red and green, is an expansive light-up village, complete with gas stations, country stores, farms, and even a firehouse. The installation expresses his love of fire engines and also his passion for building things. With a MIDI version of “Jingle Bells” backing him up, he describes the town’s support structure. It is, he says, anchored by an old wooden buffet and a glass showcase. He reaches in, a little stiffly, to straighten a miniature streetlight, noting that burned-out bulbs drive him crazy. “We check all the light bulbs before we put them up,” he says. “We check them after. We go by layers. We start at the top and work our way down and we check as we go.”

    Both agree that Old Lady Pundt is the motivator in the family, while Old Man Pundt is the perfectionist, the detail man. As a team, they repair, restore, build, and create—those snow-capped mountains, palm trees for manger scenes, shelves and pedestals, night skies that can be put away whole, which is something to consider with so many elaborate displays. “She gets herself in trouble once in a while,” he says. To which she responds, “He thinks everything out. I suppose that’s good in a way. We don’t let things sit. We buy something and we fix it and we put it up or put it away. We don’t leave things goofy.”
    Old Lady Pundt breaks into a grin. “He couldn’t do it without me and I couldn’t do it without him.”

    “And I wouldn’t,” he says, with feigned exasperation.

    In the bedroom corner, next to the bathroom with the Christmas wallpaper and furry Santa toilet-seat cover, a truly unique facet of the Pundt style emerges. A lit-up nativity scene with tiny sheep and homemade palm trees sits on a table. Above it, as if in heaven, if heaven were a shelf, Santa and Mrs. Claus keep watch. Beneficently, they look down on Mother Mary, who mechanically swings the baby Jesus in her arms to the tune of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” which plays on an endless loop. “We try to make scenes out of things,” says Old Man Pundt, fiddling with an electric socket. His wife adds,

    “It would be boring if you just set them down. It just wouldn’t be pretty.”

    Her favorite items are a pair of moving statues that are dressed in white and hold candles. They are Father Christmas and the Ice Queen. “I have one hundred and fifty animateds,” she says. “I like them. But if they quit, I don’t care. They become stationaries, like this guy here.” Old Lady Pundt strokes the hair of an elegant, white-cloaked Santa. “He don’t move, he just lights up. He’s one of my newer pieces and I think he’s just beautiful.” Nor does the couple get startled at night, searching the darkness for a glass of water, by an army of animateds looming silently, eyes open. “We don’t leave it on all the time,” says Old Man Pundt. “We run it when people are here and then we shut it off.” Says the Mrs., “It’s just as pretty one way as the other.”

    At the Pundt house, Santas outnumber Jesuses by a wide margin. (“We’re not big religious people,” she says, “but I still believe.”) And Coke products outnumber those from Pepsi, which are relegated to a small basement display. This was installed after the couple’s grandson took a job with the company. The Coca-Cola room, as it has come to be known, is bedecked with a shiny black-and-white checkered floor, a five-foot-tall Santa and Mrs. Claus, antique gas pumps, a series of enormous Christmas trees, and a human-scale but non-functional soda fountain that Old Man Pundt built himself. “I always kind of collected Coca-Cola,” says Old Lady Pundt. “I’m a red person. I like bright things that give me a lift. I hate dark things that don’t give you a lift. But I always had my Coke stuff all boxed u
    p. And then we hired a contractor.”

    “Because we used to have a deck out here,” interjects Old Man Pundt.

    “I hated that deck,” says his wife.

    She also has no use for windows. The Coca-Cola room has just one, to suit fire codes. “It’s covered up over there,” she points. “The contractor said we needed it in case I had to jump out of it in a fire. I don’t need no windows. They just take up my space.”

    Because the house is brimming over, the Pundts are considering a Morton outbuilding for the yard, where they could arrange an additional display of gas-station memorabilia and also a whole new roomful of Christmas toys. “Collecting keeps your mind active,” says Old Lady Pundt. “You think of one thing and it gives you another idea and another idea and pretty soon you’re”—she makes the sound of a jet roaring off. “It’s a mission.” Christmas, she adds, is the ideal focus for a curious mind and a mirthful heart. “Christmas makes you all…it’s something inside you. You can’t explain it. It’s, I suppose, love. Love of people. It just makes you want to bubble all over.”

  • Reds, Blues and Others: Terry Gydesen and Diana Walker

    MCP’s latest exhibit is something of a tearjerker in a blue state like Minnesota. Terry Gydesen documents the glory that was the Democratic presidential campaigns, proving that black and white is just the medium to highlight crisp lines in the Johns’ expensive suits. Diana Walker, Time’s White House photographer for twenty years, captures candid moments with chief executives, from a Bush grandchild being dragged from Poppy’s office to Clinton popping French fries (oh, the days before heart surgery). Then there’s Gydesen’s shot of the Dean Scream, in all its delicious darkness. After all the hard work and heartache, let’s look back and laugh—even if it still hurts. 165 13th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-824-5500

  • Brand of Sky Blue Waters

    Growing up on the East Side of St. Paul in the sixties, I always took Hamm’s beer for granted. The giant brewery was simply part of the neighborhood scenery, little more than a dependable source of jobs—at least until the seventies, when it was sold and started succumbing to fickle consumer tastes and corporate mismanagement, entering what turned out to be a drawn-out death spiral.

    But to be honest, even though most of us Harding and Johnson High kids personally disliked the beer—it was watery and your friend’s dad drank it (not very cool)—we adored the Hamm’s Bear. This was, mind you, decades before Joe Camel was pilloried for his appeal to kids. We also reveled in the goodwill Hamm’s produced for our home state with its glorification of “the Land of Sky Blue Waters.”

    Until I visited John and Paula Parker, however, I didn’t realize just how much of a hold the bear, in his heyday, had on much of the rest of the country’s imagination. The Parker’s split-level home, located on Medicine Lake along a tree-lined suburban lane, doubles as a personal Hamm’s merchandise museum. When you walk in the front door, nothing much seems out of the ordinary. The Parkers, North Dakota natives whose children have left the nest, look like a hard-working, successful couple. They exude Midwestern levelheadedness. But then they lead you down to their family room, which is filled to the rafters with blinking, buzzing, twinkling, glowing Hamm’s Beer bar signs, no two alike, of the kind that decorated nearly every tavern in Minnesota from Roseau to Rochester in the postwar years. Display cases are crammed with collectibles: steins, mugs, bottle openers, pens, pencils, beer bottles, lighters, ceramic bear sculptures, all with the Hamm’s imprint.

    The Parkers have collected some four thousand Hamm’s items. They are among the most prominent collectors of Hamm’s artifacts in the world. They have at their fingertips Hamm’s magazine ads and bar signs from the West Coast featuring Latina bathing beauties; from the East Coast picturing black folks refreshing themselves with the St. Paul brew; and from Chicago, where the bear is forever associated with Jack Brickhouse, WGN-TV, and the Cubs-White Sox rivalry.

    It came as a bit of a shock to a Minnesota-centric hick like me to realize that Hamm’s wasn’t all about us. In fact, by 1960, the Hamm’s Bear ad campaign was in full swing in about thirty markets nationwide. The Parkers say it’s probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that the lovable bear and his animal buddies did more to cement Minnesota’s image nationally than all the dollars spent by state tourism agencies ever since.

    “The only cartoon animals that were bigger than the Hamm’s Bear were the Disney characters,” said John Parker. “Actually, the bear almost comes across as a Disney critter. When you look at people like us who collect Hamm’s memorabilia, it’s not because we like Hamm’s beer, or even like beer at all. It’s because we love the bear and what he represents to us. He’s like a member of the family. You never actually see a beer in his paw in any of the ads.”

    Paula Parker said her husband’s obsession, and by extension hers, comes from the same part of his mind that led him to study accounting in college. “The desires to complete a checklist, to methodically sort items and arrange them in a proper order, and the competitive urge to stay on top of an ever-changing set of circumstances—they are all related to collecting. John is a born collector, but I was the original Hamm’s fan,” she said. “I sort of steered him into that area.”

    The Parkers began their collection in 1992. They hesitate to put a dollar value on it, though John Parker said that promotional items made of cardboard and plastic are among the most sought-after types of Hamm’s collectibles. For instance, molded plastic liquor-store wall displays from the late fifties can go for one thousand dollars apiece. So can cardboard cutouts of the bear and his friends used as in-store displays, which are rare because most were thrown away. The most popular items are the “scene-a-ramas,” the scrolling or shimmering bar signs that even many non-collectors are familiar with. Even though they’re not rare, they also go for a thousand apiece because there’s so much demand.

    The Parkers have been so successful in tracking down items from the classic Hamm’s Bear campaigns of the fifties and sixties that they have lately started to specialize in items from the prewar and pre-Prohibition eras, well before the bear took his first animated tumble off the log and into the lake. “Probably my prize possession right now is a big lithograph of the Hamm’s factory, the kind they used to hang on the walls of taverns that were owned by the brewery,” John Parker said. “Once you reach a certain level in collecting Hamm’s stuff, it becomes more challenging to go after the pre-bear pieces.”

    The desire to reach further back into Hamm’s history is understandable for the high-level fanatics like the Parkers, but for the rest of us, fond memories are directly linked to the bear, who made his first TV appearance in 1953. Hamm’s television ads were true groundbreakers, and showed what a truly high-powered marketing machine the brewery had in Campbell-Mithun, the local agency that rode the bear into wildly successful national prominence. Campbell-Mithun and Hamm’s had just settled on “From the Land of Sky Blue Waters” as the theme of their campaign to introduce the rest of the country to Minnesota’s favorite beer (although Grain Belt fans will argue the point). It was a bold effort to bust Hamm’s out of the regional brewing ranks to join what were then just a few truly national brands, among them Budweiser, Pabst, Schlitz, Ballantine, and Falstaff.

    According to beer historian Carl H. Miller, author of Breweries of Cleveland, the Hamm’s campaign was so successful because it came at a time when consumers thought all beers were made the same and tasted pretty much the same. It worked, he maintains, because it drove home the concept that Hamm’s was brewed in a place where the water was fresher and cleaner, the Northwoods. The Hamm’s ads were also the first to use an animated “spokesperson” for a beer. Up until then, the only beer-ad icon was Mabel, a blonde bartender who rarely spoke while she pushed Carling’s Black Label. At about the same time as the Hamm’s Bear, the comedy team of Bob and Ray were doing the voices of Bert and Harry, the spokes-characters for New York’s Piel’s Beer—a campaign that got critical praise but had little effect on sales. Budweiser’s famous Clydesdale horses and Miller Lite’s “Tastes Great/Less Filling” campaign were still at least a decade down the road.

    By the late fifties, it was apparent the campaign was a success. Hamm’s entered the Chicago market just as a brewery strike in Milwaukee made Wisconsin beers unavailable; it also displayed great timing by picking up the sponsorship of the Cubs and White Sox broadcasts on WGN. The brewery went on to become one of the first companies to create a national pro- and college-sports branding campaign, and by 1964 claimed to be the biggest TV and radio sports beer sponsor in the country, according to Moira F. Harris’ The Paws of Refreshment: The Story of Hamm’s Beer Advertising. Hamm’s ran its bear ads in support not only of the Twins, the Vikings, and the Chicago teams, but also the Kansas City A’s, San Francisco Giants and 49ers, Los Angeles Rams, Houston Oilers, Baltimore Orioles, Green Bay Packers, and Dallas Cowboys.

    That year, with the sale of 3.8 million barrels of beer, Hamm’s had risen to become the nation’s eighth largest brewery, with expansion breweries in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, and Baltimore. Sales would peak in 1968 at 4.3 million barrels. The ad campaigns made liberal use of images of pristine Northern Minnesota lakes and streams (powerfully putting across the idea of clean, crisp water), sandwiched between animated bear storylines. The spots became so popular they actually vied with some legitimate TV programs; in the mid-1960s, for instance, Twin Cities newspapers ran schedules showing when the ads would air.

    The commercials were clever and had real entertainment value. Each was a miniature story that began with twenty seconds of animation. In one spot, the Bear is a hockey goalie on a frozen woodland pond. Other cartoon critters are taking slapshots at him, and he’s making great saves. Then comes the hard sell: twenty seconds of filmed shots of the beer, with a voice-over extolling the many virtues of Hamm’s. Finally, the payoff: The last twenty seconds go back to the animation. The Bear gets overconfident, takes a puck in the mouth, and tumbles backward into the net for a goal.

    Along with the first-rate animation and charming storylines came the unforgettable “tom-tom” musical theme. While adults bought the beer, their kids dug the tune, said Dick Wilson, a former Campbell-Mithun staffer who produced the music for the classic bear commercials. “I had little kids at that time, and when the Hamm’s Bear came on, they’d all stop whatever they were doing and look at the TV,” he said. “It was those drums that really bore into your mind. I don’t think people realized how much of a part they played. It was like the beat of your heart.”

    According to The Paws of Refreshment, Ray Mithun had the idea to add the tom-toms to the jingle’s still-developing musical mix after being impressed by voodoo music he heard while visiting Haiti. In other words, the Hamm’s music was tapping into a similar vein as early rock ’n’ roll—a dangerous, African beat filtered through a safe white medium (the bear always scored off the charts on the ad industry’s “likeability” measure) that hooked young baby boomers. Even though they were silly, the commercials were well written. They were smarter and funnier than most “real” cartoons at the time.

    “The animation was always cute,” Wilson says, crediting the work of artist Pete Bastiensen. “He was like a child himself and knew instinctively what would work. There weren’t any commercials like that back then. When I would give lectures about ads, I’d talk about how important it was to have uniqueness, and Hamm’s had that in spades.”

    The nostalgia that spurs Hamm’s memorabilia collectors like the Parkers is the same thing that leads other people to agitate for an outdoor stadium for the Minnesota Twins. Hamm’s ads were so much a part of the baseball experience at old Metropolitan Stadium that they are forever linked to the Twins of Harmon Killebrew and Bob Allison, said Kirk Schnitker, a Minneapolis attorney who heads the local Hamm’s Club, the beer’s official fan organization.

    “Seeing the Hamm’s Bear never fails to make you think back to the old days when we kids had those great moments at the Twins games,” he said. “It also makes you remember another great Minnesota tradition: going up north. When we went up to the cabin we’d see those ‘Land of Sky Blue Waters’ signs at the taverns and at the resorts. They were everywhere. Their marketing effort was so huge.”

    Despite all the talk of the how the bear was so lovable and universally adored, there remained the fact that he was selling beer. In that respect, some present-day critics regard him as a predecessor to the loathsome Joe Camel—a merchant of death hooking children via animation and cartoons. This critique has created obstacles for Schnitker and the Hamm’s Club, who are trying to get a granite monument to the Hamm’s Bear erected in downtown St. Paul; Schnitker chalks up their battle to “political correctness.” Last year, their effort to put the bear statue in Como Park was shot down by the St. Paul City Council, with Council Member Jay Benanav comparing the Hamm’s Bear to the Marlboro Man and colleague Chris Coleman labeling the character “schmaltz art.”

    That charge rings hollow to Schnitker, who sees a city littered with fiberglass depictions of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, characters that, while undeniably a pop phenomenon, were created by someone who left St. Paul at an early age. They have never meant as much to the city’s history and development as did Hamm’s, an institution that literally helped build the East Side. Schnitker says he’s made headway this past year in convincing the city to reconsider, and now counts St. Paul Parks and Recreation Director Bob Bierscheid among his key allies.

    “We’re close to getting the OK for the statue to be erected on the Seventh Street Mall, just outside the Hamm Building on Cedar Street,” he said. “What the politically correct people need to realize is the huge impact Hamm’s had on the city and on a generation. It provided jobs, and the Hamm family is still active in giving back to the community through their charitable foundation.”

    “I’m admittedly part of that generation, and the Hamm’s Bear did have an impact on me. I always liked him, but as a kid I never really stopped to wonder why. Looking back, what I most closely associate with him is the memory of my late grandparents, and of spending lazy summer days at their lake cabin in Isanti County with Twins games—and Hamm’s commercials—playing in the background on their little black-and-white television set. That’s pretty darn Minnesota. But it was having the same effect elsewhere, too, according to Bonnie Drewniany, a journalism professor at the University of South Carolina and an expert on the history of American advertising icons. She says there’s a strong connection between the Hamm’s Bear and family.

    “I think the Hamm’s Bear is a wonderful example of how an advertising trade character can become like an old friend or a beloved relative,” Drewniany said. “I have a collection of advertising trade characters in my office, and one of them is a Hamm’s decanter from 1973 sitting proudly on my top shelf. While most of my students don’t recognize the bear, I occasionally have a colleague or parent who beams with excitement when they see him on my shelf. The fact that the Hamm’s Bear continues to bring joy to people speaks volumes about his importance as an advertising icon.”