DECEMBER 8, 2020 – For today’s post I’d composed another anti-Trump rant but then stumbled across something far more interesting: a fireplace stone.
Yesterday evening I was reading my father’s book, My “Auto” Biography. To write about his life, he used the clever vehicle (as it were) of family automobile ownership. When I say “book,” I mean 132 pages, double-sided, that he’d hammered out on a home typewriter, then copied, along with a raft of old photos, and assembled in a three-ring binder. Each of my sisters and I received a copy. Dad had talked a lot about it during the project, and told many of the stories he intended to incorporate. Perhaps for that reason, I never got around to reading his “Auto” Biography until now. That’s a lame and disturbing excuse: what can I expect our sons to do with my collective [self]biography—thousands of pages of journals in cursive script they won’t be able to decipher?
As it turns out, Dad’s writing takes the reader on a fascinating journey through American life from the late 1920s into the 21st century. I’m learning amazing and amusing personal stories in the course of the ride. In the midst of these I made a particularly notable discovery.
In July 1940, we are told, construction of the cabin on Grindstone Lake (WI) was in full swing. Underway at the same time was the demolition of the grand old Industrial Exposition Building, built of stone and in just three months in 1886; site of the 1892 Republican National Convention and for a time the tallest building in Minneapolis. Any student of Minneapolis architectural history is acquainted with that enormous and historical structure and joins the large chorus of plaintive sighs over the building’s demise.
Dad had turned 18 the previous May, and a short while later, my grandfather had bought him a used Model A Ford. Very early one Saturday in July, Dad drove the Model A down to the site of the demolition site. He picked over the ruins and pulled out a large stone; carried it to the car, and hauled it away.
“I thought it would be interesting,” wrote Dad, “to have a stone from that old building incorporated into the fireplace at the cabin.” (How many 18-year-olds would have such a notion—and the initiative to carry it out?)
Dad drove the Exposition Building stone up to the cabin construction site and presented it to Carl Hanson, the cabin builder and a master stone mason (see 9/5/20 Blog post). “When I got the stone to the cabin,” Dad continued wryly, “Carl Hanson cut it in half and set the two pieces at the outside corners at the bottom of the inside face of the fireplace, where they have been ever since.”
Reading this jogged my memory—Dad had once mentioned the provenance of those base stones, but had I not stumbled over them in his “Auto” Biography, I’d have long forgotten that in the old family cabin is a piece of the old(er) Exposition Building.
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
