JULY 29, 2023 – Several years passed, and one Saturday afternoon in June 1961, while I was playing out in our spacious, oak-shaded yard, the newest, largest moving van in the fleet of Geo. B. Holman & Co., Inc., “agents for United Van Lines[1]” came growling down our quiet, sleepy street in Anoka, Minnesota and pulled up in front of our house. The rig could just as well have been a B-52. Mother and Dad came out of the house in rather a hurry, and others gathered around too, including at least one of my older sisters and a few neighbors. We could see a man way up in the cab, but not for long. He popped open his door, jumped down and strode around the front of the cab to greet Mother and Dad. A stocky man, the driver had bowed legs and close-cropped hair.
“Pete!” cried Mother. “So good to see you! Did you have any trouble finding us?”
“Nah,” he said. His voice sounded like a semi when the driver gives it a little extra gas. “Why would I have trouble finding your place? You forget, Sis, that ol’ Pete here has been drivin’ a rig for Griz all over this country for 35 years.”
“It’s been that long?”
“Just about. So who’s this good lookin’ guy?” Pete extended his hand to Dad.
“Hi, Pete,” said Dad. “Good to see you.”
“You too Ray. Gee, mighty fine place you got here.”
“Kids, come meet Pete,” Mother said, encouraging us to step closer to meet this man with a raspy voice, this man about whom I had heard a lot over the past few days. Just below the side window of his truck, I could read “Pete” in white lettering against the dark tan background color. Pete Christiana turned out to be his full name, except I don’t think I knew the “Christiana” part until many years later. In the meantime, Pete was just plain “Pete,” and he was about as loyal an employee as ever there could be. Over the years, I would hear just how much Pete worshipped Grandpa, and likewise, what high regard Grandpa—and Gaga, Uncle Bruce, and Mother (and Dad by extension)—had for Pete. He was so trusted by Gaga and Grandpa, that one of his duties early in his career, which would have been in the late 1920’s, had been to escort Mother to nursery school.
“Eric, say hello to Pete,” said Mother, gesturing for me to go first. However gruff his voice and confident his gestures, his eyes told me that this was a kind, sincere man. He patted me on the head, and I felt as if I’d been touched by somebody famous. When he greeted my sisters, I turned my attention to what had become the center of attention for the neighborhood: Pete’s truck. It sported the newly adopted logo and color scheme of United Van Lines, and I noticed that on the front was the word “Mack[2]“ under the maker’s logo—a bulldog. The truck looked like it meant business. I noticed that it was longer than our house, not counting the cab, and then I wondered how in the world you got yourself all the way up into that cab.
Just then, Pete’s voice shouted above the hubbub. “Who wants to go for a ride?” I thought he was kidding, but then he opened the passenger door and showed one of my sisters—I think it was Elsa—and me how to grip a handle, get a toehold, and pull ourselves up into the cab. I had never been inside such a truck or anything close to it. The steering wheel was huge and almost level, and when I looked out the window, I could see over the top of Dad’s head and way over Mother’s. In the middle, between the two seats, was a long gear stick with a large, black knob on the end. Up above, behind us, was a camping spot, it seemed. A kind of tent, almost, where, I assumed, a person could sleep. In the corner of the cab, on the driver’s side, was a small fan. I had never seen such a small fan, and I was curious how much of a wind it made.
Pete told me to climb up on the ledge just behind the gear stick, and told my sister that she could have the passenger seat. We scrambled into position, ready for the ride of our lives. Pete fired up the engine of the mighty Mack and then, to the utter delight of every kid watching outside, he gave the horn a healthy blast. He pushed the gearshift forward, and gave the machine some gas. We pulled away from the curb as the engine harrumphed, and the resulting lurch forward set us bouncing. I remember the exact route Pete took—down Rice Street to Levee, then a block to Benton Street, down Benton to Green Avenue, up Green to Park, Park to Levee and Levee back down to Rice. It was quite an operation, all the shifting and pushing on pedals, engine harrumphing, cab bouncing, as Pete navigated through our neighborhood. I had experienced nothing like it, and the short ride around a few blocks was not nearly enough.
“I’ve never had so much fun, Pete,” I said, overcome by excitement.
* * *
And so it was arranged. I would ride with Pete in his truck all the way back to New Jersey for a visit with Gaga, Grandpa, and Uncle Bruce. Doubtless there was much more to the process than my simply climbing aboard. Phone calls between Minnesota and New Jersey, conversations with Pete, and so on, but a kid going on seven and filled with excitement doesn’t worry about such things. He simply climbs aboard.
I remember well the send-off. It occurred three days after Pete’s triumphal visit to Anoka. Mother drove me down to a United Van Lines agent in Minneapolis, where Pete had left a load. It was an unceremonious farewell, except that as Mother handed Pete my suitcase, she had to go mention that on unpredictable occasions, I was still known to WET THE BED. I didn’t know any swear words at that stage of my life, but I remember a mental reaction that could have been accurately translated as “Oh shit.”
Pete took the wet-the-bed revelation in stride. He didn’t flinch, or at least I didn’t see any adverse reaction on his part. As I ponder this now, I suppose he was thinking, Not in my cab he won’t, or . . . I won’t let him drink a single drop of water for three days, or more likely . . . What the hell?! But what’s ol’ Pete gonna say to the boss’s daughter? Nothin’, that’s what. Pete’s not gonna say nothin’.
In any event, I climbed up into the cab on the passenger’s side, and Pete hopped up onto the driver’s seat. He brought the surly engine to life as I rolled down the window and waved to Mother below. She looked so small standing there, waving back, smiling, as she shaded her eyes from the late afternoon sun.
* * *
A full 20 years later, after considerable plotting on my part, I would leave on a much longer trip, one that would take me away from home for nearly a year, and to remote, exotic, and potentially dangerous regions of the world. (See blog posts beginning late January 2022 for a chronicle of that journey). That odyssey began after I’d been living at 42 Lincoln and working for Grandpa’s business for five months. My stint in Rutherford had led to great disillusionment, and when I left New Jersey for Minnesota to make final preparations for my grand trek around the world, I was filled with angst and bitterness. To a large extent, I was running away from myself and my inheritance, as it were, as much as I was running from New Jersey. By the time I was ready to leave home for New Zealand, my first destination, Mother was back in New Jersey, giving Uncle Bruce some relief from caring for Gaga and Grandpa, but mostly Gaga.
“Hi Mom,” I said when Gaga handed over the phone to Mother on the eve of my departure for the other side of the world.
“Hi, Eric. Are you all packed?”
“Yeah. I’ve got everything ready for the flight tomorrow.”
“Well, be careful, now. Don’t do anything foolish, and be sure to write to us.”
“Sure, Mom.”
“Will you ever be able to call us?”
“I’ll try.”
“Say . . . “
“What, Mom?”
“I’ll have you in my prayers, you know that.”
“Yes, Mom. Thanks.”
“I love you, Eric.”
“Love you too, Mom[3].”
“Okay, well good-bye and good luck.”
It took yet another 20 years for Mother to tell me what she had really been thinking back then, namely, that she would probably never see me again. She said it off-handedly, but with kids of my own, I now know full well what anguish I must have caused her in the course of pursuing my dream of solo travel around the world. But in a way, she had encouraged it when she orchestrated my trip with Pete in his Mack truck hauling a United Van Lines moving van all the way from Minnesota to New Jersey.
* * *
A half hour east of St. Paul, Pete and I entered the countryside of western Wisconsin. The sun was reclining and cast a gold light across the lush, undulating farm fields along our route. I marveled at the storybook-like scenery, and realized that I was then and there, probably the luckiest kid alive. For the next four days, I never tired of looking out the window. I never tired of Pete or of the incessant churning of the engine under our seats. I never tired of seeing in the mirror outside my window, the United Van Lines logo on the outside of the front of the van and at night, the yellow running lights on the front of the van.
The next morning, we stopped in a suburb of Milwaukee to move a family that was heading for New Jersey. I say “we,” but I mean Pete, along with hired help from a local United Van Lines agent. I watched. Pete called the shots, and I was impressed by how hard he worked, how confident he was in his orders to the hired help, and how he seemed to know every angle of the job, from packing things into special boxes that had been stored in the van, to maneuvering a refrigerator through the front doorway, to assembling boxes and furniture into the van in such tight fashion, not even a bug could find any breathing room.
* * *
Fourteen years later, when Grandpa was 80 and Pete was I don’t know how old, but close to 80 and I was working for the company after my junior year of college, Grandpa and I drove over to Teaneck to visit Pete. Grandpa was a long way from retirement, but Pete had retired many years before. I remember Grandpa looking for the street where Pete lived in a modest house. One of the cross-streets was “Mozart,” which Grandpa said aloud, pronouncing the “z” as a regular English “z” instead of the proper German “tz.” I couldn’t help but contemplate the irony that this Grandpa, who had gotten an Ivy League education, had become a captain of industry, and was worth a fortune, hadn’t a clue about how to pronounce the last name of Wolfgang Amadeus, and the other grandpa, who had led a hardscrabble childhood, never gotten a formal education, had become a professional violinist, was a season ticket holder to symphony concerts and knew full well how to pronounce “Mozart” properly, not to mention “Dvorak,” “Chopin,” and “Saint-Saëns.”
Pete greeted us at the door. He had aged considerably since I had last seen him, probably on our trip to New Jersey the summer of 1964, and with severely bowed knees, he hobbled around much in the way Gaga did when she wasn’t in her wheel chair or using her walker. We had a nice visit, mostly small talk, and Pete asked about Gaga and the rest of the family, and Grandpa returned the gesture by asking about Pete’s family, a son and a daughter, I think.
Ironically, as the reader will later understand, it was Mother who, more than thirty years after that visit with Pete, would inform me that Pete’s wife had been in a “mental institution” for nearly as long has Pete had worked for Grandpa.
It was a hot muggy day, and Pete offered us some iced tea and made more light conversation, but eventually, we ran out of things to say. It was at that point when Pete looked at Grandpa, then looked at me, and nodding toward Grandpa, said, “Yeah, right here is the best boss a guy could ever have.” Grandpa let out a self-conscious half-chuckle. I figured that a compliment like that made up for a hundred reprimands from Gaga that Grandpa seemed to get for one thing or another when he wasn’t in control, which was pretty much whenever he was in the same room as Gaga.
On the way back to Rutherford, Grandpa reminisced about Pete. “You only had to tell Pete once how to do something, and then he got it down. He was the best driver, the best mover we had.”
“He sure was good to me on that trip I took with him out here,” I said, reflecting on that road trip aboard the Mack truck with the moving van in tow.
Grandpa let out a closed-lip chuckle in rare acknowledgment of something I’d said. “He knew how to take care of things too,” he continued, “and he set a good example for the other drivers. I could always count on him doing things right.”
I wondered if he had ever told these things to Pete directly, just as I wondered whether Pete had ever told Grandpa directly before that afternoon, that Grandpa was “the best boss in the world.”[4]
That was the last time I saw Pete, but it wasn’t the last time for Grandpa. Mother told me that more than a decade later, when Grandpa was ailing, an abiding sense of loyalty prompted Pete to come visit Grandpa.
* * *
But that was all in the future. Back in that suburb of Milwaukee, the family “we” were moving had a boy and a girl a few years older than I. They were nice kids but rather quiet. At lunchtime, we ate baloney sandwiches together out on the front lawn. By that time, Pete was no longer wearing his dark green shirt, which matched his work pants. He was down to his sleeveless undershirt, and nearly every time he went back into the house to carry something out, he was wiping his brow with his industrial size handkerchief.
The day following the Milwaukee move, “we” moved a family from a suburb of Chicago. The dad told us that he had been transferred to a job in New Jersey. They had three boys, each older than I by a few years, and they exhibited boundless energy and were heavily into sports, as I could tell from all the basketballs, football equipment, and baseball bats and gloves, that were spilling out of the garage. The boys were also very friendly toward me and not just a little curious about how it was that I was riding with “that guy” on a great big moving van. At first, they didn’t quite get it.
“So, what are you doing riding on that truck?” the oldest asked.
“I’m going to New Jersey to visit my grandparents.”
“Huh?” asked the oldest. “You mean that guy there,” he said, nodding in Pete’s direction, is your grandpa?”
“No,” I said. “That guy works for my grandpa. He works for my grandpa’s company, and the company is in New Jersey.”
“Wow!” said the kid. “You mean your grandpa owns the whole company?”
“Yeah.”
“He owns the whole company?” asked one of the other brothers. “He must be rich!”
“Uh huh,” I said, feeling at once proud and just a little self-conscious.
“Hey, want to play football?” asked the oldest kid.
I didn’t know the first thing about football, since no one in my family was into sports, though as I would learn over the years, left to her own devices, Mother was very into sports. Getting me to play peewee baseball was the one time when I saw Mother stand up to Dad. I mean really stand up to him—and win.[5]
I could see, however, that these kids of the family we were moving needed me so that there could be teams—two kids on each side. Reluctantly, I agreed. “What are the rules?” I asked.
The brothers looked at me as if I had come from another planet, and I suppose, in a sense, I had. “It’s gonna be me and him on one side,” said the oldest brother, pointing at his youngest brother, “and you and him on the other. Our goal is that tree at the end of the driveway, and yours is the birdbath up by the house.”
“Okay,” I said, still wondering what the rest of the rules were but being too embarrassed to inquire further. I soon figured out the two main rules: 1. You hang onto the ball as tight as you can and run toward your goal as fast as you can. 2. If you follow the first rule but aren’t fast enough, you’ll get squished. When the kid on my team told me that I was going to “carry” while he “blocked,” I had no idea what force would come down on me from the other side. Soon I was spitting grass while a brother on the opposing team lay sprawled on top of me, depriving me of oxygen. Just then, I heard Pete’s voice.
“Hey! Off the kid!” he yelled, running over to us. “You stay off the kid, you hear?”
“Okay, okay,” the offending tackler said. “We were just playing football.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want the kid getting hurt, you hear?”
I was proud of Pete for having come to my defense and thankful that he had rescued me from any further humiliation in playing a game I didn’t understand. But I also felt bad for the kids, since I knew that they were good kids and had meant no harm, and Pete’s reprimand had worked as a splash of cold water on their good nature and perfectly legitimate fun. In retrospect, I can imagine that Pete had been too busy to distinguish an over-exuberant football tackle from a malicious fight with a bully, and that he had every reason to worry about answering to his boss for the welfare of the boss’s grandson.
That very evening, however, I would give Pete a far bigger scare.
It was around 8:00 when we stopped at a truck stop somewhere along the turnpike in Indiana. Pete and I saddled up to the counter amidst a crowd of other over-the-road truckers, several of whom gave us passing looks and friendly nods. With his chin, Pete himself gestured in acknowledgment, and following his lead, I gave a little wave. Soon I was devouring what would be my standard fare on the trip: a hamburger, French fries, and a chocolate malt. After dinner, we climbed back into the cab, and Pete piloted the rig over to the gas pumps. He got out of the truck to give it an inspection before we hit the open road again, but I was feeling sleepy, so I climbed up into the “tent” behind the seats and soon dozed off.
The next thing I knew, the truck was moving slowly across a different part of the broad staging area outside the truck stop. Strangely, it was also much darker out. Pete parked the truck and hopped out. Curious as to just what was going on, I slid down from the sleeper and climbed down out of the cab myself to see where Pete had gone. I walked toward the back of the van, rounded the corner and bumped right into Pete.
“J-e-e-miny Crick-et,” Pete shouted. “Where the . . . what the . . . my God I thought I’d lost ya,” he said.
“I was sleeping,” I said, a little worried that I had gotten myself into trouble with Pete.
“Holy Christmas,” Pete said. “I was driving down the highway for I don’t know how long and looked over and you weren’t there, and I thought I’d left you behind at the truck stop somehow, so I turned around and drove all the way back. Holy Mother of Jesus, but I was worried I’d lost ya. It’s a good thing I didn’t isn’t it?”
“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. The fact that Pete was relieved, not angry heightened even more my respect for him.
“It’s okay. I found ya. Get back into the cab—we gotta get movin.’”
I climbed back into my seat, and as we drove out of the truck stop, another big rig was pulling in, and its headlights revealed beads of sweat across Pete’s forehead. I watched him reach up and turn on the little fan mounted in his corner of the cab. I had been wondering if he would ever use it. I guessed that it was for emergencies like the one we’d just been through.
It was very late that night when Pete pulled into the lot of a motel right off the turnpike. I wondered why we were staying at a motel when Pete’s truck had ample sleeping room (I figured that given the trouble I’d caused, only Pete would get to use the sleeping compartment, while I was perfectly capable of dozing in my seat). It also occurred to me that I ran the risk of wetting the bed and embarrassing myself something awful. I remember the room—two big beds and a large TV set. Pete told me to brush my teeth but not swallow any water and then go straight to bed. The going to bed part wasn’t a problem, since I was plenty tired. I assumed that he was too, so it surprised me when he turned the TV on, low, and then sat on his bed and watched a western. I was very curious about it, and I turned over on my side and positioned the pillow in a way that allowed me to watch too, without Pete noticing that my eyes were open. But I don’t remember how the western ended. I must have fallen asleep long before the bad guys were caught. I was greatly relieved the next morning when I woke up to a totally dry bed.
After learning thoroughly over the next couple of days the names and order of the states that separated Minnesota from New Jersey, I was quite ready to try something other than a hamburger, French fries, and a chocolate malt and to see Gaga, Grandpa, and Uncle Bruce. It was a Saturday morning awhile after an early breakfast stop, when Pete pulled the rig up to yet another truck stop. “We’re gonna call your grandpa,” Pete said.
Together, we walked inside, where I watched Pete feed coins into the payphone and dial up 42 Lincoln. “This is Pete,” he said, injecting his words forcefully into the phone. “Yeah, we’re just a couple of hours from the end of the road.” He listened for a moment. “What’s that? Yeah, he’s been a good boy. Likes hamburgers, French fries, and chocolate malts,” said Pete, as he winked at me. “Well fed, yes. Here he is,” said Pete. He handed the phone down to me.
“Hello?” I said.
“We’ll be seeng you sn, I guess.” It was Grandpa.
“Yeah.”
“Your grndmther is waitng,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
Before long, Pete was turning the moving van into the driveway at home base. The long journey was over, but it confirmed what I had already sensed before the trip: I was born to travel.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] In the early 1930s, Grandpa and several others nationally prominent in the moving and storage industry formed Allied Van Lines. As best as I could later understand Allied was initially intended to be an umbrella entity under which individual corporate agents would be allowed considerable latitude. By the early 1940s, however, this turned out to be a minority view—retained by Grandpa and some of his fellow original organizers. In 1946, they picked up their marbles and formed a competing entity: United Van Lines. For many years Grandpa served on the board of directors and was corporate secretary. Fenton, MO—at the geographic center of the country—was selected for the location of corporate headquarters. Grandpa retained his desired independence as a major United Van Lines agent operating as Geo. B. Holman & Co., Inc., which had multiple facilities in New Jersey and Florida. He made frequent trips to Fenton, MO but always by air—never by truck, a Mack or otherwise.
[2] Twenty years later, in the course of one of his interminable monologues during a car ride, Grandpa told me that he had known the Mack brothers, John (“Jack), Augustus, and William, who, like Grandpa, were pioneers of the American trucking industry.
[3] I’m not sure just when I started calling Mother “Mother,” instead of “Mom.” I think I simply followed the lead of my sisters, whose more adult-like reference to her matured ahead of mine.
[4] At the time of our visit, during the summer before my senior year of college, I was quite smitten by theoretical laissez-faire capitalism, and I thought that this happy reunion between the Grandpa, the embodiment of “capitalism,” and Pete, the personification of “labor,” was fine evidence of the correctness of my political-economic theory, and would serve as an excellent example for late-night bull sessions with my leftist-socialist friends back at Bowdoin, as to how, in a perfect world, capital and labor could, in fact, co-exist just fine, even quite amicably. With perspective acquired by experience, however, I tempered my views. If Grandpa was a captain of American industry and a “capitalist” in every practical sense, he was not an ideologue by any stretch of the word. He probably considered himself no more a “capitalist” than Pete drove around thinking of himself as a member of the “proletariat.” Neither man viewed the world in such terms. One owned the truck that the other one drove, which made good money for the owner, who paid the driver fairly. The one depended on the other and vice versa, and most important, both were decent men about it. It was that simple.
[5] It was all very much against my wishes. Mother argued that I needed to play sports and be “part of a team.” But I was not a “team player” and had no family example for playing sports, per se. I would much rather have pedaled around on my bike, hung out by the river, and be left to day-dream, which I was very wont to do as a kid, pretending I was some figure in history, usually in the history of exploration and discovery. When Mother persisted on the day of summer pee-wee registration, Dad sided with me. “Why can’t you just let him do what he wants?” he said angrily. “He doesn’t want to play baseball, so don’t force him.” Yet Mother prevailed. On his way back to work from his lunch break, which uncharacteristically he’d taken at home, Dad dropped me off at the local park occupied by a crowd of pee-wees. I appeared feeling very conspicuous and self-conscious, since by that time, I was very late for the sign-up and the other kids were already practicing out in the field. I must note, however, that eventually I learned to love baseball and became quite a rabid fan, and insisted that Dad play catch with me every evening after he came home from work. One evening when Dad had a meeting to attend, Mother offered to play catch and amazed me with her zest and skill at catching and throwing the ball. As was the case with all of her endeavors, she was a team-player without ever sacrificing her individuality.
