JUNE 5, 2023 – One of my earliest memories of Mother was the day when Mrs. Donaldson and another woman stopped in. I was too young to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle that arose from the commotion and very lively conversation, as they sat in our living room, bathed in sunlight, and sipped hot liquid from china cups. I remember hearing a lot of “Panama,” but I had no idea what any of it involved, except, apparently, unbearable heat. Much later I learned that the woman accompanying Mrs. Donaldson had been her daughter, who was visiting from the Canal Zone, where she then resided.
“Mrs. Donaldson,” as my parents called her, always dressed in black and drove an old, shiny, black car with a large visor shading the top of the windshield. She looked pretty old but still very much in command of her game (which happened to be real estate), and I always liked the authority with which she guided her heavy, old car down the street past our house. Her gloved hands on the wheel reminded me of well-trained squirrels serving as posted look-outs. What I admired most about Mrs. Donaldson, though, was her nice, neat, trim house, to which I had assigned within my thoughts, the “Most Perfect House on Our Street Award.” I figured she must be perfect too.
But there was something truly extraordinary about the fact that Mrs. Donaldson and my family happened to live on the same peaceful, quarter-mile street.
A decade and an epoch before and 1,200 miles away, Mother and Mrs. Donaldson’s son, Bob, had worked together as aeronautical engineers at the Curtiss-Wright facility in Caldwell, New Jersey, intently engaged in designing warplane propellors during World War II—fighters, not bombers like the one that Bob Holman, Mother’s beloved cousin, went down in over the English Channel. And if that Rice Street coincidence wasn’t enough, there was yet another that connected Mother to her previous life as an engineer.
It was in the fall of 1954. My parents had just moved to Rice Street after my Dad’s appointment as Clerk of District Court for Anoka County. His office was at the courthouse on the other side of town, and in his initial weeks on the job, he got acquainted with a number of people in offices adjoining his. One person was “Ginna” Ridge, who was particularly outgoing.
“My wife is a very sociable person,” Dad said to Ginna one day, “and would really like to get to know more people in Anoka.” Although Dad had grown up in Minneapolis, just 20 miles downstream from Anoka, he had never been to Anoka until his interview for the job as Clerk of Court. For Mother, a native of New Jersey, this old Upper Midwestern lumber town which straddled the Rum River at its confluence with the Mississippi was an even more improbable place to call home for the next half century.
“Where do you and your wife live?” asked Ginna, chewing her gum in synch with her words.
“On Rice Street, down there by the beach,” said Dad.
“Well, well! It just so happens that my husband and I are your neighbors.”
“Is that so?” said Dad.
“Yes. We live at 453 Rice, which is next to the Johnson’s who are on the corner of Rice and Green. It was built in 1858, but we’ve made some improvements since then,” she laughed.
“Well, then, we’re just two doors away.”
“So then, you’ll have to send your wife right down this evening and we’ll get acquainted and she’ll have a new friend and so will I.”
That evening, Dad recounted the conversation to Mother, and after supper, they strolled down to the old Ridge house at 453 Rice. They hiked up the long set of steps and rang the doorbell. A short, confident man with a pipe in the corner of his mouth answered the door.
“Will!” Mother shouted.
“Boots!” said Will, dropping his pipe into his hand. He and Mother were dumbfounded, as Dad and Ginna would be when they learned that Ginna’s husband, Will Ridge, like Bob Donaldson, had also been an engineer at the Curtiss-Wright plant in New Jersey and that he and Mother had actually gone on a date or two way back then. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
