JUNE 22, 2023 – (Cont.) Later in the summer, there was another unusual encounter with Cyril. Jenny and I had been staying up at the lake for the week with our Nilsson grandparents. Dad and one of our other sisters were scheduled to join us for the weekend. The hour grew late Friday evening, however, and we began to wonder where they were. Then, quite late, our solitude was broken by the arrival of not one but two cars—one of them being a red Volkswagen.
I couldn’t believe it. The only visitors ever to our grandparents’ cabin were us—Dad, my sisters, and, on two previous occasions (there may have been more, but I can remember only two), Mother. Yet here now were the Hanney’s—all four of them, in addition to Mother, Elsa and Kristina. I thought it would be overwhelming for our grandparents. The whole scene was so totally out of their experience there, and totally out of character for Dad, even, without any advance warning or planning, to bring a bevy of guests to that secluded retreat. I noticed that he himself seemed extraordinarily enthusiastic about having Cyril on hand, and that made me feel more comfortable.
True to form, Cyril later sang for us, and I do believe his musical gifts rendered the invasion more tolerable for my grandparents, whose appreciation for great music was among their finer attributes.
The last thing that I remember about Cyril’s visit that summer, was the day when he took Derwyn and me with him to downtown Minneapolis. Derwyn and I were left to our own devices while Cyril was meeting with a certain “important gentleman.” Our random wanderings included milkshakes at the Woolworth’s café bar, where we spun around on the stools until the waitress put an end to it, saving us from regurgitating our milkshakes—paid with money Cyril had given us before he’d left us on the street. At an appointed hour, we were to join up with Cyril again at the important gentleman’s office on the 28th floor of the 30-story Foshay Tower, at the time, the tallest building in Minneapolis.
When Derwyn and I arrived on the 28th floor, a receptionist let us into a sprawling office, filled with ornate furniture, oriental carpets, loaded bookshelves, artwork on the walls, and most impressive of all, French doors that opened onto a concrete balcony—that being the only floor of the building that had such a feature. The important gentleman looked the part. I remember his attire—a three-piece, gray suit with a piece of red cloth peeking out of the front pocket, an outfit looking several steps above Dad’s suits, and Dad was no sartorial slouch.
“Well, hello boys!” the gentleman’s voice boomed. “Come in, come in. Why don’t you take a look out on the balcony? You’ll be able to see all the way to Anoka from out there,” he said, gesturing toward the open French doors behind his desk.
How did he know we—well, I; Derwyn sort of—were from Anoka? Derwyn and I scrambled out onto the balcony for the view to the north, and sure enough, we could see the steeple of St. Stephen’s Catholic Church, which, I knew, was just a couple of blocks from Trinity Episcopal. As we rested our elbows on the balcony, I could hear Cyril and the important gentleman winding up their conversation.
“I’ll see what I can do,” said the man. “It’s a worthy cause, certainly, but there are many worthy causes, and I will just have to consider it among the many other . . .”
“Thank you,” I heard Cyril say. “Thank you very much, really, it would be greatly appreciated . . . Boys?!”
On the way home in the red Volkswagen, I learned the identify of the important man with the office on the 28th floor of the Foshay Tower: Charlie Horn. Much later in life, I would learn that Charlie Horn was the Citizen Kane of Anoka. He was founder, owner and president of Federal Cartridge Corporation, based in Anoka. He’d made a fortune selling ammunition to the government during World War II, and based on the power of money and sheer ego, he had become a self-appointed king-maker, whose larger than life, full-length image, painted in oil, hung for decades inside the Anoka City Hall—itself (along with the Charlie Horn Municipal Swimming Pool on the other side of town) a gift from the benevolent Charlie Horn. As my Dad would explain to me many years later, nothing happened in Anoka without Charlie’s Horn blessing.
It was Mother who had asked Cyril to call on Charlie Horn for a donation to Trinity Episcopal Church. The money was badly needed for construction of a new church in Anoka. Mother, I knew, was on the church building committee.
The last that we would ever see of Cyril Hanney was years later—August 1976, to be exact. Dad had inherited the cabin on Grindstone Lake and was now lord of the manor. When Cyril was on what would be his last visit to our part of the country, Mother and Dad invited him to stay at the cabin for a several days.
It was just a week or two before I would begin law school, and I was on hand as well, for one last respite before hitting the books. What remains most vivid in my memory of those few days is Mother urging Cyril to paint something, anything, that she could remember him by. He set up an easel in the yard on the east side of the cabin, and for the better part of a day, he transformed a white canvas into an impressionistic depiction of the woods beyond, highlighting three distinctive birch trees among the pines, oaks and maples. His painting captured precisely, miraculously, the essence of a scene that was just a patch of non-descript woods to a stranger’s non-artistic eye but a special, familiar face of nature to us who knew the scene so well. To this day, the painting hangs in a perfect, cozy spot inside the cabin. On the back, in Mother’s hand, is the title, Birches; the date, August 15, 1976; and the artist—Cyril Hanney.
It was the last time any of us would see Cyril. He died a year or two after that summer visit, and I now believe that part of Mother died with him.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
