JULY 30, 2023 – After a proper thanks and farewell to Pete[1], I followed the welcoming committee—Gaga, Grandpa, and Uncle Bruce—up the sidewalk past the nicely appointed garden and patio, where a hot sun reflected brilliantly off one of those silver globes on a pedestal, the kind that I associated with rich people. The committee then led me into the big, gray, stucco house that seemed to dwarf my mental image of our home back in Anoka. The Holman house had a slate roof with a number of dormers and gables, and the stucco was so thick and course, I thought a kid could climb it. The back entryway led into a modest-sized kitchen, the layout of which I remembered ever so vaguely from my first trip to New Jersey as a toddler[2].
Once the initial excitement caused by my arrival had died down, Grandpa and Uncle Bruce disappeared back outside, just where I wasn’t sure or can’t remember, and Gaga prepared me a little sandwich and served it with a glass of milk and a plate of cookies, all of which I downed while answering questions about the ride with Pete. However, I was eager to satisfy my curiosity about the house, since my recollection of it was rather vague and distorted. My life had doubled since I’d last seen it. I asked Gaga if I could “walk around.”
“That would be perfectly all right,” she said. She’d already embarked on a project involving a peeler and knives and an assortment of dishes and bowls, all of which looked as though it would add up to a full-scale meal rivaling what Ga was known for—dinner. “I think Uncle Bruce took your suitcase up to your room. You are going to be in the back bedroom, if that’s okay. It’s the one on the far right at the top of the stairs.”
I slipped off my chair and set about exploring the grand old house. I felt like a prince in his palace. From the kitchen, I followed a long pantry and pushed a swinging door, which allowed me into the dining room. Shiny mahogany wainscoting rising higher than my head covered all four walls of the room, and above the wainscoting was a heavy tapestry with a repeating pastoral scene and braided borders. Around a big, polished, mahogany table standing gracefully on a sprawling, elegant, oriental carpet, were half a dozen Chippendale chairs, each upholstered in matching fashion with the tapestry. The end chairs had gracefully curved arms. Above the table, centered between two, mahogany ceiling beams, was a beautiful set of Tiffany lamps, which made me think that the light fixture over the dining room at home was something you’d buy out of a Sears Roebuck catalogue. Only I had never heard of “Tiffany” or “Chippendale,” and I didn’t know at the time that the wood was mahogany, hand-selected by George B. Holman straight off the boats that called in nearby Hoboken back in 1910 when the grand house was under construction.
I felt just a little out of place in my T-shirt, deck-pants, and P.F. Flyers. To my impressionable eyes, the dining room looked something like one of those rooms you’d see done up at the Art Institute down in Minneapolis. From the dining room I passed into what I later learned was called the “billiard room,” which had its own entrance from the outside to accommodate party guests. The ceiling was much higher than the ceiling of the dining room; higher, in fact, than the ceiling of any room of any house I’d ever been in, including Barbara Johnston’s house, and her house was by far and away the finest home in Anoka.[3] Another oriental rug covered a large portion of the floor, which seemed bigger than the entire downstairs of our house. Above more of the mahogany wainscoting was wallpaper with large white flowers against a dark green background. Large windows with Venetian blinds and elegant curtains let in natural light on three sides, and a fireplace with a slightly tapered chimney made out of smooth, light brown bricks arranged in a staggered pattern above the mantel occupied the main portion of the fourth wall. The fireplace itself was not all blackened like the one at home, but looked more for show, and in place of half-charred logs on a grate, there was a giant, fancy fan, kind of like the tail of a peacock. A floor lamp, a small bookcase and a few simple pieces of nice looking furniture occupied the room. Long gone was the billiard table that had given the room its name.
From the billiard room, I passed back into the dining room, but instead of going back through the pantry, I walked around the table to the wide doorway that led into the main hallway. As I did, I noticed the two big pocket doors that extended part way out of their pockets. These too were mahogany. Each contained many window panes from top to bottom, and as I squeezed through the opening between the doors, I saw that they were twice as thick as a normal door. The hallway had white wainscoting about halfway between my waist and my neck, and above that was wallpaper similar to what I’d seen in the billiard room, only it was white flowers against a burgundy background. I turned to my left and found two more rooms across from each other. One adjoined the dining room and around the perimeter from floor to about two feet shy of the ceiling were built-in, mahogany bookcases, each with a glass door and a little key in the lock. The room also had a small sofa, a couple of reclining chairs, and a large TV set. The TV was parked just inside yet another doorway—the fourth—that led into the dining room. This doorway—or rather, each of the doors, which were another pocket set—was the most impressive of the things I had seen that far on my little self-conducted tour. They were similar to the other pocket doors of the dining room, only this second set had shiny, delicately fashioned brass plates between the panes of each window. In awe I examined them, and then, in even greater awe, I discovered that there were yet two more sets—one in the doorway through which I had just passed to enter this room, which I later heard Gaga call the library, and another set in the doorway leading into what I would hear Gaga refer to as the parlor, across the hallway from the library.
It was decades later, just a few years before the fire, when I was told that George B. Holman had salvaged all of those beautiful doors from a Manhattan bank building that was being razed. I wondered how old they must have been, coming from a building that was being torn down four years before the outbreak of World War I.
The parlor looked like a room where kids would not be allowed to sit down. It was comparatively bright compared to the other rooms. The wallpaper was beige with vertical red stripes bordered in gold. The sofa and chairs had spotless, satin upholstery, looked very old, very fancy and strictly for show. They were not for sitting, certainly not for kids wearing play clothes. On the wall facing the doorway was a large double-hung window, and the afternoon sun streamed through the open Venetian blinds and struck the prismatic pendants that hung from the two impressive candlesticks that stood guard atop a large buffet. Another rich looking oriental carpet covered the floor.
After turning full circle in the room and realizing exactly how rich my grandparents and uncle were, I stepped back out into the hallway, peered through the full-length beveled glass of the door that opened into a small vestibule behind the front door to the house. The front door, in turn, opened onto a tiled veranda. I walked back through the hallway, past a small lavatory on my left, and was about the re-enter the kitchen where Gaga was working, when a cuckoo clock went off. I don’t think I’d ever heard a cuckoo clock before. It hung from the wall just outside the kitchen, and I was amused by the little bird that stepped out of its house, opened its beak and said “KOO-Koo! KOO-Koo!” Over the next several weeks, I loved to watch Gaga pull on the chains, raising the heavy “pine cone” weights to rewind the clock.
I had completed the tour of the downstairs of the house, and I was curious about the upstairs. What I remembered most clearly about it was the bad dream I had experienced there back a long, long time before—way back when I was a little kid, to be exact. “Can I go upstairs, Gaga?” I asked.
“You certainly may,” said Gaga. “But stay on the second floor. We don’t much go on the third floor. You’re liable to get lost up there.” She let out a little laugh.
I turned around, walked past the cuckoo clock again and ascended the stairs to the a landing where there was a white, boxed-in bench, with cushion and pillows, where it looked as though you could rest if you were too tired to hike up the rest of the stairs to the second floor. High above the bench were windows through which I could see leaves of the huge (chestnut) tree near where the driveway intersected with sidewalk outside. On the left side of the landing was a door, which my curiosity insisted on opening. Then it came back to me—the hidden stairway where you could go if you wanted to be invisible.
I resumed my climb to the second floor. In the center was an open area, carpeted, and off to one side stood a very high piece of dark furniture, in perfect condition and containing many drawers. Much later, I would learn that it was called a “high boy” and made of cherry wood. I was also told that it was quite a valuable piece of furniture, even though it was a replica of a late Eighteenth Century “high boy.” It wasn’t the only piece of valuable furniture that was to be destroyed in the fire. But years after the fire, I learned just how priceless that “high boy” was: it had been hand-made by George B. Holman, whose amazing craftsmanship in furniture making was matched only by his remarkable success in the business of furniture moving and storage.
The first room on the left was Gaga and Grandpa’s bedroom. I peered in, saw the dark green wallpaper, the bed with the large headboard and foot posts that had little pinecones carved on top, and the chests of drawers. Everything was neat and in its place. The next room, on the other side of the high boy, had a bureau straight ahead and couple of beds, one next to the doorway, and the other in the corner, perpendicular to the first one, and a table and some chairs, all in nice order. I walked between the beds and saw a doorway which led into a lavatory, and then yet another doorway, through which I passed into a small room, which looked as if it was exclusively Gaga’s domain. I saw a sewing machine on a special looking desk with small, square drawers, and a small version of the big desk where Mother kept her slide rule at home. On the wall was a photograph[4] of a smartly attired gentleman, whose identity was a complete mystery. Later in the summer, when Gaga sat at the desk, writing a letter to Minnesota, I asked about the photograph and learned that it was “Pisey,” which is what people called Gaga’s father.
On the other side of the cozy room was yet another large, dark wood door with a glass doorknob. I opened it and gazed into what I guessed was Uncle Bruce’s room. It looked interesting, because there was quite a lot going on in there. A couple of magazines lay at odd angles at the foot of the unmade bed, and in the corner of the room was a sink with lots of things crowded around the faucet handles—the same sorts of things that Dad put away in the cabinet above the sink at home. A couple of neckties hung over the mirror above the sink, and a pair of trousers were slung over the back of a chair. I crept in for a closer look, and saw more things atop the dresser, mostly mementoes of one sort or another—too many for any to be memorable, certainly not as memorable as what I would stumble over in the same room 45 years later. In my mind, it all made for an impression of casualness, which I found to my liking. In contrast with the rest of the house, which looked as though it was dressed up for Sunday visiting, this room looked as though it was wearing play clothes, and as much as I admired Gaga and Grandpa, who showed every measure of kindness and good cheer, Uncle Bruce’s bedroom was that of a grown-up who still knew how to have fun—consistent with the jocular reputation that he had well-established in the course of his Christmas visits to Minnesota.
I exited his room via the main doorway back out into the central hall. To my left was a door with a full-length mirror. I opened it and found a long, carpeted staircase leading to what I imagined was the top of a mountain. I could see the afternoon sun blazing through windows at the top of the stairs. I was already well out of earshot of what was going on in the kitchen, and though I wasn’t altogether sure that there was a clear prohibition against my going any farther, I decided that it wouldn’t be a good idea to get lost on the first day, so I pushed the door and continued past it. Next was a bathroom, twice the size of the one at home, with a shower and sliding glass doors with mixed-up glass. One had a little silver handle, and I tested the sliding part and wondered if Barbara Johnston’s mansion back in Anoka had such a combination of elegance and modernity. I then went over to see the view out the window.
I was impressed by the elevation of my vantage point. It overlooked another driveway, one that ran perpendicular to the main drive between the patio and the warehouses on the other side of the house. A closed double gate at the end of the driveway was aligned with large hedges that ran between the house and the gate on one side, and between the gate and the edge of the lot on the other. I also spotted some flowers down below. I figured they were Gaga’s work. They looked neat and nicely arranged.
From the window, I had a good view of the house next door, a much simpler looking house than the palace I was in, but stately, nonetheless, and certainly just as high. I didn’t know that Grandpa owned that house too . . . or that it was occupied by two sisters, Zelda and Emily Jones, whose family had begun renting the house from Grandpa back in the late 1920s . . . or that Emily was one year away from retiring as Grandpa’s secretary . . . that she would send Gaga, an avowed atheist, a greeting card with the inscription, “May He hold you in the palm of his hand” . . . that when they were in their 90s, Gaga and Emily would signal their well being to each other by hanging a towel in a window (in Gaga’s case, that very window) each morning and removing it later in the day . . . or that Emily, at age 106, would be paying the same monthly rent—$250—that she and Zelda were paying at the time I was gazing at their house in 1961.
I stepped back out of the bathroom, turned to my left, and in the last room of my second-floor tour, I saw my suitcase resting on a stand. It was a cozy room and had its own sink, and then I remembered again. This was the room where I’d had the bad dream full of snakes. But that had been back when I was a little kid, and I decided that since I was going into second grade, there was no reason to fear a recurrence of the bad dream.
I looked out the back window of the room and saw part of the collection of warehouses that I understood to be the focal point of all the wealth that Gaga, Grandpa, and Uncle Bruce had accumulated. The closest one looked ancient. It was two very tall stories high and had a row of gabled dormers on the side facing the house. It was covered with wood siding, like the clapboard siding on our house in Anoka, only the old warehouse didn’t have a spot of paint on it. It was all gray, weathered, and extremely tired, even haunted looking. I wondered why it wasn’t painted, because certainly Grandpa could afford it. Positioned just behind the old building and angled a bit toward the driveway, was a gigantic garage door on a building with an expansive arched roof, and behind the big garage rose a brick building several stories high with one window on each floor. On the broad driveway that separated the patio and garden on the house side from the old warehouse on the other side, were parked a couple of smaller, non-semi-trailer moving vans, the “van” portion of each resting on top of the cab, as well as behind it. I was curious what the inside of each cab looked like, but no matter what, I knew that the drivers of those trucks could not be as good as Pete.
I turned from the window to exit the room and go back downstairs. However, I noticed that I had left ajar the door leading up to the third floor. It dawned on me that if the windows on the second floor had afforded me a good view of things, the windows on the third floor would be even better. I hesitated, then decided that if I could ride in a moving van all the way from Minnesota to New Jersey and pass through five other states along the way, I could walk up one flight of stairs, take a quick look around, and get back to the kitchen without getting lost—or found out.
* * *
The clock struck two a.m. Like a seething dragon full of sin and evil, the house roared with flames of outrage shooting from the deep, dark throat of UB’s room. Swinging around the door to the third floor staircase, the dragon lashed out with tongues of flame, burning the stairway carpet to ash and licking black the stairwell walls. Explosive heat shattered the windows at the top of the stairs and set the roof aglow. Slate and burning wreckage crashed down and shot up a spray of sparks high into the night. Sirens wailed, men shouted, water gushed, all to subdue the beast. Eventually, in retreat but not defeat, the monster withdrew to its cave, and while the ruins cooled, a life’s worth of dragon piss coursed its way down through the lower floors, laying waste to all within.
“Meanwhile,” said Cliff, drawing on his Cuban, “Uncle Bruce wet his pants. In the light under the street lamp, I could see the crotch of his pants go dark in about five seconds.”
And it wasn’t over the fact that the house and its contents were underinsured.
* * *
I had gotten no more than a step or two up the stairs when I heard Gaga’s voice. “Yoo-hoo! Eric!” Another day, I thought, I’ll see what’s up there on the third floor. I stepped back down, closed the door to the stairway and answered Gaga.
“Coming!” I yelled back.
For the next number of weeks, no one called me the “Crown Prince” [of Sweden], as Dad and Grandpa Nilsson did, especially up at the lake, but Gaga, Grandpa, and Uncle Bruce sure treated me like a prince. I had the run of the palace, I got to watch all the TV cartoons that could be watched, and Gaga fed me pretty much whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. Every afternoon at about three, Uncle Bruce took me in his burgundy, convertible Pontiac Bonneville down to the local soda fountain, where I ordered an orange “Freezie” and Uncle Bruce had a cup of coffee and exchanged small talk with “Al” behind the counter. On weekends, Gaga and Grandpa took me up to the “Escape Hatch,” their summer home on Hamburg Cove in Lyme, Connecticut[5]. Uncle Bruce went too, but drove separately in his convertible. Sometimes I rode with him, and if I asked, he’d let me undo the clips to the convertible top and push the button that lowered it. On the way up, we always stopped at a Howard Johnson’s, where I ordered—a hamburger, French fries and a chocolate malt.
During the week, I remember seeing a lot of activity around the warehouses. Once in awhile, Gaga would walk me over to the offices, where one could see, hear, and feel a thriving enterprise. Grandpa was usually on his feet, conferring with one employee or another, or striding purposefully from one place to another, or engaged in a serious conversation on the telephone in his spacious office. Except when he was on the phone, he would acknowledge me with a friendly, “Hey, hey, hey,” but I don’t remember him saying much to me beyond that. However, I do remember the time when I was in his office while he was on the phone and I visually inspected the heavy brass name plate on his desk, the map of the United States on the wall, a lot of framed sheets of paper with printed words—several of them having round pieces of gold foil in the corner—and a large poster with lots of writing on it and old photographs along the borders[6]. The name, Geo. B. Holman & Co., Inc. appeared in big letters across the bottom of the poster, and just above the company name was the portrait of a man with thick white hair and a dark, full, but nicely trimmed mustache[7]. I was looking at it intently when Grandpa finished up his conversation on the phone. “That’s yr grt-grndther,” he said.
“That was George B. Holman?” I asked.
“My fther.” Grandpa might have said more about him, but I don’t remember. What sank in was that Grandpa’s business was not only big. It was old, and it was important enough to have a large, framed story written about it.
Later that summer, Gaga and Grandpa took me with them on a grand excursion to Washington. The occasion was one of Grandpa’s many transportation related conventions, which he attended throughout the seasons, throughout the years. We had left Rutherford in the late afternoon and arrived in Washington after nightfall. It had begun to rain by the time we entered the city, and I remember well when we were at the very center of things, and Gaga said to me, “Look! Straight ahead is the capitol.” I was seated between Gaga and Grandpa in the front seat of their big, blue Cadillac, and through the rapid sweeps of the windshield wipers, I looked wide-eyed at the brightly lit capitol building. The black street in front of us was shining in the rain, and I realized that I was one lucky kid to be looking firsthand at an icon, with which I was very familiar, thanks the paper-weight model of the capitol that Nina and Elsa had in their bedroom at home—the paper-weight that Gaga had sent them the year before following a prior convention trip to Washington.
We stayed in Washington for several days, and while Grandpa attended business meetings, Gaga took me on sight-seeing tours of the city. We saw the White House, the U.S. Mint, the monuments, and a number of other things which formed a less than indelible impression. The weather, of course, was stifling, and I was relieved when it came time to climb back into Grandpa’s air-conditioned Cadillac for the ride home to Rutherford.
Eventually, it came time to return to Minnesota, and the plan that developed was for Grandpa to accompany home on a Northwest Orient Airlines flight to Minneapolis. Grandpa would stay overnight with us in Anoka before flying down to Chicago for another convention. It was my first time aboard an airplane—something I had dreamed about as long as I had been aware of planes. It was not a first for Grandpa. In fact, as I would learn much later, he had probably flown hundreds of times by then. For a long stretch back in the thirties, he had commuted weekly by plane from New Jersey to Washington, where he worked on trucking tariff legislation and practiced before the Interstate Commerce Commission. Throughout the 1940s and 50s he had made flown back and forth between New Jersey and Missouri on United Van Lines business. And of course, there were all the meetings and conventions all over the country.
On that first flight of mine, we flew first class, and Grandpa graciously ceded the window seat to me, though he seemed to have important paperwork to attend to for the entire duration of the flight from Newark to Chicago and then from Chicago to Minneapolis. It was a pure thrill to watch the four turboprop engines fire up, one at a time, to see the ground pass by on take-off at a speed I’d never before experienced, and then to feel the freedom and exhilaration that came with separation from the earth[8]. As the plane soared into the blue yonder, I knew that when I grew up, I wanted to do and be something great, and it occurred to me that because his attention was focused on paperwork that came out of a briefcase and not on the wonders that could be experienced by looking out the window, Grandpa must truly be a man who was doing and being “great.”
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[3] Barbara Johnston and her parents lived on what was an “aristocratic estate” by Anoka standards or even by much broader measure. Although it had seen many upgrades, the “mansion,” as we referred to it, had been built by a wealthy Easterner in 1857, and was such a grand place, it served as the site of our class field trip in first grade.
As a young kid, George got himself in business by having a local printer print up cards, which he placed under the dinner plates of guests at fancy homes catered by George’s mother–assisted by George and his sisters. Knowing that his mother knew how to upholster and decorate, he had the printer identify those services on the business cards. Soon business was booming, which required George to rent a horse and wagon to haul customers’ furniture to and from the small barn behind the Holman home in Rutherford–which barn became the quarters where the upholstery could be untaken. Out of necessity, George also found himself in the “moving & storage” business, which, of course, became the mainstay of the business that he grew into a booming enterprise–once he achieved adulthood.
