AUGUST 1, 2019 – Every good story involves a little background:
FIRST: By the age of eight, I was hooked on history. My dad ensured that. He read aloud to me books like William Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico and articles out of his bi-monthly issues of American Heritage magazine. History fired up my imagination.
SECOND: Our house was toward the end of Rice Street on the west side of Anoka, Minnesota. Rice ran parallel to the Mississippi River, and at the end of the street, a couple of lots down, was a public beach. It wasn’t much of a classic “beach,” but there was a lot of sand involved on a slope that flattened out along the water. On hot summer days, people would gather there with their beach toys and towels and hang out from late morning until dusk.
We young kids would swim in the lazy flow of the muddy Miss until we were raisins. The moms sat in folding chairs in the grassy shade that cooled the area at the top of the “beach.” We’d go way out to the sandbar, then yell back at our moms, “Hey, Mom! Mom!! MOM!!!” and once we’d captured their full attention (signaled by absent-minded waves as they chattered away with one another), we’d yell, “Watch!” Then each of us would launch into some miraculous underwater maneuver, which, of course, the moms couldn’t see because the maneuvers were, well, underwater until we were out of breath, whereupon we’d surface and yell, “Did you see that?!!!”
THIRD: Anoka was split in two by the Rum River, which flowed into the Mississippi about a quarter mile downstream from the “beach” at our end of Rice Street. “Downtown” Anoka was on the other side of the Rum, so to get there, you had to head down Rice, cross busy Ferry Street without getting killed, then take the sidewalk to Main Street, hang right and cross the bridge.
Along that sidewalk not too far from Main was a granite boulder purposefully placed in front of a big old house. Cleanly chiseled on the boulder was the inscription:
A. W. GIDDINGS SETTLED HERE IN THE YEAR 1854
I passed that boulder hundreds of times, but every time it captured my imagination. Maybe it was the year—exactly 100 before I was born—but I think it was mostly the thought that a guy’s name and something important about him had literally been etched in stone.
FOURTH: From an early age, I liked the limelight.
FIFTH: My mom was very much into art and made sure my sisters and I were well-supplied with art stuff—paint, crayons, paper, and eventually, modeling clay. I remember the modeling clay. If you didn’t put it in a container after you were done playing with it, it got hard as a rock. That quality is what gave me an idea one hot, lazy August day way back when . . .
(cont.)
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
