THE NEIGHBORS (Part I – “An Overhead View”)

APRIL 6, 2024 – I remember well that beautiful summer day between second and third grade—warm and filled with sunshine. Lyle Roeckers, two doors down, had recently acquired an airplane and was offering rides to our family. I say “rides,” plural, because there were more of us than there were seats in the plane, and Lyle, of course, had to occupy the pilot’s seat. Plus, he had his own wife, Betty, son John (my friend) and daughter Susie (my sister Elsa’s friend) to think about.

Lyle’s new airplane coincided with his family’s automobile downgrade. Before the airplane, they’d owned a Cadillac; not a brand new one like Fred Moore’s across the street from us but new enough to make me envious even as a not-quite-eight-year-old. The best that my parents could do was a two-door 1954 Buick Super—exactly my age, which in car years I considered old. Our other car—Mom’s—was a DeSoto coupe, almost as out of date as the conquistador himself, a small bust of whom, bearing a helmet and leaning into the wind, served as the hood ornament. Anyway, the price of Lyle’s airplane approximated the value of the Cadillac, and in place of the swanky car, Roeckers now rode around in a very tired, very used white panel van with the tiniest taillights of any vehicle I’d ever seen. By comparison, even our DeSoto with its out-of-date visor and rust on the rocker panels looked like a luxury vehicle.

But we didn’t own an airplane as now the Roeckers did—along with the Cutters, who lived at the end of Park Street up the Mississippi from our neighborhood. The Cutter family, though, was in a class of its own: they lived on a veritable “spread,” though still within the city limits. Their place included a swimming pool, a horse barn, and a mooring site on the river for Darrah’s Seabee, which, when he flew over our neighborhood, Mother or Dad—whoever was present—would look up and say, “There goes Darrah.”[1]

In any event, Lyle was quite excited about demonstrating his new airplane. I was too young to worry about his piloting skills. I have no idea whether on some whim he’d taken lessons recently and was new to aviation or if, perhaps, he’d flown a Corsair or a P-51 Mustang in WW II and was thereby a seasoned combat fighter pilot and eminently qualified to fly a basic Cessna. Having taken the afternoon off from work, Dad changed into casual attire and drove us over to the grass airstrip on the other side of town. The Roeckers were already on hand—I spotted their white panel van right away—and Lyle was running his preflight check of the aircraft.

At first sight, the happy looking plane had an attractive personality. Red and silver with sturdy struts holding up the wings, it looked eager to fly, and Lyle was just as excited to fly it. For the first round, the passengers were . . . Dad up front, and my sister Jenny and I in the back. After buckling us in, Lyle reached back and pulled a plastic container out of the pocket on the back of Dad’s seat. “If you get sick,” he said nonchalantly, “use this.” For a second I thought it was filled with special air you breathed to override your “sickness.” Having survived carnival rides just fine, I didn’t plan on getting sick, but in the next moment I wondered what Jenny and I were supposed to do with the container if either of us did get sick, or, perish the thought, what we were to do if we both got sick. I figured I’d hand the container to Dad and let him worry about it. Lyle would be too busy flying the plane.

Two seconds later the propeller sprang to life and whirled its way into invisibility. The engine sounded louder than 10 lawnmowers, but the powerful noise was also reassuring: this plane was meant to fly. Lyle maneuvered the happy bird to the end of what served as the runway, looked around, and released the plane to its wild desires. We bumped along the ground, building speed until we broke our bonds with the earth and climbed smoothly into the world above.

In short order downtown Anoka lay like a detailed map below us—the cars, streets, and buildings appearing as models of themselves. I recognized the Rum River dam next to the city hall and beyond those landmarks by a few seconds was the playground of Franklin Elementary and soon the western edge of town. It all looked so small and contained, a perfect playset of reality.

Lyle then banked hard to my side, circling back around the east side of downtown then westward again until we were right above our neighborhood; our street, Rice Street, running along the Mississippi on the south edge of town.

As we floated in a big arc over Rice Street and the river, I could pick out each house of the people I knew. Inside my head I matched the neighbors with their homes:

The brick river rambler of the Benzians, Anoka aristrocrats, Dick and Margaret and their two very tall, very old sons; Dick, who owned a furniture store in town and didn’t drive, so Margaret, who looked like Cleopatra, drove him in their brand new black Thunderbird;

The Colemans—with six or eight kids, I could never keep track—who came and went from their large, gray-painted cedar clad house separated from the river by the Benzians; Mr. Coleman, a lawyer with an office on Main Street two doors down from Ben Franklin, who, as the years passed, looked more and more like the Coleman’s pet boxer in the family’s annual Christmas card photo;

The Thurstons—both Harlan and Clayton—brothers who lived next door to each other in elegant homes on enormous lots filled with oaks and who, according to Mom, were multi-millionaires. Harlan’s large black late model Buick Electra always looked so stately as it rolled down Rice and turned onto his long driveway;

The Spurzems, “Doctor” and Evelyn, who drove an enormous black Chrysler Imperial—the same Dr. Spurzem whose dark, mysterious medical office above Peterson’s shoe store downtown was where you went for a shot in the butt when you had an ear-ache;

Bob Ehlen, the mystery man, whose luxury home (I imagined—years later it was razed to make room for a true luxury home) was perched on the height of his big river lot next to Spurzem’s;

Next door to Bob Ehlen and directly across the street from our house was the Caines’ flat roofed house; their daughter, Jill, was my neighborhood chum; her two brothers carried out active lives on their busy, sprawling, dusty lot, which was actually a double lot, along the river;

Next were the Moores and their stately home, “designed by an architect,” Dad once told me, on a vast lot between the Caines’ Wild West operation on one side and the public beach at the end of the street; from the air it looked like a movie star’s manor;

Across from the beach, was the Violets’ house in their junked-out lot where the scruffy Mr. Violet and his even scruffier son ran an upholstery business; from the air it looked just as dumpy as from the ground;

Next to them was the worn-out house only slightly larger than a small doghouse, where the Hollands lived in perfect order and neatness—my friend David, a year ahead of me in school, his younger sister Randi, Jenny’s pal, their parents, Mr. Holland, a school janitor more serious than any principal, and Mrs. Holland, always dressed with style and elegance because she made her own clothes; Mother told me the Hollands didn’t own the house but rented it—I was never sure if it was rented from the Violets, since it seemed to go with that family’s topsy-turvy lot . . . or from the immediate neighbors on the other side, the . . .

Rathbuns, in a haunted house on haunted grounds, the haunted factor being as evident from the air as it was when from the ground; where lived old John the plumber with an enormous head, his wife the witch, who as far as I knew had no name other than Mrs. Rathbun, and their grown-up son Arlan, who had many missing teeth—a fact he tried hard to hide when he laughed—until one day he showed up at our house to work on the garbage disposal and flashed a brand new set of choppers;

Down there next to Rathbuns was our own house with its big gray roof, sundeck over the garage and boxelder woods in back;

Judge and Gerri Green’s well-kempt, single-level house with a stone front and blue roof, behind our original house, with its red roof and sundeck over the back porch, on the corner of Rice and Green, right next door to our new house; our old house and yard looking even neater from the sky than they did from the ground;

Then in miniature, it seemed, the Johnson’s big brick fortress, a suitable residence for the Anoka County Attorney, which meant nothing to me, except that his office was in the courthouse, the same building where Dad worked;

Next to Johnsons, the Roeckers themselves, in a house that my sister claimed had been built before the Civil War, whenever that was, surrounded by a yard that when you were in it seemed big enough for two simultaneous baseball games but maybe not when viewed from an altitude of 2,000 feet;

Followed by the Tobins, later, the Jocelyns, in the stucco house the size of the courthouse, except from the airplane it looked more modest, and next door to the Tobins . . .

The Carlson couple’s big, neat white house with a dark green roof; an older couple I never saw except when I had to stop my trike—later bike—to let them drive in or out of their long driveway, which seemed much shorter from the airplane;

The Byes—the school district superintendent and his wife, who one day backed her car out of their driveway and mistook the brake for the accelerator and banged into the streetlight on the opposite side of the street; the streetlight was clearly visible from the air, which made me wonder why Mrs. Bye didn’t see the light pole from the ground.

Next door to Byes was the Anderson house with a gambrel roof, except to me it was a barn roof, which made me wonder why would anyone want to live in a house that was made on purpose to look like a barn; the family with two scruffy boys a couple of years behind me; a couple of rug rats with whom I palled around, whose old unkempt house was gutted by fire one day when I was home sick but missed all the commotion, and was rebuilt like new with picture windows in the master bedroom on the second floor;

Across State Street from the Andersons but still on Rice was the art deco house (as Mother called it) built of huge stone blocks and with an underground garage; a house inhabited by an elderly woman whom I was sure was a millionaire because her shiny black Chrysler had tinted windows, obscuring her appearance but not her stylish hat; the house later occupied by the raucous Wards, whose dad owned the Plymouth/Chrysler car dealership on west Main Street, smoked cigars, ran for the state legislature on the strength of campaign signs that read, “Go Forward with Ward,” and was related to all the other Wards in town;

Then the Jepsons modest but stalwart two-story stucco house; they were quite a bit older than Mother and Dad and had three older daughters, one of whom, June, was our regular babysitter, who nearly got herself fired after she told us spooky stories that scared the crap out of Jenny and me . . .

As we flew another turn over the neighborhood, the plane engine rattling my jaws, I marveled again at every rooftop, every driveway, an occasional car, the beach, even the big individual oak trees I knew so well in our old yard, and our walking route to school. Lyle circled round several times to give Dad a chance to capture it on his Bell and Howell 8 mm movie camera. I could feel Dad’s own excitement, and when Lyle turned his head in the direction we were turning, I noticed his mile-wide smile. I found great satisfaction in seeing a grownup have as much fun as a kid.

He then turned the plane back over downtown, the junior high school, the senior high, and Goodrich Field. Just after I noticed the Friske’s A&W Root Beer drive-in from the air, we closed in on the ground until bumpity-bump, we landed back on the grass airstrip and Lyle brought the plane to rest.

A year or two later Roeckers moved to what I considered a luxury stone rambler on a river lot on the east side of town. Elsa and I remained close friends of Susie and John, respectively, at least for a while.

My confidence in John’s reliability slipped a few notches the day when we were going to play war at our house and he announced that he would ride his bike back across town to get his new toy gun. He said he’d be back before I could say “Jack Robinson” a hundred times. I fell for it, and immediately started repeating “Jack Robinson,” counting on my fingers and toes as John high-tailed it down Rice Street. After a hundred reps, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and counted down another hundred, but John failed to reappear. When I asked him about it several days later, he gave me a very lame non-excuse: “I changed my mind.”

At least he was honest, I rationalized, but at the same time, he’d failed to keep his word.

Our parents remained close friends, however, and we wound up spending many hours together, mostly at their house. Lyle, who was apparently successful as a realtor specializing in selling lake properties up north, upgraded to a bigger black and yellow floatplane. We never got to ride in it, but often while I was kicking sand and skipping stones down at the beach, I’d see Lyle’s plane over the river after his take-offs or on his approaches.

Then one day we got disturbing news: he and Betty had crashed. While on a river landing approach somewhere, he struck an unmarked powerline. Miraculously, they survived—she with a fractured arm; he with a broken nose and two very black eyes. As I remember, that was the end of Lyle’s flying days. A while thereafter they moved out of our lives altogether—all the way out to California.

Over time some of the neighbors left for parts far and wide, just as my sisters and I would. Not so in the case of most of the neighbors.  They wouldn’t leave the neighborhood until they left life altogether. (Cont.)

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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson

[1]Darrah Cutter had been a Navy fighter pilot in the Pacific during WW II. He was shot down and rescued but not before his hands and forearms were badly burned. After recovering he returned to Anoka, where he took up the practice of law in the footsteps of his father—directly across the street from the courthouse. Darrah took frequent fishing trips to the far north of Canada, flying his Seabee the forever distance. Dad told the story of how on one of the trips—with several fellow Anokans aboard—Darrah stopped somewhere in northern Minnesota to refuel. As Darrah and friends reboarded the aircraft, the airport manager, observing the considerable combined weight of passengers and gear, said to Darrah, “You’ll never make that plane off the ground.” According to the story that found its way back to Anoka—and Dad—Darrah looked at the guy and said, “Watch me.” As a war pilot, Darrah knew what he was doing. On a trip in August 1960, however, he met a tragic end, but in his airplane. His fishing boat capsized in a rough river crossing, and he was unable to survive the frigid waters. Darrah left behind a wife and eight kids, one of whom is a close friend of mine and law school classmate who followed her father and grandfather’s profession, and as did her grandfather, became a jurist.