THE NEIGHBORS (PART IV – “Halloween 365 Days a Year”)

APRIL 11, 2024 – (Cont.) When Mother and Dad built their dream house on the lot between our original house and Rathbuns, they asked the general contractor to hire ol’ John to do the plumbing. I remember well the evening when the contractor, John and several other sub-contractors appeared at our house so Dad could settle up with them. They all gathered around the dining room table while Dad wrote out checks—never a borrower but always a saver, Dad paid all cash for construction of the capacious four-bedroom, three-story Colonial with a redwood sundeck on top of the double-car garage. During the payment session I sat on a chair in the corner of the dining room, fascinated by the men whom I’d witnessed from a distance as they’d labored on our house.

I’d never gotten such a sustained, close-up view of John Rathbun. The bib overalls were smudged; the brown shirt was stained; his dense white stubble was at least three days old; his thick white hair wasn’t going anywhere soon, least of all, I thought, to the barber. He spoke hardly a word, and his countenance revealed nothing but inscrutability. Yet—his eyes projected what struck me as uncommon intelligence.

When I was in about third grade, the talk of the neighborhood was the Rathbuns’ surprising home improvement project. The main thrust of the effort was removal of the dilapidated front screened-in porch that for years had been sagging under the weight of a jumble of bursting cartons and discarded furniture. All in a day, the porch and its long-inert contents were gone. Over the next week or so, it was replaced by a new enclosed three-season porch, which even as a kid I could see was sturdily framed and properly constructed. But soon it was filled with the the same bulging boxes, junked out overstuffed chairs and sofas that had been stored on the old porch. That’s exactly where matters remained forever after.

The front porch project coincided, however, with an improvement at the back end of the house. Replacing the dark and dingy storeroom that had once existed adjacent to the kitchen was a sunlit room—thanks to a set of modern windows—filled with large sturdy shelving braced with freshly cut two-by-fours. The resin from the lumber challenged valorously the smell of cat urine that hung in the kitchen. Crowding the shelves was the biggest rock collection I could imagine. Mrs. Rathbun’s voice sounded suddenly vibrant as she explained how all those rocks—many split open to reveal magical displays of inner crystalline worlds—she, John and Arlan had collected on their regular trips to “Dakota.”

Who would’ve known, I thought, that the Rathbuns had gone anywhere outside the Halloween Capital of the World—let alone out of the state?

Then came the morning when my sisters and I were informed of a most improbable episode. The evening before, our parents had attended the opera down at Northrup Auditorium on the main campus of the University of Minnesota. It was back in the day when everyone attending such an event was dressed to the nines.

Over breakfast, our Mom and Dad recounted with almost kid-like enthusiasm, the highlight of the opera: no, not the leads, not the set, not the costumes, not the orchestra, but the intermission. For it was during that break when they had encountered none other than . . . Arlan Rathbun—wearing a tuxedo—with an attractive woman on his arm! It turned out that Arlan was a bona fide connoisseur of opera. “If only he had teeth,” said Mom, “he would’ve rivaled any prince charming in the world.”

Eventually, Arlan did get himself a set of attractive dentures. Lord knows what took him so long. Given all the cash in the family’s library bank, I’m sure it wasn’t about the cost. Perhaps he was simply burdened with some awful fear of the dentist.

The old Rathbun couple got so old that by the summer of 1974 they were dead and gone. I remember the year and the season, since that was when the Watergate scandal came to a head, and that sequence in the political life of the country coincided with Arlan’s extended work on our garbage disposal.

Mother had hired him for what turned out to be major surgery on our kitchen sink, and with a collection of plumbing tools and a box of fittings, Arlan set up shop on the kitchen floor. I happened to be on hand, and in short order Arlan, mostly while lying on his back, struck up a friendly conversation with me. He asked lots of questions about school—what subjects I enjoyed, where I wanted to attend college, what my major might be. His interest in my education prompted my own curiosity about his. The more questions I asked the more surprised I became. After graduating from the University with a degree in geology—which explained the rock collection and the trips out West—he’d gotten his master’s degree in chemical engineering. Soon we were engaged in a serious discussion about Watergate and speculated about what would transpire next. By the time Arlan was finished with the kitchen sink, all my childhood memories and impressions of the Rathbuns had undergone a major transfiguration.

Arlan the geologist, engineer, political scientist, opera buff, smart conversationalist—and master plumber—turned out to be more than cordially cerebral. He also revealed proclivity for amusement.

After Fred Moore had sold his business and the land it occupied, to occupy himself in retirement he became a distributor of various odd products from Tug-A-War adhesives to Pelican paddleboats to small land-based sailboats manufactured in the garage of some eccentric from Toronto (according to Fred). The sailboats consisted of a simple aluminum frame, a single sail, basic rigging and three pneumatic tires. They were designed to fly with the wind across . . . large parking lots. Fred knew I was a sailor and one Saturday afternoon he invited me to try out his demonstration model of the “rolling boat.” He figured we’d have free-reign of the expansive parking lot up at the vo-tech school on the edge of town. As we were loading the vessel onto a trailer, Arlan happened to see us and crossed the street to satisfy his curiosity. When Fred invited him to join us, he readily accepted. Fred happened to have two models on hand, so Arlan and I loaded the second one onto the trailer.

Arlan had never sailed before and neither had Fred, for that matter, so on the short drive to the vo-tech, I gave Arlan some rudimentary instructions. I assumed they would apply as much to “land-based” sailing as they did to the conventional mode. Once we’d assembled the “boats” and rolled away from our moorings—i.e. Fred’s car and trailer—our polymath neighbor revealed that he was a quick study. He also exhibited good sailing instincts, and soon Arlan and I were crisscrossing the parking lot at speeds much faster than my real sailboat ever traveled across the lake up at the cabin. Arlan was enjoying the thrill of a lifetime, and as he laughed into the wind, I wondered what on earth his parents—by then long deceased—would’ve thought of him careening around the light poles of the parking lot at the local vo-tech. Almost equally hard to imagine was Dad—roughly Arlan’s age—sailing his own boat . . . let alone on asphalt and without a helmet.

One day when I was in my early fifties Mom informed me that Arlan had passed away. I hadn’t seen him in years. I felt regret that I hadn’t gotten to know him better. What was his family history? When had his forebears landed in Anoka? How and when had his parents moved to Rice Street? What had been their plan for the lot around the corner on Levee Street—another jungle and a house boarded up since time began? Why was his mother stuck in the 1880s? Was his father in WW I? How had his father gotten into the plumbing business? Was Arlan in the service during WW II? Had he traveled abroad? If not and he could go wherever his desire led, what would his destination be? What books did he read? What music did he like? What friends did he keep?

And, I wondered, why hadn’t the neighbors reached out to him more and invited him into their lives? (Cont.)

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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson