The Old Woman’s revenge

BY ED FELIEN

When I was a small child growing up in South Minneapolis, my Uncle John used to take care of me and my brothers while my mom and dad had to go to work. He really wasn’t my uncle. He was more my grandmother’s boyfriend. When my grandmother died, when I was 5, Uncle John stayed around and cooked and took care of us when he didn’t have to go downtown and stoke the boilers under the Alvin Burlesque Theater. He would tell us stories about how he rode the rods from city to city looking for work. (Riding the rods is slang for hitching a ride on a freight train by placing a board through the bottom rungs on either side of a boxcar so that you could lie under the boxcar.) It was cold and dirty, and it was dangerous.

Some people went to sleep and fell off.

John McCall was Irish and filled with awe and wonder at the wide world, and he had a sense of poetry that could sometimes exceed the probabilities of reality. He used to tell us about how Lake Hiawatha used to be called Mud Lake and after that Rice Lake. Indian women used to harvest wild rice in what was then a swamp more than a lake.

Theodore Wirth wanted to purchase Lake Hiawatha at the time that the Minneapolis Park Board purchased Lake Nokomis—known at that time as Lake Amelia—for $63,500 in 1908. They could have had Mud Lake for an additional $25,000, but according to David C. Smith in his “Parks, Lakes, Trails and So Much More: An Overview of the Histories of MPRB Properties,” “Objections to that purchase included the argument that the patch of swamp could be bought at any time.” In 1922 the Park Board decided to buy Rice Lake, but by that time the price had jumped to $550,000. The Glenwood (now Wirth) Golf Course had been quite successful, so they planned to dredge the swamp and fill in part of it to make a meadow and a golf course.

“Dredging of the lake was completed in 1931 and work began in earnest on the golf course. With the completion of dredging, the beach on the east shore of the lake also opened in 1931.The final touch to the new golf course was a clubhouse with the appearance of a ‘very cozy cottage,’ according to Wirth, which was constructed in 1932,” says Smith. “The golf course was finally in playable condition and the first nine holes opened for play July 30, 1934. The charge for playing nine holes was set at $0.35. The full course opened the next summer. Almost immediately, the new course was the only profitable course operated by the park board.”

Being Irish, Uncle John was always sensitive to the indignities suffered by minorities. One of my earliest memories is sitting in Uncle John’s 1935 Dodge listening to the car radio give the blow by blow live report of the Joe Louis versus Jersey Joe Walcott fight. Uncle John loved them both, but he felt Jersey Joe had been cheated out of a victory in their first fight, a fight that Louis had won on a split decision. In the second fight it looked like Jersey Joe was ahead all the way. He knocked Louis down in the third round, but Louis knocked him out in the eleventh. Uncle John said about Louis, “I guess he was the better man.”

Uncle John used to tell me scary stories about Lake Hiawatha. He told me there was an old Indian woman who put a curse on the lake after she and her people were kept away from it to make way for the modernization, the dredging and the beautification. The Park Board changed the name from Rice Lake to Lake Hiawatha in 1925. Uncle John said it was to try and satisfy the woman, but she wasn’t fooled by some East Coast poet’s made-up Indian name. She swore that those people who walked on her land would be swallowed up by it, that hands would reach up out of the earth and pull them down into the bowels of hell.

I think about that old woman’s curse sometimes when I’m playing golf at Hiawatha and my ball goes off into the rough and is swallowed up by the swamp grass, and I try to hit it out of the grass, but the grass holds onto the ball, and sometimes it seems like it’s reaching out for me. They can’t kill the swamp grass. It’s part of the swamp that’s been buried under tons of fill. The grass keeps coming up because the swamp is still alive under all those modern fairways and improvements. The Park Board and the grounds crew can’t kill it with herbicides or by planting new grass. It’s a battle they fight every day, but, finally, it’s a battle they can’t win. Eventually, someday, just like Uncle John said, the swamp and the old Indian woman will return to claim their land.