A First Letter to Stacy Benson

To get the flavor of what it was like to grow up in Portage, I always begin with earlier years when I lived with my grandparents in rural Columbia County. My mother’s youngest sister, my aunt Shirley, was only eight years younger than me and looking back, I get the distinct impression that Fred Zuelsdorf had found raising four daughters had left him feeling incomplete because for all practical purposes, I was the son that had never quite arrived in time to keep the four daughters company.

I can write much more about this time of life and certainly plan to do that in a memoir. It’s been a fascinating journey and I’m glad to be able to fill in at least some of the blanks. The family decided in 1944 - maybe 1943 – that I should be schooled in a regular school, not the one-room school that was just a mile down the road from the Zuelsdorf homestead. This meant that I was sent to live with my aunt Edith and her husband Maynard Benson who were living in an apartment in Portage. They soon were fortunate to become the caretakers of the Indian Agency House and that meant that I had to be “farmed out” to foster parents who lived very near the Portage public school.

Bill and Prue Jenkins were their names and they had raised 18 foster children over the years. While I lived with them, they also provided a home for an elderly gent who was a surviving parent and he spent most of his time in a rocking chair. Bill worked in Madison as boiler operator or some such and Prue was always wonderfully warm and concerned about my well-being. They lived not far from the marshalling yards and so I frequently heard the switch engines at work in those days before the streamliners and the much quieter diesel switch engines. Portage was a “red ball” stop on the Milwaukee Road so there were many trains and lots of hustle and bustle.

A big difference from being at home with Grandma and Grandpa Zuelsdorf was that the Jenkins had a for real house with electricity, indoor plumbing, and a furnace that burned something other than firewood. The Zuelsdorfs had none of these “modern” conveniences and lived quite serenely without them, save only that my grandma would be quite put out with her husband when he insisted on shooting off the heads of the garter snakes that kept her many flower gardens free of insect pests.

The one change that came along during my stay with them was the arrival of the party line telephone. My grandmother was a typical farm woman in that she really liked listening in on the party line. There were special rings that let the households know who was being called and one can only guess at the number of silent listeners who kept themselves informed on the latest news and such. My grandmother would put her hand over the mouthpiece and give me a stern look that needed no words - “quiet as a mouse” took on personal meaning for sure.
She cooked on a big wood stove in the kitchen and would give me baths in the copper boiler that she otherwise used to heat water for washing clothes. I had a mandatory spoonful of castor oil every day and later on dutifully swallowed “goiter pills “ that were in vogue in the Jenkins household.

More of this narrative later. I just wanted to share a “preview of coming attractions” because I also want you to know that I traveled far afield from these rural and small town origins. In 1971-72 I flabbergasted the Minneapolis Interagency Riverfront Design Team by persuading the Art Institute in Chicago to write me in my capacity as the Chair of the Nicollet Island-East Bank Urban Renewal Project Area Committee agreeing on their letterhead that Bucky Fuller would make a fine principal architect for the future being planned for the 48-acre island in the St. Anthony Falls Historic District – the only continuously inhabited island in the entire course of the Mississippi River and very much a part of both the Native American heritages (Anishinabe – Chippewa - and Dakota) and an integral part of the birthplace of Minneapolis as settled by Europeans who came along shortly after the Indian Agency House was finished in 1832 in Portage earlier in the expansion of the American frontier.

There’s a lot to work with in the context of a personal memoir in my case and I hope you will find these stories interesting. There’s something to be said for waiting until social security pays the bills before embarking on such a project and I just hope the creatures in Washington and elsewhere don’t destroy the currency with their antics while I’m still spinning yarns and making maps.

Your long-missing shirttail relation,

Fred