My Days Page 2

  My childhood was a happy one, filled with many simple pleasures, which I began recording in a 1940 diary that, along with slippers and a scarf, I received as a Christmas present in 1939. Among the documented things that filled the days of my twelve-year-old, sixth-grade life were ice-skating or swimming at Fountain Lake, which was just a few blocks from our house, and going to movies, such as North West Mounted Police, with Gary Cooper; Santa Fe Trail and Virginia City, with Errol Flynn; and The Old Maid, with Bette Davis, which, according to my recording of January 4, “I enjoyed and cried.”

  Other “monumental” moments of those days that I felt it was important to document in my diary were working as a junior lifeguard; buying movie magazines and Cokes; my father coming home one evening with a “nifty waffle iron,” and surviving crushes that vacillated between Milton, Tom, Jim and a few other neighborhood boys, who at one point all so disgusted me that I resolved in writing to “never like a boy again.”

  Those written recordings of my early teenage days, which continued on for a few more years, always included three key players: Alicia and my two best friends, Margaret Larson, whom we all called Muggs, and JoAnn Young-strom, who was known as Mert. The four of us would explore the lake in a little boat or canoe we would rent from Mr. Murtaugh’s Boat Rentals, or we would roam the halls of Carnegie Library, the local public library, where I would seek out books on famous actors and actresses, hoping to learn about the path that had led them to stardom so I would know what I needed to do to follow in their footsteps.

  Every one of my adventures during those days included either Alicia, Muggs or Mert, and while I loved all three of them dearly, at times Alicia and Muggs got on my nerves. Unlike me, Alicia was very careful with her toys and particular about what she wore and how her clothes were neatly hung or put away. Alicia’s persnickety ways, which I perceived as being her way of showing me up with a superior attitude, infuriated me, and the last thing I needed was for her to ever get wind of my secret dream, for which I knew she would unmercifully tease me. From time to time, always in short-lived resolutions, I would also have to keep things from Muggs. In a March 1942 diary entry I wrote: “Tonight I hereby resolve never to tell Muggs any of my private affairs. All she does is mouth it off.”

  My little dustups with Alicia and Muggs never lasted long, and during times in which my better angels took over, I gave both of them a pass for their infuriating behavior. That was, perhaps, due to my understanding that I, too, could be equally annoying. In one of my diary entries in which I again resolved to exclude Muggs from my “private affairs,” due to her “mouthing off,” I also wrote: “And another thing, I am going to quit picking on everyone. Mouthing off is one of my specialties, too.”

  While I was so good at not keeping my mouth shut that I considered it to be a “specialty,” there was always one thing I never mouthed off about: my secret dream. And, while I was always thoroughly convinced I was keeping the biggest secret under our roof, there was an even bigger one playing out, right under my nose, which I was not aware of. No one was keeping this secret from me. In reality, it was no secret at all. It was right there, out in the open for all the world to see: the fact that we were poor.

  Our house on High Street, where I would dream my secret dreams, had a good-sized yard. All the houses in our neighborhood had been built on quarter-acre lots, so everyone had big yards and wonderful vegetable gardens. From the time I was very young, I was always aware that there were those who had riches far beyond ours and that there were houses far grander than ours, but those wealthy folk and magnificent mansions were simply a part of my secret dream of destiny, and the thought that we were “poor” never entered my head. And yet we were, which just made us fit in with everyone else in our neighborhood.

  I was born in October of 1928, and just as I celebrated my first birthday, the Great Depression hit. It was, of course, a time of tremendous financial struggle for so many Americans that lasted well into the following decade, and it ended with the beginning of another horrible chapter in history: World War II.

  I had just recently turned thirteen when Germany invaded Poland, and while the United States remained neutral until that fateful December day in 1941, we were all aware that our country was supplying our allies with money and materials to fight the war. During those early days of the war, we rented out the three second-floor bedrooms of our home to make ends meet. Because of that, my parents slept in the one bedroom we had on the main floor, my brother slept in the living room, and my sister and I slept in the basement. Now, when I say we slept in the basement, some may envision this cozy finished “family room” type of a thing. That would be wrong! It was a basement—a real basement—with a coal-burning stove, a washing machine and a very small unfinished bathroom.

  Not only were Alicia and I relegated to the basement, but we also had to share the same double bed, where the verbal fight for covers would sometimes get so loud, we would engender a parental shout from the floor above, warning us to “Be quiet and get to sleep.”

  On either side of our bed were constant reminders of how hard my mother worked to keep her family clean and fed. On one side there were shelves where she stored all the jams, jellies and whatever else she canned. On the other side was a small heating contraption with burners. I remember my mother pumping water and then heating it on those burners so she would have hot water for the washer. She always did her laundry early in the morning, which infuriated me, because our sleep would be cut short.

  Alicia and I tried to make the best of our shabby basement bedroom accommodations by plastering two solid walls with pictures of movie stars we had cut out of magazines. I have so many memories of looking at the photographs of those stars, wondering what their lives must be like, and secretly dreaming of the day that photos of me would be in a magazine. Of course, I never shared those dreams with Alicia, who would have teased me unmercifully over harboring such audacious thoughts. The other thing I never shared with anyone outside of our house was that I was dreaming those dreams in a basement. I remember, when I was twelve or thirteen, attending the Episcopal summer camp, where after it was lights out, all the girls would lie in bed and talk about how they missed their home bedrooms and describe how they were decorated. I would lie there in completely horrified silence, thinking, Oh my gosh! I can’t say that I sleep in the basement . . . in the same bed with my sister! But that is what we did for about four years. And yet even that never made me aware of just how bloody poor we were.

  Chapter 2

  My Family

  Although I grew up in Albert Lea, I was actually born in a Watertown, Minnesota, hospital thirty miles west of Minneapolis and lived a portion of my earliest days in Waconia, which is about thirty-five miles southwest of Minneapolis. My birth certificate listed my given name as “Marian.”

  As a young girl, I never gave any thought to the spelling of my name, but when I turned twelve, I was given a little Episcopalian prayer book that had my name embossed on the cover in gold letters. I would look at my name on the cover of that book and, as part of my secret dream, would imagine how it would look on a theatrical program and, more importantly, in lights on a theater’s marquee. The more I looked at my name on that book, the more something bothered me. It just didn’t look right to me, and finally, it hit me: my name would look so much better if I changed the spelling to “Marion.” For some reason, I felt that by changing the a to an o, my name had a more pleasing appearance. That was extremely important to me, because I knew that I was destined to one day step into the real-life role of my secret dream—that I was going to be someone special and needed a name that would look good on a marquee.

  The middle name on my birth certificate was “Ellen,” a name, and a spelling, I was so proud of and fine with that years later I would pass it on to my daughter. I was proud of the name Ellen because it was my mother’s name. My mother, Ellen Alicia Hamilton, was a Canadian, born in northern Saskatchewan, in the little wheat farming town of Tisdale, which is about 170
miles north of Regina. She was a pretty woman with blue eyes and dark hair. She was also a wonderful storyteller and frequently told tales of her parents, Irish immigrants who relocated to Canada after the Crimean War.

  My mother’s family was quite well educated, and they were all great fiddle players. They had originally come from Dublin and were proud of the educations they had received. Following the Crimean War, the boys in the family, who had served as soldiers, packed up their parents, siblings, wives and children and left Ireland, first for America, with their final destination being Canada. The lure of Canada was due to the country’s willingness to provide a parcel of land to soldiers who had served in the Crimean War.

  From what I recall, the Hamilton clan’s trek to Canada was not an easy one. They somehow made it to Iowa in covered wagons, where they spent their first winter away from Ireland in a small house. As soon as the first signs of spring appeared, the men then left the women and children behind and headed north to search for their next stop. I can recall being in awe as my mother recounted the story of how the men returned for them, loaded them and whatever meager belongings they had into covered wagons, and took them to their next stopping-off point. Exactly where that was—Minnesota, perhaps, or maybe one of the Dakotas—is uncertain. The one thing my mother did remember is that when they got settled, they all took up their fiddles and played music, and everyone danced, kicking up the dust from the dirt floor of the small shelter the men had built.

  While much of the story of the Hamiltons blazing their way toward Canada has been lost to the ages, from what I have pieced together, by the time they crossed the Canadian border and settled, the men had become scalawags and scoundrels of sorts. They were educated but knew nothing of farming. What they were good at was talking—telling stories and jokes. As for the Hamilton women, they also had no farming skills, so they used their education and became teachers.

  My mother, who had studied English and the works of the great writers, poets and playwrights, could sit and quote Shakespeare for hours (something she continued to do for the remainder of her life). She became a young teacher with her own horse and sleigh and moved in with a fine family. Every day she would go off to a tiny school where many of the children were what was referred to back in those nonpolitically correct days as “half-breeds,” half Native American and half European or Canadian.

  It was a rough life, but one my mother embraced with her adventurous, can-do spirit. She was a woman who appreciated humor, had an infectious laugh, and was fiercely ambitious and driven. She had an innate passion to get somewhere in life—to become somebody—and she loved adventure. When she was just twenty-two, she used some of the money she had set aside from teaching to travel to Europe. This would not have been a typical move for a young single woman of the time, but my mother was never a typical woman.

  She embarked on that trip with the desire to visit the battlegrounds and graveyards where the soldiers of World War I had fought and been buried. I have a picture that was taken during that trip of her standing on the deck of a ship. It is a photograph that, to me, says so much about the kind of woman she was and how she raised me. It is a photo of a young woman oozing with blind ambition who believed she could do anything and was always in search of her next adventure.

  Long after she returned from that trip, met and married my father, and had children, she still kept the travel trunk she had used during that trip. Inside the trunk was a little beaded dress, picture books from Europe, and a program from an operatic performance she had attended in Paris. That trip was clearly a highlight of her life, and she reveled in reminiscing about it so much that I thought, as a child, I would never hear the end of it.

  My paternal grandfather, Alexander Duncan Ross, was of Scottish heritage. When he was a young man in Scotland, there were big signs posted throughout the cities that read COME TO AMERICA AND WORK. There were not a lot of good prospects for a young Scottish lad in his homeland at the time, and America was in desperate need of workers. With the promise of work and a better life, he decided to leave his country and come to America to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. There was just one problem: he wasn’t a big, tough guy, by any means, which was the kind of men they were looking for to do the backbreaking work of setting railroad ties and rails into place and then hammering them together with spikes. Quickly realizing that this was work for those of a more burly constitution, he ended up becoming a jeweler—a profession far better suited for Alexander Ross, who may not have been a specimen of great physical strength but certainly cut a striking image, with his bald head and finely trimmed mustache.

  His son, my father, Gordon Wright Ross, inherited his father’s thin build, even thinner hair, and Scotch Presbyterian gentlemanly manners. He had served overseas as an officer in the Army Signal Corps during World War I, and when he returned home after the war, he decided to leave his family home in South Dakota and begin a new life in Canada. Buying into a parcel of Canadian wheatland, he soon thereafter met a feisty and ambitious young schoolteacher who was ten years his junior and had recently returned from an exciting adventure abroad—the aforementioned Ellen Alicia Hamilton.

  I can’t imagine there being anyone who knew them making whispered predictions that the electrician and wheatland owner Gordon Ross and the schoolteacher Ellen Hamilton would establish a relationship, much less get married. He was quiet—a loner—and was standoffish in social situations. She was gregarious, enjoyed interacting with people, and always managed to meet the most interesting people wherever she went. He was a conservative Republican. She was very liberal. She was always out and about and involved in various organizations. He preferred staying at home—working in the basement or remodeling rooms in the house. She was a free spirit with a wonderful sense of humor who embraced the wonders life had to offer. He, unlike his Scottish father, had hardly any sense of humor at all. He was always very serious and obsessed with exercising and seeking out all sorts of potions and elixirs to regrow his hair. She was whimsically Irish. And, while he had a beautiful singing voice and was actually quite artistic, he didn’t have a dramatic bone in his body. She, on the other hand, always had a story at the ready, which she would relay with great panache, although most of them wildly exaggerated the truth, if in fact there was any truth at all to be found in them.

  The biggest difference between these two polar opposites, who would go on to become my parents, was that he was content to settle in his newfound Canadian farming town, while she wanted more out of life and couldn’t wait to get the hell out of that town. And yet, in spite of all the forces that should have repelled them from one another, there was an attraction that resulted in marriage and a move to Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  It was the mid-1920s when the still newly wed Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Ross, now of Minneapolis, celebrated the birth of their first child, whom they named Alicia. Three years later, I came along, followed by my brother, Gordon, who was just eighteen months younger than me.

  After moving to Minnesota and having children, my mother gave up her teaching career, although she always stayed active by conducting book clubs for neighborhood women, joining the local chapter of the League of Women Voters, and serving as the president of the PTA. When money and jobs got tight, especially during the early years of the war, my father did whatever he had to do to care for his family, which at one point included his acceptance of a job that took him to the Panama Canal. When he returned, he found employment at the Interstate Power & Light.

  Although my parents were very different in many ways, they both considered their faith to be an important part of their lives. My father had been raised a Scotch Presbyterian, and my mother’s family were Episcopalians from the Church of England, and while neither of them was religiously demonstrative, attending church was very important, especially for their children. As a child, I loved going to Sunday school and church. I was fascinated by the Episcopalian rituals: the kneeling, bowing, music, readings and the priest’s ornate vestments. Those things all c
ame together with a pageantry that had a “show business” quality I found extremely appealing, although I always kept that to myself.

  Like my parents, there were also stark differences between my older sister and me. I was always very sturdy—a physically strong child who was energetic and dramatic. Alicia was more petite and slender. She was quiet, practical and serious, like my father, and tended to keep to herself, always guarded when it came to expressing her thoughts and feelings. My childhood relationship with Alicia was complicated. As much as I admired her, I also resented her. As much as I loved her, we had more than our share of fights. To me, Alicia’s appearance and mannerly ways were things I saw as being lovely. She had what I perceived to be an air of distinction and sophistication, which I lacked. She looked like the movie star I secretly planned on becoming.

  And as much as I may recoil at the thought, I would be far less than truthful if I didn’t admit to the enjoyment I found in demonstrating my jealousy by tormenting her. She was so easy to torment, and even more so as we became young teens. Alicia’s clothes were always nice and neat, while mine—both because some were hand-me-downs and because I lived a much more active outdoor lifestyle—were wrecked and torn. This resulted in my constant pillaging of her far nicer clothing and then wearing it until she caught me red-handed in something that belonged to her or she couldn’t find a certain sweater or blouse and confronted me about it. I was well aware that my “borrowing” of her clothing infuriated her, which gave me the double delight of not only looking nice but also of antagonizing her.

  Alicia and I also had very different views on what we found funny. I enjoyed joking around and laughing with my friends, while she tended to be aloof. She was, by all means, not a smiler. When we were kids, we would all be sitting around the dinner table and my mother would be telling one of her fanciful stories all laced with drama and humor and my father would at times be totally unappreciative of her tales and humor. “It’s a joke, Daddy,” I would say, begging him to understand. “It’s just a joke.” In her own way, Alicia also had less than an appreciation for my mother’s stories. In fact, she and my mother didn’t seem to understand one another much at all in any way. Whereas I was always in sync with my mother, Alicia distanced herself from her, and rarely could they find common ground on much of anything.