Linden Street

Linden Street

In the late forties, ours was the house at 417 Linden Street in my hometown, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. We lived there until I was nine years old. The house sat directly across the street from Haentze's Wholesale Florist Company and close to the Goodrich Senior High School building. It was a quiet area where neat older homes lined the street. Mature linden trees towered along the terraces and in front of the high school. Only five blocks long, Linden Street was the center of my world.

The neighborhood kids played together daily. One of our favorite activities was to explore the rank of hothouses that made up Haentze's greenhouse. We ran between the rows of flower benches, sometimes playing hide and seek, sometimes just looking at what was there. There was one peculiar place in the hothouses where a stairway descended into a black hole.

None of us ever wanted to climb down the steps to see what was there, because when we tossed a stone into the hole, we heard it fall into water. Even Tony, whose parents operated the place, didn't know where the stairs led. It was so dark inside the hole that we were unable to assess its contents. That information vacuum allowed room for all sorts of conjecture. We fed off each other's imagination and envisioned the direst of purposes for that hole in the floor. It housed my worst demons and that place remained a mystery to the day we moved away from Linden Street.

The entrance to Haentze's public office area was a thirty by fifty foot hothouse filled with displays of tropical and other specimen plants. One such display included a water feature, which was home to a baby alligator. I never visited Haentze's without stopping to see the alligator. I don't know what became of the reptile. I never saw it in a larger state. I suppose Mr. Ferdinand didn't want a customer coming in for a hydrangea plant and leaving minus a finger.

The Haentze employees worked at a potting bench in the next room planting and transplanting tiny seedlings. Their work was hypnotic to me and I loved to watch them. I had a million questions and their patience with me knew no bounds. Haentze's occupied the twenty or so acres south of and adjacent to the Goodrich Senior High School property. Out behind the hothouses were the compost heaps and beyond that the river formed the west boundary of the property.

If we lost interest in Haentze's, we might start up a baseball game on the high school lawn. Our ball diamond was situated far enough from the building that even the most powerful of the boys was in no danger of putting one through a school window. The high school playground was located in the flat area behind and to the west of the school building. There the playground had stationary pieces of equipment for public use: swings, jungle gyms, and bars.

Additionally, during the summer months, the city recreation department provided supervised activities there. For a few pennies, I could purchase several lengths of material from the big spool of colored plastic strand and braid a key chain or a bracelet. We made things out of paper, played games, and had fun. The attendant was usually a college student who was home for a summer break. When it began to get dark, we played "hide and seek" in someone's yard, or "olie, olie, oxen free" over a neighborhood garage.

In winter, the city recreation department maintained two skating rinks in the playground area behind the high school. The rink attendant started flooding the sites at night as soon as the temperature permitted it. "Boards" surrounded the hockey rink and the other was available for recreational skating. This was a popular activity and most of the neighborhood children and some adults suited up after supper and headed over to the ice shanty. Often John or Tommy Remo stopped on their way through our yard and picked me up. They were older boys from two streets over and looked out for me.

The shanty was the hub of this activity. It was a small building, only about eight feet wide and fifteen feet long. Raw wooden planking formed the floor. It was rough and splintered from skate blades and toe picks. There were simple benches along each wall where we sat to change into our skates or to take a breather. The space under the benches was crammed with shoes and boots.

An attendant kept order in the shanty and played records like "Skaters Waltz" over the loud speaker. Folks glided counter-clockwise around the oval to the music. He also kept the potbelly stove in the shanty stoked. The shanty was usually crowded but always cozy. When our hands, toes, and nose got too painful from the elements, we came in to sit a spell and warm up before going back out into the winter night again.

Vaccines for illnesses such as Poliomyelitis, Mumps, Measles, and Chicken Pox did not exist in the late forties so it wasn't surprising when I got the hard measles. Rubeola is highly contagious, and the public health nurse required Mom to keep me at home until the rash faded. She also tacked a quarantine paper on the front door of the house to warn any visitors.

My sister also got it and we suffered together in a dark room. My eyes ached for about a week and the all-over, red rash was hot and itchy. Mom filled the bathtub with cool water and added cornstarch to it. Those baths soothed us while we were sick.

The scariest communicable illness in those years was Poliomyelitis or Polio. Polio was relatively common then and often people spoke of epidemics. Polio frequently caused varying degrees of paralysis that could be permanent. Those most seriously stricken by it couldn't breathe and required mechanical respiratory support in the form of an "iron lung."

This device was essentially a body-sized tin can within which the patient lay. Only the person's head was exposed and a seal kept air from escaping from around the neck. A motor created alternating negative and positive pressure inside the can and on the patient's chest causing the person to inhale and exhale.

In those days, hospitals everywhere had entire wards dedicated to the care of patients in iron lungs. Many others were unable to walk again or could do so only with the aid of crutches. We were fortunate: no one in my immediate family was so stricken. Dr. Jonas Salk developed a vaccine that provided immunity against the virus in 1955.
One fall day a noticeable ruckus on the high school lawn caught my attention. The facade of the High School building there was slightly longer than a city block and it was set back from the street by about 300 feet. The majestic, mature Linden trees that populated the lawn in front of the school were such fixtures that I rarely paid them any attention until that day. When I became aware that neighbors were converging on the grass in front of the school, I went to investigate.

The cause of the excitement was the appearance in one of the Linden trees of a large, majestic, snowy owl. One of the biggest in North America, it was far from its normal territory to the north. It's large white form in the green canopy attracted a sizable crowd and it seemed as comfortable watching us as we were watching it. We maintained our vigil for more than an hour before it spread it's nearly six-foot wings. We watched as its sleek body slipped silently around the end of the school and out of sight to the west. The occurrence made the newspaper the next day.

I have many wonderful memories of my life on Linden Street. The pace of our days was slower and less complicated then. The high school building and the playground behind it are gone now. Hard looking, square, yellow brick buildings have replaced all of it. Riverside Elementary School sits on our impromptu baseball diamond and no hint of Haentze's greenhouse remains. The Zimmerman Athletic Park occupies that space these days. The house at 417 Linden is still there but I wonder where the kids play now. The soft, comfortable feel of the neighborhood that nurtured me is no longer apparent and I mourn its passing in my hometown, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.