A Meaningful Part - The Life Story of Clarence Stolt - Foreword (revised)

 

“Let it be said,

When I am dead,

He was a meaningful part of the whole.”

                                        A quote (source unknown) found in Clarence’s journal – 1966

 

 

 

FOREWORD

 

 

My father was fifty-nine-years-old when he died from hypernephroma, or renal cell carcinoma, widely regarded as the most common type of kidney cancer. I remember how that age seemed so ‘old’ to me back in 1976 when he quietly passed away. I was just a teenager then, still emerging from protected childhood but hardly a fully appreciative adult either. Now I’ve seen plenty of my own years go by and I have crossed over the fifty-year mark (and then some) myself, and somewhere in all that my attitude towards fifty-nine went from old to mature to prime of life. Now it hardly seems fair that his life was cut short the way it was. Of course, this is one of the more slippery tricks time plays on us all. And just as easily as time slips by, so too does the stories and details of a person’s life. They fade and fade until finally they disappear altogether.

Perhaps the biggest regret I have about my father’s life, and death, is that I never had the chance to sit down and talk with him man to man about his experiences: the anecdotes, the lessons learned, the hopes, fears and disappointments he must have carried to the very end as he faced up to his own mortality.  What more might I have learned about him from such a conversation? Maybe more selfishly, what might I have learned about my own life? It is in those fleeting, daydream sort of moments that I find myself wanting to be re-introduced to the man who once loomed so large over a young boy’s world.

I remember him fondly, if vaguely, and can rely on memory enough to say with confidence that he was a good man and upstanding father. No dark mysteries there. But still, what of the many facts and circumstances that once made up so much of that life? Naturally, if not sadly, many of those bits and pieces are now gone forever; lost to history, as they say. (Not that he didn’t leave any written record behind. Surviving journals and family narratives were an invaluable source for much of what follows.)

It was for these reasons I decided to dig a little deeper into the past – his and mine – to record and preserve what I could. This before any more details of the man fade away. I owe him that.

I’ll start with one distinct memory I do have: I can still hear him in the basement of our home at night, clattering away on his trusty old Remington typewriter, the keys firing off in spurts so rapidly it sounded like a tiny motor going through its paces down there. I didn’t know then what he was writing or who he was writing to, but when he was on a roll it was almost comforting to listen to it. And so it is with that enduring sound in mind that I now start tapping on my computer keyboard what I have come to know to be the life story of my father, Clarence Stolt.

 

 

 

 

Kent Francis Stolt

April, 2012

 

 

Where Do You Go to Get Away?

In the mind of a writer places can tell a lot about people. In the mind of someone needing fresh direction or a little escape from it all, the place one chooses to go can say a lot as well. The place I go when I need to get away is a town in Wisconsin named Black River Falls. I go there when I can, which is to say not that often, maybe two times a year if I’m lucky.  Yet the older I get, the more meaningful it is every time I do get in my car and “head on up to Black River.” When I go to visit family living in town, I always come back feeling a little more sure of myself and very sure of my heritage and good fortune. Might that make it a sort of sacred place for me?

We’ll get back to that.

       For the record, Black River Falls is located in the west central part of Wisconsin. It serves as the county seat of Jackson County and tallied an official population of 3,622 according to the 2010 census. While there are two other rivers named Black flowing elsewhere in the United States, there isn’t another town called Black River Falls anywhere else in the country, or the world, for that matter. So I guess that qualifies it as a unique place right there, right?

Originally named “La Riviere Noire” or “The Black River” by French explorers in 1659, the river’s dark waters gave name to a trading outpost that was eventually incorporated into a village in 1866. By 1883 Black River Falls had grown to become a town of sawmills sending fresh-cut timber downstream for processing and the construction needs of a rapidly growing nation. (But with prosperity came peril, and in October of 1911, following days of uncommonly torrential rains, that same river rose up and went on a flooding rampage that nearly wiped out the town. Black Friday they called it.)

On a lighter note, according to the official town website the list of notable people born in Black River Falls include major league baseball players Ernie Rudolph and Phil Haugstad Rudolph pitched in seven games for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945 and Haugstad pitched sparingly for the Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds from 1947 to 1952. There were legitimate heroes, too, like United States Marine and Congressional Medal of Honor winner Mitchell Red Cloud Jr., who died in action in Korea in 1950.

       Not that any of that brief history lesson has a damn thing to do with my story, except for the fact that my mother, Carol Stolt (Nee Thompson), was born on a small farm on the outskirts of Black River Falls in June of 1922. As for me, I was born and raised in Milwaukee some years later, so I never once called Black River Falls home. Yet for as long as I can remember, the times spent up there with aunts, uncles and cousins, the many days and nights spent swimming, fishing, playing cards, anything that lent itself to sharing a good laugh. Some of the best times and best memories I will ever have.

       So really this is more about family than it is about the town itself, though in my mind the two always seemed to fit so well together. The heritage of my mother’s family, and the majority of the townsfolk, is Norwegian - hardy people who are steady-working, slow to anger and quick to laugh at themselves.

I like that.                                                                                          

       When I’m in Black River Falls I flash back now and then to some of the times we, as an extended family, have shared over the years. Too many to count.  There were weddings, vacations, sleepovers and holidays. I think of my dad’s old home movies showing Christmas Eves long ago when we all gathered in the cramped but cozy quarters of my grandmother’s house on Fillmore Street. For a few years in the mid-sixties us cousins put on our own little Nativity play for the grown-ups, complete with homemade costumes, painfully bright lights for the home movies, and a bale of straw fresh from the Johnson’s farm for the manger. Nobody would ever think of doing that these days. Probably just as well.

       But time moves on, and nowadays any trip to Black River Falls requires my stopping out at the grounds of Little Norway Lutheran Church where my mother was laid to rest in 2011. Little Norway lies at a quiet crossroads in the midst of farmland and a stretch of woods a few miles west of town. The whitewashed building with its grand steeple was built in 1873, and in the church yard are cracked and weathered tombstones etched in Norwegian to prove it. I enjoy going out there by myself and walking in the yard, then down the patchwork-paved country road next to it. I think it’s the stillness and the quiet out there that impresses me. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, out there “my thoughts are my company.” It’s the perfect spot for me to take stock of things, do a little self-inventory of past and present. I’d like to think Thoreau would have found this an agreeable place too.

This town means a lot of things to me. It becomes a source of pride and wonderful memories whenever I drive across the bridge over the Black River and see Main Street. I trust it will be like that again the next time I return.

The dictionary definition of the word “sacred” includes the phrases “highly valued and important” and “entitled to reverence and respect.” Well, when it comes to the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, I guess that covers it just fine for me. 

So if you get a chance, take a minute from your busy day to think about wherever it is you go when you really need to get away and unwind, to rethink things or recharge your batteries. It could be a backyard, a park, a town or city where you grew up. It could be a church or even a favorite watering hole, for that matter. It could be from the past or in the present. Whatever does it for you is good enough; no explanations necessary. Just appreciate the feeling you get when you think about it and don't ever let that go.

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