No one could have loved a career more than I, Glenn Herbert Ray, now approaching his 82nd year of life. For you readers to bear “witness”, it’s 5:30 PM this moment as I sit at the computer after spending ten straight hours “working” my landscaped home grounds to maintain and increase its beauty. My cartilage-less knees are killing me at this moment. It was this pain which put an end to my today’s ‘occupation’. Two years ago I was still able to reach dusk before my landscaping drives arrived at their daily end.
I cannot deny landscape gardening became my only drug of choice since early in life….and I do know when, why, and the where of it’s beginning.
My mother came from a German immigrant family. I do know my great grandmother Kraft, wife of Gustav Kraft immigrated to Minnesota directly from the old country, but being German in the twentieth century in the United States wasn’t always a comfortable setting. Great grandmother Kraft understood English but never was known to speak it. She was very much into gardening, however. Her daughter, Paulene, was my mother’s mother, who died after a nearly ten year battle with cancer before I was born. It was a horrible death. My grandfather, Herman Danner, was a carpenter who became a house builder in St. Paul a couple years before our American entry into the First World War. All of his accumulated resources were spent attempting to save his wife’s life.
Incidentally, my grandfather, Frank Ray, from my dad’s side, was born in Cherryfield, Maine before the American Civil War began….either in 1857 or 1858. His family was well established and quite wealthy, I was told, the families practiced primogeniture at that time, meaning the oldest son would receive the family wealth following the death of the father of the family. Grandfather Frank was fourth in line, so at seventeen decided to go West alone on horseback….to homestead…..eventually winding up near Hope, North Dakota. Somewhere in the corners or bowls of my house I have a post card postmarked “Chillicothe, Ohio, a picture of Grandfather Ray himself, dated 1874 he had sent to his mother, back in Cherryfield, Maine, which read:
“Mother. I am fine. Frank.” He died of throat cancer in 1917.
One note further….Grandfather Frank met my Grandmother Anna while she and her family were attempting to cross the Sheyenne River forty or so miles west of Fargo. He and neighbors came to the rescue while the Williams family’s wagons got stuck in the crossing not far from Hope. They were married a year later in Hope, lived in town not far from where Grandfather Frank had homesteaded and was farming.
My own Mother was into gardening female style. She was a German, overwhelmed with independence, determined to be the best in anything she ever challenged. She was very attractive and proud of it…..very athletic and proud of it, everyone like her, and proud of it. She entered the competitive world at age 13, after graduating from German Lutheran School of the Emanuel on the German west side of St. Paul, Minnesota in 1919. By age 16 she was head cashier at Friedman’s Super Market downtown St. Paul the largest in the city.
She met my dad at Ballroom Dancing competitions a year or two later and very soon competed as partners. He was a pharmacist and manager of the Liggett Drug store downtown St. Paul. She was much in love with dad as she was mesmerized dancing Johann Strauss waltzes. Except during fishing season, they danced together about once a week for decades until the Prom Ballroom in St. Paul was demolished.
I did not choose to be drugged by the art of landscape gardening. I believe Nature’s God made it so…..it was meant to be.
Moms were stay at home mothers then, fully responsible for the immediate upbringing of the little ones. My own version preferred to be in public or at least earning some money to help payments on the newly built house purchased on Eleanor Avenue for $6,500.in 1936. This was Depression time folks….preWar. Even so, gals dressed beautifully when they ‘stepped outdoors’ beyond the yard. Guys were wearing straw hats, dress shirts and vests or something like sport jackets during their business hours.
Mother was the only one around then who worked part time. She worked at the downtown St. Paul Emporium department store in the women’s accessories departments…which I believed included hats.
While at home she listened to popular classical music on radio….Strauss waltzes led her list of favorites, but she was really hooked on Beethoven, but I don’t think she knew any compositions by name beyond his Fifth Symphony….which she called “It’s the Fifth”, not “It’s Beethoven’s Fifth”. Handel, Mozart, Polkas and Waltzes, whatever seemed ‘classical’ in kind especially melodic, worked.
I, at age four, was an interference in her paths to listen to beauty while conquering domestic life….including make our clothes. She was very popular with every adult, very well liked and played cards, poker or five hundred like a hungry shark.
At four, I was in her way. My sister, a year older, was easy to isolate from the regular world. Give her a doll, or a set of paper dolls, and she was in her bedroom for the entire season. She was not assertive….but rather shy, tender, preferred to read, chat with her doll families.
I was a different animal entirely….”IF YOU ASK ME ONE MORE QUESTION, YOU’LL GO TO THE WALL…..DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME, GLENN HERBERT RAY? was my Mother’s pronouncement many times a day…..(I was four years old at the time. Of course I knew what the wall was once I was there, but I’d forget I was supposed to stop asking questions. I’d rather know answers! I was inquisitive by birth. I had big trouble reading anything except wartime news in newspapers, so I’d ask questions.
It’s early May, 1938. My sister was in morning kindergarten, leaving me alone with busy mother and radio music. I have no memory of the start of my standing at the wall…..a blank stucco wall near the front entry to our new house.
When I did forgetfully ask one more question, I would get an hour’s punishment standing facing that very vacant wall….then Mom could do her many tasks around the house in peace and quiet with Beethoven or something classic and sweeter in the background.
I fully understood the system….I’d simply forget…”Mom…..What does ‘capital’ mean….like St. Paul?” is the only question I do remember which did perish the peace. I was already into collecting road maps…and still have about two hundred of them. “To the Wall…That’s it!….I warned you, Glenn Herbert Ray!”
Each punishment facing the wall was one hour….being Germanic, her hour went neither over or under….sixty minutes looking at the wall. If I played any typical child payback games like pouting, staring, slouching, showing anger, any feelings whatsoever that my deed asking the question was innocent, not a crime, I’d have to stand for 120 minutes, not one minute more nor one minute less.
This meant I couldn’t use kiddy weapons to get back at a Mother…make her feel guilty. Instead I become quite adult about the matter…..”Oh dear, here we are at the wall again…..I couldn’t pout….but I learned to look and listen…..eventually with pleasure. I’d have to listen to Beethoven, Strauss Waltzes, Swan Lake highlights, even Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copeland regardless…..and it all almost immediately became a pleasure….enough a pleasure to be uplifted, wondering if the next piece would be more beautiful.
At about the six foot mark above the floor where I stood for punishment, was a wide horizontal picture-painting of a landscape garden filled with trees, shrubs and beautifully colored flowers. My mother gardened flowers; peonies, four-o’clocks, bleeding hearts, some rose shrubs, obedience, garden phlox all German neat and well placed. I did come to know the names of what she planted…by asking her….where and when she was thrilled to answer my every question! There were no radios for the outdoors then.
Mom knew tree names, shrubs, too….and so did I by this early May, 1938. Mom was a terrific teacher when outdoors.
Hour after hour of punishments studying this picture hanging on the wall a few feet over my head I already had come to recognize peonies, hollyhocks, and soon began to study a group of very narrow but tall trees in the background of the idealized colorful landscape garden setting. “Those trees look like the one Mrs. Rowell has growing in her front yard next door. I wonder what the name of that tree is? I know it’s not an elm!”….(We had a Slippery Elm growing as a streetside tree at the front boulevard.)
“I’ll go ask her!….And so, as soon as I was released at the sixty minute mark, I skipped happily over to next door neighbor, Mrs. Rowell’s back door. (Children, then, at least in St. Paul, were not allowed to go to the front door until roughly high school age, beginning ninth grade in those days.)
“Mrs. Rowell….What’s the name of your tall tree at the front corner of you house?”
“Well, Glenn, it’s called a “Lombardy Poplar”.
“Thank you!” and I turned around knowing the name of that tree ever after. But, Mrs. Rowell didn’t let me go so early.
“Why on Earth did you ask me that question, Glenn?” I told her I had seen it in a picture. It turned out the tree was indeed a Lombardy Poplar…a very popular inexpensive tree to buy at the time.
Mrs. Rowell was my first ‘client’ as a landscaper. A few years later she began hiring me to lay out her garden shrubs and flowers in the Spring.
I was then, and still am very dyslexic years before that word was invented. I knew the alphabet by heart early, but couldn’t read letters, and got my head snapped more than a couple of times for printing G and R backwards as I saw them….tough when ones name is Glenn Ray. I never got it straightened out until second grade when aged teacher, Bell Swanson, announced in front of the class…”Glenn Ray has finally decided to make his capital Gs and Rs properly…It’s about time! Isn’t it?”
“Yes, Miss Swanson”, they all agreed. I was always considered second rate student until third grade when my favorite teacher of all time, Mrs. Lucille Jaeger, startled me by saying in front of the class, “I understand, Glenn Ray, that you draw maps at home. Could you draw a map of the United States on the black board for the class?”
Oh what a piece of cake. I had drawn that at home a hundred times from the atlas Mother got me for Christmas one time….When I drew maps, I never asked her questions……It was wartime. I even knew all of the capitals of Europe as well. I loved maps.
I am guessing it took two minutes to draw the US map. I’d practice it at home testing my accuracy starting at Angle, Minnesota, go West to and around Puget Sound down the Pacific Coast making needed indentations for San Francisco Bay, then south to Baja, in Mexico and easy lines to the Rio Grande, Louisiana and the Mississippi’s end to the Gulf….Florida’s easy, then up the coast, a bit more demanding at Chesapeake bay, then up to Massachusetts and Maine. I knew drawing the Great Lakes well.
The class (about 38 kids) was stunned. I thought everyone experienced at home what I did. Didn’t they draw maps too? Then I asked Mrs. Jaeger if she wanted me to draw the states as well.
She told me to go ahead…..I always worked from California to the Mississippi River….that was easy….By the time I got there, in maybe another two minutes, she asked the class for an applause….and sent me back to my desk.
It was before third grade when I learned to ‘read’ the signature of the painter of my landscape garden picture in the lower right hand corner of the painting, even though I couldn’t yet read in class…..R. ATKINSON FOX….. I looked him up on the internet only about five years ago….. Please look it up as well. Check out some of those paintings.
My Mother had bought that R. Atkinson Fox painting when she was sixteen and working at Friedman Brothers. She walked home carrying it with her across the Wabasha Bridge…”I thought the painting was so beautiful!”
I am forever grateful for having had to stand in front of that beautiful, idealized painting of an idealized classic landscape garden of around the end of the nineteenth century with nothing else bothering to think about. I began playing landscaping in Mrs. Rowell’s son’s sand box a place he never like to play. I had become drugged….and only discovered the presence of the ‘malady’ about eight years ago…..yet have enjoyed it all of my life.