I stumbled across broomball one winter night in my sophomore or junior year of high school. I was plagued by teenaged angst and unrequited love(s) and, rather than plotting to blow up my school or axe-murder my family in the middle of the night, I'd go out for long solitary walks and feel sorry for myself. Even in the dead of winter. It was on one of those walks that I noticed bright lights and loud voices coming from the backyard of 145 Amherst. This was Kurt Wiessner's house and he was one of my friends from Highland Park High School and, before that, Ramsey Junior. Drawn by the lights and the voices, I walked up the driveway to the backyard and discovered broomball. I was allowed to play, became a regular and found meaning for my otherwise sad and doubt-wracked life. Turns out that there were plenty of others from my high school crowd who were happy to find meanings in broomball for their similarly pathetic lives.
145 Amherst is a big white-stuccoed slab of a house smack dab in the heart of St. Paul's Tangletown, south of the Macalester campus. It was the home of Kurt, his three older brothers and their parents. Tangletown is full of charmingly winding streets and alleys, streets with collegiate sounding names like Princeton and Amherst and Cambridge. I suppose that whoever platted that quarter of a square mile, apart from being drunk, named the streets with an ear to charm and prestige to match the grid. I leave it to others to argue if those names come off as more pretentious than prestigious. I've lived within a half a mile of this little neighborhood since 1964 and know it for what it is: a secure little enclave of the upper middle class with housing stock to match. Mostly. My swim coach at Macalester lived a block down the street from 145 and his placed looked liked it had been lived in hard by a family with four kids. Which it had. When Coach retired and moved to Lake Tahoe, the new buyers quickly gussied up the place to the point of making it unrecognizable to me from the curb.
The Wiessner place was similar. It was in a constant state of remuddle and visions of the next project. Just as soon as the current one got finished. It was a great house. We played more than our share of broomball in its sprawling backyard but we also did our share of beer drinking there since the senior Wiessners were frequently absent on the weekends.
Oh, but that sprawling backyard. The twists and curves of Tangletown's faux-medieval street map made for building lots of various shapes and sizes. The backyard of 145 benefited from this; it went rambling away from the back door's little concrete stoop toward the alley for easily 150 feet. The yard wasn't wide in the same way but its shape was perfect for flooding a broomball rink enclosed with banked piles of snow. The rink didn't take up anywhere near the whole back yard but it was at least 60' by 40', plenty of room to handle a dozen or more players at one time. And there were lots of times when a dozen or more players would descend on the Wiessner backyard on a Friday or Saturday night during broomball season. The season ran from about Thanksgiving thru Valentine's Day with allowances made for minor weather fluctuations.
Broomball mostly kept us off the streets and sober during those winters though there was some bad behavior that went along with the game. Broomball "brooms" are now high-tech items with high-impact plastic heads rather than our brooms' bristled ends; today's broom looks more like half of a kayak paddle than the ones we played with. Our brooms broke constantly in the heat of the game and needed replacing. Some nights, play couldn't start until we'd fanned out into the Mac-Groveland and Highland Park neighborhoods for an hour's worth of snatching brooms off of people's front steps and porches. Kurt was especially brazen. He'd work the apartment buildings up and down Grand Avenue for the brooms he knew he'd invariably find in their furnace rooms. This was long before landlords started installing locks on the outside doors of their buildings but the petty broom larceny might have pushed those security steps along. Jim Theirs kept a machete in his truck, not for dealing with rival gangs from Central or Monroe but for shortening the bristles of newly acquired brooms for better ball handling.
Kurt's mom and dad were remarkably tolerant of the hordes which took over their house every weekend for 3 1/2 months every year. Maybe his mom more so; she would make huge batches of Kool Aid punch for the players. As the last of the players headed for home every Sunday at midnight, they both probably breathed huge sighs of relief that their homeowner's insurance had survived to cover them for another weekend and that sleep-deprived neighbors hadn't called the cops.
Broomball at the Wiessner's didn't last much past our high school graduation in 1970. The core group of players scattered to college and jobs and, if we still got together to play occasionally, it was never in that backyard again. Kurt's was diagnosed with Alzheimer's shortly after broomball gave way to other entertainments and lived out the rest of her life in a residential care facility a couple of blocks away. I went to her funeral service in the mid-90's. Kurt's dad stayed on at 145, probably manning the place at all hours like a ship at sea.
I wasn't ever even close to being a good broomball player (the best was Kurt's brother Todd, an amazing natural athlete who reveled in making me look stupid) but I parlayed what skills I picked up into a successful intramural carer at Macalester and as a ringer at the U of M. After I graduated from Mac, I somehow managed to scam a key to the old gym and permission to flood the broomball rink in the dead of night while most everyone else in the zip code was fast asleep. I remember a great sense of peace and purpose at 2 in the morning on those freezing cold January nights. Much like playing the game.
My sister called me a few weeks ago to tell me that there was an estate sale at 145 Amherst that weekend and hadn't I known the family that lived there. Well, yes, I had. I got over there on Saturday about midday and the place was pretty picked over. Not that I went looking to add to the already unmanageable piles of stuff I've got cluttering our house. But I found a few things that cost me four bucks: an LED flashlight (I'm always a sucker for a working flashlight), a 19-tools-1 Leatherman knockoff still in its plastic clamshell, an 18" drafting ruler minus its cork backing. That wasn't why I'd gone, of course. I went, mainly, looking to poke around in my childhood and pay my respects to something that had once been an important part of my life. And. judging from my continuing fondness for the people I played and committed petty larceny with and what I've written here, still is.
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| 40+ plus years ago... |
