Gary's StoryStack

Love, Love, Love . . .A TRIPLE PLAY

Here’s the final entry in a short series of love stories:

We rookie reporters for The Minneapolis Star who found ourselves momentarily not busy would sometimes be sent to a cubicle in the lobby, just outside the newsroom, to interview a member of the public who had entered the building hoping to get a story into the paper.

This often produced in us a fear of boredom, of time spent on what would produce neither a story nor a byline. That sort of assignment came to me only three times, this one the most memorable:

The person sitting in the cubicle was a man in, I guessed, his 70s, portly, with a broad face and full head of white hair. His shoulders sagged, and his eyes pleaded for attention.

He told me he had just driven into town from Madison, Wisconsin. Previous stops: Indianapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee.

Why was he traveling? Why was he here?

He said his wife had recently died. He wanted the world to know what a wonderful woman she was, and how rich their life together had been. But he apparently understood that he needed something more than that to get their story told. After all, the world is filled with folks whose sadness at such a loss smothers them.

He needed a gimmick, and he brought one with him. He opened a large art portfolio, and he spread out on the table between us a three-dimensional cardboard model he’d created of a baseball diamond, with baserunners and infielders poised in action.

He saw that I was impressed, and he said, “This a from a real game my wife and I went to, between the Detroit Tigers and the Chicago White Sox. She loved baseball.”

Suddenly, he brightened, pointed to the model and announced: “It’s a triple play!”

He wondered if a news photographer would take a picture of him and the baseball scene, and if I would write a story about his life and his loss..

“I’ve been traveling for a few weeks,” he said, “going from one newspaper to another, hoping to let the world know what I’ve lost.”

A grieving man, on a grueling road trip, searching for sympathetic ears, and for space in print to honor his wife and their love?

Seemed newsworthy to me. My editor agreed, and we ran the story. With a photo he’d brought of him and his wife . . . and of him and his triple-play.

* * *

Another day, the city desk sent me to cover the aftermath of a house fire; an electrical short circuit had scorched a couple of walls – the sort of thing that could be repaired.

The homeowner was an elderly unmarried woman named Helga Turnquist, distraught about damage from the fire, of course, but more upset that she did not have the option to get the damage repaired. Her house – typical of those with elegant mahogany woodwork and built-in hutches – was scheduled to be demolished to make way for a new Interstate freeway.

By the time I arrived, Miss Turnquist had told a fireman she had no idea where she would go.

As firefighters opened walls to check for further damage, Miss Turnquist, a slender, silver-haired woman clearly born in the late 1800s, stood alone and lonely, seeing her history crumble.

I wondered what that history would tell us, but in that moment I did not want to intrude on her. I tried to imagine what her life, until now, had been. Precisely placed around the living room were old family photos, crystal vases resting on dainty lace doilies, a silver candelabra on the mantel.

In one corner of her living room, an upright piano, made of oak, carefully polished, obviously cherished. On the music stand, the pages of a composition by Edward MacDowell, written in 1896 – At an Old Trysting Place.

Did Miss Turnquist ever want to marry? Have children? Meet someone for a tryst?

* * *

Gary Ales taught in St. Paul high schools for 37 years, pouring love into kids everywhere he went, including on weekends, when he was not being paid.

Beyond his devotion to his wife and children, he devoted himself to this mission:

To introduce his students to a wider world than the one they lived in, and to the value of expanding their own lives by performing service for others. He offered them opportunities he had never had, as one of nine children in a family of less than modest means.

He organized kids into what he called the Friendship Club; they sang and danced for residents in retirement and nursing homes.

He labored with kids in cleaning up litter on the banks of the Mississippi.

He took kids camping in the Boundary Waters area of northern Minnesota.

He led kids on group bike rides around the Twin Cities, to places they’d never seen or even heard of before. He loved the kids so much that he wanted their lives to expand.

Gary was a gifted athlete, and he coached kids in several sports. As a member of the St. Paul football coaches association, he asked his colleagues to institute the practice commonly observed by teams in hockey and volleyball: forming a line at the end of a game to pass the opponents’ line for a round of celebratory handshakes and solidarity.

“No!” those other coaches bellowed. “We want our football players to be tough as nails.”

Gary lost that campaign, but he succeeded everywhere else, paying special attention to kids who were not gifted athletes or gifted students.

One Saturday, hours before one of those group bike rides was to start, Gary got a phone call from a young girl who was scheduled to join the outing. She was crying. Her bike was broken, she said, and she couldn’t go.

Gary hustled over to her house and fixed her bike. He wasn’t about to let her miss an opportunity to grow.

That wasn’t his job.

That was his love.

* * *

Thank you for being here.

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Cheers,

Gary