My half brother Leonard Carl Lundeen was born in Minneapolis on December 5th, 1934. Growing up, I only saw him when he was on holiday leave from the Army -- flying in from Korea, Germany, or Vietnam, where he served mostly in the Military Police. The story I got from my older brother Billy is that Leonard dropped out of high school and lied about his age to get into the military when he was sixteen.
My dad, who was not his biological father, tolerated Leonard, at the most -- but then, my dad pretty much just tolerated everyone; he was about as affectionate as a wasp. Dad refused to pick Leonard up at the Greyhound Bus terminal in downtown Minneapolis when he came on leave, so my memory is of him loping up the sidewalk from the city bus stop on Como Avenue and ringing the doorbell.
He was a tall drink of water, standing about six foot eleven in his undarned stocking feet. We had a chintzy ceiling lamp in the dining room, an angular pinchbeck affair that shed about as much light as a white paper bag -- Leonard continually rammed his head into it whenever he came for dinner. And he came as often as he could, because he loved to eat. I have seen him devour half a turkey in one sitting, with several helpings of mashed potatoes, stuffing, whipped sweet potatoes, half a dozen dinner rolls, and a large slice of apple pie topped with a wedge of cheddar cheese, on the side. And he could drink coffee until it seemed to pour out his ears.
He was always a gentle and kind man around me. He brought me presents every time he came to visit. A cuckoo clock from Germany; a black silk windbreaker from Vietnam with a dragon hand embroidered on the back; and my first transistor radio from Korea. This last item was one of my most cherished possessions as a teenager. It tuned in to KDWB just perfectly, so I could listen to the Beach Boys and Rolling Stones in angst-driven bliss. It even had a separate bandwidth indicator for international broadcasts, with little dots helpfully labeled “London,” “Paris,” and “Tokyo.” I could never raise anything with them except static.
Leonard retired from the military around 1985 and bought a house in Nordeast Minneapolis. It had one bedroom downstairs and two dormered bedrooms upstairs. The house was very modest, but then most houses in Nordeast were pretty modest. People in that neighborhood who had any money invested it in kabanosy sausage, not in fixing up their domiciles.
He was unlucky in love. His first wife was a Vietnamese girl. When he tried to bring her over to introduce to mom and dad, they literally shut the door in his face, and hers, and refused to speak to him until she fled to her relatives in California. His next wife was a obstreperous drunk, with flaming red hair that she piled up on her head into a beehive. She could drink my dad under the table, which took considerable talent. Alas, she got the d.t.s one day and smashed most of the furniture in their house. Leonard had her arrested, then she divorced him. His last marriage was to an LDS woman who had a son from a previous marriage. I only met her once, and even though we were co-religionists she seemed to have a chip on her shoulder the size of a two-by-four. I was not much surprised when she took him to the cleaners with the help of a slick divorce lawyer.
In his later years, before liver cancer took him suddenly in 2002, once he was free of female distractions, he collected a large variety of handguns. He spent many happy hours polishing them and keeping them oiled. He doted on cable television, never missing a war movie -- especially any with John Wayne or Robert Mitchum. He never learned to drive, so when I was available after my own divorce he would pay me to drive over to Totino’s on East Hennepin to get him a large meat pizza with toasted fennel seeds. After he was diagnosed with liver cancer, I also drove him to numerous medical appointments. I never heard him once complain about his “Big Casino,” as he called it.
Like most wounded bachelors (including me), his surroundings eventually became permanently blended into a trashy wasteland. He kept stray, feral cats, which spurned the use of a litter box. And, like most bachelors, he was under the illusion that he was keeping the house spick and span by mopping the kitchen floor once a month and vacuuming the living room with a Hoover that lacked a bag.
There was an old varnished panel screwed into the wall of the downstairs bedroom, behind which Leonard was convinced there was an illicit treasure trove of some kind. The original owners of the house were apparently notorious bootleggers, and when the Feds finally dragged them off to the hoosegow, their ill-gotten gains were never discovered and confiscated. When Leonard would gloat about the incipient windfall behind the panel to me I’d ask him why he didn’t open it right away. “It’s my rainy day fund, Timmy” he’d tell me. “When the meat wagon is coming for me, then I’ll open it!”
Well, the meat wagon finally came for poor Leonard, as it will for all of us, but by then he was so exhausted and emaciated that he didn’t care about his fabulous hidey hole anymore. So he never opened it. But I got to thinking about it after his funeral, and since I had the keys to his house I decided to go open it up -- to honor his memory, of course, nothing else. When I got there I found my older brother Billy had preceded me, jimmying the lock to the front door to get in. He was industriously collecting all of Leonard’s gun collection. “For safekeeping” he told me. (He’s still safeguarding it in his own home today, as far as I know.) I told him about Leonard’s fantasy about the panel, and, being as, um, curious as I was, he got a couple of phillips screwdrivers out of his car and we went to work on the panel. It had sustained a lot of water damage over the years, and was swollen and warped; so it didn’t want to come out in one piece. Finally Billy just grabbed an edge and heaved with all his might and a corner of the panel tore off in his hands. We then yanked the rest of the rotten wood off to reveal . . .
Old newspapers and a shattered brown whiskey bottle amid a pile of plaster rubble. And a stoppered Y connection for the sewer pipe. Nothing else. I locked up the house after Billy had gotten the last of Leonard’s guns. Since Leonard died intestate, without a will, his house was eventually sold for back taxes. He lies in Section 16, Site 84, at Fort Snelling National Cemetery in Minneapolis, Minnesota
