Uncle Louie

These are the stories of my life and my family, reconstructed from direct memory and from fleeting snatches of conversation and observation. Plus a little creative guesswork. As the years ripen I grow more determined to take charge of my own history, to leave behind a narrative that informs my children, and their children, and maybe the whole damn world, that there once was a man named Tim Torkildson, and what things befell him and his family . . .

My Uncle Louie Hedges was married to my mother’s sister, Aunt Ruby. How they met, how they fell in love, how he courted her -- of these things I know nothing. What I do know is that Aunt Ruby was a fastidious housekeeper and upholder of the bourgeoisie faith, while Uncle Louie was a rowdy, somewhat loudmouthed gambler -- always bright red in the face. A chain smoker, he trailed cigarette ash all over Aunt Ruby’s house, and liked to call me “Bowtie” because I once was dragooned into visiting them right after Mass, still dressed in my Sunday best, which included a bright red bowtie. I despised him for attaching that nickname to me.

They lived in a large house on a large piece of land in the suburb of Edina. Before the freeway came through, it was a long tedious drive out to their place from our home in Southeast Minneapolis. I spent those long drives in the backseat, counting trees. I once got up to 654 before letting out a scream and punching my sister Sue Ellen in the small of the back -- for which I was hauled out of the car and threatened with being abandoned by the side of the road. I don’t recommend counting trees as an effective game for children on long road trips.

Coming from our cramped 3-bedroom home, which housed 2 adults and 4 children, with only one bathroom, Ruby and Louie’s house seemed immense. The upstairs had 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. And they only had one kid. In the master bedroom was a spacious walk-in closet, in which there was a ladder that led to a trapdoor in the ceiling -- which opened into a tremendous attic under the peaked roof, lit by round mullioned windows at each end. The attic smelled of camphor and fried dust. It contained steamer trunks and leather suitcases and gateleg tables and precariously leaning stacks of National Geographic and The Saturday Evening Post. There were cribs and toothless old radios and a rusty black Singer treadle sewing machine. A creaking mahogany wardrobe brooded in one corner, filled with three piece wool suits and floppy Easter hats; the floor was littered with brittle leather high button shoes and some weirdly shaped things I took to be dead bats but which I later learned were spats.  

In our own house back in Minneapolis we didn’t have a real attic -- just a low space under the roof that had a mattress of spun asbestos laid down. It was of no consequence. People of consequence, like Aunt Ruby and Uncle Louie, had big jumbled attics, with enough stuff in them to start a thrift store. When I grew up the idea of an attic of consequence stayed with me -- I wanted a dark and musty and unheated attic at the top of my house where old magazines and morris chairs with the horsehair showing could be stored. But the only house I and Amy ever owned with a decent attic, on Como Avenue in Minneapolis, had been invaded years before we bought it by pigeons and squirrels -- who claimed squatter’s rights until I poisoned them with little plastic bowls brimming with bright green antifreeze along with some rodenticide pellets. But by then the accumulated guano was more than I wanted to deal with, so I sealed the holes and locked the trapdoor and we never kept anything up there -- branding me and my family, in my own eyes, as people of no consequence.

Uncle Louie had a fawn-colored Great Dane, named Tiny. The dog was extremely patient with me, letting me mount and ride it around like a pony, or pull its ears when it displeased me. I was never afraid of it -- rather, I treated it like an idiot companion, taking it around the backyard and pointing out obvious things it probably didn’t understand.

“See there, Tiny” I’d say to it, “that big tin tub? That’s where Uncle Louie keeps his grub worms for fishing. Let’s take some out to throw on the porch roof.” Or in late summer when their plum tree was full of succulent ripe fruit that the wasps guarded jealously from my questing fingers, I’d command Tiny to go pick me some, and when the poor dumb brute just looked at me, wagging its tail, I would fly into a rage and box its ears.

Uncle Louie owned a Ford Dealership in Edina. He did very well with it for many years until, so I was told by my mother, he lost it in a card game. He then wangled a job as train conductor on the Great Northern’s Empire Builder run. Back in the early 60s this was considered a peach of a job, since conductors not only punched tickets but facilitated round robin card games for big spenders out of Chicago, and provided cooling adult beverages when the club car was padlocked for the night -- all for a hefty fee. Louie enjoyed the job immensely -- in fact, he enjoyed it too much; he gambled with the high rollers and lost his shirt, and he always took a convivial drink along with those he was serving liquor to. When he died of liver cancer at the age of 59 Aunt Ruby had to sell their big home in Edina to pay off his gambling debts. She moved into a very modest home, with no attic, out in Eden Prairie. And there she met Bill, a retired school teacher, who liked what he saw, pitched some woo, and relieved her of her widow’s weeds. His ample teacher’s pension provided for both of them very well. Once she was remarried she never spoke of Uncle Louie again, at least not in my hearing. My parents never mentioned his name again, either. It was like he had never existed.

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My nephew Rob Torkildson sent me a FB msg with a few corrections and observations of his own:

SiffyandTor Torkildson A few things that are in question. Louie had a towing company, not a Ford dealership. He played for the Green Bay Packers, which I have verified and I remember him showing me his leather helmet. He was pretty old when I met him, but, he liked me because I played sports. He liked the hand slap games and would tell me about chasing deer, pinching their asses, before he killed them. I thought Louie a great character. Tork and Louie swilled many nights away downtown at the Annex and Auggies. Yes, he was a gambler, drinker, and lost everything is what I learned. His son, Bob, became a high ranking Officer in the Air Force, and Ruby retired in luxury. 900 19th Ave was a weird set up, that damn tiny bathroom and kitchen. Why? I preferred washing myself in the limestone soaked basement sink. Enjoyed your Story! Keep them coming Tim, Rob