From
this
Valley
By Pete Steiner
The annual Christmas letter F
irst of November dawned gray before yielding to oblique sunshine. Fast away the old year passes! Time once again to invoke the tradition, to compose the seasonal missive … Paging through the diary, jotting stuff down, it occurs: If I had to send this to all via standard mail, I’d spend my entire year’s allocation for lattes in postage. Writing for the magazine definitely brings benefits. On the other hand, I don’t get to use my 100-year supply of return-address labels sent as “a gift” from umpteen causes that heard I gave somebody $25 once. •••• Weather’s always a worthy topic for the Year-Ender … a long wet spring culminated with snow on the first of May! F o r
us, not as bad as – was it 1992? – when we got three inches on Memorial Day. Then, for a long stretch of July and August, one of the most pleasant periods of Minnesota weather I can recall, 75-degree days, 55 at night. San Diego without the ocean? •••• Back in January, some of us old guys were declared “celebrities” and paired with lovely young dance instructors for a Red Cross fundraiser dubbed, “Dancing with the Mankato Stars.” My partner, Dani, tried valiantly to get me to shake my hips more vigorously on the salsa. On Feb. 23, at The Kato Ballroom, the crowd applauded wildly and gave generously: Thirteen couples raised more than $50,000. Pretty satisfying gig. ••••
I spent 10 years as a country music DJ, during which time I tried to convince a lot of people that there were few artists in any genre who had better vocal control than George Jones. IMHO, his evocative power put him up there with fine opera singers. So when we lost him April 26, I was sad. Yet, as much as he had abused his body with alcohol and drugs, we were lucky to have him for 81 years. “The Grand Tour,” “These Days I Barely Get By” – he could rip your guts out. I’d tried to see him twice, but “No-Show Jones” was famous for not showing (guess why), including at a Country 44 • december 2013 • MANKATO MAGAZINE
Time outdoor concert in Janesville in the 1980s. But in 1995, he finally did show, in fine voice, right here in Mankato at our civic center. I hope he’s serenading angels. •••• About a month ago, I visited Uncle Dave Boyce and his beloved wife, Doris. I’ve written about Dave occasionally, and people ask, is he really your uncle? No, but to a certain generation of young people, he was what we wanted an uncle to be: a little iconoclastic, accepting, understanding, encouraging. As the Vietnam War and the Culture Wars of the ‘70s tore at the fabric of our country, something labeled “the generation gap” began to widen. We didn’t trust our elders; they thought we had lost our minds. Whether we were protesting in the streets, shutting down the bridge, letting our hair grow long, joining communes, or listening to that awful rock music – the Rolling Stones sang, “Let’s spend the night together”! What was the world coming to?? Dave didn’t necessarily condone all that, but what counted was, he didn’t condemn it. He expected most of us would ultimately evolve into productive citizens. He was a businessman, proprietor of Backlund’s Music downtown. At a time when many business people, we thought, looked down their noses at us, maybe even considered hippies “un-American,” Dave welcomed us into his store, even offered us credit. “I was a freak,” he told me for an article I wrote seven years ago for the now-defunct Static Magazine. “We lost some business [because of it.]” He had a falling out with some others in his church over the war, and though he never joined another church, he said something that sounded like what Jesus might say: “We’ve lost the sense of neighborhood. Taking care of the neighbors, THAT
Dave Boyce in his home. | Photo courtesy of Pete Steiner