Home But Not Quite Home

Tony Oliva sprints out of the batter’s box at Metropolitan Stadium after a base hit. The Twins hall of fame outfielder had a career batting average of .304, winning three batting titles during his 15-year career. | Submitted by The Minnesota Twins

After leaving his family behind in Cuba as a young adult, Tony Oliva has become a beloved and respected figure for the Twin Cities community he continues to enlighten.

By Caden Christiansen

Tony Oliva walked past the glass cases in his living room holding the Silver Slugger awards, Gold Glove, replica World Series Trophy and hundreds of signed baseballs to a black cabinet on the far corner of his living room. A two-foot-tall silver trophy rested at eye level on the shelf, engraved in Spanish on the rectangular trophy plaque. The room itself holds enough baseball lore to make a fan’s blood pressure surge, but this trophy shined brighter than the smile on Oliva’s face when he pointed to it.

“I have no idea what that’s from,” he said with a smile. “They used to give me those trophies all the time back home.”

For the last 50 years, home for Oliva has been a three-level tan house with a long and skinny front yard bearing his son Ricardo’s city council sign. The corner house in the Bloomington, Minnesota cul-desac is shaded by several trees, but open enough for anybody who wants to wave to the Twins legend.

Oliva frequently makes his way down to Tony Oliva Field off highway 169 and Old Shakopee Road to watch high school, legion and youth baseball games. He used to watch his grandkids play, but they grew up years ago. He greets grandparents who watched him take the field at Metropolitan Stadium in the 60s and 70s, and gets certain pleasure from young kids yelling his name from across the stands. Even at age 83, the baseball diamond is where Oliva wants to spend his time.

“For some reason, people feel impressed that I go over there,” Oliva said.

Oliva grew up as the third oldest of 10 siblings, on the local town baseball fields and the field his dad constructed on their 120 acre tobacco farm in Pinar Del Río, Cuba. His father was a talented baseball player in the amateur town leagues, and Oliva and his three younger brothers followed suit. As kids, the Oliva boys went to school and worked long hours harvesting tobacco and taking care of the cows for their father. For a kid in Pinar Del Rio, there was nothing to do, outside of school and work, but play baseball.

At age 15, Oliva’s effortless left-handed swing was noticeable. Working the farm had helped him grow stronger as baseballs began to shoot off his bat harder and faster. He had to travel to neighboring towns to play organized baseball because his town didn’t have the players or the resources to field a team. Oliva had always dreamed of playing baseball in Havana where the most talented Cuban players competed, but as he watched teammates and opponents get scouted by major league teams, his confidence grew.

In February of 1961, Oliva signed a professional baseball contract with the Minnesota Twins and arrived in Fernandina Beach, Florida in April for Twins rookie camp. Making his major league debut in 1962, Oliva would spend 15 years with the Minnesota Twins winning rookie of the year in 1964, a gold glove in 1966, three batting titles, and was voted an all-star eight times. Widely viewed as one of the best Minnsota Twins players of all time, Oliva’s famous No. 6 was retired by the Twins in 1991 and after 45 long years, Oliva will be inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in July, 2022.

Oliva has spent the last 60 years in the United States. He lived out his dream playing major league baseball, met his wife Gourdette in a Minneapolis hotel, had three children and has become a beloved and respected figure in the state of Minnesota. But before all of the accolades, Oliva endured the same prejudice and racism that many in the United States endured during the 1960s.

Upon first arriving to Twins rookie camp in Fernandina Beach, Florida, Oliva was turned away by the assigned hotels for incoming players for the color of his skin and was forced to stay in small, cramped housing for people of color. His late arrival to camp gave him only 10 at-bats to show his skills during his first tryout, and despite his hitting prowess, Oliva was not given the same opportunities as his white teammates to showcase his abilities. After only five days of intrasquad scrimmages during tryouts, Oliva was released from the team and was told to pack his bags to return home.

Oliva knew if he went back home there would be no opportunity to ever come back. Joe Cambria, the man who had scouted Oliva and helped bring him to the United States, had other plans. He was able to convince the Twins Class A Charlotte, North Carolina team to take Oliva in while the team tried to find a suitable place for him to play.

When Oliva arrived in Charlotte, the Class A manager Phil Howser agreed to give him a place to stay and to pay him $2.50 a day for meals as long as he came to the ballpark to run 25 laps across the outfield a day and continue to work on his hitting and fielding skills.

“I walked all the way from the black neighborhood, to the white neighborhood, to the ballpark every day, four miles and back,” Oliva said. “If I take a taxi, I don’t eat.”

After six weeks of reliving the same day, Oliva was signed to the Twins rookie league in Wytheville, Virginia, but the racism he faced did not stop. On the way to one of his first games in rookie league, the team of 40 players stopped for lunch at a small town restaurant. As Oliva and the other players of color sat down to eat, the manager of the restaurant approached and told them to sit in the back of the restaurant isolated from their teammates. Oliva, who at the time did not speak any English, was confused by what was happening and followed one of his Nicaraguan teammates to the bus where they sat and waited for the other white teammates to bring them food.

“We never stopped, after that, in any restaurant,” said Oliva.

Prejudice was something that Oliva endured during his first few years as a ball player in America, but despite its frequency, it didn’t bother him. Being a major league player was his dream. What really tugged at his heart was missing his family in the stands at his games and late nights on the baseball field with his brothers.

“It’s so hard to leave your family behind,” Oliva said. “I still think about Cuba every day. God gave me a special attitude.”

With poverty and political tyranny still impacting the lives of Cuban people since its communist conversion in 1965, Oliva worries about the state of his

“For some reason, people feel impressed that I go over there.”

– Tony Oliva, Twins hall of famer

“I turned to God and I said, ‘Really?! No. 6?!’”

– Will Healy, former Park Avenue Methodist Church pastor

home country. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, he and his wife Gourdette have made numerous visits to Pinar Del Río to see Oliva’s family members. Despite not being able to visit the last few years, the couple still sends food and money to families in need on the island every month.

Former Park Avenue Church pastor Will Healy recalls meeting Gourdette and Tony Oliva for the first time after moving from Northfield, Minnesota to preach at Park Avenue. After extending an invitation to the congregation to come to the altar for prayer, Healy was astonished to see the hall of famer walking up the aisle.

“I turned to God and I said, ‘Really?! No. 6?!’” Healy said. “I always wanted to be No. 6 growing up, he was my favorite player.”

After serving as his pastor, Oliva and Healy have become close friends. In 2018, Healy officiated Oliva and Gourdette’s vow renewal for their 50th wedding anniversary at Target Field and he occasionally stops by Oliva’s house to watch baseball games.

“I found out that they are delightful, plain folks who are so gregarious and accommodating and welcoming,” Healy said.

Major League Baseball has finally cemented Oliva’s name into the most prestigious honor the game has to offer, but it is his service to the community, colorful stories and vibrant personality that will be remembered by a state he has chosen to call home. The life he has created for himself and his family in Minnesota is something he is grateful for, but there will always be a special place in his heart for Pinar Del Rio and the island of Cuba.

The last time Oliva and Gourdette flew to Cuba a few years ago, the couple visited one of Oliva’s brothers who still lives next to a neighbor’s tobacco farm. They had arrived just in time for tobacco harvest.

“I told the guy to give me the knife and showed my wife what I used to do here,” Oliva said. “Looking like I never forget.”

Designed by Ariel Dunleavy

.304

CAREER BATTING AVERAGE

220

CAREER HOME RUNS

1,917

CAREER HITS

1964

ROOKIE OF THE YEAR

2021

HALL OF FAME INDUCTEE Tony Oliva chats in the Twins dugout with fellow Twins hall of famer Rod Carew. Two of the best hitters in Twins history, the two former ball players still find time to work with young players and spend time around the team. | Submitted by The Minnesota Twins

PINAR DEL RIO, CUBA

HOMETOWN:

A place that doesn’t need us

Artist Jeff Wetzig builds an off-the-grid house in Wisconsin in order to escape the noise and combat consumerism.

By Sarah Bakeman

Jeff Wetzig held a chainsaw in one hand. He revved it up, focusing his eyes on the shady maple tree in front of him. It wasn’t diseased like the other trees he’d cleared, nor was it dangerously leaning toward the timber frame house he’d built. In fact, Wetzig usually spent his mornings tapping the tree and making coffee from the sap.

Despite being the family’s “yard tree,” as of last year it had become an obstacle for the newly-installed solar panels on the side of the house. Its lofty branches filtered the sun, leaving little power for the chest refrigerator inside. As the chainsaw ripped apart the bark, his wife and two kids shed tears.

“It was a hard thing to cut a friend,” Wetzig said. “I didn’t have time to cry. I was trying to not die from a chainsaw.”

In 2011, Wetzig and his wife Christy bought a plot of rocky, wooded land in Wisconsin. They wanted a summer escape from their Minneapolis home that required nothing more than a tent, a car ride and some food. As they spent the night, sounds of traffic and music were replaced by the ambient noise of a gentle breeze and unknown animals rustling in the darkness.

The startling sound of wildlife inspired Wetzig’s first project: a screen house.

It was a tiny, screened-in building with a stove inside, built next to the maple tree. It allowed them to store pots, pans and sleeping bags as well as providing peace of mind as they tried to sleep.

“It allowed us to go there a lot more,” Wetzig said. “If we kept enough wood in the stove, it would be comfortable. Then we would sit around having coffee in the mornings, and we would start to dream about things.”

Years earlier, when Wetzig was buying his first house, he decided he wanted a fixer-upper. After three failed attempts at restoring a home to his liking, he figured he didn’t like picking up after others’ sloppy work. He then spent mornings with Christy in their Minneapolis home, filling quarter-inch sheets of grid paper with sketches of houses they’d entitled “coffee dreams.” Sometimes they added a garden or solar panels, or they wondered how many acres of wilderness would surround them.

“We wanted to live in a place that doesn’t need us,” Wetzig said. “When I was living in our house in Minneapolis, I was aware that the property needed me on some level. I had to mow the lawn because the property and neighbors require it. But when your neighbors are squirrels and deers and bears, they don’t really need you to do anything.”

After the Wisconsin property had been purchased and coffee dreams turned into finalized plans, Wetzig spent mornings pedaling over the Lowry Bridge and down East River Road to Bethel University, where he works as an art professor. In the span of a decade, he went through a fixed gear bikes that didn’t agree with his knees and an ELF solar and pedal powered hybrid vehicle, but mainly relied on his three-speed bike.

The commute took 50 minutes, but sometimes 40 if he had the right mix of motivation and green lights. Pedaling meant he’d accomplished something before he’d even started his workday,

especially if he had to slosh through snow and ice.

As cars whizzed by, the morning bike ride forced Wetzig to move a little slower. He saw objects such as soggy couches, busted workout equipment and pieces of plywood littering roadsides. No matter how dilapidated or weather-damaged they were, the objects had one thing in common: a handmade “free” sign attached to the surface. Wetzig would squeeze the handlebars of his bike, pull out his phone and snap a picture before continuing on his way.

After months of foraging for free items, Wetzig began to turn the photos into artwork using a watercolor variation of Japanese woodblock printing. He found himself becoming fascinated with the objects themselves, but also imagining who the owners were and why the objects had become so worthless to them.

As he gained more photos than he could possibly use, the project’s roots became clear: consumerism.

“There’s a beginning of that euphoria of getting a new thing,” said Wetzig. “At the end of it, it sits out on the curb and you hope somebody will just take it away so you don’t have to deal with it… putting it out on the curb with a free sign allows [us] to assuage guilt.”

On the seat of his bike, Wetzig identified the question of American consumers: “can abundance be enough?”

He decided he wanted his Wisconsin home to be an experiment with the question “can enough be abundance?”

Between work days and art projects, Wetzig spent weekends on his land in Wisconsin. The screenhouse was soon accompanied by a kiln with a timber frame surrounding it. It served as a workspace for his potter wife, but also as a practice run for the larger-scale timber frame that would become the family home.

Starting in 2016, Wetzig spent his summers commuting to the property, working until he missed his kids too much. Usually, that meant three-day spurts. Nonetheless, he finished the foundation and the timber frame.

After two years of commuting back and forth, Wetzig and Christy bought the old firehouse in the nearest town, converting the first floor into a studio, the second into an apartment and leaving behind Minneapolis, their home and the art and culture surrounding it.

“It meant that I could sleep in my own bed and get even better sleep at night,” Wetzig said. “And I could start earlier in the day and work later in the night and still see my family.”

Wetzig spent hot summer days strapped to the top of the timber frame, filling in the roof. He calls the day the roof was completed the biggest day of his life, besides his wedding and the birth of Mercy and Abel, his children.

The summer of 2019 was spent plastering the inside and outside of the house, leaving a white finish and the individual hand strokes visible on the walls. Initials and handprints were left carved into the doorway. When the plaster dried in the fall, Christy was ready for the next step.

“It’s a house, it’s time to move in,” she said. “If you wait until you’re ready to do things, you’ll wait forever.”

So they loaded the car up with the necessities: mattresses, clothes and Legos. Mercy and her younger brother, Abel, wouldn’t consider the tool-filled building a home without the brightly-colored plastic bricks.

Two years later, the tools have been cleared. Upon entering, the main floor of the house has no walls separating rooms. An alternating wooden staircase leads up to Mercy and Abel’s rooms in the loft. A stove sits in the middle of the floor, warming the two worn, red antique armchairs in front of it. Mercy recalls her parents taking her to a history museum and seeing the same model of chair in an exhibit.

“I sit in those every day,” she said.

To the right of the stove, there’s a piano keyboard, a bed for Wetzig and Christy and a couple of rows of books containing stories, recipes and school materials that Christy teaches the kids. A rope hangs down from the ceiling, and Abel will often climb it to nestle himself in the crevice of the “Y”-shaped beam. The supporting beams were left raw, resembling tree trunks growing through the floor.

“To cut down trees … means you are affecting the landscape for years,” Wetzig said. “All the trees we cleared became part of the house.”

To the left of the stove, there’s a kitchen lined with roughedged wooden shelves made by Wetzig. Jars filled with mushrooms foraged from the property are placed in rows above stacked plates and cups sculpted by Christy: the ones that failed to sell.

Plants from Wetzig’s garden

raspberries hazelnuts garlic hazelnuts maples apples shiitakes

“The people who buy most of their things at Target and Walmart, they think [the pottery] should be perfect, like machine made,” Wetzig said.

At the back of the kitchen there’s a doorway overlooking the screenhouse and the stump of the maple tree.

The building has been made into a home since the family’s 2019 arrival. A greenhouse sits out front, preventing their collected rainwater from freezing in the winter. Patches of berries, nuts and mushrooms are grown throughout the property. On the side of the house, there’s a pizza oven built from the leftover bricks from Christy’s kiln.

The couple plans to build a screen porch on the side of the house. That project comes after Wetzig rebuilds the shabby, dilapidated shed he calls “a trial for an artist [to see].” But that comes after he finished building a sauna in the backyard, wiring the house, fixing up his studio, making bookshelves, grading his students’ assignments and putting a wall in to separate his bedroom from the rest of the main floor.

For now, one of Wetzig’s winter projects will be building a kitchen table for the family to sit around. He’ll use the wood from the maple tree he cut down a year ago. Wetzig hopes the tap marks will be visible as the family eats dinner.

Designed by Joy Sporleder

Above: The Wetzig timber-frame home stands in its second year of being a full-time residence, with solar panels, a greenhouse and a water tank out front. | Photo by Bryson Rosell