Linda Buturian 11735 90th Avenue Milaca, MN 56353 320/983-6376 rumriver@frontiernet.net
Conversation with Fran Blacklock, September 2, 2004. (On her porch in Moose Lake, Minnesota.)
Where did you grow up Fran?
In Minneapolis, except for three years when we lived in Albert Lea.
How old are you now?
I’ll be 90.
Before you married Les, you worked and did some traveling.
In 1937 I went out West with a car I borrowed from my father, and two teachers from Baudette--special friends—and another woman and my mother. Five of us in the car along with our baggage. We drove from Minneapolis to Los Angeles and went through all the national parks along the way going and coming, wonderful. I bought this ring from a Navajo jeweler who had made it and he was wearing one like it; it’s my favorite ring,
I was noticing your ring at lunch; both the stone and setting are beautiful. When did you go to Mexico?
In ’39 and ‘40.
So you were 23 and 24 then. And this was Mexico City?
That’s right. It was a wonderful experience.
Did you go there with friends?
I went by myself with directions of where to stay from my uncle who had gone down there before to brush up on Spanish. It cost me ten dollars to come from Minneapolis to Mexico-
By train?
Private car. This teacher went to Mexico in the summer times and I was one of his passengers, and Miss Bowen, who turned out to have been my Physical Ed. teacher in Washburn High (laughs). She didn’t know anybody in Mexico and didn’t have the vaguest idea where to go and so I took her with me. She purchased choice things and she sold them, and I bought a plate and two wool rugs that were handmade that are still being used, haven’t shown any wear except on the fringe.
Anyway, my uncle gave me names of three places where I could inquire. Mrs. Ebberts was the first. The place was walled to the sidewalk like so many places are, and a gateway to get to the innards. A little girl came to the door and asked who I was. Un momentito she said. Mrs. Ebberts could keep me for three days.
The second place was run by two sisters who had inherited their mansion. They came to the door and I started to tell them who I was, un momentito, they went to get a roomer who was staying there. She was a Spanish teacher from Arizona, and she said well you can room with me. I ended up living with her for two summers. The second summer we rented an apartment together and picked up some of the boyfriends we had met the first year. Jesus was my boyfriend for those two summers. We met him at a supper club; he came up and introduced himself to us. He worked for the oil company.
Did you correspond with him?
Not much. He sent me a bracelet. We had several boyfriends in Mexico. It was easy there. My friend eventually married one of them, which was a mistake.
There’s one thing I’ve never told anyone. When I was in Mexico, people thought I looked like the actress Loretta Young. I was flattered, of course. This was at the height of her career. People would come up to me and ask me if I was Loretta, or question whoever was with me. I’ve thought about that, how we look at someone from another culture. There’s something about their facial structure that calls attention to the fact that we don’t know them individually, that they resemble one another.
In Mexico, the Zozoya sisters, Luz and Carolina, had an At Home night when all their friends knew they were welcome to come and sing and play and dance and have drinks. My roommate and I went often and had a wonderful time. I learned many of the folk and popular songs and brought a stack of sheet music home with me. When I returned I was going through some of the music with Kathleen, a fine pianist who was a classmate of mine at the University, and based on that, she asked me to sing a program for the Faculty Wives Club, which she was one of, and from that program somebody had the courage to ask me to sing for the Minneapolis Woman’s Club on Loring Park. I showed the slides I took, such things as a loaded down donkey that was typical of small town transportation; living like we do, you don’t expect to see anybody with a donkey. Anyway, I wore a costume which I brought back with me and I sang some songs, and told them about the songs, and Kathleen played some solo piano numbers from well known Spanish composers. From there I got asked thirty, forty times. We charged twenty-five dollars a show.
Kathleen was married to a plant professor, and I’ll never forgive him for what he said about Rachel Carson. All of us in the music school were good friends. Her husband came to a backyard party at one of the homes about the same time as Rachel Carson came out with her book Silent Spring, and he pooh-poohed it, “Well she’s no scientist.”
Little did he know.
I heard another scientist from our church who pooh-poohed her, too.
She probably had a hard time of it.
Until her point was proven. .. The second summer, before I went to Mexico, I took a short course in directing music from Peter Tchosh. In two weeks I learned more from him in directing than I had in four years at the University. He was just marvelous.
You went to the University for Music?
I graduated in 1936 with a B.S. in music education, right in the middle of the depression. Very few people got jobs that year, and I was fortunate to get one in Baudette. I taught Junior High English and girl’s Phy. Ed. I had to coach woman’s basketball, which was a foreign language to me. The men’s coach helped me. I formed a chorus, and we performed Jerry of Jericho Road. A big success. They had never had anything like that in Beaudette. One student performer came from Canada across the ice from Rainy River, on a railroad bridge.
From 1937-8 I taught in Sebeka. I put on a junior high operetta called Tom Sawyer. Two wonderful kids with marvelous voices were the leads. The Superintendent at the time was not going about things right, manhandling the students, and just before midnight on the last day that we could have resigned legally, three of us handed in our resignations. Bravery in numbers, I guess. I don’t think he was there very much longer.
Then in ‘39 and ‘40 I taught in Mound. I put on an elementary school operetta, Hansel and Gretel, and the next year I put on Pirates of Penzance at the high school. I was teaching in Mound during the big Armistice Day Blizzard, Nov.11, 1940. Our superintendent had arranged for a speaker. A school board member came in from the country and said, What, are you crazy? You’ve got to let those kids go home, there’s a storm coming. Well the superintendent had this speaker and we had to stay, so we did, and we had lunch. By that time the storm was at full blast and we had over a hundred kids that couldn’t get home. It was a terrible time. And three of us teachers stayed across the street from the school and were responsible for taking care of the kids, along with a couple of the men teachers. The home ec teacher was my roommate; she had never been in the kitchen of the school before and didn’t know anything about the ovens and she had a girl fixing potatoes. She stuck the potatoes in the oven; well the moisture and the expansion blew up the oven and blew off the oven door, so that was the end of baking, but luckily some veterans organization was going to have a turkey dinner and they cancelled it, so the men got the turkey dinner and that lasted us the whole week. By the time the last kids got home we were eating turkey soup. Some of them lived in Maple Plain which was through the worst roads and they were the last to go home.
I bet they remember that.
I wrote up a story on it for a book Carol Bly was making on blizzards. I don’t know if it ever sold, I never heard of it, but I did write it up.
Can you say more about why you quit the teaching jobs in Baudette and Mound?
I quit due to the marriage clause. The contracts in those days read that if a female teacher ever married that would cancel her contract. I figured it wasn’t for me, so I quit.
After Mound I went to Minnesota School of Business to learn to be a typist or whatever you learn. Laugh. I graduated in the summer of 1941 and that fall I got a job at Northwestern National Life as a supervisor--I never used a typewriter or shorthand or anything. I was supervisor for the service department, about 18 people running around who didn’t care about working. It’s the first job they were put in at the office.
The day before I started was Pearl Harbor day, Dec. 7, 1941. Right around then everybody got patriotic, so they figured if they had a chorus there could be use for it, politically and patriotically. Because I’d been a music teacher they asked me if I could form a chorus, so I did. I had contact with every department, I think that’s why I was elected President of the Employee’s Association, which had about 1300 people that worked there. I worked there 2, 2 ½ years, before I was told I was as far as a woman could go in the company. I had not asked for a raise or anything. But the fellow that did the booking for our chorus, inquired about me, and that’s what they told him, so I quit and went back to the agency that got me the job. The Star Tribune was looking for somebody to fill a job and they weren’t telling what it was, because they didn’t want anybody else to find out about it –to start a public opinion poll, like the Gallup poll, so I was hired not knowing what I was going to be doing, and I think they wanted a chorus too. I think that’s what got me the job. Laugh. I was designated as director of interviewers for the Minnesota Polls. We were instructed by people from Gallup who came from the east to train us and I went all over the state gathering groups of people who were going to be interviewers and training them. The people that were going to be interviewed, and the place that they came from were selected by the Journalism Dept. at the U. We got the outline, “a man in his 50s,” etc. -- a cross section of that community.
You traveled all over Minnesota and you were still single.
Yes. The Star Tribune decided they wanted a chorus and the girls just came and we had a great time. I remember a program that was worked on by Harry Jones, who was theatrical by nature. We designed a program to work around songs of the early days, from the turn of the century up to the present time. This was at the Aqua Follies where the stage was behind the water pool. Our show was the opening program. Three of the favorite people from the Star Tribune came in raccoon coats--Cedric Adams, Bob Dehaven, and George Grimm, and they would take turns during the week narrating about our songs.
Well we sang for everything. And the last place we sang was for the Veterans Hospital at Fort Snelling. I had become friends with Les Blacklock and I had seen his slides of glacier climbing, which was part of his ski troops training, and so I asked him to come and bring his slides. After the program--we had come together, I had borrowed my father’s car because I didn’t have one and he didn’t have one--he said do you know of a place we could go and see the planes come in? And I thought back and I remembered being across the Minnesota River at a cemetery for a sunrise service at Pilot Knob. laughter. Well yes I do, and so we drove over there and got out of the car, and here was a sign in the grass, Hallowed Ground, sacred ground, and I thought well that has reference to the treaty that was signed here by the Indians in the 1850s.
Anyway, we stayed there a while and it began to rain. I don’t remember anything specific being said, but from that night on we were engaged. We began planning what we were going to do, where we were going to live. That was going to be Moose Lake, and what the business was going to be, we thought of all kinds of things. We finally decided we were going to make Christmas wreaths. That summer he went around to all the places that would sell wreaths and got orders and I would take a train up to Sandstone, which was the end of the line, and somebody would come and meet me and take me on to Moose Lake and I would work on the design and the decorating of the fire shack that we were going to live in. Back in 1918, a forest fire came through Moose Lake from the west and burned everything, so that there were a lot of people who didn’t have any place to live, and the Red Cross or some other organization came and put up these temporary little houses and they were commonly known as fire shacks. We were married in 1947 and they were still there. Les’ father owned one of them; it didn’t have water, so he had the water from the street brought to the house and it was modernized with a bathroom and a faucet in the kitchen.
We lived there for about six months. After Christmas Les had left me, as we had agreed, to live on the North Shore to photograph how the deer survived in winter, and he went back in the other seasons. I took the bus up and met him at the Cascade River where his campsite was. It was a nice balmy winter day, about 15 above, but that night the temp. dropped to 33 below zero with a strong north wind blowing. Well I would have liked to have not gotten out of bed that morning, but Les had gotten up and had a little campfire going, and he made me a cup of coffee, which was the first cup he had had, because he didn’t drink coffee, and --
Where were you sleeping?
In a pup tent—enough for one person.
In a sleeping bag?
A sleeping bag made for one person, of two layers, so he’d spread out the layers which sort of covered us. He had a theory that you sleep in the nude because your body heat is reflected from the top down so that’s the way you keep warm. After he died, we asked people to send memories of Les and one woman said, I asked Les how you stay warm in a sleeping bag, in the wintertime, and he said, with two bare legs, and she said, two bare legs? Well four would be better. Laughter.
It’s true because we did it. The moisture from our bodies froze at the top of the tent so there was a layer of ice; my shoulders happened to rub against that ice in getting my clothes on, it wasn’t a very fun thing to do. I had gone up there to take pictures of Les filming the deer, and there was no way we could take pictures in that temperature. So we hiked down to the North Shore, and went to the Cascade Lodge, which was closed, because nobody in their right mind at that time would keep open in the winter, and Les knocked on the door, and got their sympathy by telling them what our situation was and they opened one room for us. We stayed there for a couple days until it warmed up, and then I went back and took the pictures. Well when Les went back in different seasons to complete the picture of the deer, he came out with an hour long movie that he lectured with, for every sportsman’s club anywhere around, and some of the national organizations--there’s a squirrel that’s thinking of going to the feeder—
So he became quite an authority on deer. After he lectured two years, he condensed it to ten minutes with a soundtrack, “Deer Live with Danger.” Encyclopedia Brittanica took it on for ten years and we got the royalty for it. Three dangers deer live with: one, starvation, because if they eat all the edible twigs in the wintertime, they’re going to starve, and that’s what was happening on the North Shore. The other thing is man with the gun, and the third is the wolf. He showed the wolf chasing a young deer, and the deer eating bushes down to bare branches, and the man was Les with a gun shooting at a beautiful buck deer on a rise ahead of him.
Was this before or after your honeymoon?
After. It started that same winter as our honeymoon. From the time we got engaged, we talked about what we were going to do for our honeymoon. Les suggested a canoe trip. Well I’d never been on a canoe trip, so I agreed. And somewhere along the line a date got set for Oct. 25th (1947). When people found out I was going then they thought I was crazy because winter could have set in by that time, and we might have been snowed in. In fact they had us give them the route so they would know where to come and get us or send for the bodies or whatever. Laughs.
In any case it did happen on November 11th during that Armistice Day blizzard. Minnesota had the worst snowstorm in history and several people froze to death. The day started out so warm, people dressed for a sunny warm day, and the blizzard caught them off guard. And these were hunters down in the Mississippi River valley, southern Minnesota. It could have happened to us.
You also talked about Isle Royale.
We were married in ‘47 and the next summer we went to Isle Royale to do the moose movie. He got so much encouragement from his deer movie; the department of photography at the university lauded it to the skies. Oh Les this is worth 20 thousand. Sounds good but nobody was going to pay us for it, but anyway he decided on the moose movie on Isle Royale. By then we had money enough to buy a 9 by 9 army tent for a shelter and a mosquito tent inside of that. Our friend Harry Jones lived in a pup tent. The three of us worked on a camping/canoeing trip all that summer and the film never got out of the can because there’s never been a market for it.
Then Harry had to get back to the city because he’d been promised a job taking care of the movies at the TV station WCCO, when it opened. It was the first TV station that started in the spring of 49. Isn’t that something?
Hard to imagine.
He had to leave Labor Day. He said well I have this log that I found floating on the shore, and I have no way of taking it back so you can have it if you want it. Well that’s our lamp stand. Beautiful twisted cedar. Beach-polished. Les cut off the rough ends. Then Les started in earnest working on a moose movie and that turned into a ten minute sound film that Hawly-Lord, a film distributor in New York, took on. Those were the days in the beginning of television when stations didn’t have a full half hour and they were looking for filler, so our sound movie was shown all over the United States.
Were you or Les in it?
His feet were in it coming out of a tent in the morning. And he was looking at two moose feet.
What were you doing while he was making the film?
I was alone.
Did you help him?
I was a cook for all of us. And I kept track of footage, what he shot, and so on, but I was mostly there for company. We stayed on Isle Royale from the fifth of July until the middle of November, 1948. We came back to shore at Grand Marais in a raging storm on the next to the last boat for the year. Nobody lives on the island in the wintertime because there’s no transportation. If anyone does work in the winter they go in by plane now.
Well, the deer movie really made Les’ career because people began seeing it and knowing about Les and then the offers for making a movie came in. Johnson Reels, through their ad agency, wanted a fishing movie, so that was Cast of 3, the fisherman in the boundary waters with his son--Earl Nelms and his boy--and a wildlife artist out in Wyoming and a trout fisherman in North Carolina were the Cast of Three. Play on words. A friend of mine gave us the title.
The next year they wanted another movie and that was done in Alexandria, Minnesota with a family--a father, mother and two children. It was to teach them how to cast and how to fish and that was called A Bass in the Hand. So the next movie, I don’t know the order of these, for the state of Montana, was on ghost towns. They had designated what ghost towns we were to go into and who the family should be—mother, father, two children. And Les’ mother came with us and we had a camper by that time, with a cot and a makeup bed. That was a wonderful summer. And Les was able to make up a movie and the dialogue. It was shown at a state viewing that winter.
That was the one trip Les’ mom was with us, well she was with us in Glacier Park too.
I think there came a time when Les decided that still photography was better for him. A movie would take a whole year to do the editing and sound and put it all together and didn’t make enough money to more than live on. Ten thousand a year. In 1953 we bought a house in Eden Prairie on Anderson Lake. I think the land itself was 7 thousand for seventeen acres. I think we got 84 thousand when we left; we said we’d sell it for whatever the town would pay us because we wanted it to be saved for a park, and that’s what it is. It’s now part of the Hennepin county park system. Les made studies of 4 of the parks that are in that system.
There wasn’t another house in sight except one across the lake from us. But I’ll give Les credit. He walked around the lake with the park planner from Eden Prairie and they designated how many feet above the shoreline would have to be saved for nature and recreational purposes, and that’s called the Blacklock Line now.
Well from there on he went into still photography and the first trip he took was in the Black Hills, and he took how many sheets of film with his 4 by 5 camera, not many, say 12 sheets of film, and he used them all and sold four of the pictures, which was very good. Then he went out west and from the Mexican border up through Alaska taking mountain pictures. And of course Minnesota. He took a bunch of Minnesota pictures to Sigurd Olsen and asked if he’d consider doing a book with him and Sig said Well give me time to think about it and he finally said yes. So he would send down to us in Eden Prairie maybe two or three chapters of the Hidden Forest and they didn’t have to match anything that Les was doing.
Les was ready to take the sample of his photography and Sigurd’s writing to New York to seek his fortune, and right at that time a friend of ours who had done an interview with Les for one of the suburban papers happened to come by to see what Les was doing these days, Well I’m ready to leave for New York. Who are you going to see, well I think I’ll see…. (Fill in name press). And she said my brother in law happens to be head of their consumer dept and I’ll tell him you’re coming. Monday night he was greeted at the door, and by Friday he had a contract. And Sigurd said Well nothing like that ever happened to me. I had eight rejections before I had an acceptance. It shouldn’t happen that way. And then they wanted to do a second book which turned out to be the High West, which sold more copies by far than the Hidden Forest because it sold to a camera or nature club, some club that probably gave it with a membership.
Voyageur Press was a bookstore on 50th and France in Minneapolis. Bob DuBois, the owner, got the idea that a Minnesota calendar would be a good idea, and Les agreed; well 1973 was the first Minnesota Season’s calendar. Les would write captions under the pictures and Bob asked him if he would write and photograph a book on his own, and so that was Meet My Psychiatrist. Sigurd thought he was crazy: I know Les and I know he doesn’t need a psychiatrist.
When was Craig born?
1954. We were seven years married without a child. One day we were attending a program at Northrop auditorium and all of a sudden I began getting tight around the waist, and I loosened my belt than took my belt off because it was so uncomfortable, and all that night I was waking up with this terrible feeling in my stomach. I didn’t know what it was. Les was working at that time for Empire Photo Sound. He was on call day or night any day of the week and he was called out of town so I was left at home with this terrible ache. I finally called my mother and told her something was wrong, and she called round and no doctor would make house calls, so she came and took me to the doctor which was the beginning of Park Nicollet Clinic, it’s now five stories tall, well then it was in the remains of a grocery story, and very crude, and I saw the doctor and he looked me over and gave me a punch and then let his finger up and I yelled, and he said well you’ve got a ruptured appendix, and so mother took me to Mt. Sinai hospital. He took it out and I heard the next morning that I’d have to come back in three weeks for another operation because I was full of poison and they had sprinkled penicillin in the cavity and I was full of tumors. In three weeks I had the tumors removed; they were all benign, so that was good news. And as soon as they healed up, I got pregnant.
Tell me how your book Our Minnesota came about.
One of the jobs I had was with an advertising firm. I was advertising and public relations director, and I worked with Bill Nee, who later went with another agency, where they had a state account. The state would give the rights to a certain agency for one year. He remembered what I worked on so he asked if I would do a fishing booklet which I did, and it was turned over to the DNR to see if it was ok, so I’m an expert on fish.
I’d love to see that.
I don’t have it. Then they wanted me to do a book on camping, so I did a booklet, not a book, and then they wanted me to do a What to See and Do in Minnesota book. I divided the state into four sections: northwest, northeast, southwest and southeast, and told what was there to do and see, special things, and when it was finished, there was a meeting of many Minnesota legislators from all over the state at Itasca Park, and Les and I were not allowed inside. We sat on the porch while they talked about it. Everybody wanted a piece of that book for themselves, so that’s what it turned out to be. This was the first time that the tourism department handled sections of the state separately. I didn’t have the book and the material other than the notes that I’d taken. I don’t remember the year, but Bob Dubois saw my notes and he wondered if I would make a book and we named it Our Minnesota. I rewrote the text and Les redid the pictures in color and shot new pictures because the first pictures were done in black and white, which was all we and the state could afford at that time, so it’s come a long ways since then.
I was looking on the internet and one of the sites said Our Minnesota has sold 80, 00 copies. Isn’t that remarkable?
Yes.
When you went around with Craig and Les to these sections, did you organize who you’d talk to and where you’d stay?
Yes. Talking about the honeymoon now—the publisher didn’t think people would be interested in what we had to eat, so he left out what I think are the most exciting parts of the honeymoon. I’ll give you a sample of it; the first night we were going to have bacon and eggs and Les left the meat at home in his mother’s freezer, so we didn’t have any bacon but we had eggs. Ok, the next day I was standing at the end of the portage; Les had to make two trips because he carried more things. I carried canoe paddles and fishing reels and a light pack. Well I was waiting for Les when I heard something right behind me, and there was a partridge sitting there in a tree and I thought oh gee wouldn’t it be great if I could shoot it and have it for dinner. Well I looked in the pack and there was a gun and some ammunition and I began putting it together and I thought I can’t do this, I’ve never seen a gun before and I wouldn’t know how to put it together so it would shoot. I took the two parts of the gun and started up the trail to meet Les, and so help me that partridge had followed me and it was standing ten feet off the trail when I got to Les and I told him and he put the gun together and took aim and shot the partridge in the head. That night we had partridge stew.
The other part that I think is so exciting was when we got to Gneiss Lake. There were no established campsites and it was getting dusk and there was a sand beach at the far end of the lake and Les said well you can always camp on a sand beach, so we paddled over to that and he got out and said Oh wow, look at these tracks, moose, bear, wolf, oh gosh look at these tracks! Well I would have loved to have walked home at that time because I didn’t want to sleep there but he convinced me that I would be all right because he would keep the fire going. We put our sleeping bags on the sand beach which was on a slope away from the lake and soon I went to sleep. That morning there was just beginning to get grey light and I heard something flutter over my head and land in the water right in front of us, three black ducks. I nudged Les and I said look, well pretty soon they began swimming behind the rushes down toward our canoe, which had a gun in it, and Les crept behind the rushes and got the gun and loaded it and when he stood up it flushed the ducks and he got two of them.
That part got left out too. That day we had roast duck and an apple pie that I made on the bottom of the canoe for a breadboard and we kept our matches in a glass jar and I used that for a rolling pin. Les had made a stone oven of two layers of flat stone so the bottom layer had the fire, and the heat from that would go up and over to the stuff you were cooking. Well it was Les’ sister’s birthday and I told her that I would make her something, so I thought maybe I could make her an apple pie; I rolled out the dough and cut up the apples and it was a passable pie. We had roast duck and apple pie.
The last day we had northern pike. It was getting to be rainy as dusk came on and it turned black—you couldn’t see anything—and we had been told that our car would be at the end of the trail by the people at the Gunflint. We were looking for a light, but I thought I saw something big black right in front of us and I said Les back up, back up, and it turned out to be a boulder that was as tall as this ceiling that had a light on top but they hadn’t lit the light, and it was an entrance to the resort. Les and I went up to the door and knocked on it, and here was Irv Benson who Les had gone to school with at Duluth Junior college. He had been hired to take over that resort for the winter and he said Well I don’t know where your car is, but there’s a fellow coming to see me on a motorcycle. He just got out of the hospital from a motorcycle accident on the Gunflint trail. He’d gone off of a curve and hit a tree, and he’ll be coming and he can scrounge around here and find your car. He did; it was a short distance from another resort.
Coming home, there’s another food story. Les knew Vince Acurkis, isn’t that a name, who owned a lumber camp up in the woods, so we stopped there and it was deserted, but there was a pile of sawdust about as big as this porch and tall. Les remembered that sawdust holds its heat and he dug in a little bit and it was warm, so we kept digging and got ourselves a cozy nest that night. Well the next morning I was making flapjacks and the Whiskey jacks came around, the grey jays, and one almost stole the flapjack out of the frying pan before we could get it, and Les said well I wonder if he could get a tidbit out of my mouth so he handed me the camera, and he knelt down and stuck out his mouth and the tidbit was sticking out of his mouth, and I shot the film, I said I got it, I got it, I did have it, except when the film came back there wasn’t a bird or a tidbit in his mouth; the whiskey jack had gotten it so fast.
Did you have any encounters with bears?
I think they were all sleeping. I don’t think we had any encounters in the canoe area. Once, they got into our tent when we weren’t there and stole everything that was edible. They had eaten all the Crisco out of the can! Can you imagine the stomach ache they must have had? And they were sitting outside the tent.
You came back to them?
Les was able to go up, they didn’t bother him at all, laughter, they were so full. Another time we saw a bear crossing the channel. We were going toward the bear and Les said Well let’s hurry up and see if we can’t catch him, and I was back paddling as fast as he was forward paddling. We never did catch him.
After the bear ate everything you had, could you resupply?
No, I think that was the day we were headed out of the canoe area to come down to the State Fair to see the Smother’s Brothers. We paddled like mad to get to the takeoff point where we put the canoe in. We probably broke every speed record getting to the State Fair, but we made it. That was when the Smothers Brothers were really hot.
I remember them when I was very young.
How old are you?
42.
Laughter. Quite a difference.
I’m struck by what an impact you and your family have had on natural areas in Minnesota. What I’m impressed by is how you have consciously lived your beliefs. Among other projects, Les helped to establish the Wolf Center?
Helped. He was also on the Metro Council Advisory Board for the five county area around the Twin Cities, helping to decide what areas should be saved and what should be built up.
The thing that most people don’t know about him, he did over thirty studies for parks and wild areas or camps, including the YMCA, Girl and Boy scouts, and he did four Hennepin county parks, two St. Paul parks and the Girl Scout headquarters in upper New York, which was a national thing. But those are sort of the behind the scenes that very few people would know about. One camp which represents all of southeastern Minnesota YMCAs has a camp on Little Boy Lake straight west of us, and they have quoted Les from his reports. What he did was take pictures and write out what he thought should happen to make a park or an area where people could go and not disturb the wildlife, where the wildlife would have a chance to live their lives undisturbed, and so it was a combination of the two things. He did thirty of those.
People became knowledgeable about Les so that the phone was ringing almost daily. Some people were asking him for help to save their part of the land from commercialization. I was afraid he’d have a heart attack or a stomach ulcer or something, so I encouraged the idea of leaving Eden Prairie. My mother lived next door to us. She had asked if she could have an acre of land to build a little house; well she taught piano there for almost 18 years before she died, and we had made up our minds that we would stay there as long as she lived, so then we began looking in earnest for a place to live, and in 1976 we ended up here, right next to the town where Les was born.
How many acres did you buy?
160. We found that by taking the advice of a family that lived on the next lake, little Moose lake, and Les had told them we were looking for land, he told us, from his land, through the woods, we’d come to a beaver dam, which we did the next spring. Craig, Les and I packed our lunch and hiked around the lake and met at the beaver dam on the way finally, and thought, this is it, because it had all the things we wanted--trees, lake, and terrain, and it isn’t flatland. We went to see the man that owned it. Oh no, I want wild land for the same reason you do. Les said if you ever decide to sell, please let me know. About two years later Les got a call, he said I’m ready to sell but prices have gone up, so are you sitting down? The price has gone up to, I can’t remember, I think it was 12 thousand dollars we paid for the whole thing. It had been logged in the 40s and Les never forgave them. Got all the white pine out. There were two white pines that were still standing. One has been hit by lightning, and another one is on the north side of the lake.
We added on to it. Ten acres on the east side and 80 acres beyond that and that joins onto wild land that was turned into a bed and breakfast that failed. Hidden Ponds. Now another couple has bought it. And they are happy we are saving this land because they are going to keep theirs wild.
When you bought this place did you have the idea of a sanctuary?
Not as much as it has become, but to build a house that was wheelchair accessible. Our idea was that after we’re gone we wanted the house and land to be used for the wild, for the wilderness. The 160 acres on the other side of the road where the barn is came up for sale, and we decided to buy it, so that was added on. Then Willy Carlson called from Florida, and said I’ve decided to sell the house (Turtle House). Either I want you or the Sanctuary Board to buy it, abut 1994, so the Sanctuary decided to buy it, and Steve Lick finished it.
That house was on the forty that has the heron rookery. We own all the land contiguous with the Sanctuary, the Turtle House, back from the road. You could hike from here to there if you wanted to, and several people have. The composer, he loved to hike over here, and play the piano.
Whose idea was it to do the artists residency?
Our niece Catherine Jordan, Craig and Nadine. Les died in 1995 and the sanctuary began in 1996. It was in the plans; he knew what was going on. Catherine arranged with the Jerome Foundation, which provides funds for the fellowships and contributors and we take care of the facilities, taxes, insurance, and upkeep. We never could have done it without them.
About 100 people came for the dedication in 1996. Bob Duerr, a long time friend and naturalist who is the snake man at the State Fair booth every year, brought the decorated turtle shell that hangs on the Turtle House wall. It came from a Lakota tribe in South Dakota, near Bended Knee. Bob is a friend of theirs and he told the Lakota chief about our sanctuary plans, and the chief said, We’ll make something for you. I remember Bob telling us that the woman who crafted the checkerboard part on the turtle’s shell said “I made that, isn’t it beautiful?” The turtle--long lived and very wise.
For a long time we didn’t know what we were going to call the building, and then we decided on the Turtle House
Can you talk about your experience with the artists on residence?
It has been a wonderful experience. I’ve gotten to know every artist that’s come. They’ve been here for lunch or tea. Last night we had dinner over at Craig’s with the photographer who teaches in Rochester, Minnesota. It was her last evening of residency. This Thursday we’re going to have a poet coming in. Everyone brings something of themselves that’s different. It’s hard to understand how it can be different when there are so many of them, but each ones brings with them a different skill, thought, or experience, and I’ve gotten to know all of them.
I’m thinking of Jason Brown, an inventor of unlikely things, a creative genius. He’s now teaching in Tennessee. He summed up what he does: he invents things that won’t work. Laughs. He has a picture of a ladder that stands by itself, without any props or reason to be. While he was here, he made a long roll of about nine foot square of red plastic to put down in the woods to alert anyone that has lost their way, to enable somebody to find them. Well our banker has a small airplane, and he saw it from the air. Now that did work. Ultimately Jason used the plastic to cover up a haystack in a hayfield surrounded by a lot of other stacks. I called it a blooming haystack. He sent me a brochure with a montage of different scenes of building the stack. The final image is a beautiful picture of a meadow with haystacks, and one blooming red haystack.
Barbara Yoshita, a photographer living in New York City, is now taking nothing but moonlight pictures. By the light of the moon. She recently had a show of the moonlight pictures.
There’s Jude Nutter, a poet originally from England who received a grant to do a study on an island in the Antarctic. She showed us some of the large pastels she had done, blue and white, stark and interesting. She sent me her first book of poetry, Pictures of the Afterlife.
Jane Jeong Trenka is a Korean woman whose first book was published by Minnesota Historical Society Press. The Language of Blood. I’ve read it; it is beautiful and fascinating. At the age of five months, Jane was adopted by a family in northwestern Minnesota in the middle of the prairie where, she writes, “Where stoicism is stamped in the bones of each generation.”
And photographer Celeste Nelms, who recently received a McKnight fellowship. In her photographs she works with old antiques nobody thinks have any importance at all, but she makes something of them. She carries around a picture of a fellow that she found in some cast-off collection. I went to her show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Fascinating to see what she’s done.
You’ve had composers as well.
Carl Witt is one of my favorites. Carl is a graduate of Eastman School of Music. He composed the music for the dance performance The Two Fridas (Kahlo). Wynn Fricke choreographed the dance and directed two women to perform it. I went down to the see it performed at the Fitzgerald in the Twin Cities. Carl had an ensemble to perform the music. It was very emotional, the sound and what you saw, just marvelous. I thought it should be performed in Mexico. Catherine was with me; we came out during the intermission. I gave Carl a hug and he handed me a signed copy of the manuscript, which he had dedicated to me, which was a thrill. It is framed and hanging on the wall at the Turtle House.
Are there any projects you would like to see through?
Not an overall project. Just individual things, putting in something for pottery, so somebody can come and pot. We yet haven’t had a botanist or anyone in the nature field where that was their sole aim, which I thought was going to be a natural, to come and study the plants and wildflowers. But it has to be somebody with a schedule of their own that fits in. Everyone can’t leave their job for two or three weeks. Can you think of anything?
I was thinking about your house book; I like that idea. Each of these objects has a history. They’re so well made and tell a whole story. The house is its own story. Who built it?
A builder, and Craig came and worked on the house too. Especially the beam that’s holding up the ceiling. The architects said we couldn’t use the barn beam because it wouldn’t be substantial enough so we’d have to have a metal one. What did Craig do, he took that beam and split it in two and hollowed out the place for the metal pole, so that pole goes from the ceiling beam down to the basement floor. It’s there to stay, and the metal pole is hidden.
And our parents gave us this wooden table and chairs as a wedding gift. That was the sort of thing that was indicative of how much money we had. Well those wrought iron table and chairs were my mother’s. She saved money from choir directing to buy them. You don’t find iron work like this any more. It’s all so spindly and inexpensive. This has lasted for more than before we were married, well over sixty years, and never been refinished. Les and I did the seat covers but that’s all.
Can I bring your shoes and hat over and have you tell me about them. They’re amazing. High-laced leather hiking books from the 40s, and a dainty wool balaclava hat that looks like new.
The boots came from an army surplus store, so they were made for heavy use. And they are heavy. You wonder where all the weight comes from. Largely from the soles.
You got these early on.
Before the honeymoon.
How long did you wear them?
On all the outing trips we took, all the trips to the Boundary waters and out West.
The hat is a small red wool balaclava with green ear flaps; so this is what kept you warm all of those freezing nights; it’s funny because these have come back in style. The hip young kids wear them.
Oh really?
Are you getting tired?
No.
It’s a hard time to be hopeful. You’ve seen a number of presidential administrations and shifts in government. How do you remain hopeful?
Right now I’m not at all. President Bush has done everything wrong. The environment is the worst. Sept. 14 is the last day to protest against the roadless area in the National Forests being clobbered. And the kind of people he would put on the Supreme Court are all wrong. I’m afraid he’s going to make it. I don’t think the environment’s been pinpointed as one of the main areas to be looked after. There hasn’t been much talk about it.
Looking ahead, you’ve left behind a legacy in protecting the natural areas in Minnesota, and my children and their children will benefit from these efforts. I wonder what you would have to say to the young nature lovers and environmentalists.
You’ve got to appreciate it in order to want to save it, I think. All children won’t be brought up like my granddaughter Charis is, where she loves everything that is natural. But if we can just get people to appreciate some of the wild places, rather than have their noses in a computer or a rock show, primarily. I don’t know, the way the world is going…it’s all going in the other direction it seems like. Except there are groups like the Quetico Superior Foundation--I was just looking at their literature. People on it are good solid backers of the environment, like Oberholser, and Sigurd Olsen. They aren’t living anymore and who’s going to take their place? I’m sure there are people who are going to work for it, but they don’t have the name that stands out that people will respect. I don’t know, I should be hopeful… …well let’s look at these beautiful flowers.
Well, it has helped me to come to Blacklock. I hope you take comfort in that; when you come here and spend time at Turtle House, you can’t help but fall in love with everything that you see. I think we all have that innate love. It has to be brought out of us. I don’t have to encourage my daughters Audrey and Franny, to love, they love flowers and trees and butterflies. Coming to Blacklock helped me to fall back in love again and remember how much the natural world means to me. I’ve lived a life that sustains that. I guess that’s what so hard about making changes in our society. It takes a long time, it’s messy, slow-going, and you often lose. You were talking about Les being called every day. That is the nature of it. It’s up to a few people and they are doing too much work, and now they are passing, and I think more of us need to do the work.
I’m saying there aren’t the few people whose names stand out, because they haven’t been given the publicity, or what it is, but people don’t automatically respect them for what they do, like Dave Mech for the wolves; he is respected, but there are very few.
That’s true, that is something that’s changed.
Thank you very much for talking with me Fran. I wish this conversation could go on forever.
Well it’s been a good thing for me, remembering some of these things, because if I don’t bring it up they’ll disappear I think. . .
I was pretty lucky. Who would ever have thought that a newspaper gal would fall for a wildlife artist that hadn’t proven himself? Everybody thought I was nuts, including my folks. But there was no question in my mind.
I remember when you told me, your first date, or the only thing he bought you was when you went to that drugstore and-
--he bought me a grape soda. He never took me to a movie or anything. We never dated other than seeing each other in class. It sort of just fell into shape.
Linda Buturian 5 April 2008
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