Dave Wood

Some folks believe I’m nuts to prefer black and white movies. But I have my reasons. I recently watched such a relic, called “You Can’t take it with You,” filmed in 1938, which goes a long way in explaining why some folks like the old-fashioned methods for its texture, its humanity and how it brings back childhood memories of 12-cent tickets, Mallowcups, 10-cent popcorn and Salted Nut Rolls. And Bonafide good guys and bad guys.

“You Can’t Take It with You” is a madcap comedy set in a rambling old house destined for urban renewal by a realtor (Edward Arnold). The plan is opposed by its owner (Lionel Barrymore), a radical freethinker with a nutty family and foreign roomers to match. They’re full of radical and even exotic ideas to match Barrymore’s irascibility.

As a young boy, I lived in just such a house when I was parked in my grandparents’ rambling old five-bedroom house in Whitehall, which to this rustic farm kid was a virtual Xanadu, with flush toilets, central heating, electricity and a movie theatre two blocks away. Whatta palace! There was only one catch: A few years earlier, on Black Thursday 1929, Martha and Ralph awoke in their palace to discover they were broke.

Soon after my Aunt Helen tied the knot and was safe and secure, my father returned home from college with straight A’s, but no diploma and no job. Grandpa had left business college half a century earlier because he found the Twin Cities too wild and uncivilized, so he sat on a canvas lawn chair, an ever-present nub of Champagne Blend hidden in his lower lip (he never spit) and wondered what in hell he was going to do now.

Only his practical wife Martha, a Swede, remembered that her father told her if you’re dealt sour apples, make applesauce. Suddenly the newfangled electric lights flashed on in her always-cunning brain the apple, and a steady stream of house guests would be a sauce to carry them through the Depression and into the postwar that hounded our nation.

And what a stream they were, even more diverse than Lionel Barrymore’s tenants. One room was devoted to a telephone, a bathtub and an ornate incense burner that Martha lit each morning.

Her first tenants were men who were erecting the huge Land O’Lakes plant two blocks away.  Those foremen tenants were not averse to fun, which sly grandma sensed and thus created a salon d’ joyesse with oval cans of sardines, oozing with oil and mustard sauce, saltines, Velveeta and 2 qt. picnics of Fountain Brew Beer imported from far-off Buffalo County by Ralph in his 1936 Ford.

I discovered the beauteous teacher and tenant Miss June Rose was an admirer of scotch when she tore the black and white Scottie pups off her empty bottles and gave them to me, so I could pretend they were mini-Holsteins, kinda like I was back on the farm milking with Dad.

Across the hall was immigrant Lyder Nelson, who worked at the creamery. At the end of each month, Lyder cashed his paycheck, handed Martha the next month’s rent, and headed for the Walgert Hotel—not to imbibe, as most of the town’s bachelors did, but to play in high-stakes poker games played shrewdly by wealthier men than he, resulting in losses every month. 

“Lyder was his own worst enemy,” opined Ralph, who rarely opined. Even Martha’s impoverished oldest sister, Lotte Enger, checked in and constantly criticized her younger sister’s cooking, much to Ralph’s muffled amusement.

Once a month a very long Cadillac pulled up and Martha greeted its owner warmly. It was Mitchell Robbins, the first Jewish person I ever met, the President of Meadowbrook Produce, a Chicago company which bought eggs from my uncle, whose wife persuaded him to stay in Martha’s place. Once he checked the hotel rooms, he was a customer of Martha for life. The same went for Mrs. Priss, who spent summers with Ralph and Martha for years.

Not to be beguiled by wasteful entertainment while the big shots were chatting in the parlor, Ralph was two rooms away chatting with his blind neighbor Gabe Nelson, telling him he’d listened to the Packer-Bears game on Sunday. “At half time” reported Ralph, “The announcer chatted with Coaches George Halllas and Curly Lambeau, and OUR TENANT Mitchell Robbins!”

“What did you say, Ralph?” asked Gabe. “The radio announcer was chatting with COACHES CURLY LAMBEAU, GEORGE HALLAS, AND OUR ROOMER, MITCHELL ROBBINS.”

You didn’t have to be deaf to overlook what was being said by the upper classes. And the converse is true as well: Grandpa  occasionally opined “rich people only hear what poor people say when they want to.”

Just like in the old black and white movies, there was a lot to learn from living in a boarding house!