Dewey's Nine Lives

They were self-sufficient, the kids of Pierce Street. Their fathers worked in the factories. Most of their mothers worked to support the family in “women’s jobs” like waitressing, sewing, and housekeeping that were the secret backbone of Midwestern America. As the family drifted through apartments, Glenn’s mother worked for a catering company, cooked for a local restaurant, and waitressed at the coffee shop in the Warrior, the grand old hotel that had been a fixture of downtown Sioux City since 1930. Eventually, she found a permanent position running the kitchen at a retirement home for women. She cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with special requests taken. She started cooking at dawn and rushed home every afternoon, because she knew that as soon as her husband opened the door, he’d boom, “Is there anyone who can cook around here?” Then he’d smile and envelope her in a hug. She always had a meal ready for him, too.

Glenn’s father worked at the Albertson Tool Company. The name wasn’t a coincidence. Glenn Albertson, Sr., a soldier from the stone-quarry region of southern Indiana, married Christel Mai, a farm girl from the small town of Pierce, Nebraska, at the end of World War II. They tried to make a life in rural Nebraska but soon moved to Sioux City, about seventy miles away, in search of job opportunities. Glenn, Sr., saw a notice about the Albertson Tool Company and decided, with a name like that, the company must be his destiny. He worked at Albertson Tool, manufacturing air and electrical tools, for a few decades before leaving to become the best commercial painter around.

Glenn, Sr., was a “man’s man,” stern and strong. He worked hard labor, and he worked it hard. He stood six feet tall with two hundred fifty pounds of muscle molded by his hours lifting hammers and steel. Days, he shaped tools at the Albertson company; nights, he was a bartender and bouncer on Lower Fourth Street, the gin-joint district on the edge of downtown. He was a gregarious man with a lot of buddies, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to disappear with them for days on end. By the time Glenn, Jr., was nine years old, he knew just about every bartender in the Lower Fourth ward.

“Sit down, kid, and have a strawberry pop,” they’d say. “I’ll find your dad for you.” It wouldn’t be long before Glenn’s father would walk in and clap his son on the back, bags under his eyes and a rumpled smile on his face, but otherwise hardly worse for wear.

“Let’s go home,” he’d say. “I’m hungry.”

By eighteen, Glenn, Jr., was six feet four and two hundred sixty-five hard pounds. He was even bigger than his father, but everyone called him Tiny. When the school principal introduced him before the big football game, Glenn came out carrying the smallest guy in the school in the palm of his hand. The kid jumped down, slapped him five, and everybody laughed. Glen was a gentle giant, the big man on campus (if by campus you mean Pierce Street), and a friend to all.

Six months later, he was married, a proud (if accidental) papa, not quite graduated from high school but already pumping gas and repairing cars. The gas station where he worked was near the highest point of Court Street, a few blocks from where he grew up. From the front of the lot, he could see the ten-story buildings downtown. Beyond them, hidden from view, were the Missouri River and Lower Fourth Street, where his father spent his afternoons in the company of other hardworking men. Behind him, less than a mile away, his mother labored over the stoves of Rose Hill. When he left the gas station, he walked the same blocks he had always walked, where the kids still rode their bikes to the corner shops for soda pops and candy even if they didn’t congregate on the corner to watch television through the appliance store window anymore. It was the 1960s. Most of them had their own televisions now.

Glenn was content. He wanted nothing more than to be a good father to his boy. He was home every night to tuck him into bed. He read him books and explained how motors worked and told him that he loved him, that he was there for him, whatever he needed. He nearly froze that first winter at the gas station, with the continuous blanket of snow and the cold wind of the Upper Midwest blasting him day after day. He took a second job as a fry cook, for the extra money, but also to keep warm. After a few years, he gave up the gas station for the temperate environment of the assembly line at Sioux Tools, formerly the Albertson company.