As most of the nation is unemployed during this pandemic it’s been a good time to catch up on much needed sleep, spend time with our family and get a lot of things done at home and around the house. Old photos is something everybody probably has and as they lay in a box forgotten for many years, now is the time to organize those memories before they are forgotten. I got in this photo with Mac Davis, who I didn’t even know about at the time, because my friend Laury was a musician and singer and a huge fan of other musicians and singers. She’s got albums full of photos of her posing with the famous. We were probably only about 15 or 16 when this photo was taken. Laury was smart and knew all the tricks of sneaking into the backstages of concerts and catching the stars just before they walked onstage. I remember climbing over a tall fence and running for it. The stars were usually very nice back then and allowed a photo like this to be taken. A cop had took this picture before escorting us out of there, Mac himself handed him the camera and asked him to do so. I had a lot of fun with Laury, she was very talented, adventurous, bold, and not afraid of anything. I have to admit, I’d never had pulled this backstage photo off on my own. I can’t remember what year is was and the date wasn’t written on the photo, but I do remember this happened at the Minnesota State Fair and Laury moved away while we were still in high school.
Other memories I found at an estate sale. There were a lot of books at this sale and I found many of them very interesting. I opened one and found a bookplate of a judge I had before me in court once. I had a problem with a slumlord who was in the process of selling the property to an institution who would’ve paid a relocation fee to the tenants, but this landlord was trying to kick us all out so we couldn’t collect. He must’ve had something to gain by doing that. The poor tenant upstairs from us was just devastated. His roommate had moved out and he had plans to attend graduate school at the University and wanted to stay in the area because it was so close, but he didn’t want to live in a dump and so approached the landlord with a proposition the fix the place up at his own expense. They made an agreement and he did an excellent job of it, he patched all the walls and painted them fresh, sanded the floors and refinished them, fixed and replaced a broken toilet, then invited the landlord up to see. The landlord took a look around admiring the work then decided the place was worth more rent so he raised it. Meanwhile a tree in the back had fallen down and went through the roof of the back pantry of my unit which was open to the kitchen. The landlord wasn’t about to spend a penny to fix it and we knew he was selling the house. He was trying hard to find a way to evict us and with all that going on we just called the city inspectors over about the roof and he got cited for that and a lot more. The upshot was, we didn’t get any relocation but then he didn’t get to keep whatever money he was probably getting for ousting the tenants and had to spend even more fixing a house that was going to be torn down. So, that explains what I was doing before this judge. I remember he was a prick and had made the decision that I should voluntarily move like the guy upstairs did without any relocation payment. When I got home from that estate sale, I looked up the obituary for this judge and found an interesting news article about him. He ended his days just out of jail in a halfway house. He had been incarcerated for stealing approximately $400,000 from a trust fund of a mentally vulnerable adult that he was managing. When one of this clients managers had requested the funds to replace the roof on the house, the judge told him the funds were depleted.
I read something he wrote to one of the newspapers how his attitude had changed since he was now the one in custody. “A Fallen judge Rethinks Crime and Punishment” He admitted he was hard on a lot of people who came before him in the court but that the system should lighten up more and take mercy on them. Blah! Blah! Blah! His collection of books included much about Witchcraft and the Devil and other weird stuff that probably wouldn’t be found in your local bookshop. A strange but varied collection. Speaking of weird, I have one more story for today.
Years ago when they were still searching for the body of David Wetterling, a body had washed up in the Mississippi river with the hands and the feet cut off. The body was a young boy about David’s would be age at the time but it had been embalmed. It was discovered that the body had been dug up from a cemetery by a group of kids who were messing about with the occult. They were staying in a room in an old warehouse about 3 miles up Lake Street. They stole the body from a grave, put it in a bag and carried it on the city bus to the warehouse. This warehouse had a number of tenants living there, we used to call it the “Home for Displaced Husbands”. My ex-husband was one of them and he gave me the inside scoop. He told me there was a pentagram painted on the floor of the room this group of kids had, they had a party of some sort and the body was the feature for whatever they were doing. I remember that year there were a number strange occult events. My neighbor had one where she was spelunking with a couple other people by the river and came to a trap set up in one of the caves. A trip wire attached to a rifle. They got out of there and called the cops. The cops found more strange things in that cave and told my neighbor that it appears the trap had been set up to deter anyone from entering the cave because someone was planning a ritual suicide and it’s possible they had foiled it. Evidently some people believe that suicide is the ultimate sacrifice and insult against God’s ultimate creation of man. Yikes!
Well, Stay home and stay safe so we all can finally get over this pandemic. People have a hard time believing some things really happen until it happens to them. I’m trying hard not to be one of them. I was one who didn’t always take the advice my parents tried to give me so I wound up in the school of hard knocks. Just had to go my reckless way and find out for myself. Age makes most people cautious and I consider myself very lucky to be alive and healthy, now I take care that I stay that way. I hope you do too.
Road Trip Minnesota 