Zenith City: Stories from Duluth

Christmas with the Klines

i spent my twenty-second Christmas in a quiet hotel dining room in overcast downtown Omaha, Nebraska, while my parents and brothers celebrated at home in frigid Duluth, Minnesota. This was my first Christmas away from my family and its holiday traditions. There was the selection on December  of a tree at Stan Darling’s Pure Oil station, where Dad annually enjoyed choosing some bony old spruce nobody else wanted. Stan would sell it for a quarter because it was Christmas Eve. That evening we could anticipate the inevitable lutefisk and potato sausage supper at Grandma Norquist’s house next door, accompanied by smothering hugs and kisses from great-aunts that left me redolent of their Youth Dew or Tabu. I’d miss the wild and noisy unwrapping of presents, followed by our pastor’s midnight sermon at Bethel Baptist, which seldom failed to induce somnolence. I was in Omaha as one-half of a folk singing duo. My partner, Dan, and I had accepted a two-week engagement at a coffeehouse called the Crooked Ear. We were fresh from our first gig at the old Padded Cell on Lake Street in Minneapolis, where we opened the night after the departure of an up-and-coming trio called Peter, Paul, and Mary. Dan and I hoped to emulate that group’s success and felt it was in the best interest of our fledgling show business careers to take the Omaha job. This meant, however, we’d be absent from our homes during the holidays, which was no big deal for Dan, who was Jewish and thus eschewed both the religious and commercial trappings of Christmas. I thought it would be no big deal for me either. Opening night in Omaha was December , and we learned then that instead of the anticipated three sets per night, typical of a christmas with the klines 140 Christmas with the Klines | 141 bar gig, we were to play four or sometimes five sets, concluding anywhere between : and : a.m., depending on how many patrons were still around. If there were more than five, we performed. The first three nights the proprietor kept us working until : a.m., singing “Matilda” and “Scarlet Ribbons” to grumpy stockyard workers who ventured in for morning cups of coffee before starting their shifts. After postperformance meals, we returned to our midtown hotel and tried to sleep. We rarely saw daylight. Around : each afternoon, we’d leave the hotel, eat breakfast, and arrive at the club by :. Thus did our time pass in days of subfreezing, darkened gloom. No way to spend Christmas. Somehow word circulated that a Jewish folksinger was headlining at a downtown club, and by our fourth night the city’s Jews were flocking to see us perform. Not just kids either. Ladies in their seventies, wearing jewelry and furs, and men in smartly tailored suits sipped cappuccino alongside the flower children in their Levis and sandals. They roared with approval, no matter what we played. They especially loved our Hebrew medley of “Tzena, Tzena” and “Artza Alinu,” which stopped the show while the audience demanded encores. Dan and I were taken in by these strangers, who brought us to their homes for meals, feeding us lox and cream cheese on bagels, chicken soup with fist-sized matzo balls, and great briskets of beef. Christmas Eve arrived, differing slightly from previous days. We didn’t begin until : p.m., by which time college students had excused themselves from their families and headed downtown. The Crooked Ear was packed that night, mostly with our Jewish friends. Just before we opened our midnight set with a rousing version of Blind Blake’s “Run, Come See Jerusalem,” I felt the inexorable tug of nostalgia. I suddenly craved the fragrance of balsam boughs that always decorated Bethel Baptist’s sanctuary and the scent of hot wax from lighted candles placed in every stained glass window. “Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie” played well to the crowd, but “Good King Wenceslas” rang in my head. 142 | Christmas with the Klines Our new fans must have sensed my displacement, because a man and his wife, old enough to be my parents, stopped by after the set and invited Dan and me to dinner the next afternoon. Mr. and Mrs. Kline met us in our hotel lobby on Christmas Day and drove us to another hotel and a dining...