Ode to a Folding Travel Chair

[kickysnana]

The Folding Travel Chair is my connection to the Gangster era in St Paul. The chair was given to us by a long time friend and neighbor who went straight when he turned 16 and could be sent up for hard time. His buddies called him "Fingers Fannon", Bernie to us. He grew up in an apartment over a bar at Rice and University, the same corner my great grandmother "Ma Hughes" was hit by a car in 1959 when she stepped out from in front of bus she had just exited. Ma ran a boarding house near downtown in the 1920's but there were whispers between cousins that it was more than that and a published book of photographs of St Paul prostitutes has S J Hughes for its author/photographer. Sheil Jack to us. I guess Sheil was a given name in Lebanon TN.

In Aug 1934 Homer Van Meter, henchman for John Dillinger had fled to St Paul, which had been a haven for gangsters until they kidnapped the Bremer kid and brought the wrath of the FBI down on them. Homer Van Meter met his end at University and Marion a couple blocks from Rice St and the body was whisked away before the photographers got there. Bernie told me that he was the stand in for the body for the photos splashed across the nation. Bernie was the kind of guy who would give you the shirt of his back, worked his whole life, sent his kids to Catholic school and took care of his aged mother and her family. I never caught him in a lie. His cousin married a Chicago Gambino and he also told me that rumor had it that one of the Gansters left in St Paul in the late 1950's is now part of I94 that runs through downtown St Paul.

Now the chair belonged to Bernie's great uncle Dodo Gittens who had been a bootlegger back in the day. My grandfather had a large duplex a quarter mile away from where Van Meter had been gunned down and he eventually rented to Bernie's Ma and her companion, Sven who only ate fish in the winter, eggs in the spring and sausage the rest of the year. So the chair came there and when Sven passed and Bernie's Ma passed within months of each other the chair became my grandmother's. She used it the last 5 years of her life through two broken hips and her final illness. My kids and their toddler cousins spend hours pushing it around empty and riding in it when they could get someone to push them. "Push, they would say, "Push me", "I go". Grandma passed, I got sick, I sold my house and moved in with my Aunt until I got well, but then she became unstable and used it for a walker and when my grandson was born in 2003 he would say "Push me", "I go". His mom and Dad gave him the middle name Shiel and like his Daddy he almost got kicked out of Kindergarten last year.

But now Auntie and live in a very nice apartment in the burbs and Auntie had a stroke and zips around in her power chair. I was using the Folding Travel Chair to ferry laundry up to the 3rd floor and groceries up from the fist floor but someone gifted me a brand new cart and it was time for the Folding Travel Chair to go. I scrubbed it all up one more time tonight. Dug deep into the cleaning supplies to find the metal polish so it would look nice for the fellow who is taking it for his Mother tomorrow morning.

Nobody but me cares that the Folding Travel Chair has a direct link to St Paul Gangsters but it seems such a shame to just let the story die.