Skip to main content

Hubbel House. Again.

We think we first visited "The Hubbel House" in Mantorville, Minnesota about twenty-nine years ago.  On our way back from Decorah, Iowa, yesterday, we drove west from Rochester to have dinner there, again.

The Hubbel House remains as dark inside as it was then.  The restaurant was first opened in 1854, and has reluctantly conceded to electric lights or, perhaps more accurately, has conceded to reluctant electric lights. 

Unable to read the fine print on the menu, which is a very good one, I read the place mat, instead.  It features replicas of some of the guests of the restaurant and inn.  The list began with "W. W. Mayo", father of the doctors who founded Mayo Clinic in Rochester.  A third-generation Mayo is there, too:  Charles W. 

The name that caught my attention was "Ole Bull".  "My god," I said to Mari, "Ole Bull had dinner here!" 

Well, as you all know, since all of you are keenly interested in Norwegian violinists, Ole Bornemann Bull was a featured soloist with an orchestra at age nine, made a fortune, and lost it, not least by trying to found a colony for Norwegians in Pennsylvania on land that was not worth farming.  Poverty forced him back to playing his violin, again, and--apparently--to dinner at the Hubbel House.  There is a statue of Ole Bull in Loring Park, in Minneapolis.

The other names on the place mats were even more astounding:  Horace Greeley, U. S. Grant, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Ringling North, Sid Luckman, the magician Harry Blackstone, Roy Rogers and Trigger, Mickey Mantle, Joe Garagiola, and more! 

Mantorville is less than a small town, but in the century-and-a-half the Hubbel House has been there, it has evidence for the threads that bind the nation together.  Four elegantly dressed prom nighters came in, demonstrating that the level of lighting was just about perfect.  I pointed at the perfectly-lighted menu, confident that it would have broiled walleye, and asked for another glass of chardonney. 

No one asked me to sign the guest book.  Again.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

AT YEAR'S END, 2014

Ah!  There you are!  And so are we! After more than thirty years, sometimes Mari and I look at each other and say how surprising it is that we have found each other.  It often happens when we have decided that neither one of us wants to go adventuring: you know, to the grocery, or to a movie; or least of all, to a party designed to disguise gravity, deny arthritis, and display bottomless good humor. At the same time, sometimes Mari and I look at each other and say how surprising is everything that has happened to us.  The world we grew up in has gone, and now there is another, and that we are still here, as we were, and altogether new. It is Jao we are thinking of. This year, more than any other in our lives, has been the year when a grandchild has occupied a significant portion of our ordinary lives.  We have, in our various ways, come to have several grandchildren, but this time one of them has lived so nearby that we could walk to where he...