Call Me Al

Call Me Al


The disclosure to me by my mother that she was going to get married was as incongruous to me as it was stunning and surprising.  She sat me down in our little upstairs apartment at the farm and told me that she might get married and that I would then have a step-dad.

I didn't know what to think.  I thought things were going pretty well with our then current situation, living upstairs from Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee, who cared for me all day while she was at work and spoiled me in the evenings until she returned, usually quite late.

From my mother's point of view, which I had no ability to empathize with at my tender age of six, living with her parents as a single mom was a drag sometimes.  She was twenty-eight years of age, beautiful,  and had wanted a loving relationship and life-partner.  While I was otherwise occupied, the rascal had been going out partying and dating!

Then came the shocker.  We would not continue to live with Grandma and Grandpa!  I was pretty dubious about that part of the deal, because I was living pretty large.

She assured me that we would have our own house to live in and that I would even have my own room.  Her fiancé was named Al.  His real name was Adolph Botcher but he shortened his first name because we had just won the second world war by defeating, among others,  Adolph Hitler and no one, even of German heritage, wanted to have any connection to that horrible tyrant.

Not too long thereafter Al even went so far as to have his first name legally changed to Alec, which he went by thereafter.

Al Botcher had never met me.  He was going to marry a woman without even setting his eyes on the child that was going to become his stepson!  I'm sure she must have had Al over to the house to meet her parents and me between that announcement and the wedding, but I don't have any memory of it.

All I remember is that I checked out of Hickory Hill school and we moved our paltry belongings in early spring of that year to Hokah, Minnesota where Al Botcher had bought a farm, not too different from the one belonging to Lill and Lee.

The address of the farm was La Crescent, Minnesota, right across the Mississippi River from La Crosse, Wisconsin.  It was located in one of the valleys, named Pfeffer Valley, between the bluffs along the river.  Hokah was a very small town several miles south and located where the Root River flows into the Mississippi.  The farm, however, was in Houston County and Hokah had an elementary school in the Houston School District.  Houston High School is where I was slated to go when I got old enough.

Our new abode was really only about forty miles from the farm of my grandparents, but it seemed five hundred miles distant.  The roads were rather poor in those days and there was only a primitive state highway, HW 16, going between La Crosse and Sparta unless you wanted to drive the back roads, which would virtually take forever.

Al worked as an accountant for Harnwell and Harnwell, an office right near Fifth Street and Main in La Crosse right across from the Bodega, a landmark restaraunt and in fact, the one that Uncle Si went to for his coffee clutch.  Al continued that job even though he was going to dabble into farming in Pfeffer Valley.  My mother continued to work as a secretary at Camp McCoy.  They would drive to La Crosse in the morning where she would catch a ride to Camp McCoy with someone else who worked there.

I don't remember a wedding.  I think they just went before a justice of the peace.

Al Botcher was a big, strong, fairly imposing man.  He was handsome and my mother seemed delighted with him.  He had the middle finger of one of his hands bent back and growing right back into itself just before the knuckle.  When I got more relaxed around him, I asked him how that happened and he told me that it was an accident with a stone boat when he was young.

That didn't help me much.  I later learned that a stone boat was a sort of raft, made of sturdy bolts of wood, that got dragged behind a tractor or a team of horses to load stones that had come to the surface during plowing of the fields.

So Al had some experience at farming.

Al Botcher and my mother made a very pretty couple and were excited to move into the farmhouse.  I was apprehensive about going to a new school in a small town instead of out in the country.  There were a lot of things to do to adjust to Hokah, Minnesota.

My little universe was about to get a bit larger than hanging around with Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee.