“I was lying upside down on the front seat with my head under the dashboard and I felt something on my chest. I looked up and here’s this little orange and white kitty cat. Estimated age six to eight weeks. And he was on my chest meowing. I looked up and said, ‘Well, hey, Rusty, how are you?’ I petted him, and he laid right down on my chest, and he just stayed there. He never left.”
Part I
For those of us in northwest Iowa, Sioux City is the hub of activity. We go there for Christmas shopping, for theatre and entertainment, for business meetings and dancing and advanced medical care. The big city, we mutter in Spencer, shaking our heads. Railroad town, we say, because you can’t drive three miles in Sioux City without crossing a railroad track. Too crowded. Too much traffic.
But that’s not entirely true. The truth is that Sioux City is just different from the rest of the world out here on the high plains. Towns here are mostly flat, sunny, and open to the sky. Sioux City is dense, industrial, and tall, full of church steeples and factory towers. It’s one of those old towns, like Pittsburgh or Cleveland, that seems to have been carved by brute force out of the ground. Pittsburgh had steel. Cleveland had oil. Sioux City was built for cattle. They came a thousand head at a time down the Missouri River or on overland trails to be penned and fattened and slaughtered in the raw brick factories along the river, then shipped back out on railroad cars.
The Missouri River, the reason for the location of the town, brought other things as welclass="underline" granite, grain, steel, hides, and the men who raised and built and transported them. Downtown Sioux City featured the best restaurants and hotels in the region. The warehouses of Lower Fourth Street, on the edge of downtown, were the center of vice—mostly the liquid kind—for a hundred miles around. The workingmen’s homes stretched into the hills carved by the river and its tributaries, punctuated by Catholic and Orthodox churches for the mainly Eastern European immigrants building the city one stone at a time. On a bluff sat the octagon, an old steamboat captain’s house, built so he could watch the river. On the highest hill, Rose Hill, were the mansions of the slaughter bosses and factory owners, built mostly of the rough-hewn Sioux Falls granite that was always being shipped down the river and moved out to the rest of the world.
Glenn Albertson grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the edge of Rose Hill, in the days when the factories were humming, the riverboats were running, and every ten blocks of closely built four-room houses and four-story apartment buildings felt like its own world. Glenn’s family moved often, but they always seemed to end up near Pierce Street, where the storefronts were feet from the road and often attached at the back to Victorian-era boardinghouses. In the 1950s, when Glenn was growing up, there were bakeries, barber-shops, and locally owned grocery stores on almost every corner. The kids played stickball, rode bikes, and walked to school, even in the brutally cold Sioux City winter. In the summer, they congregated on the sidewalk, watching the big color television in the window of Williams Television & Appliance Store.
They were self-sufficient, the kids of Pierce Street. Their fathers worked in the factories. Most of their mothers worked to support the family in “women’s jobs” like waitressing, sewing, and housekeeping that were the secret backbone of Midwestern America. As the family drifted through apartments, Glenn’s mother worked for a catering company, cooked for a local restaurant, and waitressed at the coffee shop in the Warrior, the grand old hotel that had been a fixture of downtown Sioux City since 1930. Eventually, she found a permanent position running the kitchen at a retirement home for women. She cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with special requests taken. She started cooking at dawn and rushed home every afternoon, because she knew that as soon as her husband opened the door, he’d boom, “Is there anyone who can cook around here?” Then he’d smile and envelope her in a hug. She always had a meal ready for him, too.
Glenn’s father worked at the Albertson Tool Company. The name wasn’t a coincidence. Glenn Albertson, Sr., a soldier from the stone-quarry region of southern Indiana, married Christel Mai, a farm girl from the small town of Pierce, Nebraska, at the end of World War II. They tried to make a life in rural Nebraska but soon moved to Sioux City, about seventy miles away, in search of job opportunities. Glenn, Sr., saw a notice about the Albertson Tool Company and decided, with a name like that, the company must be his destiny. He worked at Albertson Tool, manufacturing air and electrical tools, for a few decades before leaving to become the best commercial painter around.
Glenn, Sr., was a “man’s man,” stern and strong. He worked hard labor, and he worked it hard. He stood six feet tall with two hundred fifty pounds of muscle molded by his hours lifting hammers and steel. Days, he shaped tools at the Albertson company; nights, he was a bartender and bouncer on Lower Fourth Street, the gin-joint district on the edge of downtown. He was a gregarious man with a lot of buddies, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to disappear with them for days on end. By the time Glenn, Jr., was nine years old, he knew just about every bartender in the Lower Fourth ward.
“Sit down, kid, and have a strawberry pop,” they’d say. “I’ll find your dad for you.” It wouldn’t be long before Glenn’s father would walk in and clap his son on the back, bags under his eyes and a rumpled smile on his face, but otherwise hardly worse for wear.
“Let’s go home,” he’d say. “I’m hungry.”
By eighteen, Glenn, Jr., was six feet four and two hundred sixty-five hard pounds. He was even bigger than his father, but everyone called him Tiny. When the school principal introduced him before the big football game, Glenn came out carrying the smallest guy in the school in the palm of his hand. The kid jumped down, slapped him five, and everybody laughed. Glen was a gentle giant, the big man on campus (if by campus you mean Pierce Street), and a friend to all.
Six months later, he was married, a proud (if accidental) papa, not quite graduated from high school but already pumping gas and repairing cars. The gas station where he worked was near the highest point of Court Street, a few blocks from where he grew up. From the front of the lot, he could see the ten-story buildings downtown. Beyond them, hidden from view, were the Missouri River and Lower Fourth Street, where his father spent his afternoons in the company of other hardworking men. Behind him, less than a mile away, his mother labored over the stoves of Rose Hill. When he left the gas station, he walked the same blocks he had always walked, where the kids still rode their bikes to the corner shops for soda pops and candy even if they didn’t congregate on the corner to watch television through the appliance store window anymore. It was the 1960s. Most of them had their own televisions now.
Glenn was content. He wanted nothing more than to be a good father to his boy. He was home every night to tuck him into bed. He read him books and explained how motors worked and told him that he loved him, that he was there for him, whatever he needed. He nearly froze that first winter at the gas station, with the continuous blanket of snow and the cold wind of the Upper Midwest blasting him day after day. He took a second job as a fry cook, for the extra money, but also to keep warm. After a few years, he gave up the gas station for the temperate environment of the assembly line at Sioux Tools, formerly the Albertson company.
In his spare time, he trained to be a cop. There was no police academy in Sioux City in those days. Studying to be a policeman meant experiencing it, strictly volunteer, with a senior officer. Glenn rode in a squad car for a year. He called on domestic disturbances. He was in car chases. He talked angry, drunk, and angry-drunk people out of foolish decisions. He was good. But police work didn’t pay. So when his second son was born, he took a job at his father-in-law’s insurance office. He was even better at selling insurance, he soon realized, than he had been at police work. He knew how to put people at ease. He was enormous, but he wasn’t intimidating. I am reminded of the words used to describe a commander from the Second World War, who also happened to be from Iowa: “[He] was a leader—quiet, unselfish, modest, yet very strong . . . One believed what he said; one wanted to do what he proposed.” You wanted to buy, in other words, what Glenn Albertson was selling—whether it was an insurance policy or a Sunday school lesson—because you believed in him. And you knew he believed what he said. Glenn Albertson, people could see right away, was a stand-up guy.