From Where I Sit

By Pat Spilseth, Columnist

I spent my childhood in jail. Growing up in a rambling, big box house, with attached jails housing robbers, derelicts, bums and a few shady characters, felt perfectly normal to me. 

To this day, I haven’t met anyone else who spent their childhood, grade school, high school and college years living in a jail house. But I did. And I loved it!

Mom wore house dresses with bib-aprons and made fresh homemade chocolate chip cookies, doughnuts and cakes. Dad was my hero; he was the sheriff of Pope County and drove a fast car to catch crooks. My cute baby sister Barbie, eight years younger than me, and our pet dog, Daisy Mae, rounded out our family. Later on, Dad found a tiny Chihuhua we called Imp. He ruled the jail with his furious bark, though his presence was anything but intimidating.

I lived the best kind of childhood, in a small town on a big lake in Glenwood, Minn., where most everyone knew everybody else in town as well as their business. My family lived a bit differently than my friends. We lived in a jail, with iron bars at the windows, where several characters with not quite acceptable personalities visited us regularly. Others in town probably would not choose these folks to be their neighbors. But our visitors provided built-in “live” entertainment for my family and my childhood friends. Life was never boring at the jail.

Sheriff DeKok was my dad. Our family of four lived in a nine room, red brick house along with two jails fortified with iron bars: men were locked in the downstairs jail next to Dad’s office; the upstairs jail housed women prisoners. My bedroom and the women’s jail shared a wall. Next to Dad’s office was the kitchen where Mom made three meals daily and served coffee and cookies several times a day…for no pay for her work. A large dining room and living room completed the downstairs of our home. A staircase with bannisters led upstairs to bedrooms and bathroom.

At eight, I was perfectly comfortable sitting near the closed door to Dad’s sheriff’s office, listening and catching a peek when the door opened. My dog Daisy Mae and I would sit at the kitchen table, munching on chocolate chip cookies and drinking a tall glass of white milk. I would see big-shouldered parole agents in their open suit coats, starched shirts and tie, with hats to shade their eyes; husky, uniformed cops with shiny badges on their chests, hats with visors and braid, and a hanging gun belt and bully club. Sometimes I’d meet the gaze of a stumbling, handcuffed prisoner being led into a cell through the huge steel jail door, just outside our kitchen door. The men often called me by name, winked and smiled, even teased Patty with the thick pigtails. I wanted to hear what the men were talking about. There was always some excitement when the uniformed officers arrived at Dad’s door, but especially intriguing for me was watching the prisoners being “booked” into jail. Dad had to get names, write their formal charges in the big linen book, and collect their personal possessions like wallets, keys and belts. 

     It was well known that some of the guys tried to hang themselves in their cells, probably upset about a family fight or a lost job; many were depressed. Most times I wasn’t scared, just fascinated: my Dad was the sheriff. He’d take care of everything. All was well in my world. 

Dad was the serious sort; he took his job very seriously, but, looking back on our life in the jail as an adult, Dad probably attacked his sheriff job too rigorously, took it too seriously. In a few years, his worrying led to numerous doctor visits where he was diagnosed with ulcers. He began losing his suppers in the bathroom, losing weight; eventually he had to be hospitalized to have the ulcers removed. Eventually his body had cancer and he died a long, painful death at sixty-one.

His happy-to-lucky deputy, Lynn Krook, was a perfect partner to Dad. Lynn was always smiling and telling jokes. Rather than tackling the routine details of office paper work, Lynn enjoyed planning vacations in the West where he could pan for gold. He loved adventure. Ideas were spinning continually inside his head; his talk was contagious. Lynn would spend hours chatting with each new person who entered the sheriff’s office; he’d trade stories and check on travel routes, good fishing streams and where he should go to prospect for gold in those mountain streams. He had dreams of “striking it rich” out West in his beloved mountains. Deputy Lynn loved life’s adventures, even at the Glenwood jail. He’d sit on a bunk in the jail cells, visiting with the prisoners; rest at our formica, kitchen table, Mom’s coffee and chocolate cookie in hand, and visit with the courthouse crew. Downtown, he would be the perfect campaign politician with the townspeople, something Dad, the man of few words, was not skilled at.

Every fall I’d look forward to the expected one-to-three-month visits of my jailhouse favorites,  men different from anyone else I had encountered in Glenwood. Some of my best-remembered characters were Blackie the stuntman, Pretty Boy Verdi and Paul, the dancing decorator. They bunked at our jail regularly. Usually the “regulars” received their jail sentences from Judge Dietz in the fall. Repeatedly, they were charged with offenses of drunk and disorderly conduct or bouncing bad checks. In those days, we didn’t look at repeated drinking offenses as alcoholism, a disease to be treated with hospitalization and therapy. Facilities to help problem drinkers or those with other behavior problems didn’t exist where we lived. Jail was the only available solution for these folks. 

Their three month sentences allowed the guys to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays with our family. There were only four people in my family: Mom, Dad, my little sister Barbie and me, so we enjoyed the additional company. Their jail vacations, as Paul referred to his visits, and their fascinating personalities endeared them to our family. It didn’t matter to Barbie and me that they had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly, stealing, embezzlement or bigamy. We were kids; the jail guys were good to us; they were our adopted family.

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To contact Pat, email: pat.spilseth@gmail.com.