How Angel Peterson Got His Name (2 page)

He is always called Angel.

Angel Peterson, and I was there when he got his name.

We lived in northwestern Minnesota, up near the Canadian border and not far from the eastern border of North Dakota. The area is mostly cleared now and almost all farmland, but in the late forties and early fifties it was thickly forested and covered with small lakes and was perhaps the best hunting and fishing country in the world, absolutely crawling with fish and game. My friends and I spent most of our time in the woods, hunting, fishing or just camping, but we lived in town and had town lives as well.

Because the area was so remote, many farms still did not have electricity, nearly none had phones and the rare ones that did were on party lines, with all users on the same line so that anybody could listen in to anybody else (called rubbernecking). Individual phones were identified by the rings: two longs and a short ring would be one farm, two shorts and a long another farm and so forth. You would call somebody on a separate line by hand cranking a ringer on the side of your phone for the operator—one very long ring—and
when she came on (it was always a woman) you would ask her to place your call, as in “Alice, I would like to talk to the Sunveldt farm over by Middle River,” and the operator would ring them for you. Anybody on your own party line you would call by simply cranking their ring (my grandmother was a short, a long and a short).

In town we had private phones, with a clunky dial system that didn't always work, and that was about it.

There was—this is important—no television. There were just two channels in the major cities on the East and West Coasts. Almost nobody in town had a set. A TV set at that time was a huge buzzing, hissing black-and-white monster that had the added benefit of being dangerous. The coating on the inside of the picture tube required no less than forty-two
thousand
volts to operate, an amount that could easily kill fifteen or twenty horses. When television finally did come to the small towns up in Minnesota many a cat was turned into something close to a six-hundred-watt lightbulb by
sticking his nose back in the power supply area of a console television set, trying to investigate the little crackling sounds and blue glow that came out of the ventilation holes. On his twelfth birthday, my pal Wayne Halverson licked the end of his finger and stuck it near the ventilation panel on his family's new RCA set. (Even though there was no television station programming to watch for nearly two more years they used it for a conversation piece and a place to put their bowling trophies, but my grandmother said the Halversons had always put on airs ever since Dewey, who was Wayne's great-great-grandfather, was kicked in the head by a workhorse and found that he could do accounting.)

Wayne never actually touched the top of the main rectifier tube and so didn't get the full jolt, which would have cooked him on the spot, but it arced over to his finger and a lesser charge, say enough to light two or three single-family dwellings for a week or so, slammed him back into the wall and left him unconscious for several minutes.
He later claimed that the incident was what made him the only one in our group who could actually talk to girls.

Radio was king and every Sunday night we would go to the Texaco station where Archie Swenson worked and listen to
Gunsmoke
on the radio. Matt Dillon (played by William Conrad in the radio version) would say things like “I'm marshal of Dodge City, Kansas. It's a chancy kind of job and makes a man watchful and a little bit lonely but somebody has to do it.” Archie let us buy bottles of Coca-Cola for a nickel and bags of peanuts to put in the Cokes for another nickel and sit and listen to the radio as long as we didn't bother him at work and most especially if we didn't bother him if any older high school girls came by for gas or just to flirt with him. We were all twelve and thirteen and in Archie's world not quite human.

Archie was very, very cool. He was sixteen and had a perfect ducktail haircut and worked at the Texaco station full-time because he'd dropped out of school. He wore Levi's pulled so low that if he
hadn't worn a T-shirt tucked in you would have seen the crack in his butt. He smoked and kept a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his T-shirt and as boys we worshiped him, and also, much more important for the story of Angel Peterson, Archie had a car.

For the times, it was a very hot car. It was a '39 Ford sedan with an original V-8 engine and even though it was well over ten years old, with years of rough use during the Second World War, when small-town cars had to double as trucks and sometimes even tractors, even so it was a fast car. But more, Archie had “done things” to the car to make it faster. We were too ignorant to know how, but we were sure he had chopped this or enlarged that or channeled here and ported there to make it more powerful, and V-8 Fords were known for their speed. Some could do well over eighty miles an hour. We had read about some hot rods that would do a hundred miles an hour but dizzying speeds like that were usually only achieved on racetracks. Archie's car was also cool because he
had a knob on the steering wheel that was made of clear Plexiglas and had a picture of a partially nude woman imbedded in it.

Two more things have to be understood about those long-ago times before the stage is finally set for Angel.

First, that part of northern Minnesota is completely and unbelievably flat. During successive ice ages, it was scoured flat by glaciers bulldozing their way south. When the glaciers melted, the land became an enormous inland freshwater sea called Lake Agassiz, which later receded to form the Great Lakes.

The land is so flat that if you cut down the trees and paved the area, you could probably roll a bowling ball from northern Minnesota to Montana without half trying.

Second, without television the only news, outside newspapers, came once a week at the theater matinee, when we would watch something called newsreels, short black-and-white film clips of the week's events.

And so in mid-January of 1954, when the Minnesota winter had settled its icy hand on the north country, it came to pass that four of us, all thirteen years old, went to a Saturday matinee showing of a really interesting and informative film about how radiation from nuclear testing (known then simply as A-Bomb experiments) had caused a species of common ant to mutate and grow to be huge, forty-foot-tall monsters. The radiation also made the ants develop an overwhelming need to eat human flesh. The movie was called
Them!
and we all agreed it was well worth the fifteen cents' admission and the extra dime for popcorn and another nickel for a box of Dots.

We were also impressed by how the giant ants, which made a sound strangely similar to small, peeping chicks, could suck all the flesh from a cow's skeleton (or a human's, come to that) and leave the bones intact. As we exited the theater, we argued about how
we
would have handled the ants. As I remember it, the government invaded their nests and very brave men attacked them with flamethrowers….

That is, we all discussed the film except Carl Peterson. He had been strangely quiet since the showing of the newsreel and a short sports film about a man who had gone for the world speed record on skis and exceeded seventy-four miles an hour.

We walked along in the steam from our breath, talking about giant ants that sucked flesh from bones, and Carl stopped dead and said,

“I can do it.”

“Do what?” Pete Amundsen asked.

“Break the speed record on skis.”

There was a pause. Then, from Pete: “Here? There isn't a hill for a thousand miles—maybe two thousand. How are you going to get up any speed?”

Carl shook his head. “I don't need a hill. It didn't say anything about a hill. It just said you have to go fast on skis. Well, I've got these old army trooper skis and we can smooth them up.”

“I don't care how smooth they are, on flat ground they won't move—”

“Archie,” Carl cut in. “We get Archie to pull me
with his car. He's got a hot car, hasn't he? We just get him to pull me faster than seventy-four miles an hour and bingo, I've got the record.” And then he said the one thing he should never have said.

“It can't miss—what can go wrong?”

Every single one of us knew at least one very good reason not to do it—it would break the skis; it would break the car; it would break Carl; it would
kill
Carl. But not one of us said a word.

In all of us was the thirst for what can only be called scientific knowledge, the need to know the answer to the question:

What exactly
would
happen to Carl if he went over seventy-four miles an hour on a pair of army surplus skis?

Of course, there were many logistical problems to be overcome. Carl had the skis, that was true, but the rest of the equipment was lacking.

Nowadays, it may be hard to realize how difficult it was then to get simple things for outdoor use. There was no L.L. Bean or any other specific outdoor supplier. There was the Sears and Roebuck
catalog, and they would send you a shotgun or a tent that the famous baseball player Ted Williams said was the best in the world.

There really wasn't much in the way of equipment available anyway, nor were there any real sporting goods stores. Hardware stores sometimes sold roller skates with metal wheels that locked on to your shoes with clamps. Ammunition for .22 rifles was sold in grocery stores.

Which left army surplus.

The Second World War had just ended nine years earlier and clothing, rations, ammo, guns, jeeps, even some explosives could be bought for almost nothing from the government. A 30/06 rifle went for seventeen dollars, a .45 automatic pistol was eleven dollars, a jeep cost a hundred, a fighter plane went for three hundred and you could even buy a tank or a battleship. It was said that John Wayne had bought a destroyer or minesweeper and turned it into a yacht, and there was a bachelor farmer out east of town who bought a hundred or more
tons
of high
explosives to use for clearing stumps. (It didn't work out so well for him because he'd stored them in his barn and as near as they could figure it a mouse or rat chewed on a blasting cap and set them off, making the whole farm vanish. The crater smoked for days. All they found of the farmer was his left boot but Archie said that didn't prove much because it could have been anybody's foot in the boot.)

So we went to the army surplus store and for seven dollars and eighty-one cents we completely outfitted Carl for his world-record speed-skiing attempt. For those who might think we weren't serious about his effort, let me point out that this was not an inconsiderable sum. A man working in a factory was paid a dollar and five cents an hour and a Dairy Queen cone was a nickel—ten cents if it was dipped in chocolate.

By pooling all our money we spent nearly a man's daily wages on Carl. We got him the best equipment we could find.

We found flight goggles—the kind with the large, soft rubber wraparound frame—and a leather flight helmet. A leather flight jacket used up four dollars; it was on sale because it had three holes that were kind of stained. We did not say the jacket might bring him bad luck even though some of us were thinking it.

Then came sheepskin flight pants, only half a foot too long, sheepskin-lined flight boots just two sizes too large and a jumbo pair of genuine sheepskin gunner's mittens with a separate trigger finger.

When Carl was fully dressed, standing there in Bruce Carlson's garage, he looked like a large leather ball with tinted green eyes.

“It must have taken four or five sheep to make his outfit,” Bruce said.

“I can't see through the goggles,” Carl said. “Should they be all fogged up like this?”

“Don't worry,” Bruce said. “Once you're outside and moving in back of Archie's car they'll clear right up.”

“Should the pants legs be bunched like that around my ankles?”

“Don't worry,” Bruce said. “Once you're outside and moving, the wind will tighten them up.”

“Should the jacket be this loose around my neck?”

“Don't worry,” Bruce said. “Once you're outside and moving …”

And so, with all Carl's worries completely covered, we walked down to the Texaco station and approached the second most important ingredient in the record attempt: Archie.

“No,” he said. “Absolutely not.”

He was adamant until Bruce said, “We'll give you five dollars.”

We all looked at each other, then gave Bruce the evil eye.
What
five dollars?

“Cash?” Archie asked.

Bruce nodded.

“In advance?”

Silence.

Pete finally said, “As soon as we've made it shoveling walks after the next snow …”

Archie thought a moment. He probably knew we didn't have that much ready money, knew we had spent what we had on Carl's clothes. He also knew we would pay him. Not paying a debt to Archie—Archie of the ducktail haircut and hot car, who was said to sometimes carry a switchblade,
that
Archie—would be something close to suicide for a thirteen-year-old.

He shrugged. “All right—but you pay me right after the next snow.”