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The Runaway Kids 50 Years Later from Home of the Good Shepherd
Elizabeth Weintraub and Ileen Johnson at Pepito’s in South Minneapolis.
When my housekeeper asked who was the friend in Minneapolis I would be meeting yesterday, it gave me the opportunity to tell her about the runaway kids. It was a crime to leave home without parental permission in the 1960s. If you were caught, the police threw you in jail with all of the adult criminals. Not many people know this about me, but I left home at 15 and did not return until I was 19. And every so often I got picked up, incarcerated and slipped back into society. Runaway kids are rebels or troublemakers or both.
I knew Ileen from high school in Minneapolis, but we were not friends. Not until I met her in the Home of The Good Shepherd. The buildings and campus were from the 1800s, but it seemed like a castle to me. High ceilings, vast spaces, long hallways, damp, chilly and dark. The Sisters gave us 3 cigarettes a day at meal times. At night, they read us a bedtime story: The Hobbit. We went to school onsite, did chores and smoked.
Now, as luck would have it, when I spot a window of opportunity, I generally open that window. In this particular case, the windows had bars on them. Everyone had left us for the afternoon, all the Sisters, and we were unsupervised. This was my opportunity to escape. A large group of us kids tried to pry off the bars from the windows, but it wasn’t working. I noticed the bars were attached to a frame, and somehow, I don’t recall how I did it, I managed to release the frame from the window.
The kids gasped. I opened it. We were on the second floor. There was a tin roof over an extended first floor. Ileen and I jumped out the window, landed on the tin roof and hopped down the remaining distance to the ground. It was the middle of winter in St. Paul, Minnesota. We had no coats, no belongings. We ran. We were 15 years old.
Somehow we found my great grandmother’s house. My great grandma gave us winter coats, a little bit of money, and we left to take the bus into Minneapolis. Along the way, I felt into my grandfather’s coat pocket and discovered a flask of brandy. Nobody thought of us as runaway kids because that’s how kids dressed in the 1960s. In old peoples’ clothing.
Ileen was busted early on, but I stayed on the run for several more months. That was 50 years ago. And above is a photo of me with Ileen today. I am in Minneapolis for a few days to help scatter the ashes of my aunt, my mother’s sister. Still selling Sacramento real estate in my absence from town, though. I’m one of those people who always finds a way to succeed. So does Ileen.
The Hobbit and Sacramento Real Estate
One of the requirements to be a writer — what they call an “expert”– at About.com, is to be passionate about your topic. You have to be able to write, of course, and have something to say, naturally, but that passion (expressed through dedication, intense commitment) is completely necessary. Passion is also the necessary ingredient to being immensely happy and content in your job. If you find yourself consumed, driven, and almost half nuts about a particular topic, that might qualify you to write for About.com.
My topic is home buying and home selling. I can’t help it, I love real estate. I love everything about real estate. The people, the homes, the financing, the excitement, the challenges, the battles, the history, the future. It’s given me independence and extreme satisfaction in my chosen career. I started in real estate when I was in my 22, and I’ve been happily married to it in some form or fashion ever since. This year, I will sell over $30 million as a Sacramento real estate agent.
Real estate has become my Hobbit, the foundation for some of the other stories in my life. We saw the movie The Hobbit yesterday, and my husband shot a photo of me with Gandalf. The Hobbit is being shown in theaters all over Sacramento, but if you want to see it in 3D and high-speed (48 frames per sec), you need to see it at Century Stadium. It’s been more than 45 years since the nuns at The Home of the Good Shepherd in St. Paul first read that book to me, but I do not recall much of that movie in the book. Oh, how us poor souls who read expect screenplays to faithfully follow the book, and film entertainment often crushes those silly expectations.
Here are a few highlights without spoilers: I had to laugh when Thorin knocked on the door. It was why, hello, yes, here I am, the hunk of the movie. And he swaggered into Bilbo Baggin’s home. I thought Cate Blanchard was going to throw Gandalf to the ground with her mind and molest him right then and there. I kept waiting for it, but it didn’t happen. There were many battles. One after the other. We were in the theater for days. Some people went to sleep and snored. Oh, wait, that was on the screen. And then, at the end, there was no end. Because we have 2 more movies. And there you have it. The complete description of The Hobbit.
Don’t get me wrong, I was entertained. But last night while I was thinking about The Hobbit, I suddenly realized I have two more reasons to buy a home to add to my article of 8 reasons to buy a home. I finally have 10 reasons. I had tried to come up with 10 reasons when I originally wrote the piece in 2006, but 8 was all that popped into my brain, so that’s what I ran with. But now I have 10. And it’s because of The Hobbit that I thought of them.
Reason #9 is Security. Because nobody can kick you out of your home, as long as you make your payments. Your landlady can’t come along one day and tell you she’s decided to rent to her son. Or remodel. Or sell the home. Because it’s your home.
Reason #10 is Stability. With today’s widely used amortized loans, your mortgage payments, the principal and interest, stay the same over the term of your loan. They don’t go up when interest rates go up, and they don’t fluctuate. The state of the economy has no affect on your mortgage payments. Nobody will raise your rent.
