St. Albans, Idaho, population 7,276, was nestled on the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, about 40 miles west of the Grand Tetons. The town had been established in 1870 by Mormon pioneers, most of whom had immigrated from Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. While the high altitude, harsh winters, and short growing season had proven to be too daunting for previous settlers, the Scandinavians were right at home.
Given it’s Mormon origins, it might seem odd that that St. Albans’ name had come from a Catholic saint, but the name was a borrowed one. The area around St. Albans had reminded one of the early settlers of St. Albans, Wisconsin, which, as home to a large granite quarry, had been named after St. Alban of Mainz, the patron saint of hernias.
While St. Albans, Idaho, didn’t have a granite quarry, its roots were firmly planted in the earth. Its rich, volcanic soil was ideal for growing root vegetables and the area quickly became one of the largest potato producing regions in the U.S. Up until a few years ago, most people in the town were either potato farmers, ranchers, or, like Grim’s father, taught at the college in nearby Rockford. But even though none of these occupations paid particularly well, St. Albans had one of the highest average incomes in the state. When one of your neighbors is a billionaire it tends to skew the numbers a bit.
Pete Peterson was born in St. Albans in 1923 and, after a brief stint in the Navy during World War II, he headed off to Chicago to attend Northwestern’s business school on the G.I. Bill. After graduating, he married Florence Smyth-Hamilton (of the Chicago Smyth-Hamiltons) and returned to St. Albans with an eye on modernizing the potato processing business.
He noticed one day that a lot of potato scraps were wasted during processing, so he devised a way to mince the scraps, add a little seasoning, and form them into bite-sized nuggets. He called them Spud Nips™ and they were an instant success. In the post-war era, frozen foods were a symbol of modern suburban chic, and Pete Peterson’s Spud Nips™ became a fixture, along with TV dinners and chicken pot pies, on the TV trays of Americans everywhere.
Unfortunately, a year after the successful nationwide launch of Spud Nips™, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite into orbit. The American public went into a panic, figuring that if the Russians could send a metal sphere the size of a basketball into orbit over U.S. soil, it was only a matter of time before nuclear warheads came raining down on their pot pies of prosperity.
The name of the Russian satellite, Sputnik, bore an unfortunate resemblance to the name of the Pete’s starchy confection and his competitors, Alma and Heber Driggs, of La Grande, Oregon, took advantage of the anti-Soviet backlash to launch a competing product. The name Tater Tykes™ didn’t conjure up the same vision of a nuclear apocalypse in the American mind, and by the end of 1959 the Driggs brothers had gained 90% of the bite-sized potato market.
Pete Peterson lost almost everything in the Spud Nips™ fiasco and decided that catering to restaurants would be less risky than dealing directly with fickle, reactionary consumers. So, he developed a method of parboiling and freezing thin strings of potato which could then be shipped to restaurants where the potato strings would be cooked in oil, salted, and served with a tomato-based condiment. Within a year he had a contract to be the exclusive provider of french fries for a small chain of hamburger restaurants that was experimenting with the concept of “franchising” and the rest is history.
As Pete’s fortunes rose, so did Florence’s expectations. In the early 1970s, Florence insisted that Pete’s new billionaire status warranted a move from the unassuming, ranch-style home they had on the outskirts of town to something a little more…prominent.
The new house, designed and built under Florence’s supervision, ended up looking vaguely like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, but without the water. And rather than being nestled in a valley and integrated with its surroundings, it was perched on the top of the highest hill in the valley. The large plate-glass windows of the house faced northeast, ostensibly to provide the best view the Grand Tetons, but since St. Albans lay to the west, it gave the impression that the house was trying to ignore the town.
The town tended to ignore Florence right back. Pete was considered a local and made frequent trips into town in his 1969 Ford pickup for groceries and hardware supplies. But Florence had worked hard to foster an outsider status and hadn’t set foot in St. Albans since 1978. Even after Pete died in 1985, she rarely left The Fortress (as it came to be called). What little interaction she did have with members of the community was usually quite unpleasant. Her tongue lashings were legendary and there were persistent rumors that she’d reduced each of the last four mayors to tears.
The only thing Florence seemed to enjoy was gardening. The Fortress was surrounded by five landscaped acres and while a commercial firm from Idaho Falls had always taken care of the lawn, she’d done everything else herself. There was a small orchard with apple, apricot, cherry, peach, pear, and plum trees, a rose garden, grape vines, raspberry and blackberry bushes, a kitchen herb garden, and a large vegetable garden, as well. All of it scrupulously maintained.
In the late-1990s, however, Florence’s arthritis became progressively worse and she wasn’t able to get around the gardens like she once had. The lawns remained in good shape, but since she was too proud to have anyone else come in to do the gardening, the rest of the grounds fell into disrepair.
This situation wasn’t unusual. While the average Idaho farmer could expect to live into his mid-70s, it was not unusual for Idaho farmers’ wives to live into their 90s. As these women got older, health problems often limited their mobility and if getting around the house became difficult, getting outside the house to do yard work was often impossible.
Grim’s introduction to horticulture came when his neighbor, Mrs. Skarsgaard broke her hip and Grim’s mother asked him if he’d be willing to go over once a week and mow her lawn. Shortly thereafter, he started mowing Mrs. Stratton’s lawn, followed by Mrs. Johnson’s, followed by Mrs. Nay’s, followed by the nearly-blind Mrs. Johansson’s, followed by others’. Mowing led to sprinkler work, which led to flower beds, which led to vegetable gardens and soon he was the groundskeeper for twelve of the best-looking yards in St. Albans.
When Grim turned 14, he started feeling the great adolescent need for spending money. Money was kind of tight at home, so if he wanted some disposable income he was going to have to find some way to earn it himself. The employment options for a 14-year-old don’t go much beyond yard work, which was fine with Grim, but he couldn’t very well start charging the widows for his services. There was only one person in St. Albans who could really afford to pay for yard work, and that person was Florence Peterson.
So, one May afternoon, Grim made the pilgrimage to The Fortress on his mountain bike. He was too young and clueless to realize how nervous he should be about meeting the Queen of St. Albans, but this lack of fear was one of the first things she noticed about him. Grim made her a proposal: He would work for three weeks for free. If she didn’t like his work, she was under no obligation to keep him on. But if his work was satisfactory, she would hire him as her full-time gardener.
If she had known that what she was really doing was subsidizing 12 other widows’ yard work, she might not have agreed, but she did. The truth is she didn’t think a 14-year-old boy had the maturity and discipline to do the work and she had secretly been looking forward to firing him at the end of the first week. But he was much tougher and more mature than he looked at the time. For three weeks, he woke at sunrise, rode his bike out to The Fortress, worked like a dog until sundown, rode back home again, and collapsed into bed, his arms, legs, and back aching like they had never ached before.
He spent the first week doing demolition: pruning shrubs and trees, thinning the flower beds, aerating the lawn, amending the soil, turning the garden, and weeding everything. The second week he repaired the irrigation systems, fixed the broken panels on the greenhouse, and (with some help from his father) reworked the electrical wiring for the outdoor lighting. The third week he had his Mom drive him to Idaho Falls where he picked up seeds, vegetable seedlings, annuals, ground covers, a new plum tree, and a few dwarf evergreens to replace the ungainly, aging junipers that flanked the driveway.
While Grim was working, Florence made frequent trips out onto the porch to criticize Grim’s pruning technique, click her tongue at perceived horticultural missteps, and second-guess his plant choices, but in the end even Florence had to acknowledge the results. The grounds were beautiful again, and though Florence would never admit it, they looked better than ever before. He got the job.
He’d never worked harder than he did that summer and the results were striking. But it wasn’t just the yard that was transformed. That summer Grim went from being a scrawny 14-year-old boy to being a lean, muscular young man. He grew three inches, put on about 15 pounds of muscle, and developed a dark tan. When he showed up at school that Fall, every girl at school couldn’t help but notice the change, but Grim was oblivious to their stares. In his own mind, he was still the same gawky nerd he’d always been.
He’d spent the last three years refining what he’d started that first summer at The Fortress and it had turned into a year-round job: landscaping in the summer; snow removal in the winter. The previous summer, when he turned 16, Grim purchased an old Toyota Tercel station wagon from a guy in Jackson Hole who had decided to abandon the granola lifestyle in favor of a career in accounting. The station wagon had 160,000 miles on the odometer and 20 years of road salt had taken its toll on the paint job. The brown paint on the roof and hood of the car was peeling off in large sheets and parts of the floor had rusted through so that driving through puddles usually meant getting your socks wet. Florence had been so appalled by the appearance of the vehicle that she had forbidden it in her driveway. Grim had to park at the bottom of the hill and ride the mower up.
The car was not what you would call a “babe magnet,” but it ran well and the price was right. In fact, the trailer he pulled behind the Tercel was worth double what the car was worth, and the mower he carried in the trailer was worth double the value of car and trailer combined.
But now he was leaving them all (the car, the trailer, the mower, The Fortress, St. Albans) behind…at least for the summer. His brother, Thor, was taking over lawn mowing duties for the widows in town and Mr. Nelson, who was currently being lectured by Florence Peterson (still wearing the gas mask) on The Florence Peterson Rules of Horticulture, was going to be in charge of The Fortress while he was gone.
Grim waited for a pause in the lecture and excused himself. He said goodbye to Mrs. Peterson, whose muttered response was unintelligible through of the gas mask, shook Mr. Nelson’s hand one last time, and rode the mower down the driveway to his car. He loaded the mower into the trailer, slammed the tailgate shut, and looked back up the hill one last time. He was going to miss this place, there was no doubt about it. But this opportunity to go to England was the chance of a lifetime and there was no way he could pass it up.
So, even though he’d never in his live travelled more than 300 miles from St. Albans, tomorrow morning he was getting on a plane (for the first time) and flying 4,731 miles to England. If he’d known just how much this summer was going to change his life forever, he would have been a little more nervous. But sometimes it pays to be young and clueless.
Posted: Thursday, March 11, 2004 at 11:40 PM
