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| Private Joe Haan, the Last Iconoclast |
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Author:
B. Wayne Quist |
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My uncle, Joe Haan, and his sisters Cecilia Haan and Rose Marie Haan(my mother) were consigned to the Owatonna Orphange by the Ramsay County Court in 1926. Joe remained at the Orphanage until 1932 when he was placed with a sadistic farmer in southern Minnesota who beat him, worked him as a slave, and did not allow him to attend school. Joe's sisters fared better. Joe finally escaped from the farm, joined a CCC camp, enlisted in the Army following Pearl Harbor and survived the Battle of the Bulge with Patton's Army after spending three days in a foxhole with a dead German soldier. Joe survived the war, married and had two sons. He died in 1994, leaving a collection of essays and poems that are being published under the title, THE LAST ICONOCLAST- POETRY & ESSAYS OF PRIVATE JOE HAAN. The following poem begins an orphan's odyssey and tells of the death of Joe's mother in 1925. B. Wayne Quist Email: waynequist@comcast.net Tel: 952-270-8764 THE VAGABOND ROAD By Joe Haan In the year of our Lord 1925, Like any other year, Many human tragedies occurred, For certainly the whole pudding of life Is well-seasoned with such. So quite early in the morning, We find an undersized seven-year-old boy Clutching the side of a cheap, gray coffin Within the confines of a third-rate mortuary, In the seedy slum of a large Minnesota city. Streetcars, horse teams, and primitive autos of all sorts Flowed by the door in a constant sluggish stream. All day, till late in the evening, he stood, His small and frail hands Clutched to the edge of the cheap gray coffin. Inside reposed the Mother, Who had been his source of nourishment and security, A thin and slightly graying creature Who departed to oblivion in the darkness of death. In later years he remembered being wracked by sorrow, But rather, the pain was from the pit of the body, The pain that is recognized as hunger. The Mother was a scrub woman, One who worked for pennies per day plus streetcar fare, Six children she bore in dire poverty, he being the youngest. In the pre-school age, he accompanied his Mother To the homes of the affluent and wealthy, To clean their mansions and wash their clothes Of worldly grime, on a washboard, by hand. What he would look forward to With anticipation and anxiety Would be the hour of noon, For some of the owners of these sumptuous mansions Might provide a meal, And others would deny that privilege, So he learned to steal at a very early age. When no noon meal was forthcoming He crept stealthily into their pantries And took what was available. The finality of death is a terrible shock to the human ego, For we never pass this way again, A message that is constantly transmitted to us At every conscious moment of existence - The lettered men of physics and chemistry, Without serious gaps in their education, Know beyond a reasonable doubt, That only the lowly atom Will survive without dissolution, Atoms without emotions, reason, personality, consciousness, or sentimentality, For the atom is godly - the reason for everything that exists - For even if god existed, That god would be as emotionless as the atom. And so, most become nameless martyrs in anonymous death. Only those principals in which they reverently believed, We hope shall survive, and become infinitely better. As man marches down the endless corridor of time To an unpredictable future, he shall either walk in the sun, Or return to the primitive darkness that was his past. Were it not for the William Cunninghams, That darkness would have partially descended On the stage of civilization, For the average man, With his narrow egotistical concept of Who he is, why he is, where he is going, Lacks the fortitude and intellect to pay the price. |
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