Ramsey County History – Winter 2011: “Growing Up in St. Paul: Louis and Maybelle: Somewhere Out in the West”

Growing Up in St. Paul: Louis and Maybelle: Somewhere Out in the West
Author: John W. Larson

This is John Larson’s evocative view of his aunt, Maybelle, and her husband, Louis, who were proprietors of a nightclub hotel in a Montana boom town, which flourished during the construction of the Fort Peck Dam in the middle of the 1930s. Much of this reminiscence is about Larson’s efforts as a young boy to understand who these relatives were and why Maybelle had left St. Paul for the West. In an abrupt ending just when Larson was graduating from high school in 1941, Louis dies, and Larson realizes that despite his grief over the loss of his uncle, life goes on. Looking back from many years later, Larson identifies this as the moment when he became an adult.
PDF of Larson article