On the morning after I watched the conclusion of “Death
by Lightning" on Netflix.
One of the final scenes really got to me. It’s First
Lady Lucretia “Crete” Garfield (Betty Gilpin) confronting the assassin Charles Guiteau (Matthew McFayden) in
prison before he is hanged. She is angry and distraught about her husband’s
death at the hands of this addle-brained miscreant, the likes of which we’ve
seen too many times. Crete (President Garfield’s endearing name for her) tells
Guiteau that she has halted the publishing of his tell-all book. “You will be
forgotten!” She also knows that history will forget her husband, that he will
be some sort of trivia question about the shortest-serving president. Nobody
will remember what a fine man he was.
But this viewer now knows. President Garfield, streets
will be named for you. Millard Fillmore too. In the 1980s I lived in the Cherry
Creek block north of the funky-but-soon-to-be-ritzy Cherry Creek North Shopping
District. Chris and I walked from our rental on Fillmore Street to the old
Tattered Cover Bookstore when it actually had tattered covers for sale – cheap!
– and the Cherry Cricket for football and beer and burgers.
Millard Fillmore. Yet another forgotten one. From Wikipedia:
Millard Fillmore was the 13th president of
the United States, serving from 1850 to 1853. He was the last president to be a
member of the Whig Party while in the White House and the last to be neither a
Democrat or a Republican. A former member of the House of Representatives, Fillmore
was elected vice president in 1848 and succeeded to the presidency when Zachary
Taylor died in 1850. Fillmore was instrumental in passing the Compromise Act of
1850 which led to a brief truce in the battle over the expansion of slavery.
"Brief truce” indeed.
He also later ran for president as a member of the
Know Nothing Party.
Fillmore is now mostly a Jeopardy question: Who
was the one-term 13th president? Here’s a hint: There is a comic strip about a duck named for him.
Not surprisingly, there is also a comic strip
named “Garfield” that features a misbehaving cat. Baby Boomers’ kids had Garfield stuffed animals.
You can look it up.
In Denver, Fillmore is situated between Detroit
and Milwaukee streets. We rented a typical Denver bungalow brick house with a
porch and a swastika on the chimney. I walked to the branch library and found
that this swastika stood for auspiciousness and good luck until the 1930s when
the Nazis hijacked it.
A writing colleague lived in our basement and another
writer friend and his girlfriend lived in the big corner house on the next
block. Fillmore was a friend to writers if only for a short time.
Now, Garfield. It was named in the 1880s. The
street runs north and south and dead-ends on the north at the old City Park Golf
Course and on the south at City Park. After Fillmore, Chris and I lived in a
walk-up apartment on Cook Street that was so close to the Denver Zoo that we
could hear peacocks screeching at all hours. Garfield was a few blocks east as
you walked to Colorado Boulevard.
The unforgettable thing that happened to us on
Cook Street was the Christmas blizzard of December 1982 that buried us in three
feet of snow for a week. The infamous event in the neighborhood was the
assassination of radio talk-show host Alan Berg in June 1984, by The Order
Neo-Nazi gang. He was at 14th and Adams, another street named for a
president, actually two of them. They were not assassinated. They are not
forgotten.
I have a library of presidential books willed to
me by my father. No Garfield or Fillmore volumes in the collection. I have an
original copy of Mark Twain’s hardcover bio of Ulysses S. Grant, known as one
of the best memoirs in presidential history. I also have a trade paperback of
it. Several other Grant bios.
We bought our first house in 1985 on South Grant
Street in Platt Park in Denver. The next street over was Sherman. We all know
the origins of those names. Street names you won’t find anywhere in the South. Our
bungalow-style house was built in 1909 and needed work. Our son Kevin was born
there. Neighbors were nice. We let them rent our two-car garage for their woodworking
business which is how we got our living room furniture that we no longer have. I
walked to work at Gates Rubber Company. I came home, got on my running clothes,
and jogged to Wash Park where every Yuppie jogged after work.
My mother grew up
in the Wash Park neighborhood. Wash, of course, is short for Washington, our
first president. In the 1920s, the resurgent KKK once burned crosses in this
Irish-Catholic neighborhood. Public school kids used to harass my mom and
sister when they walked home from St. Francis. Mom said that was the first time
she was called a redneck. Their father, my grandfather, was an Irish immigrant
whose neck had been burned many times. The streetcar ran nearby. Some of the
original houses have been “scraped off” and now are monstrous million-dollar-plus
townhomes.
I looked to see if there were any streets named
for Garfield in my Florida county. Garfield Avenue runs through Deland, not far
from Stetson University and the historic downtown. There is a house like ours
for sale on S. Garfield.
Every day and everywhere, we live with ghosts.
