Bob Hazen:
CLASS OF 1969
Central High SchoolClass of 1969
Grand forks, ND
Bob's Story
“April 1969: the Flood of the Red”
by Bob Hazen (GFC ’69)
Dr. H was holding a tool out to me while explaining something about the ground floor carpet needing to be pulled up if the water got too high. But I didn’t understand. As a very self-conscious 18-year old, I was so concerned about merely looking like I understood that I soon became bewildered by his directions. So I did something unusual for myself at that age: I interrupted him and admitted I hadn’t been following him - could he please start over from the beginning?
Rob’s dad - Dr. H, as we sometimes called him - wasn’t irritated. He simply nodded and began again. As I listened this time, I appreciated not being belittled for being spacey at first. Dr. H was giving me precise instructions about why the carpet needed to be taken up. The rising waters of the Red River were filthy with debris, mud, and oil. Since the waters were almost certain to fill up the basement, the danger was that the waters would rise up through the flooring to soak and ruin the ground floor carpet. We had to watch the basement stairwell, and if the water came within an inch of the topmost stair, we were to pull the carpeting up. The tool he held was the device to remove the carpet staples. Both Dr. and Mrs. H had to be out of town, and they were depending on us to watch the house for them.
Their home on Riverside Drive was soon completely surrounded by the rising Red River, and we had to row a boat to the house from across the now-submerged street. We had to enter and exit the house through the kitchen window. Before Mrs. H left town, I one day had to tramp my muddy boots through the kitchen window and over her counter. I thought she’d be upset and so I apologized, but she said it didn’t matter.
The waters grew steadily higher, and for the next several days, about a half-dozen of us skipped school and stayed in the house overnight. The gas and electricity had been cut off, so there was no TV, no lights, no cooking. We had flashlights and candles and brought food in from time ...Expand for more
to time. We watched the basement pump and water level, built fires in the fireplace, and played hearts till midnight. We were on a mission to save the house - Jeff Brown, Dick Lund, Tom Polovitz, Larry Satrom, Rob Hariman, John Davenport, myself, and maybe a few others I can’t recall now. One night later in the week as we watched the fire, a log rolled out of the fireplace and left a burnt spot in the carpet. But eventually the waters of the Red subsided, and we never did have to pull the carpet.
Fifteen years after the flood of the Red, I became the father of a boy who loved to hear stories about when his daddy was young. I had told him as a 4-year-old this story of the flood a dozen times or more, each time conveying different elements of the drama, each time remembering and adding other details that only return with repeated tellings. One night as the story finished, with my little boy in my lap, I realized another thread that I’d not seen previously. I realized why Dr. H hadn’t belittled me about the carpet tool, why Mrs. H had said it didn’t matter that I’d tracked mud over her kitchen counter, and why neither of them was upset about the carpet burn.
Many things had happened in the years between the flood of the Red and the time of telling this story to my son. The Sixties counterculture infiltrated and infected my life. My Vietnam draft number came up really low. I voted for Presidents and paid taxes and bought a couple houses. Twice I lived briefly in Europe. I married a lovely woman and watched both of my boys come into this world. But in the darkness of that night in my son’s room, as he was falling asleep in my lap, I said aloud to myself, “That flood was the first time in my life that I felt I was doing something that really mattered to someone. It was the first time I felt like a man.” Many times since then, I had known what being a man means, but on that night, I realized that the flood of the Red had been the first time. I laid my son in his bed, then prayed over him, and hugged him goodnight.
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