He had no doubt that he had chosen the right occupation.
By the end of September Allen knew all of his students' names, some 150 of them. The task was made more difficult by the fact that so many had similar surnames — Dahlberg and Dahlstrom, Kvist and Kvaal, Halvorson and Henderson, not to mention the Johnsons, the Carlsons and the Andersons. He prided himself on knowing who they were wherever he saw them, in the classroom or on the street.
Except for Dave Meyers and Orville Christopherson (and, inevitably, since she was his closest colleague in the curriculum, Patty Porter), he knew the other teachers in the senior wing only by name, 15 of them. Almost all were married, many with children, which put them out of his league. The grade-school teachers he knew not at all, quickly forgetting those he'd drunk beer with that night in Benson.
Whenever he saw old C.P. Arndt in the hall, the man's expression remained the same. He nodded but never spoke.
Allen got a haircut in the barber shop. He sent his clothes to Crookston to be cleaned, and had a heel replaced at the shoemaker's. He ate his meals either at The Food Box or the hotel or Hilma's. He stopped in Iverson's drugstore occasionally for items like toothpaste, shaving cream, hair oil and candy bars, where he often saw George Schuelke, the chemistry teacher, smoking his usual cigarette and talking to the owner. At Kvist's Standard Station — owned, he assumed, by little Jimmy Kvist's father — he had the distributor in his engine checked and the fan belt replaced. He bought a pail and sponge to wash his car at the Coast to Coast hardware store.
