Copy

Dispatch from Lake Worth

In which the author relates a local mystery at a most mysterious time of year –– here's the annual Convivio Dispatch for Halloween: Halloween Dream Waltz.

Hello My Friends,

John Cutrone here, from Convivio Bookworks in Lake Worth, Florida. Autumn has been creeping in slowly this year, but persistently nonetheless. No cold front has yet to make it this far south, and yet there is something quite discernible about the quality of light, shifting lower in the sky. The shadows lengthen day by day and the air, while not at all crisp, is lighter, and there is a general feeling about town that any day now we’ll remember again why we live here in this strange green land: an anticipation of open windows and starry night breezes laden with the salty smell of the vast ocean that is at our doorstep. It is a fine place to be, Lake Worth, when the season is gentle, and for us, we know it will be any time now, and just like that, we will forget all about summer.

It is precisely this that has brought so many people here over the years. In fact, very few of us were born here. My family came to Florida from New York when I was a boy and I eventually wended my way here to this part of the peninsula that is closest to the Gulf Stream. Others have come from Finland and from Cuba and Guatemala and others from all over this great country, and we have seen our share of the famous, too. Babe Ruth liked to visit Palm Beach and was known to play golf here on this side of the lagoon at the Lake Worth Municipal Golf Course. One of our locals who caddied for him as a teenager happened to share the Ruth surname, and as a result he, too, was given the nickname “Babe." George Gershwin, the great American composer, spent some time here as he wrote Porgy and Bess, and I like to imagine the seeds of the melody for “Summertime” were planted here, nourished by a bit of languid humidity rising from the Lake Worth Lagoon. And in 1981, Hollywood came calling when the film noir thriller Body Heat was shot on location here; watch the film today (as Seth and I did earlier this month) and you’ll see our City Hall with its minarets and the bustling downtown is featured prominently, too, before Minnie opened her diner and before Lake Avenue was narrowed from three lanes to two. Good old Lake Worth, forty years younger, as much a star in the film as William Hurt or Kathleen Turner, who played the lead roles.

On a lower rung of this Ladder of Fame, Betty Seinfeld (Jerry's mom) lived nearby and in 2005, the City asked her to be the Grand Marshal of the Christmas Parade. It was one of our warmer Christmases, and I recall watching Betty seated high atop the back seat of a red Camaro convertible, melting in the sunshine, waving her wilted hand along the parade route through Lake Avenue and Lucerne Avenue. And when Seth’s sister moved her family to Lake Worth from California earlier that year, it was Kathy Griffin’s aunt’s home they purchased, and I suspect we have more of these relatives of celebrities in our midst than we realize. Even after Kathy Griffin’s Aunt Mary had died and left this world, she seems to have been in our midst. Our niece, the one who’s now 15 and taking flying lessons, had an imaginary friend when she was little and living in that house on M Street. No one but Isabella could see her. Her name? You guessed it: Mary. She recalls Mary as an old woman with pale skin and dark brown hair. Present in her way yet always imaginary... until the night Isabella felt three slow taps on her shoulder. Tap. Tap. Tap.

But my favorite local celebrity is a famous but long forgotten early 20th century singer and accordion player who came here in the early 1950s from Michigan. She was Finnish-American, and came south to this land where Finns are known to gather. Her name was Viola Turpeinin Syralia, and I never would have known of her had my neighbor’s daughter not bought the house that once belonged to Viola and her husband. It’s a story of great mystery, and one I think of most often at this mysterious time of year: when Halloween ushers in the days when we remember our beloved dead.

The first mystery, perhaps, is how grumpy old Mr. Solderholm could have a kind and gentle daughter, but he does. Mr. Solderholm wanted to call her Elsa when she was born, after his mother, but his wife liked the name Monica, to which he reluctantly agreed. And perhaps Monica Solderholm arrived on this earth with the gift of St. Monica’s patience that she certainly would need as her father grew older and more crotchety. Monica came here about fifteen years ago from Minnesota with her daughter, Ingrid, to be close to her dad, but not too close, so she found a place just west of town: a little bungalow on Reidel Avenue, built in 1939. A sturdy house but in terrible shape, just the right size and a good deal for someone who didn’t mind putting a lot of work into it, and it was just a few blocks from the community college, where she found a job as the secretary for the property department. Not the best job, but a foot in the door, and a new lease on life. Ingrid, too, started school, made new friends. And one day, while visiting her mom at her desk in a corner of the college warehouse, amongst all the surplus chairs and lamps and filing cabinets, Ingrid sat down at a broken down old piano and began dabbling with the keys, and even though the piano hadn’t been tuned in years, the sound that came out of it could only be described as musical. Monica was astonished; she had no idea of Ingrid’s gift. And when she told her father about it, old Mr. Solderholm did what any proud grandfather would do: he went over to Chafin Music on Dixie Highway, and he bought his granddaughter a piano. It was a secondhand model, just in case Ingrid’s interest was a fleeting one, but oh, it was a beauty and the nicest thing Ingrid had ever laid eyes upon: a polished ebony spinet. Ingrid took to it like a fly to honey, and began proper piano lessons, filling that home on Reidel Avenue with music.

It was not the first time. When Monica found it, the house had been vacant for over a decade. Not bad from the outside, but inside, there was cracked plaster and termite damage and a whole lot of unfortunate decorating decisions to be dealt with: drop ceilings from the 70s, carpeting laid over hardwood floors in the 80s. But the house had good bones and Monica could see that its original 1939 beauty could be brought back with a bit of effort. She bought the house from the nephew of the man who had died there a dozen years before: Bill Syrjälä, the widower of Viola Turpeinin Syralia, and from the nephew, along with the house, Monica got its story.

It was a splendid little place when Viola and Bill first arrived there in 1952. Viola had made a name for herself back in the Twenties in Finnish music halls across the country and in Finland, too, as a great accordionist. She played waltzes, polkas, and the slower schottisch, all of them in a way no one had ever heard before, a brand new fusion she invented of traditional Finnish music with Italian staccato accents. It was purely accidental: when Viola was learning accordion as a little girl in Michigan, her teachers just happened to be Italian. By the 1920s, she was a recording star with a string of hits on the Victor label. Every parlor in the nation that had a Victrola probably had a Viola Turpeinin record in the cabinet, too, and her music played on the wireless on stations coast to coast. In 1933, at a Finnish dance hall in New York, she met a sharp dresser and good looking trumpet player. He was Finnish, too, from the old country, and she and William Syrjälä married that same year. They began recording and performing together, Bill on horns or violin, Viola on accordion and occasional vocals. The music was sublime. Perhaps their most beautiful song is “Unelma Valssi” –– the Dream Waltz. A simple song; Bill wrote it, Viola played accordion and sang the words. And maybe its beauty lies in its simplicity. To hear it is to enter a dream, one where you can close your eyes and find yourself floating amidst the Northern Lights as they dance their own dream waltz above the plains and bogs of snowy Lapland, high above the Arctic Circle.

Viola and Bill settled in Manhattan at first and toured the country to packed houses throughout the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. But by the early 50s, they decided it was time to head south to this area, to Lake Worth or Lantana, this odd place that so many Finns had chosen to call home. More Finns than anywhere save for Finland; they found saunas in the houses and heard Finnish spoken in the coffee shops. It felt like home, more than New York ever did. One look at the house on Reidel Avenue, and Viola knew it was the perfect one. She called it “The House that Polka Built.” They had done well for themselves, and now they had a lovely little home in Lake Worth to show for it. That was 1952. There were some good years here in South Florida, and then the devastating news that Viola had cancer. She died here in Lake Worth the day after Christmas, 1958, only 49 years old. But oh, what a life. Her husband stayed on in the home on Reidel Avenue, a widower for more years than they were married, until he, too, joined her in the afterlife, 35 years later.

But accordion music has not fared well since those RCA Victor days, has it? Which is a shame, I think. My Aunt Anne played accordion with the USO, performing for the troops on destroyers and aircraft carriers and at stops all through Japan and Korea during World War II. My Uncle Phil played accordion, too, and so does my neighbor Margaret, who has even joined up with the local accordion orchestra. But let’s face it: accordion lovers are old souls, and they are fewer and farther between than they were 50 or 60 years ago, and now, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who knows the music of Viola Turpeinin Syralia, let alone remember her. Which, perhaps, brings us to the greatest mystery.

As Ingrid’s piano talent grew and developed, she began venturing off on her own from her music lessons, off the pedagogical road and into the woods of her own imagination. One bright Saturday afternoon, her mother heard her play, out of the blue, the most lovely tune. Three quarter time: a waltz. Monica remembers chopping onions at the kitchen counter and pausing, knife in hand, tears in her eyes. From the onion or from the music, she couldn’t tell. “What’s that you’re playing?” she asked Ingrid. 

Ingrid was quiet, at first, contemplative. “I don't even know,” the young girl replied. “Just something that came to me.” Her mother stared out through the kitchen window, out over the yard, the trees, the grass, all of it, a blurred mass of green. “It’s beautiful,” she said, as Ingrid played on this haunting tune that took her breath away.

And now here we are, so many years later. Monica has since retired from the community college; she sold the place on Reidel Avenue a couple of years ago and bought a small condo on the lagoon up in West Palm –– still close to Mr. Solderholm but not too close. Ingrid: she’s in music school, at a conservatory in Rhode Island. One of her first assignments was a term paper: write about a famous musician. Ingrid decided she would write about a famous musician that no one had ever heard of: Viola Turpeinin Syralia, the woman who lived in the House that Polka Built before she herself did. There were no books. She searched online and learned about Viola’s early days in Michigan. She found pictures of Viola and Bill in Lake Worth in a back yard she recognized, the same one that the kitchen window overlooked. She read about the dancehall days and the recording sessions. And then, great wonder! She found Viola Turpeinin’s recordings in an online database in Finland. She sat in the school library and listened to each and every song, lost in a bit of a reverie. Until one song in particular. It began with Viola’s staccato accordion, and then a lilting melody that stopped Ingrid in her tracks: It was her song, the one that came to Ingrid years and years ago at the piano, out of the blue, as if from nowhere, or from a dream. Viola’s voice, captured in wax in 1938, played in her earphones as she sang "Unelma Valssi" –– the Dream Waltz.

But then again, it’s a dreamy place, Lake Worth is, and perhaps we should not be so surprised when strange things happen. They still do, and they always do. They always do.

Happy Halloween.
John

Post Script: By the time you read this, our first cold front of the season will be fast approaching. Saturday's forecast: lows in the 60s. Perfect pumpkin carving weather. This Dispatch, I thought, deserved some photographs (and perhaps they all do). Introductory image: Viola Turpeinin Syralia and friends here in Lake Worth, circa mid-1950s; I love pictures of smiling people with closed eyes. Closing image: Viola and her fantastic accordion, circa 1938, about the time she recorded Unelma Valssi.

To listen to Viola's beautiful recording of Unelma Valssi, click here


  

"Thank you, and write when you can."
 Convivio Bookworks
 Inspired goods from around the globe and close to home...
 Books and broadsides, made by hand in Lake Worth, Florida.
 www.conviviobookworks.com

Subscribe to the Book of Days blog:
www.conviviobookworks.com/blog

www.instagram.com/conviviobookworks (@conviviobookworks)
www.facebook.com/conviviobookworks

Facebook
Website
Instagram
Subscribe to Dispatch
Copyright © 2021 Convivio Bookworks, All rights reserved.


Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp