Ain't Gonna Be Nothin'

The summer my grandfather chose his own path

Feb 25, 2025

Between May and August of 1936, after completing eighth grade, my grandfather, Louis J. Corbo, decided not to return to school. This short story is a fictionalized account, inspired by real events, of what may have led to that choice.

Black and white photo of a dark-haired man wearing a suit coat and tie, posing next to a car. — Louis J Corbo posing with his new car, purchased in 1941.

The air was thick and unmoving, the kind of heat that pressed down on a person, heavy and relentless. Fifteen-year-old Louis sat drenched in sweat beneath the wide arms of an elm tree, its shade offering the only relief after the long walk back from Phalen Lake. The cool water had refreshed him for a while, but the sun always won in the end, baking the pavement, searing his skin, making him feel trapped. He and his buddy Carmen sat in exhausted silence, as if speaking would only make them hotter.

It had been ten days in a row over 90°. The entire city was wilting. The streets shimmered in the heat, the air hung thick with dust, and sleep was nearly impossible inside homes that held the day’s warmth long after sunset. If Louis had read the local paper, he would have known that most of the country was suffocating under the same unrelenting heat, with no relief in sight. As it was, all he knew was that he was hot—too hot to think, too hot to sleep, too hot to care about much of anything.

“Can you believe school got shut down by a blizzard just a few months ago?” Carmen muttered, his voice dry and rasping.

“Best day ever,” Louis joked, rubbing his sweaty palms through his thick, dark hair. It had been a while since he’d joked. Between the heat, the death of their friend Earl, who drowned in Lake Phalen trying to escape it, and the growing dread of returning to school, there hadn’t been much to laugh about.

Louis had never been a strong student. Raised in a household where only Italian was spoken, he didn’t learn English until he started school at five years old—placing him at an extreme disadvantage. He struggled to keep up, his broken English earning him teasing from classmates and frustration from teachers. By the time he reached eighth grade, he had been held back twice, making him the oldest and tallest student in the class, his presence an awkward mismatch in a room full of younger boys.

And then there was the heat. The school building, overcrowded and outdated, was a furnace that spring. The tall windows had sashes so thick with layers of lead paint that they barely opened. With no fans and no relief, the classroom air was dense with the smell of sweat—young boys who hadn’t bathed in days, their clothes damp and clinging. The temperature inside climbed into the 80s. By late May, as the final weeks of school dragged on, Louis sat at his desk, lightheaded, heavy-eyed, and sticky with sweat, staring at the clock as if sheer willpower could make it move faster. Concentration was impossible.

By June, school was over, but the heat remained. Louis took a job at the market, helping local farmers sell their vegetables. It was grueling work under a scorching sun, but at least he was earning money—one dollar for every three hours. When the market shut down for the day, he went straight to Lake Phalen to wash off the stink and cool his body. Sometimes he met friends, other times he was responsible for watching his younger siblings, a role he took seriously as the oldest of seven children.

But in the quiet moments, he pondered his future. What was the point of going back to school? More humiliation? More frustration? His father, a car repairer for the Northern Pacific Railroad, had kept his job despite the Depression, but Louis knew he wouldn’t have the same opportunity. His father – unable to speak English – unknowingly accepted lower wages to keep steady work. And school? School was suffocating.

The heat of the summer might break eventually, but the feeling of being trapped—by language, by circumstance, by a future that felt out of his control—would not. He thought about the weeks ahead—another sweltering summer day at the farmer’s market, another dollar earned, and soon, the looming return to school. The idea of sitting in that stuffy classroom, struggling to find the right words in a language that never felt like his own, was just as suffocating as the heat itself.

And now it was the height of summer, with temperatures reaching 108° – a record high, after a series of record highs. After having slept outside to escape the heat inside, Louis and Carmen had spent part of the morning making their way to the cool, damp air of Carver’s Cave—a half-forgotten hideout on the bluff near the railroad tracks. They had explored the cave as younger boys and remembered that inside its cool walls was a giant lake. Cooling off there would be much less crowded than Phalen Lake and keep their minds off poor Earl, who had drowned a week earlier.

But they weren’t the only ones with that idea.

They hadn’t expected to find the cave full of scores of homeless men who had taken up residence and defended their space with stern, threatening looks and a cat named Jockey. Jockey’s primary responsibility was to keep the cave rid of rats, but he voraciously adopted his second responsibility of warning the itinerant men of incoming strangers. The boys heard Jockey’s hisses echoing off the cave walls long before they saw the matt-haired feline, its ears flattened back against its head and its narrowed eyes filled with a firestorm of fury. A low, guttural growl rumbling from its throat, and piercing stares from the men, made it clear—they weren’t welcome. Carmen shot Louis a wary glance. No words were needed. They turned and scrambled back into the sun, their brief hope for cool relief thwarted by the cave’s inhabitants.

The only real escape left was Phalen Lake.

“Go swim?” Carmen suggested when they caught their breath, wiping sweat from his forehead.

Louis didn’t answer right away. His shirt clung to his back, damp and stiff with dried salt. He thought about Earl—how the water had swallowed him whole.

“No swim...” he finally muttered, “let’s get poles. Ma’ll need fish sup’r.”

Carmen nodded in agreement. With a mission to accomplish, their pace picked up. At the lake, they waded in the water while casting their lines. The sunfish his mother would clean and fry would sure taste good.

“I read in the paper that fifty people died just this past weekend from this heat,” Carmen said. “Fifty people,” he emphasized.

Louis acknowledged his friend’s words with a slow shake of his head while he bobbed his line up and down. He considered Carmen to be one of the smartest kids in school. They weren’t in the same grade anymore, but Carmen had always helped him with his homework and defended him against bullies. Carmen would be moving to the High School in the fall, and Louis still needed to finish a year at his school. The sudden realization that they would be separated filled him with dread.

Louis posed a question to Carmen: “What job think I get af’r summer?”

Carmen thought for a moment before responding. His brow furrowed, realizing what Louis was really saying, he held his hand up to block the sun, squinting at Louis, "You mean, like, after school? Or..."

Louis tugged his line to hook a fish. "Nah. I mean, I don’ go back."

Now Carmen felt a tug on his line and quickly moved his hand back to his pole. Louis let the silence stretch. "Well," Carmen finally said, "depends on what you wanna do. You could try the railroads, maybe. Lotta guys workin’ there, but it ain’t easy. Long hours, hard work."

Louis nodded. His father came home every night with grease under his nails and exhaustion in his bones. "They not hiring, ‘cording to pop."

"Could do something in the markets. You’re already good at talkin’ to folks, sellin’ stuff."

Louis scoffed.

Carmen shrugged and let out a slow breath, considering his friend’s words – spoken and unspoken. He knew Louis struggled—he’d seen the frustration on his face when teachers called on him, and heard the kids snicker at his thick accent. School came easy to Carmen, but he knew it wasn’t the same for everyone.

"Could try carpentry," Carmen continued. "You’re always makin’ stuff … like that birdhouse for your ma." That idea sat differently. It wasn’t a bad idea. The thought of using his hands, figuring out how to put things together—yeah, that didn’t sound too bad at all.

Louis exhaled, and for the first time in weeks, the weight in his chest felt a little lighter, the air a little less dense. A slow smile came across his face. Carmen noticed and the two boys continued pulling in the sunnies in silence, each with his own thoughts running through his head.

"You sure about this?" Carmen finally asked after they had packed up and started the long walk to their homes.

Louis nodded. "Yeah. I work already down farmer market,” he gestured to the east, “Maybe somethin’ better, y’know? Like you say, workin’ wit my hands.”

Carmen rubbed the back of his neck, glancing down the road toward the houses, toward the school they’d both walked to for years. They walked in silence for a moment before Louis spoke again. "Think I make mistake wit my life?"

"Nah," he said at last. "Long as you do somethin' with it. Ain't gotta be school, but can't be nothin', either."

Louis nodded, his mind made up. "Yeah. Ain’t gonna be nothin’" he said under his breath. Louis exhaled, the decision feeling more solid now that he’d said it out loud. Telling his parents would be a problem for another day. Tonight, he would eat fried sunfish with his family, feeling the last bits of daylight stretch out over the city.

As they neared home, the sun dipping low, the air finally cooling—if only a little—Louis felt something shift inside him. The heat would break eventually, and so would he, in his way. Maybe not like Earl, swallowed by the lake, or the men in Carver’s Cave, swallowed by hard times. He didn’t know what his future would be, but he would break away from what had been holding him back – the school desk that felt like a cage, the continued bullying, and the words that never came out right.

The End

Louis’ full story can be read here:

Pt 1: A Complex Life of Family, Faith and Unending Love

Kirsi Dahl

August 29, 2023

Read full story

THE FACTS:

This story is a fictional account of a series of actual events. Louis did drop out of school sometime before classes resumed in August of 1936. He did have a best friend named Carmen whom he considered the smartest in his school. He did explore Carver Cave and it was full of people (and a very protective rat-eating cat named Jockey) who had lost their homes during the Depression. And, sadly, he did have a friend who drown while trying to stay cool in the waters of Lake Phalen. Even today, the summer of 1936 remains one of the hottest on record in Minnesota. In 1998, when Louis wrote down some of his memories, he referenced the heat from 62 years prior:

Back 1936 all summer the temperature was over 95 degree. I think it was the most drought that St. Paul ever had. Lot people such sick. Some died. Gang and I would go to Lake Phalen try to keep cool, when got to hot we go back home and stay under tree in the shade. It was one of the hotest summer I could ever remember.

Indeed, the early months of the year had unprecedented cold weather and the spring and summer were made up of record-breaking highs. According to most accounts, the heat wave of 1936 resulted in over 5,000 deaths nationwide, 900 of them in Minnesota. The timing of the heat wave came at one of the worst moments, too: The country was in the midst of the Great Depression and was also suffering from severe drought.

In the Twin Cities, the high temperature was 90° F or higher for 14 straight days, including eight days with high temperatures at or above 100° F. That's more 100° days than the Twin Cities recorded for all of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s combined!
The heat wave included five straight days with high temperatures at or above 105° in the Twin Cities, with an all-time record high of 108° F on the 14th, and seven straight days with low temperatures failing to fall below 80°, with a low of just 86° F on July 13th. These measures of excessive heat are unmatched in records going back to late 1872. (Source: Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.)

After the summer of 1936, Louis went on to have a few odd jobs, earning enough to purchase his first car in 1941. He was able to secure a job on the railroad in 1942, just months after marrying my grandmother, Vivian Faircloth, and just before shipping out with the Navy. Louis spent his entire career with the railroad, retiring in 1981.

For the majority of his career, he worked as a carpenter.

Stories from the Tree

Pt 1: A Complex Life of Family, Faith and Unending Love

Discussion about this post