Joe Rantz—Harry Rantz

Joe Rantz and Harry Rantz’s relationship is marked by distance, mistrust, and the possibility of a return to family life. After Thula Rantz’s death, Joe does not simply step back into the role of son: he is unsure whether he can trust his father, even as he worries about Harry and the four children left in his care. Their movement toward one another comes through concrete acts—food bought for the children, a house raised from a damp basement, work shared in the rain, and a song around the stove—rather than any instant resolution of old hurts.

Distance and responsibility

By the summer before Thula’s death, Joe and Joyce Simdars had reason to worry about Harry’s household. Harry and Thula were making extended trips around the state, including visits to places associated with their courtship. On one occasion, Joe and Joyce arrived at the Bagley Avenue house to find that Harry and Thula had been away for three days, leaving Harry Junior, Mike, Rose, and Polly without adult supervision and with little food. The children had searched the cabinets for something to eat. Harry Junior said their parents had left provisions, including stewed beef, potatoes, vegetables, bread, and canned goods, but he did not know when they would return.

Joe and Joyce took the children out for ice cream, bought basic groceries, and brought them back. Harry and Thula had returned by the next day. The episode mattered beyond the immediate shortage: Joe could not understand what his father and Thula had been thinking, and learned that the absences had been happening throughout the summer. Yet his response was practical rather than punitive. He made sure the children had food and continued visiting, even while his relationship with Harry remained unsettled.

Bereavement and an uncertain invitation

On October 25, Joe returned to the shell house after a cold, wet workout and found his brother Fred waiting on the floating dock. Fred had received word from Harry at the hospital: Thula had died of septicemia caused by an obstructed bowel. The news left Joe numb. Thula had been the closest thing to a mother he had known since he was three, and he remembered good times with her, including singing together around the piano. He also had regrets about the later strain between them, wondering whether he might have tried harder to understand her circumstances. His grief had limits, however; beyond a point, he found that he could not feel much more. His immediate concern turned to Harry and the children, because he knew what it meant for a child to be motherless.

The next morning, Joe went to the Bagley Avenue house. When no one answered the front door, he followed the path around to the back and found Harry and the children at a picnic table on the wet lawn. Harry was mixing cherry Kool-Aid, the children’s favorite. Joe sat down without speaking and looked at their faces: Rose, Polly, and Mike had red eyes; Harry Junior looked tired; Harry seemed deeply hurt and suddenly older. Joe expressed his sorrow. They talked about Thula, and Joe described the memories he could share with the children watching from over their Dixie cups. Harry began to mention a recent trip to Medical Lake, but became too upset to continue.

Harry then told Joe, “Son, I’ve got a plan. I’m going to build a house where we can all live together. As soon as it’s done, I want you to come home.” The invitation did not settle the relationship. Joe stared at his father, could not tell whether he could trust him, and answered without committing himself. He promised the children he would visit, but that night drove back to the YMCA in confusion and anger as well as uncertainty. The distinction matters: Harry offered a home, but Joe was not yet ready to treat the offer as proof that the past had changed.

Building a home together

In the following weeks, Harry’s plan began to take physical form. He was building on a lot by Lake Washington, and when Joe and Joyce visited on a Sunday, the basement was nearly complete and the upstairs was under construction. Harry and the children were living in the basement, which had one garage-style entrance and a single small window facing the lake. A woodstove made the rough space warm and dry. The house was not yet the settled home Harry had promised, but it gave the family a place to gather while he worked toward that future.

Joe and Harry spent the morning carrying lumber from the road to the site in driving rain and lifting it to the level of the future main floor. Their work gave the invitation a practical form: Joe was helping build the place where his father hoped they would live together. Inside, Joyce entertained the children with card games and made fudge and cocoa on the stove. She and Joe were concerned that the children were struggling after their mother’s death. The children had frightening dreams; Rose and Polly often cried when left alone; their grades were slipping, though they remained in school. Joe offered a dime for every A they brought home, while Joyce tried to find caring, motherly things to do with them. Their attention to the children became one way Joe and Harry’s household began to take shape around shared responsibility.

A tentative return to family life

The shift in Joe’s feelings is conveyed not as a declared reconciliation but as a change in what he sees before him. Through the rain, he looked toward the house, with a freight train passing on the tracks behind it. Inside were Harry, the children, and Joyce, gathered under one roof and waiting for him to come in. Joe’s feelings began to rearrange themselves, like notes finding a new pattern. He returned to the warm basement, dried his hair, unpacked his banjo, and drew a chair up to the woodstove. After tuning the instrument, he gathered the children and began to sing. One by one, they joined him, along with Joyce and Harry.

The scene does not erase Joe’s uncertainty about his father or supply a final accounting of their earlier conflicts. Instead, it gives their renewed connection a modest, observable form: Joe enters the house, brings the children together through music, and shares the song with Harry. The family is not restored by Harry’s promise alone; its tentative unity appears in the work of building, the care given to the children, and the act of singing together.

The relationship in retrospect

The book’s later account of the family also records reconciliation beyond this moment. Joe’s daughter Judy Willman grew up hearing his stories and learning about the hardships he had endured and their psychological effects. She knew Harry’s version of events too: by then, he had reconciled with the family and was affectionately known as Pop. Judy also learned Thula’s perspective from her uncle Harry Junior. Her long collection of stories, photographs, letters, and memorabilia preserved accounts that did not come from Joe alone.

The relationship’s history is therefore presented through more than one family memory. Joe was a central witness to his own troubled relationship with Harry and Thula, while Judy’s later conversations and records helped fill gaps and keep the family’s differing recollections in view. The book’s movement from Joe’s guarded response at the picnic table to the shared song in the basement, and then to Harry’s later place in a reconciled family, makes reconciliation a process rather than a single declaration. Its evidence is domestic and specific: a grocery run, a pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid, lumber carried through the rain, and a home whose unfinished rooms slowly become a place where Joe can return.