The Arrogance of Infinity: Tales of Transition from the Industrial to Technology Age

Part One

NOW ARRIVING

When I was a tow-headed kid with a crew cut who wore striped t-shirts and hockey tape around the tips of his tattered sneakers, there were several passenger trains routed through Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Great Northern had its Empire Builder, Burlington the Zephyr, and North Western the 400. Northern Pacific had the North Coast Limited, Rock Island the Twin Star Rocket, and The Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad – known as the Milwaukee Road – had their flagship Hiawatha; these were the engines of the Industrial Age.

Meanwhile, on TV, Lawrence Welk, Dick Rodgers, and Florian Chmielewski (shim-a-less-key) were delighting viewers with static camera shots of folks dancing in circles to Slavic music played by a concertina and a saxophone.

North American settlers who still had ties to the land were taking their last romantic spins with polka dancers and passenger trains. Boeing’s 707 was lifting people above and beyond as rock ‘n roll was warning folks to keep the white patent leather off o’ their Blue Suede Shoes.

The new heights and sounds of jet planes and rock ‘n roll were age spots on the hands of industrialists, and more pain in the hearts of the indigenous. The 1960s micro-age foreshadowed the coming tech revolution with sleek speed, new rhythms, and futuristic peeks at outer space on television. Between Slavic dances, the emerging media began to paint revealing color over episodes of black-and-white Wild West lore.

Historical context and emerging trends meant nothing to a little towhead. I stood in awe on the platform at the Milwaukee Road Depot in Minneapolis as my oldest sisters boarded a big steel coach with seats so huge you could sleep in them.

Taking the girls to the train was a family affair but, since there were nine of us, you had to cast lots for the privilege to watch them leave. They’d wave at us from their seats with excitement that was magnified by hair pulled back in white headbands that matched their gloves and the teeth of their ear-to-ear grins.

The aging, relatively tiny train station in Minneapolis may as well have been Grand Central or Penn Station to me, but it only had four platforms - Grand Central has 44. That meant nothing as well; the quixotic drone of a single locomotive beneath the tin-roof of the train shed canopy, rusted I-beams, and massive iron rivets was all I needed to be drawn into the geriatric allure of Industrial Aged nostalgia.

I knew my time to ride the big steel rails would come, and happily waved in response to my sisters’ hands that kept flapping as the train began to chug toward a romantic, ten-hour roll through parts of cities and towns never seen by the girls; it would carry them over rivers and through the woods. To grandmother’s house they’d go.

My only train ride had been with Jimmy Brinkhaus and Tommy Kobold on the Dan Patch Line of the Northfield, Minneapolis, & Southern Railway. We climbed into an empty box car for a couple hundred yards as the freighter crawled along Bailiff Place in our Bloomington, Minnesota neighborhood at speeds that were ‘safely’ slow enough to be overtaken by six-year-olds in tattered sneakers. That was the only train I ever ‘hopped’. Cautionary tales of a kid* who slipped and had his leg cut off convinced me to bide my time for a big cushy seat on The Hiawatha.

I had to wait til I was twelve, when I was deemed old enough to take the trek down to grandmother’s house by myself. The sisters were nearly grown up by then, and curb-dropped me and my powder-blue Samsonite at the downtown terminal with instructions to wait for the proper announcement before climbing on board.

There were more stops by then, so mine would be a 14-hour trek. The recorded broadcast echoed through the building: Now boarding, Jefferson Lines and Continental Trailways service to Northfield, Faribault, Owatonna… that was my bus.

A bus… and not even a Greyhound.

The announcement continued, …Dodge Center, Rochester, Stewartville, Spring Valley, Decorah, New Hampton (home of Sara Lee), Oelwein, Waterloo, Vinton (famous for popcorn), Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Mt. Pleasant, Fort Madison, Keokuk (World’s Largest Street Fair) …

There were some small towns in there, too. One of the last stops would mock me; Burlington was famous for railroads.

The bus trips down through Iowa, to Mom’s family farm in western Illinois all blend into one memory. I imagine a dozen rides, but it was probably about four, and I admit to artistic license in recounting them.

In my memories, Jefferson Lines wasn’t so bad, but there was no observation car with a 360 view of the amber waves, no refreshments in the diner, and no place to explore except that tiny, overused rest room in the back. I’d play a balance game in that stinky little box by standing in a sports-stance and counting to see how long I could last without touching the walls as the bus bounced along Highway 63, or some crumbling County Road. It was a game of skill and will, in that you never really wanted to touch anything in there.

Jefferson Lines curb-dropped me in Waterloo for continuing service via Continental Trailways. The new rig had the same little box in back, but I’d already set a world record at Bus Bathroom Balance and would strike up a conversation or read a book. I read a lot of books. It took a full day in a Soviet Gulag to get from Oelwein to Ft. Madison one time as I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Sometimes, I’d just look around at the characters. I saw a cute girl my age one time, in Stewartville, but she got off the bus too soon for me to gather courage. It was only three hours to Iowa City. Despite my lack of courage, the bus rides were good to me, they got me to the farm.

One thing I liked about riding high was being almost eye-to-eye with truck drivers like my uncle Benton ‘Jiggs’ Burton. Mom once asked what I wanted to be when I grew up.

A truck driver, I replied.

I had Jiggs in mind. He was a tough country boy who could drive and fix anything. He could shuffle cards faster than anyone on the planet and finesse a 40,000-pound truck with no power steering using big, industrial-age-spotted hands. He was part cowboy, part man of the world, as he drove herds of cattle across the plains to big cities and stockyards at Kansas City, Chicago, and South St. Paul in a snub-nosed hauler that could be tucked into a modern sleeper cab.

Years later, I’d bypass the steel rails and bus rides and re-trace Jiggs’ path to Illinois in a modern truck that could be steered with a little finger. In 2001, I ran into his son, cousin Bill. I hadn’t seen them in more than a decade; not since time turned ten buildings and two feed lots on the farm into more tillable acres that grew soybeans and corn rather than family and livestock.

Family reunions were semi-annual affairs at the farm where cousins renewed best friendships then dispersed to not be seen or heard.

We’d drive cars at 13, shoot squirrels with .22s, and each other with BB guns. We’d ride branches of mulberry trees like rocking horses above bedsheets that would harvest fruit by the pailful rather than the one-at-a-time plucks of gooseberries. We’d stay clear of the bulls, stampede the hogs, and skim low and quiet in ponds, like alligators, then pounce with rocks to thump bullfrogs that would expand dinner menus for us, and the feral cats.

After supper, at a dining room table that could seat about 50, games would be dealt, talks would include politics and religion. Iced desserts came from fresh cream and wild berries that were hand-cranked by big spotted hands and little would-be industrialists. No matter how or when I got there, it was always summer at the farm – in the way I remember.

In 2001, when there was little left but gravestones and memories, I was pleasantly surprised to learn from cousin Bill that Jiggs, the old truck-driving shuffler, was still with us, about 30 miles south, in a Mt. Sterling, Illinois nursing home.

The receiving nurse pointed down a hall cluttered with service carts and orange fiberglass chairs shaped like ice cream scoops, to a man who was now of a tiny world and draped in a wheelchair he couldn’t drive.

Jiggs didn’t know me from a deck of Hoyles and looked up with grumpy disgust for interrupting his habitual gaze. When I reintroduced myself, his eyes flashed like the bulbs of a Polaroid. The mood, and his eyes, then got soft and syrupy as I thanked him for great childhood memories and recounted quail hunts, Sorghum Festivals, and Old Settlers’ Days at the town square bandshell.

When there was nothing left to say, I said Welp… and eased up out of the scoop-chair. His eyes just blinked this time, with a fading, bittersweet resignation. I sensed he knew that other than his two kids, he’d just seen the last visitor from the outside world. He knew the freak coincidence, or divine intervention, was but a final glance at days-gone-by in a country farmhouse full of kids, card games, banjos, and roars of laughter. The picture had fully developed and started to fade. The cards had no more hands to shuffle.

I felt good, like a visiting angel, for a split-second, then slinked like a reaper down the hall of the Senior Dying facility before slumping in my pickup to spend the next ten minutes in a weep I didn’t fully understand. A few weeks later, Jiggs went to see the outside world, forever. His legacy isn’t on the Internet.

Jets and Zooms replace train rides that once were the connections to rural families and farms. The horsepower of a leaf-hauling F-150 exceeds the force of a snub-nosed cattle rig. Thick, age-spotted hands of industrial strength pass on, as slim fingers finesse keypads of code.

Things aren’t as I wish to remember they were. The future – as it always must be – is now arriving.

*Writer’s note: Through a Bloomington, MN nostalgia page on Facebook, I learned that the story about the kid who lost a leg to train hopping was not just a parental scare tactic. It was Ronnie Knutson who tragically gave a leg that saved many others. God bless you, Ronnie.

Part Two

EXPEDITIONS

For a seven-year-old kid who’d spent 90 percent of his life in a forest or field, the sidewalks beneath the cavernous buildings of big-city Minneapolis were a wonder; especially when being dragged by a 70-year-old Word War I Vet who kept pace with pedestrian traffic through an excellent memory and the rapid clickety-clack of a white cane.

Gramps gave life lessons to his eight grandsons by occasionally taking one of us to work with him at the Minnesota State Highway Department, known - in the age of hurry-up acronyms - as MNDOT. His job, reserved for a disabled vet, was daily management of the donut vending machines on each of the Highway Building’s eight floors.

I was stealing glances at my all-time favorite building, the art deco Foshay Tower; a Washington Monument look-alike that was the tallest structure between Chicago and the West Coast from 1929 to ‘72. That’s when Investors Diversified Services came along and stole the title with their evil, glass-and-steel IDS Tower.

My first classroom experience occurred atop the Foshay two years earlier in the studios of KMSP-TV, alongside Miss Betty, on the Do Be a Do-Bee set of the children’s television show, Romper Room. Despite getting to drive the Milk Truck, I was unable to parlay the performance into child stardom.

Gramps busted my reflections of youth with each tug of the hand, Gotta keep up, he’d say. Get the drift? If ya don’t, I’ll snow ya in.

I needed to keep pace so we could catch the connecting bus that would take us across the Mighty Mississippi, through the sprawling campus of the University of Minnesota, past St. Mary’s – the hospital of my birth – and on to the mysterious land of Government, Fairgrounds, Ice Castles, and Catholics – St. Paul, Minnesota.

When it was my turn to make the epic journey with Gramps, I’d sleep in his big leather recliner and rise at 4:30 a.m. at 3444 Colfax in South Minneapolis. Today, the Pullman-style apartment with a garage stall and location in trendy Uptown, is priced like a New York City flat and a dream address for millennials. Gram would have the most important meal waiting but, with bakers in St. Paul filling a room with glazed and sprinkled and jellied pleasures, my interest in nutrition was thin.

Before any taste of the rare delights came the expedition. It was a half block up Colfax to 34th, then three blocks over to Lyndale where we’d fill the clinking coin counter of a green-and-white bus that would take us downtown to Hennepin Avenue.

Hennepin was aptly named for a Franciscan priest (as in – who else could forgive its existence?) and was one of two Skid Rows in Minneapolis that were populated by mostly white men whose post-war dreams and ambitions had been rediscovered in day-jobs, flop houses, panhandling, thievery, and booze.

We’d walk a few more blocks past Nicollet and Marquette to 2nd Avenue where we’d complete the transfer to an eastbound bus. I’d gape at more buildings along the way: another art-deco tower, The Rand; the gothic spires of Northwestern Bell Telephone; Farmers & Mechanics Bank – whose entrance was guarded by depression-era sculptures of lean and powerful-looking men; Northern States Power had mascot Reddy Kilowatt; and the top of the Northwestern National Bank building had a color-coded ball of glass that told the weather. By the age of nine, I knew Minneapolis architecture like most kids knew baseball cards.

After the bus transfer we’d pass one of the city’s most significant buildings, one that housed the apex of media power and influence in the upper Midwest: The Minneapolis Star and Tribune Company, a business that relied on more than 10,000 independent distributors to circulate almost a million newspapers six days a week, and more than a million on Sundays. The distributors were 12-to-16-year-old kids who were also in charge of sales, revenue collection, and local inventory control.

St. Paul, however, had a building far more impressive than any in Minneapolis. The Cathedral of St. Paul is the fourth largest church in the U.S. and the largest outside of New York City and Washington, DC. It sits on the city’s highest hill, and the massive, 120-foot wide, copper dome rises another 306 feet with such ominous presence as to never be taken for granted. The first time I saw it, I knew Minneapolis had more big business towers, but God’s headquarters was across the river.

We couldn’t see the cathedral for most of the seven-mile trip of starts-and-stops along University Avenue – the main drag between the cities. The route was a gorge of two, and three-story structures that had aged through a century of major world conflict and the Great Depression. The buildings that had been torn down were paved with asphalt and loaded with New/Used automobiles for sale at the best prices, but probably not the best values, in town.

The Highway Building was perched alongside its brand-new Interstate 94 that was near completion, but traffic-free in the summer of ’68 as a river of concrete cured in anticipation of joining America’s most recent innovation in distribution: the Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. The folks in the building – Gramps’ customers – engineered the ramming of I-94 through the Rondo Neighborhood, just as their counterparts in New York, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Nashville, Tulsa, et al, had done to the burgeoning centers of Black culture throughout the nation.

Half of Gramps’ customers looked up at the cathedral, and half across expansive lawns to the gleaming white marble of our state’s capitol – a building that in 1968 represented, to me, the hope of humanity, but 50 years later would come to epitomize waste and corruption.

The green-and-white bus, that looked like it belonged in every American city, took a turn off University Avenue and stopped a half block from our destination. Once inside the Highway Building’s commissary, I’d marvel at Gramps’ sense of feel for the right keys that opened access to his daily process. He had a broom closet of an office that had a couple of bus carts, general supplies, and a cast iron safe with a big dial that was just as cool as they looked on TV.

Work would begin with packaging freshly baked doughnuts, eclairs, and Bismarcks, which are jelly doughnuts from Germany where they were called ‘Berliners’ before being renamed after Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck. In the U.S., the original name stuck in heavily concentrated German populations and led to the localized joke that John F. Kennedy’s Ich bin Ein Berliner speech translated to I am a jelly doughnut.

My job was to slide pastries into cellophane bags, fold them over, then swipe the package over a stainless-steel hot plate to create a quick-melt seal. Back in the ‘60s, adults believed the pain of error was the fastest way to teach.

We’d visit vending machines on each of eight floors – using modern, operator-free elevators with push buttons the whole time – to swap out day-olds for fresh doughnuts and pour square metal buckets of coins into canvas cash bags. Some of the day-olds would be sold to frugal palates at half-price, some would go to churches, most of the leftovers went to custodial pals of Gramps who carried obvious indications of their military service.

It wasn’t rare in those days to see Buffalo nickels, last minted in 1938, and Mercury dimes from 1916-45, in circulation. Once in a while, we’d even come across Indianhead pennies that were minted from 1859-1909. The ‘Wheatback’ pennies had only been out of circulation for a decade, so Gramps put those collectibles aside in a WWII surplus shell box to save for future generations.

The blind man’s sense of feel would again come into play back at his office where he’d sift coins through his fingers. His keen sense could feel the difference between the more valuable discontinued coins and the new mints of Washington, Jefferson, Abe, and FDR.

He’d let the modern coins fall away, then buy out - at face value - the more valuable stock for his side venture as a coin broker. We’d swing back to the 3rd and 7th floors to visit Gramps’ coin-collector buddies who would purchase the currency at wholesale, then turn it again at pawn and coin shops. The gratuitous insider trading was forgiven in lieu of their Nine-to-Five fates as cattle in 40x100 foot rooms with no dividers, just dozens of perfectly aligned rows of metal desks separated by the exact amount of space it takes to get a mail or doughnut cart down the aisle.

The day would come full circle with a return trip to Minneapolis on the green and white bus where we would be dropped at the doorstep of Ballantine VFW Post #246 on Lyndale and Lake Street. Gramps would set me up at the bar with a soda and instructions to keep an eye out for Gram while he conducted business – a card game – in the club room. Gram would show within an hour in a shiny Buick Skylark from her job as a bookkeeper at the world’s largest retailer, Sears & Roebuck Company, before driving us weary workers back home.

My Pop’s folks exuded an air of wealth; everything was always so tidy and neat at 3444 Colfax – from the kitchen to their clothes, to the air-conditioned Skylark. Unlike mom’s home on the farm, where bugs, dust, and animals were first-cousins, Rex and