Category: Saint Paul History

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White Pine and Blacktop

This morning the stillnes of the neighborhood was violated by the rumble of large trucks and chain saws. It was as if someone had thrown a brick through a plate glass window.

The crew scaled the majestic White Pine and dangling on the ropes like an aerial circus act began whittling away at the branches. Chips and sawdust drifted like snowflakes as a light breeze stirred the  sweet resinous air.

In the neighboring trees, the birds, that I expect had made the pine their home , were wildly dancing and singing a  song of distress. It was an unusually loud and high-pitched scold I wished I’d recorded.

The tree was estimated to be between 100 and 150 years old, was nearly 3 feet in diameter and reached almost 200 feet into the sky. The branches extended 20 feet or more from the trunk.  One of the woodmen said it was virgin growth which meant it was here long before the urban life was laid down.

As the last large section of trunk shuddered the truck bed, I felt sad that such magnificence would not be seen again on those mornings after a fresh snowfall. The whispering of the the needles in the wind falls silent. It was feared that such a giant, could, in a storm, wipe out  3 or 4 homes, theoretically I suppose. Fear of the giant was its demise.

My violin is made from Maple, Spruce, and Ebony trees. Trees are invaluable to me. I’ve started composing a piece about the White Pine as token of tribute.

 

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Welcome Home, Brothers !

 

Last November I was selected for jury duty. As I entered the courthouse I was greeted by a 38 foot, white onyx sculpture, a First Nation’s man with a pipe, bearing the title “Vision of Peace”. Having arrived early I escalated to the second floor to check out what was advertised as a Veteran’s memorial. The dimly lit walls were labeled with the names of our wars; below was listed the names of those who died in service.

I sought out the Vietnam War section and followed the alphabet down where my finger stopped at Lawrence Paulsen 1950-1969. I knew him as Larry. His name is on the wall both in Washington D.C. and Minnesota as well. We were born just a month apart. My eyes welled with unapologetic tears as they often do when I think of that war.

Moose Lodge 40 couldn’t have been prouder of its sponsored hockey team, a rag tag bunch of 17 and 18 year olds from St. Paul’s North End neighborhood and their coach George Paitich. From the funky ice at Front Recreation Center we rose to claim the Minnesota State Juvenile Hockey Championship and travelled to Houghton, Michigan to compete in the national tournament where the scruffy city kids were soundly defeated by a much bigger bunch of guys from Canada.

For our efforts, we were awarded the finest soft black leather sports jackets you had ever seen. I can still smell the new leather scent from the moment I first put it on. Crossed black and gold hockey sticks on the right sleeve and crossed Canadian and American flags on the left with a large gold figure of the state of Minnesota over our hearts, inscribed with “Moose Lodge 40, Minnesota State Juvenile Champs 1967-68”. We were so proud of those jackets.

The following season, with the cheers still ringing in our ears, several of us traded our skates and sticks and jackets for jungle boots, M-16’s and camouflaged fatigues and marched off to the arena of war.

We arrived in Vietnam almost at the same time, but assigned to different parts of the country. Larry, my left wing, died during his first firefight. All but I returned carrying shrapnel and bullet fragments in our bodies. I was lucky. But the freshness and joy of youth had been stolen from our faces by fear and Agent Orange defoliant. When I strap on my skates and push the puck across the frozen surface, I slap the blade of my stick on the ice and hear the words Welcome Home, Brothers !

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Working on the Railroad

 

The Dale Street Locomotive Repair Shops

This story originally appeared in the Saint Paul Almanac, 2013-2014 Edition

Driving through the intersection of Dale St. and Minnehaha Ave, in the Frogtown district, you couldn’t help being impressed by the massive yellow-ochre brick building with the exceptionally tall glass block windows. The three story monolith housed the diesel locomotive repair and overhaul facilities for the Great Northern Railway. The ‘shops’ as they were known, were built by James J. Hill at the turn of the 20th century. Because of his admiration for the work ethic of the Bohemian and German immigrants of Frogtown, he built the shops in their neighborhood in order to have a dependable work force to drawn on. It seems like almost everyone in my family, and my friends’ families, worked or had worked for the railroad at some point in their life. I was no exception; after returning from a tour of duty in Vietnam, I was offered a job in the materials department and joined the union of the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks.

Locomotive engines are propelled by microbus-sized diesel engines that spin the generators that power the traction motors that in turn, move the wheels. To overhaul and maintain these beasts required a corps of mechanics, steelworkers, pipe-fitters and electricians, along with a warehouse full of parts. My first day on the job, I felt as if I had been transported to a medieval blacksmith shop. Lined up before me were three tracks of locomotives with their guts spilled out on the floor alongside them. The dark air was perfumed with petroleum distillates; the light from the tall, glass block windows was dim, punctuated by brilliant blue welders’ torches and showers of sparks cascading off over-sized grinding wheels. All rays of light were lost in the concrete floor which was saturated black with decades of oil and solvents.

Above the dull roar of the machinery, the ring of hammer on anvil ricocheted off the pale green walls that were coated with a film of oily grit, obscuring the red stenciled safety slogans above the power tools. Time of day was marked by the steam whistle atop the building. Start time, break time, lunch time, break time, and finally at 3:20 pm the crew shed their masks, goggles and safety hats to assemble near the open door. Before the final whistle ended, we were gone.

Many of the guys headed over to the Bourbon Bar, kitty corner on Dale St where they cashed their paychecks and washed the diesel dust from their throats with bottles of Schmidt beer, openly uneasy about their futures. Rocky, the Great Northern Goat had morphed into the generic corporate logo of Burlington Northern, Inc.; the old timers with insider information warned of a bad train coming down the tracks. I moved on to Colorado before it hit, but family members kept me in the loop as the age of corporate consolidation progressed.

A sprawling, state of the art locomotive maintenance facility was constructed, somewhere in Montana I heard, and in the late seventies the end came for the Dale Street Shops. In 1999, the wrecking ball punched through the bricks and glass; decades of history crumbled in a heap onto the carbonized cement floor. It took three years and approximately thirty million dollars to clean up the soil contaminated with 100 years of chemicals and petroleum products before it could be redeveloped into an office park. I often shop across the street at Dragon Star Market and glance at the turquoise sign that reads Great Northern Business Center, but it must be a mirage, I still see the shops.

Robert Hale, 2011

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Franky Rides the Clipper

You can also listen to the author read this story on SoundCloud !

 

 

This story originally appeared in the Saint Paul Almanac, 2014-2015 Edition

As was its custom, the Alberta Clipper rode into town on a carpet of warm Pacific air, dropped a couple inches of fluffy white, and headed south. Nipping at its heels was a howling Canadian wind, so dense and frigid that, even the windows shivered in their frames, loud enough to rattle Frank out of his coma.
Frank Rothbauer, an under employed, twenty-eight-year-old, would have loved seeing his story in bold headlines on the front page of the St. Paul Daily News, sharing the spotlight with the smiling photos of the Winter Carnival queen candidates. That was Frank. As were so many of his age, Frank was enchanted by the glitz, glamour, and lifestyle of the gangsters of the era. In his pursuit of the dream, he obtained a tenuous low-level position managing a “Soda Shoppe”, a front for illegal liquor distribution.
But peer way down between the fuzzy lines of official denials, and there you’d read Frank’s tale, one of an unfortunate individual caught up in that great American experiment known as Prohibition.
“The Drys”, the popular name given to the federal agents charged with ferreting out illegal sales of alcohol, raided Frank’s Frogtown “Soda Shoppe” that Sunday morning intending to nab a big- time bootlegger. If Frank hadn’t sampled his own product before breakfast, he may have had the clarity to recall that what the Feds really wanted was the owner’s name or at least a payoff; he might also have wiped the cockeyed grin off his face that his assailants interpreted as a defiant smirk. After refusing their demands, he was knocked around the soda bar and thrown to the floor, almost taking a couple frightened patrons with him. Frank’s last conscious thought that day was probably to wonder where that “Dry” got the money to buy a those brand Red Wing boots with the deep snowy tread that was were coming at him.
Dazed and in cuffs, Frank was led across the intersection of Thomas and Dale Street just a half block from home in full view of the neighbors to the waiting Ford Model A and taken downtown to jail. Later that day he was moved to Ancker Hospital after he began to convulse in his cell. As in a nightmare, Frank thrashed about in his restraints as as the wind rattled and howled like banshees at the windows, all the while mumbling “stop beating me” as his sister Anne held his hand and tried to soothe his swollen brain. The doctors proclaimed his injuries fatal, and so two days later they were.
With the passing of the Clipper, the winds died down enough for a good crowd of friends to caravan from the Church of St. Agnes across the Dale Street Bridge to Calvary Cemetery. The case was referred to the coroner, who reported he could not “definitively” determine the cause of the injuries. Public outrage at the case waned as the official investigation was shuffled between departments, and within a month, Frank’s story had drifted to the far pages and languished among the classifieds, leaving only his family’s voice demanding justice. Months later, after the Alberta Clippers had retreated, the stock market crashed and Frank’s story was buried in the avalanche of the Great Depression.

Frank Rothbauer was my great- uncle. His story was told to me by his ex-wife, my great- aunt Grace. The “official” story appears in the St. Paul Daily News, Vol. 23, No. 323, January 17, 1928, and several weeks following.