The Rake Magazine

Author: Eric Dregni

  • Destination: Tomorrow!

    Later this month, the World Future Society brings its annual conference, including a Minnesota Futures Day, to Minneapolis. To mark the occasion, Dregni sat down with the most outspoken member of the Society’s Minnesota chapter, Hank Lederer, who forecast possible advancements over the next century for the book, Follies of Science: 20th Century Visions of Our Fantastic Future (see page 38). An advocate of scientific optimism, Lederer is a retired computer scientist and a past president of the Minnesota Futurists, which, he said, “is like being the future president of the Minnesota Historical Society”; he will co-present on nanotechnology at the conference on July 30.  

    “I never think of the future,” Albert Einstein famously said sometime back in the twentieth century. “It comes soon enough.” Hank Lederer, though, can’t stop thinking about it. He rattles off descriptions of the technological marvels that await us with the rapidity of a semi-automatic ray-gun. “I have benefited enormously from high tech,” he says. “I was born two months premature, so technology saved my life.” Lederer was born in Chicago in 1933, and by the time he was ten years old, he’d read stacks of sci-fi books and comics. “I had chemistry sets, model airplanes, Erector Sets—I love all that crap. But I hate algebra, so I never went into science.”

    Instead, he got a B.S. in business administration from Macalester College, an M.B.A. from Northwestern, and wound up back in Minnesota working at Honeywell’s aerospace division in 1960. “I loved computers, but Honeywell didn’t have any back then, so I went to Control Data Corporation in 1964. I used a lot of punch cards in those million-dollar computers,” Lederer said. “The discrete transistors got so hot that some were cooled by liquid nitrogen. Control Data had to turn on their air-conditioning in the winter.” Always one to point out the dramatic progress of technology, Lederer observes, “Now my cell phone is a hundred times more powerful than those giant computers that filled a floor of the building in Bloomington.”

    Lederer firmly believes that the biggest invention of the twentieth century was the integrated circuit chip developed in the 1960s. “People use it as proof that aliens have landed here, because it is too fantastic for humans to have invented. Just imagine, there are twenty million transistors in one circuit chip the size of a postage stamp. They can’t even be seen with a microscope. The transistor is a billion times cheaper than the next cheapest man-made object—say, a staple.”

    While Lederer was working with early computers at Control Data, the World Future Society came into being in 1966 in Washington, D.C. The organization’s goal was to promote more accessible visions by extrapolating into the near future, instead of promoting the kind of far-out utopian daydreams that authors like Jules Verne or Edward Bellamy had dreamt up one hundred years earlier. Rather than rockets and ray-guns, the WFS’s magazine, The Futurist, publishes thoughtful ideas with an academic bent, as opposed to the more fantastical visions in Popular Science. For example, it highlights simple yet crucial technologies invented for the developing world, such as the LifeStraw water purification device, pot-in-pot food coolers, and a bamboo treadle pump in an article called “Designing for the Other 90 Percent.” Another article, “Capitalism with a Conscience,” predicts that the rise of socially responsible investing in China and other developing nations will create sustainable economies as investors “vote” with their money to create a world using clean technologies.

    The World Future Society was wary of organizing satellite futurist groups until Earl Joseph, a Minnesotan computer scientist, overwhelmed them with his enthusiasm. Joseph, who died last February at the age of eighty, worked for Sperry Univac (later Unisys), and eventually formed his own company, Anticipatory Sciences, Inc. The Minnesota Futurists became the first chapter of the World Future Society, with Joseph as the president.

    When it came to forecasting the future, Joseph often looked back on trends for guidance. For instance, he wrote that life expectancy “in 1900 … was about 35 years. In 2000—it was about 75 years. If the same rate of increase continues, then in 2100, the average person could reach 150 years of age.” To forecast changes in computer technology—trending from vacuum tubes and silicon chips to artificial intelligence, bio chips, and quantum chips—Joseph wrote that the “rate of advance has been doubling computer capability every two years. If computers continue to advance at the same rate, then they will be a thousand times more capable by the year 2024!”

  • The Tightest Home in North America

    A few miles north of Bemidji, there’s an old-world mini Bavaria: A cluster of white stucco and brown-timbered buildings that surround a quaint central fountain. The street signs are auf deutsch, schnitzel and sauerkraut are on the menu, and the speaking of German is strictly enforced. When this Concordia language village, a German immersion camp for kids, needed a new dormitory, however, the staff voted to promote a modern vision of Germany rather than further perpetuate this idealized version of the past.

    Enter Eddie Dehler. Lured from his native Germany in 1987 to work as a language teacher at the youth village, Dehler tapped into his environmental-studies background to initiate the construction of North America’s first certified Passivhaus: an airtight, super energy-efficient structure that utilizes passive solar and geo-thermal energy for year-round temperature control.

    The project began in the fall of 2005, when special triple-pane, heat retaining, argon-filled windows from a factory in the Black Forest were flown in. The roof was covered with dirt and seeded with purple sedum flowers that help retain water, avoid erosion around the house, and provide extra insulation.

    The project was not inexpensive. Concordia Language Villages built Dehler’s five-thousand-square-foot modernist Bauhaus vision at a cost of around $1.3 million. But owners of these ultra-green buildings are destined to save on utility bills. Beneath the house, a tube filled with food-grade glycol-water solution runs two hundred feet into the earth. This creates a constant-temperature mixture that gets pumped back up to the house and into a reverse refrigeration system, thus providing low-cost heating and cooling.

    The house still uses some electricity. “It’s on the energy grid—so we could [improve efficiency by installing] photovoltaic solar panels on the roof,” Dehler said. With them, Dehler said, the building would actually produce more energy than it consumes.

    In order for the house to be certified as an authentic Passivhaus, the structure had to be assessed to determine whether it met the German government’s strict standards. Gary Nelson, president of the Energy Conservatory, a local building-performance testing service, came to the language village to conduct something called a blower-door test.

    “We created a negative pressure in the building to test every wall and window for air leaks,” Nelson explained.

    Heating the building “requires less than one watt per square foot. A typical toaster or hairdryer uses 1,500 watts, so one of these could heat a 1,500-square-foot Passivhaus,” Nelson concluded. In the end, the house was deemed twenty times more airtight than required by German standards.

    Using the Passivhaus (which officially opened in July 2006) as an instructional tool, the German camp now offers a four-week environmental credit program for high school students. Inside the big blue box with giant southern-facing windows, twenty-eight campers can learn about the first Passivhaus (built in Darmstadt, Germany in 1990), and about how passive solar heat, when combined with super-insulation, makes for one of the most energy-efficient buildings ever made.

    Dehler proselytizes visitors to what he calls the “tightest home in North America” in hopes of spreading the German ideal for sustainable living, proclaiming that the extra money spent to reach these strict standards — around twenty thousand dollars — will be recovered through energy savings in as little as eight years.

    “The Passivhaus uses about ten percent of the energy of a regular house,” Nelson, the house-tester, said. “The six thousand of them already built [in Germany and Austria] use the same amount of energy as six hundred regular houses. Why can’t we do that in Minnesota? If we made enough of them, we could shut down the Monticello nuclear power plant.”

  • LSD Goes to College

    In 1967 an article with the headline, “Mentally Ill Take LSD at U” appeared on the front page of the Minnesota Daily. The story recounted the experiences of “William,” a patient in the University of Minnesota’s psychiatric ward who was administered LSD by Amadeo Marrazzi, a professor of pharmacology, as a “clinical yardstick” to determine how the nervous system handles impulses in mentally ill patients. According to the reporter, “William sat in front of the room, put on some goggles, and was instructed to rotate a bar on the far wall, by means of a dial, until it was parallel with the floor. He did so. But after a minute, the floor was no longer parallel to the bar; it now inclined downward to the right.” William had been set up in an eight-foot-high, windowless room with three walls. His goggles were fitted with special lenses that distorted the shape of the room.
    Marrazzi had already discovered that rats tripping on large amounts of LSD showed indifference to their surroundings, a phenomenon he labeled “behavioral dissociation.” In a 1966 speech to students at the university titled “LSD and Man’s Search for Understanding,” he described how one human user of the drug lost all sense of time, to the point where fifteen minutes seemed like three hundred years. This work was carried out with the help of Sandoz Laboratories, which at the time was supplying LSD to any scientist interested in conducting experiments, as well as with funding from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Marrazzi’s findings led him to report that the use of mescaline and DMPEA (a chemical similar to LSD) “might, indeed, be a factor in the causation of some types of cerebral and mental illness.” Fortunately for patients who received heavy doses, he also discovered that “the effects of both mescaline and DMPEA can be offset by a tranquilizer drug.”
    Meanwhile, the recreational use of LSD was also being promoted to the U’s student body at large. In 1966, hippie godfather and drug pioneer Timothy Leary had hooked up via an early conference call—thanks to the advice of “media is the message” visionary Marshall McLuhan—to speak to a crowd of six hundred students gathered at Coffman Union. As they took in a psychedelic light show, Leary advised them to join an estimated three million other Americans in taking LSD. “Are you going to sit back and take canned positions to life?” he asked. “When you take LSD, you talk directly to yourself.” LSD was not a drug, he argued, but a chemical that opened up the cellular level to the point where a person “goes beyond his own body.” Humans, Leary said, were caught up in “an endless round of self-deception and routine behavior,” and LSD could expand their consciousness.
    Leary’s pupil, Andrew Weil, “an expert in the field of mind-altering drugs” (and current medical guru), spoke to students at the Mayo Memorial Auditorium in 1971 and pronounced that humans had an innate need to get “high.” Weil claimed to have viewed drugs from “every angle,” beginning when he was a Harvard freshman in 1960. That was when, under the tutelage of Leary, he took his first mescaline. He wrote about his psychedelic experiences in a newspaper, and said his articles were instrumental in getting Leary fired from Harvard.
    Though LSD experiments at the U of M were initially publicized, today the medical records of psych patients dropping legal acid are strangely unavailable. After much investigation, I received a note in early 2006 from Jim Rothenberger, a professor at the U. He said that sometime around 1971 he had heard about the mysterious psychotropic experiments at the university from Dr. Gordon Heistad. “Gordon was then head of a unit called Psychiatry Research, which was housed in Diehl Hall. I remember that as we were talking he opened up an unlocked desk drawer and showed me that it was full of Sandoz LSD.”
    Now that the paper trail for the university’s LSD experiments has conveniently disappeared, the only readily available information regarding the experiments is found in newspaper articles in the Minnesota Daily from the time.
    From the 1950s through the 70s, during the height of the Cold War, the CIA conducted LSD experiments under the code name MK-ULTRA, in hopes of controlling social engineering and finding a truth serum for more effective interrogation techniques. MI6, the British spy agency, also tested LSD on patients who were told that the purpose of the experiment was to find a cure for the common cold. Perhaps the documents pertaining to the U of M experiments were removed when, sometime in the 70s, the CIA ordered that all such records from the period be destroyed.
    Just a few years later, however, the drug experiments—and the open championing of drugs by counterculture gurus—had become little more than a strange and unreliable flashback. By 1976, for instance, Dr. Joseph Westermeyer had conducted a study at the U on sixty-one drug-addicted patients, from which he concluded that “drugs substitute for religion … A person may adopt a drug habit as a substitute focus for social interaction if he or she has stopped going to church.” Or as Marshall McLuhan told Timothy Leary, “Wave reassuringly. Radiate courage … You must be known for your smile.”

  • Holiday in Albania

    Last summer, Ismail Kadare was awarded the first-ever Man Booker International Prize, beating out Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Ian McEwan. I felt a bit smug about having discovered the Albanian author many years before, in the late 1980s. At Hungry Mind Bookstore in St. Paul, where I was working at the time, no one bought books by this little-known writer, from a country I could barely find on a map. But then my brother loaned me a copy of Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone, a semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in the remote villages of the forgotten country of the Balkans. In it, Kadare showed how bizarre tribal laws kept religion in check among a fiercely proud population made up mostly of Muslims, as well as Orthodox Christians and Catholics—while also fomenting vendettas that endured for generations. The rigid rule of monarchists, Stalinists, or fascists pales in comparison with these Albanian blood feuds.

    I was hooked and have since devoured Kadare’s other hard-to-find novels. Broken April, published in 1998, used as a backdrop those generations of familial battles that, in a country cut off from the rest of Europe, continued well into the twentieth century and the reign of King Zog I, the tribal king with the space-alien name, from 1928 to 1939. In 1938, Zog had Mussolini’s son-in-law as the best man at his wedding to Princess Geraldine, the “White Rose of Hungary.” As a wedding gift, Mussolini gave the king and his bride a yacht with an Italian crew that tried but failed to kidnap Zog on his honeymoon.

    Italy eventually annexed Albania in April of 1939, and while Italian troops were greeted with cheers from the Albanians, Mussolini had the Italian press publicize the event as a fantastic military victory for the Fascist forces. The Italian public went wild over Il Duce’s triumph, and Zog looted the treasury on his way out. When he checked into the London Ritz Hotel, a porter asked him what was in his bags that made them so heavy. “Gold,” Zog famously replied.

    But even after Zog’s abdication, little Albania couldn’t oust its homegrown communist tyrants, as most other Eastern European countries had by 1989. Many of Kadare’s books, such as The Concert, give a glimpse into this complete communist state and how its dictator of forty years, Enver Hoxha, who followed Zog in power after the war, played Mao and Stalin off each other and maintained the most repressive government in Europe, comparable only to North Korea.

    Spurred by the tales Kadare told of his lost country, I decided to travel to the darkest Albania to meet the author. Like awkward subtitles of foreign films, the sometimes simplistic translations of Kadare’s books only piqued my interest in what seemed like an undiscovered and closed world. I wanted to see for myself the towns made of stone where generations of vendettas and clan loyalty made Sicily’s Cosa Nostra look modern and welcoming, like a group of Rotarians. Americans were unwelcome and the only way into the country, I found out, was through an obscure Greek bus-tour company.

    Our bus left Thessaloniki, winding through desolate dirt roads over empty mountains. Guard houses sat atop every hill in the distance. At that time, an average of five Albanians a day were shot trying to flee the country, and their corpses flung into town squares as a warning. I soon realized that the inspiration for many of Kadare’s stories—vicious but often faceless government oppression—was alive and well in his homeland.

    At the remote border post into eastern Albania, officials rifled through suitcases and confiscated magazines and picture books. A Greek man whispered that photos from the outside world were illegal as one guard paged through a Bible and another studied glossy centerfolds of Greek starlets in search of propaganda. Religion was outlawed, too, making Albania the only officially atheistic country in the world. Also verboten: kissing in public, dogs, foreign music, beards (border guards had orders to shave any visitors with facial hair), candy and gum, and cars (except those for government business). As we drove onward, people who were hunched over in the fields stood up and waved, as if they’d never seen a bus before.

    All the roadside trees had been chopped down, as Hoxha, like Zog before him, had a particular fear of snipers. Among the stumps, cement bunkers lined the roads about every hundred feet—the dictator’s investment to protect the country from some imminent attack and evidence of his paranoia.

    The Successor, from 2003, shines light on Hoxha and his possible motives in the unsolved assassination of his Number Two, known throughout Albania as the “successor.” High-ranking members of Albania’s communist party, who apparently shared Hoxha’s paranoia of insurrection, dug secret escape tunnels from their houses in the capital of Tirana. Theories abound in this real-life mystery and probable cover-up, with the shadows of Mao and other tyrants eclipsing the truth. Kadare’s Cold War whodunit opens the curtain to reveal Eastern European intrigue and the subsequent official government version of events, whitewashed for consumption by the masses.

    When we reached Korçë, five hundred people surrounded our bus; we were the first foreigners in that town since the 1940s. I handed out ballpoint pens and a fellow tourist gave some teenagers a Bic lighter after demonstrating how to use it. A boy flicked a flame to life and held it aloft as his friends clapped in awe.

    The stores were empty. A line formed around the block outside a boarded-up, padlocked shop; rumor was that milk would be delivered at midnight. I asked our guide how I could meet Ismail Kadare. Impossible! He replied. Our tour only had permission to visit two towns on the Greek border. Perhaps as consolation, he led me to the town bookshop. Its window displayed the dust jackets for a French-Albanian dictionary and a remedial physics book; no one had seen the actual books in years.

    The bookstore clerk, too, was aghast when I asked for Ismail Kadare’s books. He caught the eye of the guide waiting outside and stood up straight. A shipment of Kadare’s books was expected any day—but not today. Instead, he suggested I purchase the twenty-plus volumes of speeches of Comrade Enver Hoxha, which was on special; apparently, the forward-looking autocrat’s memoirs made a decent substitute for firewood, since most of the trees were gone.

    The clerk seemed to convey that Kadare’s novels were off-limits under the repressive regime, though of course everyone knew them. The people were starved for information and stories that weren’t burdened with purveying government propaganda, and Kadare provided page-turners without glossy fairy-tale endings. Even though the prolific author’s works are relegated to the fiction aisle in American bookstores, these are the only true and readable windows into this land of secrets.

    The next year, images of Albanians toppling statues of Enver Hoxha were transmitted across the globe. I made another attempt to visit Kadare in Gjirokastër, the mountain town where he was born and grew up. Thanks to a faxed letter from the prosecutor general of Albania (who had visited Minnesota to learn about our legal system through the Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee), I acquired a visa at the Albanian embassy in Athens, a dingy, smoke-filled efficiency apartment in a rundown suburb. From Tirana, I hopped a bus south to Berat and then on to Gjirokastër. In the highest point of the walled city stood stone houses, headless minarets, and once-outlawed church ruins that now served as playgrounds. On a distant mountainside, “ENVER” was spelled out in three-hundred-foot letters formed by painted stones; the deceased leader had hailed from the same town as the country’s most famous writer.

    I poked my head inside a beautiful stone three-story villa where royalty, perhaps even King Zog’s relatives, had probably stayed. Grizzled men chain-smoked and took shots of raki. I asked if anyone knew where Ismail Kadare lived. They didn’t understand, but tried to sell me the villa for three thousand dollars.

    A fifteen-year-old boy chimed in that Kadare left as soon as he could, probably for Paris. “Anyone that can leave Albania, does.” In fact, this boy had already walked to Athens twice—eight days and eight nights with only three hours of sleep per night—and had been returned both times.

    I was crushed to find out that Kadare had left this country—his muse—for greener pastures, and I cut short my trip (but not before succumbing to a vicious bout of food poisoning).

    I eventually did meet the author, but not until 1997, by which time the already-feeble Albanian economy had collapsed and the influx of guns during the Balkan War had made the country Europe’s center for weapons—and white slave trade. That year, I traveled to Frankfurt for the annual Frankfurter Buchmesse book show, the world’s largest trade show, filling eight convention halls. The Albanian booths were easily identified by the pall of cigarette smoke, in flagrant violation of the “Rauchen Verboten!” signs everywhere. A ring of men hovered around a table littered with shot glasses and a large bottle of Jack Daniels. When I asked about Ismail Kadare, they looked me over suspiciously.

    One stubbed out his cigarette and said, “I’m his agent. What do you want with him?” I explained that I was a fan and had even traveled to Albania to interview him. “You went to Albania? No foreigners go to Albania.” He squinted at me almost menacingly and scribbled something on a scrap of paper. He handed it to me and commanded, “Meet us at our hotel at 11 p.m. tonight. Don’t be late.”

    I went to a cafeteria in the building next door to get a cup of coffee and ponder how this guy planned to swindle me. There, just a few tables away from me, sitting alone and eating a würstel and sauerkraut, was Ismail Kadare; he was surprised that I recognized him from his dust-jacket photo. I told him I had visited his hometown, and he wanted to hear about the situation there. I ended up relating the story of my two unforgettable trips. He shook his head. “There is much to tell about Albania. The problem is, who wants to listen?”

  • Down in the Dumps

    In Ideal Corners, a tiny town near Brainerd, trips to the local dump were a family tradition. My grandfather would pop the enormous trunk of his robin’s-egg blue Oldsmobile and we’d load it up with cans, done-in appliances, or dozens of leaf bags. In the spring, he’d bring along binoculars in order to watch the wild animals—black bears and so forth—lured by the aroma of rotting trash. It was more exciting than any episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

    Nowadays, things are less wild. The dump has been spiffed up and renamed the “Ideal Corners Transfer Station.” There are no more scrounging bears or hawks diving for rodents. Gone are the mountains of plastic and eggshells, and along with them the exciting prospect of a garbage avalanche.

    In this new age of trash, recycling must be dutifully sorted into various bins. Old batteries, and other toxic waste, are set aside in the garage for environmentally responsible disposal. Customers must sign a ledger, describe what they left, and pay accordingly. Trucks then haul everything away thirty miles to a forty-acre pit lined with protective clay and plastic.

    “Nope, you can’t bury toxic waste anymore,” said Doug, the transfer station manager. “The dump in Brainerd cost eight and a half million to build and they thought it would last thirty years. It’s only been eight years and it’s half full!” On a recent Wednesday afternoon, a few buddies kept Doug company as they lollygagged on discarded couches and stained Barcaloungers. Inside his little office, a salvaged chandelier dangled from the ceiling and the radio with the coat-hanger antenna blasted live coverage of Bean Hole Days in nearby Pequot Lakes.

    Given rapidly dwindling natural resources, a new subculture of salvagers now keeps watch on the dump. Steven, a junk dealer wearing gigantic sunglasses, examines incoming vehicles for worthy finds. “Do you want to buy an icebox from 1906?” he asked me. “You can’t find them anymore. I heard they’re going for hundreds of dollars on eBay, but I don’t know anything about computers.” Doug told me that Steven looks for storm windows and breaks the glass out to sell the aluminum. “I don’t know where he takes the metal now. There used to be a guy down in Crosby who had an aluminum smelter, but he got lead poisoning.”

    During my afternoon visit, the pickings were slim, but everyone was excited anyway. “You know today’s a big day here, right?” Doug asked. “The baler is here and is compacting all the appliances.” He pointed down a dirt hill to a cherry picker lifting rusty, old machines from a thirty-foot mound of old refrigerators, washing machines, and ranges. Making a considerable racket, the hydraulic press smashed each appliance into a mangled square bale and spit it out onto a pile.

    The garbage pits are gone from Ideal Corners because, simply put, trash is just too valuable to waste. After the compactor finishes, Doug explained, the bales will be shipped “to Winnipeg where the insulation and plastic is blown off. They take out the mercury switches. You know, the kill switches, the Freon, and all that. Then they ship it by train to Seattle. From there it’s sent by boat to China where they melt it down.”

    “In the end, we buy it all back!” —Eric Dregni

  • "Never Have Too Much Fun."

    You could be forgiven for believing that Minnesotans had something to do with inventing the Zamboni. But the celebrated Dr. Seussian vehicle wasn’t invented in the back of an Iron Range machine shop, nor in a Twin Cities garage. Your second guess—somewhere in Canada, right?—would be wrong, too. The home of this icon of winter sports isn’t in the frozen northland at all. To see where Frank Zamboni dreamed up his world-famous ice resurfacer, you’d want to put on some shorts and sunglasses and fly to sunny Paramount, California, just south of Los Angeles.

    What? Zambonis are from Southern California?

    I double-checked the address because when I got there all I found were warehouse buildings along a bumpy little side street of Paramount. Where was this Wonka factory of the winter-loving world? Given the huge popularity of ice hockey and figure skating in recent years, I half expected to see lines of hardcore fans and toothless hockey players and Michelle Kwan banging on some gilded gate to get a peek at the machines and the people who make them. But the streets were empty, and the buildings were all nondescript industrial fortresses.

    Then a couple of young Hispanic workers materialized out of nowhere. They hung several freshly painted blue and white hulks of sheet metal on hooks. As I came around the corner, the sun suddenly broke through the clouds and smiled on three shiny, partially assembled Zambonis. They were lined up and being readied for shipment to China, Austria, and Nebraska.

    Richard Zamboni, the son of the founder, gave me the VIP tour of the Zamboni factory. (Perhaps all visiting Minnesotans get the treatment, I thought.) It all began sixty-five years ago, at a skating rink just a few blocks away known as Iceland. Richard’s father, Frank Zamboni, was a refrigeration expert. In 1940, he was thinking big thoughts for a cooling guy: He had a dream to create an enormous open-air rink in Paramount. The tropical sun and dry winds fast proved that Southern California was no place for outdoor ice skating. The short-term solution, Richard recalled, was to skate at night. “Iceland was covered in canvas during the day, and then they’d pull it off at night and we’d all go skating.” The rink surface was cooled by machinery at a huge refrigeration plant across the street, which also stored locally grown carrots and rhubarb.

    Richard said that ammonia, the main chemical coolant in the antique system, was run in lines under the streets. “Back then you could do anything and get away with it,” he said. Resurfacing Iceland’s rink the traditional way—with a leaky barrel of hot water, shovels, and mops—cut down on precious ice time. It was a problem at ice sheets everywhere, but especially in the warm Southern California night; even the most devout hockey player or fan would be hard pressed to wait an hour between periods while the ice was cleaned, flooded, and refrozen.

    In 1942, Frank rigged up a little tractor with a trailer that smoothed the ice and scooped up the shavings. The prototype machine hardly worked at all, and Zamboni was eager to perfect his brainchild. But with the attack on Pearl Harbor the previous December, and America gone to war, ice resurfacing was not exactly a national priority. Zamboni redirected his work, but the idea to finish his ice-making machine was never far from his mind.

    Richard said his dad never would have finished the project if people hadn’t told him it was impossible. When the war ended, army surplus offered plenty of cheap parts—especially sheet metal and Jeep components—to complete what became the world’s first working Zamboni. But in some ways, the Zamboni was never complete because Frank never stopped working on it. “He was a dedicated smoker and he’d go outside and just look at the machine,” Richard said. “My dad drove me crazy because he’d change the design each time we had a new machine. He didn’t get past the ninth grade, and he thought he was educationally challenged. But he was really a genius at design.”

    Basically, Jeep chassis were stripped and built back up. The job of a Zamboni is to shave the ice to a depth of one-sixteenth of an inch with a stainless steel blade. The shavings are then gathered to the middle with huge augers. From there, the snow is conveyed by little paddles on a chain up into the holding tank—the sort of whale’s head that dominates the machine. Directly behind the blades and augurs, water heated to 180 degrees is sprinkled onto the ice surface. A chamois distributes the water evenly behind the machine, and the rink’s refrigeration coils freeze the water within minutes. Pointing to the wheels of a classic Model J Zamboni from the late 1960s, Richard said, “We took the Jeep tires over to a shop and they scarfed off all the good tread. Then we put crushed walnut shells on the tires to make them grip the ice.”

    As a self-styled Renaissance man of automotive machines, Frank Zamboni didn’t limit his creativity to ice resurfacing; he branched out into many less well-known Zamboni vehicles. The Zamboni Gopher Digger dug trenches, the Zamboni Track Dryer mopped up after a rain on running tracks, and the Astro Zamboni laid down Astroturf in domed stadiums. Richard remembered testing the Astro Zamboni by turning the streets next to the factory into plush, green, temporary lawns. The company also produced the Zamboni Vault Carrier, which lugged concrete cemetery vaults and dropped them in the ground, and “the Black Widow,” which was designed to push dirt into the grave.

    Many of these side projects were abandoned, though, when it became clear that the Zamboni name would forever be associated intimately with the ice rink. In 1950, Norwegian figure-skating champion Sonja Henie bought two Zambonis, which went on tour with her ice skating revue.

    The Number Four Zamboni had an even more eventful career. First it traveled with Ice Capades in the fifties, and then, at the height of the Cold War, it was sold to Los Alamos National Laboratory to keep our atomic scientists happy and healthy on their days off. In February 1973, the Los Alamos rink caught fire, and the firemen were going to let Number Four burn with it. A Zamboni driver named Ted Dunn doused himself with water, entered the burning building, and threw a wet blanket over the Zamboni. He tightened the battery terminals, revved the Zamboni engine, and burst through the burning doors at the vehicle’s top speed of nine miles per hour. Years later, the machine was restored and placed in a museum where it can still be seen today—at the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in Eveleth, Minnesota.

    Since the birth of the Model A Zamboni in 1949, eight thousand of the machines have been hand-built at the factory by about thirty employees. Richard showed me a photo of the celebration the employees had earlier this year for number 8,000—a landmark Zamboni 540 that went to a special team. Earlier this fall, it arrived at Mariucci Arena, home of the University of Minnesota Gophers.

    The eight-thousandth Zamboni is, of course, a radical upgrade from the Model A. Zamboni engines today are either electric or gas-powered. Electric engines are a bit more expensive, but they don’t spew the toxic exhaust created by the gas-burning machines. Zambonis today are four-wheel drive and have studded tires for traction around those breakneck curves. Despite being in the business for sixty-five years, Zamboni has never seen the need to sully the dashboard with an odometer or even a speedometer. A standard gas-burning Zamboni runs about fifty-thousand dollars—odometer and speedometer not an option. The Zamboni company does have one minor corporate rival. A company called Olympia sells its machines with a GM chassis at a slightly lower cost. Naturally, Richard feels the quality doesn’t come close to the real Zamboni.

    Resurfacing the ice takes less than fifteen minutes, depending on the prowess of the Zamboni driver. Three basic patterns are followed by Zamboni operators: the common double outside loop, the less common figure eight, and the rarely seen crosscut. The hockey world stood aghast as the Minnesota North Stars took the bold step of introducing two Zambonis to resurface one sheet of ice back in the 1970s. The fans were perched on the edges of their seats awaiting a low-speed Zamboni crash on the blue line that never materialized. Today, dueling Zambonis are standard at all pro hockey games. Why? To allow more ice time for those between-period shenanigans.

    The Minnesota connection with Zamboni runs deep. Through the mouthpiece of Charlie Brown, St. Paul native Charles Schulz professed in Peanuts, “There are three things in life that people like to stare at: a flowing stream, a crackling fire, and a Zamboni clearing the ice.” Schulz’s use of “Zamboni” as the punch line in so many Peanuts strips popularized the ice resurfacer like no big-budget advertising campaign could ever have done. Richard Zamboni remembered how people in Northern California, where Schulz lived, would ask him, “What the heck is a Zamboni?” Schulz missed the ice rinks back in Minnesota, so he donated an indoor ice arena to his adopted hometown of Santa Rosa—along with its very own Zamboni.

  • North Dakota High

    The world’s tallest structure is not the Sears Tower, the Space Needle, or those strange conjoined skyscrapers in Kuala Lumpur. The acme of human achievement isn’t even in a city. It stands a few miles outside the hamlet of Blanchard, in rural northeast North Dakota. Two million feet of one-foot-thick steel guy-wire stretch upward in graceful arcs to support a tower that reaches more than a third of a mile into the air.

    It is a TV antenna. Viewed from the ground, its top is nearly lost in space and its shadow extends out of sight to the horizon. It may not be in the running as the tallest actual “building” (that is, something with a roof and walls that people inhabit every day, answering telephones and writing memos—the Petronas Towers in Malaysia get that prize), but the North Dakotan marvel really is the tallest man-made thing.

    KTHI-TV and KVLY 11 raised this 2,063-foot tower in 1963 to send their signal to homes across “an area larger than the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut with one thousand square miles to spare,” as noted in promotional literature about the colossus. The television stations also tout their tower as “taller than the combined height of the Great Pyramid Khufu at Giza, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the Washington Monument.”

    The Blanchard television tower is in the heart of the Red River “Valley,” the same valley that floods so dramatically because the only rise in the perfectly level landscape is the occasional roadbed raised five feet above the fields (to allow easy escape during flood season). This green pancake topography presents no barriers for the tower to connect the prairie to the world. Like most things in North Dakota, the tower does not get a lot of publicity. If there are Homeland Security agents about, they are hiding, because this little-known monument does not appear to be protected by anything other than “No Trespassing” signs and the dirty looks of locals. In fact, I can’t see anyone within about thirty miles across the flat prairie.

    Still, what visitor wouldn’t want to take a thrill ride up the mini elevator inside that takes workers part-way up the tower? Actively trying to dissuade nosey Minnesotans, KTHI warns that the top will sway ten feet on a windy day and “the signals atop the tower are so strong they can hurt the fillings in a person’s teeth.”

    The television station’s cautionary brochure brags, “If a twenty-second commercial started at the same moment a baseball was dropped from the top of the KVLY tower, it would end nearly four seconds before the ball hit the ground and it would be traveling 250 mph.” Whew, talk about excitement!—Eric Dregni

  • Stand Down

    Exit 127 off Interstate 90 doesn’t seem to go anywhere. There are no towns, no farms, no apparent reason to build an exit in the middle of the driest, flattest section of South Dakota, a desolate expanse of land. If you steal a glance at the right moment, though, you may notice a nondescript vinyl-sided building sitting just off the highway. It’s surrounded by a tall chain-link fence and topped with a yellow weather vane.

    “Here we are!” announced my cheerful guide, Ranger Mark Herberger, dressed in a tan park ranger uniform and wearing a stiff, wide-brimmed hat. We were entering one of the country’s newest national parks: the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. It was established in 1999 as a sort of Cold War museum. Limited guided tours began last summer.

    “This is Delta One Launch Control Center, where they controlled ten missile silos,” explained Herberger. The park is but a remnant of a missile field that once spanned 13,500 square miles of South Dakota countryside. Under grazing cattle and bison, and barking prairie dogs, lay dark secrets: one hundred and fifty Minuteman II missile silos and fifteen launch control centers. Built in 1962, these were the nation’s first solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles. And for thirty years, they stood ready to annihilate every living being in the U.S.S.R.—and possibly the rest of the world. According to the doctrine of the time, if the Soviets initiated a nuclear war, it was believed that at least some of South Dakota’s missiles might survive the attack. They would be used to return fire.

    Though the building looks like an average house, curious sightseers during the site’s active days would have been greeted by unhappy armed guards racing toward them in armored vehicles, known as Peacekeepers. “Millions of people drove by every year on the interstate and did not realize they were on the front lines of a war zone,” he said.

    Many South Dakota residents were just as oblivious to the existence of the silos, but that was part of the appeal in building the silos here in the first place. There weren’t a lot of people around to ask questions. Recently declassified documents explain that here, there was “an existing network of roads, large amounts of easy-to-acquire public land, and a low population density to minimize civilian casualties in the event of a nuclear accident or attack.” There were other strategic reasons. The government figured that if the Soviets attacked, they would have gone the most direct route, over the North Pole and through our undefended border with Canada. Suddenly, in the era of intercontinental ballistic missiles, sleepy South Dakota was flung into the middle of the Cold War.

    The same goes for North Dakota, where many national defense sites are still in operation (though the targets undoubtedly have been updated). For example, the five-thousand-acre Air Force base in Minot, built in 1956, along with the base in Grand Forks, currently provides staging areas for hundreds of bombers equipped with nuclear warheads. When the Minuteman silos were still online, North Dakota had the heaviest concentration of nuclear weapons on earth. People used to joke that if the state seceded from the U.S., it would have been the third largest nuclear power in the world.

    The specter of the apocalypse did not dampen the upbeat tone of Herberger’s tour. Stretching an upturned hand toward the parched yard, he said, “Here’s a volleyball court where soldiers could pass their time, and a horseshoe pitch, too.” While officers perfected their bump-set-spike, two officers below ground maintained a hot line to the White House and plotted coordinates in the Soviet Union, calculating nuclear strikes that would cause maximum damage.

    This site, along with others like it, was decommissioned after President George H. W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 1991. Inside the house, Herberger opened a door that led to a garage-like space. “We call this the Retro Room,” he said, “because of all this old exercise equipment and the bumper pool.” In this carpeted area, soldiers relaxed, shot the breeze, and kept in shape. A long-neglected Ultra Gympac weight-lifting system with cables, bars, and iron weights sat slumped in the corner.

    Next to the Retro Room, plush modular furniture filled a lounge with a picture window that framed an expansive view of the empty skyline. “Everything in here is exactly as the Air Force left it,” said Herberger, with more than a little pride. “All the books, magazines, and videos.” He picked up a yellowed copy of Popular Science from the early nineties. The magazine’s cover depicted an ominous-looking nuclear weapon under the headline, “Taking Apart the Bomb.” Apparently, the soldiers stayed in touch with their sensitive sides, too: A dog-eared copy of Shirley MacLaine’s Dance While You Can held a place of honor at the center of the coffee table.

    The launch control center was a self-contained little world. It had a backup generator that could produce enough power to supply all of Rapid City. It had its own well, three thousand feet deep. There was a helicopter pad and a hardened antenna system, designed to survive attack. “Everything above ground is just to support those two men underground,” said Herberger. Even if a near miss knocked out all the above-ground equipment, he added, the underground capsule still could have operated for two weeks. “Nothing could have withstood a direct hit, though.”

    We went down for a look at that underground capsule. A shabby old service elevator lowered us three stories—about forty feet—and stopped with a clunk. Herberger opened the lift gate to reveal a large mural of an American missile dramatically piercing a Soviet flag. “Each site had its own artwork that the men painted,” he said. He showed me a photo of a mural from another silo. It showed a pizza box with the ominous promise, “Worldwide delivery in thirty minutes or less—or your next one is free.”

    At the mouth of Delta One, the launch center itself, I noticed a cryptic message stenciled on the wall. Near a wide yellow line painted across the floor, it read, “No-Lone Zone Two Man Concept Mandatory.” Herberger explained. “If you crossed this line alone you’d probably be shot. At all times there had to be two people in the capsule.” We crossed a little gangplank, passing five-foot-thick concrete walls reinforced with quarter-inch steel plates. The capsule looked like a train car suspended by enormous springs—the idea being to lessen the shock of a nuclear blast.

    Inside the pod, there were two red chairs set on runners so they could roll from control panel to control panel, all festooned with sixties-era dials, knobs, and switches. Next to the capsule was a cot for catnaps, a toilet, and an ancient microwave oven. It was like a tiny high-tech bachelor pad, circa 1962, buried deep in the earth.

    To prevent any horrific mistakes, each officer wore a key around his neck. These had to be inserted simultaneously into two separate locks, ten feet apart, in order to activate the missiles in any of ten remote silo sites. But that was just the start: Two codes and two more keys allowed access to a red do-not-touch box prominently mounted on the wall. “Actually, you needed more than two people to fire the missiles,” says Herberger, “because the command had to be approved by another launch control center.” If the Soviets knocked out all fifteen control centers managing the one hundred and fifty missiles in South Dakota, the Air Force crossed its fingers that confirmation could be obtained from a launch control center in another state.

    Although it’s true that the fixed locations of these missile silos made them sitting ducks for a Russian strike, they were less vulnerable to accidents than the mobile bombs the military carried around on submarines and airplanes. (According to some sources, as many as fifty nuclear weapons lie at the bottom of the world’s oceans, jettisoned from distressed planes or lost during naval mishaps.)

    The threat of nuclear annihilation had its benefits. The silos brought jobs and federal funds to an often financially strapped state. “The interstate, jobs, and rural electrification—they were all put in because of the missile fields,” explained Herberger. Many Dakotans also thought the missiles made them safer. They didn’t necessarily consider that their wheat fields were now ground zero on a map somewhere in Moscow.

    Herberger pulled aside a Velcro patch on the ceiling of the pod and told me, “Here’s the escape hatch, but it just dead-ends in five feet of dirt, tar, sand, and clay.” Herberger said that in order to escape, a soldier would have had to shovel. And what would they have found, had there been a serious attack? “Some guys who manned this launch control center called the escape hatch a joke, because you’d find total destruction and nuclear winter,” he said.

    Now that we’d viewed the switches and panels, the brains of the operation, it was time to inspect the brawn. “Do you want to see a nuclear weapon?” asked Herberger. We drove about ten miles farther down the interstate to another exit to nowhere. Standing in an empty field with the wind howling, Herberger explained that we were right next to the Delta Nine silo, which was invisible except for a tall fence and a thick cement slab.

    He opened the padlock and we scrambled onto the silo’s concrete lid. Pointing to a group of ten-foot pilings fifty yards away, Herberger said, “See those cement pillars out there? In the early days, they took measurements for navigation from pillars placed in the field and by the stars.” In other words, if the little cement poles were moved or misread, the navigation system sent the missile to the wrong city. And back then, there was no turning back, he added, “no redirecting it, no self-destruct mechanism like there is now.”

    We stepped up on a platform and peered down, into the silo, sunk eighty feet into the earth. Cupping my eyes against the sun’s reflection on the protective Plexiglas cover, I could see it. Poking up from the enormous concrete pit, a gigantic Minuteman II missile. It had been waiting here—silent, lethal—for more than forty years, ready to level Moscow within a half hour. Looking down into the hole was like peering into the business end of a gun, except that this thing was designed to kill not just one person, but an entire nation. Suddenly I was overcome by the powerful memory of maps showing the impact-radius of a twenty-megaton bomb; old newsreels of Hiroshima; scenes from The Day After—all the fantastical, nightmarish visions I inherited from my parents and their war. And here was the weapon itself, the real deal, more or less pointed at my forehead.

    These are the silos my grandmother refused to believe existed when I pointed them out on our way to the Rocky Mountains. Other relatives of mine, who lived in Montana, remember seeing the missiles on flatbed trucks in the parking lot of a restaurant called Eddie’s Corner. The airmen used to go inside to ogle the voluptuous Fergus County sheriff’s daughter, Carol Couch, who waited tables in a pink low-cut T-shirt. David Arnott of Moccasin, Montana, remembered this beautiful threat to national security. “The Air Force boys used to hang around quite a lot in those days, and she could keep a whole counter of them occupied for hours,” he said. “The missile and warhead trucks would sit idling in the parking lot.”

    Through eminent domain, which allows the government to take personal property for certain public purposes, Arnott’s father had a missile silo placed on his ranch. His sister Sigrid remembered, “The Air Force would drive three hours from Great Falls to check on the silo and always forget to close the gate so our cows would get out. We used to joke that the cattle could trigger the alarm and start a nuclear war. One day, my dad wound the gate shut with wire and snipped off the ends so they’d have to use wire cutters to open it. A colonel called and yelled at Dad. ‘This is a threat to national security!’ he said. ‘You’ve endangered our country!’ After that, the Air Force remembered to shut the gate.”

    The fenced perimeter of each silo, including the one on the Arnott property, was equipped with dozens of motion sensors, in case industrious teenagers tried to break in on a dare. With little to do on a Saturday night, why not break into a missile silo? Thankfully, even if a group of drunken teens did manage to get through the fence and past the sensors in an attempt to blackmail the world with a thermonuclear device, they’d never penetrate the silo’s blast-proof doors. Plus, as an extra layer of security, the missiles were controlled remotely and couldn’t be detonated on site.

    The Delta Nine missile was the last of the Minuteman II missiles in the Midwest. The other underground silos in the Dakotas, Montana, and northwestern Minnesota were imploded beginning in 1991, as part of the START treaties. The resulting craters were left open so Russian satellites could verify their destruction. The missiles casings themselves, minus the warheads, are in storage for possible future deployment or even as space launch vehicles. The government has tried to sell the abandoned land back to local farmers, but it’s tough going since just two feet below the topsoil, there is plenty of asbestos, leaked fuel, and PCBs.

    A visit to the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site may feel like a trip back in time to the heart of the Cold War, but the credo “peace through superior firepower” is still very much on active duty. Eight countries possess the thirty-thousand or so nuclear weapons known to exist in the world—the U.S., Russia, China, Great Britain, France, Pakistan, India, and Israel. In all, forty-four countries have the technology and material to build nukes, including North Korea and Iran. (Experts now believe North Korea has twelve to fifteen nuclear weapons.) Today, the U.S. spends $100 million per day to maintain our existing, though significantly diminished, nuclear arsenal. Currently, we possess the explosive force of roughly 140,000 Hiroshima bombs.

    In 2002, President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty to further reduce our nuclear arsenals by 2012. Still, peace is tenuous at best. As rustic as the Cold War may seem today, and as scintillating as it is to look down a hole at a neutered Minuteman II missile, the possibility of nuclear war is hardly a relic of the past.

    The U.S. withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 2001. We have developed—and exercised—a policy of preemptive military strikes. Some of our leaders still dream of a missile defense shield in outer space. Others seriously consider using new, smaller, “tactical” battlefield nuclear weapons. And three years ago, an interesting document was leaked. It was a “Nuclear Posture Review” that recorded official U.S. strategies for nuclear strikes against Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Perhaps most discouraging of all: Despite its overwhelming lethality, the U.S. nuclear arsenal apparently has not deterred countries like North Korea and Iran from developing their own weapons in the post-Cold War world. Even if the Minuteman silos are being turned into parks, there are new targets being mapped every day.

  • The Trek Begins

    A few weeks ago, William Shatner stopped by Riverside, Iowa, to audition locals for Invasion Iowa, a sci-fi screenplay he supposedly co-wrote with Leonard Nimoy. It turned out to be a put-on. There will be no Invasion Iowa, only a reality-TV show making fun of Riversiders.

    Why did Shatner, an unapologetic Canadian, decide to pick on Riverside? At some point during the original Star Trek series in the sixties, it was said that Capt. James Tiberius Kirk of the starship Enterprise was born in a small town in Iowa. Years later, that gave Riverside City Council member Steve Miller an idea. In 1985, he wrote to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and asked why Riverside, Iowa, shouldn’t be the “future birthplace of Captain Kirk.” Perhaps seeing a chance to generate a little publicity for their new sci-fi series (Star Trek: The Next Generation was just being conceived), the producers agreed.

    The town festival, on the last Saturday in June, soon changed its name from the unfantastic “Riverfest” to “Trek Fest.” Naturally, this adjustment lured more sci-fi fans dressed as Vulcans, Klingons, coneheads, and future cadets of Starfleet. A sign reading, “Where the West Begins” used to welcome Riverside visitors, but the town motto has since been changed to “Where the Trek Begins.” Videos of Star Trek are screened after the parade, and collectors trade memorabilia at a swap meet.

    In August, I beamed down and explored the area in the wake of the festival. Some people in town were still feeling a little overwhelmed by all the trekkies who had converged on Riverside. “I don’t watch Star Trek, but the festival was pretty fun,” said Ron, a clerk at the Kwik-n-EZ. “There was a costume contest over there at the park, but I didn’t dress up.”

    A sculptor who was fixing up downtown storefronts had a more enthusiastic take on the festivities. He said, “It ain’t the Green Bay Packers, but it sure is a flying farce that sets us apart from every other podunk town in Iowa. I think Riverside should take advantage of it and have all sorts of prequels filmed of his life before Star Trek and Starfleet.” Any profit from Trek Fest is dedicated to erecting a monument to Captain Kirk’s future birth. Unfortunately, Paramount—the company that owns the rights to all Star Trek paraphernalia and armaments—won’t let little Riverside erect a Star Trek statue without a hefty licensing fee: forty thousand dollars.

    “That’s extortion!” griped the Riverside sculptor, known to locals as simply “Artist Bob.” To skirt these legal obstacles, the town built a twenty-foot-long USS Enterprise and mounted it on a trailer in the town park but named it the USS Riverside. Apart from that, a plaque behind the yellow New Image Salon marks where the future local hero will be born on March 21, 2233. Vials of “Kirk Dirt” from this spot are for sale for three dollars via catalog.

    “The other local legend,” said Artist Bob, “is that he’ll be conceived on the pool table in Murphy’s Bar—of course, that probably puts him in the running with everybody else in town. I doubt they’ll put up any sort of plaque for that, though.”

    Bob also passed along the gossip that people in town have been wondering what Kirk’s ancestry will be, because his great-great-grandparents probably are alive today.

    “There’s something strange and special about this town that people just up and do things,” he said. “I just gotta hand it to the son-of-a-bitch who wrote Gene Roddenberry. That’s genius. I hope Riverside goes overboard and keeps expanding on this crazy idea.”—Eric Dregni

  • Funny Money

    When Fort Knox couldn’t hold enough gold to back all the paper money in circulation, the U.S. government in about 1913 began weaning the greenback from being a promissory note for precious metals. Instead, the mighty dollar became “fiat currency.” In other words, it became a slippery theoretical thing that depended on the Federal Reserve to wave a big wand and decree its value. The markets adjusted accordingly. No longer could you trade in your buck for its equivalent in gold. Presumably, that’s when they really locked down Fort Knox.

    Critics carped that this decision was folly, and they blamed it for every subsequent recession, depression, and hyper-inflated bubble burst in the economy. Even author L. Frank Baum felt so bad about abandoning the gold standard that he penned a children’s book in which the characters “follow the yellow brick road” to the Technicolor land over the rainbow—a green city where money is measured by the ounce, abbreviated as “Oz.”

    The slow transition to fake money was complete in 1968, when “silver certificates”—the last of the promissory notes—were removed from circulation. It didn’t take long for libertarians to respond acrimoniously (it never does). They dubbed the new bills worthless “frog skins.” But the government ignored them (it always does). Eisenhower silver dollars were soon drained of any precious metal and went out of circulation. A few years ago, the U.S. Treasury issued the quarter-sized Sacagawea dollar to replace the quarter-sized “Susan B. Agony.” The libertarians were ready. They scoffed at the brass coin as more government-issue “fool’s gold.”

    Rather than sitting back and letting the system collapse and taking all our savings with it, some libertarians founded the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act in 1974. A mint master from Hawaii named Bernard Von NotHaus took the matter into his own hands and began issuing “liberty dollars” in 1998, backed by real silver and gold rather than the “national debt, Alan Greenspan, the IRS and taxes, and tanks and guns.”

    “The most popular is the ten-dollar coin that is one troy ounce of silver,” according to James Hess, a local liberty-dollar advocate who lives in South Minneapolis. “There’s nothing like having the real thing. For someone who has never held an ounce of silver in their hand, it’s exciting and liberating. I buy gas with it, I buy lunch with it. I sometimes even buy groceries with it.

    “Just as UPS and Fed Ex brought competition to the post office, the liberty dollar is forcing the Federal Reserve to improve its standards,” according to Hess. By way of a didactic warning, he added, “The Federal Reserve note doesn’t really belong to you. That’s why it’s illegal to deface a dollar. You’re just borrowing it. Even if it’s in your bank account, it’s not technically yours. All Federal Reserve money is just loaned out.”

    But are liberty dollars legal? When I asked a woman at the U.S. Treasury, she deemed it permissible, and not counterfeit. “They’re doing what?” she said with a chuckle. “As long as it doesn’t say ‘legal tender’ on it, they can do what they want.” A man named Mike White at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing concurred. “Liberty dollars are not considered legal tender, but it’s fine if they do it,” he said. Many Twin Cities stores aren’t quite so sure. Liberty dollars are available at the Libertarian Party headquarters near Raymond and University avenues in St. Paul, so the Hampden Park Coop just down the street sometimes gets this alternate currency. In general, the coop doesn’t accept liberty dollars—unless a volunteer is willing to swap their own ten-dollar note with its rough equivalent in silver. Libertarian optimism is unfazed. “If you look back, not everyone accepted Visa or MasterCard, but now everyone recognizes credit cards. Same thing with checks. It was a trust issue,” explained Hess. He said there are now more than five million dollars of liberty currency in circulation.

    Hess claims that a troy ounce of silver, or a ten-dollar liberty coin, is far more secure than a personal check or a Visa number. He claims liberty dollars can only gain in value. “If you look in the newspaper today, the price of silver is a little more than six dollars an ounce. The difference on the ten-dollar coin is the cost to mint the coin and pay for the shipping. Once the rate of silver is more than ten dollars an ounce, the tens will be melted down and made into twenty-dollar coins. You can trade in your ten-dollar coin and double your money!”

    Banks do not share this enthusiasm about the new currency. At first, a local Wells Fargo branch accepted deposits of liberty dollars from a loyal customer, “but then they had to make a decision at the national level not to accept it,” said Hess. “I told them that I’d gladly take all their liberty dollars off their hands and give them regular Federal Reserve notes, but they wouldn’t do it.”

    Nevertheless, Hess claims this is an asset that “banks don’t usually accept liberty dollars, because then the money doesn’t go to New York or out of town. It tends to stay in the community. It’s probably the main reason that I use the liberty dollar, because it helps the community I live in.”

    Hess confessed that only a handful of shops, or “liberty merchants,” accept the coins in Minnesota, but “in Austin, Texas, liberty dollars are generally accepted in most stores. There are also five-hundred-dollar gold pieces made of an ounce of gold. Not many places will accept them, but I heard that there are some car lots in Texas that love them. So if you want to buy a car with gold, go to Texas.”—Eric Dregni