Author: John Tribbett

It was 5:30 a.m. and it was pushing thirty below outside the Kemps Dairy on Minneapolis’s North Side. Mike White whistled a sunny tune as he loaded milk crates into the back of his truck. Like Dick Gephardt’s dad, he’s a milkman. Unlike Dick Gephardt’s dad, he’s still on his route. He delivers five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year—in the snow, rain, heat, or humidity. “Just another day for a milkman,” White said, with a wink. “We’ve done this before.”

The milkman legacy runs three generations deep in the White family. It began with his grandfather, Emmett White, who delivered for the Ewald Dairy on Golden Valley Road in the late thirties. Back then, most of the deliveries were made by horse, although the first Divco trucks were just then going into service.

When people think about home delivery today, they picture mega-companies like SimonDelivers or Schwan’s, operating with hundreds of employees. Mike White is a member of a group of fifty independent milkmen. In a kind of nod to the new competitors on the block, the loose association is called Milkman Delivers. White thinks both the association and the competition are good for his own business, because they promote the idea of home delivery—an idea that has more or less vanished in a cloud of single-occupancy cars headed to the grocery warehouse.

The stars were fading from the blue-black sky as I followed Mike to the door of his first stop. It was a two-story house with a gray Volkswagen Passat parked in the driveway. “These people won’t mind if you come in,” he said. Mike and I walked right into the kitchen without so much as a knock. The mother of the household, Mary, greeted us as if we were family. She was still combing out her morning hair. “Girls,” she called. “Mike’s here.” Two girls ran down the steps to spy on us. “I love my milkman,” Mary said. “I just like it simple. Old-fashioned. I’m not into technology.”

Mike got hooked on the business as a kid. His father, Jim, took him to the dairy to watch the bottles getting filled. “We would grab a chocolate milk right off the line,” he recalled. He helped his dad pack the truck with ice and ran the glass bottles to the doorsteps.

Some of Mike’s customers have been with him for twenty-six years. A few are second generation—kids he watched grow up, now with families of their own. “I have all kinds of customers, from everyday people just scraping by, to some who have so many millions they don’t know what to do with them,” Mike said. He loaded cottage cheese for his next stop. Decades on the truck have made it possible for him to divine the empty spaces in the refrigerators on his route. “Some customers don’t even give me a list. I just put it in the fridge. They come home and it’s all taken care of.”

A typical day spans ten to twelve hours, and he carries as much as sixty pounds of dairy and frozen food into a customer’s home. “I wouldn’t recommend it for the non-hardy,” he said, stooping for a plastic crate. In almost three decades, he’s had a total of two weeks’ vacation. “I don’t break. I eat my sandwich as I go. No time for lollygagging.”

The snow crunched under our feet as we approached a Kenwood home. Mike pulled a doggy biscuit from his pocket. “Secrets of the trade,” he said, as two freshly trimmed poodles circled in the kitchen. Darla, a pretty blond housekeeper answered the door. There was an antique Ewald Dairy milk box at her feet. Milkman and loyal client chatted amiably, but Mike suddenly looked alarmed and stopped short. “I forgot something!” He jogged back to his truck, and Darla looked at me with a coy smile. “Sometimes he brings me a treat,” she confided. Mike returned with a box of orange creme bars.

Back on the truck, I asked him how the milkman was different from the dot-com upstarts, and he laughed. “We’re the guys who show up and the old lady asks, ‘Can you change the light bulb?’” he said. “We deliver. They drop the stuff off at the curb and run.”—John Tribbett

In a world gone mad with wi-fi, razor-thin laptops, and Xboxes, Dave Slabiak is fighting to preserve a questionable American icon—the pinball machine. “I live, breathe, and eat pinball,” he said the other day, staring through his Buddy Holly glasses to make sure his interviewer took in the gravity of the statement.

Slabiak is a charitable guy who will pump a couple bucks of quarters into a pinball machine after he’s done playing, in hopes that some teenage slacker might chance upon the freebie and take a liking to it. He is also a founding member of the Twin Cities Pinball Enthusiasts (TCPE) who are dedicated to all things having to do with pinball.

They meet once a month to drop quarters into their favorite public machines and to practice their “bangbacks” and “drop stops” while talking shop. Players like Jen McGaffey, one of the few women in the group of mostly 30-something men, reconnoiter the Twin Cities in search of surviving pinball machines. “We just drive by spots, mostly bars and bowling alleys, and pick ’em,” she said, explaining her scouting technique between sips of a tall Long Island Ice Tea.

At a recent meeting, enthusiasts gathered around three dinging cabinets in a back corner of the American Sports Café on Como Avenue. There was trouble: The lights on the Attack from Mars playfield were burnt out, so you couldn’t see the silver ball jetting off the bumpers.

“Geez,” 34-year-old Jeff Kasten lamented. “I did recon on this place for the guys who maintain the machines. I told them the lights were out and there was gunk on the flippers making them stick and that ten to fifteen people were showing up to play. You’d think they could fix them.”

Indeed, operators who view the machines as dinosaurs and fail to maintain them are especially scorned by the TCPE. Several big vending operators own machines in locations all over town, but they tend to focus on video games because they generate the most cash. It’s a catch-22, said Slabiak. They don’t see pinball as a big money-maker so they let the machines deteriorate, then fewer people want to play them.

“It’s all about being analog in a digital world,” said one aficionado who was clad in a tight black T-shirt and refused to give his name. “It’s not a Luddite thing or about embracing the old. It is about putting it all in context and enjoying what remains valuable.” After some needling, he explained his need for anonymity. It seems pinball’s unseemly reputation would not be looked upon sympathetically by his boss; he works as a governmental policy analyst.

Pinball’s association with hoodlum culture is long-standing. The image of the greaser with the Camel straight dangling from his lips while he bangs the flippers, or of freaked-out rock operas (think Tommy) don’t help. But the bad rap goes back further than that. It all stems from pinball’s historical roots as a gambling device.

Even though pinball’s precursor, bagatelle, was played by Honest Abe Lincoln himself, many of the early 20th century versions had cash payouts. And when they didn’t, tavern owners would frequently offer prizes for high scores. Early laws actually made pinball illegal in several states until the 70s.

Twin Cities enthusiasts embrace the outlaw image. “It’s an introvert’s way of gaming,” mused the government worker. “You’re turning your back on a crowd in a bar and engaging in something you are trying to get better at—by yourself.”

The game’s more recent evolution has mirrored other dark aspects of American culture. Like six-figure inflation. In the old days of chime-ringing reels, scores in the thousands earned you the knocking sound of a free game. Today, there’s been a clear case of score-inflation, where tallies in the ten-millions are mediocre. Games are also heavily commercialized today. South Park and Austin Powers are recent pinball themes. These newer games are not necessarily a hit just because they’re pinball machines. “Now they are catering to Attention Deficit Disorder,” complained our Deep Throat.

“The arcades, the 7-Elevens—that’s all gone now,” said Slabiak ruefully. “We are just people who are trying to enjoy this hobby and promote the sport.”

As The Rake made our way to the door after a night of free games and mixed drinks, it was put more succinctly by the guy with the backwards baseball hat. “Pinball kicks ass,” he slurred. “Put that in your newspaper.”—John Tribbett

With the economy stalled in first gear, strip-mall stalwarts like Kmart have left cavernous buildings in the wake of their demise. This is bad news for shoppers, of course, but good news for motorsport enthusiasts. Built inside one of these defunct discount centers is Brooklyn Center’s Thunder Alley, the nation’s largest indoor go-kart track. Business there is booming, showing little respect for the recession.

The other night, I found myself strapped into a bucket seat and prepared to burn rubber in my maiden go-kart race. I was nervous. It might have been the exhaust fumes choking the air. It might have been the three high-testosterone teenagers revving their engines behind me. Especially the one with the all-star wrestling mohawk and the pentagram necklace.
Though teenage drivers dominate the ranks at Thunder Alley, it’s worth noting that the all-time speed record is held by a gentleman who races under the moniker Ol’ Sarge. He’s 74.

So it was with trepidation that I eyed the grey-haired father next to me, whose personal fan club leaned against the chain-link fence (just under a sign warning “do not lean on the fence”) screaming “daddy, daddy, go, go, go” before breaking into a chorus of dog howls. He assured me it was his first time “on this track.”

REO Speedwagon blared in the background (“take it on the run, baby”), and I strained to hear 17-year-old race marshal Tony Richter. “These are race cars, not bumper cars. Take your first lap slow. After the straightaway there’s a hairpin curve at the end. Slow down! Hittin’ the wall at forty is not fun.” Indeed, the 6.5 horsepower Honda engines can rocket the tiny machines to 40 mph with an involuntary twitch of the ankle.

“If you see me waving the yellow flag, slow down, there’s a crash. Blue means let the kart behind you pass. You all know what the checkered flag means. The black flag is the penalty flag. If you see it, pull over; I need to talk to you about your driving,” Richter bellowed his over-rehearsed lines to us with a lackadaisical authority. If a driver declines to follow the rules or has a panic attack, all of the cars are equipped with a computerized system that allows track officials to slow down or stop any car from a keyboard.

One by one we peeled out of the pit. Leaning back in the low-riding kart, I jetted down the straightway with a visions of trophy girls on my arms, their breasts heaving, in the winner’s circle. The fantasy was quickly nixed, as my go-kart fishtailed and threatened to eject me into the blue and yellow barrier lining the first hairpin corner. I recovered just in time to crank a hard right, wheels squealing.

I managed to work my way through the snaking passages and suddenly found myself jockeying for position with two of the kids. Setting them up on corner number three, I went wide before diving inside. They were soon eating my dust.

Just as I was basking in my future NASCAR glory, the senior driver nudged my kart, deftly lapping me. We were only halfway through the race. Humbled, I realized the memory of Dale Earnhardt was safe from my driving prowess for the time being.—John Tribbett

Except for a few listing gravestones, you could easily mistake the vacant lot for a small park or the exceptionally large backyard of one of the lucky homeowners bordering it. A bus stop and a row of gnarled oaks describes one edge near the street. Two green beer bottles stand attention at a granite monument. There, a bronze plaque identifies the grounds as a “potter’s field.”

Since biblical times, humans have set aside burial grounds for paupers and unknowns. After Judas betrayed Jesus, he passed off his blood money to the priests. They didn’t dare keep the tainted silver. So, according to Matthew, “They took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.” The priests chose a field where clay was dug for pottery, and the name stuck.

The plaque in the St. Anthony Township cemetery, just east of Stinson Boulevard, details a more recent interment. In 1853, with Minnesota still five years from statehood, Lewis Stone donated a one-acre homestead “to be used exclusively for the uses of the public as a common and free burying grounds forever and never to be used for other purposes whatever.” It was an act of charity that made this quiet neighborhood lot some of the oldest hallowed ground in the metro area (excluding native burial grounds). But the cemetery itself has become something of an indigent.

Searches of historical repositories for the city, county, and state reveal only cursory facts about the miniature necropolis. “We have absolutely nothing on it,” said Jay Hartman, the public works director for St. Anthony. “We maintain it because no one else will.”

This funerary ground is not the only one of its kind. A dozen potter’s fields dot the metro landscape, in various states of disuse and neglect. Many appear to be abandoned lots. Some have been turned into parks appointed with jungle gyms and picnic tables. Some, like the cemetery just off the State Fair midway, or the plot at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street Southeast, have simply disappeared beneath the asphalt of an expanding city.

These burial grounds were often set next to “poor farms,” public workhouses charged with the care of the state’s destitute at the turn of the last century. One of these was the Ramsey County poor farm, just off White Bear Avenue in Maple Grove. There, in an unidentified parcel the size of a city block, nearly 3,000 bodies lie in unmarked graves. Through the years, nearby construction projects, such as widening the avenue, have accidentally uncovered human remains. In 2001, a protected zone was established to prevent further disturbances. It was modeled on efforts at the Gettysburg Memorial.

“It takes a lot to move a cemetery. You don’t just do it,” said Steven Tibbetts from the Institute of Mortuary Science at the University of Minnesota. In addition to respect for the final resting place, it’s largely an issue of money. Scant records exist, graves were unmarked, and burial techniques were in many cases pre-modern. These realities turn any attempt at disinterment into a major archeological dig. Add to that reburial costs, and it’s easy to understand why the sites are forgotten and the land is slowly adapted to other surface uses.

Mark Trostad’s backdoor is less than ten feet from the edge of the St. Anthony potter’s field. When he moved in, there was a privacy fence the previous owner had hastily assembled, apparently to help sell the property. The sight of a few random gravestones just past the kitchen window frightened away most prospective buyers. But the dead don’t bother Trostad, who sees the cemetery as a park.

“I took it down the first week I was here,” he explained, although he hasn’t managed to extract the posts yet. “I work at home. I like to look at the trees all day.”

Today, the county and Medical Assistance pick up the cost for the indigent dead, burying them in functioning local cemeteries. And the unknown? Well, there just aren’t that many of them. Since 1997, State Health Department statistics reveal only three unidentified deaths in Minnesota. Even in death, Social Security numbers, DNA testing, and computer databases pretty much ensure that the most down-on-their-luck don’t slip into the afterlife without a marker.—John Tribbett