Her name is Gloria Alexander.
When I called the impound lot a week later, she wasn’t even suspicious. She couldn’t recall me, even when I described my car and myself (five-foot-three, sniffly, really pissed off — I suppose that didn’t adequately narrow it down). Nonetheless, I apologized for my rude behavior and suggested we go out to lunch. She said she’d be delighted.
Truth: I was a little confused by the fact that she didn’t seem to find my calling at all odd. One of the tools we reporters use is a ballsy, presumptive approach that puts most people off their guard. But this woman had no guard. She acted as if we were old friends.
"Well, I usually go to Red Lobster when I eat out," she said. "But that’s because it’s my mother’s favorite. What I really like is this little place in the neighborhood called Milda’s."
Milda’s Café is on the corner of Glenwood and Logan Avenue North. It opened down the street in 1965 — a speck of a diner operated by Milda herself and a staff of three. Over the past 40 years, Milda’s has become a North Minneapolis institution. In 2000, it moved to its present [larger] location; and Milda’s daughter, Jane Eisenschenk, along with her husband, Tom, have taken over the day-to-day. But the menu remains eerily reminiscent of the Nixon years.
At Milda’s, you can get a homemade cinnamon roll for $1.75, two eggs and toast for $3, a plate of grits for $1.95 (add cheese for an additional 80 cents), biscuits and gravy for $4.25, or a full catfish dinner — including choice of soup or salad, choice of potato (French fries, hash browns, American fries, or mashed), the vegetable of the day, and homemade dinner rolls — for $7.65. But it’s open weekdays only, from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., so you have to plan.
Gloria Alexander and I have agreed to meet at 11:30 on a Wednesday, her only day off. When I arrive at 11:15, I seize the only open booth and sit watching as people — clearly from the neighborhood — mill from table to table. The noise level is high, but clearly happy.
When she arrives at 11:25, I don’t recognize her. I would have sworn Alexander towered over me. Now, she is perhaps only a couple inches taller than I. "Oh, I stand on something back there behind the window at the impound lot," she laughs.
Then, shyly, she hands me a large white envelope. Inside is an 8-panel color magazine from the Alpha and Omega Deliverance Ministries, where Alexander serves as lay clergy. Her cousin is the pastor. And their mission, she tells me as she settles into the booth, is to find people who are hurting and welcome them to the kingdom.
"I was getting ready to come here today," she says, "and I thought ‘Give her something back for this wonderful invitation.’ So I brought you this. Now, I don’t want to overshadow what you’re here to do, but you should know, I’m a Christian."
Indeed, in both the large- and small-"c" sense of the word. She works full-time in the warrant division of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, and at the impound lot just 12 hours a week — this is a part-time job she took while scouting for employment opportunities for other people in her community.
"I saw diversity in this place, and a variety of things that needed to be done," she explains. "When the supervisor asked if I would take the job myself, I said, ‘But I’m a minister.’ Still, it was a nice setting, and I thought, ‘I could work here,’ so I started in the dead of winter when they were towing hundreds of cars." She laughs. "Oh, it was busy. The days went by really fast."
Our server comes, and I — who claim to loathe and avoid all fried foods — order a plate of American fries with the works: ham, diced onion, and crispy little bits of green pepper. Alexander drinks Pepsi and eats little because, she says, she’s planning to take her mother and several of her grandchildren out to eat after we’re done.
She was born in 1948 in Rockford, Illinois. Her mother was “called” to Minneapolis in the late ’50s by the Reverend Billy Graham and moved here to attend beauty school. Alexander stayed with relatives, but in 1960 — when she was 12 and her mother had become established — she moved here, too.
“We lived at 514 15th Avenue North, where Lynn Park is now,” she recalls. “Back in those days, our neighbors were everyone: Indian, Norwegian, white, Mexican, and black. We had little mom-and-pop stores across the street. It was nice.”
She attended the vocational-technical high school downtown, then went to beauty school. The plan was that she would go into business with her mother. But they had, Alexander says carefully, “different views.”
“I had an idea for an ‘everything’ shop — not just hair, but massage and the whole nine yards. But at that time, it was taboo because it had a bad name from all those dirty massage places.” She shrugs. “I guess I was just ahead of my time.”
She had a baby at the age of 17, and another two years later. Unmarried, living in a duplex with her mother, Alexander went to work for Farmers & Mechanics Bank on 6th Street and Marquette, where she says a man named Everett Christianson set her on the right path.
“I wasn’t saved yet, and I was quiet,” she says, with tears in her eyes. “But this wonderful man sent me to a training called Dale Carnegie. Because of that, I now do public speaking. He also allowed me to get a daycare going for the children of bank employees.”
A few years later, in ’71, Alexander’s aunt gave her a family Bible and asked her to read it. She was skeptical but promised to try. Then something happened: she read the gospels once, then again, and again. One day, as she was reading, she saw a picture in her mind of the crucifixion, of the Romans spitting on Jesus as he lay bound to the cross.
“As soon as I received that image, I knew,” she says. “I said to Jesus, ‘You did this for me?’ And that’s when I accepted him.”
She was married at 26. Her husband, Marcel Alexander, was a machinist; they had a third child and were together, living in North Minneapolis, for nearly 25 years before he died of a heart attack in ’99.
Today, Alexander has 12 grandchildren, ranging in age from 2 to 25. She has a ministerial license through the Church of God and Christ. And she spends the time she is not working at the sheriff’s office or the impound lot, volunteering: campaigning for social justice, counseling at-risk families, helping find jobs for unemployed members of her community, and spreading the word of her lord and savior.