I’ve always liked to talk to people, especially strangers. I also like to drive the roads outside the commercial net of the interstates, the state highways and neglected county roads that still take you right into towns that can feel either forsaken or impossibly wholesome, and sometimes both at the same time. On such roads, particularly in Minnesota, the moment you leave the city limits of one place you can often see the familiar rural navigational landmarks—steeples, grain elevators, and water towers—of the next little town rising from the flat prairie and farm fields.
I’ve been doing this sort of thing—driving back roads and being generally nosy—since I first learned to drive. In those days an automobile was a form of real salvation, a means of escaping my own suffocating hometown and discovering that there was another world out there, full of interesting people and places. My own town—Austin, Minnesota—was a decent, easy place to grow up, but held limited charms for restless adolescents. Real, fascinating weirdness of the sort I craved seemed to get driven underground, if not right out of town. (I still remember a short-lived head shop downtown called, if I’m not mistaken, either the Soviet Embassy or the Soviet Revolution.) When I started driving, I was looking for novelty as much as freedom; I suppose, for me, the two have always gone hand in hand. Going somewhere else was also liberating in the sense that it allowed me to escape the pigeonhole of identity that seems to be the inevitable byproduct of living in a small town; being freed of the feeling of being wholly known and classified permitted me to be myself and also to try on some of the other identities I was playing around with at the time. People in other towns, it seemed to me, were less wary, perhaps precisely because I was a stranger. Like lots of folks everywhere, they were vulnerable to the flattery and curiosity of interlopers, and I discovered that even towns that were virtually carbon copies of Austin were teeming with odd characters and people with interesting stories they were more than happy to share.
Once upon a time, for instance, on one such utterly aimless ramble, I met a woman who appeared on the old television game show Let’s Make a Deal. This is a strange thing to be haunted by, as I have been, for so many years. Yet that woman, and her story—her account, I remember, was made up of many colorful strands leading up to her few, fleeting moments of minor celebrity—of that one day on which she unexpectedly found herself standing face to face with Monty Hall in a television studio in California, has stayed with me ever since I first met her.
That random encounter had been exactly the right sort of magic I have come to associate with and expect from traveling. I’ve met many other people out in the sticks with similarly interesting stories, and I’ve stumbled across people who’ve done extraordinary things, and who have made the places they live more colorful or virtuous. To me, these sorts of people have always been more interesting and three-dimensional than the bona fide celebrities or dignitaries that occupy so much space in the national consciousness.
A few weeks ago, I got the old compulsion again. I thought if I just got in my car and drove in any direction I would turn up living legends and amiable eccentrics in every town along the road. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Talking to a friend about this idea, he said, “Oh, hell yeah, just pull up to the curb, grab the first person you see, and they’ll have a story to tell or they’ll point you in the direction of someone who does.”
The truth was, I was restless, and I thought that if I could just get out from under the city and outside my old autopilot orbits for a week or two I might clear my head, or at the very least meet some interesting or inspiring people.
With this idea in mind, I decided to hit the road to see how many of these sorts of colorful characters I could bump into in the small towns of outstate Minnesota. Before I left, a coworker and I worked the phones, after basically jabbing our fingers randomly at a map of the state. We were calling local city offices or chambers of commerce, so I wasn’t terribly disappointed when we failed to turn up much in the way of what I thought I was looking for—there were some interesting folks whose exploits belonged decisively to history (long dead people, in other words), some actual minor celebrities (a QVC Channel hostess, for instance) who no longer lived in the towns they were born and raised in, and a few purported “local characters,” who, based on the sketchy information we received, might or might not have been promising.
But no sweat, really. The truly entertaining and obsessive locals would be most easily discovered through inquiries in local bars, public libraries, and historical societies. I also believed it was possible, as my friend had asserted, that I’d be able to find my legends by simply walking down the sidewalk of any small-town Main Street and chatting with the residents.
This was, after all, essentially how I had met the Let’s Make a Deal woman. One day I was out poking around in little towns around the state, and in the public library of one such town I had a discussion with two women during which they mentioned a local couple who had a large and distinguished collection of miniature bells. I generally like people who have large and distinguished, or even undistinguished, collections of anything. Naturally, I asked if it might be possible to see these bells. A phone call was made, directions were scrawled on a slip of scratch paper, and I walked several blocks off Main Street, knocked on a door, and was ushered into the presence of the bells. There were indeed a great many bells (some of them not miniature at all), and the woman was passionate about her hobby. I recall that when a large truck rumbled past the house the bells began to quiver in unison. They didn’t ring, exactly; it was more like the rattling noise of kitchen cupboards and silverware drawers in an earthquake.
The first bell in the woman’s collection, I believe she said, had been obtained on her honeymoon. One thing led to another, which is, of course, how most obsessions snowball, and how most interesting conversations proceed.
The woman was curious about my curiosity regarding her bells, as might be expected. I explained that I was always fascinated to discover how many truly interesting people lived in almost every town in America, people with interesting hobbies, experiences, and accomplishments. Local celebrities or legends, I told the woman. People like you.
“Oh, Lord no,” the woman said. “Good heavens, no.” Her bells, she insisted, were small potatoes.
And then she told me about the Let’s Make a Deal woman. Another phone call was made. A young man from the Cities is in town, the person on the other end of the line was told, and he’s interested in hearing about the game show. Once again I was dispatched with an address in hand.
I’m not sure how old the Let’s Make a Deal woman was, but I’d guess she was then in her early seventies. She had lots of photos. She had been dressed as a hillbilly, I think it was, or maybe it was a scarecrow. And she had a signed copy of Emcee Monty Hall, the biography of the show’s host. There had been, she recalled, a lot of standing around and waiting. She’d had a feeling she would get on the show, somehow she’d just known. She hadn’t won a car or anything that fancy, she said, but she hadn’t been skunked, either; she’d won a washer and drier, which she didn’t need and had to pay the taxes on, but it had been a fun and wonderful experience regardless. “This was before we all had the video machines,” she told me. “That’s the only thing I’m sorry about, that I don’t have the show on tape.”
I didn’t have a camera, which is something I regret to this day. I also wasn’t talking to this woman as a writer; I wasn’t thinking of her as a potential character for a story. I was just interested in hearing her story, and looking at her photographs.
Later, in a used bookstore somewhere, I actually found a copy of Emcee Monty Hall, and I read the book with great pleasure. This is ridiculous, I realize, but after digesting Monty Hall’s words of wisdom I came to see in Let’s Make a Deal a fine metaphor for life. Everything’s there: faith, hope, disappointment, the desperate desire for attention that sometimes goads people to behave like total jackasses, and the occasional too-brief bursts of glory and exultation. It was a show that was about living with the choices you make, really, and accepting what’s behind the doors you open, or down the fork in the road you’ve chosen to travel. It’s also about gusto. Here’s a little snippet from Emcee Monty Hall that says what I’m trying to say much better than I can say it: “Of course, everyone can’t win big or winning big wouldn’t seem big. Whatever they win, the contestants seem happy. Monty says he has seen ladies make bad deals, perhaps trading a three-thousand-dollar car for three young pigs, and still kiss him. The men do not kiss him, but some hug him. He has had men grab him and throw him straight up in the air. This scares him because he worries about his back, which goes out on him constantly. He goes backstage complaining, ‘Oh, my back.’”
A modern map is a congested thing. Looking at just one page from a modern road atlas it’s immediately apparent that there’s a lot out there, no matter how loosely or broadly you define “out there.” In even its most seemingly empty stretches, Minnesota is a very crowded place. This is still essentially a state of small towns, clustered close together and sprawling out in every direction from the fat inkblot of the Twin Cities. I thought I might kick off my trip by trying to find the Let’s Make a Deal woman. I had an idea the town might have been either out on U.S. Highway 12 west of the Twin Cities, or along state Highway 56 in the southeast corner of the state. I felt certain I would recognize the place when I saw it.
Highway 12 definitely offered a greater concentration of communities, and if I followed it all the way to the western border of the state, I could then swing north and eventually pick up Highway 55, which would take me back to Minneapolis through another string of little towns. I headed west one morning. By noon I had a creeping suspicion that I was working with a seriously flawed central question; either that, or something strange was happening, or had happened, in America in recent years. I don’t know, perhaps it was just a bad patch of luck, but I can tell you that it took me almost four hours to cover sixty miles. In every town I ran into virtually the same story, which was not the story I was looking for. Nobody seemed to feel much like shooting the breeze. Even the drunks were more guarded. People clammed up on me.
In small towns and rural areas there’s always been a certain amount of reserve and charming self-effacement when dealing with outsiders, of course, but you could generally get around that without much problem if you were persistent and curious enough. The key, I’d always known, was simply to get people talking, and then to keep them talking by your obvious interest in what they were saying.
It wasn’t working, though. Oh, some folks would rack their brains all right. Particularly in the local libraries and city offices, they would scratch their heads and ponder and mull and maybe bandy a few ideas back and forth among themselves. And then they would half-heartedly offer up the name of, say, some fellow who’d been the county assessor for forty years, or a former mayor who had a park named after him. Every town seemed to have dead people who’d done something interesting once upon a time (politicians, mostly), or local sons or daughters who went out in the world to make a name for themselves.
“What was the name of that gal who moved out east and married some big shot?” a woman in one town—it could have been Montrose, Waverly, Howard Lake, or Dassel, or, really, any other town out that way—asked her coworkers, who couldn’t seem to remember the name of either the girl or the big shot.
“How about that old barber who used to be a race car driver?”
“He’s dead. My God, Janice, he’s been dead for years.”
I quickly learned that in the local bars I could reliably expect this response from some regular: “Local legend?” (Points across the bar.) “That guy’s a legendary drunk!” I also encountered the inspired variant, “That guy’s a legendary asshole!”
In every town I would inquire about the Let’s Make a Deal woman. No one had heard of her.
By noon I was in Darwin, a town that was once home to Francis Johnson, who was exactly the sort of character I was looking for. The result of Johnson’s lifetime labor, the world’s largest ball of twine wrapped by one man, is permanently displayed in its own glass-enclosed gazebo beneath the town water tower. Johnson’s twine ball, twelve feet in diameter, is a spectacular piece of work, and it’s nice to see the community give his achievement its proper due; it has become a sort of iconic roadside attraction that everybody in the state seems to know about, yet somehow I’d not only never stumbled across the thing, but had never even heard of it. Darwin holds an annual Twine Ball Festival, and adjacent to the ball’s permanent resting place is a bar, the Twine Ball Inn, and a souvenir stand that sells things like T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, and hats. Johnson, while unquestionably a legend, is not, alas, a living legend. He died in 1989.
Death, in fact, dogged my entire journey. It was that “living” business, unfortunately, that posed a pretty serious problem. There were dead legends everywhere I went, and I sensed a clear attitude among many of the locals I talked with that this was precisely the way they liked their legends, that death was the ultimate credibility stamp or qualification on any true legend’s résumé. The achievements of the living were tenuous things; they could be too easily eclipsed, the people behind them disgraced. Once safely in the ground, a legend could no longer do much to discredit himself or his community.
To many of the people I talked with, the very word, legend, was fraught with semantic difficulties; it seemed to suggest to them a story that folks tell about the past, about people who are dead and unmistakably historic, or mythical places or characters. A legend belongs to a place’s past, to its history.
Death, I suppose, allows enough perspective for an honest appraisal of the achievements of native daughters and sons, and provides a bit of a historical comfort zone in which civic pride in these legacies can find proper incubation. It was hubristic to toot the horn of someone still living, unless, of course, they had gone somewhere else to make their mark and had earned the validation of the outside world. Thus Hibbing can celebrate Bob Dylan and Mound can proudly proclaim itself the birthplace of Kevin Sorbo. The people in these small towns seemed to understand implicitly that when local kids go out into the world to make their mark, they’re not likely coming back.
I also figured out that the sort of people I was looking for and would personally classify as living legends were people with some peculiarly obsessive drive—folks who would be locally regarded as eccentrics or crackpots, if not outright lunatics. In small towns, I discovered, there is a prevailing attitude that such character flaws are absolutely not to be rewarded with anything in the way of attention or recognition. It was best to simply ignore them and then, when they died, confiscate their twine balls or the other products of their lunacy and build a community festival around them or let them fly their freak flag through eternity at the local historical society.
I drove all the way west and then swung back east on Highway 55. I was making very slow progress. I was not, in fact, making any progress at all, unless tacking miles onto the odometer qualifies as some definition of progress.
In every town I would go through the same basic routine. People would shrug, rub their chins, and consult their coworkers. Often enough, a phone call would be made to a local historian and a few names would be proposed and dismissed. I would be encouraged to see a woman at a local frame shop, or a guy at the post office who was an avid birdwatcher and history buff. At the tavern or serviceman’s club I would once again be offered an introduction to a legendary drunk. Plenty of people, including a man who was painting curbs in downtown Maple Lake, nominated themselves.
I was encouraged to visit Hubert Humphrey’s old hometown of Waverly. Somewhere else, I was informed, a former Vikings cheerleader was at work at the turkey plant. In Buffalo a woman at the Chamber of Commerce referred me to Mary Ellen Kreitlow, who referred me to Ruben Bonk, who, Kreitlow said, “Coffeed every afternoon at three o’clock at Culver’s with some of the other older fellows.” Bonk proved elusive, so I ventured to the Wright County Historical Society just outside of town. There I talked with Maureen Galvin, the curator. Galvin and a few other volunteers engaged in some brainstorming while I admired Albert Nelson’s “Mighty Nelsonian,” an imposing contraption that took up a good part of one room. The Nelsonian was a thirty-two-piece musical instrument, a one-man band, that could be played using two keyboards. Nelson tinkered with his one-man band for decades, and the final version on display at the historical society, completed in 1957, featured such diverse instruments as accordions, violin, cello, xylophone, banjo, trombone, and two guitars. He showcased the Nelsonian at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium at the Chicago World’s Fair, and later spent many years on the road, traveling and playing with a circus out of Florida.
Nelson was clearly an interesting man, and, in my eyes, an obvious legend. He was also dead. Long dead.
The brainstorming session in the other room had been remarkably productive, particularly when compared with my other experiences thus far. Galvin and her associates had clearly given my question some serious thought. They had even excavated some material from file cabinets for me to peruse.
There was, it turns out, a woman from Buffalo, Debbie Meyer, who had married the entertainer Andy Williams. She now, however, lived in Branson, Missouri, where her husband has a theater. Her mother, Mary Jane, who had until recently resided in Buffalo, was also now in Branson.
Bernie Parquette, a gospel singer, was from Buffalo as well. Parquette was definitely a local legend, someone said, and a truly incredible singer, but she wasn’t still residing in Buffalo. She was, in fact, living in Branson, where she had twice been named “Gospel Female Vocalist of the Year.”
Bob Dylan’s brother, David Zimmerman, I was told, had once served on the Buffalo school board.
And in nearby Howard Lake there was a guy named Bruce Hoffman who was a champion fiddler and had once appeared on Star Search once. Hoffman, alas, was now in Branson.
And so it went. I drove north, crossed the state, and headed back south along the eastern border. Somewhere out there were towns that claimed to be the birthplace of Greyhound Lines (Hibbing) and the birthplace of water skiing (Lake City). Rothsay was home to the world’s largest prairie chicken, and Fountain touted itself as the sinkhole capital of the world. I saw giant statues of a trout, a green giant, and a mosquito. I’m sure there were other giant statues I’ve forgotten.
Still. No one I talked to had any recollection of a woman who had once appeared on Let’s Make a Deal.
The entire time I had been on the road, it had been outrageously hot, and I drove in and out of thunderstorms for several days. I was south of the Twin Cities on Highway 56 when for some reason I became convinced that the hometown of the bell collector and the Let’s Make a Deal woman was somewhere nearby. I had traveled that stretch of highway on a number of occasions, so the towns all looked familiar to me. I had a good feeling, a strong feeling.
When I got to West Concord I was certain I had finally stumbled into the right town. It was late in the afternoon, and the Main Street was almost completely abandoned. I walked into various businesses that I found open and time and again made my increasingly desperate inquiry.
“Have you ever heard of a woman in town who once appeared on Let’s Make a Deal?”
No, I was told at each place, no, that didn’t sound like anyone in town.
“How about a woman who collects bells?”
“Bells? No, I can’t think of anyone,” someone told me. “There is, though, an older gal who collects shells.”
By this time I was feeling utterly defeated and beleaguered. There were possible explanations; I’d been severely handicapped by the fact that I didn’t have a cell phone, and I hadn’t been able to figure out how to use the wireless internet connection on my laptop. I’d had bad timing and even worse luck. Maybe the lousy state was entirely legendless, or maybe all the legends really were dead. I had no idea anymore.
I decided to drive the forty miles to Austin, my own hometown, and get a motel room to lick my wounds and try to hatch a game plan. I haven’t lived in Austin in more than twenty years, and the place has undergone a lot of changes since I moved away. Even so, I get back often enough that the town still feels achingly familiar. Every time I return, I’m reminded of the empty, humming, vacuum feel of the place on summer nights and of how anxious I once was to get away.
Austin has a population of 23,324, but it’s always felt much smaller than that to me. It’s located ninety miles almost directly south of the Twin Cities, just off Interstate 90, and you could jog to the Iowa border in a couple of hours. Hormel, the Fortune 500 meat and food processing company, was founded in Austin, and still has its corporate offices and a packing plant there. Austin’s got a Target now, and one of those sprawling, nondescript clusters of chain restaurants and retail establishments that you see everywhere these days. It didn’t have any of that stuff at the time I moved away. I can still remember, in fact, when McDonald’s first came to town.
As I sat in my room at the Days Inn eating a pizza from Steve’s, my all-time favorite pizza place and the source of many of my happiest memories of Austin, I tried to think of whom I would define as the living legends of my hometown. Suddenly, I felt just like the people I’d been talking to for the last week. I honestly couldn’t think of anyone. There were my old friends Otto McDermott, a long-haired plumber who drove a van with the yin-yang symbol painted on the side, and John Beckmann, a lawyer and one of the best writers and most interesting people I’ve ever met. Both of these guys had been instrumental in introducing me to a world outside of Austin, and were legends to me, but I have no idea how the other people in town saw them.
For a town of its size, Austin has produced more than its fair share of accomplished and distinguished people. The late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Eberhart was born and raised there. Novelist Tim O’Brien, football coach and analyst John Madden, and golfer Tom Lehman were all born in my hometown. Mike Wuertz, a pitcher currently with the Chicago Cubs, played high school baseball in Austin. I have no doubt that the stages of Branson are crowded with talented former Austinites.
I had absolutely no idea who might live there now, however, other than, I’m sure, lots of intelligent, interesting, and talented people who were nonetheless not living legends. At this point I had no idea, in fact, what I ever might have thought the term “living legend” implied, other than a woman who had once appeared on Let’s Make a Deal.
The next day I went in search of the Mower County Historical Society, which was located at the fairgrounds in Austin and which I had never visited. It was a pretty impressive place, full of interesting stuff and fantastic photos. There were lots of dance posters from the old Terp Ballroom (“Old Time Dance Every Friday Night”), which I remembered as a roller skating rink from when I was kid. These days it’s some sort of church.
Jacky Pierskalla, the society’s director, and Polly Jelinek, its secretary, mulled my challenge.
“If this was twenty years ago, you’d be in business,” Jelinek said. “Nowadays people move on.”
Death, of course, is the ultimate form of moving on, and in a dimly lit room inside the Historical Society building I discovered a monument to one more dead man’s obsession that is almost the equal of Francis Johnson’s twine ball in Darwin. William Tyrer’s “Wild Animal Three-Ring Circus,” assembled over more than fifteen years, is a sprawling and startlingly detailed creation. Composed of carved and modeled figurines and elaborate props, Tyrer’s spectacular circus includes hundreds of pieces, ranging from clowns and wild animals to trapeze artists and lion tamers. There are indeed three rings, all of them hives of activity, and contained under a giant canvas tent that is packed to the rafters with visual stimuli. Even the peripheries are busy with minute details, and outside the tent there are dozens of wagons and all manner of behind-the-scenes hubbub.
Pierskalla and Jelinek didn’t know much about Tyrer other than the bare-bones details that are displayed with his tabletop circus: He worked for Hormel for forty-seven years and died in 1969. During the years Tyrer worked on his labor of obvious love, he was a member of something called the Circus Model Builder’s Club, and once displayed his creation at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin.
Tyrer did have a son, Kenny, who was still living in town, I was told, and I was given a phone number. I tried to get ahold of Kenny Tyrer every day for a week, but nobody ever answered the phone at his home. Unsurprisingly, he did not have an answering machine.
I spent a great deal of time marveling at William Tyrer’s circus, and it gave me some small encouragement that there might still be people out there in towns all over the state who are working away at similar wonders in absolute obscurity.
While I was browsing around the historical society I stumbled across a photograph of Knauer’s, a tiny meat market downtown that had been a museum of exotica even in the Austin of my youth. It was an old-school, throwback market of the type that must have once existed in small towns all over America, and at a time when even the most out-of-the-way places have Wal-Marts, Targets, and all manner of twenty-four-hour Super Stores, it was a genuine relic. Every time I returned to my old hometown I was both astonished and relieved to see that Knauer’s was still surviving, and I’d been going in there on Christmas Eve for oysters, cheese, and bulk candy for as long as I could remember. It was a place that I’d always taken for granted, and I realized that I knew nothing whatsoever about its history.
After I left the Historical Society I stopped off at Knauer’s on my way downtown to the library. The almost impossibly cramped little market was bustling, and there were three generations of Knauers working behind the scenes—Bob (who admitted that he was “almost eighty”), his son Mark, and his grandson Bob.
Knauer’s, the elder Bob told me, has been in business since 1886, and when I asked him how long he’d been at it, he answered, “I’ve been going since six o’clock this morning, unloading semi loads of beef.” He had, it turned out, been going a lot longer than that. He’s been working at the family market for sixty-five years, with a little time off for military service, and grew up in a house next door.
“This is pretty much it,” Knauer says. “The Knauers are meat cutters, and they’ve always been meat cutters. This is the only thing I’ve ever done, and in all those years I’ve never gotten a promotion.”
Looking at the historical photos of the market that adorn the walls, it’s apparent that the basic layout of the place hasn’t changed much in over a century. When Bob’s grandfather, Tony Sr., first came over from Austria, the Knauers were sausage makers, a trade that Tony had learned in Vienna. In the early years, the family ran a small slaughterhouse just outside town, and had a sausage factory and smokehouse behind the market.
“You didn’t have refrigeration or suppliers in those days,” Bob says, “so you pretty much had to do everything yourself. At one time we had nine meat cutters going like gangbusters ten hours a day back here.”
The Knauers have held onto their history over the years; the original smokehouse still stands out back, and a number of original fixtures—an icebox, a meat locker with an imposing oak door, and a cash register—have all been preserved, or at least left alone. There’s also a huge black onyx safe in the back room that had the lock blown off in a robbery once upon a time.
They still cut their own meat at Knauers, and Black Angus steaks are the market’s specialty.
“Quality is everything in a business like this,” Bob said. “If you don’t have quality you’re not gonna be around for long. We’re hanging in there, but we’re pretty much the last of the Mohicans. It’s always a battle running a place like this. It always has been. There’s so much competition, and there’s more all the time. The nice thing about keeping things in the family is that you always have plenty of helping hands.”
In the two days I spent in Austin, nobody I talked to mentioned Bob Knauer when I inquired about local, or living, legends, and it occurred to me that there was something seriously flawed in not just my own conception of what a legend was, but also with the conception of virtually everyone else I’d talked to.
Try to think of your neighborhood or orbit of friends as a small town. Who among the people who populate that town would you describe to a stranger as a living legend? What would be your criteria for making this determination?
Look around. Surely there are people like William Tryer and Bob Knauer in your midst. There must be, even if they seem like nothing more than average Joes to the people who live just up the street. Surely all of the legends in your little world aren’t dead, are they?
No, surely they’re not.
Of course they’re not.