I grew up on a farm just outside of Potsdam, in rural Olmsted County, Minnesota. Potsdam’s German founders were confident that the railroad would come through their town. And they envisioned a metropolis to rival Potsdam, Germany, their town’s namesake city. But that was not to be. The railroad, when it came, followed the course of the Zumbro River, through towns such as Zumbro Falls, Hammond and Millville, leaving Potsdam high and dry on the prairie.
Potsdam had a second chance at the big time, but missed it again, when a Le Sueur physician decided to move his practice to Olmsted County. Unfortunately, Dr. William Worral Mayo chose Rochester instead of Potsdam, and you know the rest of that story.
Back then, wheat was king, and the Potsdamers decided their town would become a great flour-milling center. They had, of course, no railroad transportation and no river to power a mill. They put their hopes on the wind-powered Potsdam Flouring Mill, whose giant 60-foot wooden wheel, a landmark on Greenwood Prairie, turned the millstones through a series of big gears. Two counter-rotating 14-foot wooden wheels out at the end of the tail kept the big wheel facing into the wind. It was quite a spectacle. Problem was that when the wind didn’t blow the mill didn’t grind and the wheat piled up; then when the wind did blow the mill would grind day and night. Potsdam’s mill never was much of a threat to Minneapolis, but it ground away for several years, until one windy day when the miller was drawn into the gear train, ultimately causing the demise of both miller and mill.
When I was a boy there, in the 1930s, Potsdam had only a general store, a Lutheran church, a blacksmith shop, a tavern and a one-room school. The signs on Highway 247 at either end of town said “population 37,” and all 37 were stoic Germans, who did not generate much in the way of stories. In 1941 when, at age 12, I completed the eighth grade, there was no high school in Potsdam, and no rural school buses to get to a town that had one. So I did what the oldest child in a German family did back then. I went to work on the farm.
I read everything I could get my hands on, and somewhere read of the advantage of marrying above one’s station. I set my sights on a high school graduate. The object of my affection, and ambition was a graduate of the high school in Sebeka, a metropolis of more than 800, mostly Finns, in north-central Wadena County.
Sebeka was a railroad town, on the Great Northern line to Park Rapids. It had a sawmill producing lumber from the pine forests, and a flour mill that did not depend on wind but was powered by the Red Eye River. A newspaper, the Sebeka Review, and a telephone company formed way back in 1906, with a switching central in Field’s Restaurant for night service, put Sebeka at the forefront in communications, for a few months anyway. One day in 1907 the crew of the Great Northern work train forgot to lower the boom on the pile driver and pulled into town with the boom upright. The Review reported that the boom snagged the phone lines over by Anderson’s store and snapped the poles as far east as Kunkle’s blacksmith shop, where the train and its tangled tow of phone lines and poles finally stopped. This feat knocked out most of the Sebeka System and the North Germany and Nimrod exchanges as well. The Great Northern sent a repair crew in the next day, but it was several weeks before the telephone system was back in service.
On an early trip to Sebeka with Marlene, my bride-to-be, I had met her taciturn Uncle Hjalmer, who seemed to know a lot, but to relate very little. Curious, I asked Marlene’s mother what Uncle Hjalmer, who seemed mostly to hang out in town, did for a living. She thought carefully before replying, seriously, “He drinks.” That gave me a fresh new perspective on Sebeka; back in Potsdam we’d never given professional status to drinking!
It was after Marlene and I were married and I began attending her high school class reunions that my knowledge of Sebeka grew incrementally and I began to grasp the wealth of stories to be found there. I’ll recount one of them, as it was told to me.
It was at my second of these reunions – it must have been the 15-year one. The banquet was held in the party room of the Town and Country Café on Minnesota Avenue in Sebeka. The café’s party room was a windowless rectangle in back, where a small bar was set up along one wall for the social hour, and the banquet arrangement was six eight-foot folding tables set up in a U-configuration and covered with white paper.
After an hour of social time, during which I came to know several more of the classmates, Roland Aho, the master of ceremonies, announced that we should begin to take our places at the table and remain standing for the invocation. Marlene and I were among the first to move to one side of the U-shaped table. John Flanagan, the sole Irishman in the class, fell in across from me and, by way of making conversation, said, “It’s sure too bad about Ernie.” I figured Ernie must be a classmate, but I had no idea what the “too bad,” was about. So, to keep the conversation going I asked, “What happened?” “Well,” John said, “Ernie had spent Saturday night at the Legion Club. At closing time he had to leave, so he went out to his car, got headed out to Main Street and turned east.”
For the benefit of those of you who have not had the good fortune to visit Sebeka, I will explain that Minnesota Avenue, the main street, is wide – very wide, one of the widest in Minnesota. Marlene recalls the consternation caused when state officials decreed that, being the route of a state highway, the main street would thereafter be restricted to parallel parking. This new rule outraged the Sebekans, who were accustomed to parking facing into the curb, where they could sit in their cars or pickups on Saturday night and watch the people go by.
John told how Ernie was doing well late that Saturday night, heading slowly east, until he crossed the intersection just before the lumberyard. Across the intersection, in front of the lumberyard, the driver of the bulk petroleum truck for farm deliveries had parked his truck after his last farm delivery that afternoon. Ernie had drifted a bit in his course, the truck wasn’t parked in very close to the curb, and Ernie hit it. He hadn’t been going fast enough to do much damage, but the impact stopped his progress and Ernie got out to size up the situation. The collision had broken off the petroleum truck’s outside spigot, and gasoline was pouring from the break. Perhaps to steady his nerves, Ernie took out a cigarette and lit it.
At that precise moment, much to my misfortune, Roland Aho, now at the head table, called for a moment of silence in remembrance of Ernie. Caught up in the absurdity of the situation, I clutched my rib cage tightly and fought to maintain control. Finally, after what must have been the longest moment of silence in history , Roland Aho said, “Thank you.” I let out my breath in relief. John Flanagan looked across at me and said, thoughtfully, “That sure was too bad. Ernie was the smartest boy in the class.” ###
OK—now tell us all about North Germany and Nimrod, please.
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