This marks the second installment of the Epic Journey to the Heart of Fargo, a tale with everything but Yul Brynner. When we left off I’d finished breakfast, and visited the station with my father. After I dropped him off I wandered downtown to Atomic Coffee. I’d been there before, and ordered coffee in a cup. Mistake: it was almost seven inches wide, which guaranteed the coffee would be dead cold within a few minutes. This time I chose a paper cup.
Wrote, sipped, watched people walk past. People, walking, in downtown Fargo. I’m still surprised by downtown’s renaissance. Also somewhat saddened; a few old painted signs are gone, and a particularly carbuncle-like condo perched on top of a parking structure has permanently obscured the view of the coffee shop ghost sign. Just a cup of coffee to you, but a reputation to us. That’s almost backwards from the way it is now, eh? People stake their identity, their reputation, on their choice of coffee. Shade grown fair-trade organic in a cup made from 60% recycled post-consumer materials. A reputation to you, but just a cup of coffee to us.
I drove north to my old neighborhood. The Sambo’s is gone. Of course, Sambo’s have been gone for decades, but this place had a spot in my heart. One of the first restaurants on the north side in my childhood, a place for Sunday French Toast, meeting place for coffee in high school. A counter, vinyl booths that exhaled when you sat down, turquoise galore. It went through many different names, closed, opened, closed again – and now it’s been razed, as if they’re just tired of trying.
This was the Sambos in its final days:
Not that it matters, but it had a doppelganger on the south side of town. It’s still around.
I know, I know – it’s only commercial architecture of dubious value; who cares? No one, or at least hardly anyone – which is why the urban landscape loses its landmarks and familiar themes, and everything gets replaced, blandified into faux-historic structures that pretend vernacular modernism never happened.
A few blocks to the west: my old elementary school. McKinley.
I don’t think I’ve been inside since I left sixth grade. Last I heard, one of my favorite teachers was the principal; I had an odd idea I might run into him. The door was open. Inside everything from the rooms was heaped in the hallway: renovations, cleaning, painting, preparations. I checked the office, explained my mission: I’d missed him. By a year. Could I look around, take some pictures?
Sure, said the nice lady. This was Fargo, after all.
Part of the shock of remembering is recognizing all you have forgotten. If I’d been asked to reconstruct grade school memories, I would have never recalled the gold-leaf decals on the doors. But of course. Of course!
BOYS led to the bathroom, the hues of which has the original institutional vitality of post-war boomer bins. Still peachy after all these years:
The glass block windows are gone – insulating issues, said one inspector – but the ceramic tiled walls, the 50s hues, the light wood with the gold-hued decal names on the doors, it’s all there. There’s much more stuff on the wall, most of designed to provide rote institutional reinforcement and encouragement to the kids. I don’t know how much it works. I don’t recall any of it in my time.
This would have been my fourth grade room. I knew it right away.
I knew where I’d sat, and I stood there, remembering a picture I drew of the sinking Titanic in a tablet that had spacemen on the cover. (Realistic spacemen in bulbous suits building a space station.) Next to me, over there, would have been the desk of that big clumsy slow girl noted for throwing up inside her desk, hoping no one would notice.
At the end of the hall were the kindergarten rooms. Couldn’t get in. Just peered through the glass, looking at the spot where I’d napped 45 years ago, at the bathroom door where the teacher helped me with my zipper and managed to get the equipment caught in the teeth. It’s a wonder I’m not a serial killer.
There should have been a sign: “This door has been permanently locked for symbolic purposes.”
I crouched down, and there it was, the view I had on my first day in school:
Stopped by the GYM, always a source of anxiety and failure. It was dim and ominous, as ever:
I don’t know what I expected to find when I walked in – as I said, you don’t know what you forget until you remember. But the original teacher’s desks, from the Space Age of Educational Furnishings?
I found the people who’d seen me come in, told them I was going – see? No computer parts under my shirt – and thanked them for letting me take a private tour. On the way out I paused again, because this view -
- had meaning. On the right was where I was beat up by a kid on crutches, of all things. He cracked me hard on the shin, knocked me down. It must have been that spot, because I still recall the reveries where I inflicted revenge, earning the awe and respect of all. They took place right here. It would have been great if he’d been the janitor, and we’d stood there having a laugh, and I’d kicked him in the leg. Fair enough, he’d have to say, grimacing, down on one knee, catching his breath.
I got in my car, called directory assistance, and called what I hoped was my old 5th grade teacher, Mr. Kahl. He wasn’t in. I left a message telling him I’d been at the school, how I’d always remembered his joy and enthusiasm, and never forgot him. Thanked him, pressed END CALL and drove away. I’ll never have to go there again.
After the school it was time to revisit something I’d seen a few years ago: the abandoned McDonald’s. Yes, a McDonald’s closed in North Fargo. There aren’t many fast-food options, except for another McDonald’s. Apparently the town wasn’t big enough for the two of them. This was what it looked like three years ago:
And now:
Much more overgrown. Nearly all the plants are ugly. They’re nasty, too – they sting, they stick, they make your skin tingle if you rub up against them. It’s like a garden from a Stephen King novel, because it’s all off, somehow, wrong in a way you grasp straight away. The bad juju screams from this place, and you can’t help but wonder if the inside is dead cold, the walls smeared with word that would be innocuous in another context but frightening here. Surely something bad happened here, and that’s why it closed. I mean, look at this place. Tell me there’s not something wrong here.
The drive-thru. Thank you, please DIE ahead.
–
That was pretty much the trip; I drove around, took pictures, went back to my dad’s place. Had dinner with sister & her family (her husband runs the family business now; learned on the job, grew the business and bought it a long lease in the 21st century.) We sat outside on a restaurant’s patio, alongside a new road by a new development – Fargo grows so fast Google Earth can’t keep up – and toasted sunset in the new world. Dad picked up the check. He always picks up the check; it’s the pleasure of being Dad.
The next morning I intended to get up and out, but lo: a puddle of oil on the driveway. Dad said they may have crossthreaded the plug when they changed the oil. Checked the dipstick: down two quarts, but that might have been due to starting the car. Still, better check it out. Went back to the oil change shop, and they explained: yesterday we were out of the stuff we use to clean the oil after a change, and it might have collected in the frame. See? Your dipstick reads full. Well, thanks, guys. Great. Great job. For my troubles I got a free car wash. But I’m leaving town. Good for four months. Why not forever? I wanted to ask.
Called my dad from the road, said it was just a messy job.
“Figures,” he said. “I drive past there all the time and never see anyone in there.” He advised me to check my oil throughout the trip, though. And I did. Pulled over outside of Detroit Lakes to get some coffee. Oil was fine. Went in for coffee. They were out. Oh, they had French Vanilla and Cappucino and Hazelnut, but no actual coffee coffee. Grr. “You’re out of coffee,” I said to the clerk on my way out.
“Thank you,” she said, and to this day I don’t know if that was a thank you or another kind of blank-you. I drove on. Pulled over in Verndale to top off the tank; as I pulled up to the pump a guy came out, wiping his hands. I looked at the pump: no credit card. I said I was just looking for a quick fill with a card, and he said “Oh.” I felt bad. Asked if they had any coffee.
“We just ran out,” he said. Good Lord.
Drove on. Outside of Staples I pulled over again, filled up. The speakers were playing “Morning Train” by Sheena Easton; winced, as usual, when she went for that high note. Went inside for coffee: brother, did they have coffee. Bought a go-cup as big as my forearm. Back on the road.
There you have it: three thrilling days. It’s been a fine week, and I look forward to getting back to all the usual updates next week, before I take another week off before the delightful hell of the State Fair. New column up at Startribune.com; the Strib blog will have another entry today about the run up Highway Ten.
I leave you with . . . The Bowler. See you later today, with 100 Mysteries.
Spud: “DOOM” Oy. Tell me about it.
When I started kindergarten in ‘69, the elementary school had a “new part” (K, 1, 2, lunchroom) and an “old part” (3, 4, 5, 6, furnace). About 10 years ago they tore down the “old part” and built an addition for the police department. The “new part” (which is now the “old part”) holds the town offices. The high school has been extensively remodeled since I left it in ‘79, so I’m not sure what the nostalgia factor would be. Never much liked that place anyway. The private school that (barely) gave me my diploma is in a continual state of demolishing, rebuilding, and renovating. The new stuff is nice, but I miss the old a little. And while visiting my college campus a few years back, I got lost because they’d moved the roads around. Maybe I’ll stay home from now on.
Wow. I live 1.5 miles away from the building I was born in and can visit four of my elementary schools (the county changed school boundaries every few years) and my high school within 20 minutes.
And it isn’t even a small town – it’s Hayward, California, part of the San Francisco Bay Area!
Every day is nostalgia for me – the old city hall/police department where my dad worked in the early ’60s; four different houses in four ’60s housing tracts, Centennial Hall – the community hall that was my father’s high school gym.
Bancheros – the Italian restaurant that is celebrating its 60th year; I used to dance on the bar when I was three years old and my grandparents would take me there. You could do that back then. Mr. Gino was the bartender and I’d get Shirley Temples. Old juke box; grandpa would give me dimes to feed it. My dad, my mom, me and my oldest daughter all celebrated our 21st birthdays there.
The names of the stores in the tiles on what used to be downtown.
Aw geeze, I’m going to go hop in the car and take a drive…..
My elementary school,which I attended from 1969-1973, was torn down sometime in the 80s – it was about a quarter of a mile from my house, but I lived out of town at the time and my sister got all of us kids a brick from the school with a gold plaque attached. It’s a nice memory. I was recently looking at my 1st grade class picture – I think I completed high school with 85% of the kids in the picture.
On my last Fargo visit, the Bowler advised that it discontinued its classic smorgasbord 15 years ago. Through the 60s and 70s, that was good eatin’.
Kim Wow I went to Mt Eden my wife went Hayward High and we still live in Hayward
My original elementary school (Coloma Elementary 4623 T St. Sacramento CA) was closed as I entered the 4th grade (around the time of Prop 13 and all the angst regarding school funding being ripped away by black hearted Republicans – meh..). It wasn’t earthquake safe, and the cost to seismicly retrofit was deemed too high. So Off we went to another school miles away.
It was a grand old building – all brick with a Spanish tile roof. Everything was indoors which to folks outside of California seems like no big deal, but out here, you walk outside to go anywhere. No indoor hallways. Even had a second floor, which the ADA would have killed eventually anyway.
The City of Sacramento ended up buying the building from the school district, and converted it to a community center. We rented the Auditorium for my Wife’s College graduation party in 1994 (A genuine whip-lash-bash, if ever there was!) Not safe enough for school kids, but good enough for City employees. Yeesh.
Here it is from the city website —http://www.cityofsacramento.org/parksandrecreation/recreation/c_coloma.htm
And of course the obligatory Google Map Street View. —http://maps.google.com/maps?q=4623+T+street,+Sacramento,+CA&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&split=0&gl=us&ei=f6aFSoS0OoH2sgOriP2bBw&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1
Fantastic time to ponder the old school, as my youngest just started her first day of Kindergarten yesterday…
That school looks hideous. I can’t believe they still imprison children in those places. Some day people will look back on that the way we look at medieval medicine.
In my neck of the woods, former McDs (and BKs and J-Boxes) don’t die…they just become Mexican restaraunts with names ending with “berto”.
All these years of reading and I never knew you had Mr Kahl as a teacher.
Larry – holy cow! I went to American High in Fremont – class of ‘75! We detoured briefly to Sacramento or I’d have gone to Calaroga Jr. High and Mt. Eden!!!! : D
Last weekend I was in the small town where I grew up about 40 miles SW of Chicago. I was attending a family reunion for one of my old neighbors. His parents still live in the same house they bought 50+ years ago. Only 2 new houses on the street since I graduated from high school in 1983. Only 3 since I moved their in 1972.
Left the party beifly to walk over to the elementary school that is nearby. I walked the 1/2 mile or so to school every day from 2nd grade until high school when I finally had to take a bus. It was weird, walking the same path I had first trod 37 years earlier. The bones of the school are there, although augmented by additions. I peeked in the windows at my 4th grade classrooms and marveled that some of the playground equipment I played on over 30 years ago is still there.
A few years back I wandered to the school web site. I saw that my 4th grade reading teacher was still there. It was in her class that I first read The Hobbit and the Lion, Witch, and The Wardrobe (we read them out loud as a class). I sent her an email to thank her for fostering what has been a life long love of reading, fantasy novels in particular. It turned out she had just retired. I was so glad that I had sent her the note.
Kim
Wow again, I also went to Calaroga Jr I had transfered from Westlake High in Okland
Would they start with Alda-? IN Nor Cal?
Grew up in Sacramento – What Middle School / Jr. High did you attend?
My older brother was in the first Graduating Class from the California School for the Deaf in Fremont (prior to that he was at Berkley before it moved to Fremont).
I did a Nostalgia Tour in 2000. The goal was to visit every place I’d lived and every school I went to. The biggest and saddest shock was finding no trace of the lovely old Hills School where I spent kindergarten and first grade (blessings to Mrs. Zutt and Mrs. Carlen wherever they are) The beautiful old Dutch Colonial building with its slate roof and rolling green campus had been paved over with McMansions. The heck with the fact Hills was the first school in the newly consolidated district, and therefore historic, forget the fact it was architecturally distinct and lovely. All I could find was a berm of earth at the head of what had been the driveway, and the walnut trees that lined what was now a suburban neighborhood cul de sac. All the other flat-roofed cinderblock Bauhaus monstrosities had survived nicely. And I was sad to see the earth hadn’t swallowed my junior high – repository of so many hellish memories. Oh, and our first house, the house my father built in Heiligmann’s meadow – transformed from modest cedar-shingled rambling rancher to Italian marble-floored palazzo. Sigh.
One morning I explained to the manager of a fast food place the importance of not shutting off breakfast orders at 10:20am.
Oh man–that happened to me a few years ago at a Mickey D’s while on a roadtrip; the manager shut down breakfast while I was in line (I think I was next). Grrr…
Great nostalgia trip once again, James. I’m really liking this series…
@juanito – John Davey
Phoenix…Filiberto’s, Edelberto’s…etc
@jamcool
Why, then it’s decidedly more authentic than Nor Cal.
Nostalgia is an everyday experience for me. I live in the house in which I was born and raised. In the basement there is an impression in the concrete of my foot when I was one year old.
When I started school in 1960 I attended a one room schoolhouse. It required a one hour bus ride each way from my house to the school. The county was growing and consolidating all of the little schools into fewer, larger structures to accommodate more student from a wider geographical area. So in first grade we used one room for all grades. The next year we has three classrooms (1st & 2nd, 3rd and 4th, 5th and 6th grades) with the original ‘classroom’ being used as the lunchroom & gymnasium. Two years later the school grew again to 6 classrooms; one grade per room. That was a big deal for all of the students.
Personally I think I learned more being in a one room school house. I could listen and watch what the older students were learning.
Many years later my daughter went to the same elementary school I attended. However when she was there is had grown considerably. The six classrooms we had were now just the first and second grades. New additions and trailers were used for the older grade classrooms.
When (if) my daughter has kids they will go to the same school as we did. But how will it have changed? An interesting concept.
I grew up in rural N.California a few miles outside of the rather small town of Sebastopol. The elementary school (Gravenstein Union Elementary) I attended has changed very little. One of the memories that I still think about today is of one of the custodians. I can’t remember his name but I’ll never forget his full head of slicked back, jet black hair and the fact that he always had a .357 magnum holstered too his hip! Who was going to get us out here in the boonies? A rabid Turkey Vulture? Later on someone told me that he was on of the survivors of Pork Chop Hill in the Korean War.Not sure if that was true but it does seem to make sense.
Any nostalgia for my old schools will have to be from memory or photos. All the schools were razed. My 60s elementary school was built in the classic 50s international/prairie style with multiple separate classroom blocks (4 rooms to a square) linked with exterior sidewalks and mini lawn squares. Very similar to our hosts’ pictures inside. It was rumored that the school district bought the plans from a California source. Could have been true, it was intended for a more benign climate than upstate SC. Too hot in the warm months with that glass wall letting in the sun, too cold in the winter with the inadequate heaters next to the glass. You got wet and cold going to lunch if the weather was bad.
The school was finally replaced in the 80’s by a much nicer multistory building.
My junior high school was about 50 years old and on its last days. They closed it after our last year and it was demolished a year later. Those plans must have been purchased from New York City. It looked like it would have fit in perfectly among the brownstones. The third floor was condemned and chained off. Not the safest feeling to be under that.
My high school was built in the late 50s on the Florida plans. Concrete block exterior walls with holes in them so you could catch the rain and winter winds in the hallways going from class to class. They finally replaced it about 10 years ago. Some people say it looks like prison architecture but at least the walls are solid.
I visited my home town, Santa Maria, CA Friday for an uncle’s memorial service.
Many things down town were torn down in the 70s and 80s but, surprisingly, it seems like nothing since then. There are additions and expansions and new buildings but, many buildings approaching 100 and tons of “vernacular modernism” are still present and prosperous.
It is a lot like Fargo but, much warmer.
I did a Nostalgia trip of my own about a year and a half ago while on a trip to Chicago. I spent my kindergarten year in the northwest suburb of Mount Prospect, so I made it a point to drive through there while I was in the area. I couldn’t visit my old elementary school, Sunset Park, because it had stopped being a school before I was in high school, and the building has since been razed (so Sunset Park is now…a park). But I did get to go through my old neighborhood, and I was very pleased to see that everything–the neighborhood, and Mount Prospect in general–was very well-kept. I got to take some pictures of our old house to show to my folks, and the snow on the roof was a nice bonus.
The one thing I wish I had done when I was there was take a walk through Randhurst Mall, designed by Victor Gruen (a familiar name to Twin Citians) in the unique shape of an equilateral triangle with anchors at each point. Sadly, a few months after I was there, it was announced that the mall would be closed, the triangle section razed, and the whole thing would be reborn as a New Urbanist “town center.” (While I’m usually a fan of those, I wish there had been a way to save this architectural marvel.) Randhurst’s last day of business in its original form was Sept. 30 of last year.
@juanito – John Davey
When I was in Sacramento, I attended Charles Mack Elementary for half a year and then James Rutter Jr. High for 7th 8th and 9th. : )
@Kim
For me it was Coloma, Phoebe Hearst, & Riverside for elementary, Kit Carson for Middle school, and finally Christian Brothers High School.
I have just discovered that the place I knew as Sambos in Lincoln City, Oregon was never part of the national chain (despite having the same look and feel and even characters as the National chain).
http://www.lilsambos.com/aboutus.html
Nevertheless, if you’re nostalgic for Sambo’s you can get some in Oregon
“They looked like upside-down ice-cream trays.” I think you meant ice cube trays, but thank you very much for reminding me of this. I thought the same thing when I was in elementary school.