Road Trip Minnesota

Open for business or is this a free store?

These bus shelters offer a rent free opportunity to anyone bold enough to set up a business. You can find this shop at what is now “George Floyd Square”, the intersection of 38th & Chicago in Minneapolis. I don’t think Metro Transit uses these particular shelters anymore because of the round-a-bout and blockades make getting a big vehicle too difficult to get through.

Since I’ve been working the weekends driving Uber and Lyft, I haven’t been around the estate sales much and only a few yard sales throughout the summer. People don’t have yard sales here during the winter. Driving a cab, or the equivalent of a cab, these days is very different from the old taxi days when I worked downtown and ordinances kept me from picking up outside the city limits and taxis from outside the city limits were prevented from picking up fares in the city. A lot of things are nice about this, venturing around the entire metro area and sometimes beyond for one. I get to see more and learn more about the place I live in. The Minneapolis city center is all but dead anyway because after the riots those downtown apartments began to empty out as the people who moved in from the outer regions decided to move back out. The pandemic work-from-home has emptied out some of the office buildings too and now the city is talking about converting those into “affordable” housing. The bottom has been falling out of commercial real estate ever since shopping online became popular, now some people only shop online and barely venture out to shop anymore. Investors had moved out of the commercial real estate and into the private housing market and companies like RealPage uses algorithms that management companies and landlords use to set the rents and those algorithms were set high all over the nation. But high rents aren’t the only reason we’re seeing an increasing amount of homelessness, that’s more of a drug problem, a very big drug problem and mental illness. Even the old hoboes that have been homeless most if not all their lives because of alcohol and drug abuse say that this next generation is very different from their days on the streets and in the rail yards. The old school hoboes kept their camps out of site and weren’t the nuisance these ones today are. The synthetic drug abuse is much different from the old organic drug abuse is one reason and there are a lot more people affected by it too.

I don’t work in the city much anymore as most business has shifted out to the suburbs and beyond. I don’t see homeless camps in the suburbs, I don’t see people on the corners and freeway ramps holding up signs begging, and the roads are a lot smoother too.

We’re in a new era and it almost makes me feel my age. That’s a realization that can be hard to come by sometimes. Time moves on and we hardly notice the change until we find ourselves on the outside of a new generation. Though much remains the same we are very different, the world has changed and moved out of our age. It’s a generation gap. We might think we’re keeping up with the times, but really we’re not. We think different, look different, wear different clothes and most of all our memories are different. We might like the same music and even agree on many things, but that difference is there, just like our own parent’s difference was there to us when we were young.

I don’t ever remember seeing a bus shelter being used as a shop when I was young, I didn’t see homeless camps, but I have seen hobo’s camps, growing up near railroad tracks and many empty lots full of weeds. I remember black and white television and the fuzzy static when television programs ended for the night. I remember going to concerts and thinking $25 was a lot to pay for a ticket when prices rose from $15. Positively Fourth Street record shop where I bought numerous LPs at $4.99 each. They also had cool stuff, head shop stuff. Dinky Town Crazy Daze when all the shops in Dinkytown pushed their sales out onto the sidewalks and it was a big event that excited everyone. Ralph & Jerry’s convenient store where they sold T-shirts that advertised the store and encouraged everyone to “Eat and Spend Money.” I gave mine to a friend I met in New Orleans who came from Australia. Many years later when the Mall of America was close to opening, my same friend who became a journalist was sent here to do a story and I took him to Ralph & Jerry’s just so he could replace that T-Shirt with another. He bought one of the last of its kind because Ralph & Jerry’s is now gone and new owners have taken over the space.

Dinkytown has changed too. I grew up with a girl whose father owned The House of Hansen in Dinkytown, a small grocery store. The old folks in Dinkytown tried to persuade her not to sell her store to the developers but she was smart enough to see that holding out wasn’t going to do her any good and change was going to come anyway. Now a it’s a big building. So is the old high school, a huge tall building with a few shops on the bottom floors and apartments above. I’ve been on the West Bank now for many years and hardly ever cross the river to the East Bank side anymore. People who’ve lived on this side of the river for most of their lives too try to resist change, they don’t want some buildings to be torn down, they try to preserve their past, their own memories of their own lives. I try to tell them, we can’t do that, the future isn’t ours anymore, it belongs to this new generation and we’re on our way out so let them have it. Their memories are already a lot different from ours and they’re busy making new ones and changing too.

I remember the days after the old dance studio in Dinkytown caught fire and had to be torn down, people took over that space to prevent a fast food restaurant becoming a chain, “Red Barn,” from building and moving in. People back then were protesting the commercialization that we see and take for granted and even rely on today. Willie Murphy and the Bumblebees even wrote and played a song titled, “Supermarket”. The Red Owl on East Hennepin where my mom shopped for the family groceries was the biggest supermarket back then but wasn’t thought of as one, maybe because Red Owl wasn’t trying to chain their way across the country, at least they didn’t seem to that I can remember. That whole East Gate shopping center, an old strip mall basically, was torn down and replaced by one of the many gigantic buildings that we see and are still going up today, replacing the old with apartments on the floors above shops. Red Owl is long gone and has been replaced by a Lunds-Byerlys. Anyway, back to the protests. There was the Vietnam war that was still drafting boys right out of high school and protests all over the country against that war. Dinkytown was ripe for protests and the old dance studio part of that block was taken over by students and protesters of anything and everything. The vacant lot was turned into a “People’s Park” and vacant buildings were taken over by squatters and turned into a soup kitchen. Many of the squatters were not the homeless, they were political and had given up their apartments just to be there and others just refusing to pay rent to the capitalist pigs they knew as landlords. I was a freshman in high school when all this was going on, I had taken to skipping school and along with two other friends from school we would go out panhandling. We’d get a free water cup from McDonald’s or somewhere and then hit the streets with spiels like, we’re collecting to save the whales and some such. We did turn most of that money into to soup kitchen and they fed us. What little we kept was enough to splurge for a treat, like a candy bar or something from the bakery.

Well, the good old days, they come and they go and then new ones come along. Bad times do the same and right now we are in bad times.

I had recently come across this book at a sale nearby and just finished reading it. I remember the early Cold War days but my knowledge at the time was very limited. I remember my Dad would tell us kids we didn’t want the Communists to take over because if they do, they’ll just take over our house and we’ll have strangers moving in with us and we’ll be kicked out. I was too little to understand anything then and people of my generation grew up believing a lot of things they were told as kids. The Atomic bomb was going to take us out and the communists were going to be the one’s who bomb us. One day, I think I was about 5 or 6 years old, a paper factory a few blocks down the street blew up and there was a big flash of light and the whole house shook, the windows rattled and all that. One of my older sisters went into a convulsions crying that the war has started and the bomb dropped on us. I was still only curious then so I don’t remember crying. It wasn’t until I read this book did I understand that the bomb threat was really between Russia and China but we would get fallout from the winds blowing it this way. Not many people knew what to expect back then so of course could only think the worst. I question now how well were we really informed back then compared to now. I don’t keep up with much, but this is the first time I even knew about this Russian and China as enemies. Back then, those bombs couldn’t reach us anyway, but we all lived in fear as if they could. How well are we informed now?

I think of the tipping issue in the service industry when I think about what I hear on the news these days. A few years ago there was lots of talk and debate over tipping and should people tip, but not a peep about the $2.65 an hour service workers made and who relied on those tips. Kitchen staff complained they never got a cut, etc. That was and still is the minimum wage for those service workers. However, if the wages were brought up to and above the minimum wages then the price of eating out would have to go up and nobody wanted that and the servers wanted to keep their tips. Since then, the service industry has suffered because those tips have not come back to what they were before. Now, only recently, a few years after all that blabbering, there was a brief mention of this below average minimum wage service workers make, but it was only brief, no extensive talks or debates, just a blurb most people probably didn’t hear. And this was on NPR! Our trusted news station!

Growing up in Dinkytown near the University of Minnesota campus was an adventuresome experience, as most childhoods are. I witnessed the birth of the franchise era, the grandparents of the big box shops and brand names today. There was a dance studio on the corner of 13th avenue and 4th street that my mother sent me to for ballet lessons. It had burned to the ground one day in the late early 1970’s. The area was then slated for a Red Barn chicken shop while there was already a Red Barn in Stadium village less than a mile away. I don’t think Red Barn was an actual franchise then but they were trying to be and the students and all got involved in a protest to ban it and prevent the growth of franchises in Dinkytown preserving the independent and uniqueness of the neighborhood, saving the small entrepreneur from getting pushed out or swallowed up by the bigger fish, or chickens in this case. The ban was successful and also the death of Red Barn more or less. They eventually closed in Stadium Village and was never seen again. Later on McDonald’s and Burger King managed to open their chain stores in Dinkytown without the protests and remained there for decades.

As I got old enough to drink I hung out in West Bank bars and enjoyed the bands. They used to sing about the days “a’comin” one by Willy Murphy and the Bumblebees titled “Supermarket” was one such warning of the chain store take over corruption of our society.

Today any city you travel to nearly any part of the world let alone America, the chain stores we are all familiar with have taken up roost so now just about anywhere you go there’s that “sameness”. Brand names are like these same shops, everybody has them or wants them just like everybody else. They’re a trusted source for what you want. Entrepreneurs from foreign lands now come in to give us something different and I see these businesses growing in numbers, familiarizing us with their cuisine and cultures. Though the big boxes aren’t dead yet and it’s still hard to predict where all this is going, the world changes from generation to generation.

Burger King and now McDonalds are both gone and so is my old high school. In place is Target a Starbucks, and a number of small businesses, turning out Banh Mi Vietnamese sandwiches and pizza’s with not the conventional toppings.

The film industry has hit the bricks hard. With digital photography many people in the industry lost their jobs or are suffering a massive loss of income. I have three neighbors who experience this. One had a fire and lost her equipment and after trying to replace her loss and come back into the business, was another hard hit for her because the industry wants younger people with their young perspectives. Basically, she was told she had aged out of the industry. Another neighbor who just moved back to Minneapolis I hear is having a hard time finding work because her arts have become obsolete. Another neighbor was just able to retire before taking this same hit. Eventually I’ll become obsolete too when Uber replaces drivers like me with robotaxis. People can make their own films and photos with a smart phone now and they do. Social Media and channels like Netflix are pushing out the bigger fish that was once Hollywood. However, they’re not all dead yet. The nostalgia might die with the generations that lived in those days but there are some things that never die. Music! and the Muses are eternal.

What I got out of this book is the playfulness of Hollywood characters. Many times I’ve heard actors and actresses comment on the people in Hollywood as people who never grow up. This book portrayed this well with the character who as a child was into building dinosaur models and such from the hobby kits of the day. The child never “grew up” but continued building his models and creating his make-believe landscapes for his beasts. As he got older he became very good at it and was able to build his own toys without kits and this eventually landed him a job in Hollywood as a set designer and monster creator for the movies. These people who have not put themselves above their toys and silly behaviors have done very well for themselves. Walt Disney had made it huge with his Disneylands and Worlds. He was probably one of the first to develop and use robotics to animate his characters and creatures. Emotional turmoils, silly behavior, gossip, pranks and such have kept their creative minds active and alive. This is the stuff that entertains the serious grown ups on television today. They make us laugh, care and cry, taking our noses off the daily grindstones of life even for just a little awhile.

So, Hats off for Immaturity!

Now selling like hotcakes on eBay and Amazon, I read this book and it sold the very next day on Amazon. I bought it off eBay with a free shipping and lower price, now you can probably do the same. I would encourage everyone to read this because the story effects every one of us in more ways than one.

This one I expect will sell fast too. We’ve been hearing this whole story that is told in both books over the years in bits and pieces as the events happened on the news. What Tom Burgis did was take these events and drew the big picture. He explained well how resource rich nations remain in poverty, as we know the ruling elites basically skim all the wealth for their own, but also describes how the labyrinth of shell companies, tax havens, etc. and the parking of money in our own nation are impoverishing us.

This is something that should not only concern us, but anger us to no end, because here we go again with the banks involved just a deep in these schemes and shenanigans. Are we going to bail them out again?

If I were to allow the storage of stolen property on my premises, I would be convicted, so would anyone of us. We may also lose our homes and anything else of value. Parking looted cash from other nations through the real estate purchases and other means, isn’t that the same? Parking/storage stolen property/loot?

These deals have raised the price of housing so that the average American can’t afford even the tiniest of shacks and renters are paying astronomical rents because of a housing shortage! The properties of these Kleptocrats who are supposedly legally parking their money here are often empty or housing what a friend of mine calls “anchor baby hotels”, meaning the a pregnant wife or mistress of a kleptocrat that had gutted his own people can have a child born in the United States and obtains citizenship and can also have a bank account. Sanctions are a joke when there’s an anchor baby in the family with access to the these accounts.

I drove taxi for many years and now drive Uber. In the taxi I had lots of regular customers that would go from one job to the next and some would do this three times a day! They weren’t making a lot of money, but it took a lot of money just to survive. This is where we’re at folks, and over the years we thought of other reasons why, like greedy landlords, yes they’re out there, people just wanting more, they’re out there too. We all have taken a bite out of the apple, it’s in our gas tanks and our cell phones and nearly everything else we consume. There’s also the psychology that has become embedded in our lives as a consumer society itself. We are creatures of comfort, OK I get that. But over the years through the media and our peers, we’ve learned that we ain’t shit unless we’re rich and glamorous and have the latest shiny trinket of the day. We learned that success is based on how much we earn and not so much on how well we live whether we live in a shack or a penthouse. I can’t stress enough how hoarding is becoming more and more of a problem in this county too. Anyway, this might sound a bit religious now, but we have been taught to worship the “Golden Calf.” Remember that story? It’s in the Bible and probably other books too. And what happened, everything was destroyed in the end. Is that where we’re going now that this war has begun?

On that note here’s an example of one overworked worker:

In 2019 I posted a couple of blogs about my hoarder neighbors. Since then a lot has happened. I had feared the worst in the beginning because of the risk the house would get condemned, but actually I came out pretty well. The health department stepped in for awhile because of a small child’s health was at risk of lead poisoning. Old houses like mine have lead paint all over them and the government has some generous grants to clean it up. This got me new windows in the attic all around, a railing installed at the top of the attic stairs, new steps going up to my apartment on the second floor, front and back, a new bathroom sink installed, two new windows in my dining room, the problematic peeling old wall paper base over plaster walls in the kitchen was fixed and they even painted ceiling.

Not a complete makeover but a lot of work I never would’ve accomplished on my own. I was inspired to paint my kitchen walls after that, getting rid of the ugly “renter’s white” color that made it look so squalid.

Meanwhile, the inspector is still busy trying to get my neighbor to clean up the basement. I learned a lot about hoarders since I’ve had to live through this. I’ve read a number of books on the subject that I have passed on to the inspector for his own use too. Generally, hoarders are very nice people and easy to get along with, a personality trait that’s a saving grace for them. However, they’re also very difficult. The inspector told me he’s had to take classes about hoarders and how to deal with them as an inspector. It would take a lot of government resources and can be very expensive to help a hoarder clean up and stay cleaned up than what the city can afford, and it’s a growing problem. Most people think hoarders are a poor man’s domain. Just the opposite. Most hoarders are from well off families, and it is not something they learned from their parents who lived through the Great Depression as many people seem to think. Hoarders are often broke because they’re also paying for off site storage units which can amount to just as much if not more than their monthly housing expense. Cities are still in the early stages of figuring out what to do about hoarders without condemnations and evictions. It’s a mental health issue and nothing short of a court order will a hoarder seek the counseling they need until they themselves acknowledge they have a problem. Five city dump trucks parked outside the house ready to clean it out isn’t convincing enough. A hoarder will continue to argue that it’s not that bad.

The Granddaughter who was in the basement with the baby has her own apartment now and seems to be quite happy with it. I haven’t seen the daughter around in awhile. I heard she’s moved about 20 miles away and probably living in somebody else’s garage. I don’t know. Anyway, all’s been quiet here.

It’s been over a year since I wrote a blog. I haven’t been too busy but I sure am lazy! As age sets in I think about what to do with my collections. I worked a flea market last summer and there was lots of interest in the few cigarette cards I had put out for sale. One buyer met up with me later in the year and bought an album of American cards from me that consisted of numerous cigarette cards, Arbuckle Coffee Cards and some gum cards. As sad as it was for me to say farewell to those pieces of my collection, it’s just as well for me to sell them now than to leave them for someone else to do it when I’m either not here anymore or I become unable to do so later. I’ve basically been out of the card scene for awhile so the interest from old Sports Cards collectors that have changed and come over to the non-sports cards is new to me. I have read that during the pandemic unemployment times cards have been bought and sold at a much increased pace than before, so maybe this new interest is most recent. However, I did monitor eBay and haven’t noticed anything new during that time. Perhaps I didn’t monitor it close enough. Anyway, the time comes when we should consider passing our collections on to other custodians. After all, that is what we are, custodians. Collections are a preservation of history and heritage and all have their place somewhere and in some time.

Most of my collection does consist of British cigarette cards, they’re not considered worth as much as the American cards, something I heard a couple of dealers remark on at the flea market. But the vast issues of cigarette cards are world wide. The American cards only cover a few subjects in comparison. Asia had numerous issues and some most interesting stories in connection of the subjects. South American sets are hard to come by but there are numerous single cards that can be found. African cards, Australian, New Zealand, Malaysia, Cochin China, a number of European, pretty much any continent and country had issues of cigarette cards. It was in the interest of the tobacco companies to sell their cigarettes and the little pictures inserted in the packs provided an incentive to smoke and collect. I would venture as far as to claim that there were people who probably learned how to read or at least advance their reading skills from the biographies printed on the backs of the cards. Nearly every subject was covered in cigarette cards issued by tobacco companies and there was also much to learn from them as well, like Air Raid Precautions during the World Wars, First Aid, How to make something, complete instructions on how to make a wireless radio was set issued in Britain. Germany had a photography set that illustrated to the collector on the use of shadow and light to enhance black & white photos. If you insist on only collecting American cards, you are missing quite a lot.

The list of subjects is endless. Everything under the sun had been depicted on cigarette cards at one time.

Light houses have been a favorite of mine since childhood when I used to dream about living in one. This set of 50 Lighthouses is dated to 1910.

When was the last time you tried to cook a pigeon? There are 50 cards in this set titled “Cooking Subjects” dated 1889.

Postage stamps are another collection item. The Post Office entices collecting with all the pretty commemorative stamps in a display case. Many of us have a hard time using those stamps so they usually get stored in albums. With the Forever Stamps these collections never lose their usage with age. But if they don’t get used in a person’s lifetime, they’re often sold for less than their value at sales. I was told people buy them up and use them to pay the postage on packages, because even if they’re not Forever Stamps, they still have their face value.