Brainerd Minnesota History

My favorite historical places!  Click the My Favs button:

 

I love Gregory Park!!!

 

 

 

Here is a start.  I started this back in 2002, and will update as I remember more...if I do!  Read through it and see what I missed.  Names are not withheld to protect the innocent.  Where is Bruce Oxley?

 

My Brainerd:

 

Here you can tell YOUR story of how you came to be in Brainerd, and your experiences here, perhaps as a kid. Tell us about the changes you've seen, good or bad, or what you'd LIKE to see. If I get enough entries here, I may break it down into age categories, so we can detect a feeling based on different eras. Warning: I may get a bit carried away here.

 

FAUST, CARL (Brainerdite since 1955):

 

Alright, I've been trying REAL hard to not dig up my painful past after seeing that pedal car photo. I had a similar one but maybe it was a fire truck or station wagon, a dandy early 50's steel pedal car, when I was 4 in Des Moines, and the moving van was full, or so they say, and my "little red wagon" had to stay behind! Apparently, I cried until we got to the Minn. line. I must have seen a lake. Well, I'm now the maddest at what the thing might be worth today! I could have retired by now!!!

 

Apparently to console me, or just shut me up, in Brainerd they got me a Radio Flyer wagon. It was cool but had no pedals, but it did have cargo capacity.  This started my collecting career. For some reason, we kids in the neighborhood thought the tar drippings from the city street dept. hot tar boilers was valuable stuff, after cooling on the pavement. It didn't stick too well in sandy spots, and made the neatest big, flat and shiny cow pies you ever saw. Some barely fit in the wagon. They were brittle, and if one broke, it was worthless. The best ones were so shiny you could see your face in them. We collected WAGONS upon WAGONS of these, yet I have no clue where we stashed the stuff.  I think my little brother and Bruce Oxley were partners in crime on this caper.  Someday, I'll go on a WALKABOUT, IN SEARCH OF and see if I can find the tar pie pile.  Likely a thousand years from now the stash will be discovered, and they'll think some early flying saucer had a leaky oil pan. Or in 2 thousand years, they'll think our economy got so bad that this was our currency!

 

When we were REALLY little, we were restricted to just OUR block. The only house having no kids was the Kinder’s.  We never saw the Kinder’s; they must have gardened at night, I think they were elderly then, and all other houses had kids my age. Their garden was a thicket of raspberry bushes and asparagus, not regular stuff like carrots or peas. It was a great hiding spot, but prickly.  The neighborhood was a block full of 30 or so kids, and we did everything as a group. No one else from another block was invited to ours for some reason, except Andy MacArthur to the north, don't know why. We battled to keep George Ackerson out but he managed to weasel his way in now and then.  The 2 games we played were Russian Piglets, and Wolf. How they went I do not totally recall, but one was a “catch me if you can and tag you're it deal”. We played it every night until the Arnolds on the corner sounded their model T push-operated horn at 9:00.  They rang it just before the carillons on the courthouse went off.  ALL kids went home at 9, period.  There was some leeway for the older kids, like high schoolers, 10:00 I think, but for some reason, I don’t recall ever getting that old to get into the 10:00 group.  There may have been a weekend extension to 10:00, because I remember the guy on the news saying “it’s 10:00, do you know where your kids are?”  We had to be home by the time he was spouting this nonsense.  In Longfellow's backyard was the Jungle Gym, a big swing set, and a basketball court...John Longfellow was like 9' tall, and you could hear him dribbling the ball around the block until midnight. Dad used to say that you could tell it was John because the bounce sound between dribbles was longer than usual.  He would be out dribbling past 10:00…now why was he allowed to do that?  On the A-shaped part of the swing set ends, you could swing backwards until the inside of your knees caught, going around and around.  Only about 3 of us in the whole neighborhood could do this without falling off and breaking a neck.  We had to do this one when Mom was not around or she’d holler at us.  You could only make about 10 revolutions without throwing up.  Sue Kost wandered into our neighborhood once and broke her leg on the thing, and that kind of put the kybosh on the swingset for a time.  The whole neighborhood, kids that is, pretty much spent all of their non-Gregory Park time in the Longfellow’s backyard.  There we played Four Square, no spinning allowed, Duncan Tops…I had a dandy kit of tops with a full supply of spare nylon tips, YO-Yo’s and I suppose, basketball!  Later they put a garage back there and that was the end of that, or else we got older and moved on to more important things.  I’d have to make a timeline.  We about lived in Gregory Park, but were not allowed there after dark.  We pretty much just came home for feeding and sleeping.

 

When we were WAY older, our allowed territory back then was a short radius from our house on N. 5th. St., across from Gregory Park...my other home. We were stopped by the river on the west and north, and the football field and cemetery on the east. The only time I got to the top of cemetery hill was during the annual Soap Box Derby. We were too terrified of the nearby cemetery anyhow to go in that area alone, without a large crowd. To the south, Washington St. was it...absolute! So, on a typical Saturday, we'd load up the wagon in search of tar pies, and go to Van’s Café and look for money.  On the west side of the building on the sidewalk was a steel grate covering a window well.  We took the trick we saw in Scrooge McDuck comic books and some ABC gum on the end of a stick, and pick up any change lying on the bottom.  Then we’d go in and look over the candy, but I don’t recall buying any there; I suppose we were saving ourselves. Then we’d stop at the Midway Grocery (now/2002 Brainerd Insurance Agency area) for two-for-a-penny candy. Then east onto Little Farm Market where Don would always split a Popsicle in one of those neat splitter devices. No one else on the planet had one of these.  This way, we could get like a banana one and a root beer one, all for the price of a whole double! Lick-M-Aid was a favorite, too, as well as red shoestring licorice. Other favorites were the hard red hat licorice, Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy, that flat striped pull-taffy, and the 4 pack of wax pop bottles. Before the Popsicle would melt, we'd be at Turcotte’s to pick up some Fizzies for home. Having spent our entire quarter, we went to a little corner store on Cemetery Hill and about 10th St., (we called it "The Button Store") where we could exchange ordinary buttons for candy. I suppose by the time we got there, she figured these poor kids can't even afford candy. We always made the tour in that order, never in reverse, so I'm wondering if we dropped off the booty of tar pies at the hill going down to the pump house on 7th. I notice somebody removed that building, by the way. Maybe THEY got all the pies and sold them, and retired.

 

Apparently, we were easily led back then by this big kid, Randy Oxley. He talked me into a few things, like our excursion out onto the RR bridge (later, in another section, like BRIDGES, for the true story). Just east of the Depot (now Midtown Center) and by the tracks was the RR switchman's, or watchman's tower. This troll up there always fell asleep, so we'd help him out by pitching a few stones at the window. That's where we heard our first profanity. No wonder Mom didn't want us that far south. I don't remember ever crossing the tracks, since Mom had something etched in our minds on the subject. Maybe she thought we'd get run over by a train? At any rate, we had a lot of fun hanging around the depot and seeing the passengers get on and off. Trains are still cool! The other little thing I got talked into by that darn Randy was rooting in the junkyard across from the Moose, to the north, now a city street dept. storage lot, I think. Once I found an old German WW II helmet, signed Helmut Schmid or something. I figured that in order to be issued a helmet you had to be named Helmut. Randy somehow got that off me, likely as hush money or he'd tell. Say, come to think of it, that WAS across the tracks a few yards. Now I remember that Randy showed us how to go under the Washington St. and RR bridges, to avoid the "don't cross the tracks" rule. I'd better quit writing for a while, for fear of what might come back. Gosh, I hope Mom doesn't read this part, or I'm going to be in deep doo-doo. The remainder of our time was spent on the river's floodplain, building forts and exploring. I'm still exploring.

 

-CWF, about 2002, 7/31/2013; UPDATED: 9/25/2017

 

A few times a year the subject of Sliding Hills comes up on Andy Walsh's great Facebook page on Sharing History and Stories about Brainerd.  But long before that I was apparently suffering from snow withdrawal in May of 2012, and decided to jot down my memories of snow sliding.   We spent SO many hours outside in the snow back then.  I don't ever recall the cold being an issue.  Click the red button below to find a couple of lists, and LMK what you can add!  Many hills had different names over the many generations of users, I need to define them better.  This is serious stuff.

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2021 Outstanding Citizen of the Year Award; honors. 

 

I was blown away.  If you missed my dopey and lengthy talk, here it is below, and a bit more.  This is MY Brainerd, for sure!

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