The Stockholm Cafe, Me, Kid Cann & Stan La Count

by Emmett Smith

Here are some pictures, mostly from my nonage in St Paul and Minneapolis.  I rode with our mother in both kinds of the “Kid Cann” streetcars shown, mostly downtown to see “Santy Claus,” at Dayton’s, Power’s, Scheuneman’s department stores.  The streetcars were all done for by 1954, and the press marks through the Winter snow of their steel wheels on to the steel rails beneath (the polished tops before their complete vanishment out of my World just even with the tar or red pavers) struck me at three and five as something extraordinarily mysterious.  It was a track, parallel ones actually in the snow, the spoor (!) of the streetcars, something primevally urban and whiteman-like, as opposed to a family friend’s cabin on Lake Minnetonka, with mosquitoes and bogus “Indian” pots from Sears on the deck and that I did not

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The End Of The 1960s…And What Came After

by Bodwyn Wook

The following are some culls from various ongoing email threads.  In the first case, a friend recently linked to me a recording of the Irish Rovers, singing “Whiskey, You’re The Devil!”  I replied:
 
And as for all that whisky, well, that song carries me back to a lot of great good times on the old West Bank in 1969-70, with Red Nelson, Steve Bush, Dick Grinolds, Larry Glenn, Steve Egyhazi, John Smalley, Tim Mahoney, Vince Kachurik, and the bikers Chaindrive & Mongol…. 
 
It is just amazing that we lived to grow up! 
 
One time in the Triangle Bar in Minneapolis, in September of 1969, the MPD narc Wayne Billings got shitty about my fake New Zealand Army

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Trouble On The Farm

by Grampa Outhousespider

Seems to me that all this misunderstanding about national healthcare and getting our behinders OUT of Afghanistan and impeaching ALL of the bullshipping Republicans and Democrats in DC that we can catch, it is all just typicaller than hell of the farming life too.  It reminds me of the old Greater Iowa story about Trouble On The Farm….

An Algona farmer got in his pickup, drove to the neighbor’s and pulled up by the porch.  After a bit a boy about 9 opened the door.

“Is yer pa to home?” the farmer asked.

“No Sir, he ain’t,” the boy replied.  “He went to town to

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SO BEATS MY HEART FOR…FOO!

by Emmett Smith

Another artifact of the railway age now seldom thought about were the great Sunday newspapers.  Our mother in the 1930s got

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American Spirits

Voices From The Past:  Old New England Engineman Preserved Wook On A Trainman’s Holiday In The Far West With The Union Pacific

by Joseph Curwen

“‘Global Warming’ you say?  And the government be in on it too?  Well, goodness gracious, count me in, where do I sign up for mine?  What’s that…NOT to burn coal you say?  How’s that again, but just how ever in Tophet do you propose getting to get to

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Wrapped In Unending Dreams On A Long Road Home

by Emmett R Smith

This is the tombstone of some forebears who are buried in the Good Shepherd Cemetery of the Immanuel German Lutheran Church, in old Mankato, MN.  The picture was sent to me by cousin Kathy Brown, herself a Frohrip descendant of Anton and Wilhelmina Frohrip Schippel.  It is of the memorial of a great-great-grandfather, Anton, and a great-great-grandmother, Wilhelmina Frohrip Schippel.  They were emigrants one hundred-and-fifty years ago, from Saxony and Prussia in what would become that Germany that was to trouble the affairs of the late-modern age for seventy-five years, from the 1870s to 1945.  They could have stayed of course and

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American Spirits

Voices From The Past:   PRR Engineman Preserved Wook

by Joseph Curwen

“‘Global Warming’ you say?  And the government in on it too?  Well, goodness gracious, count me in, where do I sign up for mine?  What’s that…NOT to burn coal you say?  How’s that again, but just how ever in Tophet do you propose getting to get to the warm part without some fires…lots of fires?  Burning coal’s ‘bad’ you say?  Why no, it’s good, real good, I can tell you that alright, when you’re rolling westbound out of Crestline and making ninety miles per across Indiana.  Out west there where it’s flatter than

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The Way The World Was

by Emmett Smith

The reason steam locomotives appeal to so many people of our Baby Boom generation is that they bring to life again the child we all were once upon a time.  Steam locomotives more than maybe any other “adult” thing actually LOOK like fullsize toys.

http://www.steamlocomotive.com/

In fact they still do!  This Pennsylvania Railroad Q2 locomotive is so “fullsize” that it is just plain huge — over a million pounds! — but it also EQUALLY obviously is a couple of paint cans taped end-to-end and wired to a pair of roller skates, also end-to-end…and maybe a flashlight taped on top.  That’s the way the world was when I was a little boy, and steam locomotives were more than good for my imagination, anyway.

[Emmett R Smith     all text-rights reserved     4 June 2009]

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Who Cost The Most

by Emmett Smith

Who cost the most are those always who live

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“Grampa…?”

by Grampa

“Grampa, what were the Obama Years REALLY like?”

“Well, Sluggo, it was a really magical time when…

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