Meet Me in Minburn

(Part 2)
Harry and Ruth Smith, my parents, lived nearby (407 Walnut), facing the depot. Mom had arrived from South Dakota via Minneapolis at this depot, having met my dad while he was scouting for the Chicago Cubs in her little town - she was the first to get a divorce in South Dakota, a secret my parents kept from everyone in town. Dad has stayed in the Minburn Hotel near the depot until their house was built, but neighbors and people arriving by train were amused when on the first day she arrived she built a huge bonfire in front of the house and burned all his junk and old clothes. Women admired this out-of-state woman’s independence.

On the right where the telephone pole is where livestock pens kept animals until they could be shipped. And just a few feet north was where vagrant bums would jump off freight cars, build a fire to cook something, and sleep overnight. My parents warned me never to go near the area and, of course, I had a few interesting discussions with bums who told me they had no other way of traveling for free. The 1929 Depression and 1937 recession stretched even to Minburn. The occasional hobo disliked bums and had a trade such as knife-sharpening - he'd ask at people's back doors to be paid in food for any chores he'd do, although a hobo often earned an extra two bits or more if you really felt sorry for the guy).

The photo certainly brings back memories to this Pinhooker who for six decades exchanged his birth town of 328 for one with a population of well over 8,000,000 (just counting the legal ones).

As folks sometimes observe, you can take the kid out of Iowa but you can't take Iowa out of the kid. Meredith Willson, whose "Music Man" with its 76 trombones was such a hit on Broadway, observed that Iowa's a good place to have come from! (Except he and I once joked that we emphasized the final preposition.)

Warren Allen Smith
wasm@mac.com
On the Web: wasm.us