I Found a Nickel
Being outside there is always a chance of finding a treasure. Today, as I was walking, there was a bright nickel that caught my eye. I picked it up. My thought was to give it to Dennis as his piggy bank is always having hunger pains. The nickel didn’t get into the piggy bank. I swear the old adage of people taking off on verbalizing as if someone had put a nickel into them . . . happened to Dennis.
We had just finished with lunch and were not in any hurry to move past having a quiet time. I am not sure how it started or what the nickel had kicked in, Dennis started sharing with me the times that he was a substitute mail carrier here in St. James. He would take over from Howard Malmgren and other’s when some were on vacation or needed time off for family. It was at a time when there were blue mailboxes at various points around town. The bulk mail for that route was delivered to the blue boxes via an employee of the post office and his motorized cart. As the walking mail carrier’s bag became empty, their routes were walked in such a way they had keys to open the blue boxes and reload their bags and off they went using their show leather. Wow! I did not know this history of Dennis.
Dennis went right on to visit about when he was part time on the St. James Police Department in the evenings. I knew from some of the older people about town as they have shared memories of Dennis’s badge time. This Noon Dennis commented that it was often that when someone that had had too much to drink, the individual would be given a ride home in the squad car rather than a ticket given to them. It was up to that individual to figure out the next day as to how they would get their car home. Cops were much friendlier in days of old.
I had known that Dennis bar tended in the evening at the VFW here in town. When Dennis came home from Korea, he worked at Toro in Windom and apparently was always up for picking up extra income whenever the opportunity showed itself. Later on when Dennis became a full-time recruiter for the Minnesota National Guard, he was always on the go retaining many part-time jobs evenings and weekends.
Many businesses missed his after hours parttime career when Dennis and Howard Quick bought semis and began trucking poultry for Downs Foods and Campbell’s Soup in Worthington. They traveled to the states of Washington, Utah and all points east of there to bring back live poultry for processing. In the early days they went into Canada before passports were required. Oh the tales of this “Live Poultry Transportologist.”
I met Dennis in the very late 1980s over a cup of coffee in Detoy’s Family Restaurant here in St. James. My life has been anything but boring since. Yes . . . today the nickel in Dennis brought back memories to him, even those he had forgotten about. The stories began rolling out of him and I couldn’t help but love the gleam that it brought about in his 82-years-young brown eyes. Priceless. The long lunch break was a good thing and then Dennis was off working on his 50-year-old Cub Lo-Boy. He is taking off the old decals and I think there is a plan for some painting in the future. I will be on the look-out for more nickels.