MY TRAIN TRIP: Celebrating the 12th Anniversary of The Intrepid Tourist

In January 1951, when I was six, I went with my family on a short train ride from Minneapolis where we lived, to St. Paul on the other side of the Mississippi River. When we got home I wrote a report of the trip, in neatly printed letters on lined paper. It is my first travel writing--the beginning of a long life of writing down my travel experiences. On this twelfth anniversary of The Intrepid Tourist I’d like to share that report, along with a chapter from my memoir telling about the trip from today’s perspective.

The windows of our third floor apartment at the Northeast Neighborhood House faced Bottineau Park, where, beyond the chain link fence on the far side of the park, the tall brick building of Gluek’s Brewery rose above a web of train tracks.  All day long, big black engines chugged along the tracks blowing their whistles and belching smoke as they shifted cars from one siding to the other and pulled boxcars and flatcars from the mills, factories, and breweries of Northeast Minneapolis out of the city.  [Gluek’s Brewery, at Marshall Street and 22^nd Avenue, was torn down in 1966.]

Les and Kay Scheaffer, Caroline and Steve, 1948, in front of NENH 

My brother Steve, barely tall enough to see over the windowsill, loved watching the trains.  He wanted to be an engineer when he grew up. For Christmas in 1950, when he was three, he got a wooden Skaneateles train set with tracks, cars, and switches.  His favorite book was the story of Tootle, about the baby train who goes to train school to learn skills such as how to pull the dining car without spilling the soup, and most importantly, to always stay on the tracks—even when playing in the meadow might be more fun. [Tootle, written by Gertrude Crampton and illustrated by Tibor Gergely in 1945, is part of Simon and Schuster's Little Golden Books series. As of 2001, it was the all-time third best-selling hardcover children's book in English. (Publisher’s Weekly, Dec 17, 2001)]

Milwaukee Road Train Depot, Minneapolis

On January 4, 1951, Steve and I and our parents took a long anticipated train trip to St. Paul—a short but thrilling ride across the Mississippi River to Minneapolis’ Twin City. Our brothers, Tom and Pete, ages one and two, were too young to appreciate the trip and stayed home with Gladys, our live-in babysitter. The weather outside was cold but clear as we drove from Northeast Minneapolis to the Milwaukee Station downtown. At the ticket window we purchased our tickets, which, according to my account, cost 14 cents each, presumably the pro-rated portion of the Minneapolis to Chicago fare. Our train was the Hiawatha, a sleek streamliner with bright orange and maroon cars, named after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem.

Hiawatha Train Engine

The train was waiting outside under the roof of the iron train shed. We boarded at the club car in the rear and walked the length of the train, passing through the parlor cars, private rooms, dining cars, until finally we reached our coach. We settled into our seats after pushing the buttons to tilt them just right and got ready for the noon departure. Then with a bump and shudder and clang along the tracks the train began to move out of the station. The tracks hugged the banks of the Mississippi underneath tall bluffs before crossing over a bridge to the St. Paul station. The total ride: 30 minutes.

By the time we got to St. Paul we were hungry so we hailed a taxi for a ride to a large department store for lunch in the dining room. Afterward, we shopped for souvenirs and gifts for Tom, Pete and Gladys before walking back to the station. In the station lobby, Steve and I were fascinated by a huge model train display where tiny engines circled on tracks through a miniature town.

Our trip back to Minneapolis was in one of the new Vista-Dome Zephyr cars of the Burlington train line. Its glass-topped seating area provided panoramic views of the passing scenery. We climbed the stairs and crowded into one of the double seats. The rest of the Vista-Dome was filled with a Scout troop--kids and their parents--also on a day excursion. I should have been excited about riding in the Vista-Dome, but according to my mother’s account of the trip, I asked to leave and go downstairs to the less crowded seats so I could work on my new embroidery set—my souvenir for the trip.

Steve’s souvenir was a miniature village set, complete with tiny train and tracks. In my mother’s account of the trip she says:  “He came home and asked for a piece of string. I wondered what for–and it was to hitch the wagon onto the bike–to be a station baggage truck. He filled the wagon high with baggage and was very happy reliving what he had seen.” Clearly Steve had absorbed every detail of our trip to St. Paul. He didn’t grow up to be a train engineer, although for a time he had a job as a bus driver. He has always been interested in vehicles and mechanical things and how they work.

Milwaukee Road Train Shed

The Milwaukee Road Railroad Depot has not had train service since 1971. While many of the surrounding neighborhood buildings have been torn down for urban redevelopment, including the Great Northern Station of the Burlington Line, the Depot has been preserved as a historic building and been converted to a hotel and restaurant; in winter it houses an ice skating rink. When I was growing up, the train stations in downtown Minneapolis were a transportation hub. Now, on my visits to Minneapolis, when I drive by the old Milwaukee Road Depot and look at the iron fretwork supporting the roof of the Train Shed, it brings back memories of my long ago train trip with my family to St. Paul. Someday I’ll have to go back in the winter and skate under the shed.

*****

From my mother’s account of the train trip:

            We returned to Minneapolis in the Vista-Dome Zephyr–which was really exciting for Stevie–Caroline enjoyed the outing in her own way. We happened to come back with a Scout Troop–about thirty kids and ten parents doing the same jaunt. I thought Caroline would be interested in them, but she wanted to leave the crowded Vista-Dome--where we were all in one seat–to a seat below where she could embroider. Her souvenir was an embroidery set–so much to Les’ disgust I showed her the backward outline stitch and she’s been busy at it every waking minute since. She does nice work too. (Kay’s letter to her mother, Jan 5, 1951)

London's Toynbee Hall: The First Settlement House

Toynbee Hall is in London's East End

In the summer and fall of 1998, during our three month stay in London, I paid a visit to Toynbee Hall, founded in 1884.  I wanted to get  more insight into the beginnings of the settlement house movement in England and also how it evolved--or in fact, didn't evolve--in the same way as it did in the United States.  The visit was inspired by the research I did for my book, Children of the Settlement Houses, and my own background growing up in a settlement house in Minneapolis.  (Until I was ten, my family lived at the Northeast Neighborhood House, now East Side Neighborhood Services, which my father directed.  Go to at my website  and to my Dec 14 Art and Books blog for more about my life growing up at Northeast Neighborhood House.)

Social reformers Samuel and Henrietta Barnett founded Toynbee Hall

Much of Toynbee Hall was bombed during WWII, but the main building that has the dining room and main meeting room remains almost unchanged.  I was surprised to find out that the main focus, even into the 1980's, was still residential--that college and post college students from Oxford and Cambridge would live in Toynbee Hall and the idea was that somehow this meeting of the classes in the neighborhood would result in the enlightening of the poor.  I somewhat overstate the case, because there are some ongoing programs for children and the elderly at Toynbee Hall, but it doesn't seem to have the vibrancy of U.S. settlements, which as far as I can tell have changed a lot in the last hundred years to meet the needs of the time.  Part of the stodginess of Toynbee Hall, I'm told, is because of the huge cutbacks in funding for social programs during the Thatcher years.  Many social service agencies in Britain have still not recovered.  In any case, it was fascinating for me to see the roots of the settlement house movement.  You might say that if it hadn't been for Toynbee Hall my parents might never have met and I wouldn't be here today.  (My parents were social workers and met in Chicago in the 1930's.  They lived and worked at Association House as they were training for their careers in settlement house work.)

Settlement houses still exist today, mostly in large cities, and are community centers offering a wide range of social services ranging from day care and food banks to sports and recreational programs, services for seniors, and more.  A famous early settlement house in the United States is Hull House, founded by Jane Addams in Chicago.  I visited Hull House, now a museum, earlier in the same summer that I visited Toynbee Hall.  The neighborhood that Hull House originally served was torn down for urban renewal, but the original building is maintained by the University of Illinois.  Settlements have evolved as the needs of the people in the neighborhoods around them have changed.  Some have closed their doors but many continue to serve the people in their surrounding communities. Sadly, the Jane Addams Hull Association, which had served people in Chicago for 122 years, closed its doors on January 27, 2012, a victim of the economic downturn and inability to fund its programs.

In 1884 when Toynbee Hall was founded, the neighborhood around the settlement, which is in London’s East End, was largely Jewish and eastern European , but now it is almost totally Bengali.  As you walk down the main shopping street you see shops filled with strange vegetables, exotic spices and beautiful saris.   The neighborhood is also famous for its restaurants and on the day of my visit I had a delicious and inexpensive curry lunch at one of them.