Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley'

by Bill Steigerwald

  Mauston, a town of about 4,400 compared to 2,100 in 1960, was Steinbeck's first stop after leaving Chicago. He wrote a letter that night to his wife, saying, "I am camped in a cornfield behind a truckers service area and coffee shop." In "Charley" Steinbeck mentions Charley's delight in finding piles of manure that had been cleaned out of cattle trucks. And in the book Steinbeck says he walked to a valley and looked down at a sea of turkeys being raised for America's thanksgiving dinners.

  After hearing what Steinbeck said in his letter and weighing their local knowledge, Bob and Dona agreed the place he stopped had to be Ernie's Truck Stop. Ernie Schmoker and his wife Anne ran it. "On Sundays we'd go there from church for lunch and pie," Dona remembered. "Anne made the best pies – all homemade."

  The part about the turkeys didn’t make sense to the Roses, though. A turkey farm was in the area in 1960. And cattle trucks would occasionally have to be hosed out at one of Mauston's several truck stops. But Ernie's didn't have manure piles and provided no view of the turkey farm. It soon would become clear to me that Steinbeck, employing his dramatic license, created a composite truck stop based on Monday night in Mauston and his stop the next night near Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. It was another harmless rearrangement of reality.

  As the sun went down, and after the longhaired veteran leader of Shitz & Giggles sprinkled salt on the dance floor so the Roses and their gang could start their Saturday night fun-making, I drove over to the former site of Ernie's Truck Stop. It was about a mile south of town – where the busy and prosperous Brenner Tank Services operation was and where two-dozen tanker trucks were haphazardly parked. Behind Brenner's garages and offices was the stubble of a cornfield. It all fit. I took a few photos, drove through downtown Mauston on U.S. 12 and headed into the black wooded hills of central Wisconsin, where I was destined to find my fourth great American character in a long, long day.

  A Good American-German

  At first I flew right past the Target Bluff German Haus. But realizing it might be my last chance to eat in a while, I turned around. A crazy mixed-up place on U.S. 12, it was an Old World German restaurant and gift shop that also rented bicycles for the Omaha Bicycle Trail. The dining area was busy, dimly lighted and loud with the voices of an office party that was starting to break up.

  I sat down by myself near the buffet table, rubbed my eyes and ordered something embarrassing for someone with my last name in an old-style German supper club – a ham and cheese salad and coffee. While I waited, a large man in a long white dirty apron staggered out of the kitchen and sort of fell down by himself at a table. I studied him for a while. He was beat but still alert. “You must be the owner of this place,” I yelled over to him. He nodded. Before I could finish my next question, Rolf Kurandt waved me over with his big thick hand.

  For the next hour, as we ate dinner together, he told me war stories. Rolf was born in 1934 in a small German town east of Frankfurt. “I saw Hitler at age 8,” he said in a strong German accent. “I sat on the top of a stepladder as he drove by. I remember it vividly. It’s funny how some things stand out in my mind.”

  In the early 1940s Rolf’s father was drafted into the German Air Force. When the government seized his dad’s restaurant, Rolf and his mother and brother had to move out of the city to a village of 300. It may have saved his life. Though he could watch the sky light up from the Allied bombing attacks that pulverized and set Frankfurt afire, the war never touched his village. During the war Rolf lived in a nice three-story house. His mother rented a room to an elderly professor who taught Rolf and a friend how to make a phone from components dug out of the rubble of Frankfurt. Rolf and his friend spent a whole year building two phones. The other boy lived over the hill, so they needed phone cable, which only the army had.

  “One day,” Rolf said, “we saw German soldiers running wire into our village. We all knew the war was over. We found an empty spool, followed the soldiers and wound the phone wire on the spool. If we had been caught we would have been shot on the spot. Then we had to run the wire three-quarters of a mile through the oak trees. We got it into my friend’s house and into his bedroom without his parents finding out. We hooked it up and it worked! It soon became known we had the only phone in town other than the grocer.”

  In 1944, Rolf’s father, a food service officer, was captured by the Russians in Romania and listed as dead. “My mother told us, ‘Don’t worry. I know. I feel it in my heart. He will come home again.’ Others in town said he was gone.” When the war ended Rolf lucked out again. His village was occupied by U.S. forces, not the Soviet army. “I was scared shitless when the biggest black man stuck a rifle in my ribs and told me to go inside. I was 11.”

  The U.S. soldiers were allowed to loot and trash the village, Rolf said. They threw beautiful furniture out of windows and made a big bonfire in the town square. But he lucked out yet again. Because the U.S. commanding officer chose his mother’s house as his headquarters, its contents were spared, even the wine cellar.

  A year after the war ended, Rolf’s mother was still telling him his father was coming home. Everyone in the village thought she was nuts. “One day in the summer of 1946, my mother said, ‘Kids, get up. I had a dream. Dad’s coming home. I know it’s true. We have to make the house clean before dad comes home.’ All the neighbors got together and said, ‘Oh, my God. The poor woman has finally lost it. She has grieved so hard and so much.”

  The next day Rolf’s homemade illegal phone rang in his bedroom. It was not his friend, it was his friend’s mother. “She wanted to speak to my mother. She said, ‘Your husband will be at the bus stop in an hour.’” Rolf’s mother wasn’t crazy after all. His father had been released early from a Russian POW camp. Rolf’s father looked like a skeleton. The Russians worked POWs until they were almost dead and then sometimes released them to show how humane they were. “Talk about mental telepathy,” Rolf said. “I believe in it until this day. That strong bond between husband and wife. That signal connected them.” Nursed back to health, his father died in 1970 at 69.

  In the 1950s, after one year of high school in Germany, Rolf took an apprenticeship to be a chef and immigrated to Chicago. He was about to return to Germany when he met a woman from central Wisconsin. In 1959 he married Lynnette Rawhouser and the same week they opened the Target Bluff Café and Esso gas station on U.S. Highway 12 in Camp Douglas, in what was then the poorest part of Wisconsin. A year later, when Steinbeck drove by – or perhaps stopped for a coffee break or a tank of gas – Rolf’s café was selling only hamburgers, French fries and beer. He had no place for big trucks to park, but he pumped 27-cent-a-gallon gas, changed oil and cleaned windows for the heavy car traffic on U.S. 12. The coming of I-94 didn’t hurt him, because luckily the Camp Douglas exit was built at his doorstep.

  It took Rolf a while to drop the burgers and introduce real German food like Wiener Schnitzel and schweins haxen. His “Restaurant, Bicycle, Snack & Gift Shop” looked pretty busy and healthy to me. The bike rental business, which began when the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad line nearby was abandoned and turned into a bike trail, wasn’t doing as well as he’d like. But he had done all right for an immigrant who never learned to write English.

  As Rolf talked and I took notes, several regular customers came over to say hello on their way out. One guy handed him an old plaque written in German and asked him to translate it. Rolf was obviously well liked by locals and especially by his staff. They seemed to be taking special care of him. Maybe it was because his wife Lynnette had died a few months earlier. Rolf had lost 100 pounds and was down to 210, but at 76 he still looked as solid as one of his restaurant’s heavy wood doors. Before I left him, he guided me over to the pictures of his German village and his old house hanging on a wall. He had recently gone back to Germany to visit his parents’ graves. Much had changed in his village during almost 60 years. His house had been converted into a small community center. But the stolen phone wire he and his friend had run through the woods when he was
11 was still strung through the oak trees.

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Tuesday, Oct. 11, 1960 – near Detroit Lakes, Minnesota

  Steinbeck and Charley leave Mauston, Wisconsin, and drive northwest to Minnesota. They crawl slowly through the traffic of Minneapolis-St. Paul, cross the Mississippi River and pass through Sinclair Lewis’ hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota. After about 430 miles, they stop for the night at a truck stop Steinbeck says was “not far” from Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, on U.S. Highway 10 about 60 miles east of Fargo.

  A Digital Disaster

  I woke up in the dark on the wrong side of the car. I had good reason to be a little cranky. I had spent Saturday night in another Wal-Mart parking lot, this time in a place called Sparta. I was moving at the same pace Steinbeck did but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. I was still in fricking central Wisconsin. By 6 a.m. I was back on the road, blowing through thin ground fog in total darkness. No one else was on the narrow state highway or living beside it. Cruising uphill on smooth fresh blacktop at 60 or 70 mph, wondering how many deer there were in Wisconsin, I had nothing to look at but three bright lines as they tried to converge into a vanishing point on a horizon I couldn’t see and never reached.

  My spirits returned to their normal teen-age levels near Black River Falls, when it began getting light and U.S. 12 appeared again. I whizzed through the village of Merrillan and out into a rolling land of corn and Christmas trees on my way north to Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, my next scheduled stop on the Steinbeck Highway. A few minutes past a “Fight Terrorism, Vote Republican” sign, I pulled over to take a picture of an ancient grey horse with his nose hanging over a fence.

  Ooops. Major problem. Every photo I had taken the day before had disappeared from my digital camera. I had learned the tragic way that you have to format a new memory card before you use it or all your photos can dematerialize, which 134 of mine did. Devout Democrats Jim and Chicago Bob, the Good German Rolf, Bob the Ex-Trucker – their images and every shot of Mauston and Baraboo were lost to history. I had to turn around. I had to go back to Mauston, 90 miles south, and retake as many photos as I could.

  When I came back through Merrillan again, I stopped for Sunday breakfast at the Merrillan Café. It didn’t look like much from the road, but it was one of those priceless local treasures everyone says they don’t make anymore in America but they do. Kathleen Sullivan opened at 5 a.m., every day, year round. Farmers, hunters, ATV-ers and the stray trucker were her customer base in a town of 585 – another 266 if you counted nearby Humbird.

  When I walked into Sullivan’s bright and tidy eatery, her only customers were five burly, bordering-on-fat older farmers who were spread out over three booths. They were nursing coffees and arguing about football, moaning about taxes, discussing land prices and kidding each other the way only old friends can.

  "If you paid your fair share of taxes, they wouldn't need to borrow money for a new school." … "You're a better negotiator than I am." … "You're all right. You know all the angles."

  A guy they all knew – but obviously not a farmer – strolled in and sat down. He had seriously white long hair bunched at his shoulders. A white fu Manchu moustache. Tattoos on both biceps and forearms. A floppy hat. His black T-shirt – cut to the armpits – read "Born a genius. Slacker by choice." You would have thought the least-stereotypical guy in the Corn Belt had come in to discuss the latest news about Harley Davidson, Led Zeppelin or hemp deregulation, but he wanted to talk about something truly important – Wisconsin Badger football.

  In the time it took to eat my perfect breakfast of two eggs over medium, sausage and home fries, four young studs came in, plus two duck hunters in camo and a middle-aged couple in church clothes. The Merrillan Café was a two-woman operation, but Beverly the waitress handled the rush with ease. She ran from table to table taking orders, delivering plates, refilling coffee cups and praising her boss Kathleen’s work ethic. “She pulls off miracles on that grill every day. She does it all.”

  Before leaving I invaded Kathleen’s cramped kitchen and found the miracle worker in a do-rag, apron and Chicago Bears shirt. I explained myself, asked the usual nosy questions and took pictures. I had no fear Kathleen might do what she had every right to do – tell me to get the hell out of her kitchen or hit me with something sharp. She was too busy feeding Merrillan.

  ****

  I spent much of my Sunday backtracking to Devil’s Lake, Baraboo and Mauston. Using the interstate helped. Devil’s Lake was just as nuts with people as it had been Saturday, but the arts fair had disappeared without a trace from downtown Baraboo. It was already 5 p.m. by the time I returned to the German Haus to take a better photo of my old friend Rolf standing in his parking lot.

  In time I hit U.S. 10. It was still a major highway in Steinbeck’s day, stretching from Detroit to Seattle, but now it vanishes at Fargo. For several hours I squinted into the setting sun as I passed scores of large farms that have separated U.S. 10 towns like Strum and Durand and Plum City for a hundred years. Chasing a spectacular sun fall, I crossed the Mississippi River in the dark and checked in to a Super 8 motel in St. Paul, Minnesota. Only a 300-mile day, it seemed like 3,000.

  After two peaceful, lonely nights in a row in bright, vacant, secure Wal-Mart parking lots, I was terrified by all the human activity at the Super 8. Its commercial neighborhood had too many shadows. So did its jammed parking lot. I was afraid my RAV4 would be stolen or molested before I fell asleep. The motel’s younger customer base and a few shifty characters lurking outside also made me nervous. So did, paradoxically, the visit of a St. Paul Police Department cop. He sat in the parking lot for half an hour with his front door open, patiently questioning an unhappy young pregnant black woman. It turned out I had nothing to fear. My car was fine in the morning. I had been silly and paranoid. Spending too much time in the white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant-Republican sticks of Wisconsin will do that.

  Clean Republican Politics

  Tooling along U.S. 10 the next morning, I looked over and saw a steep grassy knoll covered from top to bottom with campaign signs aimed at the freeway traffic. You’d think I would have had my fill of partisan politics after my encounters in Greater Baraboo. But this was the congressional domain of Michele Bachmann, future failed presidential aspirant, bane of Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann, Tea Party heroine of Sean Hannity and the entire Fox News Network.

  Pulling off at the next exit, I found two men on the hill repairing campaign signs that had been knocked down the night before. Andy Anderson was attaching signs to the rebar that once held them up. As a newsman, I immediately suspected dirty politics. But Anderson, a veteran of election wars, had no doubt it was just the work of rowdy kids, not party operatives. "It's seldom the other party," he assured me. "Everyone respects each other's signs." Anderson was 68. He owned an auto-repair place nearby, cleverly named Andy's Service. Though he was a conservative Republican, he was re-assembling every fallen sign irrespective of political party "because it was the right thing to do.”

  No question about it, I was in the Corn Belt.

  The other Republican, Pat Walker, was on the scene for a less communitarian reason. Some of the signs lying flat on the grass had his name on them. "I'm the Blimp Man,' " he said, standing up his "Elect Pat Walker" for council sign, which had a blimp on it and the slogan “A Common Man With Common Sense.”

  A contractor, Walker was running for a council seat in Anoka, a city of 18,000 that was designated “The Halloween Capital of the World” by Congress in 1937 because it held one of the world’s first Halloween parades in 1920. It wasn't long before Walker introduced himself to Anderson. Walker quickly established that their ideological Venn diagrams overlapped very well. He declared to Anderson and the visiting out-of-town media (me) that, "I'm a conservative. I'm pro-life and pro-Second Amendment. I love my gun rights."

  True to his individualistic principles, Walker fixed his own team’s signs first. But then he too began setting up downed Democr
at signs. His spirit of bipartisan fair play made me want to cry or call Keith Olbermann. A long time Republican activist making his first try for office, Walker confidently predicted victory in three weeks, but he would be disappointed. When I asked him where a good local diner was, he made sure I would find Sparky's Cafe by leading me across town in his brown contractor’s truck. If I lived in Anoka, and if I believed in Republicans, and if I believed in voting, I'd have given Walker mine.

  In “Travels With Charley” Steinbeck said he had carefully planned his route through the Twin Cities so that he’d cross the Mississippi River three times. He also wanted to drive through Golden Valley, a city west of Minneapolis, which he said had drawn his attention with its name. Instead he got swept up in “a river of trucks.” He never saw the Twin Cities, the Mississippi or Golden Valley, where General Mills’ world headquarters were located.

  Steinbeck eventually found himself again on U.S. 10 north. In “Charley,” when he asks a waitress for directions to Sauk Centre, the hometown of Sinclair Lewis, she ridicules him for getting lost in a place she knew so well. Steinbeck paints the waitress and the cook in the restaurant to be seriously grammar-challenged, stupid and not nice or likable. Maybe Steinbeck had a natural knack for pissing off common people. Or he may have created or embellished the scene to generate some laughs or tension or to show off his dialogue skills. All I know is, his series of unpleasant encounters with everyday people resembled nothing like mine. After my unpleasant brush with the Village Creep of Sag Harbor, no one, repeat, no one, showed me anything but kindness and helpfulness.