Episode 3 - The Wrecks

Dawn sits down with retired teacher Jim Heise, whose stories span decades of life in Lake City. With humor and vivid detail, he recalls a version of the town that feels both familiar and distant. But beneath the nostalgia, deeper questions begin to surface—about change, memory, and what gets preserved or lost over time. The episode hints at a broader story still unfolding, one that reaches beyond any single perspective of small-town life.

Transcript

Jim Heise 0:01

Every household has probably 50 short stories and at least one or two novels.

Dawn Mikkelson 0:07

This is becoming Lake City, and I'm Dawn Mikkelson. In 2022, I moved to my spouse's hometown of Lake City, Minnesota, a population 5,306. Jim's family has farmed outside of this town for over six generations. I, on the other hand, have spent most of my life in larger cities. Becoming Lake City was born of my desire to understand what it means to live in a small town through the stories of my neighbors. I met Mr. Heise at parent-teacher conferences. High school teachers station themselves at tables in neat rows across the gymnasium as parents, with a teenager in tow, learn how the school year is going. When we arrived, my spouse Jim eagerly rushed over to Mr. Heise's table. Our daughter didn't have Mr. Heise as a teacher, but he was one of Jim's favorite teachers. And this was the last year of teaching before retirement. Mr. Heise made history and literature fun for generations of students who went through Lincoln High School. So when I reached out to the community for recommendations on who to talk to for this podcast, Mr. Heise's name was at the top of the list. His storytelling and memories of Lake City are legendary.

Jim Heise 1:31

One time we got pulled over and it was a sheriff's deputy, and he knew us all, and he knew what we were doing. And so he said, "Don't even bullcrap me." We had to open the trunk, and you know, we had two cases of beer, and he said, "I'm confiscating this, and I don't want to see you guys rest of the night." And we know that when they got off their shifts, they just drank beer down at the . . . and sure enough, we played softball against them the next summer, and he's like, "Oh yeah, we we always drink that up."

Dawn Mikkelson 2:00

So about a year later, after Mr. Heise retired, he agreed to meet up with me at the Lake City Library and tell me some of those stories.

Jim Heise 2:08

At that time, either it was a myth or we truly believed it, or it was true, that the cops could not search your trunk unless they had probable cause. So we always felt that if we could get the beer in the back, we would be safe.

Dawn Mikkelson 2:25

Living on the edge.

Jim Heise 2:25

Well, it was the age of "Dazed and Confused", which is a very accurate film, by the way.

Dawn Mikkelson 2:31

Nice. I haven't seen that in years. I'll have to rewatch that. Mr. Heise's family had a farm that they sold when he was quite young.

Jim Heise 2:41

We got now . . . three, four generations buried from here to Goodhue. I mean, there's those roots that go back. There's just a couple of those uh Heise farm families left. Small acreages, they weren't huge. We moved into town in 1969. All through our elementary years. Every day was an adventure. Eight o'clock, we went out the back door. We grudgingly came in at lunch, we grudgingly came in at dinner, and we were outside until dark playing kick the can and hide and go seek. I brought in farm toys. I taught those kids how to farm and they taught me how to play sports. And it was just an extraordinary neighborhood.

Dawn Mikkelson 3:34

Lyon Avenue, also known as Highway 63, divides Lake City in half, the north side and the south side.

Jim Heise 3:41

Lyon Avenue was almost like the Berlin Wall. We were south side kids. It was almost tribal between the two groups, except for summer T-ball and also swimming lessons, which just for most of us, the fear of the cold, dirty water at Lake Pepin united us together as we struggled through the waves and whatever flotsome came down from St. Paul. It was a great time to be alive, and it was uh amazing friends, and I am friends with them all still today. I remember, you know, those steamy summer nights, and it's Booger and Lefty and me and Beef, and we're riding around on our spider bikes, and we're riding around, and Ritzenthal would have the marching band going. You know, and it's a small sleepy town. So when the marching band is marching around town, that's about your entertainment for that night. So we're all trailing around it. He would stop and you know it would be somebody's house, and they'd open the front porch door, and the whole band would file through the house and back out. We would just follow the band around like flies on a hog, and then one of us inevitably would say, "Hey, let's go up and see the wreck!" And we would bike up to Wicks DX gas station. And at that time, you would have these horrible wrecks, car wrecks, and they would pull them in there, and they were like museum exhibits. And people, you know, after church on Sunday, or maybe after Sunday dinner when everybody had a big dinner, "Well, let's go up and see the wrecks." And people would stop and you'd go up there, and I remember we would look inside, you know, we're fascinated, and there'd be shattered glass and there'd be dark stains on the carpet, blood, oil, you could smell the gas. I remember seeing tufts of hair, and you would just sit and "Oh man, yeah, I heard the car rolled like four times. They found him like 30 yards from it. Yeah, his neck was broke, yeah, his arm was hanging off." And eventually the wrecks would be hauled down to Hagedorn's, cut up and disappear, and it was a form of entertainment. I remember that night I went to bed and it was hot, muggy night, and it was raining, and I was just laying there tossing and tearing in bed with no sheets because it was so hot and there was no air conditioning, and lightning started pounding, thunder, and I had nightmares all night of me being in these wrecks, hurtling through the air, twirling through the air, and ending up at Wick's DX gas station.

Dawn Mikkelson 6:57

In Lake City, there are two public schools, the elementary school and the high school. So in seventh grade, your kiddo makes that big step into being a high school student. For a young Mr. Heise, that step included something of an initiation into young adulthood. A return to the farm.

Jim Heise 7:17

Like my brother before me, when I went into seventh grade that summer, I hired out as a hired man. So I lived out in the country on on farms and I lived there till school started.

Dawn Mikkelson 7:30

Beyond his "Dazed and Confused" run-ins with the law, in high school, young Mr. Heise played sports and fell in love with reading and history.

Jim Heise 7:38

I was a very good reader, and I read early. There's a famous line from "To Kill a Mockingbird" where Harper Lee's character, Scout, says, "I never loved reading. One doesn't love breathing." That's a quote that haunts me. When I was young, they kind of called it hyper back then. You know, being wired a little tight. And I suppose maybe I had a little of that. I don't know if I quite had ADHD, as they said today, but you know, back then it was like just buck up and shut up, you know? Uh or sit in the corner or put your nose in a circle on the chalkboard. So, anyway, what happened is I found out that I could calm myself down or I could stay focused if I read. So I always had a book with.

Dawn Mikkelson 8:26

After high school, he got his degree in history and moved to the East Coast.

Jim Heise 8:31

So then I lived, I call it my Jack Kerouac years. That's when I lived out east, and I was in the restaurant industry on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, and then we opened up a big power restaurant in Washington, D.C. And that's when I decided to come back. I got my teaching degree at Mankato State. So then I got hired in the summer '93 and started teaching, and I had your husband as a junior, and I think I had him as a senior too.

Dawn Mikkelson 9:00

The schools of a small town are often its social apex. This is where the community puts much of its energy and love, from football games to the all-school play, pursuits that often include the exact same kids.

Jim Heise 9:15

I love teaching. I really did, I really love teaching. You know, on a given day I could teach the Battle of Gettysburg or Parts of the New Deal or the beginning of the Cold War. I'd be teaching Hamlet, or we'd be looking at poetry by Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson. And then in the afternoon, I'd be, you know, maybe boarding a bus to play a baseball game at Cannon or, you know, Friday Night Lights coaching a football game. I mean, talk about four passions to be able to do that every day. That was certainly a gift.

Dawn Mikkelson 9:54

You can see the future of a community in its high school. For those who stay in their hometown or return as an adult, like Mr. Heise did, it is in the schools that you see how your community has changed over time.

Jim Heise 10:08

When I was going to high school here, half of our classroom would be farm kids, and half of the classroom would be city kids, where now you can have two or three classes where there's not a student whose family makes their living farming. Because, you know, the farms are huge now, and that that way of life is gone. Which has dramatically changed the town.

Dawn Mikkelson 10:36

Sure, every town changes, but the changes in Lake City's downtown reflect not only a shift from the small town farm economy, but also the economies of small towns across the country. When I moved to Lake City in 2022, the downtown was primarily focused on tourist shops, antique stores, and the marina, as well as a handful of bars and restaurants with very limited hours of operation. Businesses serving primarily locals include a car dealership, a pharmacy, a gas station, a jeweler, a nail shop, a liquor store, a bowling alley, an optometrist, a dentist, a chiropractor, a couple of banks and hair salons, and a grocery store, which locals still refer to by its previous name from over a decade ago.

Jim Heise 11:22

At one time, for example, we had two uh implement dealerships in town. Well, those dealerships are gone. We had two grocery stores. There was Super Value and there was Fairway. Because everybody shopped in town. There was a Ben Franklin and there was a Gates Variety. So there were two like variety stores. There was one, two, three, there were four hardware stores. And, you know, the town was only 3,800 people, but it could sustain all those businesses. I don't know how many gas stations there were. There were like seven or eight gas stations. You know, and then there were all kinds of cafes and there were more taverns. There were two clothing stores. There was Anthony's and there was Rose Clothing. There were two drug stores. All the pants I wore in high school and elementary school were Mavericks that I got from Harley Eggenberg down at Rose Clothing. The community was self-contained. But so you had all these stores and businesses, and like uh just before Christmas, starting December 1st, they would stay open Thursday, Friday, and Saturdays till 9 o'clock, and that was such a big thing. And the stores were packed with people buying their Christmas gifts here in Lake City.

Dawn Mikkelson 12:38

The Lake City of Mr. Heise's past is something of a time capsule. It was a place where lessons were learned riding your bike around town with your friends named Lefty and Beef, where families went to visit the wrecks and play amateur crime scene investigator, and where almost everything you needed was within a two-mile radius. Today, I drive through town trying to imagine where these two clothing stores would have been and the grocery stores. All while we're happily driving over an hour to shop at the larger cities of Rochester and Minneapolis. I wonder if the more diverse selection of clothing, food, and cars is worth the loss of local business.

Dawn Mikkelson 13:13

Do you think we have a responsibility to our hometown, i.e. the place we live?

Jim Heise 13:33

Oh, yes, absolutely. We have a responsibility of any of the hearths we come from. And your community is a hearth that birthed you in its own way. I know a lot of people did not have kind of this storybook Disn-ified perspective. I have, you know, uh, we've had like three or four African American families here, and uh there's there's two stories. One of them, Timmy D, Timmy Davis, uh, great kid. We were studying Huck Finn, and so I took Timmy D aside beforehand and I said, you know, Timmy D, Huck Finn has the N-word everywhere. And I said, if you're uncomfortable with this or awkward with this, I will make sure that we can work on something different. You can work um up in the library on something independent. And he looks at me, he got this big spine, and he's like, "Shit, coach. I was standing in line at the Dairy Queen, and the guy behind me called me [expletive] last Sunday."

Dawn Mikkelson 14:40

Wow.

Jim Heise 14:42

Then one of his cousins, she just stopped by to say thank you and goodbye at the end of the year. And I said, "Well, I'm so excited for you. Best of luck. I hope uh I see you again." And she goes, she laughs, she goes, "Well, that's kind of why I stopped," and she says, "I'm never coming back here." And I go, "Why?" And she goes, "Heisman, how many black families live in Lake City? I'm the only black kid in this school."

Dawn Mikkelson 15:07

And this opens a bigger question. What is our responsibility to those in our community whose identities, ethnicities, or beliefs are different from our hearths, as Mr. Heise refers to them. This is the question that has haunted me throughout the process of making Becoming Lake City. This season I focused my energy on folks whose experiences reflect my own. Be it Anne Tabat, a new resident who believes in the power of community through the liberal distribution of cookies.

Anne Tabat 15:37

I personally believe baking cookies for kids when they're in middle school does far more to prevent school shootings than almost anything else you can do.

Dawn Mikkelson 15:46

To Danielle Hage, Jim's high school classmate, who reinvented the way the community saw her while honoring her sister's legacy.

Danielle Hegge 15:55

My goal is to be open for the community, to provide a spot to thrift, to provide a spot to stop and feel like you're welcome.

Dawn Mikkelson 16:03

To Mr. Heise, Jim's high school history teacher, whose life illuminates the small town living for which movies are made.

Jim Heise 16:11

All through our elementary years, every day was an adventure.

Dawn Mikkelson 16:15

I've loved their stories and their perspectives, while becoming increasingly aware that these stories share just a thin sliver of what it is to become Lake City. There are stories like Timmy D and his cousin. There are five generations of German farmers, from which my spouse descended, who have somehow continued farming in spite of the national trend of family farms disappearing. There are the original people of this area, the Dakota. And there's the newest wave of immigrants from Latin America. In the next season, Becoming Lake City will explore what it means to be of this place. A place like many in this country, full of beauty, complexity, and the opportunity to understand one another just a little bit better. B

Dawn Mikkelson 17:04

ecoming Lake City is a production of Emergence Pictures with music by David Ross Wilson at Soundbarn Studios, Minnesota. Logo by Jer Lanska. Special thanks to Marianne Combs for her advice and encouragement. This podcast is made possible by the Voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.