In North Dakota: Cafe Life

By Gregory Jaynes

This from the Fargo Forum and Daily Republican, Tuesday evening, Dec. 9, 1913:

"The village of Havana is located in the southern part of Sargent County, one mile from the South Dakota line and 50 miles from the Minnesota on the Aberdeen branch of the Great Northern.

"Previous to 1887 the village was known as Weber.

"Since then the town has had a steady growth and now has three large general stores, one bank, high school, drugstore, hardware, harness and furniture stores, millinery store, meat market, two hotels, restaurant, two farm implement houses, photograph gallery, undertaker, opera house and lodge hall, telephone exchange, two poolrooms, barbershop, two livery barns, one auto livery, blacksmith and machine shop, newspaper, three elevators, lumberyard and three coal yards, feed mill, creamery and flour mill and two dray lines.

"There are churches of the Congregational, Catholic and Methodist denominations. The German Lutherans also hold services in the Methodist church.

"The village of Havana was incorporated in the spring of 1904 and now boasts of a population of about 450."

Well, things change. The last time anybody looked, they counted 148 heads in Havana. The three large general stores are gone, and so is the bank, the high school, the drugstore and practically everything else. The Catholics and Methodists no longer have a church, but the Congregationalists and the Lutherans have hung on. Two years ago the restaurant, the Havana Cafe, went belly-up. For a while there the farmers shifted to the Standard Oil station down by the railroad -- now the Burlington Northern rather than the Great -- for morning coffee, but it got so crowded you couldn't curse a cat without getting a hair in your mouth, and finally somebody had to put their foot down. A town is not a town without a cafe, the farmers decided. Further, they decided to open their own.

The Farmers' Inn, run by farm families, is in the black and riding high. "Hey, you don't know how miserable it was," Jack Brummond, chairman of the board of directors, was explaining the other day. Outside, the wind came off the prairie hard enough to knock you flat, and in the park at the foot of Main Street the Dr Pepper scoreboard by the girls' slow-pitch softball diamond was threatening to leave the state. "This is the social crux of our community. If we don't have this, we live in total segregation. The only other place we have to see people is church."

Just then a farmer came in and poured himself coffee. "Windy where you been?" a coffee sipper asked. "It took off my hat, and that's the last I seen it," the newcomer said.

"I didn't think a restaurant would go when it first started," Daryl Bergh said and then dug into his eggs. "They started in that old one, the Havana Cafe. The building was falling apart. There was nothing left of it. You had to < shim up the table to keep your coffee cup from sliding off."

"Our biggest day was our grand opening," said Murdean Gulsvig, the cook this day, along with his wife Doris. Opening day was Feb. 1, 1986. They served 134 people in their new $34,000 building. Last year they took in $51,000, about $11,000 of that a clear profit. Today they owe only about $5,000 on their mortgage. "We're a nonprofit organization," volunteered Walter Barbknecht, who owns a striking resemblance to Mortimer Snerd. "When we're making money and not owing money, it has to be spent in the community. The park needs some equipment. And we just voted $1,000 to a feller that had a heart-bypass operation."

The mayor, Orville Bergh, Daryl's father, came in and took no credit, saying, "They got all this organized while I was up in Milwaukee. Not bad for a little jerkwater town like this." Mayor for six years, he said he had been mayor for too long. "They complain about everything." He is paid $15 every time the town council meets. His Norwegian father was born in a sod shanty in 1883. His proudest bureaucratic achievement is a $6,000, 500-ft. concrete sidewalk that runs alongside Main Street, which is dirt. "That boy is mine too," said the mayor, pointing to another son, David, a trencherman about the size of a post office.

At his table, David Bergh was explaining, "A 90 mile-an-hour fastball takes .44 seconds to reach home plate."

"How do you figure?"

"Well, we're out talking one day how long it would take, so you've got to take 5,280 feet times 90 miles an hour, which is 475,200 feet in one hour, which is 3,600 seconds that you've got to divide by, which gives you 132 feet per second, but since it's about 55 feet from where the ball is released to the plate, you've got to divide again, and that gives you .44 seconds, assuming the ball drops 3 feet because of gravity."

"I see."

"You think that's something, think about this," David went on. "The federal budget is a trillion dollars. The day Christ was born, if you had a trillion dollars and you spent a million dollars a day, that money would run out about the second week in November 2704. I got the figure written down somewhere."

"Mercy."

About here Walter Barbknecht, seeing that a visitor's head was spinning, offered a tour of town. "Orville's real proud of this sidewalk," the tour began, then abruptly turned conspiratorially candid. "The restaurant inspector is giving us a bad time. They want us to make the doors to the restrooms bigger, for the handicapped. And shields over the lights. Tiddly things. They don't want fluorescent bulbs to break over the food. We did our own plumbing and wiring, just volunteers. We have a good plumber, but he doesn't have a license, so they're hacking on that. If this place ever goes under, it won't be from lack of business. It'll be from lack of peace and harmony.

"Then of course we've had a flap or two. The gouging, for one. Say your wife is cooking. It means you get to eat free. But we had 'em bringing the whole family in here for breakfast and dinner. Oh, we had a big flap over that one."

In less than a minute, plain-speaking Barbknecht ticked off all the dirty linen. Then he moved over to the positive side of the ledger. Havana, it turns out, is a town that just won't die. Farmers are in terrible straits, as everyone knows, but Havana's farmers keep on plugging. This week they were sowing barley and wheat. More important, every other ounce of energy was directed toward keeping Havana on its feet. They had formed a development corporation that had, among other things, brought in a grocery store by providing attractive incentives, like free space. "You want to open a small business, we'll help you get started," said Walter.

"We're just an old retired town," he went on, "but we do have some kids. I mean you got your Berghs at that big table back there in the cafe; their reproductive rate is quite something." Back in the restaurant, a no-nonsense 32-ft. by 56-ft. steel building, David Bergh was saying, "The only good Republican is a dead Republican."

Doris and Murdean Gulsvig were dishing out the special, Swiss steak -- $3.10, not including beverage. The Gulsvigs man the kitchen three or four days a month, as do the other volunteers. The cafe is open Monday through Saturday, serving breakfast and lunch only. When their labors are done, Murdean was saying of Doris, "she goes home exhausted and lays on the davenport, and maybe fixes me some soup and goes to sleep. I mean it's a lot of work."

Not that it isn't appreciated. People have been known to wash their own dishes. Most everyone makes change at the cash register, paying the bill unassisted, unobserved, as the cafe talk rolls on in a relaxed, little- village-stuck-in-time way:

"Hey, what kind of a bird can't fly?"

"A jailbird."

Walter Barbknecht bursts from his seat, saying, "I got to go tell Carlton the grocer that one."