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November 2003
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ZipUSA: 58102
By David Beers
Tami Smith has already made history. She's the first woman ever to head up the annual Kiwanis Club Pancake Karnival in Fargo, North Dakota. Now she's hoping the 45th Karnival will break all records. To do so would mean feeding breakfast to 11,000 people on a single Saturday in February, a feat approachable only if Smith's dozens of volunteers flip, fry, serve, and swipe clean with crack precision.
The charity event is such a Fargo tradition that it's a coveted civic honor to be anointed a pancake flipper. (When one Karnival stalwart died, his wife requested that pancakes be flipped at his funeral. And so they were.)
Smith and her team attend to the final details at the Fargo Civic Center the day before the Karnival. Ten thousand cartons of milk. Check. Twelve thousand plastic bottles of syrup. Check. Griddle number two, a round one that rotates, is down, but Dave Duff, product manager for a local tractor company, is sure he can fix the broken bearing. Jerry Hartford, a mechanical engineer, unfolds his new blueprint for efficiently routing long lines of the hungry.
Eleven thousand cartons of orange juice. Check.
Seven years ago Smith, who is 31 and sells promotional products, was dismayed to learn her employer was transferring her to Fargo. "I told them if they didn't move me again in six months, I'd quit." She flashes a smile, resting busy hands for a moment on her fulsomely pregnant stomach. "I soon found myself loving it here."
It is no small thing to profess one's love of Fargo in the dead of winter. Even in November there are days when it is colder here than at the North Pole, days when snow might not fall but prairie winds whip up snow already on the ground (and a fair amount of dirt) to cause a blinding horizontal blizzard.
If you saw the movie Fargo, you remember the impossibly flat whiteness. But what you don't remember is Fargo itself, for not a frame was shot here. And so you may not know that Fargo is a city of 91,000 people with another 33,000 just across the Red River in Moorhead, Minnesota. Or that freight trains rumble and moan through the low-slung downtown day and night. Or that within one zip code, 58102, there is a medical center that broadcasts robotic surgeries, a historic Broadway being restored to former glory, and a library where young refugees from Bosnia, Sudan, and Somalia crowd around computer screens, catching up on news from home.
What Fargo did get right is the friendly tenacity of Fargoans, says Kristin Rudrüd, an actress who played the kidnapped wife in the film and who lives here with her ten-year-old daughter. "That spirit of pressing on, one foot in front of the other, with a good heart," is how Fargoans get through their winters, she says. "People seem to obey the Scandinavian concept of janteloven. It means, basically,'Don't show off.'"
When Fargo captivated moviegoers with its "Ya! You betcha!" heartland stereotypes in 1996, Fargo responded with an ironic wink. Residents wore their goofiest ear-flapped caps for an Academy Awards gala held downtown at the Fargo Theatre. The national news media arrived to get in on the joke. But Margie Bailly, who runs the 1926 art deco theater, had the last laugh. Drawing all that attention to her faded gem of a movie palace attracted more funding to restore it.
Weeks later, as a particularly nasty winter melted into a flood, the news media was back. With friendly tenacity and no showing off, Fargoans filled and set 3.5 million sandbags to defy the swollen Red River. Dennis Walaker, the bear-size director of Fargo Public Works, emerged as a local hero.
Fargoans do not coddle their heroes. When 80-year-old Ruth Urang catches sight of Walaker on the street, she lets him have it: "Tell your road crews to stop tossing these economy-size hunks of ice on my walk." Only after Walaker promises, and is out of earshot, does Urang say, "He saved the city. If it weren't for him, we'd all be nine feet under."
Urang, who has just returned from a friend's funeral, is attacking the snow in front of her crisply modest home with a fresh yellow-bristled broom. She wears a light coat and skirt. Her shins are bared to the 20-below windchill.
No, you don't let a little threat of frostbite cramp your style in Fargo. So on an average way-below-zero morning, you may spy Ronald Davenport cycling to his bank job, his face mask collecting a crust of ice crystals. At noon bundled-up Matt Halverson casually barbecues bratwurst outside Metro Drug at Second and Broadway. After dinner Hannah Berg, 7, braves the icy wind to arrive at Horace Mann Elementary School's outdoor rink. The other kids, all older, blindfold her so she can kneel on the ice and sort their hockey sticks to decide teams for a pickup game. And in the coldest late hours, two nearly naked souls stand on a fire escape, steam billowing off them. They have just emerged from the sauna at the Spirit Room gallery and yoga studio. They place blocks of wood under their feet to keep from sticking to the freezing metal.
On the morning of the Pancake Karnival, the griddle action is intense. "My eyelashes are melted together," says LeAnn Koehler, a first-time flipper. "Next time I won't wear mascara." Two griddles down Alex Sahr shares the wisdom of his 85 years. "When it gets dry around the edges, flip it. But don't flip it too high."
Right. Might be a violation of janteloven.
Tami Smith, wearing a headset to command her troops, takes a cell phone call from a fellow Kiwanian lying on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean. "The sausage fryer keeps blowing fuses," she tells him. "Otherwise, we're doing pretty good."
More janteloven, actually. Tami and her Karnival crew will break the record they care about most, raising more than $30,000 for charity, their highest amount ever, while serving a near record 10,737 attendees.
Out there among the breakfasting throng bobs a lonely Mohawk haircut of blue and yellow spikes. It belongs to Jake Boucher, 15, who, having downed his last flapjack, is eager to leave this Karnival for another carnival.
That would be the city's first Winter Carnival, featuring punk rock and homegrown avant-garde. Eighteen bands play for no pay at the Fargo Theatre. At one point local drag queens appear on stage to lip-synch tunes by Cher and other divas.
And just after midnight, at show's end, the mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ rises from its pit. The man at the four banks of keys is the furthest thing from the shrieking headbangers who just preceded him onstage. But silver-haired Dave Knudtson, employed here at the theater for more than a quarter century, pumps forth a melody from his youth, "Mister Sandman," that soothes and pleases the weary teenagers clustered around.
Statistics show North Dakota is having a difficult time keeping its young people in the state. But tonight, in Fargo at least, no one's in a hurry to leave the party.
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