As I’ve likely said before in this space, one of the things I find fascinating about music it is its connection with memory: Some tunes, even the barest snippet, pull listeners back to a certain place, sometimes to a specific moment at that place.
Sometimes that place was important, sometimes the moment was. And sometimes, nothing about either seems significant at all. It’s just a musically triggered memory. One of those popped up the other day when iTunes offered me Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets” as I played a tabletop baseball game.
About six blocks away from our place here on St. Cloud’s North Side, there sits a strip mall called Centennial Plaza. It went up in, oh, 1960 or so, and I think it was the second strip mall in the city. Just north of it lies a residential development called the “Centennial Addition,” and I realized not long ago that the development and the ensuing shopping center were planned in the late 1950s and named for the 1958 centennial of the State of Minnesota. I’d never thought about that; it’s odd how something so obvious can be overlooked for more than sixty years.
Centennial Plaza’s main tenant when it opened was a variety store called Grants, which sold the same sort of stuff as did the other dime stores of the day like Woolworth’s and S.S. Kresge. We didn’t shop there often, but when we did, I happily tagged along; the same old stuff seemed somehow different in a different store. In addition, a trip to Grants felt like an adventure: Centennial Plaza is on, as I said, the north side of the city, which was for me in the early 1960s a distant and unexplored territory. (An online mapping site tells me that the drive from my childhood home on Kilian Boulevard to Centennial Plaza is 2.59 miles; it seemed much further than that in the early 1960s.)
Along with Grants, one of the early tenants at Centennial Plaza was a tavern and restaurant that specialized in basic German food. In St. Cloud and the surrounding area, folks of German descent outnumbered any other ethnic group during the years I was growing up and still may do so. So the owners of the Bratwurst Haus were playing to a good-sized customer base, offering a multitude of sausages with sauerkraut and hot German potato salad, all washed down with beer. There were likely other dishes on the menu, but I don’t recall. The few times we went there, we ate bratwurst and kraut.
The Bratwurst Haus is long gone. I’m not sure when it closed (sometime in the 1980s, I think), but in its place is a generic sports bar that we’ve visited once in the nearly five years we’ve lived nearby. (We weren’t impressed.) One of the last times I went to the Bratwurst Haus was in the summer of 1974, when my mom and I had lunch there with my sister, who was going to graduate school at St. Cloud State. I don’t recall what we ate – sausages and kraut and beer, most likely – but I do remember that another patron kept feeding the jukebox and playing “Bennie and the Jets.”
Now, that’s not anywhere near my favorite Elton John tune. If I were
pressed, I’d nominate “Levon” and “Tiny Dancer” from among the hits, along with
the album track “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters.” But to this day, it’s among the
most memorable: From the first fade-in of the applause and the chopping piano
chords, “Bennie and the Jets” puts me face to face with bratwurst and beer. I
might have wanted a record I like better, but still, bratwurst and beer isn’t a
bad place to be.
– whiteray
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