A man, from our housing church, approached us a few days ago and asked if he could give us a tour of Minneapolis and St. Paul. When we found out this man has lived in St. Paul for seventy-two years, we knew that we were in for a treat. We spent an entire afternoon driving and walking, learning about the rich history of the Twin Cities, all the while listening to this man’s personal stories. Some were about how he has left his own fingerprints in the city because he, his father, and grandfather helped build the city—his father built bridges that connected the twin cities, and his grandfather was a welder who worked on dome of the St. Paul Cathedral. Others were about how he met his wife, and yet others were about his junior high days when he and his friends would hop onto moving trains and ride across the river from St. Paul to Minneapolis. We saw the typical sites—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s house, the governor’s mansion, old civil war armories, the abandoned Ford Factory. But the thing that struck my team the most was how his personal stories were so entangled with the history of the city itself. We not only got a very unique tour of the cities, but we were invited—if only for a second—into this mans past and able to relive memories with him. At the end of the day, he took us out for ice cream. We could not have asked for a better welcome to our summer home.
Paul Cook
St. Paul Site Director
YouthWorks MidStates Region 