Otters, Organs and a Bandshell off Main Street

I spent several hours in Fergus Falls on Saturday with my mom, doing research for a travel piece I’m writing for the Star Tribune.  I hadn’t been to Fergus since my junior high basketball team days, and all I saw of the town then was the inside of a gym.

(I don’t remember the outcome of those games between the Alexandria Cardinals and the Fergus Falls Otters.  Neither team mascot is particularly fierce-sounding, although I suppose any mascot can be imposing when it towers over you.)

We could have used Otto the Otter’s height on my junior high basketball team.

One stop on our Saturday tour was the renovated Fergus Theater, which opened in 1921 as the Orpheum Theatre.  Formerly a place for vaudeville productions, it’s now the location of A Center for the Arts, a nonprofit organization that sponsors a variety of year-round theater, music, dance, film and literary events by local and professional artists.

The two people on duty at the box office kindly let us look around while they readied the house for an afternoon show.  We saw the stage, but we weren’t able to see the Mighty WurliTzer Theatre Pipe Organ that’s stored underneath the stage.  I’d like to go back sometime and see it dramatically rise up onto the stage for a performance.  My great-grandmother, Islea Graham Riggs, played an organ for silent movies at the Paramount Theater in St. Cloud, which also was built in 1921.

The next day, on my way home to Northfield from Alexandria, I made a brief stop in the town of Sauk Centre, also known as the hometown of author Sinclair Lewis.  My dad often plays gigs in Sauk Centre and has told me about the bandshell there.  It’s in Sinclair Lewis Park on the southern edge of Sauk Lake.

It was a windy, misty day, and the bandshell looked lonely.  The only music I heard was the call of a loon out on the lake.  I’m sure the bandshell takes on a much more cheerful atmosphere in the summer, with the addition of some warm brass notes, leafy trees, green grass and an appreciative audience.

The bandshell was constructed four years after my great-grandfather, G. Oliver Riggs, organized a 40-piece boys’ band in Sauk Centre.  G. Oliver didn’t stay on to direct the band; he was working for the instrument manufacturing company C. G. Conn, organizing juvenile bands in the Upper Midwest.  I imagine some of the Sauk Centre boys who joined the new band in March 1927 went on to play their shiny Conn instruments in the new bandshell.

An article from the March 31, 1927 Sauk Centre Herald

I don’t remember ever going to Sauk Centre for a junior high school basketball game, although I think I may have been there once for a golf tournament.  I couldn’t recall what the town’s high school mascot is, so I looked it up: it’s The Mainstreeters.  I also learned that the Mainstreeters recently placed third at the 2011 Class 2A state girls basketball tournament.

Clearly, the athletes are impressive.  But I’m still not sure what a statue of a Mainstreeter would look like.  And how would it do in a match-up with Otto the Otter from Fergus Falls?

That’s one of the things I enjoy about travel – it answers some questions, and raises new ones.