Notebook Recollections
There is a certain amount of conceit necessary to record one’s life story! Let alone in three parts!! (you need room for all the!!!!)
I once asked Carl “Mr. Positive” Bentson (1962 to 2024), with his fascinating life and stories, if he had ever thought of writing an autobiography?
“I never owned an auto,” Carl answered.
There wasn’t an ounce of conceit even near Mr. Positive.
Community Reporter readers have been clamoring for some good dinosaur hunting tales(well, maybe one or two readers anyway) so,before we get back to the Free Clinic/Helping Hand stories, I have a pretty good true dinosaur hunting tale.
For 30 years, I kept an actual perfectly petrified three-foot-long T.Rex toe bone under my clinic office desk. My younger brother Mark (1950 to 1984) and I discovered it in the northeast Montana Badlands, after years of fossil hunting in our Highland Park Neighbourhood, eventually working up to the South Dakota Badlands.
It was “bone–a fide” by Dr. Bruce Eriksson, head paleontologist of the Minnesota Science Museum.
Flashback
In the late 1970s, Mark and I graduated from the amazing, somewhat easily discovered, fossil seashells and coral, lobster shell-like cephalopods and bug-like Trilobites we found in a recently bulldozed gray clay, new home construction site two blocks north of our Highland Park home (1357 S. Prior). And then extinct, dog-sized horses and huge rhinoceros in the South Dakota badlands just shy of Mount Rushmore.
The T.Rex bone was found on a trip to dinosaur country in the badlands of north eastern Montana in 1983. A year before we lost Mark in a horrible car wreck in Colorado .
Mark found a dino bone sticking only inches out of the side of a huge, clay butte. We dug out “a grotto“ around the bone. We could see one side of a three foot extremity. Then we covered it with newspaper followed by plaster to allow us to extract it from the cliff.
We were pretty sure we had hit pay dirt .
But then we had to wait until returning to Minnesota to finally prepare and preserve it in our basement dinosaur lab.After our final clean up, we brought it
to Dr. Bruce for the ID.
It was T.Rex!! A Middle toe. Dr Erickson said it was good enough to put in a glass case on a museum wall as he handed it back.
For the next 40 years, I kept the T-Rex bone under my clinic office desk. There were bragging rights for sure. But its primary use was to show it to 7-to-12 year-old kiddos before they got their vaccine shots. We didn’t need a rigorous scientific study, but it sure seemed a distraction from a needle in the arm or behind.
All right then ,let’s move millions of years forward from the Montana Badlands back to W. 7th St.
Last month’s “Reporter” established the early history of the Helping Hand HealthCenter . It had started next to Mancini’s in 1972, then moved across 7th to the Little Bohemian Café and Bakery in 1974 where I put out my shingle. We were there until 1978. Then the “Hand” moved back across 7th to the western end of Mancini’s.
Some cool stuff happened in there. Major expansion of staff and services, including dental and psychology. More and more patients. A Seriously successful businessman told me in a clinic exam room one day in 1981 that he had just had a 20 minute conversation in our waiting room with a guy who slept overnight in a tent.
Support and creativity was added by existing and new board members and community leaders. Jim Schiable, Sandy, Pappas and Neal Gosman, Dave Thune. John Yust. Father John Clay and Sister Alice of Saint Stan’s. Pastor Walt Wietzke of St Mark’s and super-media specialist and board member Andrea Marboe.
Clinic manager April Moore, lab director Sylvia Peruse and nurse Sharon Beatty were also on board.
New doctors and providers; Jim Barker, Dick Gordon, nurse practitioner Donna Gustafson, psychologist Dr. Norm Silverberg. Dentist Dr. Peter Frank.
The clinic was even featured by Dan Rather’s CBS “60 Minutes” for Helping Hand’s holistic, neighborhood-based care and the new concept of “medical self-care” promoted by Drs Keith Seihnert and Tom Ferguson.
We moved back across 7th to the western end of Mancini’s in 1984. We were literally a clinic in a nightclub. Good daytime clinic parking was a guarantee.
We only have 42 more years to cover.
We’ll do it.
Really.
Next month….
end
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