What thief doesn’t get twitchy fingers when they come across golden bars...of butter that is. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, gangs of butter thieves robbed Minnesota and Iowa creameries and stole their transport vehicles. Creameries that provided butter for companies, such as Land O’ Lakes, had the leverage of the companies offering large rewards for catching the thieves.  The Cokato Enterprise reported in a January 19, 1928, article that “Land O’ Lakes Creameries, Inc has been instrumental in securing the conviction of three different gangs of butter thieves, all of whom are now serving time in the Stillwater  penitentiary.”

This is all history now but in the spring of 1947 we went farther back in history. Lois Bergman and I decided we should buy a car so we could get beyond the confines of Cokato when the weather was so nice. With a teaching salary of $280 per month we knew that the car could not be new or even recent, so we went to Harold and Rub Harkman for some suggestions. They told us of a bachelor living in town who was now too old to drive; he had a 1917 Model T Roadster that was in excellent shape. We went to meet Mr. Gust Flood and bought his car for fifty dollars. Gust had only used it to go back and forth to Stockholm to care for and harvest ginseng (a medicinal plant which he marketed in New York) which he raised on his farm in Stockholm.