The city used to be a popular haven for the well-to-do who would travel twenty miles by train from St. Paul to vacation on the scenic lake that gave it its name. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about it; James J. Hill stayed there, and so did Pretty Boy Floyd and Ma Barker. Eventually the rich went elsewhere. Apparently they didn’t care to rub shoulders with the many middle-class citizens who moved to White Bear Lake once the roads improved and car ownership became common. To reach it, we made our way down to Sandstone and crossed I-35 again, this time going from east to west. From there I drove south. Skarda wondered why we didn’t take 35. I preferred to drive the succession of county roads that followed the original route of U.S. Highway 61, the legendary roadway that was made more or less obsolete between Duluth and St. Paul when I-35 was built. It was so much classier, although I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I told him it was safer. “The Minnesota Highway Patrol might be monitoring the traffic on 35,”
