(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Coming up on the next "Off 90," (upbeat music) we pay a visit to Jake's Pizza in Albert Lea.

(upbeat music) Take a trip to Hollandale to learn about the town's fascinating history, (upbeat music) and check out a rummage sale that assists the less fortunate.

(upbeat music) It's all just ahead on the next "Off 90."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) ♪ Going to take you home early ♪ ♪ And I'll tell you what we're going to do ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ We're gonna call Jake's Pizza ♪ ♪ And order one for me and you ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ Tell them what you like ♪ ♪ They'll make it any way you want them to ♪ - I'm Bill Anderson.

I'm one of the co-owners here at Jake's Pizza along with Wyath Anderson and Jim Johnson.

We've been, let's see, I think we bought Jake's in 2006.

So we've been here for over 20 years now.

We bought the business from the previous owners, which was my sister and my father who had owned it 20 years prior to that.

Jake's pizza started in 1965 by Ernie and Rose Jacobson, and that's how Jake's Pizza became.

His name was Ernie Jacobson and his kids all sat down and came up with the name Jake's.

I think Ernie and Rose ran Jake's for about maybe 10 years.

And then the gentleman by the name of Butch Donovan bought it.

First time I ever became aware of Jake's, I was probably 11 or 12 years old and it'd been here certainly longer than I, you know, since before I was born.

But two of my sisters worked here while they were going to high school.

Our high school was down the street and we could leave back in the day back when you could leave for lunch and this place would fill up, you know, all three lunch sections.

And it was just full 'cause we do a slice at lunch and we used to get a lot of high school kids here every day.

This would be a hangout place after Friday night football games or just during the week.

There used to be a game room in here when I was in high school.

This was my first job, I was a delivery driver for Butch back in 1983.

(upbeat music) I'd been in the private sector for probably 15 years and my sister was gonna start a family.

You know owning your own restaurant certainly it takes a lot of your time.

And she's like, "Yeah, it's time to move on.

I want to, you know, start this next phase of my life."

So me and my partner just kind of bought it as a investment opportunity.

My kids were young when I bought it and just made the decision to make this my career and best move I ever made.

It's just kinda worked out.

And now my son is a partner with me too.

So the evolution kind of continues.

We're a huge supporter of school sports.

We work with people in our community, the fire department.

Every fall, you know, the Fire Prevention week, awareness week with all the grade schools, we provide pizza to every fifth grade school in our community.

So our National Guard troops in town, free lunch every time they come in.

It's just, we owe them a lot and to give them a free lunch once in a while is the least we can do.

And we appreciate those guys.

So we provide pizzas for all the sports, basketball, football, hockey.

We give those people a great price and they sell them for their booster clubs.

And so we've always felt like, you know, without the community, we're really not much.

So from a quality standpoint, I think we are a step above, you know, just we're very meticulous about the things that we put in the pizza and we want to keep that same consistency.

We still use the same mozzarella cheese that they used back in 1965.

Comes out of a small dairy in Grantsburg, Wisconsin.

We've never changed it.

The spices that we put in our sauce imported from Italy, a lot of those things are, that's never changed this whole time, nor would we ever change it.

Nothing's frozen.

We make our dough fresh daily, every day.

All of our meat products are bought from a local locker.

And then just the people that make it, I mean, I've always told that my employees, you know, make it like you're gonna eat it.

It doesn't matter, just make it like you're going to eat it.

And then when you come in here, you know, we've had people that have moved away, you know, came here for pizza when they were in high school back in the mid '70s, early '70s, and they come in and they could have been gone for 20 years and it's still that connection, you know, the community connection that we have from a small town, small business.

And it's super cool to see that when they come in like, "Oh, I used to work here in 1975, you know, I used to bake."

So I think that that's kind of what kind of separates us from the bigger corporate chain pizzas is that we do have that family connection, community connection here.

That is, you can't create it, you know, it needs to be built over time.

Our traditional is our thin and crispy pizza that we've, you know, started back in the '60s and the crust is what really makes our pizza kind of unique versus like a lot of the corporation pizzas, it's a thicker crust with a rolled edge.

Ours is just thin and crispy but we offer a thick crust pizza as well.

And that's what we do for our lunch slices.

It just makes it a lot easier for that quick serve purpose.

You know, people don't wanna waste a lot of time waiting in line, you know, during their half hour or 45 minute lunch break.

And, you know, our goal here is to get them in and keep the line moving and get them out here with a great piece of pizza and a quick lunch and they're back onto their day.

So my favorite one is probably pretty simple, it's just the pepperoni sausage.

There's one that's named after my dad, "A Bud Special," which is the all meat one.

My dad was a all meat guy and that's probably one of our biggest sellers.

We do have the Porky Pig.

It's all pork products.

It's kind of unique along with mozzarella and cheddar.

There's only so many specials you can do.

We have a bunch that have been on our menu, you know, stood the test of time.

But we'll make anything, any way that they want it.

You know, if you come in with something that's totally we've never made before, we'll make it for you.

♪ Just call 373-7350 ♪ ♪ 373-7350 ♪ ♪ 373-7350 ♪ ♪ Jake's Pizza ♪ - I think this jingle for Jake's Pizza was done by our local radio station and he brought in a small band.

I think he played with a band on the weekends back in the days when "The Eagles" and "The Moose Clubs" would all have bands.

And he was a part of that group.

His name was Darryl Amundson.

Used to call him Uncle Darryl.

He was on I95 here for years.

I mean, I remember him from back in high school.

And it's just kind of carried on forever.

I mean, that's been over 50 years since that jingle's been out there.

And like I said, when people come back that haven't been home in a long, long time, they'll still come up here and like, "I didn't have to even look up the number 'cause I still remember that in my head from that commercial, from that radio commercial."

But Uncle Darryl did, so it still resonates with those people 50 years later, it's still in their head and genius.

And people still comment on that all the time about that number.

- [Interviewer] Can you sing it?

- Well, I could sing it, but I'm a terrible singer.

(laughs) ♪ 373-7350 ♪ ♪ 373-7350 ♪ ♪ Jake Pizza ♪ (upbeat music) (calming music) - Hollandale is more than just the town.

It's also the 16,000 acres of farmland that surround the town.

This was a swamp or wetland area that was available to particularly the Ho-Chunk tribe for ricing.

So this was an area that was part of a huge, huge wetlands that was characterized by the usual things that wetlands were characterized by.

It's George Payne who really had the vision for turning this into a productive colony.

But he was proceeded with that vision with the investment of P.D.

McMillan from Minneapolis who came down, purchased an enormous chunk of this land and made it kind of his home away from home.

Built a home on what is now Hickory Island and brought people down here, came down with his family, et cetera, and had the initial vision for actually draining the land and creating farmland out of this area.

It was very controversial at the time.

Of course you can follow the conversation in the various newspapers about someone from the Twin Cities actually coming and doing that.

But he was successful and George Payne from Omaha then saw the potential after that first drainage project had gone through.

- McMillan started in the late 1800s trying to drain as much as he could.

So they did as much as drain Rice Lake.

Rice Lake was about three to four feet deep, and that did drain down.

And so there was a lot of grass land, 6-7,000 acres that he used for that.

He raised Herford cattle, prestige situation there.

He tried to get Freeborn County to sell bonds so that they could put a ditch in here.

And he had a hard time doing that.

So there was a couple of lawyers, attorneys from Albert Lea that worked with the legislature, changed the laws of the state.

So in 1901, they got permission to do just that, dig a ditch, and didn't get started till '06.

And so he did get that ditch dug then.

That opened up a lot of the swamp, but not all of it.

Now there in the Turtle Creek watershed, there's 98,000 acres in the watershed that all of it goes down through Austin to the Red Cedar River and then down into the Mississippi.

It is so shallow that from one point to the other 20 miles, there's only one 10th of one foot per hundred foot of fall so shallow.

So it's always been very difficult to drain.

In 1918 when Payne acquired the land McMillan bought it for $2, Payne bought it for $15 an acre, and then he got permission to dig that ditch deeper and deeper.

So he went to Ohio and he bought a huge Buckeye trenching machine.

It was like 65-foot wide and it cut seven foot deep, 12-foot wide drainage ditch.

And it had a house on it, generator, and there were men that lived on it and they operated it 24 hours a day.

And they run JD4, Judicial Ditch 4, right up through Hollandale Maple Island and through here and now towards Geneva Lake to drain it.

(joyful music) - My grandfather, Peter Louters, immigrated from the Netherlands and was the first person to purchase a piece of land.

He did not receive title to it until he had proved that he was settling it by creating $2,000 worth of improvements on the land itself, which basically meant a house and a couple of outbuildings for livestock and so forth.

So basically George Payne realized that Dutch farmers were very, very skilled at farming this type of land.

My grandfather had farmed this kind of land in the Netherlands before he came.

And so he pitched the farmland part of the colony specifically to areas of the country that were thick with Dutch people and experience, which is why so many of the farmers in the colony of Hollandale are Dutch, or have Dutch ancestry.

That does not apply to the town itself.

The town itself was a very mixed population.

In fact, most of the businesses were not initially owned by Dutch people at all.

They were owned by various people coming in for opportunity, for commercial opportunity.

And of course, when the railroad came in in 1926, the smallest union station in the United States and the last one to be built with the Rock Island line coming in from Clarks Grove and the Milwaukee line coming in from Austin to make sure that the rich farmland that was producing so many goods, so many agricultural goods, would have a way of getting those goods to market.

And so in 1926, we have records that about 10,000 people were here.

All the important people around.

The heads of the railroad companies were here, the governor was here.

This was what George Payne was here of course, and all the investors, this was a huge deal.

Pathe came to video it and to create a news reel that was shown internationally about this event.

We have pictures here in the museum that demonstrate that.

So it's really difficult to talk about the first settlers or what actually formed this particular community.

It was something of an international or national kind of formation actually, with so many people having a vision for what this particular 16,000 acres could actually create.

(joyful music) - You gotta remember that one inch of rain on one acre is 27,400 gallons.

(joyful music) Now you got 100,000 acres, 27,000, that's one inch that's run off.

That all has to go down through the Turtle Creek.

So consequently, Austin was against Hollandale draining anything here.

They fought it tooth and nail.

And there had been several floods in the Austin area because of the rain that's come excessively here.

Carol mentioned that the railroads came through in '26 in September of '26, they gathered here.

Well, three weeks after the railroads came together Hollandale got a 7.5 inch rain in 24 hours.

So from '26, 1927, '28, there was so much water here that they couldn't grow anything.

Things went downhill from there.

So that's a little bit about the drainage and the importance of that in settling this place was really, really, that was very important to the whole settlement of the area.

(joyful music) (joyful music continues) (upbeat music) (calming music) (calming music continues) - It was in the early 2000s and the youth group here at the church had decided they wanted to raise some money to go on a youth trip and things like that.

And started mainly with the church family and said, "Hey, you have any stuff?

We're gonna have a rummage sale here at the church."

And the church family just all chipped in, filled up the gym with stuff that they didn't want from their homes.

And it was student-led and just wanted to raise some money, again just so they can use it to go on some trips.

And continued doing it just one time a year.

And it worked out pretty well and the kids enjoyed it.

And again, that's how it started.

(calming music) My name is Jeff Schei and I'm the worship pastor here at the First Baptist Church in Clarks Grove.

And this is the first of the three rummage sales that we're gonna be having this year.

We had also church people help out with the rummage sale and you come to find out that, you know, we all have our own passions and there are some people that are pretty passionate when it comes to rummage sales and thrifting.

And probably around 2010 was when it kind of switched from student-led to adult-led, which led it to basically helping the mission in Honduras.

And so there were people that had gone down to the children's home and kind of took over the rummage sale.

And so now it has evolved, I believe it was 2011 when the proceeds from the rummage sale started going down to the children's home and has maintained that ever since.

And it also has evolved into doing this three times a year instead of just once.

And all of this, it works because of the community, the people that come in.

There's a lot of people that come in each time we have this sale and they know what it's for.

It goes to the children's home in Honduras, all of its donation, we don't price anything.

And it does really well.

And now it's one of the primary financial resources from this church to offer and give that to the children's home.

(calming music) (intense music) In Azacualpa, Honduras, which is in North Central Honduras, it began with Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

And that hurricane is one of the worst ones Central America had seen.

And basically it hovered over Central America for about a week.

A hurricane usually they're moving, this one, it moved, it hit land and then it stayed for a week.

And there was roughly 11,000 deaths and at least as many missing people.

And so in Azacualpa it happened to be the hometown of the Spanish Hispanic pastor from the First Baptist Church in Marshalltown, Iowa.

That was his hometown.

And he went there and he saw the need.

He saw a lot of homeless children, children that had no place to go.

And so he just felt led, "Well I'm gonna start a children's home here."

And it was in 2006, they had come spoke to our church saying, "Hey, we have this mission down in Central Honduras, North Central Honduras, and you're welcome to come check it out."

And so we had our first group go in 2007 down to the children's home to experience it and also just, well, what are some ways that we can help down there?

And at the time they had 20 children and it got to that point pretty fast, just within a few years they would take any children that the authorities would bring to them or around that area in that community.

And Azacualpa is roughly the same size as Albert Lea, right around 18,000, 20,000 people.

But that's how the children's home got started.

That's how our church got connected to that children's home.

And it was really kind of a neat thing.

We asked the church, "Hey, who would like to go?"

And it took several months to round up six people to go.

And we went down there, we had a great time, we experienced the community down there and how we could help and different ways that we could assist.

And we came back and the next year we said, "Hey, we're gonna go again, who wants to go?"

And it only took like two weeks and we had a full group of 14.

The biggest thing I can remember from going, I remember thinking, "I'm gonna go and I'm gonna help the community, you know, see Christ and do what I can to assist these people down there."

And what I found was I was the one that learned from them.

It is so striking how much they value people.

They value each other so much because when you really don't have much of anything, that's where the value is.

You depend on each other.

It's so community-based and oriented and they focus so much on each other and it's just part of how they live.

And for some that's how they survive.

(calming music) A couple things that I have really seen grown and many people are very passionate about down there, one is the feeding program.

There's still a lot of hungry people down there and at the children's home they serve a meal every day.

And it's a pretty common meal down there of beans and rice and tortillas, but they feed the community.

A lot of the money that we do send down there, we know it supports the feeding program and helps feed the people down there.

And another great thing about this children's home over the last roughly 10 years is we were a part of helping to build a bilingual school that they built right on campus there.

And it's the only bilingual school in their community.

And so it also helps their kids there, going through that school to learn English.

And they see that as a real benefit just in, you know, how society is so global now and people can end up in different parts of the globe that if they have an opportunity and they need to know English well that's a very powerful tool.

For example, if someone wants a career to be an interpreter somewhere, that it's just another tool that they can have where otherwise they wouldn't be able to come out of that community knowing another language.

(upbeat music) One name I wanna highlight is Carolyn Weller.

She is a young lady here at the church who is very passionate about rummage sales.

And it was about in that time, 2011, where she kind of took over this rummage sale and targeted the children's home to send the funds to.

It's really quite intriguing how so many of us in here, in America, here locally, we can come to a rummage sale like this and we already have a full house, but how we can look at different things and justify, "Oh, I could use that or, yeah."

And the beauty of it too, everything here is a donation.

It makes a great deal of money through the kindness of the hearts of the people here.

And what it means to me mostly is it's so wonderful watching the ripple effect of God's handiwork and people.

This started as one thing and then it grew into another thing and now it's evolved into three times a year we have this sale that people can come and donate and all of the proceeds go to help children down in Azacualpa, Honduras.

(upbeat guitar music) A few years ago, it was worked out with The Ladybug in New Richland, a consignment store that they rotate their merchandise a couple times a year.

And so the products here, it still comes from people here in the church.

However, I would now say most of it comes from The Ladybug and it's really quite a beautiful rotation where it's offered over in New Richland, what doesn't sell there, it comes here.

And so it's offered here in Clarks Grove.

Starting just a couple years ago, we worked it out with One Vision out of Clear Lake, which is a great organization that helps people with disabilities in the Clear Lake and Mason City area.

They have a lot of great programming and assistance for those people.

And also they have thrift stores.

And so One Vision, they come up here with a truck and they load up everything that we have left and they take it down there to offer through their thrift stores and to assist the community of people that they help.

(upbeat guitar music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.