Rebuilding a piece of history
Warnke restores pickup in memory of his time as Marshall parks worker
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MARSHALL -- Steve Warnke said working for the city of Marshall's parks department was his first real job as a young man. He's found a way to bring back those memories, by building a replica of the parks department pickup truck he drove in the 1970s.
"This is a recreation of that first truck that we had when I started. That was probably, I don't know, 1972, 73, something like that," Warnke said. "I've just kind of always had this in the back of my mind, you know. I wanted to build this truck as just a memento of growing up here."
Warnke, who lives in Minneapolis now, brought the restored pickup to Marshall's Sounds of Summer over the weekend. The truck was part of the Show and Shine car show and the grand parade. Warnke even got a chance to meet up with retired parks superintendent Tom Polfliet.
"Tom and I were like the two full-time workers," at the parks department in the 1970s, Warnke said. "So in the summertime, we'd get a crew of workers, and I would take half the crew and he would take the other half of the crew."
"We'd take the crew, and we'd go to all the parks and pick up trash and stuff, and then we'd split up the teams and go mow, and stuff like that," Warnke said. "A lot of times, Tom did more the managerial-type stuff. I was like kind of the main guy who mowed everything, like the football field and baseball diamonds."
Warnke's re-creation of the 1970s-era parks pickup is a project that has taken him about three years to complete. That was when he found a 1963 Ford F-100 in Colorado.
"I had it in my garage for a while. It had a different box - it had a wide box on it before, and I knew it had to be a step side," to match the parks department truck, he said. In addition to finding parts for a new truck bed, Warnke also searched for custom auto shops to restore the truck.
Warnke found a shop in Nebraska that was able to work on the truck.
"It was about a month ago they said, 'Yeah, it's done. Come out and get it,'" he said. The truck needed some additional repairs even after the trip back to Minnesota, but Warnke said he wanted to get it done to take it to Marshall.
"This is what you call a resto-mod," he said of the truck. While the cab and some other parts of the truck are original, he said, "Everything else is pretty much brand new."
Warnke tried to make the replica truck as true to the original as he could. The old parks department truck was blue with a white roof, he said. Some of the finishing touches on the truck included details like a "pig sticker" tool like the parks crews used to pick up trash, and a decal of the cartoon characters Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble in the rear window. Warnke said the decal was a reference to Polfliet's old nickname at work.
"That goes back to when (Tom) Polfliet was first working here. He worked with a guy whose name was Fred, so they nicknamed Tom 'Barney' at the street department shop," Warnke said. "We always knew him as Barney."
One of the fun things about coming back to Marshall with the rebuilt pickup was getting to meet up with Polfliet again.
"I hadn't talked to him in 39 years," Warnke said. At first, he wasn't sure how to reach out to Polfliet. "So I sent him a text, and said 'Mr. Polfliet, or can I call you Barney?' And then I went on with the rest of the story."
Warnke said Polfliet "got a chuckle" out of the Fred and Barney decal on the replica truck. It was good to see Polfliet again, he said.
"Absolutely. Because it was like seven years (we worked together)," Warnke said.