Another in our series of stories on children who narrowly escaped serious injury: 5-year-old Roberta Sandgren of Robbinsdale was watching her mom make a cake when her “flying pigtail” got tangled in the mixer. Thanks to a quick-thinking parent and a patient policeman, no harm was done and the little kitchen aide went on to earn a degree in home economics at the University of Minnesota. Following this report from the Minneapolis Tribune, you’ll find an update based on an e-mail exchange with her and a phone conversation with her mom.

Minneapolis Tribune

ROBERTA SANDGREN, 5, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Sandgren, 3659 Halifax avenue, Robbinsdale, was truly unhappy Monday after her flying pigtail became involved with a whirring electric mixer. Roberta was helping her mother mix a cake when her hair got into the recipe. The youngster’s right thumb and left ear also became entangled. Robbinsdale police were called to pry the pigtail from the mixer gears. The cake? It was a mess. But such mishaps are annual with Roberta. She swallowed ant poison at 2, was hit by a car at 3 and swallowed a penny at 4. First aid fixed her up each time.

JULY 2008 UPDATE: Roberta Hemley turned 60 this month. She lives in Germany and works in the marketing department of Innogenetics, a biotechnology company. Her parents, Robert and Violet Sandgren, still live in Robbinsdale. It’s been more than 54 years since the mixer incident, and neither mom nor daughter remembers much about it.

	Roberta Hemley in 2008

“I was baking something, a cake, and you know kids,” Violet said. “She stood on a little chair and was going to help. I had my back turned for a second. Then she leaned over [and got her hair caught].”

Did she cry?

“No, I don’t think so. I doubt it was painful.”

Violet turned off the mixer and called the police for help. She credits the officer who responded with saving her daughter’s locks: “The policeman tried to undo it by twisting hair out of it. If he hadn’t been so patient … I bet another policeman would have just used a scissors to cut it.”

Roberta has lived in Germany since 1971. She and her husband, an Englishman, have two children, Valerie, 26, and Adrian, 24. Roberta is fairly sure her mother was making an angel food cake that day.

“And like most kids,“ she wrote, “I used to stand on a chair and watch her. I must have turned my head abruptly and that’s how my pigtail got entangled in the mixer. Mom said that it took the policeman about half an hour to free the pigtail. After that I didn’t have any more childhood mishaps!”

In a United Press story published in the Minneapolis Tribune, a Yale man who probably managed to avoid frat houses during his undergrad years demonstrates that you can be right about all the facts and still come to the wrong conclusion.

Can You Get Drunk on Beer?

‘No,’ Says Yale Professor; ‘Yes,’ Say Others

NEW YORK – (UP) – Yale university’s famed studies on alcoholism have produced a controversy over whether or not beer is an intoxicating beverage.

Dr. Leon A. Greenberg, Yale professor of physiology, said beer isn’t – and should be reclassified to the non-intoxicating drinks.

This brought emphatic objection from other scientists. They wanted to know if the man who is “high” or “tight” isn’t also drunk. Beer certainly makes people “high” and “tight,” they said.

Greenberg’s scientific theory went like this:

For people to show consistently the “abnormal behavior” which goes with intoxication, the alcohol content of their blood must be 0.15 per cent or higher.

THE AVERAGE alcohol content of American beers is 3.7 per cent by weight. In order for the alcohol blood level to be at 0.15 per cent, there would have to be two and one-half quarts of 3.7 beer in the stomach. But the capacity of the human stomach is one and one-half to two quarts.

Therefore, no one can drink enough beer at one time to get intoxicated, according to theory. As for doing it by degrees: beer is destroyed or eliminated in the body at the rate of one-third of a quart an hour. So three quarts would have to be consumed in two or three hours, and this, he said, was “physiologically unnatural.”

“THE ALCOHOLIC must not drink beer. He must not drink beer, not because it is intoxicating but because, like a small amount of alcohol in any other form, it may facilitate the uncontrolled drinking for which the alcoholic has a special liability.”

His v[i]ews were published in the official journal of the Yale studies. Other scientists were invited to publish their objections at the same time. And these objections were mainly that Greenberg did not recognize stages or degrees of drunkenness – the differences between a man who is a little drunk and one who is very drunk.

Dr. Albion Roy King, professor of philosophy, Cornell college, Mount Vernon, Iowa, said Greenberg has performed a “feat of word manufacture and manipulation which simply makes more graphic what everybody knows, that it takes more drinking to get tight on beer than on whisky.”

Dr. Harry M. Tiebout, a psychiatrist and vice chairman of the Connecticut commission on alcoholism, said Greenberg’s view is “simple nonsense – in the eyes of most beer drinkers.”

“THEY MAY KNOW nothing about their blood level or the percentage alcohol content of the beer drink, and they care less.

“What they do know is that they get drunk on beer, using their definition. Alcohol is alcohol, in any concentration and its regular use can lead to trouble.”

Dr. Frank J. O’Brien, associate superintendent of schools, New York city, objected to the generalizing on the grounds that alcohol affects different people differently.

Maybe he was thinking of this: An A&W root beer stand in about 1955. (Photo courtesy mnhs.org)

For two weeks in 1965, you had a pretty good excuse for missing a bus or being late for work in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The two cities could not agree when to start daylight saving time. State law designated May 23 as day to turn clocks forward. St. Paul’s City Council decided to make the move on May 9, in line with most of the rest of the nation. Minneapolis decided to go by state law and fell an hour behind St. Paul on the second Sunday in May. It was a mess, but people muddled through. The Minneapolis Star story below describes some of the complications.

A year later, Congress stepped in and passed the Uniform Time Act of 1966, establishing a system of uniform times within each of the four time zones in the continental United States.

Confusion Reigns as
St. Paul Goes on DST

St. Paul was on “wrist watch time” today.

That was really the only way you could be sure of the time in this city, which went on daylight saving time (DST) Sunday morning, two weeks ahead of Minneapolis and much of the rest of Minnesota.

Most business places moved their clocks ahead one hour, but some remained on standard time and moved the starting times of their employes ahead one hour.

All state federal offices, however, were on standard time. The Ramsey County Board opened its regular weekly meeting at 10 a.m. standard time.

The telephone company was still giving out standard time in its recorded time-of-day message.

Sewage rolled into the Minneapolis St. Paul Sanitary District plant from St. Paul on daylight time, but left on standard time.

If you called a cop, he arrived to take care of your problem on standard time. But if you needed a fireman, he showed up on daylight time.

Two St. Paul policemen arrived for work wearing a wrist watch on each arm, one for standard time and one for daylight time.

Mail arrived an hour earlier at St. Paul homes because the post office is on standard time.

Staggered Shifts

All city and county offices in which records with deadline times are filed staggered the shifts of some employes to remain open from 7:20 a.m. standard time to 4:30 p.m. daylight time.

Most St. Paul business firms reported little confusion with employes arriving late – or early – for work.

Two clocks were set up at the Northwest Orient Airlines registration desk to aid employes in informing passengers about flight times. Warren Phillips of the United Airlines desk said, “We just ask people what time it shows on their watch and give them directions according to that.”

Al Olson, St. Paul City Council recorder, probably had the best solution. “I don’t have any watch,” he said. “I’m going to work when I’m hungry.”

In 1965, the St. Paul Ford plant employed hundreds of clock-punching “employes,” a spelling adopted by the Minneapolis Star, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and other U.S. newspapers beginning in the 1930s as part of a spelling simplification effort. “Thru,” “tho,” “subpena” and “cigaret” are other examples of this early form of text messaging.