Shirley Berdie cradles the cassette tape gently in slender fingers, as if it were a rare gemstone.
She's kept it close for nearly 35 years -- since her kids sat their grandfather down in 1977, turned on the tape recorder and captured Joseph Sher's stories of growing up as a poor kid shining shoes and hawking fish in Duluth's Bowery.
"It's invaluable and has a pretty good chunk of Minnesota history on it -- from Duluth to the Iron Range and up the North Shore," she says, as the sun filters through her fifth-floor apartment window in St. Paul.
A retired fourth-grade teacher, Berdie spent her first 60 years in Duluth. Then she moved to Asheville, N.C., for 25 years until her husband, John, died in 2009 and her kids encouraged to move back to Minnesota six months ago.
On the 45-minute tape, Joe Sher talks about his days as plumber, pioneer movie theater projectionist and roller rink instructor. Born in 1893, Joe was 83 when the tape was recorded. He died four years later.
"Oh, boy, did I have experiences," he says.
Joe talks about how his father, who emigrated from Vilna before the Russian army could snatch him up, would take a team of horses 20 miles up to Knife River every day and bring back a ton of herring, ciscoes and trout that "peddlers from the old country, with these two little baskets on their arms, would sell on the streetcars and house to house.
"He'd wake me up at 2 o'clock in the morning and I'd go down to the lake shore 100 feet from our house and chop a hole in the ice to get water for the horses," he says. "Money was so scarce that if I needed new shoes, my father would let me pick a dozen of the biggest herrings" to sell.
