Member Profile: Al Uhl and Nancy Adair

by Rachel Fang

I first sat down with Al Uhl at his favorite Chinese restaurant on University Avenue in St.Paul (where he bought me lunch!) and we talked about his long history in St. Anthony Park and with the co-op movement.

Al has strong ties to the St. Anthony Park neighborhood. His parents met on a blind date in 1923 at an IOOF Christmas party in the Oddfellows Hall upstairs from HPC, and he grew up at the corner of Doswell and Raymond in a house where his mother formed a men’s cooperative boarding club for university students. The house contained a 50–seat restaurant when the Uhls purchased it shortly before the 1929 stock market crash. In the ensuing Depression, people quit eating out much and the restaurant was a bust.

The idea to transform the restaurant into a boarding co-op sprang from the poor and hungry students that Mrs. Uhl, a University of Minnesota home economics student, met on campus. The co-op ran from 1931, when Al was four years old, to June 1942. The fare included twenty meals a week, with cold cuts and dessert at the weekly Sunday evening meetings. At its high point, spring and fall quarters of 1941, more than 120 students took their meals at the co-op in shifts. The co-op folded as almost all of the members went off to war or took defense-related jobs after Pearl Harbor.

“It was a great time,” Al remembers, and it helped form his political identity: “I’m essentially a socialist and I believe in co-ops,” he said. Al’s father was a politically radical attorney, often representing Communists and Socialists. Al remembers some of those clients as in “pretty bad shape. Sometimes Dad gave them money with no prospect of getting any fee.”

Al’s career at Hampden Park Co-op began in 1973 when he joined St. Anthony Park Co-op (SAP) on Cleveland and Buford, across from the farm campus. He became involved with the store when everyone was a volunteer. He went to meetings and began as a produce coordinator, buying from the St. Paul Farmers' Market and DeLisi’s, then from a produce distributor in downtown St. Paul.

When SAP incorporated as a nonprofit in 1974, Al Uhl was one of the five organizing directors, working with Helen DuFault and Judy Rosenblatt, as well as two others who have since moved away. Despite financial problems, SAP began to be profitable in the late 1970s while still being run entirely by volunteers. When Green Grass Grocery (a co-op located where HPC is today) was damaged by fire in 1978 and forced to close, Al was asked to help the store reorganize and reopen. Ultimately he proposed that SAP buy Green Grass for its debts, and SAP Too was formed.

Al calls himself a “political animal.” He helped elect the first Democrat from the House district that includes St. Anthony Park in 1968, and he ran for Congress in 1976 as an Independent, “mostly out of pique with the Democrats, but also with personal desire I suppose,” he says. “The old political order needed and still needs changes, and, while the co-op movement isn’t the whole answer, it is a piece of it.”

On another day, I sat down to talk again with Al and his wife, Nancy Adair, who live in an eclectic and stylishly decorated condominium with views of downtown rooftops and (if you look very closely) the river. Over bowls of delicious white bean soup, Al said, “We eat well because of the co-op. We do most of our shopping at the co-op.”

Al reflected that he has lived in 14 different houses in St. Anthony Park. When he and Nancy first married, she found it hard to fit in. Al said, "You are considered a newcomer unless you’ve been around for a generation or two. But the co-op welcomed Nancy.” “The co-op is a wonderful place to buy good food at a reasonable price, but almost as important is its role in building community and developing a relationship between co-op members and the larger community. Our support as customers is vital to the co-op— it’s not just a business, it’s a community asset, a model for a different way of doing business.”

[Rachel Fang is a long-time co-op member, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, and enjoys interviewing almost anybody about their lives and experiences.]