SHIT FOR BRAINS ON ICE IN
ALBERT LEA, MINNESOTA
Every small town has THAT family! The family that's always in the newspapers - usually in the police blotter section - for some havoc that they're causing or is suspected of causing.
Albert Lea, Minnesota - where I grew up - had more than one of those families but the Krumb family (I changed their last name just in case one of them is still alive & in the off chance reads this and decides to put a bullet in the back of my head and bury me in a shallow grave) was numero uno in that department.
I never heard anything about Mrs. Krumb. Whether she had skipped town, was chained up inside the house, or had been offed and sunk in a barrel in Fountain Lake for burning the eggs.
But Old Man Krumb and his sons? Everyone in town knew about them. Stealing cars, dealing dope, or poaching deer - one them or several them were always spending some time in Stillwater prison. It was like a vacation home for them.
But it was the Old Man who really put the family on the map.
Every year, the local country club put a car on the ice on Fountain Lake. Then, for five bucks or so, you could guess the date and time it finally fell through the ice when Spring hit and the lake thawed. The closest ticket to the actual time/date would then win all the cash. Pretty common contest in Minnesota, a part of the country where the State hobby is drinking and throwing up on cars.
Well, Old Man Krumb decided that it would be a hoot if he went out there in the middle of the night and blew a hole in the ice and put the car to the bottom of the lake months early (I don't know if he had bought one of the tickets and thought that he could win the cash that way or not - I doubt even he was that stupid but you never know).
There were no witnesses to the final incident but the results were that Old Man Krumb obviously didn't know shit about explosives.
Dynamite "explodes," it doesn't "implode" and so what I imagine what happened was the Old Man simply stuck a shitload of dynamite under the car rather than boring a hole in the ice and sticking the TNT in the hole. But I'm just guessing.
Either way, Krumb lit the dynamite, and stepped back (not far enough) and stood there with his thumb up his ass to watch the fireworks.
When the TNT went off, not only did the car get blown to pieces, but so did Old Man Krumb! Pieces of him were scattered all about the ice.
When the cops and the ambulance crew arrived to review the carnage and "investigate" the case - local legend has that the Krumb was being picked up in pieces and dropped into large plastic bags since obviously, there was no need for a stretcher. The head of the ambulance crew (which was privately run at the time), an extremely overweight dude who would later drop a ton of weight on some radical diet and then promptly drop dead from a heart attack - supposedly found Krumb's intact brain chilling on the frozen tundra.
Holding it high in the air he had laughingly yelled out, "Does anybody needs some brains? This fucking one has never been used!"
