The King of the Nation of Scrounge

It's not much of a song, just a verse and a chorus, really. A few years ago local rocker Mike Gunther got a load of a co-worker at Airborne Express, who demonstrated a perverse gift for sniffing out found money. Every day, Gunther would watch the guy tenaciously troll the airport pay phones, floors, and rental luggage carts for stray coins and the occasional dropped bill.

Each penny that you've lost
Each nickel that you've tossed
Each dime that you threw out
With the dirt and the rocks
Each quarter that you've fumbled
Each dollar bill you've crumbled
Belongs to the Nation of Scrounge
His name is John Osterbauer:
The King of the Nation of Scrounge

The King will tell you that a scrounger is made, not born. Forty-four-year-old John Osterbauer methodically checked the coin slots in pay phones when he was a kid. (I should know: He's my cousin.) In seventh grade, John and his younger brother Joe got a metal detector for Christmas. The two would take off in the middle of the night to dig up parks and private lawns in their south Minneapolis neighborhood, finding all sorts of treasures. When landscaping crews ripped up Loring Park a few years ago, Joe was down there every other night with a metal detector. Scrounging.

It's in the blood. The King ascribes his ability to spot a coin from blocks away to his father's ability to do the same with a pheasant's head; the old man is a lifelong hunter. But the practice of the scrounge is no game, nor is it the survival mechanism of your garden-variety scrap-metal thief. The lure of the scrounge is in the free money, and the rush that comes from finding something glittery in the gutter.

"I only have one rule," says John, a father of five who works at his father's bicycle warehouse in downtown Minneapolis. (He now engages in "the ultimate scrounge" there: selling outdated bicycle parts and ski equipment on eBay.) "The one rule is you can't steal. If you see someone drop some money, you have to pick it up and give it to them. That is outside of scrounging. You can push the envelope, but theft is not part of scrounging."

His eyes remain wide open, all the time. He dreams of finding a way to put magnets on the bumpers of his dilapidated van to suck up coins from the streets and sidewalks of Minneapolis. He has found money in casinos and bars, under bleachers, on sidewalks. And he has the utmost respect for his fellow scrounge artists, like a guy he used to work with who would buy toasters at Target and return them for cash at Dayton's, where they were priced higher.

Recalls Gunther, "One day we were at work and he told me about this guy at the U who had a fold-up coin squeegee who would roller-skate from vending machine to vending machine, pulling out coins from underneath the machines on campus. He was telling me this story, and he got so excited, next thing I know we're moving the vending machines away from the walls. He found a couple quarters and said, 'I'm in pop all day!'

"I came into work one day and told him I'd seen three quarters in the C.C. [Club] urinal the night before. It was really foul. I said, 'Nation of Scrounge was almost up 75 cents yesterday, but they were in the urinal so I didn't take 'em.' He stopped what he was doing, got really serious, and said, 'Really? You didn't take those? You can wash your hands.' He stood up really straight and made this proclamation to the whole room: 'I would go up to the elbow in any liquid for a quarter.'"

In his day, the King has been called many things. "Stooper" is the time-honored term of endearment for denizens of the horse track who spend their days and nights not betting, but stooped over, looking on the floor for tossed off pari-mutuel tickets. "Gold digger" is what the security guards at Grand Casino Hinkley called him when they found him roaming the casino floor one night, looking for dropped poker chips and silver dollars. They brought him into the office, took his picture, and told him he'd be arrested for trespassing if he ever came back.