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Risky Business

Selling wieners has been tough on Jeff Bear, but he keeps o peddling.

Jeff Bear and his shiny City Dogs wiener cart.

First Friday Art Walk in downtown Springfield is normally a time of busy foot traffic on the sidewalks, but this month the crowds are absent, thanks to a series of thunderstorms moving through town. Two high school girls walk by with their jeans rolled up, jumping over a puddle that has spilled over the curb in front of Highlife Martini Bar where Jeff Bear has parked his City Dogs hot dog cart for the evening. One of the girls stops to buy a dog and asks Bear if he knows what concert is going on at The Outland Ballroom upstairs. Bear has no idea, but questions like this are common from passer byers who assume his location makes him an expert on local happenings.

This is the life of Springfield’s last remaining downtown hot dog vender. Bear is a fixture in downtown Springfield these days, with a Springfield Cardinals baseball cap pulled low on his brow and a blue apron tied around his waist. Bar-hoppers probably know him the best, since he usually opens the stand around 10 p.m. four days a week, and doesn’t leave until the early morning hours when all the hungry drinkers have had their post-club snacks. Bear made waves more than two years ago when he went through the local legal channels to make selling hot dogs on the sidewalk a legal business venture. While retail shops opened and nightclubs closed all around, it was the appearance of his $7,000 silver cart—as well as several others from now-defunct competitors N.Y. Style Dogs—that seemed to signal the arrival of a bigger city feel to downtown.

Life for this 25-year-old isn’t too abnormal, except for the work schedule of course. Jeff has a five-year-old son, Kadin, and a fiancé, Krystal Jahnke, so even though he’s seen by the throngs of college kids looking for a good time on the weekends, he rarely joins them at the clubs. While he has several part-time employees who will cover a shift for him when he needs a night off, he’s the one working the cart more than 90 percent of the time. And although he’s known by most people as the hot dog man, selling hot dogs and cigarettes on the street is supplemental income for him, not his main source of revenue. He’s also involved in some vending-machine business and claims to have a host of other ideas—current and future—that he declines to discuss.

Bear’s happy to talk about his business and is proud of the hard work it took to open City Dogs, but the work has taken its toll. In describing his experiences in dealing with the city, Bear uses a phrase he must use frequently. (It’s nearly word for word what he told a writer from 417 Magazine in the summer of 2005.) “I’m convinced that if God came to me and asked me to build an ark, it’d never happen,” he says. “Zoning would eat me alive. We’d never get the permits.”
But it’s not just zoning issues. Working in a district populated with intoxicated crowds on a nightly basis means Bear sees his fair share of fights, some of which he’s involved with. He was paranoid retelling those stories to GO—fights aren’t good for business—but he did tell of an incident in mid-May when a drunken middle-aged man misplaced 50 cents and accused Bear of short-changing him. The man charged at Bear when he noticed Bear holding a can of pepper spray he took out for self-defense. Soon the two were crashing through the front window of Systematic Savings and Loan. Springfield Police Department Public Information Officer Grant Story confirmed from the police report that the man was arrested for third-degree assault and property damage, which resulted in a felony charge, as the cost of replacing the window was valued at more than $1,000.

Most incidents are tamer, and Bear isn’t involved in many of them; more often he’s watching from across the street. Most of the time these events result in yelling matches and nothing more. Plus he has got to know several of the patrolling officers who are assigned downtown, so he gets to hear stories on occasion, even when he doesn’t witness them. But while Bear has no interest in picking fights, he’s also got to be prepared when they happen. “When someone’s thrown out of a bar, now it’s my problem,” Bear says. Drunken blabbering is a bigger problem in his mind, though. After all, intoxicated strangers can be annoying. “Usually they just force me to listen to stuff I don’t want to hear,” he says. “They rape my ear.”

The ear-raping is fine for now, but Bear doesn’t plan to make selling hot dog a career. “I’m going to be doing this for a little bit. I may sell the company sometime soon. There’s not as much money coming in as you’d think.”

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