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The working stiff's answer to Northwest Airlines opens its new Minneapolis "hub" Nov. 16.
Sun Country? Mesaba?
Nah, it's Jefferson Lines, the 80-year-old intercity bus company that takes riders just about anywhere in the Midwest and back for $80 or less, and round trip throughout the nation for $100 through connecting services.
Several years after surviving a near-death bankruptcy caused by a far-flung route-and-charter expansion, Jefferson is slowly expanding in the Midwest, overhauling its fleet with spacious motor coaches equipped with TV monitors and working with Amtrak, airlines and bus companies to improve schedules and connecting service.
Charlie Zelle, an ex-Wall Street investment banker, is driving this bus.
Zelle returned from New York City in 1987 to extricate his family from real-estate investment setbacks at St. Anthony Main along the Mississippi. He then turned to orchestrating a painful, long-term restructuring of the family-owned Jefferson Lines.
"I like this business," he said recently from the new Seward Industrial Park headquarters of the Minneapolis company his grandfather founded. "When you come back to struggle with something, you begin to know it. And I began to like it. The people in the company are incredibly committed."
Zelle also was behind the decade-long vision to replace the frayed downtown Greyhound terminal at 9th St. and Hawthorne Av. with the Hawthorne Transportation Center, a $33 million site that incorporates a municipal parking ramp, Metropolitan Transit terminal, skyway connections and flagship-terminal space for Jefferson and Greyhound bus lines that is more spacious and secure, with connections to city buses, parking and taxis.
"We are getting increasing numbers of people who come to Minneapolis for a day or a weekend of shopping and entertainment and we need to make a better first impression that connects to the rest of downtown," said Zelle, 44, who also is chairman of the Greater Minneapolis Convention and Visitors Association. "I was an advocate for this with Greyhound and the city of...