Pop music in the past different from today ...

 

Elvis (pictured in 1956)
changed everything in the world of pop culture.

Written By Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/10-132026

Yup, I’m a geezer. Look at the picture that runs with this column: gray hair (what’s left of it), white beard, other signs of geezerhood. Heck, I was born at the end of the Great Depression and that describes how I feel when I count all the years I’ve racked up.

 

Got that? One of the sure signs of what polite people call “aging” is a person’s difficulty adapting to changing times. 

 

Take “popular” music. Please, take off all of the pop music on the radio and elsewhere in this digital age. Rap? Take it all away. Turn off the radio or maybe go over to country: (“I learn’t my education out behind the barn. I ain’t foolin,’ no sireee, passed each examination out behind the barn, but it almost made a wreck of me, out behind the barn.”)

 

When I look back on my long life I sometimes reflect on the pop music of my youth in the 1950s. Songs like, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” It told the story of a person passing a pet shop and wondering how much it would cost to buy the cute little puppy on display.

 

The song goes on to identify the dog as “the one with the waggly tail.” Can you picture it? What a lyric. Maybe you’ve caught on as a garbage truck driver’s protege and that music comes out on the dashboard radio between trash-hauling stops. Makes your day.

 

Moving on, this might have sounded risqué when you first heard it on 1950s radio, but not to worry. The song was titled “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane” and that “naughty lady” was a newborn baby girl “So delightful to hold, the naughty lady of Shady Lane…is only nine days old.” How inspiring for the youth of my generation, except for a few who were HAVING naughty babies and getting kicked out of high school for it.

 

And how better to describe true love than this: “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.” Pizza was just being introduced here at that time causing some confusion among older radio listeners, but we teens knew there was no better way to express love than to eat cheese and pepperoni with a main squeeze.

 

Hey, we can’t ignore the polka folk, so many of them, um, overweight, it seemed. The “Too Fat Polka” warned “I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me.” I’m not sure if that number was performed by a popular polka group called “The Six Fat Dutchman,” or maybe it was popular polka performer “Whoopee’ John Wilfhardt (get it?).

 

Then suddenly, in 1955 a guitar-strumming 21-year-old Southern boy with a strange name showed up from down at the end of Lonely Street by the Heartbreak Hotel.

 

Elvis changed everything in the world of pop culture. No more doggies in the window. Gotta rock, rock, rock around the clock, as Bill Haley and the Comets put it at the time. Could the Beatles be far behind?

 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.

Duluth road construction projects irk Iowa family...

 

By Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/09-5-2026

Here’s the latest fake news that’s unfit to print...

DATELINE DULUTH — Law enforcement authorities are continuing their search for an Iowa couple visiting Duluth who have been stuck in traffic wherever they go due to road construction.

 

The couple, Fred and Julia Davenport of Keokuk, Iowa, has been in constant I-phone contact with Duluth acquaintances and also police, but remain missing as they attempt to make their way into and through Duluth on a tourism visit with their two children, Helen, 11, and Troy, 9.

 

“We can’t find Lake Superior,” Julia Davenport reported to local contacts as they waited in a three-mile line of vehicles on Interstate 35 stretching from western Duluth through the downtown. First-time visitors, the Davenports had been hoping to see the big lake as part of a pre-Labor Day vacation trip to northern Minnesota.

 

Later, Fred Davenport told an acquaintance via smart phone that an attempt to make their way through the city on side streets had also been thwarted due to construction projects everywhere they went. “All I see are ‘Street Closed’ and ‘Detour’ signs,” Davenport reportedly told his contact.

 

Local officials played down the dilemma, saying traffic in some places might be slowed but is moving apace throughout the city. “People should be patient,” said J.J. Jingleheimer-Schmidt, a spokesman for the Public Works Department. “If it takes an extra hour or two to get through Duluth, well, that’s the price of having good roads.”

 

A movement to install portable toilets along clogged traffic routes where backups cause unexpected lengthy delays is under consideration but would be “very expensive,” according to city officials. “Do Duluthians want their hard-earned tax dollars to be spent on biffies for out-of-towners? I don’t think so,” said Lon D. Moe, co-director of Civil Evacuation for the city.

 

Meanwhile, the Davenports of Iowa are still contacting friends by smart phone as they attempt to make their way through Duluth and to see Lake Superior for the first time in their lives. Authorities believe they were located somewhere near the Garfield Avenue-Piedmont-Superior Street confluence close to where several businesses, including one automobile dealership, are mounting their own hand-painted signage on nearby back streets in attempts to direct customers to their doors through the labyrinth of road construction.

 

Reconstruction of a pedestrian bridge over Interstate 35 just west of downtown Duluth has caused closure of the freeway at times as workers install beams between uprights. At such times, traffic has been rerouted into nearby neighborhoods.

 

One resident of an affected neighborhood, Joseph D. Doaks Jr., said, “I can’t wait for winter when they can’t work on these streets. At least you can plow snow pretty quickly, and not wait weeks for streets to open.”

 

Word on the progress of the Davenport family through Duluth has slowed, with contacts concerned they might return to Iowa without ever seeing Lake Superior. “We’ve got to get our kids home before the start of school,” Julia Davenport told a Duluth acquaintance contacted on her phone.  

 

The eventual fate of the Davenports has been couched in mystery.

 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.