Memoirs of an early election denier...

Denfeld High School clock tower

Written by Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune/10-29-22

I’d like to get one thing settled before I…before I…um, well, I’m no kid.

I want it acknowledged that I won the election for president of the Duluth Denfeld High School Boys Union when I was a senior way back when, in spite of what the counted ballots allegedly said. When was this? Well — get this and brace yourself — my graduating class recently had its 65th reunion. Yes, 65th. People who were born the year we graduated are now on Social Security, for crying out loud. 

 

But that’s beside the point. When I was a senior at Dear Old Denfeld (I always call it that to spite my two kids who went to East, and now a couple of their kids are there too) I was nominated for president of the Boys Union, an exclusive organization encompassing every boy enrolled in the school, including those studying auto body and who frequented Roscoe’s Pool Hall in West Duluth.

 

The girls had a similar exclusive organization uniquely called “The Girls Club.” How could these organizations be considered exclusive if every kid of the designated gender was automatically a member? Well, they wouldn’t let anybody from Central in, that’s for sure.

 

But back to the election. I was surprised when someone (I found out later who) had the good sense to nominate me for Boys Union president. Of course others were nominated too, meaning the boys in the student body had to vote for one of us.

 

I had high hopes, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t considered a student leader, wasn’t an athlete and my grades weren’t that hot either. When I was listed among the nominees I knew I was a long shot, but I had hopes.

 

When the votes were counted, I lost. Lost badly, they said. I don’t remember now, 65 years later, what the numbers were, but I think they said I got a dozen or so votes. I didn’t believe them for a minute.

 

I found out after the “election” that I had been nominated by my buddy Rusty Rockerpanel, the best mechanic in our car club. Our car club, located in West Duluth, was called “The Regents” in honor of the governing body of the University of Minnesota. How’s that for classy?

 

We were a dedicated bunch devoted to safe driving (yeah, right), helping distressed motorists (never happened), loud mufflers (varoom) and drag racing from every traffic signal on downtown Superior Street (yup). We were in the vanguard of concerns about critical race theory, constantly arguing over who was the best race car driver at the Proctor speedway.

 

I found out from Rusty Rockerpanel himself that he had nominated me as a joke. Some joke. I knew I would have been an exceptional president of the Denfeld Boys Union and I believed every boy in school thought so too.

 

So how the heck did this other kid get elected? Just because he played basketball and I played hooky (not to be confused with hockey); just because he was a straight A student and I was only good at B and S; just because he was already shaving a heavy beard and I sported peach fuzz and pimples. I think he might even have been a Junior Rotarian.

 

After Rusty confessed to nominating me, I was nevertheless even more convinced that I had won. All the guys at the car club thought I’d won too. Everyone agreed that the school principal had interfered with the counting of votes, throwing out mine because I smoked cigarettes while watching Captain Kangaroo and at other times.

 

Sixty-five years ago it was common for high school age kids to smoke cigarettes but it was not encouraged in school, although the faculty had a smoking lounge. I took it up to prove I was a “man now,” none of this namby-pamby kid stuff. I was good at it; I could blow smoke rings!

 

Go ahead and call me an election denier, I don’t care. I was ahead of my time, it seems. Judging from the numbers at our recent 65th reunion, the cemeteries are filled with students who also believe I won the Boys Union presidency in 1957. The trouble is they aren’t around anymore.

 

No question about it, the election was stolen from me, and you see the result. Now they’ve even removed the vaulted top of Denfeld’s stately clock tower. Elections have consequences.

 

I have kept these thoughts hidden for more than six decades but I wanted it cleared up before I…before I…um, well, you know.

 

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.

Possible Old Central sale revives rivalry tales...

Written by By Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune, October 17, 2020

So, the Duluth School Board is going about selling Historic Old Central High School. Whew. I have pretty strong feelings about that.

 

Some history of my own: I’m an old (I’ll say) Denfeld boy. In my childhood, growing up in the West End (now Lincoln Park), I wanted two things in life: To go to Denfeld and to go to heaven. So far I have achieved just one of them and lately I’ve been wondering about the other.

 

I went to Denfeld in the mid-1950s when the rivalry between Denfeld and Central was at its height. We hated Central. We despised Central. We loathed Central. I’m running out of verbs.

 

It’s safe to say that the kids at Central felt the same way about Denfeld.

 

At an early age I learned a saying that sticks with me today. It’s like a sports cheer: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, all good people go to heaven, when they get there they will yell: Central, Central, go to….” Well, you know. This is a family newspaper. Hades doesn’t rhyme with yell.

 

The extreme rivalry between Denfeld and Central achieved a fever pitch each autumn with the annual Denfeld-Central football game at Public Schools Stadium, out there in West Duluth right next to Denfeld. In fact, while it was supposed to be for all public schools, we Denfeldites claimed it as our own.

 

When the Central football team and fans showed up for the annual game, we felt they were invading our territory.

 

For reasons I can’t fathom today, the powers that were in Duluth Public Schools would schedule the Denfeld-Central game as close to Halloween as possible to assure mutual destruction and the spirit of mischief among students at each school. Paint would be used at times to deface each other’s buildings. Cops were on alert.

 

Lunchtime raids by marauding students from both schools on each campus in crepe paper-decorated cars in each school’s colors — Denfeld was maroon and gold; Central red and white — on the day of the big game drew disgusting jeers and taunts by students on the raided campus. Middle fingers raised and aimed in both directions were common.

 

In the morning, the schools held “pep” assemblies in their auditoriums to put everyone in the frenzied mood. Halls in the schools were decorated in school colors and posters encouraging victory in the game were plastered everywhere. Little or no learning took place. This was war.

 

It was all very exciting. Fun, actually. High school in Duluth in a time long past. What about East? East didn’t count. Just a bunch of cake eaters whose school had only been founded as a high school in the early ‘50s. Not enough time for traditions, rivalries and blind hatred to develop. (Don’t get angry, East. Fine school; educated my kids.) Morgan Park and Cathedral were just too small. Besides, they didn’t have clock towers.

 

Denfeld and Central were the big show. Hunters vs. Trojans. John Vucinovich, Central’s coach, vs. Walt Hunting, Denfeld’s. Both were legendary.

 

In those days, Public Schools Stadium had stands facing each other with the football field separating them. Good thing. The animosity could have led to serious confrontations if the opposing loyalists were mixed. If memory serves (and so often it doesn’t) the two schools alternated sides of the field each year.

 

Down in front girl cheerleaders clad in their school colors would lead the crowd into a frenzy. “Hurrah for the red and white,” the cheerleaders for Central would sing. On the Denfeld side, “One, two, three, four…” Well maybe not that but “Roll on to victory..,” and “When the Denfeld Hunters fall in line they’re gonna win this game another time” led by the maroon and gold-clad Denfeld cheerleaders.

 

The uniformed marching bands of both schools would accompany all this, seated in front rows above the 50 yard line across the field from each other.

 

Regardless of who won the game, when it ended large numbers kids from each school would descend on Superior Street in downtown Duluth, cars still decorated with crepe paper, horns honking, jeers exchanged, impromptu drag races at corners when the traffic signals changed to green. Pandemonium reigned. Talk about American graffiti. Talk about fun.

 

So why would I, a superannuated Denfeld chauvinist, so regret the possible impending sale of Historic Old Central, which was converted into the district’s administration headquarters and hasn’t actually served as a school since 1971? I have come to love that building, and for what it has represented for nearly 130 years. Like the Aerial Lift Bridge, old Central, with its imposing clock tower and stone facade, is a symbol of Duluth. I am concerned a private owner wouldn’t take proper care of it.

 

Several years ago, a few of us from this newspaper took a tour of the building, which included a climb into the tower, looking at those four clocks from the inside and the intricate mechanism of their operation. It is a vantage point that offers breathtaking views of Duluth in all directions.

 

With my history as a Denfeld grad, loyal to my high school for all these years, I stood in the Central tower and scanned the hundreds of autographs scrawled on every flat surface, put there by students who loved their school for nearly 80 years.

 

Glancing furtively around, I added mine. And proud to have it there.

 

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

Little pomp, under the circumstances...

By Jim Heffernan

The following column was published today, May 31, 2020, in the Duluth News Tribune

I was touched by the photo page of Denfeld High School graduation “ceremonies” in last Sunday’s Duluth News Tribune.

 

Of course, as everyone knows, there were no actual ceremonies in the traditional sense this year, replaced by each cap and gown-clad individual marching across Denfeld’s massive stage alone in an empty auditorium and being handed a diploma by a masked adult, hold the handshake.

 

Thank you very much COVID 19.

 

What got my attention most were two photos: The first one of a lone graduate marching down the aisle of Denfeld’s impressive auditorium en route to the stage, the hundreds of seats on either side empty, save for a few close family members in the front row wearing masks.

 

Then another photo showed a young woman graduate wistfully standing at the lectern before a virtually empty auditorium reflecting on the speech she had prepared; a speech intended for a full house, her proud family, and everybody else’s. Wow. Who’d have thought it would ever come to this?

 

Life in a global pandemic.

 

As I perused the photos, my thoughts raced back to my own high school graduation on that same stage, in that same beautiful auditorium oh so many years ago now. In those days the entire graduating class was seated on the stage, facing the audience of well-wishers.

 

Denfeld’s stage is one of the biggest anywhere, designed that way, I was once told, to be able to hold an entire class of graduates. There were around 330 in my class in 1957 who marched in to the familiar Pomp and Circumstance theme emanating from the huge Denfeld pipe organ. It was at a time when America had entered a period of prosperity and optimism following World War II. Our prospects were limitless, it seemed.

 

My prospects were uncertain. I hadn’t given the next phase of my life much thought. I was, and still am, a take it one day at a time kind of person and hadn’t planned for the “real world” lurking outside of that wonderful venue for a graduation ceremony.

 

I don’t recall what our commencement guest speaker said. Does anyone ever recall what the guest speaker said at their high school graduation? I was honored a few years ago to BE the guest speaker at a Denfeld commencement, and even I don’t recall what I said. I hope the kids in that class followed my advice, whatever it might have been. I’m sure it was positive. They all are.

 

I recall getting a large dose of real world on my graduation day as I exited the auditorium, still in my cap and gown, and saw a classmate on the outdoor steps of Denfeld, still in his cap and gown, holding a baby. He was the father.

 

Now I know it might be fairly commonplace in more recent times for some high school students to have already started families, but in my era it couldn’t happen. The school had a policy that if a girl became pregnant, out she went. Couldn’t attend classes. And if the father of this impending child was also a student, out he went too, and good luck for the rest of your lives, kids. No commencement for them.

 

But my classmate fooled them. His girlfriend didn’t go to Denfeld. And this Denfeld father-to-be kept his mouth shut about it, even through the birth of the child, which had apparently taken place during his senior year. Not a word.

 

Thus, he was able to graduate with us, cap-gown and mortarboard, Pomp and Circumstance, boring speech, diploma, handshake and all… and does the baby need changing? That child is now retirement age.

 

Finally, and I related this in a column years ago but I’ll have at it again, I must tell how I celebrated my big graduation night after the ceremony.

 

My parents had gathered a few relatives and adult close friends in our family home to honor me on this lovely June evening. Of course I showed up at home, but only briefly, my friends waiting outside in a car for me to join them for some real celebrating. So I went in and collected the graduation cards, most containing a bill with a picture of Abraham Lincoln, thanked them all and then high-tailed it out of there, leaving them to celebrate me without me.

 

Where did we go? I shudder to reveal it. We went to the Gary dump. Yes, the then landfill in Gary-New Duluth where a bunch of gun-crazy fellow graduates had assembled–gird your loins here–to shoot rats. Yes, shoot rats. I wasn’t an active participant in the rodent slaughter, just nearby in my navy blue graduation suit, at the Gary dump on the night I graduated from high school, when members of my family were gathered elsewhere to honor me. It is painful today to think of it. My only defense is I was 17 years old.

 

Welcome to the real world, Mr. High School Graduate.

 

So, congratulations to the 2020 graduates of all the high schools, so many schools going to great lengths–just as Denfeld has–to make the occasion as memorable as possible for the grads. Appreciate the efforts of those elders, and be proud.

 

You are unique in the annals of American education. The future depends on you. My generation has taken care of the past, and not that all well, it seems.

 

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

Spirit Valley Days in Duluth: Remembering when cars were king...

My pristine 1940 Ford Coupe in 1956-Jim Heffernan photo

Western Duluth did not escape ’50s car club phenomenon...  by Jim Heffernan  

Note: I wrote this column a few years ago for the now-defunct on-line Zenith City magazine (although the site continues as a blog of Duluth area history). I'm reprinting it here today to call attention to Spirit Valley Days, ongoing this weekend in what folks of a certain age call West Duluth. Since one of the major events is a vintage car show, it seemed like a good time to recall with this column a day when vintage cars were king in West Duluth...at least for young men (or aging adolescents). JH

A New York Times columnist recently declared “The End of Car Culture” in America.

I’ve noticed it too. Young people today are not as focused on cars as those in earlier generations. Now they’re more interested in technology, the Times columnist pointed out, citing statistics showing that many young people today—millennials—often don’t even bother to get driver’s licenses when ample public transportation is available.

It’s a cultural shift that makes me nostalgic for an earlier time in America (Duluth included) when the chief focus of youth—male youth especially—seemed to be the automobile. That focus crossed the length and breadth of the Zenith City, including its western neighborhoods. Especially its western neighborhoods.

I came of age in the 1950s, a part of the post-World War II generation that, unlike its elders who had endured the Great Depression (when even many adults couldn’t afford cars), embraced the automobile as something more than just transportation. The cars had to be “souped up” and “customized” into what were euphemistically called “hot rods” or “street rods,” some of which were not so hot at all, but more of the jalopy class.

It was nearly every teenage boy’s dream to have such a car, mainly to impress girls, impress their peers, trounce other hot rodders in street drag races and rebel against their parents, in roughly that order. Also, cars were handy in the romance department. The era was faithfully depicted in the movie “American Graffiti,” although that story was set in 1962.

Throughout Duluth in that era car crazy boys banded together and formed what were called “car clubs.” In Duluth’s western precincts, largely within the limits of the Denfeld High School district with some Morgan Park spillover, the only car club was called the “Regents.”

I was a charter member, and even named the club. A group of us got together in a West Duluth living room in 1955 to organize and, trying to come up with a name, someone suggested “Road Gents.” That seemed kind of corny to me, so I suggested we compress it and call ourselves the Regents. It had no connection to cars or much else outside of the University of Minnesota governing body, but it sounded classy. We adopted it, and a car club for the city’s western neighborhoods was born, complete with fancy license plate-size plaques bearing our name to be displayed on the rear bumpers of our cars.

The original group numbered about 15, but when we began flexing our muscles, the club grew, perhaps doubling in size. The Duluth car clubs—central and eastern neighborhoods had the “Road Toppers” and “De Malos Marauders” among others—were officially organized to assist any motorists who might be in distress: flat tire, out of gas, conked out engine, lost. We had wallet-size business-style cards printed up to hand to people we helped, stating, “You have been assisted by a member of the Regents Car Club of Duluth, Minnesota.” 

I had a passel of them in the glove compartment of my hot little ’40 Ford DeLuxe coupe powered by a ’48 Merc engine with twin exhaust pipes and rumbling mufflers to die for. I never gave out one card. Never helped anybody. Almost nobody did. I still have a few of those calling cards in a box somewhere, never to be used.

Duluth’s several car clubs were even associated with one another as the “Joint Association of Car Clubs,” JACCs for short. They met monthly in City Hall, mainly to promote the idea of the city building an official drag strip. It never happened.

Mainly, the members of the Regents just wanted to get together, fix up cars, and drag race each other after dark on wide Oneota Street, when the cops weren’t around, or on divided Highway 61 atop Thomson Hill sans the highway patrol.

West Duluth’s Regents went beyond any other city car club by establishing our own service station in a rented building still standing on the southeast corner of 41st Avenue West and Grand. It was called “Regents Pure” because we pumped gas supplied by the Pure Oil Co. Our building had a three-stall garage and an office. We sold gas to the public, and the garage was handy for club members to work on cars, installing dual exhausts or changing oil or tires and in some cases changing entire engines.

I suppose the car club was an early form of “gang,” although there was no criminal element aside from street drag racing. By today’s gang standards, we were as harmless as aging Boy Scouts trying to work our way through adolescence. Most of the members went on to college after our Denfeld years, when interest in the car club inevitably faded.

When definitive histories of Duluth are written, it’s doubtful any will include this brief car club phenomenon. Most of those who participated are now in their 60s and 70s with only dim memories of a time—a decidedly more innocent time—when America’s car culture really got rolling, often two cars side-by-side, engines roaring, tires squealing, mufflers blaring, with the noble goal of finding out which car could cover a quarter mile the fastest.

Well, maybe not so noble, but it was fun.

Reprinted from Zenith City Online, July 11, 2013

Where East Was East and West Was West, in Duluth...

What follows is one of several columns I wrote for the on-line magazine Zenith City Online, started and edited by Duluth publisher Tony Dierckins. ZCO is still active as an area history blog but no longer uses regular posts in a magazine format so Tony graciously allowed me to repost here on my blog. I was its "western neighborhoods correspondent" (also labeled "Denfeld Boy") on ZCO and wrote monthly about growing up in Duluth. Thus, virtually all of my monthly columns for Zenith City had some connection to Duluth's West End and West Duluth, back before they were called Lincoln Park and Spirit Valley. I've decided to put a few of them on my blog from time to time.             Jim Heffernan 

Where East Was East and West was West
By Jim Heffernan

For decades atop the Point of Rocks, the commanding rock outcropping just west of downtown Duluth at the foot of Mesaba Avenue, a huge sign advertising Master Bread dominated the skyline.

It was more than an ordinary billboard. It appeared to have been fashioned to fit the surroundings, long and narrow at the peak of the outcropping, and it was animated, showing a loaf of bread with slices pouring out of one end. Done with sequentially lighted neon tubes, it was attention grabbing and impressive for its day. 
Its day, hard to pinpoint exactly, did encompass the years from my childhood in the 1940s until sometime in the 1970s. [editor’s note: Photo borrowed from Andrew Kreuger’s wonderful News-Tribune Attic.]

And it had greater significance than the bread wars between Master and Taystee, both baked in Duluth’s West End neighborhood (now referred to as Lincoln Park). The Master Bread sign came to symbolize the western end of “East End” (including downtown) and the beginning of “West End” including West Duluth. Only on the map did Lake Avenue divide Duluth’s east from its west. In Duluthians’ minds, the Point of Rocks, with its Master Bread sign, did. 

The prevailing perception in Duluth was that the rich people lived in the East End, the working classes lived in the western precincts, and never the twain shall meet, except when their high school sports teams vied to prove, once and for all, which section of the city was best.

It was a fallacy, of course, to believe everyone in East End was rich. Far from it. But all of the mansions in town were there; the mining and lumber tycoons lived there, cheek by jowl with bankers and most doctors and the powers that were in Duluth. Never mind that the Central Hillside, a bit east of the Master Bread sign, was for decades considered Duluth’s poorest neighborhood. 

Image from ZCO, originally in UMD Library Archives

In the 1970s, a colorful priest, Father F. X. Shea, was engaged as president of the College of St. Scholastica. In one of his many pronouncements about civic life, Shea called for the Master Bread sign to be torn down. He wasn’t expressing a preference for bread or disgust with advertising’s often intrusion on natural beauty; as a recent arrival here he had come to realize that the sign was a line of demarcation between east and west in Duluth that stifled the city’s social, business and cultural life. (The Master Bread billboard can be seen at the top of photo on right.)

I grew up on the “poor” side of the Master Bread sign that so brightly lit the Point of Rocks after the sun went down. Not that we were actually poor, nor were most of the others in the western neighborhoods. Far western Duluth had a steel plant, after all, together with other substantial industries, and the thousands of jobs they provided allowed workers—including immigrants and many who hadn’t completed high school—entry into what most people regarded as the middle class. Being middle class roughly meant owning a home, having a car and providing for your family.

My role here at Zenith City will be to write about the western Duluth neighborhoods as I recall them in the decades after World War II. My precise neighborhood was the West End, right in the heart of it, about half way between the Point of Rocks and the ore docks at 35^th Avenue West. Informally, the ore docks have always represented the dividing line between West End and West Duluth.

There was competition between those two neighborhoods too, but socio-economically they were similar. Each had a thriving business district, providing residents with everything they might need from groceries to hardware to banking to household and personal needs, not to mention a stiff drink. J.C. Penney operated department stores in each neighborhood, as did Bridgeman’s ice cream parlors. The West End had more furniture stores; West Duluth more movie theaters (two) while each had two funeral homes for most of the years my memory encompasses.

Each neighborhood had numerous churches representing most of the mainline Christian faiths, but no synagogues. West Duluth had a small hospital, long-since dissolved, but people from the western precincts who needed hospital care depended, as did the entire city, on St. Mary’s (Catholic) and St. Luke’s (Protestant), both on the eastern edges of downtown.

Commandingly, West Duluth had Denfeld High School, for generations bringing together students from both neighborhoods whose earlier education had been provided at Lincoln Junior High (West End) and West Junior High. Until 1950, the West End educated its younger pupils at elementary schools scattered throughout the neighborhood—Adams, Monroe, Bryant, Ensign and Lincoln. West Duluth had Longfellow and Irving and others farther west, but short of Morgan Park and Gary New-Duluth, with their own schools, including a high school.

In future columns I’ll try to extract from these neighborhoods glimpses of their colorful past life —a life I knew as a youngster and much younger adult, when Master Bread meant more than the staff of life in this small corner of our world at the head of the largest freshwater lake in that world.

Previously published on Zenith City Online on January 15, 2016 and 2012.

Denfeld honor roll...

My closing remarks given at the Denfeld Hall of Fame event...

"I feel I should confess that I wasn't really the most attentive or industrious student to have graced the hallowed halls of Denfeld; so it feels great to have finally made a Denfeld honor roll."

And it did feel great to stand on stage in a school I love with a most distinguished group of Denfeld Hall of Fame inductees... the first woman chief of police in Minneapolis, a revered local public defender, a highly decorated air force major general in the Air National Guard, two accomplished professors, a talented and beloved teacher, three acclaimed athletes, a prominent area artist, and a skilled and loved secretary. I felt very humbled and indeed honored.

And to paraphrase Fred Friedman in his acceptance remarks... Basically we are those who seem to get the attention; but there are so many others out there who live a life unnoticed and who are as much or more deserving. Well said, Fred!

Duluth Denfeld High School

My '40 Ford DeLuxe Coupe...

By Jim Heffernan

My '40 Ford DeLuxe Coupe, circa 1956

This is the car I had in high school, a 1940 Ford DeLuxe coupe. I recently posted this picture on line to illustrate an upcoming column I wrote for the Duluth history web magazine Zenith City Online. I am known as “Denfeld Boy” on the site, and this is the car I drove when I was a student there.

The Zenith City column recalls the days of car clubs in Duluth in the 1950s, including the Regents Car Club, the one in western Duluth. Watch for the column on Zenith City Online in about a week.

My dad forked over the $150 for my ’40 Ford in the summer of 1956 when I was 16 years old and about to be a Denfeld junior. I found it on a used car lot in Moose Lake, looking pretty dusty and with a broken rear spring.

A buddy who was a talented mechanic replaced the spring and I took it home, washed and polished it, painted – yes painted – white sidewalls on the tires and took this picture in the alley behind our house.

The ’40 Ford was well on is way to becoming a classic even then. It is considered a bona fide classic today, with those in pristine stock or restored condition selling well up in the five figures.

I parted with mine in 1963, trading it and some cash for a forgettable ’61 Chevy convertible. More’s the pity.