Witches in Duluth? The Devil you say...

Written By Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/10-7-23

You hear a lot about witch hunts these days. Yikes! Scary!

 

Haven’t we got enough to worry about without adding witches to our daily concerns like famine, war, conquest and death (see Bible)? But there they are. Even in politics. Especially in politics.

 

Witches have been around for a long time. I remember a few who were teaching school when I was a young pupil, but they didn’t have pointy noses or wear wide-brimmed black hats or fly around on brooms. Well, one of them might have.

 

It seems strange to be hearing about witch hunts in the 21st century. Back in the late 17th century it was not at all healthy for a woman to be suspected of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, as history buffs will tell you. (Side note: One of the great perils of writing for publication is spelling Massachusetts.)

 

But if there are going to be witch hunts today, shouldn’t there be some governmental rules regulating them? You shouldn’t be able to just go out and hunt them without a license. And should there be a season, like deer season or duck season or partridge season (a.k.a. ruffled grouse)? You’d think so. Would buck-feverish archers in Duluth and Superior want to hunt witches with bows and arrows? Put that thought in your quiver, Cupid.

 

But hold it right there!

 

A quick check of Google will tell you there are still hard-working loyal Americans (aren’t we all?), both women and men, practicing actual witchcraft. These are followers of the various pagan religions, perfectly harmless believers in the occult and black magic and stuff like that.

 

The devil you say? I know it is hard for believers in traditional religions to also believe that others in our midst might actually embrace such things.

 

 

What I’ve been wondering is, are there followers of witchcraft right here in Duluth?

 

Duluth has at least one of everything, I wrote in a column years ago, citing the city’s then only tattoo parlor, a little shop at the time on First Street downtown. Now there must be a dozen, tattoos no longer principally being the result of drunken forays into towns near military installations by armed services personnel in the lower ranks.

 

But I digress. We weren’t discussing tattoos, but rather witch hunts and witches. Still, how the devil are you supposed to identify any witches in our midst? Well, maybe the devil himself knows.

 

Satan and witchcraft seem to go hand in glove. So I called him up on a special “hot” line.

 

“Hey Satan,” I said when he answered from a fiery place called “hell.”

 

“Call me Mephistopheles,” he asserted.

 

“Cripes, that’s harder to spell than Massachusetts,” I complained.

 

“So it is.”

 

“Listen, Beelzebub, I’d sell my soul to the devil to find a witch or two in Duluth to see if they’re scared with all the witch hunts we keep hearing about on television these days,” I asserted rather forcefully.

 

The devil was not pleased at being called by one of his other names, but he let it pass because it’s pretty hard to spell too. Still, he was ill-inclined to accept my Faustian bargain. (Note: Faustian bargains, in which certain individuals offer to sell their souls to the devil in exchange for various things, like a date with Helen of Troy, have fallen out of style in recent years, replaced by other temptations like legal marijuana.)

 

In declining to accept my Faustian bargain, he said, “I don’t want your measly soul, pal, and I don’t keep track of witches in towns. I have other fish to fry, which is pretty easy to do down here.”

 

“Like what?” I inquired.

 

“Don’t you know there’s another American election coming up next year? I had a great time in the last election,” said the devil before abruptly hanging up, declaring he had to get back into “the details,” where he spends much of his time

 

Heavens to Lucifer, too bad he ended the call. I was going to compliment him on his excellent chocolate cake — that’d be devil’s food — and scrumptious “deviled” hard-boiled eggs, and also wish him a happy Halloween. The poor demon hasn’t got that many holidays he can celebrate.

 

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.

Underwater hotel in Two Harbors intrigues...

Written by By Jim Heffernan for The Duluth News Tribune on1-5-22

There’s talk up in Two Harbors about maybe, possibly, building an underwater hotel with an associated submarine. How exciting is that?

 

But first…due to the Internet, this column is sometimes read in other parts of the country, even world, where some readers might not know about quaint Two Harbors. By way of explanation, it is a small shipping, brewing, car sales and tourist hamlet -- to build, or not to build an underwater hotel; that is the question -- along the north shore of Lake Superior, a hop, skip and jump east of Duluth (seems like north, though).

 

As might be deduced, there are two harbors in Two Harbors, but they call them bays. There’s Agate Bay and Burlington Bay. Most of the shipping action is in Agate Bay, where the massive ore dock is, so the underwater hotel would go in Burlington Bay, they say.

 

Who says? Well, the mayor and a mysterious billionaire who is called Mr. O. Oh my goodness. We can only hope his last name is not Omicron.

 

Still, this is certainly an intriguing development even though some leaders in the hamlet are a bit skeptical. You can’t blame them. For one thing, how deep is Burlington Bay? That would determine how many stories the underwater hotel could be. Maybe they should build a single-story underwater motel with boat mooring outside the rooms. I don’t know.

 

Once years ago I was a traveling in Greece, up in the “mountains” (the Alps they ain’t) outside Athens, and stayed in a hotel built on the side of a mountain. You entered the lobby at street level, registered, and then took an elevator DOWN several stories to your room. Very exciting and I slept like a log.

 

I suppose that’s sort of how the Two Harbors Underwater Hotel (THUH) would have to operate, if the rooms were to be in the depths of Burlington Bay. There’s also mention of a submarine involved in some way giving rides to tourists. Fun. Hire Captain Nemo.

 

As a matter of interest (I certainly hope), here’s some esoteric local front submarine background: There was talk of a submarine in Lake Superior during World War II. In an early conspiracy theory, those nasty Nazis from Germany were out to stop America’s valuable shipping of Minnesota’s iron ore for the war effort, some of which passed through Two Harbors itself, as well as Duluth and Superior, of course.

 

The theory posited that the Germans were smuggling submarine parts overland through Canada to a remote area along Lake Superior and assembling an underwater vessel that would sneak down to the Head of the Lakes and torpedo our ore boats. Never happened, of course, but it would make a good movie.

 

I suppose the novelty of spending a night in an underwater hotel would appeal to many tourists. Far be it from me to throw a wet blanket on the idea of an underwater hotel, but they sure would have to be careful about leaks. (I’m not certain the term “wet blanket” is apt here. Sorry.)

 

Bathrooms used to be called “water closets” in polite company. This development could bring them back. In an underwater hotel all closets are water closets, in a manner of speaking.

 

Hotel room windows, of course, would front on Burlington Bay under water. What might visitors see? Well, big fish, I suppose. Coho salmon and the like swimming around worried about their next meal, maybe an occasional creature from the black lagoon or stray mermaid? Exciting.

 

I wish the developers well in spite of all this wising off about it. But we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for it to become a reality. (I’m not sure “hold our breath” is apt in ruminating about an underwater hotel, either.)

 

For the record, there are no black lagoon creatures or mermaids in Lake Superior, last time I checked.

 

The only cost figure floated — yes, floated — so far is $400 million. Would that be per night to stay there, and include a submarine ride? Inquiring minds want to 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. 

Gone with the wind off Lake Superior...

Written by By Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune on August 6, 2021

Some like it hot, they say. I’m one of them. I like it hot, as it has been this rare summer in Duluth and the northland. And we’re just a week into August. Whew.

 How does it happen that a native Duluthian, such as I, could be so fond of hot weather when in most years we get so little of it? That’s exactly why. We traditionally get so little of it that when we do, when the mercury hovers near 90 Fahrenheit, I become elated, but at the same time wary that it could abruptly end.

 

I learned to like it hot in my childhood, listening to my parents decrying the northeast wind’s arrival all too often in summer. That’s the wind, commonly known as the “nor’easter,” that ushers the cool air perpetually hovering over our beloved Lake Superior into our city.

 

You could be enjoying a perfectly lovely day, a southwesterly breeze wafting in nice warm air, when suddenly — oops — the wind would change to a northeaster and the temperature would drop from, maybe 80, to around 57. Ugh. Break out the sweaters and sweatshirts, raise the top of the convertible; it’s going to be cooler near the lake. (More on “Cooler Near the Lake” at the end of this column.)

 

When I was a child growing up in what was known in those ancient times as Duluth’s West End, one of our neighbors had a weathervane atop his garage in the alley behind our house, visible from our small pantry window.

 

It never failed. Even the gentle wafting of the first breaths of a nor’easter wind would reverse the arrow on that weathervane from southwest to northeast and the temperature would start dropping. In our family, we kept our eye on that weathervane whenever we were experiencing a nice warm day, just waiting for the arrow to point toward the lake and change everything. Goodbye nice warm day.

 

Oh, the dread. Oh, the disappointment. Chilly in July. That’s why I like it hot.

 

In my early 20s, when I was on active duty in the Army, I was stationed for a time at Fort Lee in Virginia in July. The weather is always hot south of Richmond, Va., in summer. Back then, there was no air conditioning in the barracks, just large screened windows in case a cool breeze might come up as the troops slept. It seldom did.

 

Fellow soldiers, some from the South, would be writhing in their bunks, sweat pouring from their brows and backs, fitful sleep caused by the unrelenting heat. I, in their midst, would throw a sheet over my boxer shorts-T-shirt clad body and sleep like a…well, I hate to employ a well-worn cliché, but how better to put it than to say I would sleep like a log in the high summer heat of the deep South. (Well, there’s “sleep like a baby” too but everybody knows babies’ sleep isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.)

 

How could a private soldier from the far north sleep soundly through hot summer nights in the South? I always figured that, being from Northern Minnesota, Duluth in particular, I was finally thawing out. 

 

Back here on the home front and recalling way back during my early years, there was one drawback whenever the blessed southerly breezes pushed the cold air back on Lake Superior. The warm wind would invariably be accompanied by a strange odor, a sort of sweet stink. This was universally known as the smell of Cloquet.

 

When you smelled Cloquet, you knew it was going to warm up, making it kind of a mixed blessing. Of course the odor came from Cloquet’s wood industries, their air quality unregulated in those days by the environmental concerns that were invoked later. The ranks of those of us who remember the stink of Cloquet are thinning.

 

Still, it was worth it if the breezes brought warm weather, as far as I was concerned.

 

I have visited the vicissitudes of Duluth weather before in this column. Years ago I composed some light verse with the title “Cooler Near the Lake.” I’ll just reprint the final two verses here, one more time…make that one last time:

 

“I know the day is coming when

The real God’s Country beckons,

And when St. Peter meets me there,

He’ll ask my home, I reckon.

When I tell him it’s Duluth,

He’ll say, “For heaven’s sake,

Ain’t that the place everyone says

Is cooler near the lake?”

 

“That’s it,” I’ll cry, “oh kindly saint,

And in this realm please spare,

From chilly off-lake breezes,

And winter underwear.”

“If it’s heat you want,” he’ll reply,

“In the other place you’ll bake!”

“Fine, send me any place except

Where it’s cooler near the lake.”

 

We’ll see.

 

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

Confessions of a non- marathon runner...

Grandma's Marathon, Duluth MN

Written by by Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune on   June 26, 2021

 

This is being written a few days ago when we here in Duluth were still basking in the warm afterglow of the return of Grandma’s Marathon. Welcome back, Grandma, although I didn’t participate in any way this year, even as spectator.

 

I have in the past, though, and several times greeted our son at the finish line, exhausted but exhilarated. I am always amazed at the thousands of men and woman who run the full or half-marathon. It is beyond my comprehension that anyone would put themselves through that.

 

It’s always been my deeply held conviction that it is beyond human endurance to run 26 point whatever miles. Don’t forget that history tells us the first person to run that distance, in ancient Greece, dropped dead at the end. Doesn’t surprise me one bit.

 

Before I’m judged as a marathon heretic, I should point out that such skepticism is rooted in my generation. Coming of age in the 1950s, our culture back then was motor-driven. Almost nobody ran distances, and not many people were that keen on walking at length either.

 

Garry Bjorklund Half Marathon, Grandma's Marathon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, there were a few kids in high school who participated in cross-country foot racing, sprinting at track meets, relay racing, and the like. These boys were called “Thinclads” when their races were covered by the newspaper, which wasn’t often. I don’t recall girls in school participating in that sort of thing at all. They were busy practicing archery clad in their demure blue one-piece gym outfits.

 

Personally, I tried not to run at all, if I could get away with it. Innate laziness had something to do with it. When I was a kid a neighbor remarked to my mother that I sat around too much. As a teenager I can recall taking the family car to the corner grocery store half a block away from our house. Not every time we needed bread and milk but a few times. I liked to drive.

 

It was the ‘50s, so long ago now.

 

So in the ‘70s when we started to hear about marathons around here (of course Boston had had one for almost 100 years) I was nonplussed. I recalled my active duty Army days in boot camp when sadistic sergeants would order what was called “double time” on forced marches to nowhere. Double time is sort of a trot, half way between walking and out-and-out running. It resembles the pace of most marathon runners.

 

“Hup, two, three double-time” they’d shout intermittently as we marched along well-trod back roads of Fort Lost-In-The-Woods, Mo. (AKA Fort Leonard Wood), sometimes our M-1 rifles (yup, it was that long ago) slung on our shoulders, sometimes with full packs including bedding.

 

This was no place for a lazy kid from Duluth, but what choice did you have? Boys were still subject to the draft in those days. One time as we double-timed along, gasping for breath, one of the recruits near me fell out to the side of the road and collapsed in the ditch. The sergeants thought he was faking it, but when an ambulance was summoned it was taken quite seriously.

 

The next time I saw him was back in the barracks, all decked out in civilian clothes the Army had bought him at the PX. Turns out the Army docs had diagnosed a heart condition he didn’t know he had and they sent him home, his military obligation over. I was jealous.

 

Another thing about that era that might surprise younger people is that a high percentage of the population smoked cigarettes. I was no exception, especially in the Army where cadre would reserve 10 minutes of every hour, saying “light ‘em up.” Nearly everyone did.

 

Cigarette smoking and endurance running do not go hand-in-hand, I need hardly point out. But nobody cared about endurance running anyway. Once a year the Army insisted that everyone run one mile, apparently to prove the troops were in top condition. One mile, I repeat.

 

On the day I was caught up in that nonsense, we were trucked to a quarter-mile oval course on the base and ordered to run around it four times. They didn’t seem to care how long it took, just so we ran a mile.

 

A few of us — four or five friends — took off together trotting in our combat boots as the sergeants at the starting line watched us. When we were across the course from where the sergeants were standing, we slowed to a walk and lit ‘em up, puffed a bit and tossed the butts, after which we trotted past our leaders. I don’t recall my exact time for running the Army mile but I think it was around 11-12 minutes with a couple of Pall Mall cigarettes along the way.

 

Oops, looks like I’m running out of space here in the paper. Did I say “running?” Well, you can’t avoid it entirely. For the record, I quit smoking cigarettes about five years before the first Grandma’s 45 years ago.

 

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.

Hard to get around in Duluth these days...

Minnesota Department of Transportation image

Written by Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune on May 15, 2015

It's a traffic tale of twists and turns that also isn't true. But, you know, it could be.

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

A Duluth man missing for an extended period on a trip through the heart of the city was found yesterday unconscious in his pickup truck right in the center of town.

 

Fred A. Tappet, a western Duluth fishing and lottery enthusiast, became hopelessly lost navigating detours en route to the North Shore for an afternoon of angling.

 

Cam C. Clutch, chief of the Duluth Bureau of Missing Persons, Animals and Autos (DBMPAA), said Tappet had regained consciousness and was doing well in the hospital after going without food for most of his aborted fishing expedition.

 

“He just couldn’t find his way through town due to all the detours,” Clutch reported. “Many people are finding it impossible to get from one end of town to the other because of the many closed roadways due to construction. Even the ambulance carrying Mr. Tappet to the hospital got briefly lost.”

 

Hospital officials report that attendance is down in various wards due to the difficulty of patients attempting to get to their buildings. Several prospective patients simply gave up and went back home. These h non-emergency cases, said a nurse who asked not to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to speak for the institution. Midwives assisting in home births are doing “a land office business,” he said.

 

The lost man, Tappet, 57, an almost retired mechanic and Vietnam-era U.S. Army veteran who was recipient of the Good Conduct Medal, was the subject of a massive search led by DPMPAA personnel and members of his family. He and his wife, Fern, have nine children, most of whom are fully-grown and who branched out through the city in search of Tappet’s pickup. DPMPAA leader Clutch said four of them became temporarily lost themselves in the downtown maze.

 

“Things are really tough if you want to go anywhere in Duluth this spring.” Clutch said. He noted there are major repairs on I-35 related to the demolition and rebuilding of the famous “Can of Worms.” (Appellation is metaphor and only tangentially related to fishing.) Then there’s the replacement of a three-block stretch of downtown Superior Street, the city’s main drag, as well as the Essentia Health building project just east of downtown.

 

There are other detours too, related to roadway construction. Piedmont Avenue, the main local artery to the Piedmont Heights area is closed near its intersection with Superior Street and Garfield Avenue. And lower Michigan Street in the Lincoln Park area of the city has a large section closed off.

 

The search for the lost Tappet reached monumental proportions, involving air, land and water. State highway department helicopters were deployed along with Coast Guard rescue craft that searched shorelines of the St. Louis River estuary, near where Tappet lives, and the shores of Lake Superior near Lester River where the angler was headed.

 

Turns out he never got beyond downtown Duluth.

 

Consenting to a hospital interview via Zoom, Tappet said he first was going to take I-35 not far from where he lives in a modest frame house but was thwarted near 27th Avenue West where a bridge to the Western Lake Superior Sanitary District headquarters is located. That governmental unit said due to the construction it is running short of old paint and poisonous substances usually brought there by local citizens now unable to figure out how to access it.

 

Many people have also used the 27th Avenue West freeway access to visit the central U.S. Post Office nearby. Officials there said mail is way down, only half-filling trucks where it is taken to St. Paul to be postmarked, with local mail trucked back to Duluth. “Never seen anything like this,” said a postal carrier in a crisp gray uniform with a blue stripe on each leg. She declined to be identified for fear of repercussions and reprisals.

 

For his part, Tappet said he had left I-35 in frustration and decided to just plow on through the city center. That was where the serious trouble started. “I’m going up one avenue and down the other following detour signs,” he said. He said he became confused and attempted to make it through alleys, but to no avail.

 

Finally he kept going around one block after another, confused that downtown First Street has been switched to two-way after decades as a one-way thoroughfare. “When’d they do that?” Tappet asked from his hospital bed.

 

The search for Tappet ended when his black pickup truck with a rusty tailgate was spotted on Canal Park Drive near the Club Saratoga, the city’s lone strip joint. “I didn’t go in, though,” Tappet emphasized to his wife, who was worriedly standing by his hospital bed wearing a stars and stripes mask. He added: “How’d we do on Powerball?”

 

Tappet was expected to be released to his wife’s reconnaissance when his strength returns.

 

“Hope we can find our way home,” he sighed.

 

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.

When Tums for the Tummy is not enough...

   

Written by By Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune, September 5, 2020

Let me tell you about my tummy. It ached. Oh how it ached upon awakening one morning a little over a week ago. By the end of that day, it had sent me on a journey that resulted in the first overnight stay (not counting birth) in a hospital in my ever-lengthening life.

Why should you care? You might not, I suppose, but take one lesson from all this: Never ignore a persistent abdominal pain that (A) doesn’t go away the way ordinary tummy aches do, and (B) keeps getting worse as the hours of wondering stretch on.

You could be having an appendicitis attack. I was, that day, but it took awhile to figure out. Tums for the Tummy might be fine under certain circumstances, but not when your appendix is about to burst.

Many of you probably know this. I hardly know anyone who hasn’t had their appendix taken out at one time or another. Well, actually one time, not another. It had better be.

Still, there’s the tendency to think the upset is nothing serious. Maybe spicy food consumed the night before acting up the morning after. Maybe not.

So I reclined in a recliner all day waiting for it to pass, and it didn’t. The pain kept getting more intense. (Not looking for sympathy here; people go through this every day. But I never had.)

Finally, after close to 12 hours of misery, we went to a well-known local hospital emergency department — my wife drove, avoiding potholes and bumps, the jolting of which made the pain worse. The emergency personnel were very nice, making sure I had a normal temperature and asking a lot of questions because there’s some kind of global pandemic going on.

They passed me on to an affable young evening-duty resident physician, his first week on the job, who wanted to know my “history.”

“Well, I was born in a trunk in the Lyceum Theater in du Lhut, Minnesota,” I began.

“Not that far back,” said the good doctor.

What he was interested in was my medical history, which is pretty sparse, I’m happy to say. Still have my tonsils, adenoids, appendix, fingers, toes, the usual stuff. Had to admit to two hernia operations a long time ago, “way back in the 20th Century.” Only time I was ever under a knife, I reported.

Still, the pain in my abdomen persisted, and kept getting worse. A CT scan was ordered; they’re often called “cat” scans. Later I told the surgeon I saw next that I do not like cats. She responded that she has two, and we stared blankly at each other.

By now I’m on a bed with wheels, wearing nothing but one of those flimsy hospital gowns that are open in the back and hard to tie. How often do we see on TV hospital shows patients being wheeled down hospital corridors always looking either miserable or unconscious. I chose to look miserable as I made my personal appearance en route to the cat scan, ambulatory pedestrians passing by looking sympathetically at me to see if they were looking at someone who might be about to expire. Fortunately, only my driver’s license is about to expire.

The CAT scan machine looks like a huge doughnut and you are pushed through the hole so the rumbling machine can take a picture of your stomach. The most interesting aspect of that is they have taught the machine to speak English. “Take a deep breath and hold it,” the machine says in a manly, authoritarian way, followed by “You can breathe now.” There’s a relief.

Somewhere in my absence the machine told the medical personnel that, “This guy is suffering an acute appendicitis attack,” and surgery was scheduled. First they had to finish operating on another unfortunate bloke who had the same problem.

In the meantime, a Covid 19 test must be given. With a chopstick size poker a kindly nurse told me to be prepared for the poker to go through my nose “all the way back to your brain.” So I opened my mouth. I just wasn’t myself, but she corrected me and did poke it through my nose all the way back to my brain, which I was pleased to know, was still there. I didn’t know it was in my nose, although that wouldn’t surprise some people I have known.

Ninety minutes later, after testing negative for Covid, I was being rolled through the corridor once again to the brightly lighted operating room where a friendly anesthesiologist greeted me and introduced me to his assistant. They would put me “out like a light.”

“You guys still use whiskey, right?” I inquired. I’ve seen a lot of Western movies in my day.

Suddenly, adios. The next thing I knew I was back in a regular hospital room, the operation long over, and a bright new day had dawned. Felt pretty good under the circumstances with pain medicine being pumped into my arm through an IV. Bless the registered nurses… and register the blessed nurses.

Since my wife couldn’t accompany me through the corridors before the operation due to that pesky pandemic, she was sent home with the promise that the surgeon would telephone her when it was over and report how it had gone.

She — the surgeon — called our home at 4 a.m. and told my wife the operation had gone well, all was expected to be fine and that my late appendix was “one of the three largest I have ever seen.”

Well, how do you like that. Lived all these years with a prize appendix and never had bragging rights. I returned home later that day, although I wouldn’t say none the worse for wear.

That is how the only overnight I have ever spent as an adult in a hospital went. And I didn’t even sleep…the regular way.

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.  

Where have all the phone booths gone?

By Jim Heffernan           

Here’s an old limerick:

There was an old maid from Duluth,

Who wept when she thought of her youth,

Remembering the chances

She had at school dances,

And once in a telephone booth.

Telephone booth? Telephone booths today are as rare as referring to women who choose not to marry as old maids.

Last week the New York Times reported that only four outdoor telephone booths remain in Manhattan, concentrated on the upper West Side. A technology company maintains them, apparently because residents of the neighborhood like them and because they are the last ones.

I don’t suppose most in the Millennial Generation have ever seen one or that Generation Xers have ever used one, having seen them only in old Superman movies showing the Man of Steel transforming from suit-clad Clark Kent into the caped crusader in telephone booths. How handy that was.

Let me say for the record, though, that even in Duluth, telephone booths were once more ubiquitous than old maids. You could find them all over the place in the downtown, and in outlying areas as well. Before cell phones, pay phones, most often found in aluminum booths, were the only way to call someone when away from home.

Because the phone in my family home was located right next to the living room, where others could easily overhear, I used to make some personal calls from telephone booths, often to make dates with young maids. It cost a dime then.

Leave it to New York City to be the last bastion of the telephone booth in America. At one time, there was one on every block, at least in Midtown. But good luck trying to use one.

Once, years ago, when I was in New York for an extended period, I got word of the death of a relative, and wanted to call home to learn more about it. Roving around Midtown, I went to a nearby phone booth only to find it had been vandalized – probably robbed – and didn’t work. No problem, there was another booth a block up the avenue. Oops, same thing. Receiver torn from its wire too. Well, there was another booth nearby, a ways up the street. Unfortunately, same thing. I couldn’t find a functioning phone in a half dozen booths, and finally gave up. 

So now New York is down to four and Duluth has none that I know of. I don’t carry a cell phone and recently I looked for an indoor pay phone at Miller Hill Mall here. There used to be a couple in the main corridor. Gone.

Fortunately I ran into a woman I know who carried a cell phone she let me use. She’s a widow now, but has no reason to weep when she thinks of her youth, having had plenty of chances at school dances, but probably never in a telephone booth.