A look back at newspaper, city history...

DNT City Editors, Jim Heffernan & Bob Knaus
& summer interns posing by printing press. 1972

Written by By Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune, DNT Extra edition Inside Scoop: Memorable Northland events as told by the News Tribune Journalists who covered them, in print on Wednesday, August 27, 2020 

October 1963: John F. Kennedy was president–but wouldn’t be for long. Queen Elizabeth was on the throne of England–had been for about a decade. Fidel Castro was roiling the Caribbean. Closer to home, downtown Duluth was the center of local commerce–there was no Miller Hill Mall. Oh, and I began a job as a reporter for this newspaper.

 

This newspaper at the time was really two newspapers under the same roof–the morning Duluth News Tribune and the evening Duluth Herald. (A widely shared joke in those days called them The Morning Liar and the Evening Repeater). It amounted to the publication of 13 newspapers a week–seven News Tribunes and six Heralds–delivered to the doorsteps of tens of thousands of Northland subscribers by school kids eager to make a few bucks. 

Now, back to the present, in a couple of weeks, daily home delivery of this one remaining newspaper ends; publication scales back to two papers a week–Wednesdays and Saturdays–arriving in the mail. Of course the newspaper’s coverage continues daily–even hourly–on line. Times change.

 

Jim Heffernan in DNT newsroom
circa mid 60's

Back in 1963 when I walked into the newspaper building (currently for sale) it was a pretty big operation, employing hundreds in the plant, a couple dozen in the news and sports departments. I was totally unprepared. I hadn’t majored in journalism in college nor had I worked on school papers. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life, so actually being hired someplace was welcome. So was the 75 bucks a week.

 

About a month before I showed up at the paper, having recently returned from active Army duty, my Duluth National Guard unit was involved in “guarding” President Kennedy on his visit here. About a month after I began my job at this paper as a general assignment reporter, I was involved in local coverage of Kennedy’s assassination. Things were moving real fast.

 

They were moving real fast throughout Duluth too. When I began my journalism career the newspaper was located where it is now, Fifth Avenue West and First Street. The back of our building, where they loaded our delivery trucks, was across the alley from the back of the magnificent old Lyceum Theater in its last days in a run that had begun in 1891. Across Superior Street from the Lyceum’s imposing facade the stately Spalding Hotel, a contemporary of the Lyceum, still stood, but had recently closed.

 

Across Fifth Avenue West stood the Holland Hotel, still in operation but its days were numbered too, along with the Fifth Avenue Hotel, across Superior Street from the Holland. The Radisson is now where the Holland was and the Duluth Public Library is on the Fifth Avenue Hotel site, in a block considered the city’s “bowery,” locus of the oxymoronic Classy Lumberjack tavern.

 

A few blocks east on Superior Street there were several department stores, the most prominent being the Glass Block. Across the street was Wahl’s and kitty-corner Montgomery Ward had a sizable store. A little farther east was Oreck’s and Sears operated in a building that is now a casino. In between were myriad specialty stops offering everything from sports equipment to clothing for women and men, to shoes only, luggage–anything anybody might need.

 

There were also several movie theaters, and we can’t overlook various bars and restaurants nestled in among everything else. One, called The Flame, was operating on the bayfront at the foot of Fifth Avenue West, site of the aquarium today. It was Duluth’s classiest eatery, always with entertainment–dining and dancing, as they used to put it. Across the avenue, also on the waterfront, site preparation for the Duluth Arena Auditorium was getting under way. It opened in 1966.

 

And towering over all this were the banking facilities, business and medical offices, some of them where they are today but with different names. What is now Miller Hill Mall was a golf driving range, which went up in the 1950s on undeveloped land.

 

That’s not all. There were major bustling industries, including the Duluth Works of United States Steel, called American Steel and Wire, employing thousands at its Morgan Park location. Clyde Iron in the West End was multi-decades away from becoming a restaurant. Up over the hill, the U.S. Air Force had established a major air base to ward off enemy attacks from the Soviet Union (now Russia) during the Cold War. Many Air Force personnel from warmer climates found out in Duluth just how cold the war could be.

 

The University of Minnesota Duluth (known then as the Duluth Branch of the University of Minnesota) had around 2,000 students, maybe 1,999 after I left the previous year. There are upwards of 10,000 now.

 

That was Duluth in 1963 when I became a reporter and where I have continued an association with the daily newspaper in one form or another to this day.

 

Not in our wildest imagination at that time could we ever foresee the newspaper business changing nationally the way it has. Here and elsewhere it was an institution, like the seats of government across the street from our building in the Duluth Civic Center.

 

When I showed up in the newsroom, many, if not most, of the other men–yes, men–had served in World War II. What about women? There were two: the “society” editor and her assistant. They worked during the day; those of us on the morning Tribune worked evenings and nights. Evening Herald workers were leaving as we arrived.

 

We wrote our stories using manual Royal typewriters on leftover newsprint from the press downstairs. Electric typewriters had been invented, of course, but the newspaper management at the time was not quick to upgrade. I could recognize my desk in old newspapering movies from the 1930s.

 

Those World War II vets used the hunt and peck system of typing, but they were fast. I had taken typing in high school and the first night on the job I was asked by the city editor if I could type. When I said I could he said I had half the battle won. I didn’t, but it was encouraging.

 

Yup, things change. About all I can think of that hasn’t, for the purposes of this column, are I am still here, and Elizabeth is still queen.

 

It’s been quite a ride for both of us.

 

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. 

 

Day of JFK assassination still a vivid memory...

By Jim Heffernan

Someone said on National Public Radio this week that very few journalists who were working when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated are still active today, the 50^th anniversary of the tragedy.

I’m not as active as I used to be, but I’m still doing some writing, including for this blog. When Kennedy was murdered, I had been a working journalist for just over a month, which I recounted in a column for the Duluth News Tribune back on the 30^th anniversary of the assassination. That column, which was included in my book Cooler Near the Lake, is reprinted here (see below).

I can add a couple of experiences I had on that momentous day that are not included in that column. When I arrived for my afternoon shift at the Duluth Herald & News Tribune, a “cub” reporter if there ever was one, the newsroom was chaotic. Assigning editors were frantic to “localize” the story, since Kennedy had visited Duluth just two months before.

I was given two assignments: Check WDSM-TV and Radio, sponsors of the annual Christmas City of the North Parade, to determine if that night’s parade would be canceled, and then call mayors of Northeastern Minnesota cities and towns for a reaction to the news of the president’s death.

Taking first things first, I contacted WDSM, which, at the time was owned by the same company that owned the newspapers. The parade would go on as scheduled, I was told. I was flabbergasted.

But WDSM and its TV Channel 6 came to its senses within a short time, calling back to announce that the parade would be canceled after all. Thus they missed their chance at the national spotlight: “As nation mourns, Duluth holds festive holiday parade,” the headline might have been.

So much for that. My second assignment, calling as many area mayors as I could reach, wasn’t much more successful. The reason? They all said pretty much the same thing, summarized here:

Question: Mr. Mayor, what is your reaction to the assassination of President Kennedy?

Universal answer: This is a terrible tragedy. I’m shocked.

Years later I looked up the News Tribune of Nov. 23, 1963, to see what I had written. Buried deep inside the paper is a short article about the reaction of area mayors, naming several expressing their shock at the terrible tragedy.

Now here’s what I wrote 30 years later about another aspect of my role as a working journalist on that fateful day.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~                           

JFK: Four Presidential Assassinations in Three Generations

By Jim Heffernan

Originally appeared in the Duluth News Tribune on Sunday, November 21, 1993 
and reprinted in the book, Cooler Near the Lake, by Jim Heffernan in November, 2008

My paternal grandfather, whose life overlapped mine by just two years, was 10 years old when Lincoln was assassinated. In my grandfather’s lifetime, two other presidents also were murdered–James Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley in 1901. My father was born 29 years after the Lincoln assassination–a year short of the time that has now elapsed since President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed 30 years ago tomorrow.

In my father’s lifetime, two presidents were assassinated: McKinley near the beginning of his life, and Kennedy near the end. He was too young to remember much about McKinley, and I broke the news to him about Kennedy.

Why all this ancient history now? Aside from this being the anniversary of the JFK assassination, it shows that such acts are not quite as rare as we tend to think. Four murdered American presidents in three generations of one family is taking them out at quite a rate.

The day Kennedy was shot, I had been a working journalist for 35 days, counting weekends. Call it a month’s experience. Labeling me a journalist at that stage of my career is extravagant. But my title was reporter, and proud of it.

Everyone over five or six years of age on Nov. 22, 1963, remembers what they were doing when they heard Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. A few of us get to share those memories publicly. I share mine to recall my failure to do what I should have done as a newspaper reporter on what was arguably the biggest breaking news story of the century.

I was asleep when the assassination occurred. Working nights on the morning Duluth News Tribune, I had already slipped into the out late, sleep late lifestyle of my fellow nightside journalists. So I was still in bed, sound asleep, about 35 minutes past noon that Friday when the ringing of the telephone jolted me awake. It was my aunt, Elsa, who had been watching “As the World Turns” when the soap opera was interrupted with a bulletin that shots had been fired at the president. I clicked on our TV, and CBS had returned to “As the World Turns,” but not for long. Within a moment of my tuning in, Walker Cronkite was there in his shirtsleeves confirming that shots had been fired from a grassy knoll and the president’s limousine had sped away.

Here are some of my thoughts: “Wow! Big story. Wonder if they know about it down at the paper. You’re a reporter, check and see. Don’t be silly–of course the newspaper knows. They’d think I was stupid to call and be mad I interrupted them.”

My father was at work as a photo engraver at the newspaper, so I decided to call him. By then it must have been about 12:50 p.m. When my father answered, I said something like, ‘Boy, big story about Kennedy getting shot, huh?” I phrased it so that, if he already knew, it wouldn’t seem like I thought I was breaking the news. But I breaking the news. Busy working on the evening Duluth Herald, he said he’d heard nothing about it in the third-floor engraving department.

That made me wonder if I really should call the second-floor newsroom. If they didn’t know about it in other parts of the building, maybe the news editors didn’t know either. But I didn’t call.

I should have called the first time. The Herald used to go to press about noon. A normal Friday edition was humming off the press when the assassination occurred. The Associated Press was on top of the story, but they couldn’t get printed information out on the wire as quickly as TV networks could interrupt with bulletins.

By the time the Herald editors finally received a written bulletin on the wire and literally stopped the presses (the only time in 30 years I’ve seen that happen), it was about 1 p.m. or shortly after. An hour later, when I arrived for my work shift, I was told that if I had called at, say, 12:40, it would have saved thousands of papers and precious minutes preparing a new Herald for that day. “I wish you had called,” lamented the news editor. The papers already run off were scrapped and the edition started over with the assassination dominating the front page.

That’s my story of the day Kennedy was shot.  I’d been in the newspaper business a month and in my own way I had already blown the assassination of a president. Some reporter. Some future.

Smelt memories...

Dan Kraker, Minnesota Public Radio reporter, interviewed me for a Duluth smelt run piece that aired yesterday. I'm on air very briefly but we had a fun time at the Duluth Grill discussing the glory of the smelt runs long ago. He did a nice job of covering that era while bringing in how smelt still infiltrate our region. You can check that out HERE.

Of course, I still remember those wonderful and crazy days when camp fires dotted the beaches and river mouths and beer drinking partiers from near and far collided every spring to cast seines or dip nets to easily scoop up as many smelt as desired. It formed a party atmosphere with great and free eating. And it was good for the tourist economy.

I tried to capture that atmosphere in a column I wrote in the Duluth News Tribune and used it in my book, Cooler Near the Lake. I thought I'd reprint it below in honor of spring in Duluth and the smelt runs of the past and present.

 My wife and I still get in our smelt dinners every spring by traveling to the Tappa Keg in West Duluth where fresh smelt are lightly battered and very delicious.

Smelt Memories: Are They Fact or Fancy?

by Jim Heffernan

Where’s the smelt?

Somebody asked me the other night when I was going to write my annual smelt column, and I had to admit that I hadn’t even thought of doing one this year. Maybe I forgot because the smelt forgot to come.

 I’m getting the impression in recent years that the smelt themselves are tired of the annual ritual. They seem to be looking elsewhere for their spring kicks.

 As many of us who remember the halcyon days of smelting know, it wasn’t always that way. Newcomers to Duluth would have difficulty understanding what mania the arrival of the smelt used to cause back in the early days of smelt running.

 I was attempting to describe it to someone who recently moved to Duluth and I found myself doubting what I was saying. I had that eerie feeling one sometimes gets that I had dreamed it all, and then confused the dream with reality.

 So I thought I’d check myself with readers who might have the same memories as mine.

 Is it a fact, or is it fantasy, when I seem to recall that Park Point, and not the North Shore, was the focus of the smelt run in the early days? Didn’t thousands of people used to converge on the point during the run and fish with huge net seines? And wasn’t there a bonfire, often fueled with old tires, about every 20 feet for the length of the point?

 I was pretty young, but I remember looking across the lake from a location near Leif Erikson Park and seeing so many bonfires on the beach that it looked like all of Park Point was on fire. What happened to that? I’m only asking.

 And when the weather was rough on the lake side of the point, didn’t the multitudes shift over to the bay side with their seines, some substituting dip nets, and wade far out into harbor waters–almost to the ship channels–in search of smelt? I remember doing that once on a smelt excursion with my father. I think I remember it, or was it a dream?

 Do I recall that you didn’t need a Minnesota fishing license, no matter what your age, to smelt fish? Didn’t that bring just about every man, woman and child in Minnesota and the four states surrounding it to Duluth? Didn’t they cause traffic jams on London Road extending from the Lester River to the Jay Cooke statue? Did that happen, or was it just that I was younger and everything seemed bigger then?

 Didn’t roving bands of young people get drunked up on 3.2 beer and pillage, if not rape, everything in sight? Weren’t enough empty beer cans strewn along the shore and Park Point to provide sufficient metal to build three destroyers and a battlewagon?

 Weren’t the police put on double duty to make a stab at keeping order, and the traffic moving, and didn’t they always lose the battle? Did the Chamber of Commerce hook up a statewide smelt information alert line for outstate people to call for up-to-the-minute reports on the smelt run, or did I dream that?

 Didn’t the Duluth Herald and the News Tribune (there were two papers then) composing room overnight smelting party at Lester River each year turn every printer into a devil, and cause four-score worried wives to sit up all night in rocking chairs at home clutching rosaries and praying? Did I imagine all that?

 Speaking of the newspaper, didn’t each edition come out with four-column pictures of the hordes at Lester River, and didn’t occasional 84-point (War Declared-size) headlines announce that some men had given up their lives in pursuit of smelt. That happened, didn’t it?

 Didn’t I see a neighbor lady come home from smelting and dump huge buckets of smelt directly into her garden for fertilizer? Wasn’t the peak of the run the biggest night of the year for the liquor stores–eclipsing New Year’s?

 I’m not complaining that all this appears to have come to an end, mind you. I’m only asking if it really happened the way I recall it, or was it all a dream?

Originally appeared in the Duluth News Tribune on Wednesday, May 9, 1984

­and re-printed in my book, Cooler Near the Lake, published in 2008 by X-Communication.

Nuke plant on Lake Superior near Duluth once proposed...

By Jim Heffernan
We’ll never know how close we came to having a nuclear power plant just outside Duluth along the North Shore near Knife River, but rest assured it was once proposed.

I clearly recall the day at the old Duluth (evening) Herald, where I was working in the 1960s, when we were informed that a nuclear power plant was being considered at that location because the cold waters of Lake Superior would be perfect for cooling a nuclear reactor.

We’re hearing a lot now about the possible melt downs in Japan partly because the earthquake and tsunami have knocked out the ability to pump cooling water from the sea into the reactors.

But, in those days long before the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl catastrophes, and a bit before the environmental movement got up and running, Lake Superior seemed an ideal source of cold water for such a facility.

Somewhere in the archives of the Duluth newspaper, most likely in the microfilm record of all Duluth papers, the newspaper with this momentous announcement – with a banner headline extending across the entire top of the front page – lies the record of this short-lived proposal.

At the time, I had the impression that everyone was jubilant. It would mean jobs. It’s always jobs. After all, that’s why they carved up the shore of Lake Superior at Silver Bay a decade earlier for a taconite plant, and then dumped waste from the plant into the lake for a generation.

I believe Minnesota Power and Light (they later dropped the “and Light”) was involved and Minnesota U.S. Sen. Hubert Humphrey was prominent in making the announcement. This is all based on nearly 50 years of recollection, but it happened.

The History of Pizza in Duluth as I know it...

By Jim Heffernan

My life in pizza actually began in Chicago, when I was 12 years old.....Some of those restaurants featured “pizza,” a word I had never seen before, and I had to ask what it was. An Italian pie, my Chicago relatives said, but they didn’t eat it. They were Scandinavian, and in those days – the very early 1950s – things Italian and things Scandinavian didn’t mix that well, in food and in church.

Sammy's Pizza

It might come as a surprise to today’s generations that there are still people alive – me, for instance – who remember when there was almost no pizza available in Duluth.

Pizza didn’t become widely available in Duluth until about the mid-50s, or maybe just before that. I am aware of only one Duluth restaurant that served pizza among many other Italian dishes on its menu before that time. That restaurant was the Gopher Grill when it was located downtown on the second floor of a long-gone building on the north side of Superior Street between Fourth and Fifth avenues West, with a stairway entrance on Superior Street.

I only found out about the Gopher Grill’s pizza after other pizza outlets had opened, especially Sammy’s on First Street at First Avenue West.

Why all this now? Because I realized recently that never a week goes by that I don’t eat pizza in some form – fresh, frozen, reheated, bake your self. Sometimes pizza enters my life more than once a week. I almost always welcome it, but, of course, not all pizza is created equal.

These pizza thoughts prompted me to recall the first time I tasted pizza, and then the pizza memories began to flow.

My life in pizza actually began in Chicago, when I was 12 years old. We were visiting relatives and they lived in a neighborhood – Halsted Street not too far from the Loop – where several restaurants and bars were located. Some of those restaurants featured “pizza,” a word I had never seen before, and I had to ask what it was. An Italian pie, my Chicago relatives said, but they didn’t eat it. They were Scandinavian, and in those days – the very early 1950s – things Italian and things Scandinavian didn’t mix that well, in food and in church.

Then, toward the mid-1950s, a place called the “Pizzaria” opened on First Street in downtown Duluth, probably around First or Second avenues East, which is where I first tasted pizza. I was wary of it, sampled it, and didn’t like it one bit. Too spicy. I’m half Scandinavian and the rest northern European, and the cuisine served in my home was fairly bland, although my Swedish mother served a tasty spaghetti we all enjoyed.

By then I was in high school, prowling around Duluth with my friends in our family Ford, a lifestyle that opened many new horizons, including eating different foods I was not used to such as Coney Islands.

In 1955, when I turned 16, I went to work at the Duluth Herald & News Tribune as a Saturday night laborer in the mailing room. It was the worst job I have ever had, toiling to put together the various sections of the Sunday newspaper as they ran off the press, and pushing them out the alley door onto the trucks that transported the news throughout the region, from Ironwood, Mich., to International Falls, Minn., with Duluth-Superior in between. I hated it.

But one night, at our 9:30 p.m. “lunch” break (our shift ran from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m. if the press didn’t break down0, one of the workers showed up carrying a paper-wrapped pizza pie he’d picked up at newly opened Sammy’s Pizza. He sat on a stack of newspapers holding the cardboard disc the carry-out pizza came on and offered me a piece. I knew I wouldn’t like it because of my experience at the Pizzaria (which the arrival of Sammy’s from Hibbing apparently put out of business), but instead it was a revelation. The pepperoni, the cheese, the tomato sauce -- I was hooked after one square piece. Sammy’s has always insisted on cutting its pies in squares instead of the wedges most pizza restaurants feature.

The rest is history. Sammy’s reigned supreme in Duluth for several years, opening outlets in West Duluth and Superior and other places, but as the ‘50s became the ‘60s other pizza outlets began to compete – Shakey’s, Pizza Hut, several other local pizza “palaces” (for some unknown reason pizza restaurants were often referred to as palaces, which none of them were) like Frank’s and Dave’s. At the same time, home-baked package pizza meals like Chef Boyardee became available and frozen pizza, followed more recently by “bake it yourself”, flooded the supermarkets and strip malls.

Pizza is everywhere, here and throughout America and Canada and Europe, where it all began but in vastly different form. Once, visiting Paris, France, I ordered pizza in a Champs Elysses restaurant and it came with a poached egg in the middle. Very good, though. I like poached eggs too.

The worst pizza I ever ate was not in a restaurant, but at the family cabin many, many years ago when a friend and I, craving pizza, brought a Chef Boyaree ingredient box along only to realize the cabin didn’t have a pizza pan to bake it on. Employing ingenuity only Americans can muster, we scrubbed the garbage can cover clean in the lake and made our pizza in that. I’ll say this for it: It was round.

There’s undoubtedly much more to the history of pizza in Duluth, and I’ve probably left out some prominent pizza palaces, but this is how I recall it. Maybe you have different memories. Go ahead and put them on the blog or Facebook.

Hmmm. Getting kind of hungry for lunch. Maybe there’s some left over pizza in the fridge from or visit to Sammy’s West Duluth the other night.

NorShor Theatre remembered...

The NorShor Theatre picture (above) is one of the pictures given to me in the 70's by George Brown, then manager of the theatre. This picture and others in my collection have been widely circulated. Note the marquis for the first movie shown in the theatre after the remodeling of the Orpheum (original entry and facade on the avenue) was transformed into the NorShor: Hold Back the Dawn with Charles Boyer and Paulette Goddard. 

Paul Lundgren contributed a short history of Duluth's NorShor Theatre in the Perfect Duluth Day blog. The Orpheum building (former Orpheum Theatre) that houses the NorShor turns 100 this year and that inspired Paul to write about it. Check out the PDD site HERE for more from Paul about that history.

Tony Dierckins, local publisher and historian, commented on PDD about the vintage pictures of the NorShor I shared with him and also with Laura Ness who compiled a NorShor history piece for the Zeppa Foundation a few years ago. Tony hopes to publish some of those pictures on his web site soon so stay tuned at his site, http://www.x-communication.org, to see those pictures.

Here are my comments on PDD reflecting more on the old NorShor...
Yes, Tony D. has my cache of interior and exterior pictures taken at the time of the grand reopening when the Orpheum became the NorShor; also interior and exterior shots of the Orpheum before it was remodeled. The photos were given to me by the late George Brown, long-time NorShor manager at the time of his retirement in the 1970s. A couple of the shots are of the premiere at the Norshor in the late 1940s of a movie set in old Duluth called “Woman of the North Country.” Filmed in Hollywood with matte-drawing backdrops of old wooden ore docks, It starred Rod Cameron and Ruth Hussey, and the photo shows Cameron alighting from the airplane in Duluth, not Charles Boyer or either Paulette Goddard or Olivia DeHavilland. They didn’t come to Duluth for the opening of the Norshor, but Boyer and Goddard were stars of the first movie shown in the newly remodeled theater, “Hold Back the Dawn.” Tony D. might want to correct that. One star of the Boyer, Goddard, DeHavilland magnitude did appear in person at the Norshor: Ingrid Bergman. She came here to sell war bonds during WW II and gave a sales pitch from the NorShor stage before motoring to the Riverside shipyards to speak to workers. As Paul Lundgren points out, it’s all in those old Duluth News Tribunes on microfilm at the library. Also Duluth Herald. Remember that?”

Here's an anecdote going back to the building's Orpheum days (1911-1940): I once came across a Duluth newspaper review of a popular stage play of the early 1930s, "The Barretts of Wimpole Street," playing at the Orpheum, that listed Orson Welles among cast members in the role of a juvenile. Welles was born in 1915 (thank you Google), so he must have been 16 or 17 when he toured with the play, including its stop in Duluth.

Note: In my book, Cooler Near the Lake, I include a column about the NorShor–a memory piece about what it was like to see a movie at that theatre in its heyday.