Einstein kin had role in Duluth fluoride fight...

Written by Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/7-5-25

Yikes! The fluoride-in-the-drinking-water issue is back! And I don’t use exclamation points indiscriminately (there goes two). I allow myself about a dozen a year. But I can’t help it because the fluoridation issue was so large a part of my early professional life, if you can call a neophyte “cub” newspaper reporter a professional. I really shouldn’t.

 

I came to work at this newspaper in the first half of the 1960s and ran smack-dab into the same fluoridation issue that is roiling the country now, but back then was hot right here in Duluth, and even involved Albert Einstein. (More on that later.)

 

 It shows, once again, that the more things change the more they stay the same. Except for diapers, of course.

 

Local leaders had decided that Duluth water should be fluoridated to prevent tooth decay, especially in children. Many citizens opposed such an idea as dangerous to the health of children and adults, regardless of race, color, creed, national origin, foot size or eye color (that’s everybody).

 

And now these disagreements are back, thanks largely to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s Trump-appointed health secretary and leading cod liver oil advocate. He has vociferously inveighed against fluoride, claiming it is unsafe for human consumption. Fluoride has already been outlawed in many venues: Fluorida — oops, Florida — and Utah have banned it in public water systems statewide.

 

Hmmm…I wonder what else those states have in common. Not weather.

 

I actually recall Duluth’s fluoridation fight with some fondness. Youthful memories are often golden. I worked nights in my new job at this newspaper, learning as I went along. I hadn’t majored in journalism in college so I had a lot to learn. My basket-weaving background was inadequate preparation.

 

But working evenings for the morning paper (there were two, six days a week — called by some the Morning Liar and Evening Repeater. I was assigned to cover numerous gatherings where fluoridation was debated, feeling like a big cheese reporter already. City officials would praise fluoridation by extolling its positive effect on the teeth of children as they grew up, and adults as they aged.

 

Opponents considered fluoride in our drinking water a poison that would destroy everyone’s health. Evil communism was even blamed. There was word that dentists feared it would put them out of business, but the opponents had only one dentist who would speak out publicly.

 

So off I’d go in a peppy press car to various public meetings with notebook in hand — community clubs and other meeting places where the two sides could fight it out. Many were quite well attended by people representing each side, together with others just wanting to hear what it was all about. Then I’d race back to the newspaper and, to the best of my fledgling ability, write it up for the morning edition.

 

My most memorable moment in this crusade was at a large community club meeting attended, in spirit, by Albert Einstein, thanks to one of the most strident Duluth opponents. The wife of a high-level city official, she led the antis, strongly condemning fluoridation at every opportunity. You wonder how that marriage was going, with her husband’s employer plugging it.

 

After covering the public meeting, as I was about to leave, she stopped me to further emphasize her anti-fluoride views. Her main point to me was that Albert Einstein’s nephew opposed fluoridating water, the implication, of course, being that: 1) Albert Einstein was the smartest man in the world; 2) his nephew must, perforce, be very smart too; 3) the nephew opposes fluoridation, and 4) therefore Duluth should not fluoridate its water.

 

It was different theory of relativity than the one Albert Einstein was famous for. You never know what your relatives might do.

 

All of this came to an end here in 1967 when the Minnesota Legislature passed a law requiring fluoridation of all municipal water systems. Duluth complied and I’ve been drinking it ever since, and that’s a long, long time. 

 

Hold it! Let me check my pulse.

 

The city of Brainerd, Minn., resisted, though. The fluoridation fight continued there for almost 15 years with that city finally complying in 1980, much to the chagrin of many no-Brainerdites.

 

Finally, and for the record, of course I moved on from those neophyte years and became a seasoned journalist, covering many of the important stories throughout the Northland. In recognition of that, I was once awarded the Pullet Surprise for outstanding reporting on the rooster and hen competition at the Carlton County Fair.

 

But I hate to boast.

 

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.

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.

Oppenheimer film brings back A-bomb memories...

Bombing of Nagasaki, Japan/8-6-1945/Wikipedia

Written by By Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune/Saturday, 9-2-23

I was five years old that summer when the Atomic Age was unleashed upon our world — the world I would grow up in.

It seemed exciting. Big bomb. I was used to hearing about bombs and bombing. The first five years of my life were a time history recalls as “World War II.” I came into consciousness during that very period.

But the atomic bomb was different. I had no grasp of the human tragedy when two of those bombs were dropped on Japan. I recall the jubilation here in America, in my family and in my home town Duluth, that the war was over, thanks to the atomic bomb.

No more rationing of sugar (jam was hard to come by) or gasoline for our car, or tires. Peace and prosperity had arrived (although at that age I wouldn’t have been able to put it that way), and we’d all live happily ever after, just like the characters in my storybooks.

Didn’t happen, did it.

These ruminations were prompted by the popular movie “Oppenheimer.” I recall my parents looking at the stark headlines in the Duluth newspapers and talking about this atomic bomb when it was first detonated (the subject of the movie) and then a couple of weeks later dropped to end the war. It seemed exciting to my five-year-old mind, but also scary.

Not to worry though. Of course it could never happen to America, to Duluth, to our neighborhood, to us. We would always be safe here. Of that I was confident. But maybe not as confident as I seemed.

Later that summer (the bombs were dropped in August 1945) I was playing on the front porch of our family home in what was then known as the West End neighborhood. I suppose I was pushing toy cars around, or something of that sort. My mother was inside the house, keeping an eye on me from time to time through the screen door. It was a beautiful late summer day.

But my contented play was abruptly interrupted by a horrifying sight. Glancing skyward toward the ridge of the western Duluth hillside, there suddenly appeared what was, to my young mind, an atomic bomb. An atomic bomb right here in Duluth.

It was huge (atomic bombs had to be huge, right?) and shaped like a giant bullet but pointy on both ends like a humongous football. And it moved slowly over the Duluth hilltop skyline right toward our house. The Atomic Age had materialized before my young eyes.

I cried out and ran into the house and the safety of my mother, who didn’t immediately understand what had alarmed me so. I must have said the atomic bomb is coming. The atomic bomb is coming.

She darted to the porch with me in tow, looked skyward and saw my atomic bomb. It was a blimp, or dirigible, or Zeppelin as they are sometimes called. It slowly glided overhead and continued southeastward out of our sight.

Safe.  She consoled me by explaining it was just a friendly aircraft shaped like an elongated balloon. On with my happy childhood.

But I never forgot it (to wit this column). And it was the first realization that maybe our world isn’t as safe as one thinks in early childhood. There have been quite a few wars since, and our main adversaries — sometimes enemies — all got the bomb before I fully grew up, but no nuclear bombs have been used. Yet.

I didn’t know then what was in store as the years went on, of course. I had to get through first grade…and the Atomic Age.

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. 

To TOOT or not to TOOT was the question...

Source Flickr: Photographer is Apollo Antonin (8-6-21)

Written by Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune/July 23, 2022

An item in this newspaper’s Bygones column the other day brought back a couple of memories: Once upon a time Duluth harbor had a loud foghorn that could be heard far and wide before it died, and its attempted return 40 years ago got me on national television.

 

Fond memories indeed.

 

Modern technology sometime after mid-20th Century obviated the need for a foghorn at all. Today’s maritime communications are such that ships enveloped by fog off our shores can find their way into port without having an ancient mariner in a Southwester rain hat standing at the bow, his hand capping his ear, an albatross overhead, listening for our foghorn.

 

It’s been a long time but I will try to convey as best I can in print what the foghorn sounded like. It had two levels that went together, booming thusly: OOOOOM-pah…OOOOOM-pah. The OOOOOM rendered a higher tone, the pah a little lower. Got that? It resounded throughout the inner city and beyond whenever the fog rolled in “on little cat feet,” as the poet put it

 

The number of Duluthians who recall hearing the old foghorn is getting smaller and smaller with each passing year. Of course. Read the obits.

 

But Eric Ringsred remembers it, and did, back in 1982 when he tried valiantly to bring the foghorn back for, oh, I don’t know, for auld lang syne, I suppose. Ringsred, a physician and civic activist who usually advocates saving historic buildings, must have liked the sound of the foghorn, as did tens of thousands of Duluthians within earshot. Unfortunately a good number of folks within earshot did not care for it at all. It disturbed their sleep, many claimed.

 

Growing up in what was once known as Duluth’s West End neighborhood, I could hear it when the wind was right. I never questioned it; it was simply part of Duluth. When it disappeared I didn’t really notice.

 

Ringsred did, and decided to bring it back. He initiated a campaign to refurbish the old “diaphone” foghorn (its technical description) and formed an organization he called “reTurn Our Old Tone” going by the acronym TOOT. Not bad. And a summer Fog Festival was organized to help raise funds for restoring the old foghorn and celebrate its return.

 

As with some other of Ringsred’s projects, it created some amount of controversy pitting those for bringing it back against those who never wanted to hear the old TOOT again. Like every other controversy, it played itself out, and eventually died. The result was no diaphone foghorn returning to the waterfront. End of story? Not quite.

 

Of course during the height of the TOOT campaign, it made the TV and print news around here ballyhooing the Fog Festival, and somehow WGN  television in Chicago got word of it. One of the most prominent broadcasters in the country, WGN could send reporters and photographers considerable distances in the Midwest for stories. As a result, they sent a team to Duluth to find out about the Fog Festival.

 

The first place the WGN reporter and photographer stopped to seek help in getting started was this newspaper. They first encountered a summer intern in the newsroom who didn’t feel qualified to discuss the foghorn issue and he brought the television news team to me.

 

Would I, they asked, be willing to let them film an interview with me about the Fog Festival?

 

Well, I’m not too hot at TV reporting, but I agreed. Besides, I figured, it would only be shown in Chicagoland.

 

So I sat down behind an empty newsroom desk as they placed their equipment opposite me and I told them all about our Fog Festival. It took maybe 15 minutes total from setup to “thanks” and “goodbye.”

 

I gave it no more thought, but the next weekend, when we were out and about on Saturday evening, people I knew came up to me and said they’d seen me earlier on the CBS Evening News. That’s the national CBS Evening News helmed in those days by legendary Walter Cronkite, although my appearance was on a Saturday when somebody else was anchoring.

 

CBS Evening News! My casual remarks on the Fog Festival had gone national. In the ensuing days I began hearing from people in other parts of the country with whom I was acquainted. Unfortunately, I missed it.

 

And Hollywood never called.

 

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. 

A brief personal history of Duluth...

Plant built by Minnesota Steel Company (part of US Steel.
Photo: circa 1925/Northeast Minnesota Historical Center 

Written by By Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune/October 16, 2021

 

When Washington Post columnist George F. Will turned 80 recently, he remarked that he had been alive for one third of American history.

 

What? Well, if you do the numbers, I guess it’s so. Three times 80 is 240. That about takes us back to the Founding Fathers, bless their souls.

 

This whole idea gave me pause, though. I’m close to George Will in age. Got him by a couple of years. I’d never looked at my tenure in this life that way. A third of American history? Seems strange, although true.

 

It means both Will and I were born around the onset of World War II. I actually remember a few things about the war. Couldn’t get jam for toast because of sugar shortages. My parents had to turn in “points” with money to buy certain things. My father sold our car — couldn’t get gas and tires. Oh yes, the Atomic Bomb went off at the end of the conflict.

 

It changed everything, of course, and even though I was a youngster, I do remember it. The rest is history, as they say. That rest being the remainder of the 20th Century and the first fifth of the 21st. Long time. I was there.

 

Will’s observation prompted me to do the numbers on how much of Duluth’s history I have experienced. About half, give or take. Hmmm. Half of the history of Duluth in my lifetime? Well, the numbers don’t lie.

 

So, let’s see what got my attention in the past eight or so decades of my conscious observation of things Duluth. Let me start by saying it’s changed. A lot.

 

I was born into an industrial city. We were really going great guns during the war building ships for the effort — my only memory of that was hearing other kids say their fathers worked in the “shipyard.” That all came to an abrupt halt at war’s end.

 

But we were a steel-producing town, out there in Morgan Park. A lot of kids’ dads worked there too. Up to several thousand in good times, if memory serves. (All of this is memory, and not well-researched history.)

 

When I was young, and the plant was still going strong, it was called American Steel and Wire Division of United States Steel Corp. It was Duluth’s king industry, its fortunes linked to the city’s in very important ways. Like jobs.

 

Every so often there would be layoffs at the steel plant, and it was big news. But it always seemed to bounce back, along with its adjacent Universal Atlas Cement Co. in Gary-New Duluth. That is until they didn’t in the 1970s. The steel plant slowly wound down to the open field on the site today, everything disappeared except contaminants left behind in the soil on which it stood.

 

11th FIS F-102 Delta Dagger 56-1485
in arctic colors about 1959 (Wikipedia)

The demise of the steel plant closely coincided with the permanent closing of Duluth’s U.S. Air Force base, causing even more grave concern for the economic outlook of Duluth. The Air Base had been hastily constructed after World War II when a new war, a Cold War, began concerning our leaders. That sustained the base’s mission for around 20 years, as its role in defending the northern United States from Soviet missiles increased. But then the U.S. government pulled out, leaving only a state Air National Guard base in its wake and a federal prison camp in its former facilities.

 

No major steel plant? No sizable Air Force base? And oh, I almost forgot, the huge Marshall Wells hardware operation with a national reach, and the Coolerator Co., the Kleerflax Linen Looms all closing. The list was getting pretty long. Plus, it eroded the city’s population, eventually dropping about 20,000 from 100,000-plus.

 

Glancing back again, it didn’t have huge chimneys spewing industrial smoke but along came UMD, slowly growing into a large institution and economic force. It started small about 1947, replacing a small teacher’s college, and by the time I got there a decade later it had about 2,000 students. It now has more than 10,000 and it has a huge impact on Duluth, along with the several other campuses of higher education, not the least of which are St. Scholastica and Lake Superior College.

 

And, of course, we had two large hospitals — St. Luke’s and St. Mary’s —that had been around since at least early in the 20th century. I was born in St. Luke’s. Take a look at them today, with St. Mary’s emerging as part of today’s Essentia that is transforming downtown Duluth’s skyline with towering new construction.

 

Duluth has become a major regional medical center, akin, but perhaps not equal, to the Mayo Clinic’s impact on Rochester, Minn. It contributes mightily to the economy. I don’t know how many are employed in our far-flung medical facilities but it likely rivals or surpasses the jobs at the old steel plant and other former businesses.

 

In the middle of these changes, starting in the 1960s, Interstate 35 was constructed right through town. And as important to Duluth, the Arena Auditorium was built over waterfront junkyards, opening in 1966 and since expanded as the DECC, becoming the city’s preeminent cultural/entertainment/sports center.

 

For much of my lifetime what we know as Miller Hill Mall was undeveloped woods and later a golf driving range. Downtown Duluth was the center of commercial activity with five good-sized department stores, half a dozen movie theaters and a passel of specialty shops, restaurants and taverns. Now the Miller Trunk area has the lion’s share of that.

 

Can’t forget tourism. I’m running out of space here, and I’ve left out a lot of Duluth changes in the half of its history I’ve witnessed (like mega railroad activity), but the bottom line is that Duluth has transformed itself through thick and thin (lots of thin) and always survives.  Development of Canal Park and Lake Superior’s shoreline has greatly enhanced tourism, turning a downtrodden downtown neighborhood from junkyards and dilapidated buildings into a shining attraction with numerous hotels and restaurants for locals and tourists.

 

What about the arts? The Duluth Symphony (now Duluth-Superior Symphony) is a decade or so older than I am, and the Duluth Playhouse is decades older than that, going all the way back to the early 20th Century. For years, though, that was about it. In fairly recent years, Duluth has developed a vibrant arts community encompassing all the arts and a downtown neighborhood to show them off.

 

Oh, there’s so much more to say, like the arrival of television in the early 1950s that also played a huge role in Duluth’s evolution. And we once had two daily newspapers, morning and evening, the diminution of which was influenced by the advent of the World Wide Web.

 

I must stop, but not before saying we are a transformed, and become more vibrant and interesting city in the decades that I have been part of it. Glad I was born here, and glad I stayed…for half of this town’s existence, and all of mine.

 

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. 

Pandemic: Not the First time Duluth has shut down...

Check out my Duluth News Tribune column published Sunday,  March 22, 2020 HERE

Not the first time Duluth has shut down

Written by By Jim Heffernan for the Duluth news Tribune on 3-22-20

It was going to be a two-week break from late winter on a Florida beach. We left Duluth on Wednesday, March 12, for the three-day drive to the Gulf Coast and made it into Illinois where we smashed head-on into the corona virus crisis.

No we didn’t get infected; we’re fine. But who wants to be over a thousand miles from home at a time like this? We drove back to Duluth the next day and, like so many of us, are hunkered down at home.

Wow. I’ve been around a long, long time but I’ve never seen anything to compare with this in terms of a drawn-out national emergency with an uncertain outcome. I vividly remember the President John F. Kennedy assassination. Like now, the nation shut down. But only for a few days, the better part of a week. And while our sadness continued, our day-to-day lives went on as normal.

It was pretty much the same for most of us after 9-11. Terrible tragedy, but after being riveted by the television reports for a few days, almost nobody’s life was seriously interrupted away from New York City. 

There were no shortages of groceries. Restaurants were not affected, nor were schools, theaters, sports events or concerts throughout the country. This time we are faced with weeks, maybe months of isolating ourselves from one another and staying home most of the time.

There’ve been many references to the devastating Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 since the current crisis hit. Of course that was 102 years ago. Who remembers anything about that? Where was it, in Spain?

Well, I have a close association with the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 and how it affected Duluth. You could say one degree of separation. 

Two years before she died in 1983, I sat my mother down before a tape recorder with the purpose of recording her memories of the historic 1918 fire that devastated Cloquet, Moose Lake, rural Duluth and threatened the city itself.

At that time she was a 19-year-old single woman living with her father and five younger sisters on lower Piedmont Avenue. Her mother had died the year before.

On the recording (which I still have), she vividly described that day in October 1918 when fire threatened the city, mentioning that before the immediate fire threat was realized she and a friend had taken the streetcar downtown to shop. Duluth had streetcars in those days, not buses.

Almost as an aside, she mentioned that they were wearing masks because of what she termed the “flu ban” when no public gatherings were allowed. Theaters, schools, churches all were closed, she said. Downtown stores were open. It affected her life directly; she was the organist at the former Bethany Lutheran Church in the West End, the city’s largest Swedish congregation. 

How long did the flu ban last? Six weeks, she recalled.

It’s safe to say that the great 1918 fire in this region on top of the Spanish flu pandemic had to be the darkest days in Northland history. It’s been mentioned lately that that pandemic claimed the lives of some 50 million people worldwide, and 10 million in this country. And all this going on as World War I raged in Europe, then drawing to a close with further millions of lives lost worldwide 

So we’ve been there before. And there’ve been other threats, several in my own conscious lifetime spanning more than seven decades, a few in recent years — SARS, HIV, Asian flu in the 1950s, Hong Kong flu in the early 1980s, Swine flu a decade ago. But nothing like today’s pandemic. Nothing.

We’ll be fortunate if this emergency eases enough for a return to some normalcy in six weeks. It probably won’t, according to experts.

We can only hope it isn’t as devastating in terms of loss of life as the 1918 Spanish flu. But with no vaccines to fight it, hope is all we’ve got right now.

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.

Future news bodes well for Duluth...

Today's February 23rd DNT column... "... the latest fake news for 10 years from today."
Read it HERE and enjoy a little Duluth satire.

Duluth News Tribune photo

Duluth hit hard by summer storm...

Early morning storms crept into Duluth and area fast and furiously Thursday. Strobe-like lightening flashed every second and hurricane-force winds measuring upward from from 69 mph to 100 mph swept through the area. Lots of trees were uprooted, torn in half or broken off so that neighborhoods hit the hardest had obstructions on roadways, trees on cars or roof-tops and electrical lines catching trees or laying live on the ground. Minnesota Power noted 75,000 were without power in the region, with many still without power even now. The Lakewood pumping station near lake Superior was out of power as well and area residents were asked to conserve water. Duluth was finally getting back to normal after the big 2012 flood so this has hit the city hard.

And, believe it or not, Duluth is having a heat wave. It's 90 degrees right now–hot and humid.

You can read more about it and see video footage of the scenes around town on the Duluth News Tribune website HERE and HERE.

Duluth hit by early winter storm...

It's a winter wonderland in Duluth...
We're making the national weather news in Duluth with our post Thanksgiving winter storm. We've had about 15 inches of snow at our house (left) up on the hill, a little less down by the lake and around 28 inches up the north shore...and more is coming. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Check out WCCO news HERE for an update and a video and MPR for some great local photos.

Norsk royalty visit goes to head of local Norwegian citizens...

By Jim Heffernan

King Harald V & Queen Sonja 

I’m happy for all of the local Norwegians that King Harald V (motto: “Alt for Norge!”) and Queen Sonja of Norway are visiting Duluth next week.

Of course there will be no living with them after this (the locals, not the king and queen). If you thought (you think, don’t you?) the local Norwegians were an uppity bunch before this visit, well, what do you suppose this royal invasion will do to them?

Oh well, we’ll just have to live with it, for how long we don’t know. I think maybe until the second coming of You Know Who, but what do I know? I’m only a half-baked Swede calmly taking it all in from a well-calculated distance.

I will be nowhere near Duluth's Enger Tower when the royal couple rededicates it, even though I feel a special kinship with King Harald. He and I are close to the same age – he’s a little older, but not much. In the 1940s after World War II broke out, Childe Harald and his mother, Princess Martha, lived in the United States – at the White House with President and Mrs. Roosevelt and, at times, other guests like Winston “Win” Churchill. They had fled Norway when Germany invaded the country. (See historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent account of this in her book “No Ordinary Time.”)

At that very same time here in Duluth I was living in the yellow house in the West End with my Swedish mother (and Irish-German father and brother), where we entertained guests as well, including my Uncle Win (not short for Winston, but rather Winfield), who could imitate almost any European accent, especially Scandinavian, including, of course, Norwegian. What a stitch.

So you can see King Harald and I have some things in common, nationality not being one of them, but that’s OK. My Scandinavian heritage is on the Swedish side of the Baltic Peninsula where today good King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia hold forth on the throne and Greta Garbo is still dead.

Oh, how I long for the day that King Karl Gustaf  (they usually leave off the Roman numerals in second reference, Italy being so far away) and Queen Silvia would come to Duluth and rededicate, well, let’s see, oh, rededicate the Svithoid Hall in the West End, where local Swedish folk used to dance the schottische on Saturday night and deny it on Sunday in the Lutheran church. It’s upstairs of that auction place on 21^st Avenue West and Third Street, across from a vacant lot that could use a little sprucing up (attention Mayor Don Ness).

Now that would be a red-letter day in Duluth.

Addendum: Hey, I’m kidding, OK? I used to write newspaper columns about the competition between Duluth Swedes and Norwegians. This is in the spirit of that.

Duluth fireworks always a winner...

Once again the City of Duluth put on quite a fireworks show. Check out Bob King's fabulous photo  HERE on this Duluth News Tribune site.

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.

Duluth's boundaries defined at last...

I wanted to call your attention to my letter to the editor in today's Duluth News Tribune. (Click HERE to read the letter.) A woman reader wrote in to finally define once and for all the true boundaries for Duluth's "West End" (Lincoln Park is today's teminology) and "West Duluth." So many newcomers to Duluth mistakenly mix up the two geographical areas... and also misname our main downtown streets.

Merry Christmas from Duluth MN...

2009 Bentleyville Holiday magic in Duluth MN...
This amazing shot of Bentleyville is credited to local photographer, Tony Rogers. To see Tony's photo  web site, click HERE. Thanks, Tony!

May you all enjoy the season. 
Good health and happiness in 2010!
Jim