My first 60 years at this newspaper...

Written By Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/11-04-23

So, they’ve sold the Duluth News Tribune building — an edifice where I spent my entire journalism career. And the deal closed almost 60 years to the day after I started working there in October 1963.

There are so many memorable moments and hours and days of practicing journalism out of that building. It has been a lengthy career followed by free-lancing in retirement. Let me capsule it all in three words: It’s been interesting.

I was fresh out of college with no particular career ambition and recently completed Army active duty when I gave the newspaper a shot. An intrepid executive editor hired me, probably on speculation since I hadn’t majored in journalism in college. But I knew how to touch-type. That might have gotten me in.

Oh, and I was willing to accept 75 bucks a week — a princely sum for a pauper.

There wasn’t much touch-typing at all in the newsroom of the morning Duluth News Tribune and evening Duluth Herald in those days. Many of the men — the reporting, sports and editing staff was all male except for a pair of female “society” writers — were veterans of World War II who used the hunt-and-peck system of typing. But they could be fast.

I was assigned to work as a reporter afternoons and evenings on the morning News Tribune. My first night on the job the city editor, my new boss, took me to “lunch” (our lunch break was from 9:30 to 10 p.m.) in a little cafe next to the old Lyceum Theater and asked me if I knew how to type. When I said I did, he said, “You’ll be fine.”

I wasn’t so sure. My start date in October 1963 turned out to be pretty significant. One month later President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and I got to take part in the local coverage.  He had visited Duluth just two months before. My assignment was to telephone town mayors in what we called the Upper Tri-State Region for statements on the Kennedy assassination.

I managed to reach a dozen or so, and they all said essentially the same thing: “This is a terrible tragedy.” Over and over the same response. I did cobble together a story that made it into the paper, though, and I was quite proud to have been a small part of localizing what was one of the most significant news stories of the 20th Century. My first month on the job.

As the years went by, I had many different roles at the papers. They were, and are, called “beats.” I had the education beat for a while, then the city government beat, some crime and courts coverage and even the arts and entertainment beat when I started writing my own column in 1972.

But looking back today I think my favorite beat was my first, called “general assignment.” You’d go to work every day not knowing what you would be covering, you’d be assigned to cover some event or occurrence — it could be anything from a major fire to a boring speech — and when you turned in your story you were done. Well, maybe check with the cops for newsy items or log in the visiting and departing ore boats and pound out a couple of obits on a manual typewriter before going home.

We used to rush, accompanied by a photographer, to the scenes of fatal automobile accidents, which could be heart-rending. One time I dashed to a late-night explosion of a house in the East Hillside that, we learned at the fiery scene, was being rented by several members of the UMD Bulldog hockey team. They weren’t home; the team was playing on the road. The house collapsed on its foundation, damaging two others adjacent to it.

Over my active years I met every Minnesota governor, congressmen and senators, area legislators, local mayors, city, county and state officials, school superintendents, college administrators, police chiefs, sheriffs, local judges, business leaders (including one bonafide local tycoon) and, as they used to say on old radio, the innocent, the vagrant, the thief, the murderer.

Assignments were wide-ranging. I interviewed Walter Mondale in the News Tribune building when he was vice president of the United States (Secret Service lurking all around) and once tried to interview an untalkative groundhog in Northern Wisconsin who refused to say if he’d seen his shadow one chilly Feb. 3. Throw in a lot of ordinary people who were somehow involved in the news, and it all added up to being a newshound, as a cop once called me.

I spent much of one decade — the 1970s — handling the entertainment and arts beat. That involved reviewing all theater productions, college and civic, together with shows by visiting entertainers (Elvis among them), symphony concerts and other musical presentations. Even opera.

Over the years I interviewed many then-well-known actors and entertainers — comedian Jack Benny, musician Louis Armstrong, actors Maurice Chevalier and Gregory Peck, a couple of Metropolitan Opera sopranos and others whose names probably aren’t recognized by Millennials and Generation Z. Some literary readers might find it interesting that I interviewed esteemed writer Vladimir Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, a singer, when he came here to perform with the symphony. We didn’t discuss “Lolita.”

I chatted with Jane Pauley, who at the time co-hosted the Today Show on NBC, when she gave a talk here to the Rotary Club or some other service organization. I got the impression she wasn’t happy to be here and wasn’t that nuts about being interviewed by me either. It happens sometimes.

The newspapers went from two — morning and evening — to just one in the morning in the early 1980s. We went from 13 editions each week — seven with the morning News Tribune and six in the Herald — to just seven. The Herald died.

Showing the press to interns, circa 1972

At the peak there were probably 200 people working in various departments of the papers. Hundreds of “paper boys” delivered the papers house to house in Duluth-Superior, the Iron Range and Northern Wisconsin. Yes, they were called paper boys, but there were some girls too, and the newspaper referred to them as carrier salesmen. I covered the tragic murder of one of them as he delivered our Sunday edition in Superior, his wagon stacked with undelivered papers left on the sidewalk.

My final 20 or so active years were spent working on the opinion pages, writing editorials and selecting columns, cartoons and letters from readers for publication. That’s when I met many of the politicians; leaders like Sen. Paul Wellstone (who missed a scheduled interview with us when he was killed that day in an airplane crash) and Gov. Jesse Ventura. Wellstone was always affable and Ventura was always gruff. Former Gov. Arne Carlson was cheerful and his predecessor Rudy Perpich, sometimes called Governor Goofy, was not goofy at all, but incisive and brilliant. Very supportive of Duluth and the Iron Range, as was long-serving congressman Jim Oberstar.

Now the building where all of that was based has been sold to the Duluth School District for educational purposes. As far as I’m concerned, it’s been used for educational purposes for a long time. I learned a lot there helping to write a sizable chunk of the first draft of our history.

And it’s been interesting.

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. 

 

 

  

Jumping into new worm woes...

Photo by Josef Gorres, University of Vermont

"Yeah, the jumping worms are like snakes, it is said. Fool around with them and they rise up like India cobras being tooted out of a cask by a Hindi seer." Written by By Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune, September 19, 2020

 

I have never cared for worms. Have you? Even harmless angle or earthworms seem kind of yucky to me. You used to put them on fish hooks, which was unpleasant to me even at a young age. Maybe that is why I have never cared for fishing. (Don’t get me started on impaling minnows.)

 

Why worms now? We here in the Northland are being warned of the arrival from Asia — where else? — of the jumping worm.  I’m not making that up. This paper published a lengthy report on the invasion of the Asian jumping worm a week or so ago. Google it.

 

Whew, as if we haven’t got enough to worry about, now it’s the jumping worm? And, of course, every few years or so we get invaded by army worms  — they’re actually caterpillars — that strip all the deciduous trees of their leaves and crawl around outdoor surfaces ruining picnics and other outdoor activities like just relaxing on the deck.  

 

But back to the angleworm for a moment. Beyond threading them on fish hooks back in the day, we actually dissected them in a college natural science course. There’s a saddle on their back, or in their middle, called the clitellum. That pretty well summarizes everything I learned about natural science in college. Well, there were very unfortunate spotted frogs too, but we won’t go into that. It explains why I didn’t go to medical school.

 

And if earthworms are yucky, what about night crawlers? They seem juicier. They show up on the driveways and sidewalks of the civilized world — at least it used to be civilized — after it rains, ready for the, what, picking? Not by me.

 

Some guy named Walt sells them at area gas stations/convenience stores. I notice the sign “Walt’s Crawlers” as I drive by. How convenient is that? Gas, milk, potato chips and night crawling worms all in one handy stop.

 

But this threat by the jumping worm has got me spooked. Suddenly it shows up right in the middle of a global pandemic, thank you very much, and it is said to actually fight back if you pick one up. Not a pleasant thought, not that any worm is actually a pleasant thought or not that I would ever pick one up if I didn’t have to. Let Walt do it.

 

Yeah, the jumping worms are like snakes, it is said. Fool around with them and they rise up like India cobras being tooted out of a cask by a Hindi seer. And what are they good for? Nothing. Turns out worm scientists say the jumping worm crawls around a couple of inches beneath the surface of a lawn, and consumes all that keeps the lawn healthy. Trees too.

 

So, it’s an election year and what are our leaders going to do about the jumping worm threat? Wouldn’t we like to know.

 

I imagine the two main sides in this election — need I say Republicans and Democrats? — would have vastly different reactions to the invasion of the jumping worm. Republicans would blame it on Democrats and Democrats would defend them as part of the environment.

 

But enough. I want to get to a discussion of another worm that somehow enters my consciousness every single day: The earworm.

 

I am deeply involved with the earworm because I am the kind of individual who has some form of music on my mind every minute of every waking hour of the day. Mostly, in my case, it’s classical music, but other music too, like patriotic in an election year.

 

So, as I go through any given day (they are all a gift), I might be internally humming a theme from a symphony by Beethoven (the composer not the canine movie star) or “O Canada” or a show tune like “Oooooooklahoma where the wind comes sweeping down the plain” or, possibly, a hymn, “Rock of Ages” (not to be confused with rock ’n’ roll of the ages embodied by the late Little Richard) when suddenly a strange ear worm intervenes.

 

Enter, lately, a guy named “Ragtime Cowboy Joe.” Do you remember him? The song got stuck in my mind decades ago and now suddenly it’s back in the form of an earworm.

 

Readers of a certain age might recall it and even remember the melody. Hum along here: “He likes to sing raggedy music to the cattle as he swings back and forward in the saddle,/On his horse — a pretty good horse —to a syncopated gaiter and the roar of his repeater,/How they run when they hear his gun,/ ‘cause the western folks all know,/ He’s a high falutin’, roootin, shootin’ son-of-a-gun from Arizona,/ Ragtime Cowboy, talk about yer cowboy, Ragtime Cowboy Joe.”

 

That’s my latest and ubiquitous earworm. Can’t seem to shed it. Like on the Fourth of July, I might be out in the garden on a beautiful morning poking my 10-inch flag into a flowerpot and thinking, “O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light…” when suddenly:

 

“He likes to sing raggedy music to the cattle as he swings back and forward in the saddle…” drowning out the Star Spangled Banner on the Fourth of July in an election year in the middle of a global pandemic, for crying out loud. Arrest this man. Send in the Army worms.

 

So there you have it. Worms that plague our lives, including this new jumping worm. I’m an old Lutheran, but I’ll never understand how Martin got along on a diet of worms.

 

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.

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.

Add toothpaste to America’s problems...

My column appearing in today's Duluth News Tribune. Read it HERE.
Sunday, January 26 2020

A long, cold ride on an airborne sleigh....

From today's Duluth News Tribune column; you may read it HERE.

May you all enjoy your family traditions this holiday season... whatever they may be.
-Jim

Paul Wellstone Fifteen Years Later: Big Shoes to Fill

Today -- Oct. 25 -- is the fifteenth anniversary of the day Sen. Paul Wellstone, members of his family and aides were killed when their plane crashed on the Iron Range. Later that day, Wellstone was scheduled to meet with the Duluth News Tribune editorial board, of which I was a member. When we were informed of the tragedy, I sat down and wrote this column (below), which appeared in the next morning's News Tribune. I reprinted it here on this blog at previous anniversaries but wanted to honor a great man again today. He certainly left us with big shoes to fill.-- Jim

Wellstone Leaves Big Shoes to Fill
by Jim Heffernan
(Originally appeared in the Duluth News Tribune on Saturday, October 26, 2002 and reprinted in my book, Cooler Near the Lake, published in 2008.)

Paul Wellstone gone? Someone so full of life, of exuberance, of zest, of desire to do good by his fellow man–gone in an instant on a drizzly day right here in the Northland? Can't be, you think. But it's all too true.

I knew Wellstone the way a home-state journalist is likely to know a U.S. Senator. Since he was elected to the Senate, we saw him a couple of times a year. He'd come through for a visit with the editorial board, updating us on what was going on in Washington.

Always upbeat, often passionate about what he believed in, the interviews–chats, really–with Wellstone were something we looked forward to. Politics aside, I liked him personally. I admired his resolve to stand up for what he believed in.

I first met Wellstone in 1982 when he ran for Minnesota state auditor–and lost. Aching to be a major player in the liberal political traditions of his adopted state, the then political science professor at Carleton College in Northfield ran for a state constitutional office, probably seeing it as a stepping stone for bigger and better things to come.

I don't think he'd have made much of a state auditor, although he'd have worked at it. The job would have bored him. Wellstone had bigger things churning in that brain–a passion for helping people who need help and a conviction that government should do what it can to make people's lives better. In short, he was a liberal.

The word liberal has become a pejorative in some (conservative) circles. Those who disliked what Wellstone stood for know he was, perhaps, the most liberal member of the Senate. Wellstone wore that label proudly, unashamedly.

On the occasion of another of our editorial board meetings, after he'd been elected to the Senate, the subject of health care came up. Wellstone felt strongly that America's health care system was broken, and of course he was right. It still isn't fixed. In our conversation–four of us around a table–he became so impassioned about the subject that he began to tear up.

The rest of us, all male, became uncomfortable at his emotional display, but I never forgot it. And, reflecting on it, I could see that was what was best about Wellstone. He really felt what he believed in. He truly was a “bleeding-heart liberal” in the finest sense of that often cynical description. The world needs bleeding-heart liberals, and Wellstone filled that bill almost better than anyone else in a position to help shape American policy.

Finally, on another visit with us, I went to the newspaper's lobby to greet him and guide him to our meeting room, and as we walked up the stairs I noticed that his shoes–loafers–were shot. I mean shot. Hobos heating bean cans over fires in railroad yards had better shoes. Long cracks across the top, exposing his socks beneath, shabby soles.

I kidded him about it, saying something like, “A United States senator can't afford decent shoes?”

Wellstone wasn't a bit abashed. He muttered something about not having time to worry about shoes–too much to do and too little time to do it in. I later wrote a column about the senator's shabby shoes, but I never heard from him about it. Still too busy.

We had another editorial board meeting scheduled with Wellstone, this one Friday afternoon, to talk about the newspaper's endorsement in the Senate race this year. An airplane crash intervened. He was dead, along with his wife and daughter and others on the plane.

As the gray day wore on Friday, and details kept pouring in, for some reason my mind kept going back to those tattered shoes. Who will fill them?

No one quite like Paul Wellstone, whose unlikely life journey took him to the place where his death could affect the balance of the U.S. Senate at a time when the nation appears to be poised for a war he opposed, and when so many other issues remain unresolved that need a committed liberal voice.

Life goes on, but for the time being we'd better put it on hold for a truly good man who was more concerned about providing shoes for those who couldn't afford them than what he wore himself.

Click HERE for today's MPR story by Dan Kraker.

One Duluth Man's WWI Experience...

By Jim Heffernan

George Henry Heffernan in WWI Uniform, circa 1918

On a bright, beautiful garbage pickup day a few years ago, I watched as the truck lifted our bin, dumped the contents into its box, and drove away. I don't always pay that much attention to garbage pickup, but on this day our refuse included a plastic bag with very special contents: My father's World War I U.S. Army uniform, sans buttons and insignia. 

Reflecting on it as the truck disappeared, a lump formed in my throat. It meant so much to my father to have served, in many ways defining his life. But after almost a century, the uniform couldn't be saved.

Much has been made recently marking the 100th anniversary of the entry of the United States into the conflict roiling Europe since the guns of August were loosed by Germany on its neighbors three years earlier.

On April 6, 1917, the U.S. Congress, at the behest of President Woodrow Wilson, declared war on Germany. The action was felt in every community in the nation, certainly including Duluth.

Tens of thousands of American young men were conscripted or joined on their own to go off to France to fight in "the war to end all wars," as it was optimistically and naively billed at the time. Along with scores of other Duluthians, George Heffernan, 23, was among them. He wasn't my father yet -- he married late and I was born 22 years later.

The Duluth contingent marched to the train on Dec. 17, 1917, heading for the "Pacific Coast," as the Duluth News Tribune put it the morning after the departure. George was employed as a photo engraver for a firm that provided the plates that produced the photos in the News Tribune. He worked in the Tribune building, then on Superior Street between Lake Avenue and First Avenue East. The building is still standing, long since put to other uses.

The paper on Dec. 18 ran a photo of my father with the words "Leaves For Camp" above it and featuring the following caption: "Among the soldiers who left Duluth for the Pacific Coast last night was George Heffernan, for many years a valued employee of the Duluth Photo Engraving company. He was enrolled in the contingent from the second Duluth district. His fellow employees gave him a wrist watch and a fine jackknife." 

Photo and story of soldier George H. Heffernan leaving Duluth for camp
Duluth News Tribune, December 18, 1918

So off he went to California, where he was issued his uniform and inducted into the American Expeditionary Force made up of men who were called Doughboys. All I know about his service came out in dribs and drabs over the years in conversations with him as I was growing up.

Upon arriving in San Francisco, the inductees were stationed at the Presidio, hard by San Francisco Bay's Golden Gate (long before the famous bridge was built), a facility that still exists but is no longer a military base. It's never been clear to me how he happened to be promoted so rapidly from buck private to sergeant, but that's what transpired. He was a man of some bearing, and I assume that was why he was quickly named a training sergeant for inductees who followed him into the service.

He took great pride in that, and it possibly saved his life. While the trainees were sent off to France to fight in the trenches, George stayed in San Francisco as a training sergeant. But not until the end of the war. Not quite.

Finally, his unit was mobilized to join other Doughboys in France. They were put on a troop train and transported from San Francisco to the east coast, arriving there just in time for the end of the war. On Nov. 11, 1918, at 11 o'clock in the morning the guns were silenced, and armistice was declared. The war that didn't end all wars had ended.

No France for George. Rather, a sojourn into New York City with Army buddies as tourists (the only time he was ever there), and mustering out of the Army some time later followed by a return to Duluth and civilian life. America was only actively involved in "The Great War" for about a year-and-a-half, but some 117,000 American service men had been killed, and tens of thousands more injured, many with what we now refer to as Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

For my father, it meant returning to Duluth and his job, and some years later marrying my mother and having two sons, the youngest being me, born at the outbreak of World War II. By then, George was too old to serve again. In our home in Duluth's West End he placed his old uniform on a sturdy hanger and hung it on a nail in a dark corner of our basement.

There it remained all my early life and later, until we broke up the old homestead after my mother died in 1983. George had died in 1971 and was buried beneath a government headstone honoring his military service. 

When we emptied out the house, I took his uniform to my home, and later to two subsequent residences. Then, cleaning out the garage of our current home a couple of years ago, I found it, packed away in a box, a deteriorating, moth-eaten garment unsalvageable for any use such as in a museum.

So on that day, I took a scissors and cut off his sergeant stripes and the metal buttons, stowed them with other family memorabilia, stuffed the tattered tunic and trousers into a plastic bag and put it in our garbage bin to be hauled away with the rest of our trash.

By James Montgomery Flagg, 1917
Source: Wikipedia

The 100th anniversary of the start of American involvement in that war set me reflecting again on my father's proud service during that conflict, even though he escaped combat. A charter member, he spent decades actively involved in the American Legion, founded by World War I vets.

But not quite all of that century-old uniform was hauled off that day. I have the hat, the Smoky Bear-style hat (seen in the picture of young George accompanying this column), part of the standard Army uniform in that era. I'll never part with that. Or these memories.