How it was in Duluth when Elvis was here...

Written by Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune /August 20, 2021

Elvis Week ended in Memphis three days ago, and I missed it again. The annual event at Elvis’ mansion Graceland marks the anniversary of the singer’s death.

 

It’s been 44 years; it’s longer than he was alive. He died on Aug. 16, 1977 at the age of 42. Most notable for Duluthians is that he performed in the Duluth Arena twice not long before he died — Oct. 16, 1976, and April 29, 1977.

 

As arts and entertainment writer for this newspaper at the time, it was my responsibility to “cover” the Elvis visits. I have written about this before, but I thought I’d summarize some of my memories, and add some not mentioned before, one last time — almost on the anniversary of his death.

 

Glancing over what I just wrote, I realize I hadn’t bothered to include his last name: Presley. He’s so well known it’s not really necessary.

 

I well remember the day he died. I had a small office in the corner of the newsroom and one of the copy editors, responsible for monitoring the wire services, stuck his head in my doorway and said, “Elvis is dead.”

 

Bombshell. Bombshell to my generation (which is essentially Elvis’ generation) and a bombshell to me, because I had so recently covered the iconic rock star on his visits here. I got pretty close to him at his performances and once standing in his presence as he sneaked into the Radisson Hotel in the dark of night through a service entrance.

 

There were about a dozen people outside the hotel entrance when he alighted from a black Cadillac with his girlfriend and walked over to the non-public doorway. He stopped briefly and just locked at us with a slight smile before he turned and walked into the hotel to board a service elevator to his room. He’d reserved three floors, reports claimed. His plane, the Lisa Marie, was at the airport.

 

I guess I was standing about six feet from him at that moment. Many years later I stood six feet above him at his Graceland grave.

 

I was not a rabid fan of Elvis like a lot of people of my generation. We were in high school when he suddenly emerged on the popular music scene from “Heartbreak Hotel” and forever changed it. I thought he was pretty cool and liked his songs, but I never bought a recording or went to his movies.

 

Still, it was exciting to cover his Duluth visits for the paper. Back in those days, the newspaper reviewer of just about every concert or show was given what were called “ducats” — free tickets. Not Elvis. It seemed like the Elvis people didn’t want press coverage. Wouldn’t even talk to us.

 

As was the practice in those days (but no longer), no way were we going to buy tickets — we’re the free press which means we get in free; it’s in the Constitution isn’t it? — so I contacted Joe Sturckler, then manager of the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center (DECC) and made a deal. He would meet me and a photographer at a pre-arranged remote entrance and sneak us in. But, he said, if Elvis’ people caught us and threw us out, he could do nothing.

 

Elvis’ people didn’t catch us, but we didn’t have seats, all reserved. The result was we stood — right down in front at the side of the stage located on the east end of the Arena. We mingled with the mob of audience members who would run up and down the aisles to get pictures or a closer look at their idol. One teenage girl near us at the first concert fell and appeared to break her leg.

 

It was pretty much the same for both concerts. Sneak in. Work our way down to the stage and watch the spectacle. Elvis’ show was largely the same both times too. He had several warm-up acts, and then mounted the stage to great fanfare music (“Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss, the main theme of the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”) wearing an ornate white jumpsuit with a wide belt around his ample midsection. He spoke quite a bit and performed a passel of the songs identified with him. You know them. They are the soundtrack of mid-20th Century America.

 

I think both reviews — reports really — I wrote of the concerts survive in various corners of the Internet. I haven’t seen them lately, but I always remember that in the last one — about four months before he died — I wrote that he looked quite healthy. Hmmm. I didn’t go to med school.

 

By that stage of his life, he had gained quite a bit of weight, and it was noticeable. But he gave the audience what they came for, including passing out sweat-soaked scarves and bestowing a few kisses on quite a few of the rapturous women who made it to the edge of the stage just below him.   

 

Both times, when his hour in the Duluth spotlight was up, he sang one last number, turned and dashed for a waiting vehicle on Harbor Drive and a short ride back to the Radisson.

 

A deep-voiced announcement echoed through the hall: “Elvis has left the building.” (He might have said “arena,” can’t remember.)

 

In many decades of reporting, the Elvis visits are among the most memorable. Maybe THE most memorable. In retrospect there is a sense that it was a brush with modern American cultural history.

 

The famous orchestra conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein (“West Side Story” and much more) once said “Elvis Presley is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century.” Beatle John Lennon once remarked: “Before Elvis there was nothing.”

 

Well, there was Beethoven, but, yup, Elvis was something.

For more on Elvis in Duluth, check these links HERE, HERE & HERE.

 

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

Duluth News Tribune 150th Anniversary: Lots of memories from a long newspaper career...

DNT press room, 1972: Then city editor Jim Heffernan is second from right
along with staff members and journalism interns.
 

By Jim Heffernan

I had to miss the gathering at Glensheen marking the 150th anniversary of the first publication of the paper that became the Duluth News Tribune. I would have liked to have attended, since I spent nearly a third of those 150 years —my entire career — in various news room positions at that newspaper and its sister, the former evening Duluth Herald.

Some people might regard local newspapers outside of the larger metropolitan areas as the backwater of journalism, and in some ways they are. But for most of my journalistic career Duluth was the third-largest city in Minnesota. It could not be ignored by politicians and other leaders, nor was it ignored by the entertainment industry, including visits by Elvis Presley (more on that later) and other top-name entertainers.

I had a varied career at the Duluth papers, as a general assignment reporter (which means you walk into work every day not knowing what you’re going to cover), beat reporter (education, city government, politics), city editor, arts/entertainment editor-writer and finally on the editorial page convincing half of the readers we were a Republican rag and the other half a Democratic diatribe. During much of that time I was also a general columnist. 

For being in the so-called backwater of newspapering, you meet or cover a lot of people from every field of endeavor, some well known, others ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and still others in the most dire of circumstances, victims of fatal traffic accidents, drownings, murder. You name it.

Looking back on it all, I think I enjoyed my first job the most — general assignment reporter. It meant working nights and being available for anything deemed newsworthy by the city editor. In those days the paper’s circulation covered the territory from Ironwood, Mich., to International Falls, and everything in between in the upper, upper Midwest, including Duluth, Superior and the Iron Ranges (there were two, Mesabe and Gogebic).

So a lot can be happening that’s newsworthy on any given day that, as a general assignment reporter, you might be assigned to cover. I have many memories of that period, some of which might resonate today. Mainly, you meet a lot of people you wouldn’t have met if you’d gone into some other line of work — some of them quite noteworthy.

One Saturday in the 1960s, for example, I was told to go over to Hotel Duluth and cover a press conference for Walter Mondale on the weekend it was announced he had been appointed to the U.S. Senate by Gov. Karl Rolvaag, also in attendance. Mondale had been Minnesota attorney general and would succeed Hubert Humphrey in the Senate because Humphrey had been selected as President Lyndon Johnson’s vice presidential running mate. Humphrey, of course, showed up many times over the years. I had a working lunch with him one noontime in the old Duluth Athletic Club, and always got a Christmas card from him and Muriel.

Mondale came back 20 years later, as vice president, for an interview with the editorial board on which I sat. Quite a few more miles on him since that Saturday in Hotel Duluth in 1964. He was running for president against Ronald Reagan, who, to my knowledge, never came to Duluth.

Then there are those days when, from out of the blue, you become involved in an unfolding story linking someone from around here to national headlines. The most vivid of those in my memory was the time the Associated Press reported that a U.S. military member from Superior had been arrested in Europe for treason, charged with passing American secrets to the Russians. It was the height of the Cold War.

Hmmm. Nobody around here knew the man’s name (I still recall it but won’t use it), so I and our Superior reporter, Richard L. “Scoop” Pomeroy, began looking for anything about him in Superior. We found his picture in a high school yearbook in the public library, went on a couple of hunches Pomeroy had, knowing Superior like the back of his hand, and ended up finding the alleged traitor’s elderly mother scrubbing the floor in a Tower Avenue cafe after hours.

Somehow we got in, and Pomeroy approached her, asking if she was so-and-sos mother. Yes, she was. Did she know her son had been charged with betraying the country? No she did not, and her reaction was what might be expected. Such a sad scene, it is vivid in my memory 50-plus years later. The other side of general assignment reporting.

Eddie Rickenbacker
WWI Ace & race car driver

You meet a lot of famous, or formerly famous, people in this backwater. One noon I had a hasty interview with Eddie Rickenbacker, who had been one of the most famous Americans of the 20th century, a war hero and race-car driver. Here to address a service club, I cornered him in advance to ask what he was going to say because I couldn’t stay for the meeting. “Get out of the U.N.” the conservative ex-hero growled.

Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong also showed up here in the ‘60s to do a show at Denfeld Auditorium (this was before the DECC was built) and I was sent over to Hotel Duluth (so much happened in that hotel) to interview the famed jazzman. He was so uncooperative I couldn’t get a story out of him (we were in his suite where he was dining on pork chops and vanilla ice cream). Thanks Satchmo.

Over at the Radisson Hotel a few years later I had lunch with a much more cooperative luminary, actor Gregory Peck, best recalled today as the man who personified Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Looking back, I might have been talking to Atticus himself, Peck was so warm and reasoned. He invited me to visit him and his wife in Los Angeles. I promised I would but went back on my word.

Nobody knows who Dimitri Nabakov was, but his father Vlaidmir Nabokov is pretty well known to the well read. The younger Nabokov was in Duluth to perform with the Symphony as a baritone soloist in some oratorio. I spent part of an afternoon with him in my office at the paper, me wanting to talk about his father, the “Lolita” author, and he plugging the oratorio. Nice guy, though. And not a bad singing voice.

In my active years at the paper, I met or interviewed every Minnesota governor, every U.S. Senator, two congressmen from this area (that’s all there were in my active years), all Duluth mayors, Superior mayors and other Wisconsin political leaders (I’m talking about you Alvin O’Konski) and a whole host of personages too numerous to mention who had their moments in the sun, and have now faded. Among Minnesota governors, Rudy Perpich was the most fun and Jesse Venture the most intimidating. He refused to tell me his real name when asked. (It’s James Janos.)

Paul Wellstone showed up about once a year before and during his tenure in the U.S. Senate, always deeply concerned about the downtrodden. He had an appointment to meet with us in the afternoon a few hours after he died in a plane crash on the Range.

The sun still shines, sort of, on Elvis Presley, who came here twice in the last year of his short life. I stood face to face with him in the Radisson lower parking lot on one of those occasions but couldn’t get him to say a word. Alighting from a Cadillac limo, he just stood and smirked until somebody opened a nearby service door and away he went, taking some of the final steps of his storied career.

You get into courthouses quite often when you are a reporter. I covered the trial of a prominent Duluth insurance executive who had bludgeoned his wife and who, upon being declared guilty, folded into the fetal position in the lap of his attorney, moaning. Not a pretty sight; one you remember. It was said years later, after serving prison time, that he had his cremated ashes dumped from a plane on the St. Louis County Courthouse. None landed on me but I was across the street at the paper.

Another time I was sitting in the back of a courtroom just to rest on a hot afternoon when they drew a guilty plea for shoplifting from a local doctor who had treated me as a child. It made me feel terrible.

There can be action, too, at times in the work life of a reporter. I remember driving a press car through the bumpy backroads of the broadcast tower farm atop Duluth’s hill in pursuit of a confused moose so our photographer, riding shotgun, could get a photo. He got the photo; I got a memory of just another day on the job as a general assignment reporter. 

Of course, every day wasn’t exciting or even interesting. You do a lot of drudge work in newsrooms too. Before the paper turned obituaries over to the advertising department, reporters wrote them. I have sent hundreds to their rewards after a final mention in their local paper, including my own parents. Pretty soon I think I’ll write my own, just to stay in practice.

Regular news reporters also helped the sportswriters when the Friday night lights were beaming down on football fields across the Northland. I know almost nothing about sports, but managed to put together passable accounts of games described on the phone by excited or disappointed coaches enlisted to call us. My one foray into sportswriting.

Well, this is getting long. I’ve got to say, though, that sometimes I think I’d like to go down to the paper again, find my old newsroom desk, crank a sheet of paper into a mechanical typewriter, set the margins, and start banging away on some story…any story.

But wait. “What’s a typewriter, Grandpa?”

I hope that child’s child doesn’t have to ask “What’s a newspaper?”

Bob Dylan and me – forever old...

By Jim Heffernan

Bob Dylan

So Bob Dylan is 70. Welcome to the septuagenarian club, Bob. I got there a year and a half ago, so we’re rough contemporaries.

Born in the same town, delivered by the same doctor, if a book I saw that in can be believed (it was a pulpy paperback), he at St. Mary’s hospital, me at St. Luke’s, if my birth certificate can be believed (it had my name wrong). Around then our paths diverged.

All of the hoopla over Dylan’s 70th birthday has reminded me that I never “got” his art. Sorry Bob. Not that he’d care what I got or didn’t get. Only in my advanced age have I recognized that he is truly exceptional as a thinker and writer (maybe a genius as some say?), but not a singer – not by my singing standards anyway. Stay tuned.

A fascinating column in today’s New York Times (May 24) by David Hadju, a journalism professor at Columbia University who has written a book about Dylan and his contemporaries, posits that his generation of performers – and there are many notable ones – hit puberty right at the dawn of the rock ‘n’ roll era, smack dab in the middle of the 1950s when Elvis Presley changed everything. Hadju says psychologists believe that age 14 or so is when we develop musical tastes that “become a badge of identity,” almost always odds with previous generations’ tastes.

Hadju includes a Dylan quote that strongly backs this theory: “When I first heard Elvis’s voice I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody and nobody was going to be my boss. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.” Dylan was about 14 when this music largely wiped out everything that had gone before it in pop music culture.

Who else was about 14 then? Hadju lists some of them turning 70 this year and next: Joan Baez, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, Aretha Franklin, Carole King, Brian Wilson, Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia. Some, gratefully, are already dead, of course.

Mario Lanza

What about me? I was about 15 at the time, and I liked Elvis when I was in high school, but it was too late for me, and Hadju’s theory might explain why I was not an admirer of Dylan’s singing or his music. A couple of years before, I heard a singer who forever changed my perception of what singing was supposed to be: it was Mario Lanza.

I saw the movie starring tenor Lanza as “The Great Caruso” at about that age and when he sang “Vesti la giubba” from “Pagliacci” I was a goner. From that day forward I judged all male singers against that standard. No one could compare, although I had to admit Elvis had a passable baritone, and I came to enjoy Frank Sinatra when I got a little older.

Bob Dylan? Hello? With that raspy, crackling voice, I never gave him a chance. I know now I was missing some pretty impressive poetry, and even profound expressions that have had an important influence on our times, particularly at the dawn of the civil rights movement of the ‘60s.

How stuffy – uncool – is that? Early teenager likes opera music? I found a couple of operatic sopranos of that era to admire as well – Dorothy Kirsten, Roberta Peters, not pop artists Carole King or Aretha Franklin.

Lanza died at age 38 in 1959, the year Bob Dylan graduated from Hibbing High School and set out to change the world. Lanza’s recordings are still sold in stores, a pretty lasting legacy for a guy who’s been dead for 52 years.

I’ve got a feeling Dylan’s legacy will be longer than that, but you never know. In any event, neither he nor I will be around to find out.

Duluth MN, October 1976: Elvis sang...and they just loved him

by Jim Heffernan
The following review originally appeared in the Duluth News Tribune on October 17, 1976

(Note: Thirty-four years ago this month, Elvis made his first appearance in Duluth. He entertained Duluthians one more time the following April, just prior to his death in August of 1977. The following review was my first of two reviews of Elvis in concert in Duluth for the Duluth News Tribune. This concert–reviewed below–took place in the Duluth Arena on October 16, 1976. I reprinted my second review of his April 29, 1977 Duluth appearance in honor of the anniversary of his death on this blog last year– Click HERE . Those of you who are true Elvis fans may also want to check out a  memory piece I included in my book, Cooler Near the Lake, about Elvis in Duluth titled "Elvis Didn't Look Like a God During Duluth Visit." That writing first appeared in my Duluth News Tribune column on Sunday, January 30, 1994. Elvis lives...)

Elvis Presley delivered. He kept a full Duluth Arena waiting for more than an hour Saturday night while his "people" performed, but when he came on, he delivered. And the crowd went wild. Women screamed, flashbulbs - thousands of them - popped, fans tried to climb the stage and were repelled by police, and Elvis sang.

The more he sang, the more they loved him. They loved him most when he began passing perspiration-soaked silk scarves from around his neck to the few adoring fans who made it to the edge of the stage.
He performed for exactly one hour, then he was gone, a good $100,000 richer - before expenses and taxes.

At 41, Presley is amazingly well preserved. He's a little huskier now, but still trim. His white suit trimmed in gold brocaide makes him look like something not of this earth, and in some ways, he isn't. One of the few entertainers who has managed to stay popular long enough to take advantage of his own nostalgia, Elvis drew a mixed crowd of young, older and even oldish. Mainly, though, the crowd consisted of people now in their 30s who were his fans when Heartbreak Hotel forever changed the course of popular music.

He didn't sing Heartbreak Hotel Saturday night, but he managed to get in just about every other hit that's made him a millionaire several times over. But Elvis Presley is more than just Elvis Presley. He's a dozen-piece orchestra, 10 backup singers, and who knows how many people backstage, pilot fish for this unique person who somehow has managed to capture the dreams of so many people.

Soft-spoken when he addressed the audience, he mainly just introduced his music and his people and sang Love Me (Treat Me Like a Fool), Jailhouse Rock, All Shook Up, Teddy Bear, Don't Be Cruel, Hound Dog, even Blue Christmas, probably put in the act after he saw snowflakes from the window of one of the three floors of hotel rooms he's rented at the Radisson.

The show began promptly at 8.30 but not with Elvis. First his band played. Then his gospel quartet sang. Then his comedian entertained (with some pretty funny material). Then his female trio, not unlike the Supremes, sang. That took an hour, and then came intermission. After a good 15 minutes of opportunity for fans to buy Elvis memorabilia, the lights went down again and to the stirring strains of Richard Strauss' "Also Sparch Zarathustra," sometimes known as the "Space Odyssey Song," Elvis materialized in a blaze of light.

His voice is very much intact. A little raspy at first, it mellowed as he went on, soaking his vocal chords every few minutes with drinks of water provided by an on stage valet who also provided the scarves he threw into the audience. The drama of his act - his gyrations and rubbery leg movements that are his trademark - set the audience to screaming whenever he moved.

And after an hour during which he killed at least 10 minutes introducing each member of his troupe and giving them chance to solo, he led into his final number. I Just Can't Help Loving You are the lead words, if not the title, he said "If you want us back, just ask for us." The crowd again went wild with screaming, applauding and stomping and Elvis passed out a few more scarves, bowed to all four sides of his audience (the seats behind the stage were filled too), and left.

That was it. As the audience filed from its seats, a voice on the public address system said "Elvis has left the Arena." That's all there was, there wasn't any more.

Happy birthday Elvis...

Today is Elvis Presley's birthday. Had Elvis lived to a ripe old age, he would have turned 75 today. It's hard to imagine those swivel hips at the age of 75 though. Elvis was a giant in my generation and a genuine icon of our popular culture. I was privileged to have reviewed one of his concerts in Duluth not long before he died. Here's the link to that write up as it appeared on this blog not that long ago when the anniversary of his death was honored. Here's to Ol' Swivel Hips once again!

Elvis Presley: Ol' Swivel Hips Wowed Them Then

We're nearing the 32nd anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley. Elvis was discovered dead on a bathroom floor in Graceland on August 16, 1977. Earlier that year, Elvis appeared in concert in Duluth at the DECC. His last concert appearance was in June in Indianapolis. I thought you'd enjoy a bit of nostalgia as I reprint a review I wrote in the Duluth News Tribune following that concert. It was the end of an era, about to occur.

Ol' Swivel Hips Still Wows Them
by Jim Heffernan

A somewhat subdued yet happy - almost giddy - Elvis Presley did what he does best again Friday night in the Duluth Arena. A capacity crowd got what it came for at $12 to $15 a head for a show that was identical in most ways to the one Elvis put on here in October. The side acts were the same, the introductory music was the same and even some of comedian Jackie Kahane's jokes were the same.

And despite reports that Elvis had ballooned up to 285 pounds and was ailing, he looked pretty good. There's no question that he's fighting the battle of the bulge like most 42-year old men. But his paunch was well contained in his white sequined suit and massive belt and he looked healthy enough, even at close range.

The Elvis magic was still intact. Women still scream and try to make it to the stage to be immortalized by a kiss. A few made it. The white scarves, fresh from his damp neck, were handed out to screaming fans. Police and ushers fought the crowd back and one young woman fell and broke her leg at the foot of the stage. Her only regret, as police and Gold Cross ambulance attendants worked on her backstage, was that she was missing the performance. "I wanna go back and see Elvis", she cried, her knee bulging as though a golf ball had been implanted in it. She left in an ambulance. And while this small drama was unfolding behind the scenes, Elvis continued at center stage, doing as much bantering with the audience as singing. The crowd at stage front surged some more, with many women trying to pass bouqets of flowers to their idol.

Just for the record, the 8PM concert got under way about 8.30 after the Elvis entourage had milked the audience dry selling posters, belt buckles, programs and other memorabilia at tables situated throughout the arena. Once again, Elvis' very fine male quartet opened the show, followed by the comedian. He worked in the names of Mayor Beaudin and County Atty. Keith Brownell as well as some popular references to Twig. "I knew there were a lot of people from Twig here, I saw their plows parked outside." Some day a comedian is going to come to Duluth and not mention Twig.

Kahane introduced the soul singing Sweet Inspirations, a female trio with a lot of bounce, and they took it to the intermission. It was 9.30. The half hour intermission gave fans one more opportunity to purchase Elvis souvenirs, relentlessly hawked by sales people festooned with buttons bearing the singer's likeness. They were for sale too.

At precisely 10 PM, wrist-watch time, Elvis' band struck up the now-familiar introduction - the "Space Odyssey" song- and the great man swaggered to the stage, blue spotlights playing on him and thousands of hand-held cameras popping flashbulbs. The crowd surged forward down the aisles despite the protestations of ushers and police and he was off and wriggling.

The star didn't wriggle quite as much as last time, and he seemed to be having trouble remembering the words to some of his own standards. I Can't Help Falling in Love with You received a lot of help from his backup singers. My Way and Bridge Over Troubled Waters, not songs generally associated with Elvis went better.

Still the crowd was pleased. After about an hour's work, Elvis left the Arena, bound for more glory and Duluth International Airport, three floors at the Radisson vacated to be sold to more ordinary customers who can come and go more freely, but don't make as much money.

It's becoming fashionable for reviewers to say that Elvis is slipping a bit, but it's never safe to underestimate the boy from Tupelo, Miss., whose impact on popular culture at mid-century and beyond is undisputed. As radio commentator Paul Harvey said in 1955: "The kid won't last a year."

Originally appeared in The Duluth News Tribune on Saturday April 30, 1977