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?”

Big names already lost to Millennial Generation...

By Jim Heffernan

"Millennials follow Generation X on the long road to the cemetery." 

I spent an hour in a college classroom full of Millennials recently, talking about my distinguished journalism career. I mean distinguished in the broader sense, like my profession as distinguished from, say, garbage man or rocket scientist.

That is, though, entirely beside the point. The point actually is that many people my age (pre-Boomer, believe it our not) simply aren’t tuned into the Millennial Generation yet. The Millennial Generation is kind of vague, but most analysts of things like generations (Lost, Pepsi) say it consists of anyone born from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.

Millennials follow Generation X on the long road to the cemetery.

I believe the students in the class I led were a year or two on either side of 20 – making their way through college this year as sophomores or juniors. Thus, I took a couple of things for granted in my presentation that I shouldn’t have before a class of students whose memories are probably 15 years long at most.

As part of my presentation, I was telling the students about how the media covered the Iron Range plane crash that claimed the life of Minnesota U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone 13 years ago this month. Explaining that this national news story happened right in the Northland, I was interrupted by the professor, who suggested that I might want to explain who Wellstone was.

I was quite surprised that would be necessary, but, OK, show of hands, how many know who Paul Wellstone was? Three or four hands went up among the 20-25 students in the room.

The tragic death of Paul Wellstone is so fresh in my mind it’s hard to believe it was in 2002. These students, though, were six or seven years old then. With all due respect to the late liberal lawmaker, Wellstone is already history to a large part of the U.S. population—its Millennials.

There was another such situation before this class, equally surprising to me. In a Q & A segment after my presentation, I was asked to describe a favorite, or memorable, interview I’d conducted in my working years. It didn’t take me long to recall that an interview I’d had with the actor Gregory Peck was quite memorable. He was such a huge Hollywood star at the time – the mid-1970s. Peck died in 2003.

Well, an audience that had never heard of Paul Wellstone could never be expected to know who Gregory Peck was. And none did, until I told them he was the actor who portrayed Atticus Finch in the movie “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Many of the students had seen that timeless movie and then knew to whom I was referring.

Finally, later in the week, I went in for a flu shot, only to be met by a friendly nurse I recognized immediately as a likely Millennial. As with all such appointments, they ask you to recite your birth date and year (to see how your memory is holding up?), and, as it happened, it was just a few days after my latest birthday.

Joking, I told her she had my birth information in front of her, so she could figure out my age, but I remarked that I’m at an age now where I don’t exactly tell people how old I am. Instead I say, “If you know how many trombones led the big parade in ‘The Music Man’ you have my age.”

The Millennial nurse looked at me quizzically. So I sang it: “Seventy-six trombones led the big parade…” and asked if she’d ever heard the song. No, she hadn’t (and indicated by her reaction that she wasn’t accustomed to being sung to while giving flu shots).

So “Seventy-six Trombones” is gone too to Millennials.

I didn’t mention it at the time, but I also know the next line of the song: “With 110 coronets close behind.”

I’m looking forward to telling the younger generation that’s my age when the time comes. That’ll be 2049. Just around the corner.

A degree of separation from Elizabeth Taylor not close enough...

By Jim Heffernan 

I often think of things in terms of degrees of separation – from me – when famous people are in the news. Geraldine Farraro dies; well, I have met Walter Mondale many times, she was his running mate, therefore, while I had never met her, I’m one degree of separation away.

Spending a lifetime in journalism, even in Duluth, offers the opportunity to meet a lot of prominent people, mainly in politics and the arts, as they inevitably find their way to Duluth at some point in their careers. I met quite a few in my years as a newspaper reporter and, for a decade, entertainment writer.

I’ll cite just two examples of people so well known and internationally connected that through them you can be one degree of separation from just about everybody worth being a degree of separation from. I had lunch with the late actor Gregory Peck when he passed through Duluth in the 1970s, opening the door for one-degree separation from just about everybody prominent in Hollywood going back to the 1930s.

And, as with just about every journalist in Minnesota and the country, meeting Hubert Humphrey opened the door to a degree of separation from anybody who’s anybody in American politics in the last half of the 20th century. The same is true of Mondale, of course.

Then there’s Elizabeth Taylor, who died last week. I am a degree of separation from her, probably through Gregory Peck, but more closely through a friend of mine who entertained her at his home, and whose wife felt threatened by the actress’ attentions to my friend.

Such was the power of Elizabeth Taylor.

The contact took place in the 1980s when Taylor was married to U.S. Sen. John Warner of Virginia. My friend was president of a private college in that state, and, with his wife, hosted the senator and his wife – Taylor -- at a dinner in the college president’s residence on campus.

The Warners were charming, of course, according to my friend. Everyone was charming, you’d expect. But my friend’s wife, when recounting the story of the visit, was clearly irritated by Taylor’s attentions to my friend. She described how Taylor took my friend’s arm and walked closely with him as they moved into the dining room, and other attentions Taylor seemed to be paying him, in spite of the fact that Taylor’s husband, the senator, was right there.

It wasn’t serious flirtation, of course, and probably the way Taylor acted one-on-one with everyone she engaged with socially. But what amused me about hearing the scene described was that I’d always thought that my friend somewhat resembled Richard Burton, one of Taylor’s previous husbands. Not a shocking resemblance, but a suggestion. They simply looked somewhat alike – to me at least.

Did Taylor think so too? Who knows? Nothing more came of it, of course, other than an interesting conversation with my friends over gin and tonics.

Oh yes, and it assured me one degree of separation from Elizabeth Taylor. Not close enough, but it’ll have to do.