Too many bowls can spoil the soup...

Minnesota coach Murray Warmath with players L-R:  Dave Mulholland,
Bill Munsey, Sandy Stephens, & Roger Hagberg (1961)
www.the daily gopher.com (2017)

Written By Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune/1-7-23

 So, the Minnesota Gophers football team won the Pinstripe Bowl. Wow. I forget the score; didn’t watch.

 

I always like to see the home team win, but, really, the Pinstripe Bowl? Whoever heard of that? (I’m not a sports fan so I haven’t heard of a lot of sports lore.)

 

So I looked it up. It’s called Pinstripe Bowl to pay homage to the New York Yankees’ famous pinstriped uniforms. And they play the game in Yankee Stadium, the house that Ruth didn’t build. His Yankee Stadium is long gone.

 

Never mind that the Yankees are a baseball team. Does this make sense? To honor them with a football bowl? Confusion reigns.

 

Let’s face it, college football “bowl” games have gotten out of control. I’m old enough (boy, am I ever) to recall a day when there were only about three bowl games that mattered, and the Rose Bowl was the king of bowls. The Orange bowl was lurking out there somewhere, and the Sugar Bowl’s been around for awhile, but none of them compared to the Rose Bowl.

 

I went to the Rose Bowl game in Pasadena, Calif., once, a long time ago. The Gophers played there after the1960 season and again the following year. I was there the first time when they lost to the Washington Huskies. I was going to the University of Minnesota Duluth “Branch” at the time. That’s what we were known as then.

 

And while we had the Bulldog football team here in Duluth, we were part of the U of M, meaning the Gophers going to the Rose Bowl was a pretty big deal. So two friends and I decided to drive to Pasadena to see the game.

 

It was quite an adventure. We almost got waylaid in Las Vegas on the way because it was so much fun there, and so cheap. But we pushed on to Pasadena in time to see the big Rose Bowl parade and game. (The entire Cartwright family from the old TV western “Bonanza” rode by on horseback. The ranks of people who remember “Bonanza” are thinning.)

 

The night before the big parade and game we decided to take a run into downtown Los Angeles from our Pasadena motel to see what was going on in the big city. It seemed kind of quiet on the streets, but for some reason we went to the big Biltmore Hotel looking for action.

 

Turns out It was the headquarters for the Washington Huskies, the team our Gophers would face the next day. The bar was filled with exuberant Washington fans (it doesn’t take long to get exuberant in a packed bar) and exuberance is kind of catchy, so we just joined right in toasting the Washington Huskies with their fans. Didn’t feel a bit of guilt but this is the first time I’ve publicly confessed it.

 

As we were exiting the Biltmore after celebrating our opposing team, in the lobby I ran into a Duluth kid I knew. He and a buddy were in navy uniforms and had hitchhiked up from their base San Diego for the game. What is the likelihood of meeting a Duluthian among the many millions surrounding us? The two sailors didn’t have a place to say so they wandered into the Biltmore hoping to catch a few winks of sleep on the lobby couches.

 

Didn’t happen. My acquaintance told me much later back in Duluth that the hotel’s night manager “caught” them, ordered them to follow him and gave them the presidential suite, at no charge. Now that’s patriotism.

 

On to the game the next day. We didn’t have tickets, but we went to the Rose Bowl stadium in hopes of securing some. Crowds were amassing outside the huge stadium (it could hold the entire population of Duluth) among kiosks decorated in the colors of the two teams — maroon and gold for Minnesota.

 

We walked up to a Minnesota window and asked if there were any tickets. Yes, there were, but you had to prove you were from Minnesota. We told them we were from Duluth so to prove that we had to answer a difficult question about the city. “What is the largest hotel in Duluth?” we were asked.

 

Well now, let’s see. Could it be the Spalding, Holland, Fifth Avenue, Lenox, or Hotel Duluth? We said Hotel Duluth, and they handed us tickets to the Rose Bowl for a few bucks. Pretty good seats, too. Ten yard line.

 

Of course Minnesota lost to our newfound friends from Washington. They did win over UCLA the next year, and that’s the last time the Gophers played in the Rose Bowl.

 

Now on to next season. Maybe they’ll get an invite to the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl or the Guaranteed Rate Bowl or the Cheeze-It Bowl (I didn’t make those up). Is there a Toilet Bowl? I can hardly wait. If ya gotta go, ya gotta go.

 

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.

Why not put some humor in your obit...

Written for the Duluth News Tribune by Jim Heffernan for Saturday, February 6, 2021

I noticed in a recent obituary in this paper that the elderly gentleman who had died was fond of the Three Stooges. What a delightful, and insightful, thing to include in a man’s obit. I didn’t know him but wish I had.

 

It got me to thinking about what comedy team I might want to mention in my obituary when that day comes. I like the Three Stooges a lot too, but I think I’d prefer to be survived, on paper, by Laurel and Hardy. They are my all-time favorites, and when they show up on TV even today I am always compelled to watch. Their movies were still making the rounds in theaters when I was a kid

 

Still, the Three Stooges were great too — Moe, Larry and Curly (the bald one). I liked Larry the best, I think. Don’t know why. Moe was so dominant but poor Larry, a study in self-deprecation, was always the victim. Curly was he who got slapped.

 

Maybe more of us ought to think about what comedy team we liked best to include in our final public mention. In thinking about this subject, and before choosing Laurel and Hardy, I considered several other comedy teams.

 

I suppose many in my generation might choose Abbott and Costello — Bud and Lou — but not me. They were very popular when I was a kid, but even at a young age I thought Costello was too silly, presaging the serious approach to life I would take when I grew up, as readers of this can readily discern. 

 

When Costello sadly dropped dead in the early 1950s, it seemed like he and Abbott were almost immediately succeeded on the screen by Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. They became perhaps the most famous comedy team of all time, but I didn’t particularly care for them. Of course I went to all of their movies — what else was there to do? — but Jerry Lewis didn’t speak to me (too silly too) and Dean Martin was just his straight man. (In the old sense of straight.)

 

Back in the Abbott and Costello days, a comedy team on radio was very popular but seems almost politically incorrect to mention these days. They were called Amos and Andy and I feel it perilous to go into detail about their racially associated schtick. Not going to show up in any obituaries, I’d wager.

 

In more recent years (but not that recent) Rowan and Martin made a big hit with television’s “Laugh In” program but are now largely forgotten by today’s funeral directors, to whom obituary material is dictated by surviving family members. They were funny though, as was their cast of characters including Goldie Hawn and Richard Nixon, who showed up there once and uttered the famous “sock it to me” line featured each week on “Laugh In.”

 

Let’s see here… I’m running out of comedy teams. Well, around the same time as Nixon and Agnew were a couple of comics called Allen and Rossi. The usual fat clown and thin buddy, but they did a lot of TV and could be amusing. I don’t think they’re of obituary quality though.

 

I’ll digress now to a confession of a low point in my long-ago newspaper reporting years when I was assigned to go to Hotel Duluth (now Greysolon Plaza) to interview one half of an old radio comedy team called Lum and Abner. (No relation to Lil’ Abner of newspaper comic pages fame.)

 

Lum and Abner? I’d never heard of them. Unbeknownst to me they were apparently on radio forever with a folksy show purportedly out of some bucolic small town in Arkansas. I didn’t know that, though, when I dashed over to Hotel Duluth to interview whichever one was here to speak to some group.

 

The place was crowded with cheerful attendees apparently eager to hear either Lum or Abner speak, but my problem was I didn’t know which. My quest to find out became a low point in my reporting career.

 

The speaker was pointed out to me (of course I didn’t recognize him; I’d never heard of him) as the crowd assembled for a cocktail hour, so I approached the star and introduced myself as a reporter there to cover his lecture. He didn’t seem very friendly but that often happened when speakers realized they were going to be covered by the newspaper, especially politicians. They’d have to watch their fabricating more closely.

 

It was awkward for me because I didn’t know if I was talking to Lum or Abner and couldn’t proceed without knowing, so I asked:

 

“Which one are you, Lum or Abner?”

 

That pretty much ended the interview as he turned on his heel and got on a nearby elevator, the doors mercifully closing as he glared out at me after admitting he was Lum.

 

Not going to put Lum and Abner in my obituary.

 

I’ll end all this by mentioning a husband-wife comedy team on radio known as Fibber MaGee and Molly, played by Jim and Marian Jordan. They were enormously popular on radio before TV hit big in the 1950s, as they engaged their neighbors and other characters like Digger O’Dell, the friendly undertaker.

 

As an aside, they had a local connection. Peggy Knudsen, an actress who was born and raised in Duluth and who had considerable success in Hollywood in the 1940s and ‘50s, was married to their son for a time. You can Google her.

 

All, of course, have now been visited by Digger O’Dell’s successor brethren, hardly remembered by anyone…except me.

 

Even after all this, I believe I’ll stick with Laurel and Hardy.

 

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.  

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?”

A Kennedy affair to remember–even in Duluth...

By Jim Heffernan

Still another of President John F. Kennedy’s extra-marital girlfriends – some call them mistresses, quite accurately it turns out – has written a book about their affair that is being published this month.

This one, Mimi Alford, was a 19-year-old White House intern in the summer of 1962, and, according to reports on her book and news media interviews with the author, had been intimate with the president within a week of joining the White House staff.

She kept the secret to herself and a few others for decades, but now has decided to tell all, and, according to reports, she has quite a bit to tell. I haven’t read the book, but only these accounts.

But it’s clear that she and the president had their fling for about 18 months, starting in 1962 and ending less than a week before he was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. She is now 68.

During that time she reports she traveled often with the president, quietly staying in the background. You wonder if she was with him in Duluth.

In September 1963, just two months before he died, Kennedy visited Duluth, with great fanfare. Thousands of older Duluthians remember that day, but their ranks are thinning. I remember it very well, and have written about my “big” role in the visit in the past. I was a 23-year-old Army National Guardsman, recently returned from boot camp, conscripted along with the others in my unit to “guard” the president.

After he landed at the airport (his limousine – the one he was assassinated in – had been flown in the day before) his motorcade made its way to downtown Duluth where Superior Street was lined with thousands of people eager to catch a glimpse of the president. When he arrived it was evening and raining, so the Lincoln limo had a transparent top attached as it made its way from about Fifth Avenue West to Third Avenue East.

As luck would have it – and it was pure luck – I was stationed on the sidewalk right outside Hotel Duluth (now Greysolon Plaza), where the president stayed overnight, as part of a cordon of Army guardsmen standing shoulder to shoulder to keep the crowd back. Interesting duty. There were perhaps 16 of us, with the rest of the unit standing curbside all along downtown Superior Street in front of the crowd.

So I got within about 10 feet of Kennedy as he stepped out of the limo and walked into the hotel, smiling and waving to the crowd. Wife Jackie was not with him on this trip. Was Mimi Alford? In researching her book at the Kennedy Library she found Air Force One travel manifests for the period where her name appears among the passengers. I suppose somewhere there’s a record of who was on the plane when it flew to Duluth.

Reading about her experiences dredged up some of my long-ago thoughts as I watched the smiling chief executive walk alone across the sidewalk at Hotel Duluth. He was the first president I was old enough to vote for. Just about everybody my age, and plenty of older voters, were gaga over this handsome young leader with the beautiful wife. It took a pretty staunch Republican to resist him, although his victory over Richard Nixon in 1960 was narrow.

At the time it was inconceivable that an ordinary American, like myself, would suspect the president of having an affair, or many affairs, with at least one of his illicit companions still in her teens. Here was a political god whose rectitude was unquestioned at the time. I was surprised when I stood near him that he wasn’t 10 feet tall.

Learning something about this latest paramour in the past few days, I came to realize that at the time of the affair, when she MIGHT have visited Duluth with Kennedy, she was around 20 years old. The president was running around with girls younger than those of my own precise generation? Unbelievable.

It brings to mind a scene from the 1982 movie “Diner” in which a group of street-wise Baltimore boys exiting their teens in 1959 hang around a favorite diner and discuss their drab inner-city lives. In one scene, two of them are walking outside the city along a rural road when they see a lovely, obviously wealthy young woman in riding clothes, trot by them on horseback. “You ever get the feeling that there’s something going on that we don’t know about?” one of the Baltimore boys asks his companion.

Well, as for me, yeah, I get that feeling now and then.


For a look back–when JFK arrived at the Duluth International Airport on September 24, 1963 to speak at UMD the following day (September 25)–check out this News Tribune Attic post of April 21, 2009 HERE.


And... for  more information about the new memoir of JFK's intern, Mimi Alford, check out this NY Times opinion piece by Liesl Schillinger published on February 11, 2012 HERE.