Plenty of presidential visits here in the past...

Written by By Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune, October 3, 2020

Before President Trump’s visit to Duluth earlier this week, this newspaper ran a story about how popular Duluth has become in election years for visits from high-profile candidates and their family members.

 

The story recounted how his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, was also here a little over a week ago, that Donald Trump Jr. showed up and Vice President Mike Pence and Ivanka Trump recently made a joint appearance here in support of the incumbent.

 

I’m sure you recall all that very recent history even if you’re only half paying attention. But the story sparked in me recollections of previous visits to Duluth by high-profile candidates, quite a few of whom I saw either as a civilian or a journalist, and one as a member of the Army National Guard.

 

Truman in Duluth, 1948

So today I thought I’d recall some of those in the past starting — believe it or not — with President Harry S. Truman in 1948. Truman, as vice president, had become chief executive upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, but was facing the electorate for the first time in his bid to remain in the highest office in the land.

 

He toured large swaths of the country by train during that successful campaign and eventually the Truman campaign train showed up in Superior, his starting off point in the Head of the Lakes for a visit by car across the bay to Duluth on a sunny autumn day. That’s when I saw him.

 

I was in fourth grade at Lincoln Elementary that fall and we were told by our teacher that anyone who wanted to be let out of school in the early afternoon to see the president should bring a note and we could be released.

 

I took the bus downtown with my mother and we stood at First Avenue East and Superior Street when Truman was driven by seated on the back of a top-down convertible, waving at the throngs — yes, that’s the proper word — that lined Superior Street along the route.

 

A bunch of teenagers on top of the building across the street were hollering “phooey on Dewey” as a smiling “Give ‘em Hell Harry” slowly rolled by. Truman’s Republican opponent was Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of New York making his second run for the presidency, having been defeated by ailing Roosevelt in 1944.

 

Eisenhower, Duluth MN 1952

Truman was the first president I saw in person but not the last, by far. He was succeeded by former Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower who was elected in 1952 after a campaign that also included a visit to Duluth. I just caught a fleeting glimpse of him as he was driven a block from our house en route to the airport after appearances downtown.

 

I knew the route he was to take so I waited for the entourage to come, and there was Ike in the back seat of a hard-top Cadillac limo, waving out a side window to people lining the avenue, his famous grin intact. I had actually seen him once before, still in uniform, being escorted around the Minnesota State Fair just after World War II. (Yeah, I’m that old.)

 

Our next president, John F. Kennedy, had campaigned in the area in 1960 but he also showed up in Duluth as president in September 1963 when he was gearing up for his run for a second term in 1964. I’ve written about this before in columns, but, briefly, I was a member of a Duluth-based Army National Guard unit that was activated for the visit of our commander in chief.

 

We were lining Superior Street but I was ordered to the entrance to Hotel Duluth along with about a dozen other troopers to hold back crowds as Kennedy entered the hotel, where he would stay the night. The unexpected duty got me within a few feet of the smiling Kennedy after he alighted from the Lincoln limo he would be riding in two months later when he was assassinated in Dallas.

 

Onward. In 1964, Republican presidential candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater’s vice presidential running mate, U.S. Rep. William E. Miller, showed up in Duluth that fall, spending most of his few hours here on the UMD campus. By then I was a newspaper reporter and part of the team covering him. Goldwater was soundly defeated by Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s vice president who had taken over when Kennedy was murdered. Miller disappeared into the mists of history.

 

Minnesota’s own Hubert H. Humphrey, Johnson’s vice presidential pick, visited us numerous times throughout his lengthy political career as a U.S. senator. He got the Democratic nomination for president in 1968 but lost to Richard Nixon, who had campaigned here when he faced Kennedy in 1960 but I never saw him. 

 

Also in 1968, Alabama Gov. George Wallace, running for president on the third party American Independent ticket as a segregationist, showed up in the Duluth Arena, drawing a huge crowd. I was seated with others in the media slightly behind the stage and noticed Wallace’s lectern was huge and thick, large enough for a speaker to duck into if shots were fired. That didn’t happen here, of course, but he later was shot and lived the rest of his life as a paraplegic. 

 

Humphrey returned to the Senate after losing the election, continuing his long-time association with the Head of the Lakes. I had lunch with him one of those times, and he always sent a Christmas card.

 

In 1976, following Nixon’s impeachment in1974, his vice president and successor, Gerald Ford, was the Republican selected to face Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia in the race for the White House. Carter won. He showed up here in 1978 campaigning for Democrats in the mid-term elections. He spoke in Symphony Hall on a stage lined with Democratic candidates from Minnesota and Wisconsin, most of whom lost that year. I didn’t meet him, but sat with the press in a front row where I noticed grease spots on his trousers. It’s always hard to eat on airplanes.

 

Carter lost to Ronald Reagan two years later. I’m not aware that Reagan ever graced the Northland, but his 1984 opponent, Vice President Walter Mondale, certainly had, and did. I’d met him before but he visited us at the News Tribune on one trip to Duluth during that campaign. He was over confident in light of the way things turned out.

 

The next sitting president to show up was Bill Clinton, half way through his second term, to campaign for Democrats. He spoke at UMD, where I was in the audience with other press people. I didn’t meet him but he made quite a splash here, even going for a run on Skyline Drive.

 

In 2004 Republican President George W. Bush appeared before an enthusiastic crowd in the Duluth Arena. I was there with other media members. We were corralled as far from the president as possible, in keeping with presidents’ lack of affinity with the press. His wife, Laura, campaigned here too, at Bayfront Park. They won.

 

Which brings us to the present. I will never count Trump among the presidents and candidates I’ve actually seen while campaigning in Duluth. When he was here on Wednesday I had to see a man about a horse.

 

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.

A look back at newspaper, city history...

DNT City Editors, Jim Heffernan & Bob Knaus
& summer interns posing by printing press. 1972

Written by By Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune, DNT Extra edition Inside Scoop: Memorable Northland events as told by the News Tribune Journalists who covered them, in print on Wednesday, August 27, 2020 

October 1963: John F. Kennedy was president–but wouldn’t be for long. Queen Elizabeth was on the throne of England–had been for about a decade. Fidel Castro was roiling the Caribbean. Closer to home, downtown Duluth was the center of local commerce–there was no Miller Hill Mall. Oh, and I began a job as a reporter for this newspaper.

 

This newspaper at the time was really two newspapers under the same roof–the morning Duluth News Tribune and the evening Duluth Herald. (A widely shared joke in those days called them The Morning Liar and the Evening Repeater). It amounted to the publication of 13 newspapers a week–seven News Tribunes and six Heralds–delivered to the doorsteps of tens of thousands of Northland subscribers by school kids eager to make a few bucks. 

Now, back to the present, in a couple of weeks, daily home delivery of this one remaining newspaper ends; publication scales back to two papers a week–Wednesdays and Saturdays–arriving in the mail. Of course the newspaper’s coverage continues daily–even hourly–on line. Times change.

 

Jim Heffernan in DNT newsroom
circa mid 60's

Back in 1963 when I walked into the newspaper building (currently for sale) it was a pretty big operation, employing hundreds in the plant, a couple dozen in the news and sports departments. I was totally unprepared. I hadn’t majored in journalism in college nor had I worked on school papers. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life, so actually being hired someplace was welcome. So was the 75 bucks a week.

 

About a month before I showed up at the paper, having recently returned from active Army duty, my Duluth National Guard unit was involved in “guarding” President Kennedy on his visit here. About a month after I began my job at this paper as a general assignment reporter, I was involved in local coverage of Kennedy’s assassination. Things were moving real fast.

 

They were moving real fast throughout Duluth too. When I began my journalism career the newspaper was located where it is now, Fifth Avenue West and First Street. The back of our building, where they loaded our delivery trucks, was across the alley from the back of the magnificent old Lyceum Theater in its last days in a run that had begun in 1891. Across Superior Street from the Lyceum’s imposing facade the stately Spalding Hotel, a contemporary of the Lyceum, still stood, but had recently closed.

 

Across Fifth Avenue West stood the Holland Hotel, still in operation but its days were numbered too, along with the Fifth Avenue Hotel, across Superior Street from the Holland. The Radisson is now where the Holland was and the Duluth Public Library is on the Fifth Avenue Hotel site, in a block considered the city’s “bowery,” locus of the oxymoronic Classy Lumberjack tavern.

 

A few blocks east on Superior Street there were several department stores, the most prominent being the Glass Block. Across the street was Wahl’s and kitty-corner Montgomery Ward had a sizable store. A little farther east was Oreck’s and Sears operated in a building that is now a casino. In between were myriad specialty stops offering everything from sports equipment to clothing for women and men, to shoes only, luggage–anything anybody might need.

 

There were also several movie theaters, and we can’t overlook various bars and restaurants nestled in among everything else. One, called The Flame, was operating on the bayfront at the foot of Fifth Avenue West, site of the aquarium today. It was Duluth’s classiest eatery, always with entertainment–dining and dancing, as they used to put it. Across the avenue, also on the waterfront, site preparation for the Duluth Arena Auditorium was getting under way. It opened in 1966.

 

And towering over all this were the banking facilities, business and medical offices, some of them where they are today but with different names. What is now Miller Hill Mall was a golf driving range, which went up in the 1950s on undeveloped land.

 

That’s not all. There were major bustling industries, including the Duluth Works of United States Steel, called American Steel and Wire, employing thousands at its Morgan Park location. Clyde Iron in the West End was multi-decades away from becoming a restaurant. Up over the hill, the U.S. Air Force had established a major air base to ward off enemy attacks from the Soviet Union (now Russia) during the Cold War. Many Air Force personnel from warmer climates found out in Duluth just how cold the war could be.

 

The University of Minnesota Duluth (known then as the Duluth Branch of the University of Minnesota) had around 2,000 students, maybe 1,999 after I left the previous year. There are upwards of 10,000 now.

 

That was Duluth in 1963 when I became a reporter and where I have continued an association with the daily newspaper in one form or another to this day.

 

Not in our wildest imagination at that time could we ever foresee the newspaper business changing nationally the way it has. Here and elsewhere it was an institution, like the seats of government across the street from our building in the Duluth Civic Center.

 

When I showed up in the newsroom, many, if not most, of the other men–yes, men–had served in World War II. What about women? There were two: the “society” editor and her assistant. They worked during the day; those of us on the morning Tribune worked evenings and nights. Evening Herald workers were leaving as we arrived.

 

We wrote our stories using manual Royal typewriters on leftover newsprint from the press downstairs. Electric typewriters had been invented, of course, but the newspaper management at the time was not quick to upgrade. I could recognize my desk in old newspapering movies from the 1930s.

 

Those World War II vets used the hunt and peck system of typing, but they were fast. I had taken typing in high school and the first night on the job I was asked by the city editor if I could type. When I said I could he said I had half the battle won. I didn’t, but it was encouraging.

 

Yup, things change. About all I can think of that hasn’t, for the purposes of this column, are I am still here, and Elizabeth is still queen.

 

It’s been quite a ride for both of us.

 

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. 

 

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.

JFK: A short beginning fifty years ago

By Jim Heffernan

The day President Kennedy took office was cold in Washington and in Duluth...

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as president of the United States.

I remember the day very well, although I’m not sure I recall seeing the famous inauguration speech – “ask not what your country…” etc. -- live on TV. It’s been shown so many times since that it’s difficult to know if I saw it live or am remembering film of it. I do recall the poet Robert Frost, very old, participated, reciting a poem he wrote for the occasion, so maybe I saw it live.

It was an exciting time for my generation. The previous November I had voted for the first time, having turned 21 a month before the election. The voting age was later changed to 18. Of course I voted for Kennedy. Youthful looking and seemingly vigorous, he had captured the imaginations of many young people I knew and many around the country, although he didn’t beat Richard M. Nixon by much. But he won, that was the main thing.

I was still in college in January 1960 – I should say back in college – at the University of Minnesota Duluth. I’d dropped out for a couple of quarters and went back that January to finish my education.

My most vivid recollection of that January day is that in the afternoon I visited my barber for a haircut. Here is why I remember such a trivial thing: His shop was next door to a television repair business that had placed a television set in the window facing out that was tuned to the inaugural parade in Washington.

After my haircut, I stopped to view the parade for a few minutes – not only because of the parade but because it was the first time I’d seen color television. I marveled at it, having spent my entire TV life (about 10 years at the time) viewing black and white, and would continue in B & W for quite some time. Color was a novelty in 1960.

The TV image showed newly minted President Kennedy on the reviewing stand acknowledging the passing units with many smiles and waves. It was unseasonably cold in Washington, and he was wearing a dark topcoat. It was also cold in Duluth – January, after all – so I didn’t tarry long on the sidewalk watching the parade pass by on color television.

I had my haircut and I needed to get on with my life, and it didn’t much involve asking what I could do for my country. It mainly involved asking what I could do that night for my social life, and wondering what was going on on the weekend that would be fun.

After finishing college in 1962 I spent some time in the Army (“ask what you can do for your country…”), stationed near Washington, D.C., and saw the White House for the first time. Standing outside on Pennsylvania Avenue, I wondered if President Kennedy, my commander in chief, was inside at that moment. Who could know for sure?

Following active military service, back home I got a job as a reporter at the Duluth newspapers and in November 1963 was involved in local coverage of Kennedy’s assassination. We’d just seen him in Duluth the previous September when he spoke at UMD.

Back then it seemed like such a long time from that inauguration day to the day he died, but of course in terms of history it was an instant – just over three years. Yet in that brief time I had finished my education, served in the military and started my career. In some ways it was the most important period of my life, just as it was for President Kennedy, and, really, oh so brief a time.

Thinking back on it now, countless haircuts later, I have a better understanding of what constitutes a long time. Fifty years constitutes a long time, by any measure…other than archaeological.

Video footage of the inspirational inauguration speech given by JFK on January 20 1961 may be seen on You Tube HERE.