Happy B-day America; let’s not blow it (up)...

Photo source: MPR/ Remembering
Dululth's Infamous 1988 fireworks explosion/07-04-18

Written By Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/7-4-26

 So, we’re 250 years old today. America, that is. Pretty old by American standards, not very old by European standards and those of some other civilizations.

 

And not really very old by MY standards. Here’s why:

 

My paternal grandfather — pay attention here — MY (there goes that upper case again) grandfather was 21 years old when America celebrated its centennial in 1876. He was born in 1855.  There were people around then whose lives overlapped with George Washington’s (he died in 1799), and that grandfather lived long enough to see me as a baby. Yes, I was once a baby like so many others.

 

My other grandparents were a bit younger, all born in Europe around the time of America’s 100th birthday. Their countries of origin — Sweden and Germany (that older grandfather was an Irishman from Canada) — had been around for a millennium or so, but these immigrants ended up in the United States, and Duluth, when the country was just over a century old. Ancient history? Not very. Greece has ancient history.

 

Of course, I’m no kid. America was only 163 years old when I was born in Duluth on the cusp of World War II. You can count on your fingers to figure out my age, but you’ll need a lot of fingers.

 

So we’re a young-old country.

 

Like so many other Americans, over the years my family celebrated the Fourth of July with appropriate exuberance. Flag hanging on the porch, picnic food prepared in the kitchen and placed in a wicker basket, gathering with relatives for a feast, a parade (Moose Lake, near our family cabin, always had one), kids’ rides at their carnival in the park, fireworks after sundown. America a year older.

 

Not a lot of talk about the birth of a nation, which is why we all had gathered. Oh, we held all those truths of the founders to be self-evident and got on with feasting and having fun on the Fourth.

 

This year is different, of course. America is two and a half centuries old and deserves to be honored despite certain shortcomings in our society that also are self-evident. Most of us know what they are.

 

Whew, sounds like I’m getting serious. Well, try this.

 

One Fourth of July celebration in Duluth stands out from all the rest. Ever since Duluth started hosting fireworks displays on its Bayfront, our family has attended. The tradition was started by the late Mayor Ben Boo in the late 1960s or early ‘70s and it has lasted all these years — Boo’s enduring legacy. Before then Duluth was a nothingburger on July 4. 

 

We always went to the fireworks as our children were growing up, year after year, throughout their early childhoods, teen and college years, extending into early adulthood before they married and started families and developed their own traditions here and elsewhere.

 

After so many years viewing fireworks at Bayfront shortly after sundown on Independence Day, they tend to run together in one’s memory. Spectacular displays of sprays of lights flashing high in the dark sky above our heads, the sounds of explosions on the ground as the rockets are catapulted into the firmament, huge crowds of onlookers.

 

We always watched from the same place, a grassy hillside not far from The Depot. Great spot, no longer there.

 

But one Fourth display does not blend in the memory with the rest: The year the whole kit and caboodle exploded on the ground almost immediately after the display started. It was July 4, 1988. The explosion was deafening, the conflagration on the ground as the fireworks all went off at once, spectacular, yet frightening for most viewers, especially those up close.

 

Hundreds of viewers close to the explosion fled. My family largely stayed put — we were far enough away. But we wondered if we should flee.

 

After the explosion everything went dark and ominously quiet for a few moments before the wail of emergency vehicle sirens pierced the air.  No one knew the extent of the damage or if viewers were injured or even killed. What about the workers who’d set them off? How could anybody up that close survive?

 

Fortunately, everyone did. There were no serious injuries or burns. A few viewers complained about small burning fragments drifting in the air, but no serious damage resulted from that.

 

Some 10,000 spectators, give or take, left the greater Bayfront area that night 38 years ago with an eternal memory of that spectacular, if ominous, fireworks explosion. As with me, it will never be forgotten.

 

Now here we are again celebrating Independence Day, this time on its 250th anniversary. Let’s hope it’s a safe one.

 

Happy Semiquincentennial America! Whew…long word. Absolutely supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

 

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 

Paul Wellstone Fifteen Years Later: Big Shoes to Fill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A different side of Justice Alan Page...

Photo source: Wikipedia, 2009

By Jim Heffernan

Much is being made this month of the retirement of Justice Alan Page from the Minnesota Supreme Court. By law he must retire at age 70, which he marks this month.

Does Page need further elaboration? Maybe to a few, but not many in Minnesota. Most people remember him as an all-pro lineman for the Minnesota Vikings in the 1970s, a player of such skill and power that he was named to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1988.

Even while still playing professional football, Page went to law school, and in 1992 was elected to the state Supreme Court, where he has served ever since.

This is all Google-able information that needs no further elaboration here. What follows is not on Google, because it is a personal recollection of mine of one brief encounter with Page in the 1970s, long before he became a high court justice, and was still playing for the Vikings.

Sooner or later just about every Minnesota luminary, especially in politics but in sports and the arts as well, finds himself or herself in the newsroom of the Duluth daily newspaper – The Duluth News Tribune. I worked there for 42 years, a decade of those years (most of the 1970s) as the entertainment and arts writer and editor. My end of the operation was located in a small, enclosed office with large windows just off the newsroom.

I had plastered the walls and windows with memorabilia reflecting my job, including large travel posters that came to me in the mail because I was also listed as the newspaper’s travel editor (who never traveled anywhere on their cuff). One of the posters on my wall, perhaps 18 by 24 inches, was a vivid color photograph of the inside of an Austrian cathedral showing massive organ pipes rising to a blue ceiling (looked a lot like heaven), with seraphim and cherubim floating alongside (proving it).

One day as I sat at my desk I saw a large man wearing casual but athletic style clothes walking in the direction of my office on his way to an exit. He stopped in his tracks when he saw my travel poster of the cathedral organ pipes and rococo adornments, and just stared, saying something like, “Wow.”

I greeted him and invited him in to take a closer look, which he did as we engaged in small talk about the poster. The encounter didn’t last more than a couple of minutes. Not a football fan, I didn’t know for sure who this visitor was, although I surmised it was someone of importance in the wide world of sports. Yes, of course it was Alan Page, I learned for sure by checking with the sports desk across the room where he had undergone an interview.

Some people you meet you never forget, and years later when he was on the state ballot for the Supreme Court I always recalled my encounter with him. I presume I voted for him. Who could be a better justice than someone representing a minority – African American – who had achieved greatness in his chosen athletic field, educated himself to join the legal profession and who appreciated 18^th Century rococo cathedrals?

Page participated in an extended interview by Tom Weber on Minnesota Public Radio Tuesday morning that can be accessed HERE. It’s well worth listening to. A shorter interview by Tom Crann today on MPR's All Things Considered may by linked HERE. To learn more about the Page Education Foundation, please link HERE.

Season's greetings, but what season?

By Jim Heffernan

Duluth MN: Treacherous winter storm on December 4, 2013.
(Photo by Derek Montogomery for MPR News)

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2013/12/03/regional/photo-winter-weather

Well, the big holiday looms.

As I venture out each morning to get the newspaper and mail, I walk through a canyon of snow banks, some of them taller than I.

Briskly walking through the canyons of snow, braving sub-zero temperatures, I’ve been thinking that this white winter scene is precisely what people from other parts of the country think it is like in Duluth all the time.

When I travel to other parts of the country – almost always to the south of here – and tell people where I’m from, they usually respond by saying things like, “Brrrr, it’s cold up there.” People in Minneapolis-St. Paul react that way. Never mind the people way down south. To them, these conditions are unimaginable. 

Duluth MN: Famous Halloween Storm of 1991
Duluth News Tribune photo, on MPR web site:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/bigstory/archive/2011/10/halloween-blizzard-was-no-treat.shtml

It’s a perception thing that Duluth can’t fight. We might as well just accept it.

So let me just take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy Fourth of July.

Duluth hit by early winter storm...

It's a winter wonderland in Duluth...
We're making the national weather news in Duluth with our post Thanksgiving winter storm. We've had about 15 inches of snow at our house (left) up on the hill, a little less down by the lake and around 28 inches up the north shore...and more is coming. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Check out WCCO news HERE for an update and a video and MPR for some great local photos.

Enger Tower restoration web site...

Here's the official Enger Park Restoration web site... neglected to include it in the previous post about Enger Tower renovation and lighting. Check it out HERE! And... you might want to also check out this MPR web site HERE where you can see a panoramic view from the tower and how to help with their Enger project.

Some movies that changed my life...

by Jim Heffernan

Minnesota Public Radio this week (March 24) asked listeners to write their Web site describing movies that changed their lives. It made me stop and think about movies that changed my life in some way.

When I was a kid I loved movies. Went to them every week, sometimes twice a week – even two double features adding up to four movies on a single weekend. I didn’t give a hoot about baseball or other sports, spent a lot of classroom time dreaming (about movies), and my first thought upon waking up each morning was if I could go to a movie that day.

So, did any movies change my life? Some did, at different stages of my life, in different ways. At least some made a lasting – permanent – impression if not a drastic life change, like running off with the circus.

One truly scary movie changed my lifestyle when I was about 11. “The Thing” (the original version) was so frightening that I refused to stay home alone at night, after having progressed in life to the point where my parents could go out for the evening and not worry about sitters.

The idea of a seven-foot-tall space alien from a flying saucer found in Arctic ice, who was vegetable, not animal (or mammal), and who thrived on drinking human blood (also sled dog blood), scared the bejezuz out of me. It changed my life for a couple of years.

About that same time – around 1950-51 – I saw two other movies that had a profound impact on my life. I was stunned by the voice of Mario Lanza in “The Great Caruso,” and it planted the seeds for a lifelong love of (some) opera. It caused me to judge every male singing voice against that of Lanza, with most falling short.

The second movie from that era – I was about 11 years old – that changed my life was “Come Back Little Sheba,” based on the Broadway play. It was considered pretty steamy for its day, especially love scenes between actress Terry Moore and Richard Jaeckel that stirred me in ways that Randolph Scott kissing his horse or the frontier town schoolmarm had not. Of course the onslaught of adolescence confirmed the suspicions wrought by seeing “Come Back Little Sheba” at a time in life when the facts of life were still fiction, but fading fast.

I saw “Gone With the Wind” for the first time when I was in junior high, one of the many reissues of that 1939 classic. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen it since. It set a standard for moviemaking against which I judged all other movies, so it changed my life that way.

Later in my life – college years – a couple of movies I’ll wager never get mentioned in listings such as these but which made a big impression on me at the time were the remake of “ The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” starring Glenn Ford, and “Tender Is the Night,” based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, with Jason Robards Jr. and Jennifer Jones. These are lush, romantic movies that at the time swept me into worlds of sophistication unknown to me. No one thinks they are worth seeing today, but I’d give them a look if they came on Turner Classic Movies. Boy, would I.

There are so many other movies that, if they don’t actually change your life, alter it because you never forget them. There are the usual suspects, “Casablanca” and “Citizen Kane” of course, and more recently “Animal House” and “Amadeus.” I’ll never get over the impact of seeing “Amadeus” for the first time –impact so strong I saw it again the very next night, this time with my then-teenage kids in tow. Who would mention “Animal House” and “Amadeus” in the same breath? I would.

Can’t leave without mentioning “The Seven Year Itch,” with Tom Ewell at the grand piano playing the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto, Marilyn Monroe by his side, and murmuring to her, “I’m going to take you into my arms and I am going to kiss you, very quickly, and very, very hard.”

I can only say: Don’t try that at home.

Do you have a movie or movies that changed your life in some way? Blog it here. It’s fun.