Attack of a 50-foot woman and other travails...

Source: Wikipedia

Written by Jim Heffernan for DuluthNewsTribune/6-1-24

I woke up extra early the other morning and clicked on the TV. It was tuned to a classic movie channel where groups of terrified men and women were running to and fro, apparently escaping from some dreaded horror.

 

Then it showed a shapely woman wearing a somewhat scanty white outfit akin to what some woman tennis players sport. She was wandering through a forest and I noticed she was taller than the trees.

 

It piqued my curiosity so I checked to see what movie it could be. The title was “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” made in 1958. I missed it at the time.

 

Lacking compelling interest in dangerous 50-foot women, I clicked off the TV remote and wandered into the kitchen to make coffee, turning on the countertop radio as I passed it en route to the electric coffee pot on the counter, eager for some morning action. Action is right.

 

“I couldn’t get my pigs to slaughter,” was the first thing I heard, from a loudly screaming woman on National Public Radio who sounded like she could be 50 feet tall.

 

Welcome to the world on this bright, sunny spring day, Mr. H. (Nobody calls me Mr. H.; I just threw that in because I like the way Dagwood Bumstead’s neighbor boy Elmo calls him Mr. B.) I turned off the pig woman without learning why she couldn’t slaughter her pigs and went about the business of brewing the morning coffee. Oh, and also life.

 

But those scenes haunted me all morning (when this is being written), and might continue into the afternoon, who knows?

 

My first thought upon hearing the plight of the pig woman was that maybe I should consider becoming a vegetarian. You can enjoy a ham and cheese sandwich without thinking about where they got the ham, but if you do think about it, it’s apt to cause reflection. BLT anyone? Thoughts like how lucky those un-slaughtered pigs were that day drifted into what’s left of my brain after maybe being invaded by an invasive worm. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

 

In my youth, a long time ago (around the time the 50-foot woman was first lurking about), I had a friend whose summer job at the former Elliott Packing Company in Duluth was herding sheep to their ultimate demise — just like leading lambs to slaughter, you could sing. Didn’t seem to bother him. He was very good at mathematics, so I suppose counting those sheep at bedtime helped him get to sleep.

 

Hoo, boy. I’ve got to cheer things up here. Hostile 50-foot-tall women, pigs and lambs being slaughtered, brain worms…not subjects for a “humor” column, which is usually my goal, like it or not.

 

We could revisit the morning coffee, an absolute must to start the day. It wasn’t always that way for me, though. I didn’t start drinking coffee until I was almost in my 20s. The reason? I wanted to live a long healthy life without burning out my insides on my mother’s coffee.

 

She was the daughter of Swedish immigrants, a couple who met in Duluth after emigrating separately from different parts of Sweden well over a century ago. I always blamed my mother’s strong coffee on that heritage.

 

Here’s her recipe: Fill a stove-top pot with water after throwing away the percolating apparatus, bring it to a bubbling boil, dump in an undetermined amount of ground coffee without measuring it, let boil some more, pour it into a waiting cup and sip it, if you dare. She liked cream in it.

 

Both of my parents drank it, and my father wasn’t even Swedish, but when I came of the usual age that one might start trying coffee I couldn’t. Just couldn’t. I always imagined if you spilled some on the ground it would bore all the way to Communist China.

 

So I went without, until I got to college. Seeking to become a pseudo intellectual, I wanted to fit in with the crowd who hung around the cafeteria drinking coffee and discussing compelling world problems like starvation in Africa, which seemed to be in vogue at that time too. They were thinking about organizing an actual “symposium.” So I tried some university coffee and it was fine. One lump of sugar and I was satisfied. What, no Swedes in the kitchen? There’s a relief.

 

It led, of course, to a lifetime of drinking copious amounts of “normal” morning coffee, including on the day a 50-foot woman was invading my life and pigs were not being slaughtered somewhere, not to mention the enduring concern about worms invading the brain inspired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his finest hour.

 

Finally, I don’t mean to cast aspersions on my own late mother so I’ll take this opportunity to make up for it. She was a sweet woman of average height who didn’t keep pigs, made extra-strong coffee and could play J.S. Bach on the church pipe organ in a way that could make you ponder your eternal soul.

 

I sometimes wonder what my children will remember about me long after I’m gone. That’s up to them, of course, but I hope they don’t go publishing it in the local newspaper, for crying out loud.

 

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. 

Day of JFK assassination still a vivid memory...

By Jim Heffernan

Someone said on National Public Radio this week that very few journalists who were working when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated are still active today, the 50^th anniversary of the tragedy.

I’m not as active as I used to be, but I’m still doing some writing, including for this blog. When Kennedy was murdered, I had been a working journalist for just over a month, which I recounted in a column for the Duluth News Tribune back on the 30^th anniversary of the assassination. That column, which was included in my book Cooler Near the Lake, is reprinted here (see below).

I can add a couple of experiences I had on that momentous day that are not included in that column. When I arrived for my afternoon shift at the Duluth Herald & News Tribune, a “cub” reporter if there ever was one, the newsroom was chaotic. Assigning editors were frantic to “localize” the story, since Kennedy had visited Duluth just two months before.

I was given two assignments: Check WDSM-TV and Radio, sponsors of the annual Christmas City of the North Parade, to determine if that night’s parade would be canceled, and then call mayors of Northeastern Minnesota cities and towns for a reaction to the news of the president’s death.

Taking first things first, I contacted WDSM, which, at the time was owned by the same company that owned the newspapers. The parade would go on as scheduled, I was told. I was flabbergasted.

But WDSM and its TV Channel 6 came to its senses within a short time, calling back to announce that the parade would be canceled after all. Thus they missed their chance at the national spotlight: “As nation mourns, Duluth holds festive holiday parade,” the headline might have been.

So much for that. My second assignment, calling as many area mayors as I could reach, wasn’t much more successful. The reason? They all said pretty much the same thing, summarized here:

Question: Mr. Mayor, what is your reaction to the assassination of President Kennedy?

Universal answer: This is a terrible tragedy. I’m shocked.

Years later I looked up the News Tribune of Nov. 23, 1963, to see what I had written. Buried deep inside the paper is a short article about the reaction of area mayors, naming several expressing their shock at the terrible tragedy.

Now here’s what I wrote 30 years later about another aspect of my role as a working journalist on that fateful day.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~                           

JFK: Four Presidential Assassinations in Three Generations

By Jim Heffernan

Originally appeared in the Duluth News Tribune on Sunday, November 21, 1993 
and reprinted in the book, Cooler Near the Lake, by Jim Heffernan in November, 2008

My paternal grandfather, whose life overlapped mine by just two years, was 10 years old when Lincoln was assassinated. In my grandfather’s lifetime, two other presidents also were murdered–James Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley in 1901. My father was born 29 years after the Lincoln assassination–a year short of the time that has now elapsed since President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed 30 years ago tomorrow.

In my father’s lifetime, two presidents were assassinated: McKinley near the beginning of his life, and Kennedy near the end. He was too young to remember much about McKinley, and I broke the news to him about Kennedy.

Why all this ancient history now? Aside from this being the anniversary of the JFK assassination, it shows that such acts are not quite as rare as we tend to think. Four murdered American presidents in three generations of one family is taking them out at quite a rate.

The day Kennedy was shot, I had been a working journalist for 35 days, counting weekends. Call it a month’s experience. Labeling me a journalist at that stage of my career is extravagant. But my title was reporter, and proud of it.

Everyone over five or six years of age on Nov. 22, 1963, remembers what they were doing when they heard Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. A few of us get to share those memories publicly. I share mine to recall my failure to do what I should have done as a newspaper reporter on what was arguably the biggest breaking news story of the century.

I was asleep when the assassination occurred. Working nights on the morning Duluth News Tribune, I had already slipped into the out late, sleep late lifestyle of my fellow nightside journalists. So I was still in bed, sound asleep, about 35 minutes past noon that Friday when the ringing of the telephone jolted me awake. It was my aunt, Elsa, who had been watching “As the World Turns” when the soap opera was interrupted with a bulletin that shots had been fired at the president. I clicked on our TV, and CBS had returned to “As the World Turns,” but not for long. Within a moment of my tuning in, Walker Cronkite was there in his shirtsleeves confirming that shots had been fired from a grassy knoll and the president’s limousine had sped away.

Here are some of my thoughts: “Wow! Big story. Wonder if they know about it down at the paper. You’re a reporter, check and see. Don’t be silly–of course the newspaper knows. They’d think I was stupid to call and be mad I interrupted them.”

My father was at work as a photo engraver at the newspaper, so I decided to call him. By then it must have been about 12:50 p.m. When my father answered, I said something like, ‘Boy, big story about Kennedy getting shot, huh?” I phrased it so that, if he already knew, it wouldn’t seem like I thought I was breaking the news. But I breaking the news. Busy working on the evening Duluth Herald, he said he’d heard nothing about it in the third-floor engraving department.

That made me wonder if I really should call the second-floor newsroom. If they didn’t know about it in other parts of the building, maybe the news editors didn’t know either. But I didn’t call.

I should have called the first time. The Herald used to go to press about noon. A normal Friday edition was humming off the press when the assassination occurred. The Associated Press was on top of the story, but they couldn’t get printed information out on the wire as quickly as TV networks could interrupt with bulletins.

By the time the Herald editors finally received a written bulletin on the wire and literally stopped the presses (the only time in 30 years I’ve seen that happen), it was about 1 p.m. or shortly after. An hour later, when I arrived for my work shift, I was told that if I had called at, say, 12:40, it would have saved thousands of papers and precious minutes preparing a new Herald for that day. “I wish you had called,” lamented the news editor. The papers already run off were scrapped and the edition started over with the assassination dominating the front page.

That’s my story of the day Kennedy was shot.  I’d been in the newspaper business a month and in my own way I had already blown the assassination of a president. Some reporter. Some future.

Christmas Memories: The Coal Man cometh, with the Night Stalker not far behind...

By Jim Heffernan

One of my grandsons, a five-year-old kindergartner, is concerned that he might be getting a lump of coal for Christmas. We all know why he has that concern, although lumps of coal aren’t as prevalent these days as they used to be.

A lump of coal for misbehaving was not part of my Christmas tradition growing up. We heated our home with oil, assuaging any concerns I might have had. Our next-door neighbor heated with coal, though, and I think the excitement and drama of the arrival of the “coal man” has been lost in our time.

Coal was the main source of furnace fuel when I was a child, and throughout the winter large trucks loaded with it crisscrossed the city in winter. Their boxes had a sliding trap-like door at the back with a handle that, when lifted, would release the coal into a chute positioned so that the coal could fall directly into houses basement coal bins.

If the truck couldn’t maneuver close enough, the coal man – a grim looking fellow covered from head to toe with coal dust – would load a wheelbarrow and push it into position above the coal chute. Coal was king well into the era that Nat King Cole started singing about chestnuts roasting on an open fire (over coal?).

The thing that intrigued children about the process was the hope – never fulfilled – that they could slide down the coal chute into the coal bin. Nobody in my neighborhood ever pulled that off, probably realizing that when they completed their slide they would be, like the coal man and a certain jolly old elf, covered with black ashes and soot, the result being the threat of receiving only a lump of coal for Christmas.

But rest assured, the threat of receiving a lump of coal instead of colorfully wrapped gifts beneath the Christmas tree still exists, as witness my grandson who might never have even seen a lump of coal, unless charcoal for a grill counts. I suppose it does.

But enough coal. In keeping with the Christmas theme of this reminiscence, this week I heard a program on National Public Radio that devoted fully half an hour to discussion of the movie “A Christmas Story,” which has become as much a Christmas entertainment tradition as “White Christmas” (or Not-So-White Christmases in the coal era.)

People love that 1983 movie about the boy, Ralphie, who desperately wants a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas and whose adventures leading up to the grand holiday include getting his tongue caught on a metal pole, encountering and triumphing over a neighborhood bully, a fall in his snowsuit so stuffed that he couldn’t get up by himself, and a nightmarish visit to a department store Santa Claus and his elves. No further description is needed – everyone surely has seen this delightful romp written by Jean Shepard, one best humor writers of the 20^th century.

I was reminded, listening to the radio program, that actor Darren McGavin played Ralphie’s father, he of the living room leg lamp. If you have seen the movie, you know what I mean by leg lamp; if you haven’t go straight to Target where I notice they are selling them this year.

McGavin had earlier played a character on TV called “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” in which the title character investigated strange crimes of violence that the police had given up on. At the time, mid-‘70s, I was writing a column for the Duluth News Tribune and devoted one to “The Night Stalker.” I can’t recall what I wrote, but somehow in that pre-Internet era it caught the attention of McGavin himself.

Soon after I received a box in the mail from a Hollywood studio containing a nice personal note from McGavin thanking me for mentioning his show in the paper, and a narrow-brimmed straw hat, a replica of one the actor wore in his role as Kolchak (or should I spell it Coalchak?).

I wore the hat once, on Halloween one year, and now it has disappeared from my hat bag. (I do have one; it contains, among other hats, my father’s World War I “Smokey the Bear”-style uniform hat and my own coonskin cap from my Davy Crockett years.)

McGavin died in 2006, the gospel according to Google reports, hastening to add, “of natural causes.” No night stalker involved, nor any coal men, I trust.

Oh... and Merry Christmas, everyone!

History's most boring day discovered; Jesus' arrival declared imminent...

By Jim Heffernan

"Twas the llth of April in ’54, a day declared a colossal bore…”

Yes, it’s true. Some computer whiz in England fed millions of facts into a giant computer – things that make news – and determined that April 11, 1954, was the most boring day in modern history. This according to National Public Radio, which broadcast an interview with the English gentleman, who sounded like no fool.

Nobody of note died on that date, no major governmental happenings occurred, no wars started or ended, no ships sank, Leslie Nielsen’s movie career was still fledgling, nothing much at all happened, making April 11, 1954, the least eventful and most boring ever.

The researcher, whose name escapes me, did make a point of saying he only analyzed “modern history,” and not all of history. So things like the death of Alexander the Great’s horse or the Battle of Hastings (1066) or Charles Martel defeating the Moors at the Battle of Tours on Oct. 10, 732 (date provided by the Gospel According to Google) were not included. Good thing. They didn’t have computers in those days anyway.

Modern history, that’s what we’re after here: April 11, 1954, BSP (Before Sarah Palin). I’m not sure how far back the researcher dipped in modern history. I consider the last 100 years or so modern history, although serious historians probably take it back further. I do not consider myself a serious historian but rather a secular humorist.

This might be a shocking revelation, but I actually remember April 11, 1954. Well, maybe not exactly that day in 1954 but I was around Duluth in 1954 – 14 years old going on 15. I do know I was checking my legs for hair, not very successfully. Swarthier boys in Lincoln Junior High seemed to be maturing faster than I, and it was of more than a little concern to me.

Of course, they wouldn’t have cared about that in England on April 11 anyway. I was also longing – I mean longing – to get my driver’s license, which you couldn’t get until age 15. A few lucky classmates – boys who were smart enough to flunk a grade or two before reaching ninth grade on hairy legs – were already recklessly driving jalopies to school that spring. Most are now dead.

On the national scene, Dwight D. Eisenhower was in his second year as president of the United States. Eisenhower was a calm president who golfed a lot, fished for brook trout quite a bit, and didn’t seem to do much to upset the apple cart, so I suppose April 11, 1954, was just another day around the White House with Mrs. Eisenhower (call her Mamie) presiding over an early cocktail hour, Ike (the president’s nickname) planning a coronary thrombosis in a couple of years, but not that day.

Everybody liked Ike, except maybe Adolf Hitler.

Here in Duluth, Mayor George Washington Johnson must have had a light day in City Hall, or else his successor George Donald Johnson had already taken over. My memory is fuzzy on this. This was during the Johnson period of Duluth history, which not too much later was broken by the likes of Mayor Mork, not from Ork.

Meanwhile, back in the future (now, today, early December 2010), a jeweler in nearby Superior, Wis., advertised a “second coming” sale (all jewels half price) to give customers time to stock up on gems before the imminent arrival of Jesus from heaven. Readers of this from elsewhere might think I made that up. I did not. The jewels are half price! Makes you wonder: “Will there be any stars in my crown?”

Oh, and Santa Claus’ arrival is imminent as well. What if they collided in mid-air? Oh, the tragedy. I don’t even want to think about it.

I wouldn’t look for the second most boring day in modern history this month, that’s for sure.

Two degrees of separation from Jacko

by Jim Heffernan

Because I interviewed many celebrities in my years working at the Duluth newspaper, my degrees of separation from uncounted luminaries from show business to politics are very short.

But two degrees from Michael Jackson? I never expected that.

Interviewing the likes of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, on the political side, and Jack Benny and Gregory Peck on the showbiz side (among many, many others), leaves you with just a degree of separation or so from just about everybody anybody’s ever heard of, including presidents of the United States. I even had journalistic contact with one of The Flying Wallendas, from the circus world.

None of this is to drop names or boast. When you work for a newspaper – especially covering arts and entertainment – it comes with the territory.

I tend to think in terms of my degrees of separation from well-known people, especially when they die. Like, I wonder if Gregory Peck knew Gale Storm, who died this week. I wonder if anybody under 50 even knows OF Gale Storm. I can’t forge any definite degrees of separation with Gale Storm.

I learned shortly after he died, though, that I came a lot closer to Michael Jackson than I would have expected. The day after the entertainer died, National Public Radio interviewed a journalist named Brian Monroe who, it was said, conducted the last one-on-one interview Jackson ever gave.

Monroe interviewed Jackson over two days in 2007, and on the radio offered several interesting insights into the human side of Jackson – a side that didn’t show up much in the publicity surrounding the entertainer.

So where do I come in? Monroe, whom the moderator identified as former editorial director of Jet and Ebony magazines, is also a former news executive for the former Knight-Ridder, which formerly owned the Duluth News Tribune. (The older you get, the more the word “former” creeps into your lexicon.)

As a Knight-Ridder executive at its San Jose, Calif., headquarters, Monroe used to visit the Duluth newspaper two or three times a year. I spoke with him several times. When Knight-Ridder disbanded, he went to work for Jet/Ebony, and while there he interviewed Jackson.

So what’s that for me, two degrees of separation from Jackson? Of course, the concept of degrees of separation puts everyone on earth just six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, the actor.

Wish I could say that about Canadian Bacon, the artery clogger.