Corner Grocery Store Revisited...

By Jim Heffernan
Before supermarkets, corner grocery stores supplied Duluth’s West End...

Recently, as I was shopping for a few groceries at one of Duluth’s largest supermarkets, I found myself in the bakery area needing to move on to the deli.

Looking down the long aisle between the two departments, I realized that the distance between the bakery and deli was almost a city block, greater than the distance between the home I grew up in and the corner grocery store where my family bought most of its staples.

That home was in Duluth’s West End well over a half century ago—long before anyone ever dreamed the neighborhood would change its name to Lincoln Park and before that neighborhood—or any other in Duluth—lost its grocery outlets to the advent of the supermarket era.

We were located on 23rd Avenue West, between Fifth and Sixth streets, and our nearest grocery was on the northwest corner of 23rd and Sixth. It was just one of several “mom-and-pop” grocery outlets within short walking distance from our house.

The Sixth Street grocery was such a short distance away you could sit down to dinner, realize you were out of something needed for the meal (ketchup?) and run to the store and get some before the food on the table got cold. Handy. Very handy, those corner groceries.

Counting on my fingers (I always have), I realize that there were eight small grocery stores within three blocks of my house, all of which we patronized from time to time, depending on the urgency and nature of our needs. Some were just confectioneries (although they stocked basic groceries in addition to candies), others also had meat departments staffed by official meat cutters and at least one had a self-contained bakery.

Our neighborhood was not unique. Throughout the city, every residential neighborhood had its grocery stores that served nearby residents who, as a rule, simply walked down the street to pick up whatever they needed.

The eight stores in the heart of the West End near our home are largely forgotten today, and even the thought that they existed at all, and that supermarkets were unheard of, is alien to most people today. But thanks to the increasing number of candles on my birthday cakes, it’s not alien to me.

So here’s a brief compendium of the West End stores I knew best as a youngster in the 1940s shortly after World War II and into the early ’50s. By the end of the 1950s they had largely disappeared, yielding to larger, full-service, stores like Piggly Wiggly and National, serving entire sections of the city from one building.

I’ve already mentioned the Sixth Street market near our home, operated in its later years by the Archambault family. These owners, and some before them, became almost like family to their regular customers. The building is now a residence.

A block west—24th and Sixth—was a somewhat larger store I knew as “Sternal’s store” as a child but was operated by the Natalie family toward the end of its existence. The store part of the building is now vacated, with apartments above.

Just half a block south on 24th, was Charlie Caskey’s—a combination meat market and light groceries. It was a block from our house and I was often dispatched to Caskey’s in the late afternoon to pick up pork chops or hamburger for our supper. The building is now a one-car garage.

Another half block down 24th, at Fifth Street, stood Olson Bros., a full service market—groceries, produce, meats and on-site bakery, not to mention every imaginable candy of the day for the nearby Lincoln Junior high kids. (I popped a grape into my mouth from their window produce display one time and I’m still feeling guilty about it.) We shopped there too, from time to time. The much-altered building now houses the Boys and Girls Club.

Directly across 24th from Olson Bros. was a small grocery store operated by the Kramnic family, who lived nearby. Kramnic’s stocked such things as yo-yos and other items appealing to kids, and, like Olson’s, a display case chock full of (teeth-rotting) candy, not to mention wax lips and wax buck teeth.

South on 23rd Avenue West from my home, on Third Street just east of 23rd were two more grocery stores, one with meats operated by Joel Johnson and his son Delbert, and the other by Joe Lee and his son Norman. Both buildings are still there, Johnson’s today operated by another Johnson family, the bakery Johnsons.

Straying a bit farther afield, two blocks east of my childhood home, at Piedmont Avenue and Sixth Street (where 21st Avenue West meets Piedmont) was Repke’s store, with groceries and other things, like comic books. Thank heaven for Repke’s and the comic books. How else would I have learned of the exploits of the day’s superheroes, like Captain Marvel (whatever happened to him?) and western stalwarts like Lash LaRue, who tamed the Old West with a bullwhip. Superman and Batman comics were available there as well. The building is gone.

Once these handy neighborhood stores started to disappear, my family had to actually go out of this three-block radius to a good-sized, full-service (meats, produce, everything else for the pantry and fridge) neighborhood grocery, Hjelm’s, at 21st Avenue West and Third Street, across from the imposing St. Clement’s Catholic Church, itself long gone.

Hjelm’s—later Hank’s market operated by the Lysaker family—delivered, making it possible for customers to call with a list of grocery needs in the morning and have them show up in the kitchen in plenty of time to prepare dinner. For some reason in that bygone era it was tolerated that grocery delivery boys (always boys) could walk right into your unlocked house without knocking and deposit the order on the kitchen table. The Hjelm’s/Hank’s building is now apartments. 

Source: PerfectDuluthDay

Not far off, even in the mid-’40s the clinking and clanking of grocery shopping carts were starting to sound through the neighborhood. One of Duluth’s first modern-style markets —serve yourself with shopping carts and check out near the door—had been established by Piggly Wiggly at 2025–2027 West Superior St. in the heart of the “friendly” West End business district.
That clinking and clanking became the death knell for the corner grocery stores, most of which were gone by 1960 as Piggly Wiggly and others established themselves in large stores with big parking lots, often in strip malls. The final holdout, LaPanta’s market at 23rd Avenue West and Superior Street, lasted until the 1970s by staying open when the supermarkets were closed—Sundays and late at night.

The corner stores are missed, though, when you sit down to dinner and realize you’re out of ketchup.

Originally appeared in Zenith City Online on February 4, 2013

We are gradually reprinting the columns I wrote as a columnist with Zenith City Online that focused on growing up in Western Duluth. That area history site changed format a few years ago to a blog and no longer archives columns.

Spirit Valley Days in Duluth: Remembering when cars were king...

My pristine 1940 Ford Coupe in 1956-Jim Heffernan photo

Western Duluth did not escape ’50s car club phenomenon...  by Jim Heffernan  

Note: I wrote this column a few years ago for the now-defunct on-line Zenith City magazine (although the site continues as a blog of Duluth area history). I'm reprinting it here today to call attention to Spirit Valley Days, ongoing this weekend in what folks of a certain age call West Duluth. Since one of the major events is a vintage car show, it seemed like a good time to recall with this column a day when vintage cars were king in West Duluth...at least for young men (or aging adolescents). JH

A New York Times columnist recently declared “The End of Car Culture” in America.

I’ve noticed it too. Young people today are not as focused on cars as those in earlier generations. Now they’re more interested in technology, the Times columnist pointed out, citing statistics showing that many young people today—millennials—often don’t even bother to get driver’s licenses when ample public transportation is available.

It’s a cultural shift that makes me nostalgic for an earlier time in America (Duluth included) when the chief focus of youth—male youth especially—seemed to be the automobile. That focus crossed the length and breadth of the Zenith City, including its western neighborhoods. Especially its western neighborhoods.

I came of age in the 1950s, a part of the post-World War II generation that, unlike its elders who had endured the Great Depression (when even many adults couldn’t afford cars), embraced the automobile as something more than just transportation. The cars had to be “souped up” and “customized” into what were euphemistically called “hot rods” or “street rods,” some of which were not so hot at all, but more of the jalopy class.

It was nearly every teenage boy’s dream to have such a car, mainly to impress girls, impress their peers, trounce other hot rodders in street drag races and rebel against their parents, in roughly that order. Also, cars were handy in the romance department. The era was faithfully depicted in the movie “American Graffiti,” although that story was set in 1962.

Throughout Duluth in that era car crazy boys banded together and formed what were called “car clubs.” In Duluth’s western precincts, largely within the limits of the Denfeld High School district with some Morgan Park spillover, the only car club was called the “Regents.”

I was a charter member, and even named the club. A group of us got together in a West Duluth living room in 1955 to organize and, trying to come up with a name, someone suggested “Road Gents.” That seemed kind of corny to me, so I suggested we compress it and call ourselves the Regents. It had no connection to cars or much else outside of the University of Minnesota governing body, but it sounded classy. We adopted it, and a car club for the city’s western neighborhoods was born, complete with fancy license plate-size plaques bearing our name to be displayed on the rear bumpers of our cars.

The original group numbered about 15, but when we began flexing our muscles, the club grew, perhaps doubling in size. The Duluth car clubs—central and eastern neighborhoods had the “Road Toppers” and “De Malos Marauders” among others—were officially organized to assist any motorists who might be in distress: flat tire, out of gas, conked out engine, lost. We had wallet-size business-style cards printed up to hand to people we helped, stating, “You have been assisted by a member of the Regents Car Club of Duluth, Minnesota.” 

I had a passel of them in the glove compartment of my hot little ’40 Ford DeLuxe coupe powered by a ’48 Merc engine with twin exhaust pipes and rumbling mufflers to die for. I never gave out one card. Never helped anybody. Almost nobody did. I still have a few of those calling cards in a box somewhere, never to be used.

Duluth’s several car clubs were even associated with one another as the “Joint Association of Car Clubs,” JACCs for short. They met monthly in City Hall, mainly to promote the idea of the city building an official drag strip. It never happened.

Mainly, the members of the Regents just wanted to get together, fix up cars, and drag race each other after dark on wide Oneota Street, when the cops weren’t around, or on divided Highway 61 atop Thomson Hill sans the highway patrol.

West Duluth’s Regents went beyond any other city car club by establishing our own service station in a rented building still standing on the southeast corner of 41st Avenue West and Grand. It was called “Regents Pure” because we pumped gas supplied by the Pure Oil Co. Our building had a three-stall garage and an office. We sold gas to the public, and the garage was handy for club members to work on cars, installing dual exhausts or changing oil or tires and in some cases changing entire engines.

I suppose the car club was an early form of “gang,” although there was no criminal element aside from street drag racing. By today’s gang standards, we were as harmless as aging Boy Scouts trying to work our way through adolescence. Most of the members went on to college after our Denfeld years, when interest in the car club inevitably faded.

When definitive histories of Duluth are written, it’s doubtful any will include this brief car club phenomenon. Most of those who participated are now in their 60s and 70s with only dim memories of a time—a decidedly more innocent time—when America’s car culture really got rolling, often two cars side-by-side, engines roaring, tires squealing, mufflers blaring, with the noble goal of finding out which car could cover a quarter mile the fastest.

Well, maybe not so noble, but it was fun.

Reprinted from Zenith City Online, July 11, 2013

Duluth's historic western breweries: In Heaven there is no beer, but there's plenty in Duluth

By Jim Heffernan

People's Brewery: 4230 W. 2nd St. Duluth, MN

With the new craft beer operations seemingly opening on a regular basis, especially in Duluth's Lincoln Park neighborhood, I thought I'd reprint a piece I wrote for Zenith City Online in 2015.  As the column points out, Duluth has a storied past in brewing even as it moves today into the forefront of craft brewing in the Upper Midwest. 

Now that Duluth is one of the major centers for craft brewing in the Upper Midwest, perhaps it’s time to take a glance back at Duluth’s storied brewing history, together with shifting attitudes toward drinking today and in the past.

Duluth has a rich history of beer brewing going back to its earliest settlement in the 1850s, with small breweries popping up and fading in the last half of the 19th century before what I’ll call the “big three” established themselves here in large brick edifices, two of them in the city’s western neighborhoods.

About a century later, by the mid-1950s, Duluth was the only city in Minnesota hosting three major breweries, but their days were numbered.

The best remembered today—Fitger’s—was not in a western neighborhood. Major portions of that brewing company’s imposing structure at 600 East Superior Street remain as a hotel and shopping and dining facility including Fitger’s Brewhouse Brewery and Grille, an operation befitting the complex’s 135-year history. 

Fitgers Brewery, Duluth, MN

Major brewing elsewhere in the city was located in West End (now Lincoln Park) and West Duluth (now Spirit Valley), where hardly any traces of their operations exist today. Duluth Brewing and Malting stood at 231 South 29th Avenue West (adjacent to today’s Clyde Iron/Heritage Sports Center facility) and the People’s Brewery operated out of 4230 West Second Street, a block south of Grand Avenue.

Like Fitger’s, both were housed in imposing castle-like buildings, with Duluth Brewing and Malting

operating in a six-story brick building a stone’s throw from today’s path of Interstate 35 through that part of Duluth. According to Lost Duluth, Duluth Brewing and Malting’s headquarters had at least three towers and was trimmed with stone quarried at Fond du Lac.

I remember the building, usually called the “Royal Brewery” (after one of its popular brands) in my lifetime. It contained a taproom where parties and wedding receptions were held well into the 1960s. Royal went out of business in 1966, with most of the property purchased by the Minnesota Department of Transportation for Interstate 35 construction.

Royal’s West Duluth neighbor, the People’s Brewery, was established in 1908 by socialist entrepreneurs (a seeming oxymoron) “to avoid having to buy beer from Fitger’s and large national breweries and so they could…resist the evils of capitalism,” according to Lost Duluth. That didn’t stop them from erecting a five-story, castle-like structure for their brewing operation. 

And for socialists, the People’s people seemed pretty impressed with European royalty, as were their competitors a few block eastward at Duluth Brewing and Malting. The People’s Brewery’s best known beer was named “Regal Supreme” while Duluth Brewing and Malting produced a popular product called “Royal Bohemian” which later became “Royal 58.” That brewery also developed the “Rex” trademark, which later was sold to Fitger’s where it became one of the brewery's most popular beers. Rex has a strong royalty association as well—“Rex” is Latin for “king;” The beer’s full name was “Rex ImperialDry Beer.”

Portions of these huge complexes remain today. Carlson Duluth Plumbing is housed in what was once the offices of Duluth Malt and Brewing, and Brock-White Landscape Products and Serv-Pro operate out of remnants of the former People’s facilities. In fact, the brewery’s tanks are still inside the building Serv-Pro owns, as the walls would need to be partially demolished to remove them.

With modern brewing methods, it no longer takes multi-story, rambling factory-like buildings with scores of employees to produce beer. Duluth’s Lincoln Park neighborhood alone houses two of the many craft beer producers that have cropped up in the Zenith City over the past several years: Lake Superior Brewing Co. at 2711 West Superior St., which bills itself as Minnesota’s oldest microbrewer, and Bent Paddlebrewing at 1912 West Michigan Street. Several other microbreweries—including the Brewhouse, Carmody Irish Pub & Brewing, Blacklist Brewing, and Canal Park Brewing Company—operate out of brewpubs found downtown and in the Canal Park business district, where you will also find a microdistillery.

Beer, beer everywhere, and plenty of varieties to drink, unlike those days of yore when there were just three breweries in the city, housed in massive buildings. They were three too many, though, as far as folks clinging to temperance attitudes were concerned.

Prohibition, the American experiment that likely spawned more beer brewing than we have even today—but undercover—ended in 1933 after 14 dry years, but the attitudes it promulgated lasted well into mid-century and beyond. Protestant (but not Catholic) churches, in particular, condemned “demon rum” (as all drinking alcohol was often called) and Duluth had an active chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union until well after World War II.

In the Lutheran environment I was reared in, any drinking of alcohol was soundly condemned from the pulpit, with card playing and dancing not far behind. And while that message received lip service by many congregants, plenty of booze rendered its own lip service in the confines of people’s homes. And of course, for those less concerned about the religious attitudes toward drinking, the city’s West End offered plenty of taverns for open defiance of drinking strictures laid down in the churches.

Even in the 1960s, when, as a young newspaper reporter in Duluth I would cover meetings of the city’s Alcoholic Beverage Board, its members—led at the time by a Lutheran minister—tried to keep a tight lid on all purveyors of malt beverages and spirits.

Today, thanks to the most recent session of the Minnesota Legislature, you can even buy a growler of beer to take home on a Sunday, a move that remained controversial due partly to those blue-nosed attitudes of the past, which continue to prohibit, in Minnesota, off-sale beer and liquor sales on the Sabbath.

Those attitudes are fading fast, though, as more and more small brewing operations compete for a public that today views beer drinking in moderation as an innocent libation and not a ticket to eternal damnation.

So today we can celebrate this new era of Duluth’s brewing history by raising a glass of local brew without fear of the afterlife—and we should do it while we can, for as the song says, “In heaven there is no beer.”

Originally appeared on August 16, 2015 in Zenith City Online

A West End Story, Part 2: Daughters of a star-crossed couple persevere after being orphaned

By Jim Heffernan

This is the rest of the West End Story about the lives of my Swedish immigrant grandparents in Duluth 100 years ago, their six daughters and the couple’s early deaths, leaving their children to fend for themselves.

To reiterate a bit, it told the story of Charles and Anna Carlson, both of whom had emigrated from Sweden at a relatively young age and how they met and married in Duluth and started their family. Their first child was my mother, Ruth, born in 1899. Only 18 years later and with five more daughters added to the family, Anna died at age 38 in 1917. When they lost their mother, the Carlson girls ranged in age from 19 (Ruth, the eldest) to the youngest, Dagmar, just five years old. Only two years later, their father died at age 47. 

Bethany Lutheran Church, 2308 W. 3rd St.
The church of my youth and the church
that kept my mother's siblings together after their parents' death

Most of what I know about their early lives was told to me by my mother. I only witnessed the adult lives of the six daughters. In 1919, at the time of Charles’ death, Ruth was serving as organist at Bethany Swedish Lutheran Church in the West End, having been appointed to the position when the regular organist was killed on a battlefield in France during World War I. Innately talented, she also had studied piano and organ.

With the parents gone, Ruth became the head of the family along with her next sister, Lillette, who at 17 shared family responsibilities of caring for the younger children. Then came Elsa, just 12 when their mother died, followed by Mildred, who was at 7, Marion, 6, and Dagmar, almost two years younger. 

The Carlson girls stayed in the small frame home their parents had established at 1925 Piedmont Avenue, an address that no longer exists but is located near Piedmont and Fourth Street.

These orphaned youngsters were taken under the wing of the Bethany church congregation, with members and leaders offering charitable help and support as the older girls struggled to rear their younger sisters. Offers came to adopt two of the younger girls–Mildred and Dagmar–but Ruth said she could not bring herself to let them leave the family. Dagmar, the youngest of the brood, was taken in for a time by what was described as a “rich” family in East End seeking to adopt her, but her oldest sisters couldn’t let her go, and she returned to the Piedmont Avenue home. Rather than break up the family, Mildred and Dagmar for a time stayed during the week at Bethany Home, the orphanage on north 40th Avenue West, and came home on weekends.

Bethany Children's Home, 1922

That left the problem of Marion, and a problem it was. She was born developmentally disabled, severely retarded in the parlance of the day, as well as epileptic. Her condition couldn’t be dealt with at home without parents, Ruth told me, and the decision was made to send her to a state institution at Faribault, Minnesota, as was commonly done in that era. (She remained institutionalized for the rest of her life, with many visits to Duluth for “vacation” and regular visits to the institution by her sisters. She died in her mid-50s.)

Before too long in the 1920s, the second and third daughters reached an age where they were able to work. Lillette got a job at Freimuth’s Department Store in downtown Duluth, located for many years on the southwest corner of Lake Avenue and Superior Street. After a period of time staying at home tending the younger children while Ruth and Lillette worked, Elsa also went to work at Freimuth’s.

In addition to her paid position as Bethany organist and choir director, Ruth was self-employed as a piano instructor in West End homes. At first she went to students’ homes to give lessons, making daily rounds by city streetcar and walking when possible. Later she brought students into her home.

Thus their lives progressed in the 1920s, making ends meet, never wanting for nourishment or shelter, young women and girls growing into womanhood with each passing year. Soon Mildred too went to work, at a laundry. None of them were able to finish high school; all were confirmed at Bethany with formal portraits commemorating the occasion.

By the late 1920s, both Lillette and Elsa had married, each having a child in 1929. Ruth stayed in the family home with the remaining sisters, who eventually expanded their own horizons by following Elsa and her husband and young daughter in a move to Chicago in the early 1930s. Finally, when the others’ lives were settled, Ruth married my father, George, in 1932, starting a new life that brought into the world two sons, my older brother and me. Throughout, she remained minister of music at Bethany Lutheran, accompanying the transition from Swedish language worship to English. 

Ruth Carlson Heffernan, circa 1920's

All of her sisters preceded her in death in the 1960s and ‘70s and were laid to rest at Bethany Cemetery in Hermantown, three of them in the same plot where Charles and Anna were buried decades before, and two elsewhere in the same cemetery.

That left two empty gravesites in the original family plot, one of which welcomed my father in 1971. Ruth lived on, alone in our family home on 23rd Avenue West a few blocks up the hill from Bethany church, and continued her music duties at Bethany until 1976 when she retired.

Age was beginning to show, even as her younger sisters passed away, one by one. She lived until 1983, dying at the age of 84. The last six months of her life were difficult for her and she ended up at Lakeshore Lutheran Home, a place where over the years she had often been asked to provide music for Christmas programs and other events.

Unable to express herself well due to aphasia brought on by her medical condition, she seemed to resign herself to her inevitable fate. Several of us gathered with her in a recreation room at Lakeshore on Independence Day in her last year. By then she was in a wheelchair, but with a piano in the room she indicated she’d like to play. She was wheeled to the keyboard, and placing her age-gnarled fingers on the keys, she formed the familiar chords of the patriotic anthem, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” playing it beautifully, with the expression she had always demonstrated at the piano. It was the last time she played a piano, an instrument that, along with the pipe organ, had sustained her her entire life.

Three months later, she was lowered into the last grave in the family plot at Bethany Cemetery, alongside my father and down from star-crossed Charles and Anna, now with all of their daughters nearby. The original family had finally come together again. 

Thus ends this West End story, only one of so many involving the struggles of early settlers of that neighborhood and throughout Duluth around the turn of the last century, but the one I know best.  

This story of my mother's life growing up in Duluth's West End (now called Lincoln Park) first published in Zenith City Online in July, 2014

A West End Story I: Saga beginning in Sweden ends tragically for one family

A note... Last month, I wrote about our family piano and its 88 year history (88 years for 88 keys). It was my mother's piano, purchased 88 years ago. It eventually landed in my homes and recently moved from my current home to yet another home in our family. This story of my mother's life growing up in Duluth's West End (now called Lincoln Park) first published in Zenith City Online in July, 2014 and now seems appropriate to re-print as a follow-up to Ruth's piano's history. The conclusion of her story (West End Story II ) will publish in my next post. Enjoy... Jim

Anna and Charles Carlson circa 1910–11
with the first four of their six daughters,
including Ruth, standing behind her mother.
(Image: Jim Heffernan)

By Jim Heffernan
This West End story begins in Sweden, the homeland of one set of my grandparents, and a sad story it is. 

I visited Sweden in June and found myself recalling what I’d been told of the fate of these two young Swedes who sought a better life in America —and in Duluth—more than a century ago 

While Charles Carlson and Anna Joranson both were born in Sweden, they didn’t meet there. Each emigrated to Duluth in the 1890s, when so many Scandinavians arrived here. Duluth’s West End had already drawn relatives of both, so that was the destination. Anna was about 16 when she arrived, I was told, and Charles about nine years older. 

They were my mother’s parents, but I never met them. Both had died two decades before I was born. All that I know about this young immigrant couple was told to me by my mother. 

Anna went to work as a domestic in Duluth’s East
End before meeting Charles. The couple met
through Bethany Swedish Lutheran Church in the
West End, the neighborhood and church where so many Swedish immigrants congregated. 

That church as an institution still exists at 23rd Avenue West and Third Street, long since shedding its early Swedish associations, but my grandparents met and were married in an earlier edifice of the congregation at 20th Avenue West and Third, a building since replaced by a multi-family dwelling. Anna was in her late teens when the couple wed, and their first daughter, my mother, Ruth, was born in 1899 when Anna was 20 years old. 

I’ve never been clear about Charles’ work history. At times he was a grocery clerk, and he had worked on the Duluth street railway system. For about three years when my mother was a young child, they moved to Ellsworth, Wisconsin, to operate a rented farm, but returned to the West End. Another daughter had been born in Ellsworth, and Anna wanted her daughters to be city dwellers, not farm dwellers, according to what I was told. 

Back in the West End, they settled in the neighborhood just east of Piedmont Avenue known as Goat Hill, where the terrain is exceptionally steep. Soon the family grew even larger, with another daughter, and another, and eventually two more daughters—bringing the total to six girls and no boys—all born between 1899 and 1913.

But far too soon after the birth of her youngest daughter, Anna became ill, probably with cancer. She died at home in 1917 at the age of 38, leaving her grieving husband and six young daughters. My mother had just turned 18 years old, her next sister about 15 and so on down the line. 

I was told that when she died, Anna’s casket was placed in their home for the period of mourning and reviewal leading up to a funeral at Bethany church, by then located in the building it occupies today. Following the service came the long uphill trek to Bethany Cemetery in Hermantown behind a horse-drawn hearse.

These events occurred during the dark years of World War I, a difficult time nationally but strangely beneficial in one way to the Carlsons. My mother was an accomplished pianist and organist (innately talented, she had managed to study with professionals in Duluth), and when the regular organist at Bethany Lutheran was called up for military service, she, just in her late teens, took over as the congregation’s organist, a paid position. When the regular organist died on a battlefield in France, Ruth became the regular organist and director of choirs. She stayed in that position for 57 years. 

I have written before about the Carlson family’s experience in the great 1918 fire that struck just a few months after Anna’s death. The devastating October fire, extending from Moose Lake and Cloquet through the rural areas surrounding Duluth and into Duluth’s eastern neighborhoods, also threatened the West End including the Carlson home just off Piedmont Avenue at about Fourth Street. While her younger sisters slept, Ruth and her father kept a vigil all night as they watched flaming refuse from the fire sweep past their home, driven by the strong winds fueling the conflagration atop the hill that eventually claimed nearly 500 lives and left thousands homeless. 

An early morning shift in the wind saved the West End and the Carlson home. Plans had been made for the family to be taken the short distance down to the bay if the fire had directly threatened the family. Charles, working for a grocery store at the time, had been asked to take the business’ truck to help evacuate people in the path of the fire, but he couldn’t leave his six young daughters. 

But he soon did leave them. Within a year, Charles was dead. He was just 47 years old, his daughters, all under 20, left to fend for themselves. The cause of death also was believed to be cancer, and not the rampant Spanish flu pandemic threatening lives in Duluth and throughout much of the world in those hard times. 

A noteworthy transformation in conducting funerals had occurred in the two years since Anna’s death: The funeral procession for Charles was led by a motor-driven hearse, horses having only recently been abandoned for that purpose. 

He too was taken to Bethany Cemetery just inside Hermantown—in the heart of where the fire had swept a short time earlier —to be buried alongside his wife. 

That’s what I know about the lives of these grandparents, who left Sweden at young ages to play out their relatively short lives in a distant land in a small frame home on a steep hillside in Duluth’s West End. 

Last month, visiting Sweden, I couldn’t help but reflect that I had come to the land where it all had started. Charles and Anna never saw their homeland again, nor did any of their daughters ever visit Sweden, although the older girls understood and spoke the Swedish language, having been reared by Swedish-speaking parents. Even their church services were conducted in Swedish in those days. 

There’s a lot more to this West End story—how the lives of the six orphaned Carlson daughters played out without parents to nurture and guide them. Inevitably, as the decades passed, they all eventually joined their parents at Bethany Cemetery, one by one, with Ruth, the first born but last to die, laid to rest there in the 1980s. 

Maybe I’ll tell the rest of that West End story—how they struggled to keep the family together—another time. 

Finally, it must be noted that there are many such stories from those difficult days in Duluth, as a largely immigrant population struggled to gain a foothold in their new land. This is just the one I know best. 

Remembering Bessie, Duluth’s Elephant...

By Jim Heffernan

Note from Jim:  The 2018 MN legislature appropriated money for refurbishing Duluth's Lake Superior Zoo. Alas, plans are not to include an elephant. I thought it would be respectful to old Bessie, the Zoo's long-gone elephant, to re-print this Zenith City Online post remembering her. 

Lake Superior Zoo: 1962

To begin with, there was an elephant. Just one. It had its own house at the Duluth Zoo, and an elephant is hard to ignore when it’s in a room. I saw it many times as a child and youth visiting the zoo starting in the 1940s.

Bessie was the elephant’s name—I was reminded when I read Nancy Nelson’s monograph of our zoo here on Zenith City. What I have to add are mainly personal impressions and recollections of the city’s approximately 90-year-old zoo, which has greatly evolved through the years of my consciousness and patronage of it.

For one thing, it is now called the Lake Superior Zoo. For another, it has no elephant. Hasn’t had one for a long time. I suppose there are records somewhere showing when this pachyderm arrived in such an unlikely place—northern North America—or where she came from.*

There are references to Bessie in newspaper articles from the late 1930s, and she was around for many, many years after that. I always felt a little sorry for this lone elephant when I stood in her presence. She was billed as “the dancing elephant” for reasons I can understand.

Most of the elephants I’d seen were in movies or circuses. When Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey set up its big top in the Wade Stadium parking lot in about 1950, they brought 35 elaborately costumed elephants in to lead their opening parade around the three rings. Then there were the elephants in Tarzan movies, always coming to the rescue at Tarzan’s beck and (very distinctive) call.

And then there was Bessie, standing in her custom-built house (high ceilings) at the Duluth Zoo, shackled in her wing, rocking constantly back and forth as though she were nervous about something. She probably was: She had no companions of her species. She had to be lonesome, if I may apply a human emotion to a pachyderm.

Also, she seemed to grow long hair on her back, which surprised me. Other elephants didn’t have any hair. Bessie wasn’t covered with it by any means but there it was. I assumed, probably incorrectly, that she grew it in reaction to our cold climate, whereas African and Asian elephants in their native habitat didn’t need it. Bessie was Asian, by the way. You could tell by her ears.

But enough for now about the zoo’s only elephant, whose demise and disposition I will get into later.

First, some general impressions of the old zoo, and a little history. Unlike today (I visited the zoo again last fall with a few of my grandchildren), back when I visited the zoo as a youth, the main building stank to high heaven. I’m sure they did their best to clean up after the lions, tigers (but no bears there) and monkeys, but it was not welcoming. That has been eliminated today.

Unlike so many people, I have never cared for monkeys or primates in general. Maybe it’s because they remind me of me. It seemed to me that the lions were always sleeping when I viewed them. The tigers paced their cages, just as they always do when in a confined area. There are much better accommodations for them today.

Bears were kept in their impressive open-air dens with numerous caves where they could hide from people trying to view them, especially me. Nearby frantic wolves in room-size cages eyed a small herd of whitetail deer not far away, kept behind a tall fence in a wooded area. As a newspaper reporter much later, I can recall doing a story about an intrepid deer hunter, apparently frustrated in the woods, assaulting one of the zoo deer with a knife and spiriting the remains away. You want venison, you want venison.

Oh, there are so many zoo stories (not to be confused with Edward Albee’s absurdist play, <The Zoo Story>, which has little to do with zoos). For many years, well into the 1960s, a black bear with a large white V on its chest was a popular attraction—perhaps to some the V signified America’s victory in World War II. A zoo director with whom I had become acquainted accidentally caused the V bear’s death, and lost his job because of it. That was one beloved bear. The director, who always wore snake-proof boots, not so much.

Let’s not forget the Richard Griggs menagerie of stuffed African beasts he had shot on his many safaris. Griggs, a Duluth tycoon and philanthropist (Griggs Field and Griggs Hall at UMD are named for him, as he donated much of the land on which the college is built), had many of his kills stuffed as trophies—and built a wing on the zoo’s main building to house them. There was some disgruntlement at the time by those who believed zoos were for displaying live animals and not dead ones, but money talks and the addition, now the Griggs education center with just a few of his stuffed animals, was built.

Finally, let’s get back to Bessie, the lonely elephant. She eventually died right there at the zoo circa the 1970s. Google says Asian elephants in captivity live an average of 80 years, and Bessie had to be pushing it.

What do you do with a dead elephant in Duluth—or anywhere for that matter? I don’t know about other places, but in Duluth she was loaded onto a large truck and laid to rest in the Rice Lake landfill with the wretched refuse of decades of the city’s garbage. An ignominious ending for a lonely elephant a long, long way from her nativity—who knows where or when.

Her disposal does give rise to wondering. What if, sometime in the next millennium or two, archeologists sifting through the northern tundra to determine what life was like way back in the 20th century came across the Rice Lake landfill? Discovering the remains of an elephant this far north might forever change theories about the distribution of animals on this planet.

That’d be Bessie.

This post below was previously written for Zenith City Online and posted on October 4, 2016.

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*Editor’s Note: We found he following information about Bessie on the Lake Superior Zoo’s website: “Bessie, the elephant, was an all time favorite animal. She came to the zoo in 1937 when the elephant house opened. She was 12 years old at the time. The local community knew her well. Before perimeter fencing was installed around the zoo, Bessie would often wander off the zoo grounds and go ‘visiting.’ Bessie lived at the zoo until she passed away in 1974 at the age of 49.” Catch up with all of Jim’s recollections of growing up in Duluth here.

Where East Was East and West Was West, in Duluth...

What follows is one of several columns I wrote for the on-line magazine Zenith City Online, started and edited by Duluth publisher Tony Dierckins. ZCO is still active as an area history blog but no longer uses regular posts in a magazine format so Tony graciously allowed me to repost here on my blog. I was its "western neighborhoods correspondent" (also labeled "Denfeld Boy") on ZCO and wrote monthly about growing up in Duluth. Thus, virtually all of my monthly columns for Zenith City had some connection to Duluth's West End and West Duluth, back before they were called Lincoln Park and Spirit Valley. I've decided to put a few of them on my blog from time to time.             Jim Heffernan 

Where East Was East and West was West
By Jim Heffernan

For decades atop the Point of Rocks, the commanding rock outcropping just west of downtown Duluth at the foot of Mesaba Avenue, a huge sign advertising Master Bread dominated the skyline.

It was more than an ordinary billboard. It appeared to have been fashioned to fit the surroundings, long and narrow at the peak of the outcropping, and it was animated, showing a loaf of bread with slices pouring out of one end. Done with sequentially lighted neon tubes, it was attention grabbing and impressive for its day. 
Its day, hard to pinpoint exactly, did encompass the years from my childhood in the 1940s until sometime in the 1970s. [editor’s note: Photo borrowed from Andrew Kreuger’s wonderful News-Tribune Attic.]

And it had greater significance than the bread wars between Master and Taystee, both baked in Duluth’s West End neighborhood (now referred to as Lincoln Park). The Master Bread sign came to symbolize the western end of “East End” (including downtown) and the beginning of “West End” including West Duluth. Only on the map did Lake Avenue divide Duluth’s east from its west. In Duluthians’ minds, the Point of Rocks, with its Master Bread sign, did. 

The prevailing perception in Duluth was that the rich people lived in the East End, the working classes lived in the western precincts, and never the twain shall meet, except when their high school sports teams vied to prove, once and for all, which section of the city was best.

It was a fallacy, of course, to believe everyone in East End was rich. Far from it. But all of the mansions in town were there; the mining and lumber tycoons lived there, cheek by jowl with bankers and most doctors and the powers that were in Duluth. Never mind that the Central Hillside, a bit east of the Master Bread sign, was for decades considered Duluth’s poorest neighborhood. 

Image from ZCO, originally in UMD Library Archives

In the 1970s, a colorful priest, Father F. X. Shea, was engaged as president of the College of St. Scholastica. In one of his many pronouncements about civic life, Shea called for the Master Bread sign to be torn down. He wasn’t expressing a preference for bread or disgust with advertising’s often intrusion on natural beauty; as a recent arrival here he had come to realize that the sign was a line of demarcation between east and west in Duluth that stifled the city’s social, business and cultural life. (The Master Bread billboard can be seen at the top of photo on right.)

I grew up on the “poor” side of the Master Bread sign that so brightly lit the Point of Rocks after the sun went down. Not that we were actually poor, nor were most of the others in the western neighborhoods. Far western Duluth had a steel plant, after all, together with other substantial industries, and the thousands of jobs they provided allowed workers—including immigrants and many who hadn’t completed high school—entry into what most people regarded as the middle class. Being middle class roughly meant owning a home, having a car and providing for your family.

My role here at Zenith City will be to write about the western Duluth neighborhoods as I recall them in the decades after World War II. My precise neighborhood was the West End, right in the heart of it, about half way between the Point of Rocks and the ore docks at 35^th Avenue West. Informally, the ore docks have always represented the dividing line between West End and West Duluth.

There was competition between those two neighborhoods too, but socio-economically they were similar. Each had a thriving business district, providing residents with everything they might need from groceries to hardware to banking to household and personal needs, not to mention a stiff drink. J.C. Penney operated department stores in each neighborhood, as did Bridgeman’s ice cream parlors. The West End had more furniture stores; West Duluth more movie theaters (two) while each had two funeral homes for most of the years my memory encompasses.

Each neighborhood had numerous churches representing most of the mainline Christian faiths, but no synagogues. West Duluth had a small hospital, long-since dissolved, but people from the western precincts who needed hospital care depended, as did the entire city, on St. Mary’s (Catholic) and St. Luke’s (Protestant), both on the eastern edges of downtown.

Commandingly, West Duluth had Denfeld High School, for generations bringing together students from both neighborhoods whose earlier education had been provided at Lincoln Junior High (West End) and West Junior High. Until 1950, the West End educated its younger pupils at elementary schools scattered throughout the neighborhood—Adams, Monroe, Bryant, Ensign and Lincoln. West Duluth had Longfellow and Irving and others farther west, but short of Morgan Park and Gary New-Duluth, with their own schools, including a high school.

In future columns I’ll try to extract from these neighborhoods glimpses of their colorful past life —a life I knew as a youngster and much younger adult, when Master Bread meant more than the staff of life in this small corner of our world at the head of the largest freshwater lake in that world.

Previously published on Zenith City Online on January 15, 2016 and 2012.