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. 

A farewell to a fine musician- politician...

Florian Chmielewski, 2017 Polka Party
Jamie Lund/ Duluth Media Group File

Written by By Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/5-4-24

 I hate politics. I love politics. Depends on the day and the politician.

 

I spent the last decades of my full-time career at this newspaper working on the opinion/editorial page. In that job you meet every area and state politician holding elective office or running for one — Congress, state government, city government, county government, school boards. Never met a dog catcher I didn’t like. 

They all come to the newspaper at the paper’s invitation to submit to what we call endorsement interviews. These result in the newspaper, just before elections, telling readers which candidates the editors think would serve best in the jobs they are seeking, not telling readers how to vote.

 

You knew that — at least I hope you did — but I wanted to reiterate it to explain how I met virtually every upper Midwest politician (we covered northern Wisconsin too) in the last two decades of the 20th century and early in the 21st.

 

One of my favorites was Florian Chmielewski, who died recently at age 97. Florian used to stop by the paper and talk to us quite frequently when he was a DFL state senator representing a district south of Duluth. (I call him by his first name because that’s how we related with most of the politicians until they got elected to a really high post such as governor, although I’m not sure we didn’t call Governor Perpich Rudy or Congressman Oberstar Jim.)

 

Of course, most people remember Chmielewski as a consummate accordion player and leader of a family-plus polka band with a popular television show. A man of many talents.

 

Just about everybody’s seen him perform at one time or another, in person or on TV. Not everyone had the opportunity to talk public policy with him when he was a state senator. He was particularly learned in the area of health care, among other issues I recall discussing with him. Very dedicated.

 

Serious stuff, but that broad smile seldom left his face. That is how I prefer to remember him. That and how he tied his ties. No knot, but rather a regular tie arranged like a cravat. 

 

One time I happened to be visiting the hilltop studios of WDIO-TV when they were taping a segment of his TV show Chmielewski Funtime, Florian out front pumping that accordion.

 

Suddenly one of the technicians said something had gone wrong with their recording equipment — they were filming the band but not picking up any sound. What were they going to do? I was told it didn’t matter, they’d just fill the soundtrack with past recordings of the group, not attempting to match the particular song with what was filmed being played. Hmmm.

 

I’m not much of a polka fan but I hope they included “Just Because.” It’s a classic: “Just because you think you’re so pretty,/Just because you think you’re so smart,/Just because you think you’ve got something/That nobody else has got./You cause me to spend all my money,/You laugh and call me Old Santa Claus;/Well I’m tellin’ you, baby, I’m through with you,/Because, just because.”

 

Smile, you’re on Chmielewski Funtime.

 

I recall often seeing the Funtime ensemble roll by on a flatbed truck in the annual Moose Lake July 4 parade. (“I don’t want her,/You can have her/She’s too fat for me…” — another old non-P.C. polka they might have played.)

 

I almost did Florian a disservice one time when he was running for re-election to the Minnesota Senate, where he served for just over a quarter of a century. All of the candidates we interviewed for various offices would emphasize, in their endorsement interviews, that they were “committed” to various things: committed to lower taxes, committed to better roads, committed to education, and so on.

 

One election cycle when Florian came in for his interview, he emphasized that he was seeking to help the city of Moose Lake with its plans for a new high school, among many other things.

 

People of a certain age will recall that Moose Lake was once best known for what can politely be called a mental health facility located there, although for years it was often impolitely referred to as an “insane asylum,” which sounds politically incorrect today. It has since taken on an entirely different role.

 

In any event, in writing a newspaper endorsement for Florian, I emphasized his efforts to help Moose Lake, but I inadvertently headlined it: “Chmielewski committed to Moose Lake.”

 

Fortunately, that never saw print. Until today.

 

Sad to see Florian is gone. He kept going with the music well into his 90s, always broadly smiling and seeming to be singing, “Roll out the barrel, and we’ll have a barrel of fun,/roll out the barrel, we’ve got the blues on the run.”

 

But not this week: His funeral is Tuesday in Sturgeon Lake, where he lived.

 

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.