There is a new mensch in town.

Minnesota lost a powerful voice of reason when Governor Elmer Andersen died a few years ago. Elmer was a decent, caring, intelligent human being; he was a mensch. Over drinks last week two prominent University of Minnesota librarians thought it would be a good idea to make wrist bracelets that read “WWED” or “What Would Elmer Do?” and distribute them to the state’s policy makers. Although Governor Andersen is gone I heard his voice last week when I read Lee Lynch’s op-ed piece in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. I nominate Lee as Minnesota’s new mensch.
Lee Lynch asks if Minnesota is moving toward a state of mediocrity. He sees clearly that our state is off track from the direction we used to travel. He suggests that we increase the revenue (yes that means raise taxes) to where they were in the 1990’s saying “it is not too late to be great again”. This has been the frustration with conservatives in the legislature and with the Pawlenty regime. Great is not their goal. Our lawmakers, our Elmer Andersens, used to be proud to have great institutions. Not too long ago when you told legislators something like “The University of Minnesota Library lends more books than any other library in America” or “Our Historical Society is a model for the nation” the response surely would have been enthusiastic and positive. Now there are elected representatives who say, “Who asked you to be number one?” or “What is wrong with being in the middle?” Greed trumped pride. Lee Lynch’s articulate plea not to slip below average gives me hope that the pendulum is swinging back and that our business leaders –even the rich ones- want to live in a state they can brag about again; a Minnesota where the arts and humanities are alive and flourishing.
Read the entire text at http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1347536.html

I would suggest that there might be some well-intentioned ideological conservatives out there who believe that it has been a good thing to starve government and our cultural institutions. They may even believe they are getting the same amount of service for less money. That there was fat that could be liposuctioned without hurting the patient. As an example, we have often kept public library hours the same while cutting thousands of dollars out of their budgets giving the appearance that all is the same. Our task is to yell from the seven hills of St. Paul that all is not the same. That quality has suffered greatly. That our children are not being served as well as we were. The myth that we can reduce revenue without sacrificing quality and safety should have collapsed with the 35W bridge. It is our job to remind everyone we talk to and hold Republican feet to the fire.
As my brother Chris said in his budget address this week; “There are those who suggest that we can’t afford to continue to invest in high quality City services. They are wrong. We cannot break faith with those who have worked so hard to bring us to this day nor with our children whose future we hold in our hands.”

Book Recommendation



Recently I wrote to support Donald L. Empson’s book The Street Where You Live: A Guide to the Place Names of St. Paul for a 2006 Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History. As the Acquisition Librarian at the Minnesota Historical Society for the past 28 years, I am very familiar with works of local history and Empson’s work is one of the most interesting, informative, and entertaining books I have read in a long time.
In December of 1974 Empson began a daily column in the St. Paul Dispatch with the title “The Street Where You Live”. Based on these columns and the author’s work as a reference librarian at the Minnesota Historical Society, the first edition of this history was published by Empson’s vanity press the Witsend in 1975. The subtitle of the first edition (A Guide to the Street Names of St. Paul) points out its more limited scope. When the author was approached by the University of Minnesota Press to reprint the local gazetteer, Empson suggested expanding the subject to all St. Paul place names. The result of those additions was an additional 141 pages, much more history, and a more useful reference tool. The new edition also integrates appropriate photographs and sidebars. One such sidebar on the paving of the city streets is titled “The Bedraggled Harlot” referring to an 1882 article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
The first edition was quickly out of print but had gained a cult following. I, for one, bought every copy I came across and gave them away to ignorant Minneapolitans and Saint Paul chauvinists. Saint Paulites will long remember former Governor Jesse Ventura on the David Letterman show, miming a habitual tippler and stating that the Irish laid out the streets of our saintly city. True, the city isn’t a grid of ABCs and 123s, but therein lays the eccentric and wonderful history of this town that this book captures so well.
Empson understands the importance of local history which, as he states in his preface, “provides a context for the space around our lives: it gives us a perspective on who we are and how we relate to those who lived here before us and those who will occupy our house and place in the next generation”. He provides that context by telling us about the people behind the names that we come across all day every day. The entry for McMurray Field, for example, tells us not only who McMurray was but about how the civic philanthropy of William McMurray left him broke and quotes him saying “I guess I was just in business for the fun of it anyway”.
The Street Where You Live surprises the reader in that it is full of the author’s personality. Where facts alone would normally suffice we are given opinion [under the entry for Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary we are told that Congressman Vento “… found it difficult to put a period to his rambling sentences”], poetry [the entry for Larry Ho Drive quotes a poem by Mayor Larry Hodgson about St. Paul’s most famous madam, Nina Clifford. “No longer do gay lights their welcome convey/ Inviting the wayfarer in/ To choose from the bevy, his favorite lay/ To dally a while and sin.], and humor [“While we would all agree Mother Teresa was a laudable woman, the local significance of the name escapes us” or Zimmerman Place is “noteworthy as the only entry in this book beginning with the letter Z”].
My only complaint about the book is that when it is sitting out in plain view there is a subconscious inclination to walk around humming the Loewe and Learner tune of the same title. For you bratz under 40, that is from the Broadway musical My Fair Lady based on the Shaw play Pygmalion.
I recommend The Street Where You Live to you as well as to the AASLH. It is a must have reference work for anyone interested in the history of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Who Are the Real Snow Birds?



I never understood why they call people who flee to warmer climates “snowbirds”. It seems to me that real snowbirds would flock to a place where they can enjoy the cold and snow. Do Snowy Owls migrate to Sanibel Island? For about thirty years my friends and family have been going the opposite direction that sane Minnesotans go in January. We wax the skis, dig out the gaiters, buy a pint of Snowshoe Grog and head north to Ely, Minnesota. For the last twenty of those years we have stayed at the YMCA’s Camp Du Nord off the Echo Trail. The photo above is from last year but it represents the faithful core. Strandemos, Hanson/Lilley family (these are Karen's photos), Deirdre and Ben, Sally and me.

http://www.dunord.org/index.asp>



It is Paradise even at 60 below zero. They have the best cross country ski trails this side of Norway, memorable meals, super staff, the best sauna in the eighth district, and homey, comfortable cabins. The cabin that I love to stay in because it has the most character is called Dane. It was built of logs in the late 1920’s and has a rock fireplace that is the pinnacle of hearth design. There have been years when we watched mice watching us from the comfort of the structures many ledges. This weekend we had seven people staying in Dane. Six people slept upstairs. I had the first floor to myself after they retired. Fire gave the only light. It gave the room the warmest honey color you can imagine. The shadows from each and every log pulsed with the moving flames. It was as if I was falling asleep inside some benignat living thing. In spite of the unusually active days I didn’t want to close my eyes until the fire died.



“How Cold Was It?”

I have a new gold standard for answering that question. Before leaving Ely for the Echo Trail I topped off my gas tank. I was not outside for too long but when I stepped inside the gas station both lenses in my glasses popped out! The temperature difference was beyond the tolerances of the Nautica frame. I inquired about getting a copy of their surveillance tape since, with deft, dumb, and blind instinct I caught both lenses. That is as close as I’ll come to Kirby Puckett’s catch in game six of the ’87 World Series.

Is it Art?



Sarah Pace Johnson, one of the more important members of the local art community for over 30 years, and me, an avid canoeist for 45 years, combined our talents on an art installation at my brother’s cabin home. The title of the 2006 work of wood, oil, and, monofilament is “For His Thoughts as Paddles Served Him”. It is on temporary loan until a willing buyer comes along. Price on request. A boorish philistine was overheard to say that our collaborative artwork was mere decoration. I say they aren't thinking deeply enough.

Catching Up -
Sorry, dear reader, that it has been so long since I have had a chance to add to my pathetic little blog. Work and pleasure have consumed all of my time. [Blogging, by implication, is something other than work or pleasure]. Let me quickly catch y’all up on what has been happening in my life.

The Liefhebbers Go to Washington -
Sally and I are truly liefhebbers or lovers of paintings. When we travel to any major urban area there is an impossible list of museums and exhibitions that must be seen. As a reminder of why one must travel to see art, Sally, Julia, and I went to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts one evening to hear the famous Indian singer, Zila Khan. Stepping around a corner, I was floored by Robert Berk’s bust of JFK. It is an image I have seen most of my life but I never realized the immense size of this highly textured portrait. I had imagined the bust to be life size but the top of my head was level with Kennedy’s chin! It is an entirely different experience to be in the physical presence of the art.

Washington DC is hell for art lovers because no visit is long enough to get to everything interesting. On this trip we saw the Societe Anonyme exhibition at the Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art; in the Dutch Cabinet Galleries at the National Gallery of Art Sally got four steps closer in her quest to see every painting by Johannes Vermeer; the National Portrait Gallery was hosting an annual portrait competition; and the new National Museum of the American Indian would, alone, have been worth the trip.
Vacation and travel for me is always a busman’s holiday. At the Library of Congress, Dan De Simone honored me with a private behind the scene tour. Dan is curator of the extraordinary Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection containing nine centuries of illustrated books. The National Gallery of Art Library was exhibiting the work of Claire Van Vliet who was also represented in an exhibition on the book as art at the National Museum of Women in Arts. This fabulous show featured more than 100 books by 86 women from 12 countries. Two of our favorites were Peregrine Honig’s “Ovubet (26 Girls with Sweet Centers) and Audrey Niffengger’s visual novel “Three Incestuous Sisters”. For a review of the show in the Washington Post click on Book As Art: Read Closely article An interesting interview with Niffengger is available by copying the following url to your mp3 player.
http://nmwa.org/file/podcast/NMWA_P150.xml
As beautiful as the work in the show was, I came away even more impressed with the book art being done by Minnesota women. Nothing I saw in the show was more beautiful, creative, or well executed than books by Harriet Bart’s Mnemonic Press, Paulette Myers-Rich’s Traffic Street Press, or Jody Williams’s Flying Paper Press, to name just a few.

Elections -
There is far too much to say and too little time to write about the elections. I will just say that the most embarrassing aspect of the recent election was that Minnesota elected Bachmann to Congress. My fantasy is that at some point in the next year she is moved by the Holy Spirit to speak in tongues on the House floor. The clear high point of the election was the good sportsmanship shown by the losing candidate in Senate District 50, Rae Hart Anderson. She took “Minnesota Nice” to new levels when, after the election, she e-mailed her opponent Satveer Chaudhary, a practicing Hindu, wishing that he would “get to know Jesus as Christ as Lord and Savior”. How sweet of her. How thoughtful. By the way, you missed a great election night party at my home. 100 people stopped by to roast a hot dog over the bonfire and have a beer or two.

Theodore C. Blegen -
I was honored with the 2005 Theodore C. Blegan Award at the MHS annual meeting this fall. The award is given to a Society staff member for an article in "Minnesota History" magazine. My friend, Tom, called with congrats on my "Teddy". Dean Blegen rolled over in his grave. I have a clear memory of being a 17 year old geek at the MHS annual meeting meeting in 1971 when the first Blegen award was given out.

Woods and Water -
Other than that excitement fall has been unexpectedly warm and we have taken great advantage of it getting out on the water almost every night and walking in the woods often. I’ll leave you with two photos from a walk at Afton State Park the last Sunday in November. One photo is of Sally and Dori and another of Finbar on the St. Croix. He loves to climb trees and someday I’ll regret encouraging that habit.

Expert Election Insights


With the possible exception of the Minnesota Wild, politics is the best spectator sport in town this fall. Two weeks away from the elections, Saintpaulite sat down to interview the high-powered partners of the leading Washington public relations firm, Dori Finbar, Inc., to parse the midterm elections.

Saintpaulite: I know y’all have been following politics since Floyd Olson was in diapers but you have to be a little surprised by the changing political winds over the last few weeks.
Dori: In fact, we are lucky we couldn’t find anyone fool enough to bet against us two months ago. We would have lost the farm.
Finbar: There goes our reputation. [laughter] We predicted Klobuchar would win but by just a hair, Pawlenty (anyone with a name beginning in “paw” can’t be a bad guy, could they?) would be re-elected by a landslide, and we called the 6th for Bachmann by a healthy margin.
D: Not to mention that we liked Ember Reichgott Junge and Steve Kelley in the primaries. Oh well, clients are still willing to pay us too much for our “professional insight”.
F: This might just me but, at the end of the day, I still can’t imagine Hatch pulling it off. I’m not willing to bet on that, however.

Sp: So how do you explain the shift?
D: I would love to say that it had everything to do with a strong Democratic response to Iraq, the lobbying scandal, and Republicans spending money like drunken sailors but…
F: Instead of turning on Bob Woodward, earmarks, and Jack Abramoff, the key was Mark Foley. Although I think that was simply the last straw. Voters recognize that a critical mass of incompetence has finally been reached.
D: And I would say that in Minnesota Amy has coattails.

Sp: The biggest surprise?
D: We told Patty Wetterling that a Pro-Choice candidate could never win in the Sixth Congressional district even if they were running against a woman with more phobias than the DSM-IV. I am old enough to remember when they committed people who heard God telling them what to do. Now Republicans run them for office! Go figure.
F: After November 7th we are hoping that Bachmann goes back to where she belongs.
Sp: Which is where?
F: Arkansas in 1923. [chortle]

Sp: So you are currently predicting…?
D: That unless the Republican Party hires us today [our cell phones are turned on Carl] to run crisis management they will lose Congress, perhaps the U.S. Senate, the State House of Representatives, and -in spite of Finny's misgivings - the Governor’s office.
F: …lose the war in Iraq, lose the respect of the World, lose control of the deficit, etc. etc. etc.

Sp: All right, all right. How about if we check back with you after the elections and see if you have any of your legendary canine credibility left.

Of Mice, Men, and Moose

Last week I was in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area on a rare solo trip into the wilderness. I love going beautiful places with the people I love; I also find it necessary to get away by my self every now and again. This time it was a cold and rainy and wonderful canoe trip off the Gunflint Trail.
Solo trips are hard physically. They can be psychological difficult also. It is so easy to frighten yourself worrying about all the things that could go wrong out on the trail. The trick – the difficult balancing act- is to prepare for everything and worry about nothing. For me, the hardest part of this trip was the simple act of getting out of the car once I had reached the entry point.
It was hard because the early morning drive up the “flint” was dark, cold, and rainy. Since I had just left a warm motel room that looked out over the Grand Marais harbor [next to the Java Moose coffee house I might add] it was hard for me to remember just what is so compelling about the great outdoors. It took every ounce of willpower to not turn the car around and step out into the rain to begin the 160-rod portage to Ram Lake.
Fortunately, the reason I was there came back to me quickly. The smell of the wet fall woods released a years worth of endorphins. The absence of man-made noise was exactly what I had been craving. The sounds were of moose snapping large branches as they moved clumsily through the forest, a solitary loon amusing himself with song, and the damned ubiquitous rain. The striking beauty of Ram Lake even made me forget the threatening weather. The lake has a 300-foot cliff that was being raked by clouds. It’s face was layered with dark green cedars on the shore, gold and red September hues of birch and maple in the middle, and a soft, top course, of light green pines.
I especially love paying attention to the micro wilderness. My campsite for two days was set up on a spot that did not show much wear as a fall blanket of golden pine needles covered it. For protection against the rain, I put up a tarp over what turned out to be a labyrinth. As I sat underneath it, eating or reading, mice would poke their heads out of the ground all around me. Some of them were frighteningly healthy. One mouse was half the size of my fist. Another, with whom I became friends, was tiny. Her ear was the size of this printed “o”. I won her trust by leaving Brazil nuts that mimicked her shape and size near one of the many entrances to this subterranean village.
“Wanna jump up on my lap, Miss Mouse?" I asked. "I'll read to you."
“Whatca reading?” she wanted to know.
“Mary Gordon’s Pearl” I said.
“I’ll pass, thanks”
“Why? It is a fabulous novel dealing with all the important questions for humanity. What is worth living and dying for, maternal and filial love, forgiveness and the unforgivable, and all this set against a backdrop of Irish political history,” I argued.
“Gordon is a man hater,” said the mouse, dismissively. “I bet there isn’t a single sympathetic male in the book.”
“Well…?” and said, since I couldn’t take that bet, “Aren’t you a feminist?”
“You can be a feminist without thinking every living thing with a penis is deeply flawed. What else did you bring to read?”
“Louise Erdrich” I said proudly.
“All right! Now you’re talking… unless it is that book where she joins the cult of Ernest Oberholtzer”
“Perhaps we should just stick to talking about sports and weather”

Art and Geography

Last Friday, September 9th there was another wonderful art opening at Minnesota’s finest art gallery, Groveland . Now in the interest of journalistic ethics –and yes, yes I know this is a blog and there are no journalistic ethics- I must admit to a conflict of interest. Sally Johnson, the brilliant directory of the gallery, is my significant other.
In the current show two very different artists, styles and forms are being exhibited but it is not hard to find a unifying theme. Both artists have a well-developed sense of the earth’ features but opt for playing with and inventing their own geography. Jeanne McGee’s work, which is on display in the gallery’s annex, is strikingly original (one of my measures for genius) and it is stunningly beautiful. She has taken maps, shredded them, woven them back together, and painted imaginary geographic features on these now newly imaginary places. Mark Horton’s show, titled “Metropolis”, has a more traditional feel than McGee’s. His urban geography in oil is intended to evoke a feeling of place rather than document an actual city. His romantic renderings of downtown scenes makes you either proud to be a city dweller or wonder what you are missing that the artist is seeing (another sign of genius).
The show is up ‘til October 14th. Don’t miss it.
ps: I know what you were thinking when you saw the photo above. Yes it also reminded me of the classic novel "Grandpa and the Girls" by that great man of letters, Louis M. Heyward.