The Fantastic Four has always been a comic lover’s comic. Although Spider-Man is more widely known, Reed Richards and his family are often considered the soul of Marvel Comics—it was, after all, the Fantastic Four’s explosive popularity in the early sixties that vaulted the company from also-ran to market leader. Although it’s been a long time since the comic book dominated the sales charts, it continues to sell well and remains a high-profile assignment for writer-artist teams (J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the TV series Babylon 5, recently signed on to write it). Even forty years on, minor happenings in the comic’s plot can occasionally make the real-world news, as in 2002, when the Thing was revealed to be Jewish.
It stands to reason that a movie version of a franchise this beloved would generate loads of interest, and the eruption of online speculation about story and cast bears this out. Legions of nerds, and I emphatically include myself in that category, have been waiting a long time for a good Fantastic Four flick.
Let’s examine why the comic was so great to begin with. When Fantastic Four #1 appeared in 1961, it was unlike anything else in comics. DC Comics was enjoying great success with Justice League of America, a team-up of its A-list super-types (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, et al.). The Fantastic Four were Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s attempt to get a piece of the dream-team action for Marvel. Lee, however, was also sick of the comics industry and on the verge of quitting. As a result, he threw caution to the wind and wrote heroes with actual personalities and regular, human problems. They bickered. They went broke. They spent as much time exploring and inventing as they did fighting crime.
Ben “the Thing” Grimm bitterly (and rightly) blamed Reed “Mr. Fantastic” Richards for his horrible disfigurement in the accident that gave the Four their powers. Susan “Invisible Girl” Storm, though romantically linked to Richards, frequently flirted with one of the Four’s primary villains, a sea-dwelling tough guy named Namor (who, with his fish-scale swimming trunks, comes off as an ill-tempered Aquaman). This quartet was a far cry from the Justice League heroes, who were happy and well-adjusted (most of them, at least—admittedly, Batman’s got some problems). The Fantastic Four’s nemeses were also notably different; often they defied convention by having actual motivations. The jealous Dr. Doom, for instance, with his enormous ego and raging Oedipus complex, is vastly more compelling than the giant starfish from space that the Justice League faced. Sure, Doom’s desire to conquer the Earth is pretty common, but that was just one of his goals, along with contacting his dead mother, sticking it to Reed Richards, and raising the international prestige of his home country of Latveria.
This month’s Fantastic Four movie is not the first time that Marvel’s First Family has been adapted to film. A notoriously awful version was shot in 1994 purely to fulfill contract obligations—producer Roger Corman’s ownership of the film rights included a clause that production had to begin by a certain date. The resulting film featured a ridiculous foam-rubber Thing costume and a Mr. Fantastic stretching effect that, according to comics historian Scott Tipton, “looks like a sock on a really long stick.” Even by Corman’s standards, this movie stank. He buried it, and it is currently available only in bootlegs—though the prevailing consensus is that it’s not worth watching even for laughs.
This leaves the bar pretty low for the new film. However, in adapting what is essentially an origin story, the filmmakers made some choices that will rile the faithful. In Lee and Kirby’s delightful, original version, the Fantastic Four receive their powers from accidental exposure to cosmic rays while stealing a rocket to beat “the commies” into space. Reed Richards’ decision to bring his college roommate, pilot Ben Grimm, makes sense; bringing along his fiancée and her little brother is somewhat less understandable, but that’s part of the charm.
In the new film, the exposure to cosmic radiation is more or less intentional, and Richards spouts a lame generalization about advancing “our knowledge of planetary life.” How is that even one-quarter as cool as stealing a rocket to beat the commies into space? In fact, while Lee and Kirby quickly established the Four’s powers and then sent them into action, the movie gets bogged down with bogus scientific justifications, in which people must listen to tedious explanations about why they can stretch or turn invisible. If your story hinges on people doing things that are outside of the bounds of scientific possibility, why waste screen time doling out cheesy rationalizations? Every second squandered telling us about Reed Richards’ internal organs could be used instead to, say, send the superheroes back in time to hang out with pirates, or have them hypnotize shape-shifting alien invaders into believing that they’re cows.
There’s nothing blasphemous about doing the Fantastic Four as high science fiction; this is essentially what Lee and Kirby did, although the boundaries of science fiction have shifted considerably since the sixties. But why play it so straight? The comic book works because of its sense of lighthearted wonder. You can’t have an effective villain named “Dr. Doom” unless you’re willing to at least flirt with camp. While the book, at its best, is an exercise of raw imagination, the movie, like so many of its blockbuster brethren, seems likely to be little more than a modest exercise in computer-generated imagery.
Not that film adaptations of comics should slavishly ape the tone or trappings or specifics of their source material. Far from it—if adding a character or changing a power makes sense for the story, then I say go for it. The two Spider-Man movies, to take recent examples of Marvel successes, tweaked a lot of details but held on to the core elements that have always made Spider-Man interesting. The result was something that pleased pretty much everybody: Comics geeks got a couple of Spider-Man films they could love; the non-comics-reading public got well-above-average summer movies; and the producers got enough money to fill the Grand Canyon. But these are exceptions; the more typical Hollywood emphasis on effects and exposition over story and character hasn’t generated a lot of great superhero movies. Do we still talk about the film version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?
I submit that comics are a potential trap when it comes to adapting them for film. It seems like it should be the easiest thing in the world to do, since a comic book looks like an illustrated screenplay. But that’s the point: It’s illustrated. Someone has drawn the panels, and has total control over what you see and don’t see. Visually awkward elements, such as the look of Dr. Doom’s armor on an actual person, never have to appear. Moreover, a comic artist can control the flow of time itself based on how he chooses to break up the action. If, in a comic, you want to show Reed Richards stretching his arm, you show a normal Reed arm in one panel and a stretched-out one in the next. If you want to emphasize that it’s really hard for him to stretch—maybe Dr. Doom has him in a chamber whose temperature is absolute zero and he’s not as elastic as usual—then you draw six almost-identical consecutive panels, each with a slightly longer arm. The reader’s mind fills the gaps, drawing her more deeply into the story. The closest thing to this in film is that Matrix-y “bullet time” effect that keeps getting trotted out (and, mercifully, seems to be on the wane).
Superhero stories are hardwired into us humans—or more accurately, superhero stories are one manifestation of a story archetype that appears to be hardwired into us. That pretty much explains Joseph Campbell’s career, and the line stretching from Beowulf to Reed Richards b
ears that out. The weird thing, though, is the way that superheroes and comics have become inextricably linked. There’s nothing inherent about words combined with pictures that forces them to tell stories about demigods. Hordes of comics writers and artists are working, more or less underground, to tell completely unheroic stories (see Dan Clowes and Marjane Satrapi for a couple of more prominent examples; tangentially, Clowes’ Ghost World was the basis for one of the best comic-to-film translations of all time). But if you drive by Comic College on Hennepin, you see a photorealistic painting of Batman and a bust of the Hulk; when people think comics, they think superheroes.
There are three reasons for this. The first comics to sell in huge numbers were superhero books. Second, simple good-versus-evil superhero tales were an easy way to comply with the harsh scrutiny trained on the medium during the fifties. (Vibrant alternate genres that had cropped up, like pirate and horror comics, wilted when censors started paying attention.) Finally, until recently, hand-drawn pictures represented the only way to show superhero action without either looking cheesy or costing a fortune.
The universality of superhero stories means that characters can easily hop among different media—Superman is inspiring whether you’re reading a comic book, watching a movie, or playing with an action figure. The characters themselves are in no danger, but comics have become a niche market with dwindling numbers. Tipton notes that while top books routinely sold millions of copies in the late forties, these days a book is a phenomenon if it cracks a hundred thousand. Currently, the comics divisions of Marvel and DC exist at least partly as R&D departments to produce characters and storylines for use in other, more lucrative media. It’s rumored that DC’s corporate parent, Time Warner, doesn’t even require that the comics turn a profit, knowing that movies and toys will more than recoup the money spent on writers and artists. Although it almost certainly won’t match the trainloads of money produced by the Spider-Man movies, The Fantastic Four will in all likelihood be profitable for Marvel. It will provide us with a couple of hours’ worth of mildly diverting spectacle, and maybe even some cool toys (the Hulk movie sucked, but those foam Hulk Hands are pure fun). For anything more, your best bet is to turn back to the comics. Which is fine by me.
Let’s examine why the comic was so great to begin with. When Fantastic Four #1 appeared in 1961, it was unlike anything else in comics. DC Comics was enjoying great success with Justice League of America, a team-up of its A-list super-types (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, et al.). The Fantastic Four were Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s attempt to get a piece of the dream-team action for Marvel. Lee, however, was also sick of the comics industry and on the verge of quitting. As a result, he threw caution to the wind and wrote heroes with actual personalities and regular, human problems. They bickered. They went broke. They spent as much time exploring and inventing as they did fighting crime.
Ben “the Thing” Grimm bitterly (and rightly) blamed Reed “Mr. Fantastic” Richards for his horrible disfigurement in the accident that gave the Four their powers. Susan “Invisible Girl” Storm, though romantically linked to Richards, frequently flirted with one of the Four’s primary villains, a sea-dwelling tough guy named Namor (who, with his fish-scale swimming trunks, comes off as an ill-tempered Aquaman). This quartet was a far cry from the Justice League heroes, who were happy and well-adjusted (most of them, at least—admittedly, Batman’s got some problems). The Fantastic Four’s nemeses were also notably different; often they defied convention by having actual motivations. The jealous Dr. Doom, for instance, with his enormous ego and raging Oedipus complex, is vastly more compelling than the giant starfish from space that the Justice League faced. Sure, Doom’s desire to conquer the Earth is pretty common, but that was just one of his goals, along with contacting his dead mother, sticking it to Reed Richards, and raising the international prestige of his home country of Latveria.
This month’s Fantastic Four movie is not the first time that Marvel’s First Family has been adapted to film. A notoriously awful version was shot in 1994 purely to fulfill contract obligations—producer Roger Corman’s ownership of the film rights included a clause that production had to begin by a certain date. The resulting film featured a ridiculous foam-rubber Thing costume and a Mr. Fantastic stretching effect that, according to comics historian Scott Tipton, “looks like a sock on a really long stick.” Even by Corman’s standards, this movie stank. He buried it, and it is currently available only in bootlegs—though the prevailing consensus is that it’s not worth watching even for laughs.
This leaves the bar pretty low for the new film. However, in adapting what is essentially an origin story, the filmmakers made some choices that will rile the faithful. In Lee and Kirby’s delightful, original version, the Fantastic Four receive their powers from accidental exposure to cosmic rays while stealing a rocket to beat “the commies” into space. Reed Richards’ decision to bring his college roommate, pilot Ben Grimm, makes sense; bringing along his fiancée and her little brother is somewhat less understandable, but that’s part of the charm.
In the new film, the exposure to cosmic radiation is more or less intentional, and Richards spouts a lame generalization about advancing “our knowledge of planetary life.” How is that even one-quarter as cool as stealing a rocket to beat the commies into space? In fact, while Lee and Kirby quickly established the Four’s powers and then sent them into action, the movie gets bogged down with bogus scientific justifications, in which people must listen to tedious explanations about why they can stretch or turn invisible. If your story hinges on people doing things that are outside of the bounds of scientific possibility, why waste screen time doling out cheesy rationalizations? Every second squandered telling us about Reed Richards’ internal organs could be used instead to, say, send the superheroes back in time to hang out with pirates, or have them hypnotize shape-shifting alien invaders into believing that they’re cows.
There’s nothing blasphemous about doing the Fantastic Four as high science fiction; this is essentially what Lee and Kirby did, although the boundaries of science fiction have shifted considerably since the sixties. But why play it so straight? The comic book works because of its sense of lighthearted wonder. You can’t have an effective villain named “Dr. Doom” unless you’re willing to at least flirt with camp. While the book, at its best, is an exercise of raw imagination, the movie, like so many of its blockbuster brethren, seems likely to be little more than a modest exercise in computer-generated imagery.
Not that film adaptations of comics should slavishly ape the tone or trappings or specifics of their source material. Far from it—if adding a character or changing a power makes sense for the story, then I say go for it. The two Spider-Man movies, to take recent examples of Marvel successes, tweaked a lot of details but held on to the core elements that have always made Spider-Man interesting. The result was something that pleased pretty much everybody: Comics geeks got a couple of Spider-Man films they could love; the non-comics-reading public got well-above-average summer movies; and the producers got enough money to fill the Grand Canyon. But these are exceptions; the more typical Hollywood emphasis on effects and exposition over story and character hasn’t generated a lot of great superhero movies. Do we still talk about the film version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?
I submit that comics are a potential trap when it comes to adapt
ing them for film. It seems like it should be the easiest thing in the world to do, since a comic book looks like an illustrated screenplay. But that’s the point: It’s illustrated. Someone has drawn the panels, and has total control over what you see and don’t see. Visually awkward elements, such as the look of Dr. Doom’s armor on an actual person, never have to appear. Moreover, a comic artist can control the flow of time itself based on how he chooses to break up the action. If, in a comic, you want to show Reed Richards stretching his arm, you show a normal Reed arm in one panel and a stretched-out one in the next. If you want to emphasize that it’s really hard for him to stretch—maybe Dr. Doom has him in a chamber whose temperature is absolute zero and he’s not as elastic as usual—then you draw six almost-identical consecutive panels, each with a slightly longer arm. The reader’s mind fills the gaps, drawing her more deeply into the story. The closest thing to this in film is that Matrix-y “bullet time” effect that keeps getting trotted out (and, mercifully, seems to be on the wane). Superhero stories are hardwired into us humans—or more accurately, superhero stories are one manifestation of a story archetype that appears to be hardwired into us. That pretty much explains Joseph Campbell’s career, and the line stretching from Beowulf to Reed Richards bears that out. The weird thing, though, is the way that superheroes and comics have become inextricably linked. There’s nothing inherent about words combined with pictures that forces them to tell stories about demigods. Hordes of comics writers and artists are working, more or less underground, to tell completely unheroic stories (see Dan Clowes and Marjane Satrapi for a couple of more prominent examples; tangentially, Clowes’ Ghost World was the basis for one of the best comic-to-film translations of all time). But if you drive by Comic College on Hennepin, you see a photorealistic painting of Batman and a bust of the Hulk; when people think comics, they think superheroes.
There are three reasons for this. The first comics to sell in huge numbers were superhero books. Second, simple good-versus-evil superhero tales were an easy way to comply with the harsh scrutiny trained on the medium during the fifties. (Vibrant alternate genres that had cropped up, like pirate and horror comics, wilted when censors started paying attention.) Finally, until recently, hand-drawn pictures represented the only way to show superhero action without either looking cheesy or costing a fortune.
The universality of superhero stories means that characters can easily hop among different media—Superman is inspiring whether you’re reading a comic book, watching a movie, or playing with an action figure. The characters themselves are in no danger, but comics have become a niche market with dwindling numbers. Tipton notes that while top books routinely sold millions of copies in the late forties, these days a book is a phenomenon if it cracks a hundred thousand. Currently, the comics divisions of Marvel and DC exist at least partly as R&D departments to produce characters and storylines for use in other, more lucrative media. It’s rumored that DC’s corporate parent, Time Warner, doesn’t even require that the comics turn a profit, knowing that movies and toys will more than recoup the money spent on writers and artists. Although it almost certainly won’t match the trainloads of money produced by the Spider-Man movies, The Fantastic Four will in all likelihood be profitable for Marvel. It will provide us with a couple of hours’ worth of mildly diverting spectacle, and maybe even some cool toys (the Hulk movie sucked, but those foam Hulk Hands are pure fun). For anything more, your best bet is to turn back to the comics. Which is fine by me.
Month: June 2005
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Drat!
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All Fished Out!
Some of the landmarks have changed, but eight years ago, directions to the Rainbow Inn were easy: Stay on Highway 169, watch for Wigwam Bay and the Grain Belt beer sign. I found it, pulled in, and walked into the lodge. The light was comfortably dim, slanting in through the row of front windows. A man and a woman were leaning against opposite corners of a blond wood bar; they were silent, but looked up as I entered. My friends had stopped by last year to ask about cabins, I explained, and I was wondering if they had any available for the coming summer. After a few seconds, the woman started to cry.
I switched gears from oblivious to confused. They had recently decided to sell, the man said in a resigned tone. They just couldn’t make it work anymore. Things were changing too much; people weren’t coming like they used to. I should be able to rent a cabin from the new management later in the season, he added, if I wanted one. I didn’t know what to say, so I left it at “thanks” and left them to their privacy.
The Rainbow Inn is now gone altogether, but I remember it fondly. I did stay there that summer with a group of friends, and returned several times in later years. This cluster of five tiny white cabins, each with trim painted in a different color of the rainbow, was my scruffy introduction to the classic mom-and-pop resort. My friends and I were late bloomers in regard to the tradition of the Minnesota lake cabin, and we were surprised and a little overwhelmed at the range of options. The large resorts, outfitted with golf courses, convention centers, water parks, and the like, were too elaborate (and expensive) for our liking. Our desires were simple—just a place to sleep while we explored the area—so the Rainbow Inn was the perfect answer. For a modest weekly rate, we could come and go as we liked, cook our own food, and bring along various combinations of family members, partners, friends, and pets.
Cabin number one was my favorite. It had red trim and a concrete dog statue next to the front door. The dog’s ears had broken off, leaving two rusty antennae, stubs of rebar, sticking out of its head. Mille Lacs Lake sparkled and beckoned beyond, though it was separated from the cabins by the two lanes of Highway 169. Inside, the focus was the kitchen, with its antique refrigerator and tiny gas stove. The table and chairs blazed with the curvy chrome and primary-colored optimism of 1950s-era modernism, but this was no ironic retro rehab. Simply put, the place hadn’t changed for a long time. A diminutive couch and non-functioning TV finished off the main part of the cabin. In the “back” was a compact bathroom, next to a gas space heater and a bedroom that was essentially filled by the sagging bed. Cabin number one and its companions were situated on a short loop drive next to the central lodge building, to which a strip motel had been attached sometime in the fifties.
Generations of Midwestern families once came to places just like the Rainbow for their summer vacations. Some stayed in the same cabin at the same resort during the same week, year after year. At times, mothers and children would stay all summer, with dad commuting from the Cities on the weekends. For those without the means to purchase their own lake place, resort cabins provided the fishing, swimming, sun, and relaxation without the responsibilities of maintenance. Long a vital part of Minnesota culture and heritage, the cabin “up north” has attained the mythological patina of simpler times—mainly among city dwellers fueled by a Hamm’s beer-sign-tinged nostalgia. And this is only natural, considering that the golden age of the family-run resort has long since vanished.
My family took long road-trip camping vacations while I was growing up in the seventies. Every summer my parents, brother, grandma, and I would pile into the car, with camper in tow, and head out for weeks. We took scenic routes from the Midwest down to Florida, to Oregon, New England, California—or wherever we wanted. As a young child, I believed that my dad had been everywhere in the world at least once, because he always seemed to know where he was going on these trips. Even when he pulled out a map, I figured he was just refreshing his memory; maybe it had been a while since he’d been in that particular area. In later years, when I helped navigate, I still loved the sense of exploration and discovery, which fueled my curiosity about the world.
That style of vacation was a novelty to my parents and grandmother, but it was also helping to usher out the heyday of the mom-and-pop resort. Both the road trip and the resort are products of automobile tourism, made possible and promoted by a heavy investment in infrastructure and advertising starting shortly after World War I.
My friend (and landlady) Neva Bridgwater experienced the growth and decline of the Minnesota resort industry firsthand. Her parents, Howard and Lela Welty, opened the Wigwam Inn on Wigwam Bay of Mille Lacs Lake in the 1930s, when she was a little girl. The vacant woodlot where the resort once stood is just outside my office window, up the bay from the Rainbow Inn’s former location.
Neva has large, gentle eyes and a quick smile. She is athletic and whipcord thin, the result of a lifetime’s worth of swimming, which began when she fell off a dock at the age of five. Her uncle saw it happen. He said, “Young lady, you’re going to learn to swim!” and taught her on the spot. A friend of Neva’s, Jim Kalk, who ran the Wigwam Inn for a while in the late 1990s, told me that he saw her out in the lake nearly every day it wasn’t frozen. “It made me a little nervous seeing her out there so far. I’d try to keep an eye out while I was working, to make sure I could still see her swim cap above the waves, but she never had any problems.” Neva now lives on the north side of the lake with her newlywed husband, Trevor. When the couple is not elk hunting in the Rockies, they’re busy caring for their horses and building an addition on their home.
Neva’s parents brought their young family to Mille Lacs in the early thirties from a little town in Iowa. Years of drought had become an increasing burden on their farm, and Howard Welty had always loved hunting and fishing, so he decided to make a living from that. The Weltys first leased the Vineland Lodge, a long-gone resort that was situated at the outlet of the Rum River from Mille Lacs Lake. Howard had a natural talent and love for exploring the lake, and quickly established himself as a fishing guide. After discovering the good fishing up north, on Wigwam Bay, he looked for resort opportunities there.
Howard inquired about the Kingfisher Lodge, which was located on the bay, but its owner, Earle Brown, wrote that “we are not in a position to lease this property at the present time owing to the fact that we do not know exactly where the new highway is to be located and what effect this new location will have on the property.” Neva still laughs at that letter. Seven decades later, years of uncertainty over a proposed four-lane divided highway once again keeps people guessing about the future of their properties.
Not long after Brown’s rejection, the lodge immediately south of the Kingfisher went up for sale. The Weltys bought it and expended a lot of elbow grease over the winter. They lived in the lodge and rented out two cabins. At first, they focused mainly on a fishing service. Howard’s reputation as a first-rate guide grew quickly, and he had a steady flow of travelers from his hometown in Iowa. Back then, many farmers had a few weeks of leisure in June. “They didn’t have much to do after the corn was planted,” Neva told me. “Farming is much more diversified now, but at that time it was corn, corn, corn.” With the kids out of school, early summer became the natural time for a vacation. Repeat business became a sure thing, with visitors coming from as far away as Chicago. “Mille Lacs walleye were publicized in Chicago, and many groups would come up just to fish with Dad,” said Neva.
The biggest challenge at the Wigwam Inn was lodging. With only two cabins, many of their launch customers had to stay elsewhere. The serendipitous solution to the squeeze on accommodations came when a truck driver accidentally crashed into the Kingfisher Lodge. Earle Brown decided not to rebuild, and sold the Kingfisher’s five cabins to the Weltys. They moved them over to the Wigwam Inn and soon built an eighth, the largest, which was always in the most demand.
Between the fishing opener and Labor Day, running the Wigwam Inn was a twenty-four-hour job. Laundry and housekeeping chores were never-ending, and Neva’s mother ran a lively business cooking breakfast and lunch for the fishermen. The family also stocked a small grocery store in the lodge. In an era before convenience stores, most resorts kept on hand many of the basics that their guests would need. Suppliers of milk, bread, meat, and other staples made deliveries from Brainerd to the area resorts. This was usually a great help, except in 1946 when a Kremey Krust bread truck lost control and crashed into several of the resort’s boats on the beach. (In northwoods lore, there are a lot of runaway automobiles.) The resort also functioned as a gas station, and Gluek’s beer was available on tap in the lodge. The Wigwam Inn’s lodge became a gathering place not just for guests in the tourist season, but for locals year round.
On top of their duties related to maintaining the resort, Neva and her older brother, Francis, were responsible for entertaining the children of the guests. Some days they were in and out of the lake ten times or more, supervising young swimmers. “The fishermen usually came for three to four days at a time, and then families would start to arrive just after Memorial Day,” she said. “Most would stay for about two weeks. It was fun to get to know the ones who came back year after year.”
“Getting away from it all” was a Minnesota tradition long before the Weltys founded the Wigwam Inn. From the early days of the Minnesota Territory in the mid-nineteenth century, the northern air was thought to be invigorating and conducive to good health. The Lake Minnetonka area became a popular escape from the summer heat of the Twin Cities by the 1860s, and the rapid growth of railroads extended the possibilities in the subsequent decades.
As an industry, tourism provided a way to make a living in areas that had once been the domain of loggers and miners, and brought an economic dimension to the scenic beauty of the northwoods. In regions like the Arrowhead, which were still actively being logged, this created a clash of values and bolstered support for the early conservation movements. Then as now, tourists didn’t spend money to make trips of that magnitude in hopes of seeing clear-cuts. Areas like Mille Lacs, in fact, had been logged over several times by the early 1900s. But the second-growth trees still looked like a forest, and anyway the real draw, as it spread through word of mouth in the early and mid-twentieth century, was the fishing.
While cars did not lead directly to the creation of resorts, burgeoning highway development in the 1920s and 1930s did fuel the development of housekeeping cabins and fishing-launch services across central and northern Minnesota. A tourist brochure from the 1930s announced: “The Scenic and Shortest Route to the North is through the Main Entrance to Paul Bunyan Play Ground at Lake Mille Lacs.” The map on the back points out the advantages of the roads coming north from the Twin Cities. U.S. Highway 169 was “paved to the lake.” State Highway 65 was tarvia (an early road surface using coal tar) “almost to the lake,” while State Highway 56 remained a “good gravel road.” Another brochure from the 1940s assures tourists that “the roads which lead to Mille Lacs from every direction are wide and smooth.”
Even as roads from the Twin Cities extended farther north, gas rationing during World War II offered an additional boon for Mille Lacs-area resorts. For those who could vacation during the war, Mille Lacs was pretty much as far as they could drive, and continued to mean literally “up north” to many people. Furthermore, gas rationing meant that it simply wasn’t feasible for vacationers to tow boats with them. Not only were Mille Lacs resorts readily accessible from the Cities, but the guests also needed the cabins, food, and fishing service they offered. A brochure produced by the Mille Lacs Lake Association in the 1940s depicts a cluster of eight resorts on Wigwam Bay, including the Wigwam Inn and Vic’s Motel & Resort (later the Rainbow Inn), along with the Shady Knoll Resort, Pirate’s Cove, the Wigwam Bay Resort, Cofield & Whitehead, the Westshore Resort, and the North Star Resort.
Road development spurred economic development, but it ultimately became a double-edged sword for the resorts. Mille Lacs had never been directly connected to the railroads, and the first highways opened up the west side of the lake, including Wigwam Bay, to tourism like never before. The beach ridges on the western shore have probably always been a natural transportation route: first for foot travel, then for horses and wagons, and finally for motorized vehicles. The speed, noise and traffic volume of a late twentieth century highway were unimaginable to the driver of a Model T on an unpaved road, but those early byways set a precedent. They made the western bays an ideal setting for resorts—accessible yet beautiful. Today, the highway is a barrier between some of the resorts and the shore, although a number have managed to hold on due to the lure of their fishing launches.
The legacy of Highway 169’s impact on the area is most apparent at Seguchie Resort, on St. Alban’s Bay. Like the former Wigwam and Rainbow inns, it sits on the shore of Mille Lacs Lake, but it is cut off from the water by forty feet of pavement. Red and yellow cabins flank a narrow gravel road that provides access to the resort. This little road is unusual in that it has small but deep ditches on each side, and its own concrete bridge over Seguchie Creek. Owner Dave Kobilka explained that this road was the highway back in the twenties, when the resort was built. Realizing this, it’s easy to visualize the place as it was then, with a playhouse-scale highway doubling as a lane through the rows of cheerful cabins, the smell of fish frying, and the shouts of children running to the shore.
A likely option for the next phase of Highway 169 reconstruction would move the road farther back from the shores of Mille Lacs, on both Wigwam and St. Alban’s bays. It’s interesting to consider whether the early twenty-first century highway could spark a renaissance of mom-and-pop businesses along the lake, reconnecting the lakeshore resorts with the water.
Back in the late 1930s, “people would just love to sit and look out the window toward the north and watch the traffic,” Neva said. “It was a big thing then. Now we don’t think it’s so great.” She was talking to Jim Fogerty, who spent much of the 1990s compiling an oral history of the state’s resort industry. A curator at the Minnesota Historical Society, Fogerty selected the Wigwam Inn as a classic mom-and-pop resort case study for his project. Neva was his main source.
According to Fogerty, the Wigwam Inn is one of two main types of resorts, catering mainly to the fishing crowd, with guests sometimes staying for two, three, or four weeks. The other type has evolved from that mom-and-pop model into a more service- and recreation-oriented complex, with golf, tennis, conference centers, spas, and other amenities. This second type, where guests typically stay for a long weekend, dominates today, with familiar names like Cragun’s, Breezy Point, Izaty’s, and Ruttger’s. The more modest housekeeping resorts are hanging on, but just barely. Clearly, their popularity peaked in during the 1940s and 1950s.
Still, these older places have made a deep enough imprint on the Minnesota psyche to gain recognition as an integral part of our cultural heritage, warranting stewardship, studies like Fogerty’s oral history project, and even preservation efforts. Today, for instance, a thirties-era trading post is a prominent part of the Mille Lacs Indian Museum. Established by Harry and Jeanette Ayer, it characterizes the entrepreneurial spirit of many early Minnesota resorts.
The Ayers were licensed traders living among the Ojibwe community at Mille Lacs who in the early twenties purchased land, eleven rowboats, and supplies for building and furnishing tourist cabins. They lived in one of the cabins for more than twenty years, and rented the others to motor tourists and fishermen; the proceeds from the cabins and a dining hall financed the construction of the trading post. The cabins, which eventually numbered around two dozen, were at the center of several related enterprises that employed members of the Mille Lacs band of Ojibwe , including a boat works, a maple sugar factory, and a gas station. Wigwams and other traditional Ojibwe structures were built on the grounds, leaving little doubt that seeing “real Indians” was a definite draw in the tourist trade. The trading post was also a de facto community center for the band during this period, and provided an outlet for birchbark crafts, beadwork, and other traditional art.
The Ayers’ resort and trading post were always full during May, with fishermen doubling up in the cabins and perennially hoping for an early start. In the days before large fishing launches, rowboats were tied together and towed out to the middle of Mille Lacs Lake, where the fish retreated during warm weather. It was common practice at many resorts to send the boats off for the entire day with packed lunches. The motorboat could stay there with them, or go back at dinnertime (or signs of approaching bad weather).
Along with the trading post, the Minnesota Historical Society preserved several of the Ayers’ tourist cabins and their spartan furnishings. The low-lying beds look rather uncomfortable, and a small wooden table in one kitchen is set with enamelware plates and cups. But all it takes is a glimpse of Mille Lacs Lake through the gingham curtains to remember that the interior of these cabins was hardly the attraction.
Ruttger’s resort is a short distance northwest of Mille Lacs on Bay Lake. It has operated for more than a century as a family-run business. Jack Ruttger, the grandson of founders Joseph and Josephine Ruttger, was also a primary source for Jim Fogerty’s study, as Ruttger’s is a classic example of that second type of resort—the one that evolved into a major, upscale recreation site. Highway 6, which leads to Ruttger’s, evolved as Highway 169 did at Mille Lacs, but it does not carry as much traffic. Also, the alignment of Highway 6 shifted away from the resort as it was rebuilt over the years, leaving the Ruttger’s cabins in peace. The old mercantile and the filling station along the former highway are now part of the resort, converted into shops and a coffee house, and a new spa continues the tradition of adapting historic buildings for contemporary uses.
The Ruttgers’ earliest guests came in the 1890s on the railroad to the town of Deerwood, looking to escape the city summer; the first cabin was built in 1901, the same year the first family came for an extended vacation. Jack’s childhood memories of the Great Depression at his family’s resort contrast sharply with Neva’s of the Wigwam Inn. It turns out that even though Bay Lake is only about fifteen miles north of Mille Lacs, auto tourists were only just making it to Wigwam Bay, and so some summers saw a definite shortage of guests at Ruttger’s. They responded by trying to make every guest feel especially doted upon.
Thus Ruttger’s stayed one step ahead of the changes in American vacation evolution. The 1920s brought a heavy investment in tourist cabin construction, soon followed by a pioneering golf course in the pasture (shared with the cows). Later decades brought tennis courts, an eighteen-hole golf course (minus cows), apartment-style condominiums, and a convention center.
Meanwhile, at the Wigwam Inn, for example, the wooden boats purchased to replace the ones destroyed in the Kremey Krust disaster marked the end of their era. Aluminum boats were available starting in the 1950s and quickly gained in popularity, and while it would be decades before personal watercraft were substantial enough to tackle Mille Lacs Lake on their own, a trend toward visitors bringing their own boats began.
Likewise, an RV park became a focus of business at the Wigwam, although the lodge, cabins and the launch remained. Today, the buildings and dock are gone. The former resort is a park-like setting with tall oak, basswood, and ash trees, and the occasional RV electrical hookup sticking up through the grass.
The improved roads and the end of gas rationing set the stage for the long driving vacations of the late 1960s and 1970s. In my family’s case, if we had approached Mille Lacs on one of our road trips, we likely would have set up our camper at the Wigwam Inn and moved on after a day or two, rather than staying for a week or more, as guests had in the previous era.
In this sense, the heavy traffic passing the former Rainbow and Wigwam inns becomes a living metaphor. What was once a destination has become a corridor carrying people to other places. But this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The roads gave the resorts life, at a pause in the moving frontier of highway development. The resorts were inseparable from the highway, and jockeyed for position to be close to it. The ease of their trip was a sure sign of progress to the guests, and they celebrated it along with all else that was “modern.”
-
Old-Fashioned Cutting-Edge Radio
Over several nights about a year ago, a small miracle of human
interaction took place on KSTP late-night radio. Host Tommy Mischke was
embarking on a self-styled pitch for the Spectacle Shop, one of his
show’s handful of loyal sponsors, when a call came over the transom. It
had been a slow night and Mischke, who regularly acts on whims and
lives for surprises, interrupted the ad mid-sentence to pick up the
line.The call was a wrong number. A man named Al was trying to reach the
weather line at KSTP television news. Mischke didn’t let that small
fact get in the way. He claimed to be the evening weather person
himself, a guy named Blow Zephyr. Either Al didn’t make note of the
oddly perfect weatherman name, or he didn’t care. He began explaining
his point, which was that people, when confronted by tornadoes, should
take more care in “getting out of the way.” It’s simple, counseled Al.
One need only step aside, as though avoiding a speeding car. Al
revealed that he lived in Maple Grove and had been through four
twisters during his fifty-five years.Using made-up stories and half-baked facts, all delivered with ease and
in impressive detail, Mischke engaged Al, who turned out to be a lonely
divorcé recently fired from his insurance job.Mischke started off by claiming that his uncle Ned had been
killed by a tornado. Because he was a quadriplegic, Ned had been unable
to get out of the way, as Al would have suggested. “There is a guy who
would have taken a step to the right or left but couldn’t,” said
Mischke. “He wanted to, badly. And then, there was old Ned in a
cottonwood.”“Holy cow,” responded Al, guileless as Sancho Panza. “I’m sorry about that.”
Mischke, who is forty-two but was claiming to be sixty-three, went on
to ask whether Al ever thought that tornadoes might “have some sort of
consciousness” or, perhaps, possess personalities.Al pondered this and then, excitedly, told of a tintype photo of his
great-great-grandfather that used to hang on his wall. After a tornado
ripped apart the house, he found that the picture had disappeared, but
its frame still hung in the original spot. Another tornado, he said,
had dumped fish on his lawn from a nearby lake. Mischke claimed to know
of a twister that had removed a woman’s bra while leaving her shirt on.
“That’s what I mean about personality types,” he said.“You think, What’s with that tornado?”
And then he really pushed things. “You know in the old days tornadoes used to bring up slaves from down south.”
“What?” said Al. “That I don’t believe.”
“Imagine this situation, though,” Mischke pressed on. “You’re down
south. You know that tornado alley goes all the way down to the
Panhandle of Texas.” Mischke’s eclectic bank of knowledge makes riffs
like this seem almost believable. “You’re down there in slave country
and you have a tornado coming and you are owned by a man as sure as a
dog or cattle are owned. And you have this one out. You know this
tornado could do you in, but you also know it could be your ticket to
freedom. What do you do?”Al had to admit, “You’ve got a good question there.”
“There are some, obviously, who went for it and died. I’m not saying
they were all sent north. But tornadoes, because of the way they move,
can pick things up gently and drop them down gently.”
“Oh, absolutely,” said Al with a chuckle. “You’re preaching to the
choir on this one.” The lonely man found himself, unexpectedly,
delighted. “I love talking to you,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind me
calling again. You are a piece of cake. This is the best conversation
I’ve had in years.”It’s this affectionate if not quite on the up-and-up relationship with
listeners—one that is not formal or degrading or belligerent—that makes
Mischke’s show so fascinating. It’s also what makes him the area’s best
known underground radio sensation, the favorite of pizza delivery
drivers, DIY auto repairmen, factory workers, insomniacs, late-night
lonely guys, and women who lie in the dark wishing their boyfriends
were more original.Mischke is a self-described throwback to the days of entertainment
radio, before the AM dial was given over to political belligerents,
when the possibilities and probabilities of the medium seemed endless,
and the Lone Ranger always rode again. Garrison Keillor, in a recent
Nation essay, described him this way: “a free spirit who gets into
wonderful stream-of-consciousness harangues and meditations that are a
joy to listen to.” In nearly two decades of broadcasting, Mischke has
been compared to Robin Williams, Andy Kaufman, and Keillor himself, but
on acid. He has been described as the Onion meets The Simpsons. You
simply never know what he’ll say. Once, when interviewing an expert on
the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, he began to ask all of his
questions to the tune of the famous Gordon Lightfoot song: “Could
something like this ever happen a-gain? / Is there any way we can
a-void it? / Should they be worried to-day / Up there near Whitefish
Bay / Or am I just getting all para-noid-ed?”After several nights of conversations with Al, Mischke, as Mischke,
called to confess. It wasn’t a ha-ha, gotcha, Candid Camera moment. Far
from it. It was more of an invitation for Al to enter Mischke’s real
world, or at least his real radio world. This often happens to the
host; his show and the people he meets there bleed into his off-air
life. He doesn’t keep neat boundaries. Once, when a regular caller
named Cynthia—who sounds more than a little crazy—was out of town
appearing on Judge Judy (she would lose her case against a neighbor),
Mischke went to her house and fed and watered her dogs. That’s not
typical radio-personality behavior.The confessional call to Al, which was broadcast live, was handled this
way: Mischke explained that he’d simply grown too fond of the
ex-insurance man to keep up the act. “I made up the name Blow Zephyr,”
he said. “But the guy you were talking to, who enjoyed talking to you,
that’s me. That’s the real me.” It was after the confusion cleared (Al:
“You still sound like Blow.” Mischke: “I’m Blow and I’m T.D. Mischke”),
that the small miracle happened. Al simply didn’t care. He didn’t get
mad, didn’t act embarrassed, didn’t seem to mind that he’d been duped.
“I hope you enjoy talking to me,” Al said. “I love talking to you.
Tommy, the whole thing is, you got to laugh. The key to life is you got
to laugh.”Mischke introduced Al to Wildcat Fox, the show’s newscaster, and
another regular caller, an old-timer named Undertaker Fred. “Well hi,
Al,” said Fred. In one well-constructed moment, Mischke had knitted Al
into the family of misfits and weirdoes that populate the Mischke
Broadcast. From there on out, Al could call anytime, and he would. (Al
continues to phone, even though his home line has been disconnected.
And when he signs off he says, “I love you, Tommy.”) Mischke asked
whether Al knew any songs—a frequent question he puts to his guests—and
Al suggested “The Auctioneer,” which he then sang a bar of. Nobody knew
that one, but Mischke had another idea. “I tell you what, guys, I think
we’re going to end it this way: I want us all to yodel in our own ways.
All four of us.” And that’s how the show went out that night, with Al,
Fred, Wildcat, and Mischke, all yodeling together, but in their own
ways.Mischke’s first time on the radio wasn’t nearly so auspicious. It was
just about twenty years ago and he was working as a freelance writer
for several local publications, and as a delivery truck driver. On his
route, he’d become a regular listener of KSTP’s Don Vogel. Vogel, who
died of bladder cancer in 1995, was a throwback himself, a gag man and
impersonator who was said to do Larry King better than King himself.
One quiet night, Mischke pulled his truck over near a pay phone and
dialed. Vogel put him on the air immediately and he panicked. “I must
have been their only caller,” he said. “I was on. And it was the
strangest feeling. I really empathize with those who get on the air
with me and are nervous or lose their focus. It’s sort of like two
giant doors just got pulled away and you’re looking into the Grand
Canyon. You are in this gigantic world now and there is no going back.
And I just screamed something and hung up.”Mischke lives in a tidy house in St. Paul near the Midway with his
wife, Rosie, who is a psychologist, and their two preteen sons,
McCullough and Malone. On the morning of our interview, the house
exuded old-fashioned coziness. A wood fire burned in the fireplace.
There were tulips on the coffee table and throws over the armchairs. A
shaggy dog named Shep napped on the hardwood floor, woofing
occasionally. “The thing is, I wasn’t prepared,” Mischke said with a
laugh, remembering that first call. Then he slipped into what can only
be described as his amused voice, which sounds like he’s inhaled a bit
of helium. “That’s what happens when I’m not prepared.” After hanging
up the phone, Mischke sat in the delivery van and listened to himself
on the air (the station employs an eight-second delay). It was
horrible, he said, but then a very important thing happened. “There
must have been something about it, some sense that this wasn’t just a
guy who called up to scream, but a guy who kind of panicked. And they
started laughing. That hooked me to try again the next day.” Playing a
different character with each call, by the fourth time, Mischke had a
moniker, the Phantom Caller. He was hooked forever. “I’m on the radio
today because Vogel laughed.”Thomas David Mischke was born on September 19, 1962, at St. Joseph’s
Hospital in downtown St. Paul, the seventh of eight children. His
mother and father were both German Catholics from central Minnesota;
his father Maurice was from Buckman and his mother Jeanette came from
Holdingford, a town Garrison Keillor once dubbed “most Wobegonic.” For
most of Mischke’s upbringing, his father owned and ran the Highland
Villager community newspaper. (Tommy’s brother Michael is currently the
publisher; his brother Dale is an editor). The value of independent
thinking and storytelling, along with an appreciation of small shops,
was impressed upon the Mischke children. “My dad got me out of high
school early every afternoon to work at the paper as part of my
education,” Tommy said. “And I’d go home and write stories at fifteen,
sixteen, seventeen.”A quarter-century ago, good Catholic boys in St. Paul had two choices
for high school; both were military. After graduating from Nativity of
Our Lord Elementary, Mischke selected Cretin High, which, at the time,
was an all-boys school. He lasted one year. “I just couldn’t believe
it,” he said. “I felt like I had joined the service and I’m not the
kind of guy who would join the service. I wouldn’t do well with
authority like that. So here I am in a situation, at a rebellious age,
with guys telling me to come to attention and shine my shoes. And there
is no way I am going to do that.” He was in trouble from the start,
even getting into a physical fight with one teacher. “You’d have these
military guys with whiskey on their breath coming up to you and then
you’d have these Christian brothers who looked like they could swing
their arm and take your head off, and wanted to.” The only good aspect
of the experience, Mischke said, was that “it was a great fraternity.
You bonded in your connection with the other guys to try to fight and
beat the system. What it created was lifelong friendships.”He was finally expelled after he walked into the Cretin principal’s
office and asked to speak with Colonel Klink. “I guess that’s only a TV
show,” he explained, deadpan. The alternative to Cretin was public high
school. Mischke, who couldn’t wait to grow up, called his time at
Highland Park Senior High a “bad stretch,” though he was voted “best
sense of humor” by his class. The combination of misery and laughter
would become a running theme throughout his life.
Mischke went on to attend St. John’s University in Collegeville. “When
I was a little boy,” he explained, “I used to take a Greyhound up to
St. John’s to visit my older brothers. This college was in the woods on
water away from all the world. It was an island and I just loved that.”
There were no anti-authority, Hogan’s Heroes stunts, only a little time
off to travel overseas. Two years in, Mischke transferred to the
University of St. Thomas for its journalism program and, after
graduation, was “shocked” to find that there was no money in freelance
writing. He bummed around the country, hopping freight trains and
sometimes playing piano in saloons. He’s been to seventeen countries
and forty states. He always thought he’d find the place where he wanted
to spend the rest of his life.For a while in the late 1980s, it looked like that place would be
Butte, Montana, which he describes as a renegade town. Mischke prefers
the small, the underground, the individual, and the unique, as
evidenced by the introduction to his show: Ladies and gentlemen, KSTP
now presents the Mischke Broadcast, featuring the broadcast outcast
transmitting live from his renegade radio outpost here in the final
ninety feet of the city of St. Paul. “Butte didn’t consider itself part
of Montana,” said Mischke, sipping coffee, his feet propped up on the
coffee table. “It called itself Butte, America. So it was this
independent-thinking, wild, former big-labor town. They used to have a
ritual when they opened a bar in that town. They’d break the padlock
and they’d never close. Evel Knievel was from there. I used to stop
into a bar sometimes—I’d see he had his fancy car outside at ten in the
morning, and I’d stop in there and he was sitting by himself. I’d talk
to him.”Even in that setting, tossing back drinks with the daredevil, whom he
had idolized as a kid, Mischke felt an uncomfortable tug—the nagging
truth that Montana wasn’t home and never would be. “Where you live is
really going to have a dramatic effect on your life,” he said. “And I
thought if I was going to have a place like that, let it be where fate
threw me in the first place.” So he returned to St. Paul and got the
job as a delivery truck driver and started listening to Vogel on the
radio. Home has come to mean a lot to Mischke. It’s the root of the
Mischke Broadcast and of his personal identity. “You turn a corner
sometimes and what would be just a corner to anybody else coming
through town brings on this sudden rush of memories. That’s inside you.
Nobody else can feel that. And you think, Wow, this place is bigger
than just what it is.”In 1992, six years after his first phantom call, Mischke was hired as
Vogel’s sidekick for twenty dollars per show. They worked together for
two years before the relationship crumbled. At issue was the fact that
Vogel liked to wing it with little or no preparation, while Mischke
believed (and still believes) in gathering and fine-tuning a full load
of material each day. For every show, he typically spends about six
hours combing through newspapers and writing tunes on the upright piano
in his home office (he’s painted the black keys red and replaced the
front panel with glass, so he can see the hammers as he plays).
Preparation is a security blanket of sorts, in case nobody like Al
calls in. In case there are no surprises.On top of the differences in methodology, Mischke says, management
consultants were pressuring him to push Vogel in a new and unwelcome
direction. “They should have gone right to Don,” he said. “But they
knew they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with him. So they would go to
me, and Don resented the fact that I was trying to get him to change
the show. And he should have. It was his show.” Finally, he said, a
blowup ended the partnership. “But he was a real gentleman about it and
a couple of days later he asked me back. I just said, ‘You know, I
don’t think we probably should do this. I think what happened probably
will happen again.’ And so he went his way and I went mine.”During Mischke’s first few months on the air solo, he played it
straight, delivering a news program with a lefty bent. He covered all
the topics of the day—abortion, gun control, race relations. “I thought
I had to go to the complete other side,” he said. “I was thinking that
maybe this radio thing is a little too frivolous and silly and
ridiculous.” He’s sure these early efforts rankled Vogel, whom he
called a mentor “in a half-dozen ways.” Among other things, his former
boss was a force against pretension. “I don’t own my own headset
because of Don Vogel,”
Mischke said. “He thought it was the geekiest thing in the world to
have your own headset. And it probably isn’t. It probably is a good
idea.” The mentor watched his pupil with dismay, interpreting his newsy
approach as a pointed commentary on how radio should be done.Mischke found rather quickly, within six months, that he didn’t like
contributing to the cranky churn of AM radio, designed as it is to
incite apoplectic fits. “It was everything I hate about talk radio,” he
said. “A bunch of people set in their ways calling up to say they’re
set in their ways.” Radio callers, he added, tend to be more arch than
the general public; industry wisdom suggests that fewer than five
percent of listeners ever pick up the phone. “We have so damn much more
in common than we will ever have separating us,” he said. “If you get
most Americans together, it’s probably going to work best not to harass
gay people. It’s probably going to work best not to care so much about
whether they’re adopting a kid, but to care about how that kid is being
treated. Reasonable people would see this. And I think most people are
reasonable.”The proliferation of rant-filled, right-wing AM radio can be linked to
the repeal, by Ronald Reagan in 1987, of what was known as the Fairness
Doctrine. The 1949 FCC rule mandated that in return for a license to
broadcast, radio stations had to cover “controversial issues of public
importance” in a way that allowed for a “reasonable” representation of
opposing views. Once that pesky standard was out of the way, a man
named Rush Limbaugh emerged. Limbaugh built his career on the notion
that mainstream media outlets were liberally biased. Through endless
chest thumping, he enraged listeners already mistrustful of the news
and ensured an appetite for more conservative fare. The biased media
morphed into the elite biased media, and talk radio’s modern audience
was solidified. AM talk stations have been propagating ever since, born
of the syndicated likes of Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.KSTP-AM 1500 program director Joe O’Brien doesn’t like to think of his
station, which is owned by St. Paul-based Hubbard Broadcasting, as
right wing. He says he chooses hosts according to their entertainment
value and their understanding of Minnesota culture, not by any certain
ideology. “If radio were a party,” he said, “these would be the people
everyone would want to hang out with.” But the fact is, nearly all of
KSTP’s hosts are conservatives.“I’m around that climate every day,” said Mischke. “It’s all get on
board the train. And I’m not on the train. And what I hate is that
there even is a train. Because what I love about this country, what I
used to see, is that you just had all these wild individualists and all
these different ways of thinking and just this cacophony out there of
different views. There should be 280 million different views, to go
with every American, and somehow that has been winnowed down to two. I
don’t know how in the hell that happened.”Mischke eventually abandoned straight news in favor of his vaudevillian
style of humor, certainly a more nuanced and difficult format. For most
of the last eleven years, his show has been a speedball of fabricated
news reports, songs, poems, interviews, and conversations with callers
who would likely be barred from any other program.His worldview still bubbles up between the cracks. He recently talked
with a co-author of Why Business People Speak Like Idiots and wondered
aloud whether the business world makes people “less human.” Such
comments don’t draw hate mail or even angry calls. “People see it as
almost a loveable way to deliver the message,” he said. “If I say the
same stuff in a Hannity delivery, I’m a dead man. Right there is why I
survive at KSTP. Because I shouldn’t survive there.”Mischke enjoys an unusual amount of freedom at the station. In part,
that’s because he’s on late at night, from ten to midnight, when things
are more laid back. Revenue expectations are low and, as he repeatedly
points out on air, management is sleeping. “The show is whatever I am
that particular day, whatever I’m feeling,” he explained. “That’s the
beauty of it. I always think that Letterman must some days not want to
be funny. He must. And God, he should be able to not do that. And then
it would be so authentic. And people would talk about how last night,
David Letterman said, ‘Screw it, we’re not doing this format.’” The
randomness of the Mischke Broadcast doesn’t appear to ruffle longtime
fans (though it sometimes confuses new listeners), perhaps indicating
that we as a people are less brain-dead than we’re led to believe.
Mischke wants listeners to be “somewhere between intrigued and
puzzled—and sort of drawn in, but not really so positive that this is a
wildly good time.” An avid eavesdropper himself, he attempts to create
that same experience for his fans, the feeling of “peeking into a
little window.”One of his most poignant broadcasts came on a night when Mischke
said—had to say—screw it. It was September 11, 2001, and he wasn’t even
supposed to be on the air. At midday, KSTP had switched back from a
national news feed to local hosts. Somebody from the station called
Mischke, the oddball, the non-political guy, to say that Bob Davis, a
conservative daytime host, would do the nighttime program. “I was
furious,” Mischke recalled. “I said, ‘I’ll do my show.’” He remembers
arriving at the station five minutes before eight (at the time, his
slot was from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.). “The general manager and the program
director were standing just outside the door of the studio. And I
walked right by them and right in and just said, ‘Hi.’ But there was
all this tension. And I don’t know this, but the sense I had was that
they wanted to say, ‘What kind of a show are you going to be doing?’”Mischke’s turned out to be one of the most humane commentaries
delivered in the immediate aftermath of the bombings. While pundits
announced that the world had fundamentally changed, Mischke made the
opposite case. “This kind of thing has been happening for years and our
country simply has been too asleep or too busy with shopping and TV to
take notice,” he said.
“It’s a terribly violent world, be it the Middle East, Northern
Ireland, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Somalia, Central America, China, North
Korea, Algeria. Violent retribution, aggression, and retaliation are
the story of daily life somewhere on the planet all the time. This is
just new for us. But it’s not new for people. It’s not new for the
children of this planet, and for women and old people, who mean to hurt
no one. This is the horrifically violent world we live in, which
operates parallel to the profoundly beautiful, loving world we also
live in. While these planes this morning were barreling into the World
Trade Center, elsewhere, in all parts of the nation, heroic deeds of
selflessness were ongoing. The same sort of selfless acts that can be
found tonight in the Middle East and Northern Ireland. The world didn’t
change today. No.”Despite his gregarious on-air personality, Mischke himself, in his
daily life, is quite private. He likes radio partly because it allows
him to hide out—to speak into the darkness late at night, when AM waves
travel the farthest, without a bunch of people watching. He rarely
makes public appearances, doesn’t have his face plastered across
billboards or coffee cups. “I walk all around this neighborhood and all
over this community here and nobody knows who I am,” he said with
relish. Indeed, while we were talking, a lawn-care guy came to the
front door and didn’t recognize him.The problem with large-scale publicity, said Mischke, is that it ruins
the “theater of the mind”—the picture of him that exists only in
listeners’ imaginations. He described a public forum where, afterward,
a fan approached to express disappointment that his favorite radio host
doesn’t look like Woody Allen. Mischke responded, jokingly, “I hope it
didn’t ruin the show for you.” The man answered, “Well, it kind of did.”Contrary to what many expect, Mischke is really quite normal-looking.
He’s got all of his hair, a sturdy build (no, he’s not stringy like
Harry Dean Stanton), and eyes that crinkle when he laughs, which he
does often. He said, “It’s a little unnerving to hear what body they
think your voice belongs to.” But, he added, “You can’t tell people how
to like you.”Most weeknights at around ten, Mischke steps from his house into a
neighborhood that’s asleep. He drives along an industrial back route to
the station on University Avenue, encountering no other cars. “It
reminds me of a ghost town,” he said. When he gets to the station, the
hallways are deserted, aside from a night security guard. He enters the
broadcasting booth, where his boardman “Boomer” waits (Mischke
nicknames all of his producers). For the duration of the show, Mischke
keeps mostly to himself. He doesn’t chit-chat during commercial breaks,
which he’s sure people gossip about when he’s not around. And at
midnight, he returns home along the same industrial route, into the
same quiet neighborhood. “In my mind,” he explained, “I go and open up
this little store and work for a couple of hours and come home.”It’s a solitary routine, or at least it feels that way to Mischke,
despite an estimated thirty thousand listeners. “I like to think that
nobody is listening, or just five guys who are like Undertaker Fred,”
he said. And that’s how it has to be. Flipping on the lights in
Mischke’s dark corner of the radio world, with a daytime slot or a
sidekick, would fundamentally alter, and no doubt degrade the show. His
one-man-band approach allows him ultimate control and flexibility.
Sometimes he talks over the top of commercials, mocking slogans or
background music that he finds absurd, or he delays breaks altogether.
At the top of a broadcast a few years ago, he paused to think of what
to say next and didn’t speak another word for nearly two hours. When
listeners called in, he put them on the air without explanation. The
show took the form of a sound sculpture with people singing, reading
poems, and playing instruments.Kookiness tends to attract kooks. Mischke’s regular callers have
included Al, Undertaker Fred (who claims to have embalmed both his
parents), Cynthia with the dogs, a ten-year-old boy named Luke, a host
of northwoods back-to-the-landers, and Great-Great Grandma JJ. Before
dying at age ninety-six, Grandma JJ frequently called in to play
ditties on the harmonica and to speak in Polish. “Tom’s compassion and
willingness to listen to those who are usually ignored is a big draw,”
said Derek Larson, a thirty-six-year-old suburban postal worker and one
of Mischke’s most dedicated fans. Thanks to server space donated by a
fellow admirer, Larson posts dozens of audio clips at
www.mischkemadness.com. “A good example is Undertaker Fred,” Larson
said, “who was banned from most programs at KSTP. That only made Tom
more willing to let Fred appear on his show. Everyone is
interesting in some way. Tom lets these people talk, and it’s
interesting to see how some very different people tick.”To some degree, Mischke has created a situation in which he can be
morally honest. He stands up for small businesses while disparaging
Wal-Mart (he recently recounted one of his made-up news stories, about
how the company was hiring corpses because they didn’t require health
benefits) and the Mall of America, which he calls the Mother of
Abominations. He creates personalized commercials solely for local
companies to which he can lend his full support, like R.F. Moeller
Jeweler, which underwrote his most recent musical effort, a bluesy CD
called Whistlestop. Of Mark Moeller, Mischke said, “He is a good guy, a
friend of the family. Doing ads for him is just so easy.”On the flip side, operating in a self-constructed, small-town world has
made it difficult for the show to expand to new markets, something
Mischke would like to see. It’s not as though there hasn’t been
interest. In 2002, the Jones Radio Network was set to syndicate the
Mischke Broadcast—which counts among its listeners Garrison Keillor and
David Letterman—from one coast to the other. Unfortunately, and perhaps
this is why Mischke feels so comfortable among the misfits of the
world, the man who can be laugh-out-loud funny also suffers from severe
depression. Several times he’s dropped out of his show for months at a
time (listeners were convinced he’d died), paralyzed by angst. Stress
is a trigger, and the syndication process was nothing if not stressful.Big meetings, thick contracts, marketing efforts, spin-off products,
national ads, news stories about the deal: The negotiations, he said,
“were the longest, most drawn-out thing.” And at the end of it all,
“There was this date hanging out there, what they call a hard launch,
where I am supposed to go from being St. Paul Tommy Mischke to being
nationally syndicated Tommy Mischke overnight.” He began to look upon
Monday, March 25, 2002, with intense dread.Mischke expressed consternation on the air, noting that he had the
worst ratings at KSTP (he no longer does). “I mean it’s ugly, painfully
ugly,” he told listeners. “I stink in terms of ratings, people.
Absolutely stink up the joint. I’m an embarrassment. And I sit here
tonight absolutely accepting this assessment, and yet the show is
supposedly heading to the big time. Syndication, here we come. How does
one explain that? My show may very well be, how you say, a dud. Which
is kind of funny in a watching-someone-slip-on-a-banana-peel kind of
way. And I can live with that because we all have something we’re
capable of being bad at. But then why in the hell is this moronic
syndication company getting involved?”By the end of Mischke’s show on the Friday before the launch, he found
himself spiraling into a “mental implosion.” He described the
experience this way: “If your brain has all these circuits, it’s sort
of like some guy was going through and pulling out cords. And
literally, each of those cords went to some important function. One
dealt with your ability to get up every day and walk out the door. One
dealt with your creative side. One dealt with your ability not to find
it terrifying that we’re all going to be dead in forty years. Another
one helped you be able to read the paper without being bothered by what
you read. However many of those cords got pulled out the last time, it
was the most number. It happened overnight.”He knew the syndication deal was dead, “Because I’m now going to report
in that I’m leaving for a while. You know, when you play this thing out
so publicly, it’s bizarre. You feel like your life is this play on a
stage.” After his return to the show, he went to KSTP management and
asked why they didn’t fire him. “I really wanted to hear the logic
behind why they didn’t because it made no sense to me. If it’s not
working, people always say, ‘You don’t want to get fired, do you?’ I
really do. I want to get fired if it’s not working.”Joe O’Brien, whose admiration for the host is obvious, wasn’t about to
fire Mischke. Instead, a year ago last January, with Mischke’s consent,
he moved him to the ten o’clock slot because he “seemed more like a
late-night guy to me.” He added, “Tommy is a very, very talented guy, a
very smart, observant, creative guy. He puts a lot of time and effort
and thought and creativity into what he does. And he’s doing
wonderfully.” Regarding Mischke’s bouts with depression, O’Brien says,
“Things like depression aren’t uncommon in our business. In Tommy’s
case it was a little more mysterious and probably a little more severe.
But it comes with the territory. If we had completely sane, healthy,
well-adjusted people doing talk shows, it might be a little dull.”Mischke counts himself lucky that “the Hubbards don’t operate like
corporate America,” but rather “like a family business.” He has a hard
time imagining a scenario where he would survive long working for Clear
Channel. However, behind the microphone at his renegade radio outpost
in the final ninety feet of the city of St. Paul, he somehow fits. “I
didn’t come flying in from five, six other radio stations in other
cities,” he said. Mischke is a true son of St. Paul, a populist,
eschewing the big ideas of the left and right in favor of smaller, more
personal ones—those fringe beliefs that really are not of the fringe at
all. “I’m sort of a creation of KSTP,” he added. “I’m their guy.” -
Good Question
I appreciate it when people or organizations notice that
we political moderates and liberals have strong Christian beliefs,
too. I didn’t realize the depth of Senator Dean Johnson’s
professional and personal commitments along these lines; I am in awe.
On another point the article made: How can Chaplain Hall maintain his
501(c)(3) tax-exempt status (which prohibits religious organizations
from explicit political advocacy) when he “conducts ‘prayer tours’ of
the Capitol for groups interested in praying at the usual tour stops,
such as the Senate chambers” and is known as being the “the front
guy if you’re pro-life, pro-marriage”?Jolene Hart
Vadnais Heights -
Kieran's Letter of the Month
I rarely read The Rake because I get sick of the pinko rags that are
many of the independent magazines in the Twin Cities. But my co-worker
wanted me to read the article on god and politics [“Church and State,”
June]. He’s a left-winger and I’m a die-hard Republican. I didn’t think
it was going to be too pretty, because I assumed it was going to be
another Christian-conservative bash fest. I want to commend writer Adam
Minter for putting forward a really balanced and decent article. I
didn’t get irate as I had expected and was pleased with how he
portrayed Christian conservatives. We need more balanced writers like
Minter around—maybe at the Star Tribune. Needless to say, I might start
picking up The Rake more often. Thanks!Rebecca Lamont
Burnsville -
I've Seen That Guy Before
“Donny Highrise” is my new hero [The Rake’s Progress, June], but I feel
like I’ve seen him somewhere before. Is it possible that’s not his real
name? Is the man in the photograph some kind of cheap Donny Highrise
imposter, because Donny himself was too shy to pose for photos?Lisa Clifton
MinneapolisWell, now, that’s a hard one to answer. Let’s just say this: That is
Donny Highrise, played by Eric Page. Page is a local comedian and
model, who can be seen with his entire troupe at the hilarious online
sketch-comedy site, Flapping Crane. Point your browser to
www.flappingcrane.com, but be forewarned that Donny Highrise is in big
demand these days.—Eds. -
It's Only a Day
I appreciate your enlightening information [Sex and the Married Man,
March]. However, your idea about not abstaining is rather saddening. It
is not surprising that many people are dying from the dreaded disease
AIDS because of similar ignorance. I consider it unfortunate that there
are some like you who insist on having sex outside marriage, although
religiously speaking, the Bible advocates otherwise. I also appreciate
that we all have different religious backgrounds, and I do not know
yours. But if you are a Christian by religion, I think you need to
revisit your convictions from a clearer biblical perspective. If
you are from another background, what would you advise those on a
continent like Africa where AIDS is sweeping millions away because of
careless indulgence in premarital sex? Have yourself a sexless day,
won’t you?Janet Wanjiru
Nairobi, Kenya -
Three Feet?
I am a faithful reader of The Rake, and thoroughly enjoy your columns.
[Sex and the Married Man, June] caught my attention because it deals
with the issue of erectile dysfunction and the drug industry’s solution
to everything—pills. I think you are missing a key issue in this
article. It is proven that the absence of a male foreskin has
ramifications that America is only recently beginning to understand.
When you cut off over three feet of veins and arteries, as well as
twenty to fifty thousand nerve endings, you are going to have problems
with your penis. It was not meant to function properly without a
foreskin. While I do believe that psychological issues play a role
here, the key factor is that circumcision destroys, denudes, and
otherwise does great harm to male sexual function.Nicholas Ferlazzo
Minneapolis -
Great Depression
[“The Worthlessness of Things,” June] was a great article with
deeply depressing content. The writing style made me feel like I was
walking through the man’s life myself. The unsatisfying and
abrupt ending was perfect for the theme of an unfinished life.Jim Larson
Minneapolis -
Learn Intolerance
I enjoyed “Church and State” by Adam Minter. Especially because one of
his observations reveals a flaw in the progressive value of tolerance
and the point at which tolerance becomes irrelevant. “Johnson espouses
tolerance as a philosophy, but he has a difficult time extending it in
this instance,” Minter writes of Sen. Johnson’s dissatisfaction with
Chaplain Hall’s ministry. What Minter forgets to mention is that not
only are fundamentalist Christians intolerant, they openly mock the
ideal of tolerance even as they whine about liberals’ intolerance
toward them. To most liberals, the accusation of intolerance is
anathema and the only way to respond is to go on the defensive. Caught
in the trap of politically correct thinking, most liberals cannot bear
to define themselves as intolerant. But that has to change very soon if
there is to be any future for a progressive agenda. Tolerance is a
virtue that we should extend as far and wide as we possibly can.
But the virtue of tolerance cannot be extended to groups of people who
are themselves intolerant, and liberals should stop making any further
pretense of doing so. Fundamentalists of any creed are barbarians
who do not deserve the privilege of tolerance in a democratic, secular
society as long as they refuse to extend it to others. They shun
knowledge, promote ignorance, condone violence against women and
children and adhere to a social hierarchy that places a wealthy WASP
elite on the highest pedestal. Their concerns do not merit serious
consideration because they emanate not from a legitimate theological
context, but from a sense of self entitlement, false piety, and a
shameless will to power. Power is in fact, the only thing they worship.
Lest Minter give anyone the wrong idea: We have a duty to subvert and
dismantle intolerant groups in any legal way we can. Whatever hat he’s
wearing, Senator/Pastor/Brigadier General Johnson has my admiration and
respect for his ability to place the common good above his own personal
religious beliefs.
Justin Teerlinck
St. Paul