Even casual strollers of downtown St. Paul will most likely notice the majestic High Bridge, just west of the business district. Towering above the other bridges of the city’s scenic Mississippi River valley and summiting at 160 feet above the Big Muddy, the High Bridge carries Smith Avenue from the bustling West Seventh Street commercial strip to … where, exactly?
Even for many St. Paul natives, this can be a tough question. To the naked eye, Smith Avenue crosses the river to the high bluffs on the city’s West Side, and seems to disappear up a steep hill into a leafy residential area known as Cherokee Park. But if you follow the Avenue to the top of that incline, you reach Annapolis Street eleven blocks later, the dividing line between St. Paul and the suburb of West St. Paul. While some West Side merchants hope Smith will become the next Grand Avenue, plenty of locals hope that it doesn’t. Unlike its bigger-scale cousin, which has been colonized by chain stores, Smith Avenue still boasts that rare hip-yet-unpretentious vibe. This is still essentially a working-class neighborhood full of pre-war, single-family homes with modest yards, so pick-up trucks outnumber SUVs on the streets, and neckties are few and far between. Here, the West Side’s large Latino population mingles easily with the hipsters and elderly white folk who live nearby.
The Annapolis intersection is anchored by several retail businesses. Thanks to two of them—the Old Man River Cafe and Caspers’ Cherokee Sirloin Room—it’s possible to walk down Smith and smell roasting coffee and sizzling steaks all at once. The coffee shop, owned by a pair of former journalists, occupies an old brick building that for seventy years was a pharmacy. Today, it serves not only as an outlet for its own line of java, but as a hub for the neighborhood’s social and political life, attracting a cross-section of local residents, Smith Avenue commuters, and West Side political junkies and activists.
Across the street at the Sirloin Room—an excellent example of a family-owned institution that stuck around long enough to circle back into relevance—a dark, woody bar captures that feel of the comfy neighborhood joint, but with a hint of edge, especially on weekends. The place has been there since 1970, longer if you count the twenty-some years it was the Cherokee Tavern, before the Casper family bought it.
West St. Paul Antiques is the corner’s cultural attraction. While it has a fine collection of antiques for purchase, it’s also fascinating as a museum. In its basement is perhaps the most overwhelming collection of St. Paul Winter Carnival memorabilia ever assembled in one place. Where else could you find the marching band uniforms of the Northern Pacific Railroad’s 1948 Torchlight Parade Drill Team?
Farther down Smith toward Dodd Road, a few more small shops build on the arts-and-crafts theme of the corner. The Lisan Gallery of Art and Design shows mostly local artists such as June Young and Jodi Hills but is also providing a venue for artists from the Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, scene that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Next door at Fine Restorations, woodworking artisan Vanya Hoeffding does complicated repair jobs on treasured antique furniture while Classic Upholstery handles the more rank-and-file cases. Throw in a pair of picture framing shops, and you have a reminder of what it was to walk Grand Avenue in the 1970s.
Author: Don Jacobson
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The End of the High Road
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Brand of Sky Blue Waters
Growing up on the East Side of St. Paul in the sixties, I always took Hamm’s beer for granted. The giant brewery was simply part of the neighborhood scenery, little more than a dependable source of jobs—at least until the seventies, when it was sold and started succumbing to fickle consumer tastes and corporate mismanagement, entering what turned out to be a drawn-out death spiral.
But to be honest, even though most of us Harding and Johnson High kids personally disliked the beer—it was watery and your friend’s dad drank it (not very cool)—we adored the Hamm’s Bear. This was, mind you, decades before Joe Camel was pilloried for his appeal to kids. We also reveled in the goodwill Hamm’s produced for our home state with its glorification of “the Land of Sky Blue Waters.”
Until I visited John and Paula Parker, however, I didn’t realize just how much of a hold the bear, in his heyday, had on much of the rest of the country’s imagination. The Parker’s split-level home, located on Medicine Lake along a tree-lined suburban lane, doubles as a personal Hamm’s merchandise museum. When you walk in the front door, nothing much seems out of the ordinary. The Parkers, North Dakota natives whose children have left the nest, look like a hard-working, successful couple. They exude Midwestern levelheadedness. But then they lead you down to their family room, which is filled to the rafters with blinking, buzzing, twinkling, glowing Hamm’s Beer bar signs, no two alike, of the kind that decorated nearly every tavern in Minnesota from Roseau to Rochester in the postwar years. Display cases are crammed with collectibles: steins, mugs, bottle openers, pens, pencils, beer bottles, lighters, ceramic bear sculptures, all with the Hamm’s imprint.
The Parkers have collected some four thousand Hamm’s items. They are among the most prominent collectors of Hamm’s artifacts in the world. They have at their fingertips Hamm’s magazine ads and bar signs from the West Coast featuring Latina bathing beauties; from the East Coast picturing black folks refreshing themselves with the St. Paul brew; and from Chicago, where the bear is forever associated with Jack Brickhouse, WGN-TV, and the Cubs-White Sox rivalry.
It came as a bit of a shock to a Minnesota-centric hick like me to realize that Hamm’s wasn’t all about us. In fact, by 1960, the Hamm’s Bear ad campaign was in full swing in about thirty markets nationwide. The Parkers say it’s probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that the lovable bear and his animal buddies did more to cement Minnesota’s image nationally than all the dollars spent by state tourism agencies ever since.
“The only cartoon animals that were bigger than the Hamm’s Bear were the Disney characters,” said John Parker. “Actually, the bear almost comes across as a Disney critter. When you look at people like us who collect Hamm’s memorabilia, it’s not because we like Hamm’s beer, or even like beer at all. It’s because we love the bear and what he represents to us. He’s like a member of the family. You never actually see a beer in his paw in any of the ads.”
Paula Parker said her husband’s obsession, and by extension hers, comes from the same part of his mind that led him to study accounting in college. “The desires to complete a checklist, to methodically sort items and arrange them in a proper order, and the competitive urge to stay on top of an ever-changing set of circumstances—they are all related to collecting. John is a born collector, but I was the original Hamm’s fan,” she said. “I sort of steered him into that area.”
The Parkers began their collection in 1992. They hesitate to put a dollar value on it, though John Parker said that promotional items made of cardboard and plastic are among the most sought-after types of Hamm’s collectibles. For instance, molded plastic liquor-store wall displays from the late fifties can go for one thousand dollars apiece. So can cardboard cutouts of the bear and his friends used as in-store displays, which are rare because most were thrown away. The most popular items are the “scene-a-ramas,” the scrolling or shimmering bar signs that even many non-collectors are familiar with. Even though they’re not rare, they also go for a thousand apiece because there’s so much demand.
The Parkers have been so successful in tracking down items from the classic Hamm’s Bear campaigns of the fifties and sixties that they have lately started to specialize in items from the prewar and pre-Prohibition eras, well before the bear took his first animated tumble off the log and into the lake. “Probably my prize possession right now is a big lithograph of the Hamm’s factory, the kind they used to hang on the walls of taverns that were owned by the brewery,” John Parker said. “Once you reach a certain level in collecting Hamm’s stuff, it becomes more challenging to go after the pre-bear pieces.”
The desire to reach further back into Hamm’s history is understandable for the high-level fanatics like the Parkers, but for the rest of us, fond memories are directly linked to the bear, who made his first TV appearance in 1953. Hamm’s television ads were true groundbreakers, and showed what a truly high-powered marketing machine the brewery had in Campbell-Mithun, the local agency that rode the bear into wildly successful national prominence. Campbell-Mithun and Hamm’s had just settled on “From the Land of Sky Blue Waters” as the theme of their campaign to introduce the rest of the country to Minnesota’s favorite beer (although Grain Belt fans will argue the point). It was a bold effort to bust Hamm’s out of the regional brewing ranks to join what were then just a few truly national brands, among them Budweiser, Pabst, Schlitz, Ballantine, and Falstaff.
According to beer historian Carl H. Miller, author of Breweries of Cleveland, the Hamm’s campaign was so successful because it came at a time when consumers thought all beers were made the same and tasted pretty much the same. It worked, he maintains, because it drove home the concept that Hamm’s was brewed in a place where the water was fresher and cleaner, the Northwoods. The Hamm’s ads were also the first to use an animated “spokesperson” for a beer. Up until then, the only beer-ad icon was Mabel, a blonde bartender who rarely spoke while she pushed Carling’s Black Label. At about the same time as the Hamm’s Bear, the comedy team of Bob and Ray were doing the voices of Bert and Harry, the spokes-characters for New York’s Piel’s Beer—a campaign that got critical praise but had little effect on sales. Budweiser’s famous Clydesdale horses and Miller Lite’s “Tastes Great/Less Filling” campaign were still at least a decade down the road.
By the late fifties, it was apparent the campaign was a success. Hamm’s entered the Chicago market just as a brewery strike in Milwaukee made Wisconsin beers unavailable; it also displayed great timing by picking up the sponsorship of the Cubs and White Sox broadcasts on WGN. The brewery went on to become one of the first companies to create a national pro- and college-sports branding campaign, and by 1964 claimed to be the biggest TV and radio sports beer sponsor in the country, according to Moira F. Harris’ The Paws of Refreshment: The Story of Hamm’s Beer Advertising. Hamm’s ran its bear ads in support not only of the Twins, the Vikings, and the Chicago teams, but also the Kansas City A’s, San Francisco Giants and 49ers, Los Angeles Rams, Houston Oilers, Baltimore Orioles, Green Bay Packers, and Dallas Cowboys.
That year, with the sale of 3.8 million barrels of beer, Hamm’s had risen to become the nation’s eighth largest brewery, with expansion breweries in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, and Baltimore. Sales would peak in 1968 at 4.3 million barrels. The ad campaigns made liberal use of images of pristine Northern Minnesota lakes and streams (powerfully putting across the idea of clean, crisp water), sandwiched between animated bear storylines. The spots became so popular they actually vied with some legitimate TV programs; in the mid-1960s, for instance, Twin Cities newspapers ran schedules showing when the ads would air.
The commercials were clever and had real entertainment value. Each was a miniature story that began with twenty seconds of animation. In one spot, the Bear is a hockey goalie on a frozen woodland pond. Other cartoon critters are taking slapshots at him, and he’s making great saves. Then comes the hard sell: twenty seconds of filmed shots of the beer, with a voice-over extolling the many virtues of Hamm’s. Finally, the payoff: The last twenty seconds go back to the animation. The Bear gets overconfident, takes a puck in the mouth, and tumbles backward into the net for a goal.
Along with the first-rate animation and charming storylines came the unforgettable “tom-tom” musical theme. While adults bought the beer, their kids dug the tune, said Dick Wilson, a former Campbell-Mithun staffer who produced the music for the classic bear commercials. “I had little kids at that time, and when the Hamm’s Bear came on, they’d all stop whatever they were doing and look at the TV,” he said. “It was those drums that really bore into your mind. I don’t think people realized how much of a part they played. It was like the beat of your heart.”
According to The Paws of Refreshment, Ray Mithun had the idea to add the tom-toms to the jingle’s still-developing musical mix after being impressed by voodoo music he heard while visiting Haiti. In other words, the Hamm’s music was tapping into a similar vein as early rock ’n’ roll—a dangerous, African beat filtered through a safe white medium (the bear always scored off the charts on the ad industry’s “likeability” measure) that hooked young baby boomers. Even though they were silly, the commercials were well written. They were smarter and funnier than most “real” cartoons at the time.
“The animation was always cute,” Wilson says, crediting the work of artist Pete Bastiensen. “He was like a child himself and knew instinctively what would work. There weren’t any commercials like that back then. When I would give lectures about ads, I’d talk about how important it was to have uniqueness, and Hamm’s had that in spades.”
The nostalgia that spurs Hamm’s memorabilia collectors like the Parkers is the same thing that leads other people to agitate for an outdoor stadium for the Minnesota Twins. Hamm’s ads were so much a part of the baseball experience at old Metropolitan Stadium that they are forever linked to the Twins of Harmon Killebrew and Bob Allison, said Kirk Schnitker, a Minneapolis attorney who heads the local Hamm’s Club, the beer’s official fan organization.
“Seeing the Hamm’s Bear never fails to make you think back to the old days when we kids had those great moments at the Twins games,” he said. “It also makes you remember another great Minnesota tradition: going up north. When we went up to the cabin we’d see those ‘Land of Sky Blue Waters’ signs at the taverns and at the resorts. They were everywhere. Their marketing effort was so huge.”
Despite all the talk of the how the bear was so lovable and universally adored, there remained the fact that he was selling beer. In that respect, some present-day critics regard him as a predecessor to the loathsome Joe Camel—a merchant of death hooking children via animation and cartoons. This critique has created obstacles for Schnitker and the Hamm’s Club, who are trying to get a granite monument to the Hamm’s Bear erected in downtown St. Paul; Schnitker chalks up their battle to “political correctness.” Last year, their effort to put the bear statue in Como Park was shot down by the St. Paul City Council, with Council Member Jay Benanav comparing the Hamm’s Bear to the Marlboro Man and colleague Chris Coleman labeling the character “schmaltz art.”
That charge rings hollow to Schnitker, who sees a city littered with fiberglass depictions of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, characters that, while undeniably a pop phenomenon, were created by someone who left St. Paul at an early age. They have never meant as much to the city’s history and development as did Hamm’s, an institution that literally helped build the East Side. Schnitker says he’s made headway this past year in convincing the city to reconsider, and now counts St. Paul Parks and Recreation Director Bob Bierscheid among his key allies.
“We’re close to getting the OK for the statue to be erected on the Seventh Street Mall, just outside the Hamm Building on Cedar Street,” he said. “What the politically correct people need to realize is the huge impact Hamm’s had on the city and on a generation. It provided jobs, and the Hamm family is still active in giving back to the community through their charitable foundation.”
“I’m admittedly part of that generation, and the Hamm’s Bear did have an impact on me. I always liked him, but as a kid I never really stopped to wonder why. Looking back, what I most closely associate with him is the memory of my late grandparents, and of spending lazy summer days at their lake cabin in Isanti County with Twins games—and Hamm’s commercials—playing in the background on their little black-and-white television set. That’s pretty darn Minnesota. But it was having the same effect elsewhere, too, according to Bonnie Drewniany, a journalism professor at the University of South Carolina and an expert on the history of American advertising icons. She says there’s a strong connection between the Hamm’s Bear and family.
“I think the Hamm’s Bear is a wonderful example of how an advertising trade character can become like an old friend or a beloved relative,” Drewniany said. “I have a collection of advertising trade characters in my office, and one of them is a Hamm’s decanter from 1973 sitting proudly on my top shelf. While most of my students don’t recognize the bear, I occasionally have a colleague or parent who beams with excitement when they see him on my shelf. The fact that the Hamm’s Bear continues to bring joy to people speaks volumes about his importance as an advertising icon.”
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Above & Below
From a Twin Cities perspective, Duluth’s alternative music and arts scene briefly flashed across our consciousness for a while around the turn of the century. Seemingly all at once, there was a great compilation CD (Duluth Does Dylan), a breakout band (Low), and a feisty, well-written alterna-rag (the Ripsaw). There were big stories in Twin Cities papers about glimmers of hipness somehow flickering to life in that cold and rocky land. The whole idea was just so appealing—the thought of a thriving mini-scene in beautiful-but-depressed Duluth somehow made you believe that there was hope for us all.
At least that’s how I, a one-time resident of Duluth, felt about it. But in the last few years, things seemed to sour. The glowing stories dried up; the NorShor Theater, which was at the epicenter of the movement, closed for what seemed like the twelfth time; and the Ripsaw, locked in a circulation battle with another alternative weekly, was showing signs of exhaustion. It was easy to come to the conclusion that the “Duluth scene” was too good to be true, and that, like so many other attempts to break the city’s long losing streak, it had come apart at the seams.
Lately, I’ve been getting up to Duluth again a lot, thanks to a new job that prompts me to visit there every month, and from what I’ve seen, the city’s homegrown arts and music scene seems to be not just alive, but in fact poised to move beyond its first flowering. Thanks to a much-needed shift in the city’s political winds, it’s now getting the kind of respect at home that previously came only from outsiders. The election of Mayor Herb Bergson and a majority of arts-friendly city councilors in February has drastically changed the equation, and the local scenesters, long used to being completely on their own, are running with it.
When I first went to live in Duluth in the late 1980s, I had expectations that I now know are typical of Twin Cities folk who pull up stakes and head north. Basically, I expected nothing in the way of art and music, except for a few rawkin’ blues honkytonks and discos in Superior and the American Legion hall in Morgan Park, where supposedly there was a killer polka band. Big-city aesthete that I was, I dreaded being separated from the then-thriving Minneapolis alt-rock scene. I knew the Replacements sometimes played Duluth, but they certainly didn’t live there—and that scared me.
After I unpacked and took a couple of months to look around Duluth, I discovered my music fears were pretty well-founded. Also, my timing was not good: The four years I spent in northeastern Minnesota as a reporter for the Duluth News Tribune probably represented the region’s low point in terms of its economic collapse. In general, people who lived there weren’t in much of a partying mood. It was hard for the young folks to give a damn about Trip Shakespeare making a rare appearance at a tiny bar when they had just got the news that Dad was going to be replaced at the paper mill by a computerized mechanical arm.
But worse yet in my mind was Duluth’s near-complete paucity of any kind of arts and music counterculture. Of course, there were a respectable number of established arts venues like UMD’s Tweed Museum of Art, a fine institution then and now. There was also the Duluth-Superior Symphony Orchestra, the Minnesota Ballet, and the absolutely essential comedy troupe Colder By the Lake. The last year I lived there, in 1989, they started up the Bayfront Blues Festival, which is now a big cultural plus for the city but then was tiny.
Still, I missed living in the kind of place where someone with very little money and an anti-establishment attitude could find solace in a thriving community of artistic expression. I went from rubbing shoulders with the Hüskers at First Avenue to treasuring open-mike Monday nights at Grandma’s as the highlight of my week. That’s when I decided I’d better move back to “the Cities” before it was too late. Turns out I was about a decade too early.
Even though I had trouble accepting what to my mind were its cultural inadequacies, I always loved the physical beauty of Duluth and the Big Lake. I also had a strong suspicion that despite the collapse of the natural resources-based economy upon which it was built, the town had untapped potential to develop a really vibrant alternative culture. What convinced me was that even in the midst of its most recent post-industrial bust, Duluth was attracting noticeable numbers of liberal, ecologically-minded people from around the country who came for its unique combination of adequate urban amenities with real wilderness right out the back door—and this was even before the Internet and telecommuting allegedly made that kind of lifestyle possible.
As for the kids in the local music scene… well, I felt sorry for them. At the time, anyone with a thimbleful of talent loaded up the van as soon as they had the gas money and headed down I-35 to Minneapolis. Why stay in Duluth, where there were no decent venues, no community support, no one with enough spending money to go out and see a band? The city’s cycle of self-fulfilling doom was in full flower.
A decade later, by 1999, it seemed all that had been vanquished. Rick Boo, the son of former Duluth Mayor Ben Boo, had established the NorShor as the first real venue for a burgeoning roster of local bands playing original material. An eclectic coffeehouse opened in West Duluth, Beaners Central, run by Jason Wussow, frontman for the band No Room To Pogo. Ripsaw, published and edited by another musician, Brad Nelson of the Black-Eyed Snakes, was taking on City Hall’s ill-considered development deals and giving a voice to the emerging counterculture.
Up until very recently, it troubled me to think it was all was sliding downhill again.
Part of the problem with the sustainability of Duluth’s scene was its very strength—its grassroots nature. The bands and their fans were young and inexperienced in the ways of community-building. They found out the hard way that you can’t just put on a show in the barn and expect the city’s power brokers to come a-calling, eager to help out.
The city’s mayor from 1991 until last February was Gary Doty, who won the office in part because of his reputation as a moralist in the wake of the 1980s expansion and gentrification of city attractions like Canal Park. Whereas his predecessor, John Fedo, attracted controversy, Doty was a churchgoing family man among whose goals it was to encourage a no-nonsense honesty in City Hall. Doty came over to the mayor’s office from the St. Louis County Board, where Northeastern Minnesota’s DFL politics are at their most hidebound. They’re very different from what I was used to in Minneapolis. Characterized by strong support for organized labor but espousing conservative social values, this brand of DFL thinking makes it possible to blast the GOP for its anti-union ways, yet support calls to keep the Ten Commandments displayed on public property. It’s a unique type of institutionalized leftism, born in an industrialized past in which workers were mercilessly exploited, and combined with a socially repressive streak common in rural areas everywhere in America.
Not surprisingly, Doty clashed with progressives who disagreed with some of his social stands, such as his refusal to recognize the city’s gay and lesbian pride movement, as well as his approaches to developing the city. Doty favored big developers and the big projects they proposed, such as the Tech Center on Superior Street in downtown Duluth, and a golf course surrounded by upscale housing at one of the city’s gems, the Spirit Mountain recreation area.
Earlier this year, perhaps as a backlash against the retiring Doty’s brand of traditional Northeastern Minnesota leadership, Duluth voters sided with the progressives. Herb Bergson, the former mayor of Superior who campaigned hard against the golf course and in favor of green and social justice issues, was resoundingly elected mayor. The City Council’s most liberal members were all re-elected, giving them a solid majority.
In his day, Doty was no supporter of rock music or alternative culture. This extended to the Homegrown Music Festival, an annual event started in 1998 that probably did more than anything else to forge what cohesiveness the Duluth scene was able to muster. When this year’s event kicked off on May 6 at Fitger’s Brewhouse, there was an unmistakable optimism bubbling along with the freely flowing pints of Fitger’s Hempen Ale.
Scott Lunt, of the band Father Hennepin and founder of the Homegrown, led the cheers from his DJ perch as he declared the festival officially open. It was a stark turnaround from his announcement a few months earlier that he was canceling the event after years of single-handedly managing it. He was burned out, he said. But then a new group—supported by the city—stepped in to take over Lunt’s administrative chores and, in fact, expanded the roster of bands to seventy.
“The city actually gave some money to Homegrown this year,” Lunt said. “I sort of let it go a little bit, and a bigger group, the Twin Ports Music and Arts Collective, picked up the slack. It’s a nonprofit organization, so the city was able to give a little bit of money.
“As far as support for the music scene goes, it’s ten times better now. Our mayor’s into this. I mean, our old mayor would never, ever come to a bar. When Mayor Bergson was campaigning, he was saying, ‘Yeah, let’s get more music festivals.’”
The arts collective, also known as MAC, could end up being a key piece of the sustainability puzzle. It’s made up of a group of Duluth artists whose goal is to raise money for projects that can support the scene. The group has set up shop in a spacious storefront space on West First Avenue in downtown Duluth, upgrading its original plans to locate in the basement of the Electric Fetus record store. In addition to a music stage, MAC is providing gallery space for young visual artists, who are also trying to establish Duluth as an outpost for hipsters.
Eric Dubnicka, a twenty-nine-year-old expressionist painter, runs MAC’s gallery operations and says it’s his goal to “make Duluth known for more than paintings about aerial lift bridges and deer,” and to do that, the city was in dire need of a nonprofit gallery that accepted edgy work.
“There’s an ever-growing base of people up here who can support this kind of thing,” he said, “but there were no nontraditional venues besides the universities. It’s becoming more possible to make it as an artist and still live in Duluth. Look at me. I live here in a renovated artist’s studio with high ceilings for seven hundred bucks a month. I want to show in New York, but I love the base here. More and more people are seeing that, and with technology as it is you can live anywhere.”
A key supporter of MAC is Duluth City Councilor Donny Ness, who at age thirty is young enough to understand why the city needs a thriving grassroots music scene. He’s on MAC’s board and is also a big supporter of the other major alternative music and culture event in town, the Green Man Festival. Ness says he and the new mayor are determined to nurture the scene.
“Certainly the mayor and several councilors understand the value of these things,” he said. “It brings people to our town. Money and revenues flow in. And it’s a positive way to showcase what Duluth has to offer. There is significant support for it, and the real question now is not ‘should we?’ but ‘how should we?’ In other words, what is the appropriate role for the city to play in getting these events off the ground?”
Ness said Green Man, Homegrown, and other neighborhood and grassroots cultural events are going to get bigger play among city leaders from now on. “What I hope to do is move away from ongoing support for some of our events and help the newer events step up to the next level and assist them in becoming the next Bayfront Blues Festival and Grandma’s Marathon. There are some great ideas that die on the vine because of the lack of initial support—events that have been very local in nature but are creative and wonderful ideas that could be brought to a larger stage.”
Bergson, in his inaugural speech this winter, ran through a list of goals for his administration that sounded as if it were quoted verbatim from the official handbook on how to attract the creative professional class: blanketing downtown and Canal Park with wi-fi hotspots in an effort to create an “E-City of the North”; spending marketing bucks to promote eco-tourism; establishing an “eco-industry” hub in the city; building more downtown housing and staging more festivals.
In doing this, he’s turning Duluth from a city that officially discouraged nontraditional development into one that’s joining a trend of smaller cities trying to pitch their quirks and unique attributes to young creative types. One Midwestern example is Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm’s Cool Cities Initiative, a controversial program that’s funneling state grants to cities and programs designed to keep—and attract—these desirable residents.
Duluth, however has an advantage in that it’s not starting from scratch. Northeastern Minnesota has always had a niche as an outdoor athlete’s paradise: The whitewater kayaking on the St. Louis River is among the best in the nation. Then there’s the North Shore Trail for hikers, and the legendary cross-country skiing. And let’s not forget Grandma’s Marathon. Throw in prime venues for latter-day extreme sports like mountain biking and rock climbing, and it’s a powerful, easy sell for any young person with a taste for outdoors adventure.
A few prominent businesses in Duluth are already capitalizing on the trend. TrueRide is receiving orders from around the country for its brand of outdoor skateboard parks—some built from hemp. And Vertical Endeavors, with its 14,000-square-foot facility on Canal Park, bills itself as one the “largest and best indoor rock climbing facilities” in the country.
I always took it as a sign that the Twin Cities were a cool place to live because for many years we had two alternative weeklies—no other market our size could boast that. Now imagine a much smaller city of 90,000 with two such weeklies. Up until early this year, that’s what Duluth had. The Ripsaw was one of them, until the announcement came down from editor-publisher Brad Nelson that it was going monthly.
The Ripsaw differentiated itself from the Reader Weekly by giving the full force of its coverage to the local music scene, not too surprising given Nelson’s membership in one of the city’s great rock bands, the Black-Eyed Snakes. When he said the week-to-week competition was taxing his sanity and threatening the quality of the product, it sounded a lot like Scott Lunt’s exhaustion at trying to run the Homegrown Festival all by himself: another cornerstone of the nascent music scene crumbling as it struggled to reach the next level.
But what the cutback has really done is given the entrepreneurial Nelson the chance not only to redesign the Ripsaw as a glossy monthly, but also to concentrate more fully on building his outdoor Green Man Festival into something more than just another local-band showcase. Getting ready for its third year at Spirit Mountain later this month, Nelson has for the first time lined up two national acts to headline the fest, Willie Nelson and Cracker (though Nelson later had to cancel due to carpal tunnel syndrome). Throw in local heroes Low and the Black-Eyed Snakes, some extreme mountain biking competition, and an alternative energy technology exhibition, and Green Man seems poised to emerge as a major happening on the summertime alternative calendar.
And for the first time, Duluth’s city fathers have seen the opportunity that the Green Man Festival presents and are backing it one hundred percent. Plus, Spirit Mountain is no longer threatened by a golf course. “I’m relieved about that,” Nelson said. “We’ve never done this as a political event, and it’s not like we’re solving all the problems or replacing the annual income of a golf course. No, we’re not going to support a whole town like former Mayor Doty wanted.”
But, he said, Green Man is showing what can be done on one weekend when creativity is applied, “rather than falling back on traditional means of development that are going to appeal to retirees, perhaps.
“Does Duluth want to become a bedroom retirement community?” Nelson asked. “Or do we want to develop the region for the next generation so that we can lure some young professionals here to keep the city alive in the long term? Adventure-recreation, eco-tourism, adventure tourism—these things are huge.”
Down at the Duluth Visitors and Convention Bureau’s office on the Downtown Lakewalk, support for the Green Man, and acceptance of the city’s alternative culture in general, is enthusiastic. The bureau is actually co-sponsoring the event. Terry Mattson, the executive director, is a true believer.
“Brad and his people have a ton of energy behind this,” he said. “None of this would have happened without that enthusiasm—it’s a labor of love and a huge undertaking. The Willie Nelson thing raises the bar so much higher in terms of what needs to happen and there’s an element of risk. But it’s a magnet that attracts an audience that probably wouldn’t otherwise be as interested in coming here.”
To me, the thought of staid, traditional Duluth opening its arms to geeks, alt-rockers, cultural misfits, skate punks, and extreme mountain bikers is so ironic that I have to wonder if I’m still connected to reality. In a town where there’s significant public support for keeping the Ten Commandments displayed on the City Hall lawn and where gays and lesbians couldn’t get a hearing from the longtime former mayor, helping out a rabble-rouser like Brad Nelson represents real change.
Jason Wussow, of Beaners Central, says that up until very recently, “there was no support for what was happening here. Most of the city leaders would have the attitude of, ‘Oh, the music scene, those rowdy musicians.’ It was not seen as an asset in any way. Now it seems people are looking at the music and arts scene as an asset.”
The lull of the last couple of years that many in the Twin Cities perceived as backsliding, he said, was real but in no way fatal. “We had some venues close, and everyone was bummed out,” Wussow said. “But in my mind, that was just a reflection of what was going on in the whole country. There was 9/11, a smoking ban was instituted in Duluth, the recession hurt the tourism industry, big layoffs were announced, and there were so many things at once.
“The passion just got tired—but only for a bit.” -
10 Ways to Make Sure You’ll Never Fly Again
We can’t guarantee anything, but here’s a good start.
1) Have the misfortune of being named “Ben Laden.” Ben E. Laden, a resident of Washington D.C., tells The Rake that he gets stopped and singled out for a “special search” every time he flies. Laden says he gets reported to the FBI repeatedly by Web surfers from around the world who spot his name in search engines and then proceed to do their patriotic duty. But it’s okay, he says. “I’m already well-known to the FBI. I’ve actually got a security clearance.” That’s because Laden is a noted economist who once worked in the Clinton White House and the Federal Reserve. And he begs to differ with people who suggest his name is similar to the world’s most wanted terrorist. “Bin Laden is an Arabic name. Laden is a Jewish surname. There are no similarities at all, really.”
2) Be an outspoken liberal. That’s been the key to insuring a place on “the list” for the editors and writers of at least one lefty publication: The War Times of San Francisco. This magazine (and its Web site, www.war-times.org) doesn’t shrink in its opinion that the administration of George W. Bush is motivated by the twin evils of oil and ideology, publishing such articles as “Bush’s Oil Machine” and “John Ashcroft’s Holy War.” Editor Bob Wing tells The Rake that his staffers are routinely stopped and searched every time they try to board an airliner, thanks to their inclusion on a special watch list—not of terrorists, but of the current administration’s political opponents. Also, Wings says his email is continually bombarded by computer viruses.
3) Change your name to something Arabic-sounding like “Awada” or “Sabo.” Converts to Islam frequently do this—remember Cassius Clay begat Muhammad Ali? But according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, there has been an increasing incidence of the reverse phenomenon in recent months: Arabic people anglicizing their names, to avoid possible list-generated hassles. It’s no wonder. Perfectly non-Arabic names are turning up on various lists, apparently for no other reason than a phonetic similarity. For instance, there’s the case of retired Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Larry Musarra of Juneau, Alaska, an American of Irish descent who is not allowed on Alaska Airlines flights. Musarra says he’s at a loss to figure out how to get his name off the watch list.
4) Open a Swiss bank account. They’re not as secret as they used to be. Although Swiss law still generally protects the identities of account holders in Swiss banks, 9/11 has brought increasing pressure on Swiss bankers to open their books on request. For some time now, they have been required to identify (for their own purposes and protection) who the accounts holders are, and the source of their funds. With increasing pressure from other governments, the Swiss have shown a willingness to freeze the accounts not only of white-collar scofflaws like insider traders, but suspected terrorists as well. At last report, for example, banks in Switzerland had frozen $20 million in 67 accounts linked to the Taliban.
5) Carry a boxcutter onto a flight. Yep. It still happens. Last Thanksgiving, airport screeners shook loose 20,581 sharp objects such as ice picks, scissors, and meat cleavers; 15,982 pocket knives; 3,242 banned tools; 2,384 flammable items; 1,072 clubs or bats; six guns; and—how can people be so clueless?—a total of 98 boxcutters. What happens when a boxcutter is found today? The Transportation Safety Administration says the traveler can do one of four things: “a) consult with the airlines for possible assistance in placing the prohibited item in checked baggage; b) withdraw with the item from the screening checkpoint at that time; c) make other arrangements for the item, such as taking it to your car; or, d) voluntarily abandon the item.” By the way, that “abandoned item” may also be used as evidence against you in any possible criminal proceeding.
6) SIGN FOR A Fed Ex DELIVERY. Federal Express is losing a ton of business in the Twin Cities Somali community thanks to the plight of two young men who were hauled in by INS agents pretending to deliver a package, according to Omar Jamal, director of the Minneapolis-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center. He tells The Rake the tactic has resulted in FedEx becoming persona non grata in Somali homes, where residents are increasingly nervous about being singled out for scrutiny by terrorist-hunting federal agents. Next on the agenda: Color-coded drivers licenses that readily and conveniently label immigrants likely suspects in the battle for homeland security.
7) Take a vacation in Saudi Arabia. The birthplace of Osama bin Laden (and 15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11) has long made traveling there for non-business reasons a taxing ordeal for Westerners. In fact, the country does not issue individual tourist visas at all. It has only recently begun accepting groups of “educational tourists” from Western universities who want to study the country’s history and culture. These tours cost about $7,500. Unescorted female travelers aren’t allowed in the country, unless they have lined up sponsors who meet them at the airport. And forget it if you’re Jewish. Travelers proven to be Jewish—or who even have an Israeli stamp in their passports—can keep on moving.
8) Compose atonal symphonic music. It doesn’t pay to be too avant-garde nowadays. Pierre Boulez, the 75-year-old giant of modern classical music, found himself arrested and dragged away from his Swiss hotel room after police found his name on a terrorism watch list. How did it get there? According to press reports, a Swiss music critic who panned a Boulez piece for being too avant-garde so incensed a reader that he or she phoned in a death threat, making reference to “a bomb.” The next time Boulez went to Switzerland, the anti-terrorism police snatched him up after scanning a roster of luxury hotel guests (apparently, terrorists like to travel first-class in Switzerland).
9) Stand up and shout “Allahu Akbar!” when you hit the jackpot in Vegas. The Mecca of gambling has become one of the busiest spots for anti-terrorism surveillance. That’s because 9/11 pilots Mohamed Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi, Ziad Jarrah, and Hani Hanjour, as well as another hijacker, Nawaf Alhazmi, all visited Las Vegas casinos during six trips between May and August 2001. The FBI has appointed eight new agents to the Las Vegas field office who will concentrate solely on anti-terrorism activities. Funny how only certain Islamic rules applied to the devout young men.
10) One sure way NOT to get on a terrorist watch list: Buy a Gun. Luckily, in all the media hoopla and Constitution-shredding that has been going on trying to track down terrorists, it’s good to know you can still load up on all the legally obtainable firearms you want without arousing suspicion. The National Rifle Association has seen to that. The NRA’s Catherine Haggett tells The Rake, “Rest assured that the rights of law-abiding firearm owners have not been compromised in any way by the enactment of recent anti-terrorism legislation,” she says. “Purchasing a firearm through legal channels will not result in citizens being placed on terrorist watch lists.” In fact, when we inquired at gun shops around town how long it would be until we could (theoretically) get our hands on an AK-47 (legally), we were told about a week. “Unless you have a really common American name, like Smith or Brown. Then it’ll take longer.”