The Rake Magazine

Author: Katherine Glover

  • Made in the Shade

    Last December I was in Minnesota, chatting with workers at Peace Coffee, a Minneapolis-based one-hundred-percent Fair Trade coffee company. To these guys, who make local deliveries on bicycle, Starbucks is the enemy. It’s a huge, non-transparent corporation; only a small percentage of its coffee is Fair Trade; and it doesn’t re-invest in the communities where it operates.

    In January I was back in Nicaragua, chatting with Fair Trade coffee producers. It’s a different world. They love Starbucks. It may be that only a small percentage of the coffee bought by the caffeine behemoth is Fair Trade, but that’s still a massive amount of coffee. Starbucks is a godsend to these farmers, who may support the Sandinistas (the leftist party that led the Nicaraguan revolution from 1979 to 1990), but socially have little in common with U.S. liberals. They are typically gay-fearing churchgoers. The women do the cooking and watch over the children; the men carry machetes and work in the fields.

    They are also poor. They use outdoor latrines. They cook over a fire. Meat is a rarity; dirt floors are common. Many households have electricity, but others do not. Fair Trade gives these farmers a bit of stability, though; it guarantees a fixed price that meets both the costs of living and production. That price is above those offered by the extremely volatile regular market, but it does not make the farmers wealthy.

    Still, it does help them produce the best coffee in the world. The fact is, most coffee is crap. Producing quality coffee is just not cost effective on a large scale. While you can pull a banana off a tree and eat it, a good cup of coffee is the result of a long, labor-intensive process whose many steps must be approached with skill and care. Only small producers have the time.

    They grow their coffee in the shade, using arabica plants, which grow more slowly and yield less, but don’t end up tasting like sawdust. During the harvest, farmers pick only the ripe coffee berries, returning to the same plant week after week until the berries are gone. As they dry the coffee, they sort through the beans and throw away anything discolored or damaged by insects.

    On huge plantations, owners cut down trees to grow their coffee in the sun. They use the inferior robusta plant, and during the harvest produce thousands of sacks of coffee a day. Workers pick the berries all at once, and there’s no time to pick out bad beans. These beans are cut with small quantities of arabica, because otherwise the coffee would be undrinkable and wind up in cheap instant mixes, or the auto-drips at Ye Olde Truckstop.

    Nicaraguan coffee farmers are poor, but they’re not miserable. Life in the countryside is pleasant. People live in shacks, but these shacks are not one foot away from their neighbors, as they would be in the city. There are trees and mountains and lakes in every direction. Families are strong, and though people work hard, they seem to enjoy themselves.

    Twenty-year-old Byron Gámez gave me a tour of his family’s lands. Byron’s mother is the president of a women’s cooperative, formed because the men in the mixed cooperative insisted on making all the decisions. Byron is also one of my English students. He calls me “Mister Teacher,” and likes to say things like, “I am Mister Tired.” He is endlessly amused by a question he once asked in class: “How do you say say?” and repeats it every time he sees me.

    Byron showed me a neighboring farm that is nothing but a forest of stumps. He explained that disease wiped out their coffee crop. “That’s one of the disadvantages of not being part of a cooperative. You don’t have easy access to credit.” A loan of eighty dollars would have covered the chemical needed to prevent the disease.

    Fair Trade organizations must guarantee access to loans. They also generally help out when disaster strikes, such as the recent hurricanes in Guatemala and Mexico. Companies like Peace Coffee want sustainability and long-term relationships; they’re in trouble if their suppliers lose their farms.

    Cecocafen is a Nicaraguan Fair Trade organization that serves as middleman between families like Byron’s and companies like Peace Coffee. They have funded community water projects, better farm equipment, and new schools in rural coffee areas. They are also sending Byron to school.

    Then there are the cupping labs. In the past, farmers rarely tasted their own product, they just provided raw beans. They had no idea what the quality of their coffee was, much less an incentive to improve it. Cecocafen provides training on how to make good coffee, and processes it locally so the farmers can taste it. Not only can farmers earn a premium for producing better coffee, but they can take real pleasure in their work.—Katherine Glover

  • Buffalo Ridge

    I’d read plenty about Buffalo Ridge, the windiest swath of Minnesota, located in the state’s grassy and treeless southwest quadrant, before I ever got there. I’d heard stories of hats blowing off, of windburn, of tumbleweeds that just kept tumbling. People living in the area are said to suffer perpetual bad hair days. But it was one thing to read about the place and quite another to be there. As I stepped out of my car, the February wind attacked viciously, whipping across my face. I was tempted to crawl back inside and duck for cover.

    But I didn’t. I was there to meet a very important person, Dan Juhl, an early pioneer of wind energy, the man who built the first commercial wind farm in Minnesota. A renowned national expert, he runs DanMar & Associates, a company that consults on matters of renewable energy and conservation, especially wind power.

    Shivering, I stepped inside the firm’s cozy office and immediately revealed myself as an out-of-towner. “Gee,” I said, “it sure is windy.”
    The secretary laughed, her hairdo surprisingly unmussed. “Everybody says that. Today isn’t even that windy.”

    At the moment, it turned out, Juhl was busy talking with a group from another blustery plains state, Nebraska. So Juhl’s twenty-six-year-old son, Tyler, offered to show me around. Tyler is tall and athletic, dressed in jeans and a quilted winter jacket. We walked through the shop, stepping over a pair of giant blades on the cement floor, ready to be installed. That job would likely fall to Tyler, who helps set up new wind turbines. “We do more in the summer,” he said. “Last summer I put up a hundred.”

    We got into Tyler’s truck and started driving. Aside from the modest, peaked-roofed building that houses DanMar & Associates, there was not much to see in any direction except endless corn fields and seventeen tall, sleek, wind turbines.

    Dan Juhl’s wind farm, one of several in the Buffalo Ridge area, is located near Woodstock, on the edge of a zone often referred to as “the Saudi Arabia of wind energy.” The wind here blows in all directions, at most times of the day and night, at an average speed of fifteen miles per hour. There are no obstacles—not a single hill, let alone a mountain—to keep it from spinning those propellers. “There’s nothing out here,” said Tyler. “If I didn’t have this job, there’s no way I’d live here.” As it is, he resides about fifteen minutes from the office, in Pipestone, a bit livelier town than Woodstock, perhaps. Tyler wistfully recalled how he almost got to live in the Virgin Islands. His dad was there, experimenting with solar power. And then, bang, just before the family moved out to join him, Hurricane Hugo hit. “Can you imagine?” he asked. “The Virgin Islands.” He looked across the empty frozen fields of Buffalo Ridge and shook his head.

    The winds are better—more forceful and consistent—in North and South Dakota than in Minnesota, the leading wind power producer in the region. But the Dakotas don’t have the wiring and other infrastructure necessary to send power anywhere. The lines that do exist are decades old and were designed to bring small amounts of energy in. New power lines are expensive, about a million dollars per mile.

    Buffalo Ridge has similar infrastructure issues, though not as severe, and hopefully now quite temporary. Xcel Energy—which has been both friend and foe when it comes to wind power—has cleared the legal and bureaucratic hurdles necessary to embark upon a $160 million project that will further hook Buffalo Ridge into the larger power grid and potentially carry an additional 825 megawatts of energy to the Twin Cities (one megawatt can power up to three hundred homes at a time). Currently, Minnesota wind plants are capable of producing just over 595 megawatts at any given moment, so the additional power lines will make a huge difference. Around 2.5 percent of the state’s energy comes from wind power.

    In the meantime, said Tyler, gesturing to a network of power lines overhead, “All these lines are filled to capacity,” like water pipes that can’t handle another drop. When there’s too much wind, the utility companies have to shut down some of the wind parks—there are almost seven hundred turbines in the state. The producers still get paid, since they typically have a contract with the utility company. “But if you’re an environmentalist, you don’t like to see a hundred turbines shut down on a windy day.”

    Tyler drove up to a cluster of turbines, which resembled giant airplane propellers mounted on towers around two hundred feet tall. In an excited gearhead fashion, he began explaining how they work. It’s simple, really: Turbines have sensors that constantly measure the speed and direction of the wind. The entire turbine can rotate depending on where the wind is coming from, and the individual blades also can tilt to maximize efficiency. As the blades spin, a generator harnesses that kinetic energy and converts it to electricity.

    Tyler unlocked one of the towers and we climbed through a narrow entryway. We were inside a skinny, vertical tunnel, a giant’s drinking straw. A ladder leads to the top, where the turbine is mounted. Tyler climbs this ladder whenever repairs are needed. In the winter, he said, “the biggest problem is icing.” Ice on the blades adds a lot of weight and drag, making the turbines slower and noisier than usual. Normally, they make only a soft whirring sound. Ice buildup is also dangerous because the turbines have been known to fling chunks of ice hundreds of feet. A buddy of Tyler’s recently had his truck totaled by a block of ice that flew from a turbine. “It was pretty wicked,” Tyler said. Fortunately, nobody was in the truck at the time.

    Dan Juhl’s office is housed in a small, one-story building heated by a corn-burning stove and powered independently of the local utility company. When he first built on the property, he was told that he’d have to pay $7,500 for a power line. Juhl more or less told the utility company to go to hell. Instead, he wired the place himself, gathering energy from his wind turbines, along with solar panels. The building is entirely self-sufficient, and Juhl hasn’t paid an electric bill in years.

    I asked Tyler how they keep the lights on and the computers running when the wind isn’t blowing. It’s a common question. Xcel spokesman Paul Alderman and others have suggested that the main problem with wind power is that wind is intermittent. “If there’s a demand for electricity and the wind stops blowing,” Alderman said, “we have to fire up other power plants to make up the difference.”

    Tyler explained away those concerns. He said that, at least as far as the DanMar office is concerned, there are a pair of batteries that store extra energy. “We can go three days without sun or wind,” he said, pointing out that such a scenario is quite unlikely, that usually there is one or the other, and often both. Theoretically, the same sort of storage technologies could be used on a larger scale to cover cities during calm days. And, besides, what’s so awful about having to power up an existing nuclear or coal plant once in the while, if we get environmentally friendly energy most of the time?

    Solar energy could be used to pick up some of the slack as well. And though solar panels are currently quite expensive, Juhl expects that the price will drop as the technology catches on. The same happened with wind power. It used to be pricey to produce. The equipment was expensive to build, the machines were primitive and inefficient, and wind power was being utilized on too small a scale to be cost-effective. But now, the cost is comparable to that of producing more traditional forms of energy, like coal.

    Wind power has become such a moneymaker, in fact, that out-of-state companies are moving in and now own about ninety percent of the wind production facilities in Minnesota. Until recently, the biggest holder was Enron, but as that company self-destructed, General Electric bought out all its wind farms, including those on Buffalo Ridge.

    In the early nineties, those companies began paying farmers for the right to build and operate wind turbines scattered about on small sections of their farms—up to two thousand dollars per year per turbine. The farmers, struggling merely to stay alive, were thrilled. Many of them made more per year on these wind deals than they did from their crops. Nobody knew then how profitable wind energy, which big power companies are obligated to purchase, would become. Now many farmers are hoping to finance their own turbines.

    They are a market Dan Juhl hopes to serve. His company is now focused on helping local owners set up personal wind farms. That’s not to say that Juhl isn’t friendly with larger corporations, too. His goal is to promote renewable energy in whatever manner he can, and to ensure that it is widely available as soon as possible, especially as global oil reserves run dry.

    Dan Juhl, a native Minnesotan, got renewable energy fever in the late seventies, after a global oil crisis left people waiting in line for hours to get gas. “I actually started just after Tyler was born,” he told me, in his naturally low-key manner. “It might have been a subconscious thing, just the thought that there has to be something better than this, there has to be a better way than the way we’re doing things.” He worked with others in the industry to design and build some of the first wind turbines. At the time, he says, “They seemed gigantic. By today’s standards, of course, they were very small.”

    He got all the usual flack. People—friends, politicians, potential financial backers—thought he was out of his mind. He said it was that sort of skepticism that doomed North Dakota, for example, which could have been a wind power leader. “For years they pooh-poohed the idea of wind power, because of the politics of the coal companies,” he said. “And now they’re crying.” With Minnesota so far ahead, largely thanks to Juhl, he doesn’t see much chance of North or South Dakota ever catching up. Since Minnesota has the potential to generate seventeen times more power from wind than we would ever likely consume, it’s improbable that major urban areas like the Twin Cities or Chicago would turn to the lagging Dakotas to meet their wind energy needs.

    Of course, Minnesota is far from tapping its full potential. It is, however, making good headway. The state is the third largest wind-power producer in the nation, after California and Texas. “Environmentalists would like to see it all done at once,” said Juhl. “I’m more practical. Do it slowly; make sure it’s done right.”

    Juhl knows what he’s talking about. He’s seen plenty of examples of blocked efforts, screw-ups, and stupidity. During the wind craze of the early 1980s, he briefly lived in California. Wind production at the time cost around thirty-eight cents per kilowatt-hour—more than thirteen times what it costs now, and quite a bit more than it cost then to produce a kilowatt-hour by more traditional means. But the government was trying to be progressive, so it subsidized wind power with huge tax breaks. Unfortunately, the breaks were based on how much an investor spent, rather than how much energy was produced, so building the most efficient systems was not the priority. There were also environmental problems. For example, many turbines were placed along migratory paths, and birds were being chopped to pieces by the machines’ blades.

    In 1986, the investment tax credits program expired, so California investors dropped wind power and moved on to the next fad.
    By that time, Northern States Power Company, now Xcel Energy, was running three tiny turbines in Minnesota, on Buffalo Ridge. The turbines were a fraction of the size of the latest models and could kick out a maximum of only sixty-five kilowatts each (today’s turbines produce about twenty-five times that). NSP also participated in an early government study that pinpointed Buffalo Ridge as Minnesota’s prime spot for wind energy.

    Though NSP showed early interest in wind power, the company ultimately opted to play it safe. “It’s quite easy to throw vast sums of money at high-visibility, high-glitz programs that merely make rates go higher and higher,” a company spokesman told the Star Tribune in 1992. “We don’t want to be leading-edge on some of these, but we don’t want to be left behind, either.”

    Where NSP saw hassle, Dan Juhl saw potential and moved back to Minnesota in the late 1980s. In 1992, he constructed the state’s first commercial wind farm, setting up five turbines outside Marshall. The local city government agreed to buy the energy. The power still cost two to three times what it does today, but, as Juhl explained, “Cost-effective can mean different things. Some people spend thirty thousand dollars on a boat and a motor they use twice a year. Or twenty thousand dollars on a diamond.” Wind power was something Juhl believed in, and unlike NSP, he was confident that it would soon be profitable.

    NSP quickly jumped back into the game, but some would say for the wrong reasons. In 1994, the company used wind power as a bargaining chip in an attempt to convince the Legislature to allow it to store nuclear waste in outdoor casks at its Prairie Island nuclear power plant near Hastings. A contentious, high-profile political battle ensued, the utility company on one side and environmentalists and American Indians living near Prairie Island on the other.

    In the end, the Legislature granted NSP the right to fill up to seventeen casks. But for every cask of waste, NSP would have to donate half a million dollars a year to a renewable energy development fund—meaning that by the time all seventeen were full, the company would be paying $8.5 million per year. On top of that, NSP was required to generate a minimum of 425 megawatts of wind energy at any given time by the end of 2002. The Legislature also said that if by 2002 the Public Utilities Commission, the federal agency that oversees the nation’s power supply, had determined wind power to be a cost-effective source of energy, NSP would have to increase its wind energy capacity by four hundred megawatts by 2012. Finally, NSP officials had to promise never to ask permission to store more nuclear waste—a promise they would break in 2003.

    As far as wind energy was concerned, the deal worked wonders. Minnesota became the national leader in new wind tower installations. As people experimented and learned the finer points, the technology improved, and the cost of producing power declined dramatically. Wind farms proved to be an economic boon to the rural communities that hosted them, creating construction jobs, filling bars and hotels with out-of-town contractors, and even drawing a small trickle of curious onlookers.

    Wind energy’s biggest problem to date is how to transport the power from where it’s produced to where it’s needed. Thanks to shortsightedness or carelessness or even defiance, the necessary wiring wasn’t being constructed along with the towers. “NSP should have known,” said Juhl. “They were putting out these contracts to satisfy the Prairie Island agreement. I’m not sure if they didn’t think it would be as successful or what, but for whatever reason, ten years later they don’t have a way to get the power out of here.” Xcel plans to start construction this year on new power lines out of Buffalo Ridge. This is promising, but the lines should have been built years ago.

    One can’t help feeling the company is a chronic foot-dragger on innovation in the area of renewable energy. For instance, in 1999, when the PUC finally declared wind energy cost-effective, meaning that NSP would have to increase its investment in this energy source, Jim Alders, the company’s manager of regulatory projects, called the decision “a mistake.” Still, activists like Michael Noble, the executive director of Minnesotans for an Energy Efficient Economy, admit the company has made progress—but only because it had to, when the state took the company by the collar. “They keep proving they need to be pushed along step by step,” Noble said. Since wind energy has now become cost-effective, he said he feels as though he’s battling inertia. “Sometimes it seems like it just comes down to old-time utility culture, like, ‘We burn stuff for a living, and what are we going to burn next?’”

    Noble lamented that “Denmark today gets twenty percent of their total energy from wind power. It’s much, much windier here, and wind power is much more cost effective here. But they have public policy that nurtures it along, and we have roadblocks.”

    Juhl is more optimistic, as inventors so often are, as they have to be in order to envision bold solutions. Things could be better, sure. But “Minnesota is doing well,” he told me. “We’re developing our own resources and keeping a lot of those development dollars within the state.”

    And lawmakers may give renewables another boost: In March, two DFL legislators proposed a bill that would require the state to get twenty percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

    Wind power eventually will be a necessity, said Juhl. “More and more utilities are switching to natural gas. Well, the experts say that will run out in twenty to thirty years, and what then?” That, according to Juhl, is when renewable energy will take over.

    “We only have ‘cheap’ energy because we’re not putting the real cost on the table,” he said. “Everybody says coal is so cheap, but you look at the smog, the acid rain, the lung disease, and global climate change—put a value on that. We don’t put that in the electric bill. If we did, if we put the real price of energy on the table, renewable energy would be hands-down the winner.”

  • The Revolution Will Not Be Silk-Screened

    Ernesto “Che” Guevara has come a long way. Once best known as a fierce companion of Fidel Castro, he now graces the T-shirts of revolutionaries, as well as assorted hipsters, celebrities, and stoners who couldn’t find Che’s native country (Argentina) on a map. Since the release of The Motorcycle Diaries, a film based on Che’s memoirs that emphasizes his wandering, Kerouac-like persona more than his communist heroics and martyrdom, sales of posters, buttons, and other Che merchandise have soared. Che is more popular than ever, even if his socialist ideals have run aground.

    If becoming a martyr, a cult of personality, and a sex symbol weren’t indignity enough for a Marxist, his image has now been copyrighted. A Georgia man named David McWilliams is claiming he has an exclusive license to reproduce the famous Che photo anywhere in North America—and he’s threatening to sue anyone who violates this right. That includes Northern Sun, the charming boutique for radicals in South Minneapolis. “Please send a list of total inventory on your shelves, and forward same to us for destruction,” McWilliams commanded in an email to Northern Sun owner Scott Cramer on August 17. “Failure to comply with these requests will result in our pursuit of all legal remedies available to us.”

    Cramer says he initially agreed to start buying all of his Che merchandise from McWilliams’ company, but then he found out the T-shirts were made in Honduras, a country with terrible labor conditions. Who exactly was this man who claimed to own Che? When McWilliams refused to supply Cramer with T-shirts made in the U.S.A., Cramer was forced to keep all Che products out of his catalog and website until he and his lawyers could figure out what to do.

    McWilliams did not respond to my friendly inquiries. But according to Cramer, McWilliams says he purchased the license from some Frenchmen after they threatened to sue him for violating their copyright. How the Frenchmen got rights to the photo is unclear.

    The iconic image of Che comes from a photo taken in 1960 by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda. The print collected dust in Korda’s studio until 1967, the year of Guevara’s death, when a visiting Italian publisher got a copy of the print from Korda, brought it back to Europe, and sold more than two million posters. Korda could do nothing, because Cuba had, until 1997, refused to join the international Berne Copyright Convention.

    Even then, Korda only bothered with one lawsuit, against Smirnoff Vodka in 2000. They wanted to use it in an ad campaign. Korda said he didn’t mind if people reproduced Che’s image “to propagate his memory and the cause of social justice throughout the world,” but he was against using it to sell alcohol, or “for any purpose that denigrates the reputation of Che.” He won the case, and he donated all the money to Cuban hospitals.

    When Korda died in 2001, the rights he had exercised passed on to his daughter. She has been twice as aggressive in suing people who use the image for political causes, particularly those she feels her father would abhor (one anti-Cuba and another anti-abortion). But it is unclear whether she has ever profited from any licensing schemes. Some sources say it is not Korda’s daughter, but Che’s estate, that now controls the copyright.

    “That was my first mistake,” says Cramer. “When McWilliams offered to send me proof, I said, ‘No, that’s okay, I believe you.’” Cramer consulted a copyright lawyer, but he could offer little advice without actually seeing documentation of McWilliams’ rights.

    But Johnny Havana, a merchandiser based in Toronto who runs TheCheStore.com, says Cramer did the right thing. After dealing with similar threats a year ago, Havana did some research and concluded that it wasn’t worth it for a small company to take on McWilliams. “I would have had to go to France to fight.” Havana says McWilliams sells him a good product and he’s never had any complaints. And the T-shirts Havana gets are all made in the United States, he says.

    So why did McWilliams tell Cramer he could only buy Che T-shirts made in Honduras? “It’s a big company,” says Havana. “He can do whatever he wants.” In other words, capitalism wins. —Katherine Glover

  • High on the Job

    On a typical workday, Jeff Speed arrives at work at six-thirty in the morning. He has half an hour to climb twenty stories up to the little capsule where he works, which is at the top of a crane. He brings food with him—with only half an hour for lunch, there is no time to climb down, then back up again. While his fellow construction workers use Port-a-Pottys down on the ground, he keeps a jar up in the crane for nature’s call. “You learn not to drink too much coffee,” his site supervisor joked.

    Speed has been running equipment on construction sites for twenty-five years. His training was not formal; he says he just got lucky. He started by operating smaller machinery—bulldozers, forklifts—and then had the good fortune to be around when someone needed him to operate something larger and threw him in front of the controls. He gradually moved on to bigger and bigger machinery, until he found himself two hundred feet off the ground. He’s been operating cranes for about fifteen years.

    The first time was a thrill, he said, but now, “It’s kind of second nature.” He’s not always in the tall cranes; it depends on the job. He still operates forklifts and bulldozers sometimes; “I do whatever needs to be done.”

    But if a crane is being used on a site, Speed is usually the one in it. “It’s hard to find good crane operators,” said Mark Brown, the superintendent at the construction site of the new Guthrie Theater. “Everyone is dependent on them.” The Guthrie has two tall cranes, including the one run by Speed, which daily perform a careful pas de deux.

    Each carries heavy loads from one side of the site to another, delivers construction materials to workers on the upper floors of a building, keeping everyone working by keeping them supplied with what they need. The crane operator, in turn, is dependent on riggers on the ground, who strap on the materials and let the operator know via walkie-talkie when things are ready to be moved.

    It’s a lot of stop-and-go, Speed said; sometimes everybody wants him at once, and he finds himself working through breaks, even skipping lunch. Other times, there may be a long lull when he’s not needed. “I read a book, I read a magazine,” he said. He keeps all of that stuff with him up in his miniature glass office.

    Speed said he’d always wanted to operate machinery. He started on earth movers at age fourteen. “I like the challenge of being able to control something, I guess.” He appeared to set his mind on the problem from another angle, then stopped. “I’ve never really thought about why I do it. I just do it.”

    His only complaint about the job is the erratic hours. He never knows in advance how long he’ll be at work. He could be stuck for fourteen hours, or he could get rained out and find himself unemployed for a week. His pay rate also varies—the taller the crane, the more he earns. Not all construction sites require the tallest kind of crane. “It’s hard to schedule life around work,” he said.

    Overall, though, Speed is happy with his job, and seems to have a natural affinity for it. “You have to get to know the equipment,” he said. “You don’t want its movements to be clunky like a machine. You want them smooth. You have to control it like it was your own arm.”—Katherine Glover

  • Public Icon, Private Property

    Imagine: It’s springtime, there’s a sense of optimism in the air. Best Buy is about to open its new corporate headquarters in Richfield. Everyone’s talking about it. Some say it will usher the Twin Cities into a new era; others argue about whether or not that’s a good thing. Wanting to include the community in the historic event, Best Buy paints one of the thousands of steel construction beams white and leaves it on the sidewalk for several days. Ordinary citizens are invited to sign their names to it before it’s used for the “topping off” ceremony at the apex of the new building. The turnout is huge; when the mayor comes by, accompanied by reporters from every local news outlet, he can barely find space for his own autograph.

    OK, so this isn’t what happened last year, when Best Buy unveiled its shiny, nondescript corporate headquarters, a vaguely cruise-ship-shaped building plying the suburban seas just off I-35 and I-494. But that’s precisely what occurred thirty years ago when the IDS Center was built in downtown Minneapolis.

    That was a true community event. From the placement of the first beam to the final opening gala, the local papers monitored every detail—how many tons of steel were being used, how many panes of glass, how many light bulbs. They covered the seventeen helicopter trips required to haul the mechanical window-washing equipment to the top of the tower. And they related humorous anecdotes, such as the family of bats that had made a nest within the structure while it was under construction, only to come out of hibernation and fly into the Crystal Court, swooping above the heads of terrified Woolworth’s patrons. It was like celebrity gossip, with the building itself as the celebrity.

    Today, of course, it’s hard to pick out the IDS as the tallest amid Minneapolis’ brace of skyscrapers. But back in the 1960s, the tallest building was Foshay Tower, and its exceptional stature was obvious to the eye. Foshay was the Minneapolis skyline, and had been since 1929.

    “I still remember coming in on the train at the Milwaukee Road depot,” says Charlie Nelson, an architect with the Minnesota Historical Society. “And coming round the bend and this older man next to me growing very excited and pointing out the window and saying, ‘Look, it’s the Foshay Tower! That means we’re home!’”

    The IDS was built to tower over Foshay. It was built to bring focus to downtown, to connect the skyway system at a central point, to push Minneapolis into the modern age. As its website proclaims, the IDS was “a building so impressive, they built a city around it.”

    “It was a bold statement,” says Chuck Liddy, who was part of the Minneapolis Historic Preservation Commission from 1979 to 1984. “There’s been kind of a gentleman’s agreement not to build anything taller, because it was such an icon when it was built.” The Wells Fargo Center is a foot shorter than the IDS; 225 South Sixth (formerly US Bank Place or First Bank Place), a foot shorter still. The IDS remains the tallest building in the city, even if you can’t tell by looking.

    If things had gone as initially planned, the headquarters of Investors Diversified Services, Inc. would be a simple twelve-story building sited on one corner of the block. It was not intended to top Foshay or to bring Minneapolis into a new era. However, Baker Properties, Inc. had determined there was a great need for more office space in downtown Minneapolis and, in close partnership with IDS, it set out to provide some. This was 1963. The new plan was to take up half of the block and include a twenty-five-story office tower, skyway links, an apartment complex, and parking ramp. Soon afterward the proposed tower grew to thirty-six stories, and again to fifty stories in 1967. Then a 1968 study prompted another round of considerations to expand still further.

    The Fantus Company, commissioned by the Greater Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce to assess the potential of Minneapolis and Hennepin County as a location for corporate headquarters, had found the area “excellent” but the availability of space only “fair.” So Investors Diversified Services, Inc., realizing that its development could have an effect on downtown Minneapolis as a whole, devised yet another plan: a four-building complex covering the entire block and linked by skyways. Its anchor would be a central glass-roofed indoor plaza; its highlight, a fifty-seven-story, 775-foot tower—the tallest between Chicago and San Francisco, and one that would outstretch the Foshay Tower by an awe-inspiring 225 feet.

    The design commission went to Philip Johnson, an architect of international stature who had collaborated with Mies van der Rohe on Manhattan’s iconic Seagram’s Building, and his partner John Burgee. Their innovative zig-zagging windows allowed for up to thirty-two corner offices on every floor; the building as a whole, once completed, was proclaimed “one of the finest skyscrapers built in any American city” by no less an authority than the New York Times. Fortune magazine said it made Minneapolis “a leader in architectural innovation.” The words of IDS CEO Stuart Silloway, who in 1969 had described the project as “a demonstration of towering confidence in the future of Minneapolis,” rang true.

    Meanwhile, a similar phenomenon was occurring in New York with the World Trade Center, whose two main towers were erected between 1966 and 1972. Like the IDS, it began as a rather modest proposal and grew to gargantuan proportions. Its planners hoped the World Trade Center would revitalize lower Manhattan, create a new office district to rival Midtown, and bring renewed pride and confidence to the entire city. Critics in the Big Apple complained that the WTC was too big, that it didn’t fit in, that it would rob New York of its character and disrupt the legendary skyline, spiked by the Chrysler and Empire State buildings.

    Minneapple critics posed the same arguments: the IDS Center was like a giant looming over downtown, threatening to squash it. Its architecture appeared alien, completely out of context with its surroundings. In a local cartoon, a Minneapolitan showed a tourist the new skyline, saying: “There’s Foshay Tower, and there’s the box it came in.”

    There was also some resentment of the fact that designers Johnson and Burgee were New Yorkers. “Up until that time, all the great buildings here had been designed by Minnesotans,” explains the historical society’s Nelson.

    But others were eager to welcome the postwar skyscraper to Minneapolis, eager to see a city that outsiders could associate with something other than cows. And for them, the IDS was a gem. “Modern architecture tends to get dumped on as being blah, not very humane—hard to love, if you will,” says Nelson. “But the IDS is vibrant. It changes with the light; it changes with the movement of clouds.”

    1972 saw one grand opening after another at the IDS Center. On June 17, the Crystal Court had its debut with a fifty-dollar-a-ticket formal symphony ball. After a Minnesota Orchestra performance, a dance band from Palm Beach, Florida, took over. Andy Warhol was in attendance. Four months later, regular folks were welcomed to the Crystal Court, and in November, the short-lived movie theater on the lower level opened with The Darwin Adventure. Finally, the fiftieth-floor Skylook Observation Gallery went into business, open until midnight every day of the year.

    The glamour and novelty dissipated with the recession of 1973 and 1974. Investors Diversified Services, Inc. was broke. The culminating grand opening for the entire complex was canceled. In 1975, IDS sought to decrease its tax burden by reducing the official valuation of its building from $92 million to $76.6 million. The lesser valuation was granted. The building had cost $125 million.

    While the IDS was not a stunning financial success, its cultural success was immediate. The building won awards from the American Institute of Architects; it was talked about in more cosmopolitan cities like New York; it was immortalized as the location of the TV station on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The IDS Center, for all its financial troubles, quickly became an icon.

    The Crystal Court was the crown jewel of the building—and, it could be said, even downtown as a whole. Practical in the Minnesota climate, beautiful in its construction, and ideal in its location, the indoor plaza was a perfect place to escape the hectic pace of downtown. Trees in planters provided a park-like feel, and seating cubes were strewn across the court. There was even an informal sidewalk café. The court also pulled the budding skyway system together and gave downtown a central focus, like the central square in a medieval European town. Locals loved it. Architects from all over called it the best people place in the country. Philip Johnson, the architect, talked about its importance on WCCO: “Every city has to have a place where it’s natural to be together,” he said. “I hope there will be lots of little Grecian fountains, and little kiosks with flowers for buttonholes… And guitars.”

    The love affair was short-lived. The Crystal Court’s sparkle gradually dimmed, and in 1979 Bernard Jacob, then editor of Architecture Minnesota, wrote an editorial criticizing changes that had taken place since the court’s debut. The indoor greenery had become sparse, and the seating had been dispatched to the margins to make way for an upscale restaurant on a raised, carpeted platform, which had replaced the self-service café. With the main space now open only to those with the time and money for full-service dining, the Crystal Court was no longer a truly public space.

    But the real trouble began with the first of a series of ownership transfers. In the early eighties, Investment Diversified Services sold its namesake building to Oxford Development, a company that was not only controlled by Canadians who would likely value their bottom line over the social and culture welfare of downtown Minneapolis—but also the very same company that had constructed City Center, widely considered downtown’s ugliest building. The public was wary from the outset.

    Oxford did little to dispel their fears. In 1983, the company decided the observation gallery space was too valuable and gave its managers two choices: pay double the rent, or vacate the premises. The managers opted to bail. The gallery had been drawing around a thousand guests per Saturday, but on December 31, nearly seven thousand people showed up for one last visit.

    Next, Oxford announced its plans to renovate the Crystal Court. The space was bringing people in, but not the kind who were inclined to spend wads of cash at the nearby shops. Oxford planned to move one of the escalators to the south side of the court and to cut a hole in the floor to bring light to the lower level, which to this day has yet to prove itself a viable commercial space (it currently functions as an employee cafeteria). Finally, the company was going to allow the Center’s retailers to modify the facade of their shops.

    The Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Committee would have none of it. They quickly voted to designate the Crystal Court a historically significant structure, which would mean that any changes would require city approval. The Oxford managers were stridently opposed. The preservation committee was attempting to impose government control over private property, they complained; if the designation was made, the building’s value would plummet.

    “People seem to think the city owns the IDS, like it owns a park,” City Council member Barbara Carlson told R.T. Rybak (then a cub reporter with the Minneapolis Star and Tribune) in defending Oxford. “As much as I would like that, it isn’t the case.” In 1984, the Minneapolis City Council held the final decision on whether to designate the Crystal Court as a significant structure. Both Oxford and the Heritage Preservation Committee lobbied hard, and Rybak reported that a shouting match broke out in the council chambers after a March public hearing. In the end, however, the parties managed a compromise. Oxford scaled back on its planned renovations, and the City Council agreed to withhold its “historically significant” designation.

    Less than a decade later, the Chicago-based Heitman Advisory Corporation, the new owners of the IDS Center, bought out the remainder of Woolworth’s sixty-year-lease. The beloved five-and-dime, which had been on the block since before the IDS Center was built, was replaced by the Gap, Gap Kids, and the Gap-owned Banana Republic. Windows on Minnesota, the restaurant on the fiftieth floor, was closed to the public. But by far the most upsetting change was the bleak state of the Crystal Court, which Heitman’s management swept clean, removing all the seating and creating a granite wasteland. People still passed through, but there was no reason to stay. Editorial writers once again began making snide comments about the court. Heitman promised changes, but for years, apart from the occasional art exhibit, the court stood empty.

    “The management would always say ‘well, we’re working on it but we want to do it right,’ and people didn’t believe them,” says Linda Mack, who covers architecture for the Star Tribune.

    Yet to everyone’s surprise, Heitman stayed true to its promise. At long last, in 1998, seating returned to the Crystal Court. Black olive trees were shipped in from Florida. The designers examined Philip Johnson’s original plans and discovered a fountain that had never been built in 1972 because of the recession. Upon further investigation, they discovered the needed structural supports for the fountain were already in place beneath the floor. There were even water pipes in the ceiling, and extra light fixtures trained on the spot where the fountain was to stand.
    The original 1972 concept was for a fountain in brass, one that was quickly deemed too small (at fifty-some feet)—and too phallic. But the 105-foot rainfall that was eventually installed met more or less unanimous approval. Minneapolis had reclaimed its public city center.

    Its panoramic view of the city, however, may be lost for good. Technically, one can see thirty-five miles from the top floor of the IDS Center—a distance that is significantly decreased by cloud cover and pollution, but is still a lot better than what most of us will see today. The observation gallery has never been reopned since its 1984 closure.

    For awhile, there was still a restaurant people could go to, and the rumor was they wouldn’t kick you out if you just wanted to enjoy the view and not buy anything. Now that restaurant, still called Windows on Minnesota, is a private rental space run by the Marquette Hotel, and visitors can’t get there without an access key. Renting the ballroom for a wedding or bar mitzvah will run you $6,000. According to Nigel Pustam, a manager for the Marquette, opening the restaurant to the public would be “a bad business plan.” There are dozens of restaurants on Nicollet Mall, he explains; it’s the view that gives Windows on Minnesota the “uniqueness” which enables them to make thousands of dollars off the space. Guests at the $300-a-night hotel can ask for an escorted tour, but the average tourist off the street is not allowed. No exceptions.

    “I get a lot of people from other countries and out of town who want to go to the top of the building,” says Carrie Stowers, the “customer service ambassador” for the IDS Center. “It’s really sad to see the looks on their faces,” she adds with a tone of tragic perkiness.

    Gone, too, is the stream of gossip and anecdotes coming from people like Stowers. RREEF, the building’s current management, has a website with a few simple facts, which is where they direct nosy reporters. Anything beyond that is a “security concern.” Jim Durda, IDS general manager, wouldn’t even say how large the cleaning staff was. “There’s an adequate team to clean the building,” he assured us. And what equipment do they use? “The methods are proven, and they work, and they’re efficient.” Pressed for more details, he politely apologized. “Because of the heightened security, there’s a lot of questions that we just don’t answer.”

    But it’s not just the heightened security. This is the modern age. The corporate age. The impersonal, privatized, “what’s-it-to-you?” age. The IDS was constructed in a small city where the pride of a community swelled as each floor was added, but that was a different time. Any maybe that is the point: That’s what the IDS Center used to represent. It was Minneapolis’ symbolic entry into the world. It was the Minneapple’s rite of passage from a small town to a cosmopolitan city. If the building that set off that change has become impersonal, inaccessible, and all too corporate, maybe that’s only appropriate.

  • St. Salesman

    My mother’s house wasn’t selling. No one was even looking at it; a total of four open houses had yielded less than a dozen people, most of them curious neighbors with no intention of buying. When she shared her troubles with co-workers at the hospital where she works, a fellow nurse directed her to obtain a miniature statue of St. Joseph, bury it in the back yard, and pray for him to sell the house. My mother’s not a religious person, but she figured she had nothing to lose.

    St. Joseph is the Catholic patron saint of home and family, so it makes some sense that he would be the one you’d go to with real-estate troubles. As to who first decided to actually bury St. Joe in the yard, no one is sure. Some sources trace it back to 1896, in Montreal. One theory points to European nuns in the Middle Ages. All are certain, however, that the practice has been going on since at least the late 1980s.

    My mother had no idea where to find a small statue of St. Joseph for burial purposes, but her co-worker directed her to St. Patrick’s Guild, a shop on Randolph and Snelling in St. Paul. My mother stopped in a couple of days later, a bit self-conscious, half-expecting the sales clerks to think her a total wacko and call the police.

    Then she saw, right beside the cash register, a whole stack of St. Joseph Home Sale kits. “Can’t Sell Home?” the box goaded. “Ask St. Joseph… He’s Helped 1000’s! Faith Can Move Mountains… and Homes!!!” The house pictured on the box had a prominent “SOLD” sign in front of it. The kit was $6.95.

    St. Patrick’s Guild sells around a thousand St. Joseph statues every year, the manager said. Some real-estate agents swear by St. Joe, returning every few months to buy a fresh supply of kits to hand out to clients. The store also sells larger, more expensive St. Joseph statues, but the manager couldn’t say how many might be used to sell houses.

    Included in the kit is the prayer to offer St. Joseph, along with a tiny fact sheet debunking assorted superstitions that have become associated with the practice. You don’t have to bury the statue upside-down, for instance, and it doesn’t have to be located in any particular spot in the yard, or exactly twelve inches underground. That’s just silly. St. Joseph doesn’t care. What is important, notes the fact sheet, “is that the seller asks St. Joseph for his help, believes that he will intercede, and trusts him.”

    My mother was skeptical, but the clerk told her the anecdotal evidence would fill a book. My mother studied the kit dubiously. “Does that mean I can ask for more on the house?”

    The clerk’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t push it, lady.” My mom bought the kit. The house sold within days. —Katherine Glover

  • Hack the Vote

    It’s not hard to get away with rigging an electronic voting machine. No matter how thoroughly the machine is tested, you could always hack it to, say, give every tenth vote for Candidate A to Candidate B, but only if it’s November 4. Anyone testing the machine on November 3 or 5 would find everything functioning properly.

    Electronic rigging is irrelevant if people can verify questionable results by hand-counting the ballots. The problem is, a lot of new touch-screen technology doesn’t create anything hand-countable. You touch the screen, the machine asks you, “Are you sure you want to vote for X?” and at the end of the day, it announces a winner. The correlation between the voters’ intentions and the recorded results is purely a matter of faith.

    Although touch-screen voting machines are becoming more common in elections nationwide, there are no federal laws requiring that a paper ballot be kept and stored. “We have much more control over cement trucks in this country than over voting machines,” says Rebecca Mercuri, who wrote her doctoral thesis on electronic voting technology. She spends much time testifying before various government bodies and officials, and they largely ignore her.

    Our fair state has not. Minnesota statutes require that paper ballots be kept after every election. Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer personally contacted Mercuri to discuss security issues, and told voting-machine companies that Minnesota will only consider machines that meet certain requirements, including voter-verifiable paper ballots.

    Minnesota is looking at new technology in order to comply with the 2002 Help America Vote Act. Unfortunately, our statutes only detail the certification process for optical scanners, which read and tabulate results from paper voting cards. We will have to come up with new statutes to certify touch-screen technology—and some voting-machine companies will certainly try to persuade us that the paper ballot is obsolete.

    During last year’s election, three companies provided machines for free demonstrations in St. Cloud, Minneapolis, and Elk River. After casting their real ballots, voters could try out the new machines, choosing between candidates such as Abraham Lincoln and Mickey Mouse. This November, Minnesota voters will be testing machines provided by Diebold, ES&S, and Avante.

    Avante machines have always printed out a paper ballot (“only because I yelled at them,” insists Mercuri, who lives down the street from the company’s headquarters). Both Diebold and ES&S, however, are fighting hard against voter-verifiable paper trails, and there may be some doubt as to whether either of them will fulfill the requirements laid out by the Minnesota Secretary of State. Becky Vollmer, a spokesperson for ES&S, told The Rake that their machine prints out a paper audit when the election is over and stores ballot images in the computer’s memory. But voters have no way to verify that the image stored actually matches their vote.

    Diebold brags on their website that their technology has managed to “eliminate the need for paper ballots” — this despite a recent study by Johns Hopkins saying Diebold’s machines are rife with security flaws. And more than a few eyebrows went up when Diebold’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, wrote in a fundraising letter for the GOP that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

    ES&S has had its own share of scandals, especially when it was learned that Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel was a former chairman of the company that became ES&S. Eighty percent of the election results in Nebraska last year were calculated on ES&S machines, and Hagel won by a landslide. According to the electronic vote, he was the clear choice of every demographic group in the state and won in communities that decided to vote Republican for the first time in history.

    No one yet knows what Minnesota will use in future elections. With any luck, we’ll keep our paper ballots and use frequent hand recounts to keep our computers in line. It is discouraging, though, that no one seems to know who is responsible for testing the accuracy and security of the machines. They are certified at the state level, but who monitors last-minute patches and upgrades and vulnerabilities? Well, according to Kent Kaiser at the Secretary of State’s Office, “County by county, they test the machines before elections.” But Ramona Doebler, auditor treasurer for Sherburne County, has other ideas. “Security? That’s all handled through the Secretary of State.”—Katherine Glover

  • By Any Other Name

    A joke that starts off “a duck walks into a bar,” has good odds of being funny. Ducks are funny. A joke beginning “a water buffalo walks into a bar” just doesn’t have the same ring. But “a can of Spam walks into a bar”—now that’s hilarious. Spam’s one of the funniest things about Minnesota, next to ice fishing and the Third Avenue Bridge. So when a company that makes spam-blocking software tries to trademark the name “Spam Arrest,” and Hormel takes legal action, it’s funny. It’s funny on a gut level, in a way that it wouldn’t be if, say, unsolicited email had developed a nickname like “Chicken-in-a-Biscuit” or “Coke.” But is the case, now working its way through the legal system, actually something to laugh about? Or is Hormel just responsibly protecting its business interests?

    Preserving the trademark of a popular product takes hard work and dedication. If you don’t actively go after those who misuse your trademark, a court could declare it a generic term, and thus no longer eligible for a trademark. “Yo-yo” used to be a type of “return top,” but since the company that invented it unwisely marketed their product as “a yo-yo,” and not “a Yo-Yo® brand Return Top,” the word fell into common use and the company lost the trademark—and the name recognition that came with it.

    The brilliant Minnesota folks who invented in-line roller skates got it right. Rollerblade® has been successful in preserving its trademark. Style books for major newspapers and magazines now spell out that writers should use “in-line skating” in place of “rollerblading,” because a trademark cannot be a verb. Type “rollerblading” in a word-processing program with automatic spell-check, and you’ll get that jeering red underline that indicates the word isn’t supposed to exist. This is the result of hundreds of thousands of dollars Rollerblade spent on advertising to teach writers the correct way to use its trademark. Company spokesman Nick Skally expressed sympathy for Hormel’s predicament. “Can you imagine? I would not like to be in their shoes.”

    But is Spam really in the same situation as Rollerblade? Competitors in the meat industry are not claiming “Spam” has become a generic term; Armour, for example, calls its comparable offering “Potted Meat Food Product.” The chances of Hormel’s canned meat becoming confused with another are not high.

    A more salient and worrisome question might be this: Who in the wide networked world doesn’t call unwanted email “spam”? “Spam” translates to “spam” in German, French, and Norwegian. And in August of 1998, the word entered the Oxford English Dictionary for the first time, with the definition “irrelevant Internet messages sent to a large number of people.” Officially, Hormel says it does not object to use of “this slang term to describe unsolicited commercial email”—as long as it doesn’t appear in all caps like “Spam” does on its can.

    Does the dictionary status of “spam” lessen Hormel’s chances of blocking a trademark using the word for an unrelated product? In a personal, noncommercial, and solicited email to The Rake, Hormel representative Julie Craven responded by cleverly avoiding this and all other questions posed to her, instead stating, “We object to someone else trying to commercially exploit a brand we created and made famous.”

    New York patent lawyer Michael Brown remains skeptical of Hormel’s case. “I don’t see how Spam Arrest harms Hormel at all. I don’t think anyone receiving unsolicited email is going to immediately have a revulsion against luncheon meat. I mean, that they didn’t have before.”—Katherine Glover

  • May Day, May Day!

    Last year, President George W. Bush issued a proclamation designating May 1 as Loyalty Day. “Whether born on American soil or abroad, Americans appreciate patriotism and loyalty to our country,” he read from a prepared speech. “Americans affirmed this sense of loyalty for their homeland during and following the attacks of September 11, 2001.” As an example of our fealty, Bush’s speechwriters pointed out boldly that “Americans pledged to fight terrorism, both here and across the globe.”

    But Loyalty Day already existed. In the 1930s, the Veterans of Foreign Wars started staging patriotic demonstrations on May 1. They were trying to upstage another holiday—Communist Labor Day, which dated from the Russian Revolution in 1917. That Labor Day had its origins in the United States, and the effort to establish the eight-hour workday. The cap on full-time labor was legally established after nationwide strikes on May 1, 1886. Students of American history will remember that violent clashes in Chicago led to a May 4 demonstration in Haymarket Square. Someone threw a bomb, and labor leaders were hanged for it, including several who were not present at the time. In 1889, Paris socialists proclaimed May 1 International Labor Day to commemorate these events.

    May 1 is still celebrated as Labor Day in most countries, but not here. To thwart organized labor, Congress moved the holiday to an autumnal position between the patriotic holidays of July 4 and Thanksgiving, thus appeasing the working man while severing his ties to the international labor community. But unions continued to sponsor Labor Day parades in May, most notably in New York City, and governments were forced to find new strategies of co-option. In 1932, Pennsylvania created “Americanism Day,” which later combined with Loyalty Day and became federal law in 1958. Just to be sure, in 1961, May 1 was also codified as Law Day, to celebrate our laws and liberties (which President Bush also recognized in 2002, though in a separate proclamation, touting the few civil liberties our Attorney General had not yet abrogated.)

    And none of these modern holidays acknowledge May 1 as Beltane, Floralia, or any of the other licentious spring fertility festivals dating back to pagan Europe. These holidays have all but disappeared, much as May Labor Day was phased out in the 1950s and Loyalty Day went out of fashion during the Vietnam War—though of course May baskets and May poles have persisted.

    The spirit of all this conflicted tradition, however, is very much alive in Minneapolis. Sandy Spieler, Artistic Director at the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theater, said the legendary Minneapolis May Day parade in Powderhorn is about “the twining of two different roots: the red root, the blood of the People’s struggles; and the green root, the ancient, ancient root of the change-bringing of the earth to springtime.” In other words, the pagan and the proletariat elements of May Day live on in the parade’s frolicking nymphs doing battle with soot-faced corporate demons and warmongers.

    Meanwhile, the VFW will hold a parade and celebration at the Minnesota Veterans Home for the somewhat less historical Loyalty Day. In other cities, they are focusing on counteracting the anti-war sentiments they feel are over-represented in the media. But locally, Loyalty Day will be more a tribute of respect to elderly or disabled former soldiers—undoubtedly confusing those of us who already can’t keep Labor Day and Memorial Day straight.

    Jim Lahay, who runs the VFW building on Lake and Lyndale, said there’s no conflict between their event and the May Day parade. “It’s not the same day,” he explained. Loyalty Day is celebrated the Saturday before May 1, while the May Day parade usually falls the Sunday after. As to ideological differences, Lahay shrugged and said, “They do their thing, and we do ours.” Perhaps that is the true spirit of May Day. And, more and more, every other day of the year, too.—Katherine Glover

  • It Only Hurts When I Act

    Once upon a time, medical students learned from real people in actual hospitals, interviewing them about their all-too-genuine conditions. But thanks to the insurance-industry bean-counters, hospitals began discharging patients after shorter and shorter periods of time, and only the sickest hung around long enough for study. These patients could tolerate only so many repeated exams from a stream of medical students, and they began to suffer from the stress of having to answer the same tedious questions again and again.

    The University of Minnesota’s solution was the standardized patient program. Basically, it’s a theater that employs a small cast of actors—professional hypochondriacs. Rookies need only to play themselves and act natural, as medical students look into their eyes and ears and down their throats, check their reflexes, and walk through other non-intrusive aspects of a standard exam. No blood is drawn. “Patients” are invited by doctors and recruited by on-campus fliers. “They don’t need to have any particular problem,” said Josh Chapman, who was a paid patient before he was hired to coordinate the program for the U’s medical school. “But it’s nice if they have an enlarged liver from a drinking problem or they had a stroke twenty years ago and their reflexes aren’t quite normal.”

    Many standardized patients are people with disabilities who can’t work full-time jobs; others are retired. The average age is 50, but several U students work for the program, and one five-year-old employee gives medical students a chance for pediatric practice. Typically patients work for three hours a week. They’re often used in testing too, during which students go room to room and diagnose as many as 20 different patients with teachers grading them.

    Once standardized patients have some experience playing themselves, they begin to take on more challenging roles, dramatizing different scenarios that aspiring physicians are likely to encounter, such as a confrontational patient or a patient who’s tested positive for a terminal disease. Scripts are used, and the actors practice with staff before meeting with the students. “Ideally the patients act the same way for every student so they can be graded fairly,” explained Chapman. His office can’t afford professional, dues-paying actors, but he said the people they have do a good job.

    Evaluations suggest that the patients gain as much as the students do. “It’s almost therapeutic for some patients,” Chapman said. “They can talk to medical students and teach them how to interact with other people who have the same problem.” The continuing dialogue means that patients gain an understanding of doctors’ perspectives, and they feel less intimidated and more empowered to speak up and ask questions of their real doctors.
    So how much does hypochondria pay? Employees of the program start at $10 an hour, and work their way up to $15 for the more challenging starring roles. It’s not exactly Screen Actors Guild scale—but probably better than a similar program over at the U’s school of veterinary medicine.—Katherine Glover