Author: rakemag

The Hunky Dory resort sits atop a small knoll overlooking Lake Clare, in Balsam Lake, Wisconsin. It’s changed little since 1902, when it first operated as a working farm called the Hunky Dory Farm Resort. Brochures advertising the place look exactly the same as they did in the 60s. Nor have the kooky cabin names been updated: “Rest a While,” “BonEcho,” and the favorite “Kozy Knook.”

Matriarch Marvel Nielsen runs the resort with her daughters, Marly, Julie, Lori, and Joy, and an assortment of grandchildren and in-laws. Her husband Al died in ’88, leaving the silver-haired and aptly named Marvel to command this tight ship. While similar hand-hewn Midwestern resorts have gone under, Marvel says Hunky Dory remains vital due to her family’s home cooking. “What brings them back are the good swimming and the food,” she said of her guests. “You don’t have to have a fancy place, just have it clean. Cook good food and you’ll have a full house.”

“When I first married Al in ’55,” recalled Marvel, “there was a full-time cook here, and I only cooked one day a week. She died in ’84 and I’ve been cooking ever since.” Growing up in North Dakota, she learned to fry and bake from her mother, who perfected the art in order to feed and inspire the farmhands.

For ten weeks in summer, three square meals are served each day. All are made from scratch. “We don’t use anything from a box, no microwaves here,” Marvel said, carrying a bowl of flour-dusted chicken to a stove. Her two Vulcans, a six-burner oven and a grill oven, are vintage 50s, and they’ve typically got chicken frying on their stovetops, hams and turkeys in their ovens.

The day for Marvel and family begins at 6:00 a.m. They’re in the kitchen by 6:30, when they turn on the grill, brew coffee, mix pancake batter, and fry bacon. Breakfast is served at 7:30. When the lodge bell rings, as it does three times each day, guests come running or walking at a brisk pace.

It’s difficult to reserve a Hunky Dory cabin. Some of those guests are from families that have been coming to Hunky Dory for four generations; many have never missed a year. “Mom has a running list of people in her head who say ‘If someone cancels, call me up,’ ” said daughter Julie Grimsley. Otherwise, tough luck. There’s a great deal of jockeying for position, behind-the-scene intrigue over who gets which cabin, or which families may be forfeiting their cabin.

My three brothers, now with their wives and children, have been Hunky Dory regulars for years. Each July, they succumb to the lake’s velveteen waters, which have the ability to soften hair, skin, and soul. The affinity for the resort runs deep. When we were kids, our family didn’t stay at a Hunky Dory cabin; we used to rent an old hunting shack across the lake. From there we’d row over to Hunky Dory to get gas for the boat. On hot nights, there would be ice cream, and back then there were horses for rent, too. And when my mother, exhausted by bats, ticks, and children, had had enough of life in the woods, my father would treat us all to Marvel Nielsen’s famous fried-chicken dinner.

A few weeks ago, on a stifling Sunday morning, I watched the fried-chicken ritual that’s taken place every week since 1902. As soon as breakfast was finished at 9:00, Marvel and her daughters began working on the lunch. “I don’t want to know how hot it is, that’s why there’s no thermometer in here,” explained Marvel, tending four cast-iron skillets filled with chicken pieces that spat grease into the air.

Typically, the system works like this: Marly flours the chicken, Julie cuts and cleans it, and Lori oversees the baking-powder-biscuit operation. But on this day, Julie shouted across the kitchen, “Mom, I think I’m going to start the biscuits.” She’d taken over for Lori, who was in the Twin Cities that day. But Lori later called her sister. She was so worried about the biscuit-making that she hopped in the car and drove the two hours back to Hunky Dory.

It’s that kind of commitment, to the rituals of cooking, and the rituals of summer, that is vanishing. I’ve watched helplessly as the fixtures of my childhood from the 50s and 60s have been sold off and remade by big-box retailers. But Hunky Dory remains suspended in time, a little like an insect in amber. Still, Marvel can’t cook and work forever; like me, she worries about Hunky Dory’s future. “It’s not easy to answer,” she said, when asked about it. “This is 2006, and people automatically sign up for 2007; they don’t question it.” She knows that someday it will have to end. “And I’ll know when it will have to end.”

“But,” she added, “the lake will still be here.”

So will Marvel’s daughters, and in-laws, and grandchildren who want to protect Hunky Dory’s legacy. And the generations of families willing to fight for a week in the run-down “Kozy Knook.”

Cathy Madison’s “We went crazy for a decade” [July] was a truly pleasurable trip down memory lane—a guilty pleasure, at that, recalling for me the days of fashionable poverty and gallery internships. I spent my student loan money on trips to Chicago and New York, bounced back and forth between the U’s fine arts department and MCAD, and generally frittered away my time surfing the already-waning synergy of the late-80s and early-90s art scene.

Probably to conserve length, Madison blurs the distinctions between what was and is the commercial gallery sector versus the huge number of non-profits: a spectrum shift seen over the past twenty years that has real bearing on the future of the Twin Cities art scene. A respected and established framer and exhibition designer in the Northrup King complex recently made his feelings plain: Non-profit galleries don’t exist to make a living for their artists, and they’re ruining the art market. They sponge up grant funds while cultivating “presence,” making stars primarily of their founders, and keeping local prices artificially low. I’ve worked for WARM, for No Name Gallery in its day, and for more contemporary “art centers” as well as having been a for-profit dealer. Commercial galleries still struggle to survive in a pinched urban market, competing with art centers while the cash is increasingly concentrated in the Republican suburbs (a desert of flat-screen TVs, fund raisers and NIMBYism). Local and national foundations have bounced back since September 11th, and the urban non-profit art centers vie hungrily for their attentions, with curatorial efforts increasingly built around “fundable projects.”

At the same time, a top-down ethical hollowness that mirrors the corporate culture of our times results in margin over mission: non-profit organizations that are opposite to the “of, by, and for” alternative art spaces we used to enjoy. The Soap Factory is the lone exception. Artists, bottom line, are still very much on their own in this town. While Madison ends her tour on a hopeful note, I tend to side with Scott Seekins (minus his fondness for fishing): Between the anti-intellectual penury of the suburbs and a city saturated with non-profit art sponges, this town cannot nurture a viable market for most visual artists.

I was glad to see Cathy Madison’s “look back at a gritty underappreciated decade” of the Minneapolis art scene in the 80s. I’m pleased that she acknowledged that the “first-gallery bragging rights went to the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota,” WARM Gallery, as it was then known. I was disappointed that the rest of the article didn’t mention any of the women artists who were very visible and active during that time. I would like to invite Cathy Madison to see what was happening at WARM in that lively decade by going to see the current exhibition at the Weisman Art Museum—WARM: 12 Artists of the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota. [Editor’s note: the exhibition runs through September 17.]

Thanks for the great revisit of the art scene in 1980s. At first I thought it was just another nostalgic article, but it got better as I read through it. Then I remembered that someone (Churchill?) once said something about studying history. If we don’t know our history, we are destined to repeat it. (That’s what I remember of the quote.) So that got me to thinking a bit more.

A couple of things popped into my head. First, what happened to the women artists from WARM gallery? Several male artists were mentioned by name in that article. So, did the women die? Are they still around here? Who are they? Second, are we learning from history? Does anyone realize why it is important to have artists? What specific things about an artist’s lifetime of work makes her art important? Does anyone have a larger answer beyond obtaining grants and selling to General Mills? I do appreciate that you once again covered the 1980s. There are so many twentysomethings who don’t know how hard the artists from that era worked to get attention for the arts.

Having lived through and worked through the era, I appreciated Cathy Madison’s “We went crazy for a decade” and would have liked to have seen specific reference made to Butler Square. As a designer I officed there during the late 1970s into the early 1980s and the place uniquely reflected an aesthetic hybrid bridging the creative/artistic and “yuppie” sensibilities that Madison writes about as separate sensibilities.

Although not typically considered a “fine art,” I would have also appreciated more elaboration about or reference to the then-emerging Twin Cities graphic design scene. Also of note: As a writer and editor (Format, the Advertising Federation of Minnesota’s magazine) Cathy Madison’s role in shaping this era and communicating about it is also memorable and significant.
Thanks for publishing her piece. It brought back, even if for a few pages, a unique era in the Twin Cities creative community for those familiar with—as well as for those unaware of—this history.

Rake columnist Clinton Collins states that I failed to answer a young law student that queried me about legacy admissions at elite universities [Free the Jackson Five, July]. In all fairness to Collins, there was quite a bit of cross talking during the discussion he recounted, so it is possible that he did not hear my response.

It is an odd game of absolutism Collins plays. He takes the position that all forms of discrimination are equal and that any preference given is therefore equally pernicious. Reason suggests this is untrue. Our society has rightly decided that among the varying and unequal forms of discrimination, racial discrimination is particularly abhorrent. As a result our laws prohibit such discrimination. There is, alas, no such law barring the practice of colleges admitting the children of alumni.

Further, the academic qualifications of legacy students generally match those of non-legacy applicants. At Harvard, Collins’ alma mater, the average SAT score of legacy students is just two points below the school’s overall average. Middle-class black students, on the other hand, score a combined two hundred points below their white and Asian peers on college admissions tests.

So Collins’ contention that the issue of preferences is not a question of brainpower is also wrong. It is precisely the question: Can black students compete academically with their white and Asian counterparts? Dear as my friend is, he and other race-preference supporters advocate a system that screams “black academic and intellectual inferiority.”

Collins also asserts that we need racial preferences so long as there is any hint of race prejudice in the world. Collins, however, is not a latter-day Coalhouse Walker and current affirmative action policies haven’t a thing to do with race prejudice; they are instead an effort to orchestrate diversity. Black students are not being denied entrance to universities due to race. Universities are bending over backward to enroll black students. Finding a paucity of eligible black students, they must lower standards in order to get a critical mass of black students on their university campuses. “Critical mass” is what the Supreme Court defined in Grutter v. Bollinger as “enough minority students to provide adequate opportunities for the kind of interaction upon which the educational benefits of diversity depend … ”

Rather than address the lack of competitiveness among black students during the discussion, Collins offered politically correct phrases like: “Not lowered standards; different standards.” What remains unclear is this: Where there is no evidence of racial discrimination in admissions, and if there is no shortage of brainpower, why must our students be evaluated using different standards?

Black youngsters achieve excellence in athletics, dance, and music through practice, dedication, and the high expectations of their family and peers. Shouldn’t we demand a similar dedication and hold equally high standards when it comes to academics? If I became frosty during the discussion, it is because I am admittedly angry that we can so effortlessly embrace the notion that black inferiority is perpetual and that our academic success is impossible without help. The one thing Collins got right is that both of us were raised to know better.