Category: Article

We rarely think twice about a visit to this Uptown Tex-Mex haven, though it gets awfully loud inside on a busy Friday. So we took advantage of one of September’s last warm nights and grabbed a sidewalk table for some pre-Lagoon noshing. The vegetarian in our party was pleased but not thrilled with her potato pizza, declaring that the sausage was lacking in flavor. (She’s not, apparently, all that strict a vegetarian.) We split on the fajita question: the steak variety was declared bland, but the hickory chicken fajitas made us consider putting in a second order so we could have them again for lunch. The best dish of the night was the grilled chicken and wild rice burrito, with a delectable glaze of mango sauce and candied pecans. The menu’s also been recently augmented with some new pasta dishes and wood-roasted portobello mushroom fajitas. The drinks menu is anchored by a massive (even, er, Texas-sized?) selection of tequilas and margaritas. If you’re looking for something a little different, try the tart Prickly Pear, made with cactus juice. Bar Abilene, (612) 825-2525

We add our “megadittoes” to the chorus of praise heaped on this Loring Park restaurant since it opened this summer. Although it’s located in a graveyard of failed dining ventures (the unfortunately named “Snoodles” restaurant being only the most recent doomed enterprise), this Indian eatery has culinary chops to spare, and a pleasing atmosphere of hand-painted murals and hanging silks. Several recent visits to the obligatory lunch buffet revealed some unusual choices, including a clove-tinged egg curry, a seasonally-appropriate zucchini curry, a goat curry, and a vegetable curry flavored with white raisins. Also in evidence was the crepe-like Dosai, which Twin Cities diners have recently been introduced to at southern Indian restaurants like Udupi in Columbia Heights. In addition to the usual suspects of local Indian dining, the dinner menu includes other intriguing dishes like lobster vindaloo, an okra masala. and a coconut soup, which will insure many happy returns this fall. New Delhi, (612) 813-0000

Alas: the pitter-pat of shuffling feet on the stair that Martha Stewart hears each day when she awakes is not the stirring of guests invited for a festive country weekend; it’s the SEC closing in. Last month ImClone boss and “family friend” Sam Waksal (her daughter’s boyfriend, later her own) took his perp walk for the cameras on insider trading charges. A few days later the Wall Street Journal reported that the Feds had turned one of Stewart’s own pals, a woman who flew to Mexico with Martha on Stewart’s private jet the day her ImClone sale was executed.

Delicious, isn’t it? Martha summed up better than anyone the consumption side of the long 90s boom. And despite economically polarized times she figured out how to play both ends of the street. To the masses who bought up her branded Kmart merchandise, she peddled a vain and costly domestic fantasy; to the moneyed would-be gentry she offered a practical primer on the good life. It proved so lucrative in part because it tapped a market-driven article of faith rigorously foisted on fortunates and unfortunates alike in the 80s and 90s: There really is nothing you can’t buy if you’ve got the money—style, grace, dignity, domestic tranquility, you name it. At bottom, like all timeless hucksters, she was selling a sense of personal completeness and substance.

Turns out it was all pretend, right down to the paper fortune Stewart amassed during her day in the sun. So far her stock in her own company has dropped over $300 million in value, and she may be facing time in one of those minimum-security facilities whose décor she could do so much to enliven. All this over a smarmy little insider transaction that saved her about $200,000 in stock losses. If you aren’t gratified by what’s become of Martha Stewart, you just aren’t paying attention.

Don’t bet she’ll scrape by on the strength of her money and clout. If the order of the day is a few show trials to quiet public outrage, what prosecution could possibly be showier than Martha’s? One can already imagine the indictment, the subsequent death-plunge of MSO stock, even the eventual plea agreement, filed on the finest linen stationery with inlaid flowers pressed by Martha herself.

AFTER LAST MONTH’S column on Paul Wellstone’s silence concerning the business scandals, I got a testy email from a Wellstone staffer, larded with press release attachments that demonstrated the senator’s fierce and fearless leadership. Wellstone has spoken against corporate abuses on the Senate floor, I was informed, not once but twice—and, more impressive still, he spoke forcefully each time.

Naturally I felt mortified at my own hubris. Who was I to criticize Wellstone’s leadership just because I hadn’t heard a peep about it myself? Had I scoured the full menu of his press releases? Had I pored over member comments on the Senate floor? No. But in my own paltry way I did try. I looked at various news archives and Wellstone’s own Senate website. Before its content was frozen by election rules round about early July, it contained no word about corporate accountability that I could find, not even one of the press releases—each surely more forceful than the last!—that are the sine qua non of his leadership. All I can say is that I’m sorry, Paul, and in the future I’ll bear in mind that the mere fact of being invisible doesn’t make you any less a leader.

Now, in mid-August, Wellstone’s campaign website is screaming boardroom larceny front and center. Lovely. Better late than never, and better a little than nothing at all: That’s the central refrain of Wellstone’s Senate career and the only credible slogan on behalf of his re-election campaign. I’ll still vote for him if I vote at all, but I won’t venture out just to pull the lever for Paul. And in that I doubt I’m alone.

The other day I spoke with Bill Hillsman, the political ad consultant who played a vital role in electing Wellstone the first time. “I was thinking about some of the ads we just murdered Boschwitz with in 1990,” Hillsman smiled ruefully, “the print ads where we talked about his being in the Senate for 12 years and never getting anything done. And I thought to myself, good Lord, what would happen if someone did that same ad now with respect to Wellstone’s record? It would probably be no better, maybe in some cases worse.”

Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake. He can be reached at steve@rakemag.com.

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It would be nice to believe that a pajama party could be enough to ground airplanes. But we know now that silence in the skies comes at a terrible price. Last year, on a crisp blue-bird day, the planes stopped. The sky over Lake Harriet and Lake Nokomis was silent the way it hasn’t been in more than 50 years. The last contrails over the IDS tower became clouds and drifted away. It was eerie, of course, and when the planes started flying again a week later we wondered if we’d ever get comfortable with that horrible ripping sound. Was it the music of regular daily commerce, or the cacophony of some new, unspeakable horror? Or both?

We’re reluctant to dwell on this particular anniversary, because newspapers and magazines have been busy doing precisely that ever since it happened. A few weeks ago—on the 11-month anniversary of September 11, you know—the Star Tribune published a front-page, over-the-fold investigation with the astonishing news that no one is quite sure how to mark “the day we can’t forget.” Without self-consciousness the Strib wrung its hands in empty space. “When it comes to plans for commemorating the first anniversary of the attacks,” wrote puzzled reporter Deborah Caulfield Rybak, “the only thing that seems certain is the relative uncertainty about how to proceed.”

In uncertain times, the passage of time is our only certainty. It’s as if our new world disorder is a premature baby, its anniversaries measured in days, weeks, and months. Perhaps because we were so entrenched in a hollow form of journalism for so long—so little real news that our papers began to read like magazines and our magazines began to read like catalogs—we can forgive ourselves for the crisis coverage that really hasn’t let up in 12 months.

Still, no matter how much we are nagged by the popular press, most anniversaries mean nothing because they are as hollow as they are random. This month, for example, marks the 10th anniversary of the Mall of America’s opening. It’s not clear why we’re marking time out in Bloomington. True, the last resort of a slow news day is to look at the calendar and sift through the press releases for, say, the 50th anniversary of La-Z-Boy furniture, the centenary of Lindbergh’s birth, or the three-week mark of the Mayor’s Commission on Navelgazing. But there is something essentially wrongheaded about celebrating the Mall’s birthday—not because there’s anything wrong with the Mall. It’s just that the Mall is emphatically not about memory and meditation. We can’t even remember where we parked the car.

There are, of course, interesting points of comparison in these two anniversaries—and not just because we can pursuade ourselves that the Mall would make an attractive target. “Celebrating a decade of fun!” is a slogan not obviously connected to “Infidels Out of the Holy Land!” But we had better get used to these non sequiturs. We are more connected than we realize, to each other, to the world at large. Whether we believe that is less important than the simple fact that others do. This makes us both powerful and vulnerable—which is disconcerting indeed to the modest and self-reliant Minnesotan.

It’s good to remember: There is a place for fun in your life. But now we know there’s a place for terror, too. And if our only response is to count the passing hours, there isn’t much to look forward to except the day the clock stops.

Kati and Steve were standing at the foot of a fallen tree, its roots casting spiraled shadows onto the beach. Its trunk stretched a few yards out into the lake before disappearing under the surface. According to their global positioning system, the coordinates of the hidden treasure would put them 20 yards further into the water. Maybe the lake had risen. Maybe the cache was visible at first, but now they’d have to swim for it. They figured something had to be there, because it was registered at Geocaching.com, the official website of the world-wide, high-tech scavenger hunt called “geo-caching.”

The primary equipment for this new form of recreation is the GPS receiver, a digital navigation device which triangulates satellite signals to determine its exact location on Earth. Geo-cachers use the web to index their hidden treasures for each other. There are more than 400 caches in Minnesota, and dozens around the Twin Cities.

Kati said nearly all caches up in Ontario require hiking rough terrain and wading through marshes. Here in suburban Minneapolis, Steve took his shoes off and crawled onto the log, but he couldn’t find anything. On the way back he slipped and fell in the water. But as he was about to swing around the tree back to the beach in his wet jeans, he spotted the cache tangled in sprawling roots. It was a square Tupperware container bound in rubber bands, filled with cheap trinkets to take as souvenirs, plus a notebook and pen to record their successful trek. They left a plastic blue stone and took a small stuffed frog. A cryptic tag was attached to the frog with some kind of identifying number.

From the website, they learned that the frog’s name is “Dig ’Em,” and he is a “travel bug”—an itinerant little fellow that geo-cachers are supposed to move from cache to cache. Dig ’Em’s purpose is to see as many states as possible. Up to then, he had traveled 30 miles and been in three caches, all within the state of Minnesota. Now Dig ’Em was in luck. Steve and Kati were planning a trip out east, and they would have time for some geo-caching. Eventually they left him in a hollowed-out flashlight hidden in some bushes in Boston. Dig ’Em has now logged 1,153 miles. That’s impressive, but other older bugs have been through dozens of countries. As they circle the globe, their owners hope they eventually will return to their home cache.

The bulk of caches are hidden in Europe and North America, but they can be found in 134 countries including such exotic locations as Kenya, India, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil. The idea seems to be to lead people to places they wouldn’t otherwise see, places not typically highlighted on a tourist map. There are caches everywhere, frequently in the least likely places. On their trip east, Steve and Kati went geo-caching in Central Park, and their GPS led them to an isolated patch of trees and a mound roughly the shape of a human. When Kati approached, a swarm of flies flew up and buzzed angrily around her head. They gave up on that cache, deciding there is such a thing as too much adventure.

The curiosity in Father Hennepin Bluff Park, across the Stone Arch Bridge from downtown Minneapolis, is a gravesite. A shrine to a fallen friend. Tucked into the gutted remains of a stump, not far from a con-temporary bandshell, there is a flat headstone in the shape of a Superman crest. Thick, black magic-marker in an ornate hand declares, “Here lies my friend Harley, a 3 ft 6 in iguana from San Porterico.” The epitaph is a mystery in itself. There is no San Porterico. Perhaps the writer refers to San Juan, Puerto Rico. That place is lousy with iguanas. The critters scurry about like squirrels, eating tossed scraps, and amusing tourists. Along the Mississippi River bluffs of Minneapolis, however, iguana sightings are rare. While he was alive, Harley must have piqued the interest of passers-by. Indeed, according to the grave marker, “He made many friends in this park.”

Many have paid their respects. Harley’s memorial is decorated with an array of offerings and tchotchkes. There are colorful planted flowers, seashells, stones adorned with foil confetti, and a ceramic candleholder with an accretion of melted wax. Some of these gifts undoubtedly have come from people who knew Harley only through his owner’s affectionate tribute. It’s difficult to find someone who remembers the lizard alive.

“I would have liked to have seen it,” said King Dearing, who is often in the park between daytime classes and his shift at the nearby Metal-Matic steel tubing plant. Greg Blake, another frequent park visitor, never met Harley either. His first encounter with the legend came while using a nearby garbage can. “I was walking over to throw some trash away,” he said. “That’s when I noticed the memorial. It seems like every time I come down here, someone is adding something new to it.”

One day in early August, a particularly prominent addition appeared. A framed print of The Rescue Party, an oil painting by artist Arthur Elsley, was suddenly propped up inside the stump. Thanks to this two-foot wide backdrop — a Victorian-era painting of happy children playing with a Saint Bernard — almost no one can approach the site without at least a passing glance. Jackie Wallin recently paused with a coworker to discuss the alteration. She often checks out the memorial during lunch-hour walks. “I look to see if anyone’s added anything,” she said. “I think it’s nice that no one is destroying it.”

Credit city staff for that. Minneapolis Park Police officer Ron Giving described Harley’s owner—identified only as “Jerry” on the gravestone—as a “quasi-, semi-homeless” man. Early on, the memorial was “pretty elaborate,” Giving said. “It was starting to become a real showpiece.” Jerry and others added greenery, pictures, and other baubles on a regular basis. A park maintenance worker known to colleagues as “Mugs” helped rein in the effort. She convinced Jerry to remove some items, including jewelry and two hanging plants she recognized from a nearby Main Street restaurant. “I saw them there earlier in the morning,” Mugs recalled. “By lunch-time, they were on Harley’s shrine.”

Jerry used to hang around the park often, Mugs said. He was overtly friendly, and would readily leap onto the Cushman motorized cart of a maintenance worker he’d never met. He was devoted to keeping the grounds clean, sometimes hiding items in trees and crevices just to see if he could catch crews shirking their duties. Mugs heard about Harley the iguana’s death directly from Jerry, who liked to carry his pet on his shoulder as he rode his bicycle. One day near the park, Harley fell off and was run over by a car.

Yes, burying a pet in a Minneapolis park is illegal, and officer Giving doesn’t want Harley’s memorial to spur a rash of dog, cat, or horse graves on public property. But for the time being, “We’re not going to get bent out of shape,” he said.

The story doesn’t end with Harley’s death, however. More recently, on June 6, Jerry (actually Gerald J. Michnowski) got into a fight in the park. He took a blow to the abdomen from a baseball bat. The 47 year old bled internally and died at the scene. The man who fought with Michnowski was arrested but not charged with a crime. According to the “underground story from the homeless” that Mugs has heard, the altercation erupted during a session of drinking, after someone teased Jerry about Harley’s shrine.

If you doubt that the loss of a green, scaly creature could elicit such intense emotion, ask the folks over at Twin Cities Reptiles in St. Paul, where customers can buy lizard leashes, mango-scented calcium spray, and additives to make dry food smell like a live rodent. The store also sells several species of iguana. Employee Jeff Arndt is more inclined to steer people toward leopard geckos and bearded dragons, which don’t grow so large and are less liable to cause problems. But co-worker Jenna Szabo notes that iguanas can be appealing.“If you hold them a lot and give them a lot of attention, they can make really good pets,” Szabo said. “If you ignore them, they can turn out to be mean.”

In about a week, Macalester College will open another football season with a match against Beloit College. Macalester’s club has averaged about one win per year since 1989. The team won just one game last year, had three winless seasons in the 90s, and ended last season with only 29 players. (Most of Mac’s competitors field teams of 80 to 100 players.) While Macalester had four winning seasons in the 1980s, it also held the NCAA record for the longest losing streak: 50 losses in a row from 1974 to 1980.

Because of that record, the school nearly eliminated the football program last year. But a reprieve has been granted. This year, the team will drop out of the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and play against smaller teams for the next few seasons. The plan is a model of simplicity: to win more than it loses, find more exceptional students who also happen to be football players, and then return to the MIAC when the program is stronger.

Coach Dennis Czech played on the celebrated Mac squad that finally snapped the 50-game losing streak. Proving the proposition that if you work hard and become the best at anything—even losing—you can be on TV, that team was briefly the darling of the national media. “We got interviewed by Jim Lampley. We were on Wide World of Sports, the whole thing,” he said the other day. “The losing streak was really a draw. It’s the same pitch we use today.” In other words, prospective students can be part of a Cinderella story—play college football and help establish a winning tradition at Mac. It’s an odd pitch, to be sure. Since Macalester has no athletic scholarships to offer, and since they look primarily at a student’s academic record, all they can credibly promise students is a real opportunity to play.

Clark Wohlferd is one of four co-captains. He is a political science and history major with a 3.78 GPA who is planning to go to law school. While he wasn’t running drills and lifting weights, he interned for two summers in the office of the Wisconsin governor. Before settling on Mac, Wohlferd had walk-on invitations and scholarship offers from several larger schools. He comes from Sun Prairie, a powerful football school near Madison, Wisconsin, where he lost only four games in four years. The Sun Prairie Cardinals were the number one team in Wisconsin his senior year, but they were upset in the state tournament quarterfinals. “I don’t like talking about that. It was a depressing time,” he said.

So how do Mac gridders react to losing so much? Like athletes everywhere, they practice a rigorous form of denial. “Our team goals are to go undefeated,” Wohlferd said decisively. The student in him, however, was more circumspect. “We will not accept planning ahead to lose. We’ll see what happens.”

Paul is an affable retired orthodontist who, between firing rounds from his .45, is conscientious enough to sweep up the spent shell casings that have accumulated around his lane at Bill’s Gun Range in Robbinsdale. Two lanes down, a couple of bumbling boys just out of their teens, “first-time shooters,” as Paul describes them affectionately, have been inquiring of his expertise. “Should we shoot with one hand or both?”

“Uh, most people shoot with two,” Paul answers with minimal concern. One of the boys points the gun downrange, at a portrait of Osama bin Laden. Paul watches as he misses the target almost entirely and asks, “Mind if I shoot his eyes out?” The boy agrees and Paul, in an impressive display of marksmanship, takes out bin Laden’s eyes from 21 feet away.

Bill’s Gun Range is located in a strip mall, sharing the building with the Institute for Athletic Medicine and a U.S. Bank branch. Customers arrive in a barren fluorescent lobby with matted carpet, vending machines, and a television tuned to KTCA. A row of windows faces 16 shooting lanes, and the muffled sound of gunshots thumps beneath the conversation. Victoria, a tough-talking blonde in her mid-40s, presides, exercising an authority that tends to correct even the slightest deviation from what she terms “my range rules.” When I ask her if there are ever problems between shooters, she just smiles. “Lots of guns here, so everybody kind of behaves.”

Bill Penney, the 73-year-old owner and patriarch of the range, breaks down “everybody” as follows: gang members (“We make them toe the mark. If their pupils are wide, we send them home”), “Let’s-have-a-blast” customers (“First-timers trying to impress their dates with big guns”), dedicated shooters (“Guys who join leagues”), private security officers (“We set up accounts with companies for training”), bounty hunters (“One guy looks like Joe Pesci”), police officers, hunters, and those simply interested in self-defense.

Penney himself does not fit into any of his own categories. He is a retired Ph.D. chemical engineer with an impressive portfolio of patents. He enjoys target shooting and some hunting, but actually owns “few guns” personally. Same for Victoria, who claims to be “the oddity around here” because she only owns two guns and self-identifies as “just a mom who loves her job.”

Though Penney won’t divulge his profitability, he concedes that he runs “a good business.” It sure seems lucrative: Lane fees are $20 for a single shooter, $30 for a pair; gun rentals start at $15; traditional targets, as well as those with pictures of bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, are available for $2; ammunition starts at $5 for a box of 50 bullets. And the range sells lots of bullets. “Last year,” Penney tells me, “we recycled about twenty tons of lead.”

It’s mid-afternoon when I ask a young and affluent-looking couple if they’d be willing to talk to me. They happily oblige on the condition that they not have to divulge their names. I learn that they live on Lake of the Isles, that she’s “in marketing,” and that he’s a former musician and current photographer. A native of Kentucky, he did some sport-shooting in his youth and still enjoys indulging the interest on occasion. Today’s occasion is an antique .44 Auto Mag that he “spent a fortune” buying at a gun auction. “It’s never been fired,” he announces, and after several furtive attempts, it stays that way. The couple has more success with a .380 automatic that she self-consciously describes as having “nice lines.”

While chatting we are interrupted by a massive blast that resonates painfully through my ear protection (ear muffs allow conversational frequencies while excluding most “high-decibel events”). Everyone turns to lane seven where a middle-aged man has just fired something with a nine-and-a-half-inch barrel. I approach carefully.

“Four-eighty Ruger,” he announces before firing five rounds at yet another photo of Osama bin Laden. When I ask what he does for a living, he laughs. “Oh, I run a detox center.”

A few minutes later Paul is taking aim at his own targets when he notices a young black kid in warm-up pants, a black T-shirt, and an Oakland Raiders cap, misfiring his Glock. Paul strolls over to the younger man who, under ordinary circumstances, would be unlikely to take an interest in a 60-ish white man who used to straighten teeth in the Sons of Norway building. But the younger man seems to recognize a valuable level of expertise in the older man, and he pays careful attention as Paul demonstrates proper aiming technique. “I like to help out,” Paul tells me later, as he relaxes in the lobby with a cigar. I look out on the range and see that the younger man has benefited from the tutorial: his shots have become much more accurate. “That’s just part of the fun of coming down here,” says Paul.

“When I was 22 years old I was an actor, and I met a playwright who suggested that I write a play and submit it for a Jerome Fellowship. I got the fellowship, so I decided that I’d become a writer, which was really good because I wasn’t a very good actor. But it wasn’t until 1997, when I wrote a play called Molly’s Delicious, that I really started to have a career. In between I did all kinds of crazy things. I worked in a fish store; I worked at a hotel development company; I was a fund-raiser for a camp for children with AIDS; and I was a minister. All of those things helped me as a writer, because you have to be out in the world doing something. You can’t just sit and write, or else you get real solipsistic real quick. How I’ll manage to continue that process out in L.A. I’m not sure, but I’ll have to be doing more than just writing.

“I’m going to be one of the writers for Six Feet Under on HBO. The job came about because I wrote a play called Orange Flower Water. The Jungle Theater staged it in July, and my agent told me that if I wanted to get movie or TV work, I could use that play as a work sample. The executive producer for Six Feet Under liked me and passed the script on to Alan Ball, the creator of the show. Then they flew me out for a second interview, and gave me the job. They’ve got me watching tapes of the show now. I’m slightly daunted, but just enough that it’s healthy.

“I’m going to miss living in Minneapolis. I’m going to miss Al’s. I’m going to miss the snow. And my friends. And the Jungle Theater. But I’ve written a lot of plays recently, and over the next twelve months I’ll have four world premieres. That’s enough plays. It’ll be fun to take a break and work in a different medium, and I think Six Feet Under is definitely a matrix in which I can operate successfully. It deals with mortality and spirituality, and not in a heavy-handed way. That’s something I try to do with my work as well. Writing for television means you don’t have to make the whole universe up every time. It already exists and you just have to work within it, which is a relief. Also you work with a team of people. Even though I’ll write my own episodes, other people will work on them too. It’ll be a great relief from writing plays, because it’s not all up to me. The fact that I didn’t create all of the characters is definitely going to be part of the challenge. But it’s also part of what makes it pleasant. It’s like mimicry.

“If you want to be a writer, stick with it. A lot of it is just attrition. If you just stick around long enough, and if you don’t totally suck, then you can probably make a career out of it. Even if you suck every now and then, you can still have a career. I hate all those people who get on NPR’s Fresh Air and say, ‘You have to write every day. A writer writes.’ I just don’t believe that. You should write when you want to, write when you have to. The rest of the time you should do interesting things with your life.”

—In conversation with Chuck Terhark

“You can smell the underwear,” said textile curator Linda McShannock as she opened the door to the nation’s largest museum collection of panties, girdles, brassieres, and other unmentionables. We were two stories underground, deep in the heart of the Minnesota Historical Society, where the real rubber waistbands are slowly disintegrating. More than 3,500 historically significant undergarments are carefully stored in this high-security vault. The temperature is a constant 65 degrees, and sodium vapor light insures that no ultraviolet rays will damage these priceless pieces. Bust pads, boxers, petticoats, corset covers, and of course, hoops and tournures for that 19th-century wide-load look—they are all stored in these lockers, which are funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities. Of the Historical Society’s 40,000 square feet of storage, a substantial portion is taken up by underpants. The collection is not currently open to the public, but next summer it will replace the “Up North” display for the letter U in the permanent “Minnesota A to Z” exhibit.

“Munsingwear was as visible in Minneapolis as milling,” said McShannock, by way of explanation. If not for the booming flour business, our city might have been known as the underwear capital of the world. When Munsingwear downsized and moved out of state in 1979, the motherlode of museum collections was bestowed upon the MHS.

“It’s my favorite subject,” confessed McShannock. After getting a degree from the University of Minnesota in fashion merchandising, she volunteered at the MHS and spent months cataloging 900 bras and girdles—a mere fraction of the Munsingwear collection. She dated them, photographed them, wrote descriptions, and put it all in a searchable database. Her meticulous work is now used by underwear researchers across the country.

McShannock opened one drawer to show a masochistic corset stiffened with whale bone, and she pointed out how women were literally constrained by underwear. Put under too much pressure, these bones could splinter with painful results, at least until steel-reinforced corsets were developed. Enter underwear revolutionary Amelia Jenks Bloomer who pushed for female freedom in the 1850s. (Her famous “bloomers” are not to be confused with knock-offs like knickers—short for “knickerbockers,” or copycat “scimp scamp” underpants.) The mutiny against the petticoat and other vagaries seemed unstoppable in the 1870s.

Some of these innovations left skeptics sour. Gustav Jaeger ranted that “only animal fibres prevented the retention of the ‘noxious exhalations’ of the body, retained the salutary emanations of the body which induce a sense of vigour and sound health and ensured warmth and ventilation.” In other words, Jaeger was arguing for wool. George D. Munsing, on the other hand, saw an opening. By plating silk over wool, the silkiness of the garment touched the skin, while the garment retained its woolen warmth. Munsing’s famous “itchless underwear” was all the rage and helped keep to a minimum the embarrassing scratching incidents.

Minneapolis was a special challenge, of course, since warm underwear meant the difference between life and death in the frigid winter. Munsing saw real opportunity for a volume business, and he marketed his famous scarlet union suit in the 1890s. By 1917, Munsingwear produced 30,000 undergarments a day, and one-tenth of the nation’s union suits. The company did more than just free women from the confines of corsets. During the 1920s, it was the largest employer of women in Minneapolis and the largest underwear producer in the country. To celebrate their success and show their patriotic fervor after V-Day, Munsingwear even produced a prototype American flag bra and girdle in 1946—a racy treasure that is jealously guarded by McShannock.