Category: Letter

Randee Laskewitz writes: Here I am with my friend Sally Cleland, enjoying one of the last balmy days at Pelican Lake near Nisswa. MN. It was “some juicy tidbit” we were sharing.

Nancy Spannaus writes: I’ve attached a shot of Glory Kibbel and myself at the Matterhorn on a late September/early October trip to Zermatt, Switzerland. We waited anxiously
for 3 days for a clear day and unclouded view of the Matterhorn. On the
third morning, we opened our hotel room drapes to this view. Truly a breath
taking sight! The photo was taken of us on the hotel room balcony, with
camera on a tripod in our room, and using the camera’s self-timer mechanism.

Dan, of Edina, writes: I thought you would be interested to know they are still reading your subversive rag in St. Petersburg, Russia. This picture is of Dan and Amy Steinhagen and 8 year old Thor Sheinhagen at the Peterhof Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Adam Minter writes: Funny thing happened this morning while I was at the pirate DVD shop beneath my apartment building in Shanghai: I met some people from Minnesota (accents gave it away pretty quick) who had a copy of The Rake with them. So I ran back upstairs, grabbed my camera, and snapped a couple of photos. Left to right, they are Dick and Sally Clayton of Forest Lake, and Barb and George Klosinski of Northfield. They’re on a two-week tour of China, including Beijing, Shanghai, and a Three Gorges cruise. When they’re not busy eating dumplings or shopping in Shanghai’s finest pirate DVD shops, they’re reading The Rake.

It’s nice to read about the area you live in–makes it feel kind of glamorous, so I really enjoyed reading the article about the Midway [Sweet Spot, November]. It pretty much all rang true with me, from the eclectic mix of people and shops to the strongly represented blue-collar vibe. Just one thing was missing: The constant death threat to pedestrians that hovers over the area. Yes, a lot of people do walk in Midway, but actually it’s a miracle they do. Most motorists try very hard to ignore them, and I can’t even tell you how often I’ve almost been hit trying to cross the street with my kids at the intersection of Snelling and University avenues, when we had the green light. It’s a shame that an area that does have a lot of places to walk to is so unfriendly to people that actually do walk.

Kordula Coleman
St. Paul

Although I can’t speak to forestry practices cited in Frank Erickson’s letter, “Forests in Turmoil,” [Letters, November] I can tell you that newspaper publishers respond to their customer base. More national publishers are asking for “greener” paper. If you want more recycled content, ask them to use it or to increase the percentage of post-consumer content. The Star Tribune uses an average of 40 percent post-consumer recycled content and the Pioneer Press uses roughly 25 percent. Many local papers use less, and they should hear from readers. One Ontario supplier of newsprint (Bowater in Thunder Bay) for Minnesota is ISO 14001 certified, which means that it complies with the highest environmental standards, and they use a lot of Minnesota’s old newspaper, magazines, and catalogs to make your newspaper. A Duluth mill (Stora Enso) makes recycled pulp used in many newspaper inserts and is also ISO 14001 certified.

Paul Gardner, St. Paul
Executive Director Recycling Association of Minnesota

Regarding “Our Controlling Nature,” [Good Intentions, October]: In September 1868, the Eastman Tunnel collapsed and the falls were about to give away. This was due to human and commercial development at the time and had nothing to do with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In fact, the Corps’ St. Paul District, then only three years old, had to lobby Congress to be allowed to help save the falls. At the time, this was not within the Corps’ authority. In the years between 1871 and 1874, the Corps’ St. Paul District, mill owners, and private citizens labored continuously at the falls to avert one crisis after another. The Corps ended up building a dike to preserve this natural wonder. This dike is in place still today and is currently keeping the falls in place.

Shannon Bauer
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers St. Paul District

Brian Lambert is not my political cup of tea. Having said this, his article “Newspapers in Turmoil” [October] was a finely crafted insight into the corporate culture of our mainstream media (MSM). As a critic of MSM myself, I have watched the downward spiral of news delivery over the years with shock and awe. Lambert draws the same conclusions as I–but for different reasons. He claims boardroom weasels, along with unfounded claims of media bias, have torpedoed the business of news writing and commentary. I contend that it is the journalists themselves who have sealed their own fate. Where Lambert seems to miss the point is when he implies “media bias” is an invention of the Right. As long as he believes MSM critics are fueled by bile, he misses the larger point: There is a media bias. It is profound, it is tilted dangerously to the left and it is an institutional, intractable, and lethal bias precisely because it is considered only to exist in the minds of uninformed conservative Christian idealogues. It doesn’t.
Lambert rightly blames corporate suits for the demise of the newsroom. His analysis is convincing, well-documented, and provocative. That he does not see a very real MSM bias as an equal co-conspirator in that demise is symptomatic of the very disease he claims is exaggerated. All in all, though, it was an excellent treatment of a story no journalist could address while in the employ of MSM. Kudos to The Rake for pointing a finger at a cultural phenomenon which has yet to play itself out. I look forward to more of Mr. Lambert’s insightful commentary. I also look forward to not agreeing with all of it which is the essence of the very journalism the MSM have sadly tossed overboard in their cowardice and myopia.

Jerry Lindberg, Crystal

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In the first display at the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame in downtown St. Louis, a caveman mannequin with an oversized cranium and pronounced underbite grasps a huge stone. Underneath, a card explains: “THE BEGINNING OF BOWLING. Is this how bowling began, with a stone-age hunter tossing a rock at a formation of bones? No one is sure.”

That uncertainty has never stopped bowling historians from concocting imaginative theories for the apparently hardwired human need to bowl. In Bowling, author Carol Schunk offers one such unique hypothesis: “The Romans did much of their fighting in hilly areas, so one of their tactical maneuvers was to roll rocks down a pass to attract or bowl over their oncoming enemy. The soldiers practiced to develop skill in this tactic and before long began to ‘play’ this game for fun.”

Mark Vesley, who holds a Ph.D. in Roman life from the University of Minnesota, disagrees with this theory. “The story about bowling coming from Romans dropping rocks on Christians for sport is an antique urban legend,” Vesley says. “Sure, they’d roll or drop boulders on enemies during wartime … but similarity doesn’t prove derivation.”

Joe Falcaro counters the Hall of Fame’s version of the sport’s Fred Flintstone-style evolution with a bit of creationist theory (bowling as gift from God) in Bowling for All: “Some historians even ponder on the possibility that the boys in the Garden of Eden used to throw giant pebbles at a lineup of pointed stones.”

A stroll through the museum reveals additional evidence of bowling as a bounty of divine benevolence. A British holy man named Winfrid, it is claimed, exported the game to Germany while converting the Saxon tribes to Christianity around 700 A.D. Winfrid sanctified bowling by proclaiming that the kegel, or pin, was actually the heide, or devil. With each pin knocked over, a blow was said to be delivered against evil and another victory chalked up for Christ. The pagans struck back, however, by bludgeoning the poor priest as he confirmed a new batch of converts, which resulted in Winfrid’s canonization (as Saint Boniface) and his position as the de facto Patron Saint of Bowling.

The Grimm Brothers took time off from writing their fairytales to challenge Winfred’s status as the man who introduced bowling to the Germans. The Grimms claimed that early Teutonic tribes bowled in Deutschland long before the Brits. German keglers, or bowlers, in fact, would stake their livestock on the outcome of a single game. In an attempt to eradicate this sort of gambling the government in Frankfurt banned bowling in the 1440s. When, in 1468, angry keglers took to the streets in the world’s first populist bowling strike, the politicians relented and reopened the lanes.

The early obsession with bowling eventually gave the sport a bad reputation. Soon even Satan was being depicted as a bowler. While Christians believed they were knocking over the devil with each roll, medieval drawings showed Lucifer striking back by bowling a human skull to shatter Christ’s cross. The eye sockets and single nose hole provided a nice three-holed ball similar to modern designs.

In medieval times, a myth was circulated that if an innocent man was condemned to death, the sentencing judge was doomed to spend his afterlife bowling with the victims’ severed heads. Thus, a man of the cloth who did not follow Christ’s example would spend eternity bowling.

Just as Martin Luther attempted to address what he saw as the failings of the Christian church by nailing his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church, so did he preside over bowling’s reformation in the sixteenth century. Luther established the rules for the sport and declared that exactly nine pins should be used in a proper game. He also indulged himself with a private alley.

Sir Francis Drake, another early proponent of the game, was said to become hugely irritated when interrupted while bowling. In the summer of 1588, after sailing around the world, Drake was confronted by a frantic messenger announcing the impending arrival of Spain’s “Invincible Armada” intent on avenging Drake’s plundering of Spanish settlements in the New World. As the story goes, Drake calmed the anxious messenger with classic British sangfroid before continuing—and winning—his final frames. This undoubtedly inspired him to rout the conquistadors at the Battle of Gravelines.

In 1626, a Dutch governor named Peter Minuit bought a lush island at the mouth of the Hudson River from the local Indians for approximately twenty-four dollars’ worth of beads and cloth, and shortly thereafter set up a bowling green on the southern tip of the island, which at the time was known as New Amsterdam.

Envious of this Dutch paradise, King Charles II of England gave his brother James, the Duke of York, all of New Netherland, including America’s first bowling green. Faced with British warships, the Dutch colonists capitulated and surrendered their beloved bowling lawn. The victors promptly rewrote bowling history to give earlier explorer—and Englishman—Henry Hudson credit for introducing nine-pin skittle bowling to New York.

A large area of the Hall of Fame is dedicated to modern bowling media, but noticeably missing are any references to the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL), Camper Van Beethoven’s classic hit “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” the annual Punk Rock Bowling Tournament in Las Vegas, Bowling for Columbine, or the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski. Curator Jim Baltz steered me to the museum’s library—a storage locker with hundreds of bowling magazines—where visitors can research bowling history for forty dollars an hour (a rate that inexplicably doubles to eighty dollars if you spend more than eight hours). Instead, I opted for a photo of the bowling pin car in the basement and the opportunity to roll a few lines on either the renovated classic lanes, which still require human pin setters, or the museum’s ultramodern lanes, featuring the latest pin-setting technology.

The International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame may seem to overstate the importance of this humble game, but signs remind visitors that bowling is the largest participatory sport in the world. According to the American Bowling Congress, more Americans bowl than vote; an estimated ninety-one million Americans bowled in 1998 compared to the paltry seventy-three million who voted in congressional elections that year.—Eric Dregni