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  • The Big Blow of 1913

    November is readily acknowledged as the stormiest month on the Great Lakes. Each year around the beginning of this steely month, over the largest bodies of fresh water in the world, two storm tracks converge. From the north bear down the Alberta Clippers, full of freezing polar air. From the lee slopes of the Rockies and across the prairie come the heavy, snow-laden fronts. When the storms hit the lakes, the cold air masses pass over waters that are still holding remnants of their summer warmth. The barometric pressure can plummet and the winds can whip up to hurricane force. Waves will build to over forty feet, and the sky is filled with rain, snow, and sleet.

    The measure of November storms is still the “Big Blow” of 1913. For four days, it engulfed all five of the Great Lakes, blasting in from the northwest as both gale and blizzard. On Superior, the Henry B. Smith disappeared off Marquette with all twenty-five hands. That wreck has never been found. On Lake Huron, 178 seamen were lost in eight separate wrecks, all with no survivors. The winds at the southern end of the lake whipped 640,000 cubic feet of sand across Port Huron canal, completely blocking passage. The captain of the steamer Argo declared that the storm blew his cargo of lumber into the sea “like toothpicks.” Twenty-two inches of snow fell on Cleveland and the winds across Lake Erie were so steady and strong that the lake was literally pushed eastward, dropping the level along the western shore by six feet.

    When the storm was over, twenty ships were lost and tens more were badly damaged. More than 250 men and women died. It was the deadliest storm on the Lakes.

  • The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

    When the Edmund Fitzgerald was launched in 1958, it was the largest ship to sail the Great Lakes. At 729 feet and able to haul more than 25,000 tons of iron ore, the freighter was dubbed “The Pride of the American Flag.” Year after year, the Fitzgerald hauled iron ore and taconite out of the Twin Ports, breaking records for tonnage along the way. But by 1975, the Fitzgerald was showing signs of age. A rigorous Coast Guard inspection in the spring of her last shipping season netted a seaworthy certification, but another routine inspection on October 31 revealed cracks in four topside cargo hatches. She was allowed to keep sailing, but repairs were ordered to take place prior to the start of the 1976 season.

    Capt. Ernest McSorley was also looking ahead to the next season. It would be his first year of retirement after forty-four years of sailing the Great Lakes and four seasons as master of the Fitzgerald. At sixty-two, he was a respected captain—both for his skill and for his will to keep to a tight schedule.

    On November 9, the Edmund Fitzgerald was embarking on its fortieth voyage of the season, hauling 26,116 tons of taconite from Superior Harbor to Detroit. Twenty-nine crewmen were aboard.

    The Fitz passed through the harbor channel at 2:20 p.m. in clear and relatively warm weather. Twenty minutes later, the National Weather Service posted a gale warning because of a storm system pushing up over Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

    Two hours out of port, the Fitz sighted another freighter heading toward the east, the Arthur M. Anderson, a U.S. Steel ship mastered by Capt. Jesse Cooper. The Anderson was coming from Two Harbors. McSorley hailed the Anderson and the two captains agreed to travel together to the Soo Locks. The Fitzgerald, already fifteen miles ahead, would lead the way.

    By seven o’clock that evening, the National Weather Service was predicting forty-five-mile-an-hour winds and dangerous waves. The weather was quickly deteriorating. The prediction called for east to northeasterly winds during the night, shifting to northwest by the afternoon of November 10. At approximately 10:40 p.m., the forecast was revised to easterly winds becoming southeasterly the morning of November 10. By 1:00 a.m., the Fitzgerald was about twenty miles south of Isle Royale, confronted by heavy winds and ten-foot waves. At 2:00 a.m., the National Weather Service upgraded the gale warning to a storm warning with shifting sixty-mile-an-hour winds and fifteen-foot waves expected.

    About that time, the captains of the Anderson and Fitzgerald discussed the threatening weather and decided to change their route. Heading northward toward the coast of Canada would give them shelter from the expected eastern winds and heavy waves. The ships were already battling sixty-mile winds and torrential rain. Visibility was extremely poor.

    With the arrival of dawn, around the time that officials on land were issuing emergency warnings and school closings, the Edmund Fitzgerald reported its route change and an expected delay in arrival at the Soo Locks to the home office. Through the morning, the storm was gaining intensity, knocking out power across the Upper Peninsula and the Canadian coast.

    By 2:45 p.m., the winds had taken a significant turn. Now the storm was barreling out of the northwest, pushing up larger waves. The Anderson reported wind gusts over seventy miles an hour. The two ships had lost their land protection.

    The Coast Guard was calling on all ships to seek safe harbor. The captains decided to run south toward Whitefish Bay, their only hope for shelter. The Arthur Anderson was trailing faithfully sixteen miles behind as they approached Caribou Island. At 3:15, the Fitz rounded the island heading into the Six Fathom Shoal, a dangerous stretch where only thirty-six feet of water covered the jagged rocky bottom. Cooper followed the Fitzgerald’s progress on radar while crew members watched from the deck. As the Fitz slugged on, Morgan Clark, Cooper’s first mate, called out, “He sure looks like he’s in the shoal area.” Cooper replied, “He sure does. He’s in too close. He’s closer than I’d want this ship to be.”

    Around that time, McSorley radioed Cooper: “Anderson, this is the Fitzgerald. I have a fence rail down, two vents lost or damaged, and a list.” McSorley added that he was going to slow down so the Anderson could catch up. “Will you stay by me till I get to Whitefish?” Cooper replied, “Charlie on that, Fitzgerald. Do you have your pumps going?” McSorley replied, “Yes, both of them.”

    But the storm was only growing worse. The sea was pitching thirty to thirty-five foot waves. McSorley radioed the Anderson that the raging winds had ripped off the Fitzgerald’s radar antenna. A heavy snow began falling, obliterating Cooper’s view of the Fitzgerald’s lights dead ahead. Winds were gusting to ninety. The Fitz was taking on water faster than it could pump it out.

    At 4:30 p.m., the Fitz was seventeen miles from Whitefish Point. The lighthouse at the end of the rugged stretch of land would have been within view had the storm not knocked out both the radio beacon and light. Having already lost its radar and now with daylight fast slipping away, the Fitzgerald put a call out to any ship in the area for help in locating the Whitefish beacon.

    The Avafors, a Swedish ocean freighter in the vicinity, radioed McSorley the news of the missing signals. Around 6:00 p.m. the Avafors called again:


    Avafors:     “Fitzgerald, this is the Avafors. I have the Whitefish light now but still am receiving no beacon. Over.”
    Fitzgerald: “I’m very glad to hear it.”

    Avafors:     “The wind is really howling down here. What are the conditions where you are?”

    Fitzgerald:     [Unintelligible shouts heard by the Avafors.] “Don’t let nobody on deck!”

    Avafors:     “What’s that, Fitzgerald? Unclear. Over.”

    Fitzgerald:     “I have a bad list, lost both radars. And am taking heavy seas over the deck. One of the worst seas I’ve ever been in.”

    Then at 7:10 p.m. the Anderson’s first mate, Clark, spoke to McSorley:


    Anderson:     “Fitzgerald, this is the Anderson. Have you checked down?”

    Fitzgerald:     “Yes, we have.”
    Anderson: “Fitzgerald, we are about ten miles behind you, and gaining about one and a half miles per hour. Fitzgerald, there is a target nineteen miles ahead of us. So the target would be nine miles on ahead of you.”

    Fitzgerald    : “Well, am I going to clear?”

    Anderson:     “Yes. He is going to pass to the west of you.”

    Fitzgerald:     “Well, fine.”

    Anderson:     “By the way, Fitzgerald, how are you making out with your problem?”

    Fitzgerald:     “We are holding our own.”

    Anderson:     “Okay, fine. I’ll be talking to you later.”

    But there would be no further conversations. Shortly after that, the Anderson was struck by two enormous waves in quick succession, plunging the ship’s bow into the water and hitting her hard enough to cause a heavy roll to the starboard side, damaging one of the lifeboats. Captain Cooper later reported, “I watched those two waves head down the lake toward the Fitzgerald, and I think those were the two that sent her under.”

    Ten minutes later the Fitzgerald disappeared from the Anderson’s radar. No distress signal went out. No lifeboats were launched. No life vests were donned.

  • The Wreck of the Madeira

    In late November 1905, one of the worst storms still on record overtook Lake Superior in what became known as the “Mataafa Blow.” Just north of Split Rock, the steamer William Edenborn struggled along the North Shore on its way to Duluth, towing behind it the Madeira, a massive 436-foot schooner-barge. As the winds swelled to sixty miles an hour, the two ships were pounded closer and closer to the dangerous rocks along the coast. Hoping to save his own ship, A.J. Talbot, the Edenborn’s captain, decided to cut the Madeira free, leaving it to drop anchor and ride out the storm on its own. The tow line was cut, at 3:30 in the morning of November 28, but it was too late for the Madeira to cast its anchors. Within minutes the ship began to reel about in the thirty-foot waves until it was smashed into the steep cliff walls of Gold Rock, an outcropping a few miles north of Split Rock.

    Immediately, the violent deluge began to tear the ship apart and threatened to engulf the ten men aboard. But one young crewman named Fred Benson leapt from the heaving ship onto a rocky ledge with a lifeline attached to his belt. In below-zero temperatures, and with towering waves smashing at his back, Benson somehow managed to climb the sixty-foot cliff. He secured his rope and cast it back to the three men trapped on the bow of the ship. Then Benson scrambled along the cliff edge to toss a second line to four sailors holding on at the stern. All seven were able to climb to safety. Only one man, the first mate, was drowned as the ship was dragged down into the icy depths.

    In all, thirty-six seamen were lost in the Mataafa storm, with twenty-nine ships wrecked or damaged. Benson was hailed as a hero in the regional press. To avoid costly improvements to ship construction or the burden of insuring their vessels, the leaders of the Great Lakes shipping industry—-one third of the ships damaged were owned by U.S. Steel—clamored for the government to install more lighthouses along the North Shore. In 1907, Congress appropriated the funds to erect Minnesota’s landmark Split Rock Lighthouse. For years the Madeira remained largely forgotten, until a Duluth diving club, “The Frigid Frogs,” rediscovered it in 1955. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. Today, the Minnesota Historical Society estimates the Madeira to be one of Lake Superior’s most popular underwater sites, with about 1,000 divers visiting each year.

  • Sole Survivor

    Back in 1966, Dennis Hale had been sailing for three years, all of them on the 580-foot freighter Daniel J. Morrell. The Morrell was in its sixtieth year, one of the oldest of the many freighters plying the Great Lakes. The ship had just finished its already long season, but when another freighter developed engine trouble, the Morrell was sent in to carry the load. It was late November.

    On the 29th, the Morrell rounded the thumb of Michigan and was hit by a Huron storm that pitched waves of twenty-five feet over its hull. At 2:00 a.m., Hale was awakened by a loud bang. At first he thought it was the anchor hammering against the bow, but when it came a second time he jumped out of bed and headed for the deck. Wearing only undershorts, a life vest, and a pea coat, he soon found himself standing in ice and water, clinging to the deck rail, and inching toward a lifeboat.

    The winds were blowing sixty-five miles per hour. Two flares went up from a group of men huddled at the stern, but they were unaware that a broken antenna had never allowed for a distress signal to go out. As Hale and thirteen of his fellow crewmen waited for their raft to float free, the Morrell suddenly heaved, twisted, and ripped in two. “I can still see the sparks and the tearing steel,” Hale remarked quietly from his home in Ashtabula, Ohio. “The next thing I knew, I was in the water. When I came to the surface, I saw a raft and swam over to it. By the time I got there, two other men had climbed aboard, and we then helped a fourth man on. It was freezing cold and snowing. All I could do was hang on. The storm was over by 5:00 a.m., but by then, two of the men were already dead. The other one died later on.” Throughout that long day no sign of rescue came in sight. “I didn’t expect to make it. For the last twenty-four hours I was more or less just waiting to die. When you’re in a situation like that you don’t care. You just want it to end. It wasn’t important anymore.”

    After thirty-eight hours in the raft, Hale was found and rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter. His ankle was broken and his feet were frostbitten, but otherwise, he had sustained only minor injuries. His lack of clothing had actually been a blessing; had he been covered in freezing wet pants, like his shipmates, hypothermia would have set in and, inevitably, he too would have met his end. “That amazes me still,” he said.

    Of the Morrell’s twenty-nine-man crew, Hale was the sole survivor. In fact, Dennis Hale is the only man to have survived a modern Great Lakes shipwreck. “That makes me kind of an odd person, I guess,” he said, brightening. “There’s got to be some reason I survived. Maybe I’m supposed to give others hope. Maybe hearing my story inspires people. I talk at these shipwreck conferences.” He’s done eight this past year and has four more to go. “People are real interested. It puts a shift in their perspective.”

    In 1999, after twenty-three years on dry land, Dennis Hale accepted an offer to sail out on Lake Huron. “It took a long time to accept the invitation. It was a beautiful June day, but I still had to really think about it.”

  • Soundtrack to Mary

    I’m a renter, not an owner, baby, so why don’t you kill me?
    I realize that this may be the final stumbling block delaying my actual adulthood. I certainly know scads of people my age and younger who’ve taken the plunge. As Bob Smith would say, “Why can’t I be you?”
    Is it the dough? Nah. I’m not exactly livin’ large, but I’d say I’m still a few years away from living under a bridge drinking Scope, so that’s not it. I’ve got my reasons, admittedly all stupid. Here’s the sad truth: I don’t want to give up all future “renting stories.” Really, I need the material.
    There have been plenty of social situations in which I’ve held friends and strangers captive with tales of previous dumps and their inept landlords. One genius that comes to mind was the PETA-hating caretaker who regularly made change from, stored writing implements in, and fished cigarette lighters out of her ample bra—the same Dr. Dolittle I saw on more than one summer night trap an unsuspecting bat in the window and annihilate it with Final Net hairspray. I still don’t know whether that was part of her job description or just recreational.
    I loved the spinsters who would clutch their purses and practically walk into walls to avoid eye contact with me. How about the woman who lived above me who one month rented a karaoke machine that apparently featured only one song selection, namely Bette Midler’s can’t-hear-it-enough-times classic “The Rose.” And most memorable was the all-night hallwalker who once knocked on my door asking if she could “borrow a fake fingernail.” Let me rummage through my Lee Press-On Nail junk drawer and I’ll get back to you, wing nut.
    If I see a centipede the size of a Humvee in the laundry room, I need to know that it’s someone else’s job to get rid of it, and that if I wanted to I could pack up and flee in my jammies in the middle of the night.
    This all makes perfect sense to me, much in the same way that my reluctance to get married isn’t because I fear commitment or think my boy isn’t oh-so-dreamy. My strong principles demand that I never wear white shoes. Not even for a few hours. What’s not to get?

  • Desert Island Duffel

    It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, as the saying goes, and Leslie Johnson’s Mississippi Rag has devoted thirty years to keeping the swing alive. Her Bloomington-based newspaper is a torchbearer for early-twentieth-century ragtime and jazz. It may not have Rolling Stone’s circulation numbers, but it has worldwide reach; the Rag is read by jazz fans and musicians in 26 countries. (Locally, it’s available at Shinder’s and through www.mississippirag.com.) Contributors include modern-day ragtime master Butch Thompson and Will Shapira, longtime Twin Cities jazz journalist and Johnson’s husband. The Rag’s specialty is comprehensive profiles of the talented but obscure sidemen of the Jazz Age—like the recent eight-pager on trumpeter Ziggy Elman. It’s invaluable historical documentation of a set of artists often overlooked. For Johnson’s trip into our imaginary island exile, she chose five great singles from the heyday of traditional jazz.

    1. Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five, “West End Blues.” There are some classics that just have to be in there, even though I thought, “Oh jeez, I’d really like to come up with different stuff.” But actually, you just can’t get any better than this. So guess what—that’s number one.

    2. Benny Goodman, “Sing Sing Sing.” That’s the song from his 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. The whole concert is just fabulous, but that’s really a barnburner.

    3. Jelly Roll Morton, “Mournful Serenade.” One of my absolute favorites. It’s melancholy and rhythmic and creates an incredible mood. Twyla Tharp, the dancer, did choreography to it for a single dancer who did the entire dance within a spotlight, confined just to that, and it was wonderful.

    4. “Ragtime Nightingale,” which was written by Joseph Lamb, and I love it played by Max Morath. It’s a classic ragtime tune, with a lovely, irresistible melody. And Max has a touch on piano where he gets a certain poignance to his playing that’s very identifiable. We recently published a two-part article on Joseph Lamb—the first detailed article ever done on him—with the help of his daughter.

    5. George Lewis’s New Orleans Jazz Band, “Burgundy Street Blues.” Lewis had a distinctive style. It has a lilting quality, a dancing quality, and yet on this song it’s sweet and mournful, and very true. He plays an Albert-system clarinet—that’s the old-style New Orleans clarinet. It has a woodier sound and a beautiful, rich lower tone. This blues I can listen to again and again and again. It just goes right to the heart.

  • Straight Talk

    In the mid-nineties, the Hang Ups were the most prominent purveyors of what was sometimes called ’Sota Pop. Lead singer Brian Tighe and his bandmates eschewed bar-scene three-chord punk for heart-on-sleeve harmonies and shimmering layers of melody, best exemplified on songs like “Runway,” “Top of Morning,” and “Jump Start,” the latter two of which you may have heard in the film Chasing Amy or on TV’s Dawson’s Creek. After a major-label merry-go-round for 1999’s Second Story, they’re back on indie turf and set to release their fourth album, simply titled The Hang Ups. It’s the group’s most musically complex and layered album yet, but less harmony-laden and even a little melancholy. Tighe’s other band, the Owls, has released a sublime MP3 single called “Air” and will follow it with an EP in January. The Hang Ups play First Avenue on November 21, and the Owls the Turf Club November 8.

    THE RAKE: What approach did you take recording the new album?
    TIGHE: What really gave the album its start was Brad Kern, who worked a lot with Semisonic. We were interested in doing it in a way where we’d work on it in the studio, but then be able to take it home. We all have digital systems at home where we can add to what we do in the studio. And so we were all able to really think about how we wanted to flesh the tracks out. The songs are still being written in that stage. You’re deciding on melodies and countermelodies and textures and all the things that make a song what it is.

    THE RAKE: Is this the first record you’ve been able to work and rework to that extent?
    TIGHE: It really is. It’s almost too much. You can get bogged down, and I certainly did at times. Endless possibilities. Brad was so good at pulling all these ideas together and really hacking through them that at a certain point we said, “We can just leave Brad to this, and not worry about how it will come together.” Then we were free to explore the endless possibilities, and it would just create more and more of a headache for Brad. But I think he loved it too. That’s his form of creativity.

    THE RAKE: Is there a single story running through the songs?
    TIGHE: I think that one arose through the selection of the songs, but it wasn’t intentional. But it goes through these different aspects of a love life. It goes through some mournful states; there’s this excitement at the beginning of a possible new love. It goes through some pretty weird territory. Loneliness. “You’ve Come Home” is the arrival at the end where you realize that this is true love. And then the last song [“Light Green Sails”] is a send-off, a light note after you’ve come to this pretty heavy realization.

    THE RAKE: And it’s classic Hang Ups, in that it’s got that theme of motion that runs through so many of your songs.
    TIGHE: Right. The traveling, the scenery, and the quality of light. Things that seem to come up a lot.

    THE RAKE: You’re averaging three years between albums. Will we have to wait that long for the next one?
    TIGHE: We recorded at least 20 songs, so there may be a pretty healthy EP not too long after this. We take our time (laughs wryly). But I think the product has always been the most important thing for us, and not so much the promotion of the product. We love the closure when something is finished and you have something to show for it. It’s the best feeling, and really important to the process. I found it really hard to write any new songs in the last year or so, because I knew we were wrapping this thing up, and we had to get these out.

    THE RAKE: How did you feel about your songs “Greyhound Bus” and “Caroline” being picked up and covered by Muzak?
    TIGHE: Apparently “Greyhound Bus” is still going strong in elevators and grocery stores. I was tickled by that. And flattered, because the song has to make it without the lyrics to be easy listening.

  • for the heart

    Of all the places I have ever lived, Minneapolis is the most confusing. One might have thought it would be otherwise. It was meant to be laid out, after all, on a Jeffersonian grid. Yet one cycles down the street, blithely confident that the 3800 block of Sheridan Avenue South will lead ineluctably into the 3700 block, only to find that an unkind providence has interposed a lake, a railroad, or a freeway. Reason, one feels, has been defeated by Nature, or at least by Life.
    Occasionally, it is true, Minneapolis gives inklings of the organic process of its growth to the hard-pressed cyclist trying to find the house where he has been invited to dinner. If he bumps and rattles his way over the monstrous potholes in the southeast quadrant of Lake Calhoun Parkway, he will come to Richfield Road, originally the wagon route from the infant Minneapolis to the neighboring township of Richfield (which originally included modern Edina). On a good day, the remains of the streetcar rails can be made out beneath the asphalt of broad old thoroughfares such as Portland Avenue. But in Edina the farms that defined the landscape in the late nineteenth century are gone. Only their names survive in Grimes and Browndale avenues.

    After trying to get the Minnesota landscape into larger perspective, I went to see the Jeffers Petroglyphs down beyond Mankato. These lively scribings are etched (by who knows what anonymous hand) onto rocks that slope and tilt like the bed of a prehistoric ocean. The wind passes through the prairie grass like cat’s-paws at sea. Here at last I found a sense of the size of the state.

    If these waves of prairie have the breadth of an ocean, Mont Ventoux in the South of France has the height of a tsunami. From its summit you can see for miles (all right, kilometers). The fourteenth-century poet Petrarch discovered this when he climbed it—possibly the earliest example of mountaineering, or at least hill walking, done for no other reason than the fun of it. Not that Petrarch was capable of anything so innocent as fun. He took with him a copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, which he duly opened on the summit (at random, he claims), and conveniently found a passage that assured him that landscape is less important than the soul: “Men go to admire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean, and the revolutions of the stars—and desert themselves.”
    The modern climber will descry on the southern slopes of Mont Ventoux gravel terraces planted with vineyards sheltered from northerly winds by the mountainous bulk behind them. One of the Côtes de Ventoux wineries that has had a remarkable run of good years recently is Château Pesquié. The red wine made here by the Chaudière family called Ch. Pesquié les Terrasses is a round fruity Rhône. It is composed of slightly less syrah, the grape variety most often associated with Rhône reds, and slightly more grenache, the variety familiar from the wines of Châteauneuf du Pape, about twenty miles to the west. One can confidently commend it for consumption with cheese and meat (including turkey).

    Claret, they say, is wine for the head; Burgundy and Rhône, wine for the heart. Even a poet as sententious and self-absorbed as Petrarch would, one feels, have been able to allow a wine as appealing as this one to penetrate the formidable defenses of his self-consciousness. Perhaps, too, it could have inspired him to appreciate the pleasures of landscape without his having to decide in advance what he was going to think about it.

  • Good Real Food

    The Twin Cities have recently been through a golden Age of fine dining, but times are tough. From Heartland to Pickled Parrot, Minnesota struggles with its identity by way of its appetite.

    AS chef de cuisine and proprietor of Heartland, Lenny Russo has say over every ingredient, every wine selection, and every hire, but what he can’t seem to control is his disbelief. “Last night a four-top came in, sat down, looked at the menu, got up and left,” he says. “‘Too weird,’ they said, even though every ingredient on the menu comes from within a two-hundred-mile radius of the restaurant.” Russo and I are standing at the service counter; the restaurant opens for dinner in one hour. Grabbing last night’s menu, Russo points to the “pan-seared squab breast with roasted golden chanterelle mushrooms, toasted black walnuts, and heirloom tomato catsup” and takes it one step at a time. His voice is calm and persuasive, and he sounds as if he were defending the dish in a court of law.

    “There’s a chance someone at the table is a hunter, and has hunted for squab, so they know what that is,” he says. “People have black walnut trees in their backyards, and everyone knows someone who has foraged for wild mushrooms, right? But you put it all on the plate together and somehow it’s ‘weird.’” He lays down the menu and shrugs. I, for one, am convinced. When you put it this way, a pan-seared squab breast with roasted and so forth is perfectly logical. Somehow Russo has taken an example of Midwestern haute cuisine and made it seem as grounded in everyday life as a hamburger.

    “This food speaks to people’s roots,” he says, referring to Heartland’s fierce, almost evangelical commitment to indigenous and locally cultivated ingredients and organic, sustainable agriculture. In theory, he’s right, and if people were as serious about maintaining good health, appreciating their heritage, supporting American farmers, and eating delicious things as they say they are, then Heartland should be a roaring success. Yet the restaurant is struggling. Heartland opened in October 2002 to critical acclaim, grateful neighbors, and a small, but growing clientele of regulars, but one year later Russo is having a hard time bringing in enough people to make his restaurant viable. “We know we’re doing a great job,” he says. “But we’re barely keeping our heads above water.”

    It’s not because of a lack of ability or knowledge. Russo, who hails originally from Hoboken, New Jersey, has over twenty years of kitchen experience, including stints at Faegre’s, the Loring Café, and W.A. Frost. When I went to Heartland on an undercover mission to sample the experience, I found the food artful without being overly fussy, with rich, complex flavors and in portions that satisfied but didn’t make me feel like I’d entered an eating contest. The service was prompt and unobtrusive; the wine was excellent and very reasonably priced; and everyone was enjoying themselves. So why wasn’t Heartland full?

    Part of the problem could stem from the general business climate for restaurants in the Twin Cities. Talk to restaurateurs and you’ll hear conflicting stories of opportunity and doom. According to the National Restaurant Association, we rank fourth in terms of per capita dining, and in recent years have been as high as number three. Even after the Internet bubble and September 11th, the Twin Cities market is a hopeful place to open a restaurant. JP American Bistro, Mojito, Solera, and Heartland all took the gamble despite a soft economy and a flattening of business travel and convention activity, while the suburbs are practically exploding with mid-level casual chain restaurants such as P.F. Chang’s, Maggiano’s and Big Bowl.

  • How to Prepare Your Snowblower for The Winter

    But you should still protect your investment! Here are some tips for extending the life and enjoyment of that silly, useless contraption.

    Prevent snow from falling in the first place! Throughout the year, you should start and run your snowblower for a half hour at least once a week. This will ensure you’re doing your part to contribute to greenhouse gases.

    If you’re a green thumb, consider converting your machine into a dirtblower for your new winter garden. Current projections by the EPA suggest that Minnesota gardeners will be able to grow oranges by 2010!

    If you have lots of other vehicles that are already providing plenty of particulate exhaust, go ahead and change the oil, drain the gas, and carefully replace at the back of your garage. It’s a great place to hang those dangerous oily rags, and provides shelter for small birds and mice.

    Advertise in colder-climate classifieds. You could buy an ATV! (Hint: Avoid snowmobiles.)

    Your snowblower has a powerful engine that can readily be used as a woodchipper. Why not get rid of all those dusty old skis?