Famous people from Duluth (sort of)

The only month it has never snowed in Duluth is July.

That's what it's like in my hometown in Minnesota, a place where winter never really goes away, even on the warmest, most beautiful summer day, when Lake Superior is an azure jewel and the sun throws diamonds on the crests of the waves and the forest pushes against its shore like a rich, green emerald, and you know that when you die and go to heaven, you could only be so lucky if heaven is exactly like this. But even on those most beautiful days, it takes only five minutes for the wind to switch from off the lake and the temperature drops 40 degrees in a minute and a fog bank rolls in and the rain starts falling and the phenomenon known locally as "colder by the lake" takes hold, and that's when you think it just might snow. No matter what month it is, no matter how beautiful the weather was a minute ago, you think it might snow because, deep in the back of your mind, you know that the only month it has never snowed in Duluth is July. And you know, too, that sometime, long ago, before the French paddled in and opened their fur trading posts and started keeping weather records, it surely did snow in July, and one Chippewa standing on the shore of Kitchee Gummee turned to another Chippewa on the shore and said, roughly translated, "what the hell, it's snowing in July."

So you think, what's keeping it from snowing now, even on the most beautiful summer day? Certainly not history.

That's why Duluthians believe that, no matter how beautiful the weather is right now, in the next 24 hours, it might snow; and no matter how lousy the weather is right now, in the next 24 hours, it could get worse.

Duluth is a city that pops out of nowhere and then quickly disappears again. It's a strange place for a city, really, out in the middle of nowhere, further north than any other city except maybe Stockholm or Helsinki and a handful of cities in Canada and Russia. It's hundreds of miles from anything else, and in the winter, it seems even further than that. It's a great place for a settlement, probably, given its huge harbor and strategic location, but a city of Duluth's size was never meant to be where it is.

Duluth, like northern Minnesota in general, is not like the rest of Minnesota, nor the rest of the Midwest. Northern Minnesotans identify more with the "Northern" than with the "Minnesotan," and sometimes seem to have more in common with Northern Wisconsinites and Northern Michiganers than other Minnesotans. It is not like Lake Wobegon, which has become the image of Minnesota in the popular imagination. The north is fundamentally different, a different economy, geography, ecology, history and ethnic background. While Minnesota is a farm state, northern Minnesota doesn’t have more than a few hundred acres of farmable land because this is where the glacier stopped. After it scoured the rocky topsoil from the rest of the Midwest to reveal the fertile land beneath, the glacier left in place the mountains of gabbro and shale and slate in northern Minnesota, then dumped on top of it the tacky, worthless soil dragged up from the south, soil so hard and infertile only the heartiest of trees can find life in it.

Because of it, northern Minnesota is not an easy place to live. Don’t believe what you see when you visit Duluth today, a quaint old port town with hip restaurants and funky boutiques and charming ice cream shops. All of that is a façade, a collection of twee built for the tourists only in the last 25 years. In the real northern Minnesota, the one where I grew up, the land is hard, the weather is hard, the work is hard, and the people are hard. We are not descended from the soft–hearted if slightly dense people of Lake Wobegon that Keillor writes about. We come from a hard drinking, hard living, hard checking people who made our living ripping iron ore from the ground, loading ships and trains when the temperature is 20 below, trawling for whitefish in an unforgiving lake, and chopping down trees and dragging them through the forest. For fun our people hung out in taverns that were little more than corrugated tin shacks with dirt floors and skated around frozen ponds, beating each other silly with hockey sticks.

Which is probably why northern Minnesota attracted so many hard people to begin with, the Swedes and the Finns and the Norwegians, the Croats and the Bohemians and the Czechs, hard people with hard lives of their own who came to America for at least the promise of a life that, in the future, might not be so hard. And it may have been why the Zimmerman family came from Eastern Europe, with the hope that one of their descendants might someday have a better life than the one they left, never having any idea what would happen when one of those descendants, a boy named Bob, grew up and changed his last name to Dylan.

Bob Dylan was born in 1941 in St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, the same hospital in which I was born 24 years later. I realize the two events were a generation apart, but it is a small connection to fame, tenuous as it is, the fact that I and one of the greatest poets, finest musicians and worst singers in American history were both welcomed to the world in the same city in the same hospital, undoubtedly a single degree of separation between us because surely, some nurse or doctor or orderly who tended to me also tended to baby Bobby Zimmerman. We both gulped our first breaths from the same air in the same delivery room, and both cooed contentedly while looking up at the same lights in the same nursery, which creates a rather jarring mental image, when you think about it, of Bob Dylan cooing contentedly.

I always thought that would make a good conversation starter, that I was born in the same hospital as Bob Dylan, a wire-thin but nevertheless real connection to a celebrity that someone in our celebrity-obsessed culture might find impressive. I was wrong. Whenever I tell people this, I mostly get an uninterested "oh" and a look of "why are you telling me this?" Only once did it generate any kind of real enthusiasm, when I mentioned it to an aging hippie who still had a shaggy beard and a rainbow in his mind and had yet to come to grips with either the 1970s or the 1980s.

"I was born in the same hospital as Bob Dylan," I said. A look of awe washed over his face, as if I had just told him I was really Bob Dylan's secret love child, the one he had with Janis Joplin but nobody knew about. After a moment of gazing adoringly he said with all sincerity, "That makes you a great man."

Fortunately, I've never invested into my own self-worth that kind of reverence for Dylan. I see my connection to him as nothing more than the worthless trivia and feeble conversation starter that it is. Duluth never had any kind of impact on Dylan, anyway. He left the city when he was 5-years old, when his father got a new job on the Iron Range and moved the family north to Hibbing, which is probably just as well for Duluth, given what Dylan has had to say about Hibbing since he bailed on the city after high school on the first available Greyhound bus (a company that, incidentally, was founded in Hibbing). Dylan grew up in the 1950s and Hibbing in the 1950s was a conservative, blue collar, working-class place that didn't have much patience for weirdoes or poets or femmy artistes, and since Dylan was all of those things (as well as a Jew, something else that didn't sit too well with a lot of conservative blue-collar types back then), he and Hibbing simply never got along. He fled after high school and devoted a certain amount of his life to bashing Hibbing, making sure everyone knows just how rigid and oppressive and smothering it was to grow up in such a place.

Had he stayed in Duluth, I'm sure he would have said much the same thing about his life there because 1950s Duluth was also a conservative, blue-collar, working-class place that didn't have much patience for weirdoes or poets or femmy artistes (not to mention Jews). As it is, his memories of Duluth are mostly a half-forgotten haze (as are, no doubt, most of his pre-1960s memories, and probably most of his 1960s memories, certainly his Woodstock memories, and maybe even a few of his post-1960s memories.) He mentions the city only once in his music, referring to it in one line in a song I've never heard as a foggy place on a hill.

Still, this hasn't stopped Duluthians from claiming Bob Dylan as their own (as I'm doing right now). Duluth, like most small, out-of-the-way places that have few claims to fame, grasps what little claim it has and hangs on like a pit bull with lockjaw. For instance, many Duluthians believe that Mark Twain once said "the coldest winter I have ever spent is a summer in Duluth." It isn't true. No matter that summers in Duluth are cold, Twain said no such thing of Duluth. He said that of San Francisco. As far as anyone knows, Twain never came anywhere near Duluth.

I remember also hearing once that F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in Duluth for a time, even wrote part of The Great Gatsby there. I can understand how this myth was birthed because Duluth actually is mentioned in the book, and plays a small but pivotal role in the story. It's where John James Gatz (nee Jay Gatsby) worked as a poor and penniless menial laborer after leaving his father's farm, and where he meets a rich and wealthy tycoon who lives on a mammoth yacht in Lake Superior. The tycoon takes Gatz under his wing, puts him to work on his boat and takes him on a fabulous ocean voyage to exotic ports around the world (never mind that in the pre-World War I years you couldn't get from Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean on a boat of that size, but Fitzgerald was never known for his knowledge of geography). It's Gatz's first taste of wealth and the good life, and it's where he makes the decision that he, too, wants wealth and the good life, and he will do anything to get it, a decision that sets in motion the chain of events that leads to his tragic downfall.

Unfortunately, Fitzgerald did not write any part of that book in Duluth, nor did he ever live in Duluth. The only time he ever came to Duluth was as a child, when he and his mother took the train north from St. Paul to begin a pleasure cruise around the Great Lakes. Unfortunately, little Scott came down with tonsillitis and he spent the vacation recovering from surgery in a Duluth hospital (quite possibly St. Mary's Hospital, the same hospital where both Bob Dylan and I would be born several decades later).

Duluth's other claim to literary fame is that it was once the home of Sinclair Lewis, chronicler of small-town oppressiveness and hypocrisy and the first American to win a Nobel Prize for literature. Unlike the other two, this claim has merit because Lewis did, in fact, live in Duluth for two years in the mid-1940s. He shacked up in an impressive and charming manse in the city's tony East End hillside, and wrote one of his last novels, the Duluth-set "Cass Timberlane."

Duluthians don’t often claim Lewis as their own, though. Duluthians came across as looking like stupid, backwoods yokels in “Cass Timberlane,” and Duluthians are very sensitive about their image, especially when they’re portrayed as stupid, backwoods yokels. Back in the 1980s, Sam Shepard made a movie in and around Duluth called “Far North,” starring his longtime companion, Jessica Lange, who grew up in the town of Cloquet, not far from Duluth. Cloquet is a smelly little paper-mill town of which I have very distinct memories, even though I’ve only been there maybe twice in my life. The paper mill in Cloquet was so huge and so revolting that when it was going full steam, it produced a flatulent stench so powerful I could smell it at my house, a good 40 or 50 miles away. Airless, humid summer days were the worst, when the whole of Minnesota’s Arrowhead region smelled like an overflowing outhouse.

(I might add here that I am but one degree separated from Sam and Jessica, too, and once washed their dinner plates. As a high school student, I worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Duluth when they came in to eat. When the waitress gave me Lange’s dirty plate she said “this is Jessica Lange’s plate.” I washed it anyway.)

So Shepard makes this movie, and it ends up showing Duluthians and northern Minnesotans in general as stupid, backwoods yokels. The area’s bigwig Chamber of Commerce-types were devastated. When they first heard that  Jessica Lange was coming home to make a movie in northern Minnesota, written and directed by her famous companion and big-shot playwright, they were overjoyed, convinced it would be a homage to the people they saw themselves as; good, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth people of the North. The film even had its premiere in Duluth and all the area blowhards came and partied and patted each other on the back for the wonderful p.r. the film would no doubt generate, then settled back in their seats to see themselves portrayed as stupid, backwoods yokels. They were horrified. After that, whenever Jessica Lange came home to visit her family, Sam Shepard was not with her, at least in public. He probably never will be able to visit, either, because Duluthians hold grudges. Consider that it’s been near 70 years since “Cass Timberlane” and Lewis still has not been forgiven for his hatchet job.

Which is probably just as well, anyway, because by the time Lewis arrived in Duluth, his Nobel Prize was a long, long way in his past and most every ounce of talent had drained from the man’s body. By then, he was a peevish, bitter old coot with a grudge against everyone, and "Timberlane" is generally considered to be the worst book he ever wrote, if not one of the worst books ever written by a once-great writer. Criticized as narrow-minded, boring, silly and mysoginistic, it probably never would have been published had it not been written by a man who once won a Nobel Prize. After it met with critical derision and commercial failure, Lewis left Duluth, moved to Italy, and died not too long after.

So perhaps Duluthians don’t bear a grudge against Lewis, after all. Maybe they’re just good judges of literature and know that his sojourn in Duluth is not something to lay claim to.

With Bob Dylan, though, Duluth has a legitimate claim to a legend. It’s safe to say that only a handful of Americans have had as great an impact on our culture as Dylan and Duluthians try to connect themselves to that. Take, for instance, 1986, when the city sponsored an all-class reunion for anyone who ever went to school in Duluth. It was an attempt to get residents who fled the dying, post-industrial Duluth to come back and see the lively, post-urban renewal Duluth, the growing vacation town with a lakefront park and charming shops and brick streets, a shining little jewel on Lake Superior and no longer the dirty, grubby, smoke-belching, filthy little industrial dump that they all remembered. Some brilliant Chamber of Commerce-type on the organizing committee decided that Bob Dylan should come, too, even though Dylan graduated from Hibbing High School and went to Duluth’s public schools for only one year of kindergarten.

So the public relations machine spun to life in its hopeful attempt to convince Bob Dylan to return to a town where not much happened in his life, aside from the fact that it started there. Letters and press releases were mailed, telephone calls no doubt made to his agent by the dozen. Invitations to those of us who actually went to school in Duluth assured us in big, bold letters that Bob Dylan had been invited, yes, that Bob Dylan, the famous singer, hinting that he would no doubt come, might even give a concert, and we don't want to miss that, do we? So we better be there to see this landmark event in Duluth’s history.

What a wonderful chance to get national publicity for Duluth, the Chamber of Commerce-types thought, to show those East Coast national media people that the city was no longer a poster child for the Rust Belt, the dirty, grubby, smoke-belching, filthy little industrial dump. New residents would flock to Duluth, new businesses would open, the economy would explode, Duluth would be a boom town. With a little sycophantic fawning, Bob Dylan could become a great economic development tool for Duluth.

What any of them would have realized had they listened to Dylan's music is that Dylan doesn’t think much of sycophantic, fawning, Chamber of Commerce-types. He never bothered to respond to their invitations, which should have been a real big hint that he wasn’t going to come, but the organizers were confident he'd be there, making one of those surprise appearances that an eccentric mercurial artiste like Dylan is known for. But when the parties ended, the tents taken down and the reunion finished, Dylan was nowhere to be found. Organizers were disappointed he never came. I wasn't. It was obvious to anyone with ears that he’d wanted nothing to do with Duluth. That’s another thing Bob and I had in common.

But momentous events in life tend to change even the most jaundiced attitude and here again, Bob and I are similar in our sort-of-but-not-really parallel lives. For Bob,that event was turning 50, and having turned 50 he began to realize that he was growing old, as old as the people he railed against in his 1960s protst songs, and for probably the first time since the Upstate motorcycle accident, he began to grasp a sense of his own mortality. And like most people who see their own mortality approaching from ahead, he turned around and looked behind him, started to wonder what it was like back there, and that maybe he should stop by and see once more where it was he came from. And so he did, and it evidently softened his view of hard Northern Minnesota. After stubbornly refusing for years to play his hometown (or show up for its phony high school reunion), Dylan has since performed in his hometown twice, and from all reports, they were marvelous concerts, with Dylan playing with more energy and pleasure than many had seen from him in recent shows. He was friendly, joked with the crowed, talked about driving by his old house and told what few stories he remembered about his childhood there. Many believe he actually seemed to be having fun.

For me, that momentous event was the birth of a child, a little boy, and now that I can see life through a little boy’s eyes again, I can see my own little boy memories a little more clearly. What I see is a mostly safe and happy place in Northern Minnesota, with frostbite and a puck to the head the only real dangers that ever confronted me. It was a unique place to grow up, hard and often difficult, sure, but that’s a good thing to have in your blood, and we made the best of it. How many other places in the United States do kids go skating at the corner ice rink in the winter as surely as they play baseball or basketball in the summer.

Now, when I look at Northern Minnesota, I don’t see it as the place I got away from, I see it as the place I come from. I suppose that’s one more thing that Bob Dylan and I have in common.

Have fun in Los Angeles, Vikings! Don't forget to Skype!

I have to admit that I don’t have a dog in this Vikings stadium fight. I’m only a casual football fan at best and I’ve never had an emotional attachment to the Vikings. When my friends and family-members were devastated by four Super Bowl defeats as a kid, I shrugged. When Favre threw that interception in New Orleans, I laughed. It’s just not my thing.

And as for the stadium itself, I tend to be against this sort of hostage-taking situation in general, with billionaire owners demanding sports palaces from the taxpayers at little expense to themselves. But as a resident of Baja Minnesota, this story is pretty much moot to me. If Minnesotans feel that building a football stadium that will be used eight or ten times a year is an appropriate use of their tax money, well, that’s no skin off my teeth.

It seems, though, that the stadium is on life support, all but killed by the Tea Party and far right elements in the GOP in the state House of Representatives. It’s not that the House members didn’t approve a stadium bill—they did. But it’s not what the Vikings wanted nor agreed to, and it’s loaded with so many poison pills that it’s highly unlikely the Vikings and the NFL will go along with it. They killed the stadium without making it look like they killed the stadium.

This isn’t mean to be an obituary for the Vikings because there is still hope they can survive. The Senate could revive the original bill and pass it as written, then hope that language survives a conference committee and the House leadership persuades enough of its members to forget about whatever positions they took on Monday  and give it a thumb’s up in a second vote. But anybody who’s paid even a little attention to politics the last two years knows the Tea Party doesn’t compromise and it doesn’t change its vote. Ron Paul is more likely to endorse Barack Obama.

There’s also the chance the Vikings decide that 50-plus years of history and a huge and hugely passionate fan base in the Upper Midwest aren’t worth abandoning and cancel the moving vans, choosing instead to work with whatever sausage comes out of the legislature. But anyone who’s watched stadium/arena politics knows that’s about as likely as the Tea Party having a change of heart.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you have to admire the Tea Party folks for sticking to their guns and doing what they promised to do when elected, which was to cut spending, cut taxes, and get the government out of business they didn’t think it belonged in. And if they can’t do that, they stop the legislative wheels from turning and effectively shut government down. And that’s exactly what they did. Governments don’t belong in the stadium business, they argue, and so they killed the stadium.  Inelegantly, of course. The far right will never be known for its sophistication and nuance. But they lived up their campaign promises, and for that you have to give them credit.

More amusing to me, though, was the anguished tone of Vikings fans wailing and gnashing their teeth on the Twitters about the House debate. Clearly, these are not people who have spent much time paying attention to politics. The horse trading, the debate, the grandstanding, the over the top rhetoric, the death-by-amendment process must have been like watching a Czech movie without subtitles.  This is how it gets done, people. This is how the legislative sausage is made. Behold democracy, in all its ugly glory.

I wonder how many Vikings fans who voted for Tea Party candidates in the last election are surprised by this. They shouldn’t be. They wanted government off their backs, they wanted their taxes cut, they wanted freedom and liberty. They wanted to stick it to liberals and moderate weenies and the Big Money that they believe controls the government. In the stadium debate, they got exactly what they voted for.

So there’s now a reasonably high probability the Vikings will decamp for Los Angeles after next season, following the Lakers west from Minneapolis, although the Lakers weren’t a big deal because the NBA was kind of a joke in the 1960s and so nobody cared that they left, except Sid Hartman. This leaves Vikings fans with little recourse but to keep calling their legislators and hope some political leader can pull a rabbit from a purple helmet. It will likely be futile. The Tea Party’s mode of operation is forward, no compromise, never reconsider, never give it a second thought, because to do so is selling out. It sticks to its guns and its campaign promises for good or ill, and if you don’t like that, then you’re just another political enemy.

A commentary on the alleged baseball team calling itself the Minnesota Twins

A lot of my Twins fan friends are proposing ways to fix the team, so I’ll throw in my suggestion.

Nothing.

This season was a write-off from the first day of spring training. They had no hope at the playoffs and were shooting merely for a return to respectability, a .500-ish record and some decent play. But that’s not even a hope anymore. Now, it’s looking more and more like their goal will be to avoid taking over the title of Worst Team in Modern Baseball History from the 1962 Mets (the Twins are on pace to “beat” them). The offense is below average, the starting pitching horrendous, the bullpen filled with overpaid hacks, the defense filled with feet and arms of clay. The piranhas of a few years ago are now puppy dogs who roll over and want their bellies rubbed.

Worse yet, there’s nothing on the farm. A minor upgrade or two at offense, maybe, but pitching is a desert, especially now that their two best pitching prospects have gone down with career threatening injuries.

Earlier in the season, I thought they would come around, that they were going through a rough stretch, that they weren’t nearly as bad as their record would indicate and a .500 season still wasn’t unrealistic. But I don’t think so anymore. Now, I think their record is a fairly accurate representation of their talent level. They really are this bad.

Which is why they should do nothing. Because nothing they can do will improve this team. Calling up players from the minors will do nothing because replacing major league crap with minor league crap doesn’t help. Firing Ron Gardenhire won’t change anything because not even Tony LaRussa or Joe Torre could get anything out of this group.

And as for trades, this team has so many holes they can’t possibly be filled with a few knee jerk trades, as if they have players to trade in the first place. Morneau’s injuries render him untradeable, and so is Mauer because of his contract, and with an injury history of his own. Only Span (one of baseball’s most underrated players) and, at this point, Willingham would generate any trade interest. Maybe Pavano at the trade deadline.

So, do nothing because doing nothing means getting draft picks. Write off this season. Accept the ignominy of passing the Mets to become the Worst Team in Baseball History. Trade Span and Willingham and Pavano, but take in return only draft picks or highly ranked prospects who have a better than average chance of reaching the majors (if they’re not first ruined physically by the Twins’ inept training staff). Ride out the howls of indignation from the fans who don’t realize that there are  no quick fixes with a team this bad. Keep the fans interested with even more promotions, t-shirt giveaways, post-game concerts by the Beach Boys or Paul Westerberg (or the Beach Boys with Paul Westerberg). Hand out tickets like candy because they’re going to have a hard time selling them anyway, might as well make sure they go to use. Introduce waterfowl races with a loon, a mallard and a Canada goose. Bring back the ’87 and ’91 World Series teams at least twice a season. Each.  

So hoard those draft picks. Savor them, throw them on the bed and roll around naked in them, let them slide through their fingers while shouting “bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha” in their most evil laugh (I’m sure the Pohlads are good at evil laughs). Write off this season. And the next. And probably the next. Two or three seasons of lousy play will leave them loaded with gold bar draft picks that they can use to get the next Stephen Strasburg, the next Bryce Harper, while making Mauer the next Ryan Zimmerman. If things fall right, they’ll be the next Washington Nationals, which isn’t something I thought I’d ever say, but right now, it seems like it might not be a bad goal to have. Even if the Nats finish only .500, it’ll be an upgrade.

Because it looks increasingly likely that otherwise, they’ll be the next Pittsburgh Pirates or Kansas City Royals.