News Cut Category Archive: Icons

Carl Pohlad, the owner of the Minnesota Twins, has died, Twins officials said today.

Pohlad became a lightning rod for controversy while trying -- and eventually succeeding -- to get taxpayers to pay for a new baseball stadium. He died a year before Target Field opens.

While Pohlad is best-known for his ownership of the Twins, he built his wealth through a diverse set of investments including Marquette Bank (which he sold to Wells Fargo for $1 billion). As president, he bought up 30 other banks before selling it to FirstBank (now USBank). He also owns or has owned a Pepsi bottling operation, United Properties, and Mesaba Airlines. He also owned Twin City Rapid Transit, the streetcar and bus service of St. Paul, which was acquired by Metro Transit in 1970.

According to Forbes Magazine, Pohlad was the 78th 102nd richest man in America, and the 245th richest man in the world. His net worth was estimated at $3.6 billion. He ranked as the third-wealthiest Minnesotan, trailing Whitney MacMillan and Cargill MacMillan Jr.

"I had no experience dealing with reporters, especially sports reporters," he told MPR's Mark Zdechlik in 2001 on the subject of criticism of Pohlad during his bid to get public financing for a new stadium. "I don't want to see the Twin Cities without a baseball team and I've proven I want to keep them here." Find the old interview here.

But the public never warmed to a Pohlad image of baseball savior. He served on the committee that voted to eliminate -- "contract" it was called at the time -- the Twins during the height of public debate over public financing of the Twins stadium at the Capitol. Eventually, lawmakers voted to tax Hennepin County residents for the stadium.

Pohlad contributed a fraction of the cost, calling it "fair and substantial". One of his last public appearances was the groundbreaking for the new stadium in 2007. Pohlad was also the richest owner in baseball.

Businessman Irwin Jacobs, a close friend of Pohlad's, said "when Carl was hurting, he didn't want anyone else to know his pain. When someone else was hurting, he wanted to know your pain." He said Pohlad "lost a literal fortune keeping the Twins here. I told him, 'Carl, get out of it, if people don't appreciate it, move on.' and he didn't and if it was me, I'd have done it. I wouldn't have put up with it." ( Listen to entire interview)

Pohlad came from a poor upbringing. He was one of eight children during the Depression years in Valley Junction, Iowa. He served in World War II in the U.S. infantry, before returning to Iowa and starting a career in banking.

"Carl never lost sight of the fact of his roots and where he came from, "Jacobs said. "How many people are losing their fortunes today because they'd forgotten where they'd come from. He always evaluated risk."

Pohlad was the finance director for Hubert Humphrey's last Senate campaign, but his politics was hard to pin down. In the latest election cycle, for example, Pohlad contributed to Barack Obama's presidential campaign and Norm Coleman's re-election campaign for Senate. He also financial supported DFLers Amy Klobuchar, Patty Wetterling, and Jim Oberestar and also Republicans Gil Gutknecht, Rod Grams, and George Bush.

His wife, Eloise, died in 2003. The couple had three children. They released a statement on their father's death this afternoon:

Carl was the leader of our family as well as the founder and leader of our family businesses. We've loved and respected him and are enormously proud of his accomplishments. And we will all miss him deeply.

We greatly appreciate the support and prayers of our friends, colleagues and the community. We especially appreciate the support of our employees throughout the Pohlad family of companies at this difficult time. We want to assure everyone that we will continue Dad's work and his legacy - just as he would have wanted and as he has prepared us to do.

On his last visit with Pohlad last week, Jacobs said Pohlad told him he was going to do "one more deal after the first of the year." He said there was no deal; he just loved the excitement of the possibility, Jacobs said. "I hope this community appreciates what Carl has done . They're such good people and they give so much. I just hope they treat the boys in the way they should be treated. This community should cherish the history of Carl Pohlad here," Jacobs said.

There may never have been a son of Minnesota more eloquent than Quentin Aanenson. The Luverne native was the inspiration behind Ken Burns' fabulous PBS series, "The War." The series featured Aanenson and three other families around the country. Through 17 hours, it was impossible not to be confused by the calm of Aanenson's voice recalling the chaos of his experience.

Aanenson is on my very short list of people I wanted to meet. I never got the chance. Aanenson, 87, died on Sunday of cancer.

As the Washington Post obituary noted, he was a man haunted -- and changed -- by war:

But the war never entirely left him. He was haunted by the fear that he had once mistakenly fired on Allied troops. The first time he fired on a column of German soldiers along a roadside, the impact of his shells pitched their bodies into the air. He knew he was doing what he was trained to do, "but when I got back home to the base in Normandy and landed, I got sick. I had to think about what I had done. Now that didn't change my resolve for the next day. I went out and did it again. And again and again and again," he said.

"It's hard to understand why the guy next to you was blown apart and why you're able to go on to have a wonderful life," he said. "There's a sense of responsibility we assume, or should assume. I tried to make a contribution, to my family, to the business world, to live with high ethical standards . . . not to waste this life, to do something that counts in a positive way. . . . I tried to live with purpose."

Here's a roundtable of veterans -- including Aanenson -- on the Charlie Rose Show in 1994, on the 50th anniversary of D-Day, a day on which Aanenson said, "I had the best seat in the house."

After the war, he became a life insurance executive.

On his Web site, Aanenson writes his own epitaph:

I guess in one sense you can say we are an endangered species. But unlike the spotted owl or the whooping crane, there is no legislation that can be enacted to save us. We are rapidly disappearing off the radar screen, and soon all that will be left is what we have written, what we have recorded, and some old, fading photographs. Our voices will be forever silent, and the untold "first-hand accounts" of our experiences will remain untold.

We are the boys of World War II. We are dying off at the rate of 1,500 a day -- that's 45,000 a month. That number will steadily increase until the unyielding laws of mathematics give us an increasing rate of deaths, but a decreasing number of deaths -- the remaining pool will have become too small.

Taps is just one sunset away.

But in our lifetimes, we made a difference. We had the good fortune to live during a time when honor, patriotism, and character were important. We stepped up to defend freedom, and put our lives on the line for the "cause." It was a moment in history that may never occur again.

Eartha Kitt has died and it's funny the different things people think of immediately when mentioning her name. The sultry voice, Santa Baby, Catwoman on the Batman series, or -- in my case -- a huge (at the time) controversy over what she said to Lady Bird Johnson at a White House dinner.

As the Voice of America tells the story...

The president's wife, Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, had invited Eartha Kitt with a group of other women to discuss the problem of youth crime. When Mrs. Johnson asked her guests for their thoughts, Kitt raised her hand and spoke out against the war in Vietnam, where young black men were serving and dying in disproportionate numbers. Mrs. Johnson reacted with shock, blinking back tears, and the incident made headlines.

In retaliation, President Johnson ordered the FBI and CIA to investigate her and she became blacklisted.

America has often felt most threatened by its singers.

From a news guy perspective, here's the thing about Dale and Jim Ed's (Tom's) show: The news stinks. Everyone knows the news stinks. Every morning we wake up and one of the first things we remember is times are tough and, oh yeah, the news stinks. Then you turn on the radio and someone is on stage singing "Getting to Know You," just as someone has been singing it since about 10,000 end-of-the-worlds ago. And suddenly you realize that just because the news stinks, life doesn't; it goes on and people sing and dance.

The cynics will call that denial -- that life is simply too crushing in its burden. I will deny that.

Long-time The Morning Show producer Mike Pengra signs "the wall" backstage at the Fitzgerald Theater. Performers and speakers at the Fitz sign their names to the bricks. "This is quite an honor," Mike said as he finished. "Don't worry, we'll paint over it," the theater manager joked.

I was out sick last week when KSTP Radio mysteriously canned Tommy Mischke, described in many quarters since as the last of the truly original radio types in the Twin Cities. Garrison Keillor called him his "hero" on a show a few years ago.

Area blogger Mitch Berg wrote what seems to be the definitive column on Mischke from his view as a call screener at KSTP before Mischke started working there.

... like a lot of genuine originals in any art form (and Mischke's radio was a sort of art form - and I say this while stressing that radio as a whole is a craft), the art depended on having a patron to shield the artist from the spikes and deadfalls of the open market.

That someone, so rumor always had it, was Ginny Morris, one of the granddaughters of Stanley Hubbard the Elder, the founder of Hubbard Broadcasting (and one of the great pioneers of American broadcasting in his own right) and the person who really pulls the strings on the radio side at Hubbard. Ms. Morris - so the rumors in the industry had it, at least when I was paying attention to them - kept Mischke on the payroll, and on the air, for many long years when there was no explicit market demand for a free-form, eccentric stream-of-consciousness show like his. As talk radio morphed into what it is today - a venue for partisan anger, humor and information - Mischke was an outlier who, I think it's fair to say, could only exist in the market with the aid of someone who really really wanted him to exist.

Here's the bit when Mischke joined Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion in 2006. Listen

So this month will be a tough one for long-time radio fans. Mischke is gone -- for now, anyway -- and Tom Keith retires from MPR's The Morning Show on Thursday. Julia Schrenkler and I will be live-blogging the event.

Icons come and icons go. But they always leave a little bit of themselves behind.

Bill Drake is dead and the New York Times left off an important sentence to his lengthy obituary today. "He was preceded in death by the industry he revolutionized."

Drake, 71, teamed with Gene Chenault to form a radio consulting firm that programmed -- and rescued -- some of the biggest AM radio stations in America. Those of us who grew up in the business spinning 45s on a turntable had a connection to Drake every time the boss would open the studio door and shout, "just shut up and play the music."

The Times obit put that a little nicer:

In the 1960s, Mr. Drake, an up-and-coming disc jockey and programmer from south Georgia, revolutionized radio when he and his partner, Lester Eugene Chenault (pronounced Sha-NAULT), decided that radio stations could make a lot more money and reach more listeners if they cut back on D.J. chatter, accelerated the pace of their programs and gave audiences more of what they presumably tuned in to hear: hit songs.

He and Mr. Chenault introduced a formula, eventually sold as a syndicated package with prerecorded music, that would revamp -- and homogenize -- radio stations across the United States.

Under the Drake-Chenault formula, jocks on radio would stop conversing about things in their community -- be it a sock-hop or a high school game -- and provide more insight, like "more hits more often," more often.

Drake's movement led to the consultant-heavy influence on radio. Eventually it led to the end of disc jockeys altogether in many radio stations, replaced by automation and large reel-to-reel tapes instead, all bearing the Drake-Chenault logo. Machines couldn't rebel the way disc jockeys could.

Funeral services are incomplete. But a fitting tribute would be a words-free service. Just play the music.

No matter where they live in the country, anyone over the age of 50 can tell you what used to be in this building. It was an F.W. Woolworth five and dime. All the stores used the same weird brick color, few windows, except on the first floor, that housed a spectacle of consumer wants in its day. In my town, I grew up with a five-and-dime tri-fecta -- a Woolworth's, next to a W.T. Grant's, across the street from an S.S. Kresge (the forerunner of KMart). Of course, they're all gone now, along with the 10-cent hot dog and the fish department.

Why is this in the news? Woolworth's in downtown St. Paul closed in 1993. Because the big story in the UK today is Woolworth's is going under, and the big story on this side of the Atlantic is that people are finding out there still is a Woolworth's.

The British government today refused to intervene to prop up the retailer, which is a descendant of the F.W. Woolworth chain, but has been separate since 1982.

Still, the news brings back memories and prompted a stop at the Seventh Place location in St. Paul where I found the last remnants of the "get lost" spirit that the doomed retailer possessed in its latter days.

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NPR's All Things Considered tonight will air a tribute to Miriam Makeba. the South African singer and anti-apartheid activist who died this morning after a performance in Italy. She was 76.

Let's not wait for it.

True to her nature, she was at a concert against organized crime in Italy when she had a heart attack.

Says the Guardian:

As the first black South African to win international stardom, Makeba performed alongside the likes of Harry Belafonte, Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie in the US. Fusing township melodies with jazz ballads, she sang for world leaders from President John F Kennedy to Nelson Mandela, who led the tributes today, describing Makeba as "South Africa's first lady of song".

Here's a performance with Paul Simon:

Her music was banned in South Africa and she was forced into exile for three decades until Nelson Mandela, now 91, asked her to come home.

Her career was starting to take off in America until she married Stokeley Carmichael of the Black Panthers. "She was in immediate trouble with the FBI and all her American concerts and recording contracts were cancelled," according to the Times Online.

Like South Africa, the FBI realized the power of music. They couldn't stop it.

I had never heard of John W. Ripley until this morning. Apparently, I'm not alone.

"He's the most revered war hero no one's ever heard of," Fred Schultz, senior editor of Naval History Magazine, told the New York Times in Mr. Ripley's obituary today.

It was Easter 1972 when 20,000 North Vietnamese troops and 200 tanks were heading for the South. Only a bridge separated the force from Ripley and 600 South Vietnamese soldiers. So Ripley blew up the bridge in a fashion we weren't interested in reading about in 1972.

Going back and forth for three hours while under fire, Captain Ripley swung hand over hand along the steel I-beams beneath the bridge, securing himself between girders and placing crates holding a total of 500 pounds of TNT in a diagonal line from one side of the structure to the other. The I-beam wings were just wide enough to form pathways along which he could slide the boxes.

When the boxes were in place on the bridge, Captain Ripley attached blasting caps to detonate the TNT, then connected them with a timed-fuse cord that eventually extended hundreds of feet.

"He had to bite down on the blasting caps to attach them to the fuses," John Grider Miller, author of "The Bridge at Dong Ha," said on Monday. "If he bit too low on the blasting cap, it could come loose; if he bit too high, it could blow his head apart."

Captain Ripley bit safely, and the timed-fuse cord gave him about half an hour to clamber off the bridge. Moments later, his work paid off with a shock wave that tossed him into the air but otherwise left him unharmed.

Through the miracle of YouTube, we're left with Ripley's story from Ripley himself.

"Saigon would probably have been lost in 1972 but for Ripley," said retired Marine Corps Col. John Grider Miller, author of "The Bridge at Dong Ha", in today's Washington Post.

It was only two days ago that Mary Lucia and I were talking about her favorite interviews. Studs Terkel was #1 on her -- and lot of other people's -- list. He died on Friday.

We're luck enough here at MPR that he made a few visits. The format of the audio is RealAudio, but perhaps you'll enjoy a last listen to an American icon.

12/8/05 - Here's Mary's interview. "Who else could make falling down the stairs such a funny story," she told me.

8/11/05 - Tom Crann talked with Terkel about music. He was one of the people to recognize the genius of Bob Dylan early on.

2/10/06 - MPR's Midday presented this collection of interviews with Studs Terkel.

The Delta Queen, the quintessential American fixture on the Mississippi River, dies at the end of the month when an exemption that allowed it to travel the river from St. Paul to New Orleans expires.

What's behind its demise? It's either a public safety issue -- the ship is made of wood -- or it's a payback to a union from an influential Minnesota congressman.

The New York Times tackles the issue today but doesn't answer the question as it documents the Delta Queen's last scheduled visit to Cincinnati on the Ohio River.

Rep. James Oberstar, who chairs the House Infrastructure and Transportation Committee, is refusing to allow a vote on an exemption allowing the steamboat to continue. Oberstar, the Times says, cites a Coast Guard evaluation that the ship is a "fire hazard."

But Capt. Erik Christensen, chief of the Coast Guard's office of vessel activity, denies that characterization.

The newspaper story suggests Oberstar is sinking the ship at the behest of the Seafarers International Union, which represented the boat crew until a new owner forced the union off the steamboat. The union is a campaign contributor to Oberstar's re-election.

The Queen's supporters have tried video to help save it, but it never "went viral."

Politics aside, here's a nice multimedia slideshow of the Delta Queen, produced last year.

The metro media gave pretty short shrift to the death of Gene Lourey, whose death I wrote about yesterday.

His was a life story waiting to be told, and today the Duluth News Tribune (registration possibly required) told it. It's as compelling a story as ever existed in Minnesota.

We newsies often think that the only stories are the big weighty world issue stories. Don't get me wrong, they're important. But people who raise a dozen kids, many of them adopted, become the "man behind the woman", and prove that you can run a successful business, provide a living wage for your employees, and give back to your small town community, is big news, too.

When I put out calls here for you to tell me about the interesting people you know living their lives, and leaving a mark, guys like Gene Lourey are the kind of people I'm talking about. I'm kicking myself today for not telling the story when I had the chance.

Update 10/14 10:42 a.m. - I very much appreciate Chuck Haga dropping me a note from Grand Forks, letting me know of a piece he wrote in the Star Tribune in 2006 about Gene Lourey.

The Bush administration's attempt to minimize photographs of the caskets of returning soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq has often made it difficult to capture the stark reality of war: People die and the hearts of loved ones ache.

No picture better captured this than the photograph MPR's Bob Kelleher took at the memorial service for Matt Lourey, a pilot who died in Iraq when his helicopter crashed near Baghdad in 2005.

Gene and Becky Lourey, a former state senator and candidate for governor, raised a dozen children in Finlayson, Minn. Gene Lourey died in his sleep over the weekend, according to John Blackshaw, the general counsel for Nemadji Research Corporation, the software and system analysis firm the Loureys own in Bruno, Minn.

He and his wife worked on the Humphrey presidential campaign in Minnesota, after they moved back to the state from Washington. Gene Lourey was a codebreaker for the National Security Agency, and then worked at the University of Minnesota.

Leroy Sievers died Friday of the cancer about which he's blogged for the last few years.

He made several appearance on MPR's Midmorning. This one in 2006, this one last November, and this one just last month, when he acknowledged his disease was gaining on him.

The last post on his blog came from his wife, Laurie Singer, last Thursday:

On any normal day, this would just be a really bad thunderstorm rumbling its way across the summer sky.

But it's not a normal day and the rumbling is more like the growl of a predator stalking its prey.

Leroy's cancer is making its move.

I guess we all knew this day would come. The day when his doctor would say the medicine needs to be stronger.

The day when I would need to be stronger still.

The thunderstorm has passed, but I can still hear the growl.

-- Laurie

Have you ever seen 954 (at last count) comments to a blog post before? Me neither.

For reasons I don't quite understand -- and which are probably an entire post of its own -- colleagues and friends have been sending me updates over the last few weeks whenever the whiff of a Starbuck's store closing is detected.

Operating under the assumption that they're more clued in than me on matters of popular culture, I'm pleased to pass along the official Starbuck's store closing list.

Twenty-six stores are closing in Minnesota. Ignore the fact the company spelled Minneapolis wrong.

The closings leaves Walgreen's as the most overbuilt chain now.

The Associated Press must've realized today that there' simply no dignified way to write an obituary when the deceased is Bozo the Clown.

Take the last line of this paragraph, for example, in the obituary for Larry Harmon, who died today at 83:

Although not the first person to play Bozo, Harmon took on the famous clown's persona and, as an entrepreneur, he licensed the character to others, particularly TV stations. Those stations then recruited their own Bozos for local shows.

(The AP rewrote the last line for the morning papers.)

It's the slowest news day in a traditionally slow news week, which allows me more time to think deep thoughts. Today's deep thought: How many things that you owned in 1977 are still working and still useful to you?

If you were born after 1977, then think back to the deepest recesses of your memory for a similar object.

I just moved a couch that I bought in 1983, out of my house and into my son's new apartment after convincing him that an orange-dominant, all-plaid couch never goes out of style. That's about as far back as I can go to find a useful object.

1983 is six years after this country launched two Voyager space probes, which originally were intended to fly past Jupiter and Saturn, but worked so well that their mission now is to reach interstellar space, which is the space in a galaxy that is not occupied by planets or stars.

In 1977, the picture of the year was Annie Hall. Hotel California was the top song, and the Oakland Raiders beat the Minnesota Vikings in the Super Bowl, 32-14.

Voyager II was launched the same year Apple Computer was incorporated, and the Apple II computer was unveiled. Tandy's TRS-80 made its debut, the Atari 2600 game system was first sold, and the Concorde made its first regularly scheduled flight from London to New York, and this baby was the Motor Trend Car of the Year:

All of those things are now, for practical purposes, junk. And yet, there is Voyager, still functioning. And this week it taught us that the bubble of solar wind surrounding the solar system is not round, but has a squashed shape. It's an impressive thing, even though we admit to having no idea what it means or what its significance is.

Meanwhile, back on terra firma in 2008, the average lifespan of a cellphone is 14 months.

News Cut is in a nostalgic mood. It happens every time I read another story about vinyl LPs making a comeback, especially if it's accompanied by a picture of a record rack featuring albums, every one of which -- I think -- is in the News Cut vault (i.e. an unopened cardboard box in the crawl space under the stairs from at least three moves ago).

But this item in this morning's Worthington Daily Globe sealed the deal:

Pat Boone will present holiday concerts at 3 and 7 p.m. Dec. 6 at the Business, Arts and Recreation Center (BARC), 1012 Fifth Ave., Windom.

Tickets for the event are now on sale with all seating reserved.

Boone hit national fame in 1955 with his recording version of "Ain't That A Shame." He hit the national spotlight via his first television appearance singing on the "Ted Mack Amateur Hour." Pat Boone sold more records in the 1950s than any other artist except Elvis Presley. He has sold more than 45 million records and has charted 60 songs, 18 of which hit the Top 10.

Pat Boone? Is he still alive? Yes, and he's on a 50 year anniversary tour (aren't we all?), according to his Web site, which automatically plays him singing "Tears of a Clown." and -- if that's not enough to make your day, reports that there's a petition drive to get Pat Boone into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame.

The prospect of an evening checking out Pat Boone fans in Windom on a December evening during his 50 Year Anniversary Tour cannot be ignored.

Now the only thing left to make it a perfect entry into the holiday weekend is to stumble onto a Hot Rod race for pink slips on the way into work.

As planned, they dynamited the Xcel High Bridge plant smokestack in St. Paul on Saturday morning (previous thoughts on this here). News Cut readers are sending images and video. Use this form to send images.

You know how I am by now, right? I like to turn the camera around and photograph the people photographing and watching. So if you've got one of those, feel free to send those along too.

Nathan Levine of St. Paul gets the award for being the first to send an image:

And Mark Jungmann, one of my colleagues, followed seconds behind with the first video:

It fell gracefully, almost beautifully. And in Mark's video above, the little puff of smoke coming out of the stack just before it crashed seemed its way of saying, "so long." That's the way I prefer to look at it, anyway.

Teresa Boardman of St. Paul Real Estate blog fame, has sent a series...

"Oh The dust! People ran," Teresa says.

"The earth trembled..."

.. and now they've got a mess to clean up.

From a different vantage point, Luke Albrecht says, "The shockwave was amazing from just across Shepard Road."

Tracy Anderson of St. Paul took a series of images. Click on the image to see them in all of their implosive glory.

I'm getting some e-mailed links to posted video.