News Cut Category Archive: Regional history

Posting will be a tad light this afternoon. I'm heading to a neat event at the Winnetka Learning Center Auditorium in New Hope for an event that screams News Cut. The Silvertones Harmonic Group -- a 22-person group I'm told -- is honoring several of its WWII members.from 1:30-3p.m. I'll try to have an audio slideshow up later today. 7940 55th Ave. N if you'd like to stop by and forget about politics for awhile.

MPR's Stephanie Hemphill did a magnificent job in her story today profiling Erling Jonassen of Duluth for Veterans Day. His, like most of his generation, is a life well led and a service dutifully and quietly performed.

My father died in 2004 at 84. He was your typical World War II GI except for the part about seeing combat. He was a medical technician, based in England and other than telling me he sailed over on the Queen Mary, he never told me much about what he did and, compared to guys like Jonassen, I guess he didn't do much.

At his and my mother's 60th anniversary luncheon shortly before he died, I refused my siblings' request to give the toast. "I don't do toasts," I said, "but I'll do an interview." So there in the dining room of the restaurant, I interviewed my mother and father about their lives and how they met and when my father told the story about jumping out of the window of his barracks when he heard the sergeant coming to give him something to do, I figured my dad wasn't much of a war hero. He is one of the few people I've ever interviewed who didn't give me a story I could use.

After he died, we found a diary he kept during the war. Day by day he wrote about wanting to get into Officer Candidate School back in the states, not so much because he wanted to serve his country as an officer, but because it was a way to get back to his new bride.

But occasionally tucked into a day here or there was a notation about the bomber crews in his hospital. He said he could always tell how the war was going by the flyboys. He wrote several times about giving a transfusion of blood to one flier from California who, he noted in his last entry on the subject, seemed much better.

Somewhere between jumping out the window and trying to game the system to get away from the war, I like to think my dad had something to do with saving some guy from California, who went on to do great things. My dad? He ended up getting into OCS, and flunked out, continuing a long line of Collinses not ready to lead.

Today, with good reason, the Erling Jonassens and the Quentin Aanensons (the Luverne man featured in PBS' The War last year), and the Jeff Bibeaus (The Roseville school teacher who is now in Iraq) should get their deserved recognition. They come home with stories to tell from the front line that we will strain to hear.

But people like Fred Collins Jr. are on my mind today -- and perhaps people like him are on yours, too -- because he was a vet who said "I didn't do much" and he probably didn't. Except for the making-a-difference part.

That's a big buildup to lessen the impact, I guess, of this other Veterans Day nugget that appeared in the Miami Herald this morning. William Doyle has died. And few people are mourning. He left a family the unenviable task of trying to explain him, and us trying to fathom war.

Tell me about your vet and send some pictures and maybe we can extend Veterans Day for one more day.

I admit. I'm a sucker for stories from the Greatest Generation.

Here's one from the paper up in Detroit Lakes.

Tony Cichy's story: He was drafted into the Army in April of 1941 after working with his father drilling wells in New York Mills. He was stationed in the Philippines when war broke out. He was taken prisoner and was held for 3 1/2 years.

Three and a half years after being a prisoner in camps, the Japanese took 1,800 men and loaded a fighter ship -- the Arisan Maru.

"That's when the hell started."

The men were stuffed in the hold of the ship with no toilets, no light, no water, and were only fed one time. They sat on three-foot shelves.

"I sat in one corner for 14 days."

Walls and beds were made of bamboo, and

It's a gripping account.

Next Thursday, I was reminded today, is the 6th anniversary of the infamous memorial service for Paul Wellstone that some think put Sen. Norm Coleman into office. The memorial service ended up being -- the narrative goes -- a political rally after Coleman Wellstone campaign official Rick Kahn gave a speech that called for Republicans to support Wellstone's successor on the ballot, Walter Mondale.

Six years later, Kahn, who few had ever heard of before that night, is still villified for the speech. In 19 minutes, he changed Minnesota's political history. Listen

From all accounts, he was a campaign friend overcome with grief. It was actually Tom Harkin of Iowa who gave the real stemwinder that night. Kahn introduced the "stand up" theme of the evening, but it was Harkin who brought it home.

The old audio from that night is RealAudio, so I've reprocessed Harkin's speech into an MP3.

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One other missing piece of trivia in the aftermath of the speech: It was only after the service that Gov. Jesse Ventura appointed Dean Barkley, who is now running for the seat against Coleman and Al Franken, to fill out Wellstone's term. Prior to that, according to Ventura, he had intended to appoint a DFLer.

I've long believed that what's killed the sense of community in America is the backyard deck and central air conditioning. When the front porch disappeared, so did a big chunk of our shared lives.

Everett Kuntz,, an Iowa native who settled in suburban Minneapolis before he died in 2003, loved the pictures of Ridgeway, Iowa that he took as a boy. As he was dying of cancer, his son promised to put them in a book. And a few months ago, he did.

"Sunday Afternoon on the Porch: Reflections of a Small Town in Iowa, 1939-1942" has been released by the University of Iowa Press.

Today, the New York Times wrote a terrific story about the book. Unfortunately, the Times didn't produce a slideshow to go along with it, which would have been as much fun as sitting and watching small-town America go by from the front porch.

I'll bet that somewhere within arm's reach -- or maybe in an old box in the basement -- you've got one picture from far in the past with a great story to tell. Dig it out and send it along. Tell me the story and maybe I'll post a series of snapshots.

Last Friday I published the obit of Chuck Doyle, one of the most colorful pilots in Minnesota's history (you may remember him as the guy who flew a plane into a house at the Minnesota State Fair). Chuck held court at the South St. Paul airport on Saturdays, telling old stories and now the Experimental Aircraft Association has made it permanent, publishing this segment of its "Timeless Voices of Aviation" series.

Mary Baruth, 85, of Bloomington was one of the first people to know that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor to start World War II. "I was a telephone operator in the Kenwood District -- the only one left that was manual. We were all half-asleep when the board lit up," she told me on Thursday. "I knew our life was going to change from then on." (Listen)

She didn't know then, of course, that she'd spend the war years in the Army Air Force. She hadn't considered the military until a trip to Seattle where she met women in the Coast Guard who convinced her that the reputation of military women as "raunchy" wasn't true. "It was new to have women actually in the service and there were rumors that there were a lot of rough women in the service. And there were a few." Two of her best friends in the service became nuns after the war. "I made two of my best friends nuns," she said. (Listen)

She joined the Army after a fight with her boyfriend, she said. She served in the Army Airways Communication System, investigating people who were going to be engaged in secret work. "Any guy who was going to do any of the secret work had to be investigated, and we would try to get information on him from the various police departments." She started in Shepherd Field in Texas but was eventually moved to Langley, Virginia, now the home of the CIA. "That was interesting because of all the secretive work that was going on there."

"Any secrets you'd like to share," I asked.

"No," she said with a laugh, leaving the distinct impression it wasn't because she didn't know them. "They had us in a building with no windows. It was like working in a dungeon."

Mary Baruth (then Mary Reese) met the man who would become her husband after the war, when he walked into her office by mistake. It wasn't until 1949 that they married and had three children -- he called them "Little works of Art." He died last year.

The military was one of the best times of her life. "When I went in the service, I had to do things whether I liked to or not. Just to get out and meet people, it just changed my whole life as far as me not being in a shell anymore," she said. "I always think it gave me more confidence -- the people I met and travel. But I wasn't just going in for me. I was trying to help out."

Asked about an event next week at which Minnesota's women veterans will be honored, Baruth said, "It's kind of late, isn't it? We were new to the service, but it's taken awhile and I'm thinking, 'how many of us are left?'"

What would she like to hear someone say? "That we've done well. That we helped out," she said, with a touch of guilt, however. "We were there to relieve the guys and if we weren't there, maybe some of them wouldn't have had to go overseas."

This is the final of the short series on the women of World War II. You can find the first one here and the second one here. My colleague, Elizabeth Stawicki, also produced a nifty story on the subject in 2005.

Alice Iverson, 88, of Two Harbors, Minn., (above right) probably wouldn't have joined the Marines if it hadn't been for Kenny Trowbridge. She was engaged to be married to him when he was killed in the battle of Tarawa in the South Pacific in late 1943. He had just written his mother asking her to take Iverson to Duluth to buy a cedar chest. Instead, she says, all she wanted was a locket with his picture. She took it with her into the Marines. Two brothers had already enlisted. One of them was killed in the Philippines earlier in World War II.

Haily Smoger, 87, (above middle) was making parts for submarines at a defense plant in Milwaukee when she got fed up with making less money than the man who worked next to her. "That's all it took," for her to join the Air Corps. "I thought it would get me off the ground a little bit," she told me Wednesday. She lost a brother in the war, too. Clarence was killed in Germany.

June Johnson, 88, of Two Harbors (above left) joined the Marines because her husband had left for the war a week before Christmas, just a few months after they were married in 1942. She worked in Duluth servicing juke boxes and slot machines. During a lunch break, she says, she decided to join the Marines. She shipped out on her and her husband's anniversary.

Over coffee and cookies in Iverson's home, a couple of blocks from Lake Superior, all three spoke of their service -- and sacrifice -- in another time of war.

"We all had a cause," June Johnson said. "Ours was to relieve the men for duty."

Sgt. Smoger spent most of the war working at a B-24 maintenance facility in Mountain Home, Idaho. Cpl. Iverson worked at a PX in North Carolina. Johnson was among the first women Marines at Camp Pendleton, where she was in charge of a refueling station. They also serve who pump gas.

After the war ended, all three returned to the lake. June became the Civil Defense director for her town. Her husband worked for years as a plumber. "A lot of widows cried the day he died," she said. Alice's first date after the war was with the same man who was her first date before the war: the man she married. A few years ago, she was asked to introduce John Kerry during a presidential campaign stop on the North Shore.

Haily wasn't finished sacrificing. Her son, Michael, was killed in an ambush in Vietnam. She recalled the day in the late '90s when she got a phone call from the Two Harbors tourist booth. It was from a Kansas attorney who had wanted for 30 years to visit her son's grave. "He had been wounded and Michael gave up a spot on an evacuation helicopter. He said Michael told him, 'Don't worry, I'll get the next one.' There was no next one."

The three Two Harbors veterans will be honored, along with other Minnesota women veterans of World War II next week. All three say it's long overdue. "We couldn't live at home like other women did," Johnson said. "It was a different life, but it was a good life."

They don't say that about the life for today's veterans. Johnson volunteers at a Veteran's Administration Hospital in West Palm Beach, Florida. "I see a lot of young men just hobbling around; it's all you see," she said. "There are homeless veterans and I saw a nurse give one a plastic bag with a banana and a piece of cake; he was homeless."

"We're not doing right by our veterans," Smoger says.

"A disgrace," says Alice Iverson.

Listen to a portion of the conversation. (mp3)

(See part one of the series.)

If you went to the Minnesota State Fair in the '60s, chances are you saw skywriting for the first time. Or maybe you saw the biplane pulling an advertising banner over Memorial Stadium at a Gopher game. That was Chuck Doyle at work.

Chuck died today in St. Cloud. His son, Chuck Jr., penned a tribute to him which crossed my cubicle and I'm pleased to share it with you.

Charles Peter "Chuck" Doyle was born to be a pilot and stuntman. Impressed with Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo flight to Europe, Doyle talked his father into taking him to the Minneapolis Airport where he was given an air ride in a Navy trainer. In his teens, Doyle owned a Harley Davidson motorcycle and cut classes at Washburn High School to ride to the airport and hang out. In the summer after his junior year, he offered to trade the motorcycle for flying lessons, but instead was given work helping to rebuild airplanes. He soloed in an airplane that summer and borrowed money to purchase his own Travel Air biplane. During the 1933 fall homecoming football game at the high school, Doyle buzzed the field and was promptly dismissed from school. He would finally graduate from Washburn in a colorful 2002 ceremony!

At the airport, Doyle earned a living working on airplanes, selling tickets for barnstormers, and performing daredevil stunts. In 1935, Doyle made his first parachute jump at the Minnesota State Fair and towed his first aerial banner for Griffith Shoe Polish. He had learned the fine art of skywriting from local veterans and rigged his plane to fulfill local Pepsi Cola assignments. In addition to the flying, Doyle also began to take part in other thrill show events at fairs and celebrations across the country, performing such stunts as driving his motorcycle through burning board walls, head-on auto crashes, crashing airplanes through 'houses' built within fairgrounds, as well as climbing from his speeding motorcycle to an airplane by means of a rope ladder hung from the airplane. He used his motorcycle and ramps to jump over cars long before Evel Knievel was born. Despite the spectacular lifestyle, Doyle was never injured.

During WWII, Doyle worked briefly for Northwestern Aeronautical Corporation in St. Paul, building gliders that were used by the Army to land troops behind enemy lines. Despite having no college education, he was hired by Northwest Airlines in January of 1942 after Pearl Harbor as a training instructor and taught at Rochester, Minnesota. When Northwest was contracted by the Army Air Transport Command, he was assigned to fly Northwest transports in Alaska, making flights as far out as the Aleutian Islands.

Following the war, Doyle bought war surplus aircraft, flying, restoring and racing them at Reno NV. Many of his airplanes found their way into museums, including three in the Air Force Museum at Dayton, Ohio, and a Curtiss Pusher aircraft that hangs in the MSP Airport's Lindbergh terminal. Doyle's airline career with Northwest continued until his retirement at age 60 in 1976 after 34 years, but his flying career wasn't over. From his home airstrip in Apple Valley, Doyle continued to sky-write and tow banners. The airstrip's signboard heralded "UFOs Welcome." He owned and flew dozens of aircraft and had his hand in many Minnesota aviation projects, including the publishing of a Minnesota aviation history book.

When the City of Apple Valley condemned his property for a highway right-of-way, Doyle moved his planes to Fleming Field in South St. Paul. He knew everybody in aviation and lived flying and restoring airplanes every day of his life. Both Chuck Jr. and Brian were taught to learn to fly by their father and are pilots and continue the family's tradition for the love of aviation Shannon would fly only with her Father but respects their love for flying.

Next month, female veterans of World War II will be given a well-deserved honor in Minnesota: a recognition that they did their part. Virginia Allen of Minneapolis would like to see volunteers officially recognized as veterans, too.

The word volunteer doesn't begin to convey her service, which took her from helping the most seriously injured fliers at a Florida hospital to rallying morale in Burma as "G.I. Jill," the antidote to the anti-American messages of Tokyo Rose.

When the war broke out, she told me recently, she knew she had to do something. "Anyone who was not patriotic was totally ignored and rejected by one and all," she said. "The more involved you were, the more important you felt because you were doing something for the country."

Allen, now 89, had graduated from William and Mary and had hoped to move to France, but the war had other ideas and she volunteered at a hospital in Florida.

"The hospital I worked in had the worst possible injured, poor flying guys I've ever seen. I was supposed to be a secretary. I was very bad at that. I could sort of type so they kept me there in the physical therapy department in order to be sure that I could handle what I was going to see. I worked with these guys and my job literally was to look at them, chat with them, and maybe they wouldn't even have a face left. Maybe they were just like a stick for a leg or something. We'd talk about, 'OK if you aren't really working out, how are we going to dance?' It was that type of lingo that went over and I soon became quite comfortable looking at bashed-up people, which is unusual since I'd never seen anything like that."

Virginia worked as a civilian employee for Army Intelligence, which gave her more information about what was going on than many of her contemporaries. And when a young soldier to whom she was engaged was killed in a plane crash in Africa, she decided she wouldn't get involved with anybody until after the war. Still, she had a sense of wanting to do more. She headed overseas.

She and her best friend joined the Red Cross, got on a special train and headed to New York and, she presumed, France. "When we woke up, we saw cornfields. We were heading west. After training at a California Marine base, she and her best friend boarded a ship, the destination of which was secret. They ended up in Calcutta. "I had seen the bashed-up GIs, thank God, because I don't know if I would've been able to make it through all that happened in India," she said.

She ended up in Agra, a desert outpost full of C-46 cargo plane repairmen where she set up a Red Cross club, broadcast as G.I. Jill, and worked to keep morale up. "I took the GIs to see the Taj Mahal, we held dances, and we went to leper colonies."

"I was over at the hospital one night because a GI sent for me and he asked me if I would write a letter to his parents because he had a rotten cold. I sat down beside him and we talked, and he really looked terrible. The next day he died. It was the first (case of) polio among GIs. Then we had an epidemic," she said. To keep morale up, "you simply did not advertise it. We held volleyball games, we dug a golf course out of the ground, horseshoes, anything we could think of. Nobody knew how to treat polio."

"You don't have time to think of your morale, you're too busy to think about their morale. That's the thing that saved us. If they were down we had to dream up something. We even had a program called 'manners.' These guys requested that over and over again. We did it as an experiment," she said.

Her G.I. Jill radio program competed for the same audience as Tokyo Rose: the American G.I. Virginia said she never thought about countering Tokyo Rose by trying to direct propaganda to Japanese soldiers. "We didn't give a hoot what they heard. I didn't want to be responsible for giving them any information at all. We could break down an awful lot of the stuff that she was telling us as just hogwash."

"Did you listen to her?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "Whenever I had a minute."

"Did you see her as your competition?"

"We were coming from two different places. And she lied and I didn't," she said.

Through the war in China-Burma, Virginia Allen did her job, putting on shows, playing music, teaching manners, writing the last letters home for soldiers. She is one of 16 people to be put in a Library of Congress collection on the China-Burma theater of war, considered the "forgotten theater."

She wants to be sure the volunteers in the war aren't forgotten, too.

"We are treated like veterans in every way except we have no benefits whatsoever," she said. "There were a number of people who needed help, who really would've liked to have been able to go to a veterans' hospital for help. (They treated) us as veterans whenever it looked good, but never really recognized us completely as veterans. We went off to war. There were guys who were enlisted who (had to be ) dragged to go off... hated it. We could've stayed home and danced with all those people. That was the easy way out."

"You were required to be brave. There were people who dropped out and went home," she said. "But most of us didn't."

Audio highlights with Virginia Allen