News Cut Category Archive: Regional history
Former Strib editor stood on principle, and larger than life
Posted at 5:00 AM on January 5, 2012
by Eric Ringham
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Media, Regional history
Charles W. Bailey, the former editor of the Minneapolis Tribune and its successor paper, the Star Tribune, died Tuesday in a New Jersey nursing home. He was 82.
For the generation of young reporters and editors who entered the journalism business during Watergate, Chuck Bailey was the perfect editor in chief. He came from the East Coast and brought with him an air of old money. He reminded us a little of the Washington Post's Ben Bradlee. He could wear a bow tie and make it work.
Once during the news huddle he asked why the Tribune was giving so much attention to a Lutheran convention. One of the editors pointed out that Minnesota had substantial numbers of Lutherans. Chuck replied, "No, Episcopalians are substantial. Lutherans are merely numerous."
That was the story, anyway. Chuck was larger than life, and it was sometimes hard to tell the legend from reality. He wrote "Seven Days in May," a major political thriller that got made into a movie. He was there when Bobby Kennedy was killed. He was on Air Force One when LBJ took the oath of office. He went with Nixon to China.
That last one I was sure of, because I'd seen a photo from the trip in Chuck's office. Even at the bottom of the Tribune's food chain, I was often in that office, answering questions about my life and career plans. Once, when he found out I was planning to visit London on vacation, he pressed on me the home phone number of a famous foreign correspondent who he insisted would have me to dinner. He made me promise to call. I did, and though no dinner invitation came of it, I did have a memorable conversation.
It says something about a boss: that he would go to such lengths to make a young employee feel like a colleague.
Chuck wrote an occasional column for the editorial page of the Tribune. All too often these days, executive editors and publishers use columns like that to promote a coming series of news articles or to celebrate circulation gains or an iPad app. But Chuck never wrote promotional copy, and instead based his columns on the news. He was implicitly stating a principle: that he would hold himself to the same standards he expected of anyone else.
When he left the paper, it was again to state a principle, explicitly this time. After the Tribune merged with the afternoon Minneapolis Star -- a merger that Star employees compared to the merger of a bug with a windshield -- Chuck promised that staff reductions would go only so far. When the publisher told him he would have to break that promise and make more cuts, he quit. He announced his reasons in one of those somber shirtsleeves meetings that newsrooms always have when something awful is about to happen.
He did pretty well for himself after that, taking a job with NPR in Washington. But as he walked away from a job he clearly loved, he wept, and his staff applauded. In 30 years at the newspaper, I never heard that kind of applause again.
The man who dares speak ill of Iowa
Posted at 10:41 AM on January 3, 2012
by Bob Collins
(4 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
It's been a month since journalism professor Stephen Bloom penned an article for The Atlantic revealing all he knows about Iowa, which from the reactions of most Iowans, may not be as much as he thinks.
It's been a debate that's been every bit as entertaining -- maybe more so -- than the humdrum work of electing a leader of the most powerful nation on the planet.
Bloom has had some time to think about what he wrote, and he isn't changing a thing.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Vanishing icons
Posted at 11:34 AM on December 29, 2011
by Bob Collins
(3 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
Things come. Things go. That much we know about the rhythms of life. But the disappearance of the Swany White flour mill in Freeport, destroyed by fire this week, seems particularly poignant.
Owner Gary Thelan told MPR's Conrad Wilson that he's not going to rebuild.
"It's the continuation of the loss of small-town America," photographer Richard Olsenius told the St. Cloud Times. The Maryland man photographed the town a few years ago for a story on Garrison Keillor's territory. "The mill was like the church in the community. You know that guys, for three generations before you, hung out there and leaned on the same counter. When you lose something like the mill, there's a piece of us that is taken away."
Apparently, it was the last commercial flour mill in all of Minnesota.
"This was a place where you walked into a 12 x 20 room with a counter and some wall displays of all their flours and grains in bags," MPR reader Frank Steen of Saint Paul told us in an email today. "In a couple minutes you were greeted by a flour covered man who had milled the flour. He would total your bill in dollar or 50-cent increments on a 10-key calculator and offer to carry your order out to your car. The quality was great. We just made 9-grain with extra rye with sweetened cranberries for Christmas. I think we have two-loaves worth in the dough bucket. We'll have to blend in a tear or two."
What struck me about Wilson's photograph of the mill above, is it is from almost the same angle as the Minnesota Historical Society's 1977 photo.
It's the smokestack that was the icon of the icon and, fortunately for Freeport, it's still standing.
It would make a great historical marker.
Why the Kensington Runestone is a fake
Posted at 10:15 AM on November 16, 2011
by Bob Collins
(10 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
Minnesota farmer Olaf Ohman unearthed the Kensington Runestone on his Douglas County farm in 1898, and for a good share of the time since, people have debated whether it's a fake or an actual artifact from Nordic explorers dating from 1392. If it's a legit, it proves the Vikings were here first.
But now there's some additional evidence that the mysterious inscriptions on the stone come from the hand only of Olaf Ohman.
Aardvarkaeology points to a paper deciphering a numerical code, which appears to say:
"The Öhmans found. We kept/collected firewood at the stone."
The Swede who wrote the paper says, "after his rune stone gained acceptance in wider circles through skilful marketing by others, it became almost impossible for him to come clean with his honour intact."
(h/t: Paul Weimer)
Mr. Bubble Day
Posted at 12:40 PM on August 31, 2011
by Bob Collins
(4 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
You know things are going great in North Dakota when the governor can proclaim it "Mr. Bubble Day" without fear of humiliation. That's the way that state rolls in a time when the economy is zipping along and the budget is balanced.
Yesterday, Gov. Ed Schafer Jack Dalrymple declared it so on Mr. Bubble's 50th anniversary. The product was manufactured by the Gold Seal Company.
"Mr. Bubble bombed. It tanked. It was a flop," the governor notes. "It didn't do well enough to even keep it on the shelves."
And how could it? It was expensive. Fifty-nine cents. So Harold Schafer -- did I mention he was the (former) governor's dad? -- dropped the price to a more affordable 39 cents and the product took off.
"Before he died, the last year sitting in Medora, he would sit out on our porch for hours with boxes of Mr. Bubble on the side of his rocker," his widow said. "He would call the kids in that walked by our house and say, 'C'mon kids' and 'Where are you from?' and all that. And then he would autograph a box of Mr. Bubble for every one of those kids."
Mister Bubble is now made by a Minnesota-based company, proof we can take a North Dakota company away from time to time.
Is Iowa the Fairest?
Posted at 1:30 PM on August 11, 2011
by Bob Collins
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
On the day the Iowa State Fair opens each year, my mind drifts a few cubicles away where its chief defender in these parts -- MPR's Nikki Tundel -- sits. In 2005, she acquitted herself well in a Buckley v. Vidal-style debate with All Things Considered host Tom Crann, who insisted Minnesota has a better state fair.
Sure, there are probably Norman Rockwellesque scenes like these at the Minnesota State Fair as well. But too often they're obscured by the crowds of women in high heels complaining about the smell of the horse barn or overshadowed by the countless men in American-flag T-shirts gobbling down alligator on a stick.
The Iowa State Fair isn't hip. It's not flashy. But it's genuine and sincere and unpretentious. The cattle barns are filled with dairy farmers who never leave the side of their prized cows. They set up cots and card tables and crock pots and simply make themselves at home under the wooden rafters of the 85-year-old building. At night, some even curl up on the hay next to their cows and fall asleep. You can't get much more real than that.
Find the segments, which unfortunately are preserved in the dreadful RealPlayer format, here.
The big news out of Iowa this year is deep-fried butter.
Lessons from the Apostle Islands
Posted at 2:46 PM on August 10, 2011
by Bob Collins
(2 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
Boing Boing, the popular website, has provided a great look at the history of the Apostle Islands on Lake Superior.
Few other locations, once "spoiled" by human intervention, carry such a reputation as now being unspoiled by human intervention.
It's a fine line, and not one that the Park Service was really set up to walk. In a 2003 article in Orion magazine, William Cronon explained that the 1964 Wilderness Act and National Park Service policy separates "nature" and "culture" as two very distinct things. Where there is culture, you can't have true nature. This attitude means that, in lots of places, the Park Service has actually torn down historic buildings and removed traces of past human habitation in order to make National Parks more "natural." Cedar Bark Cottage was long gone by the time the Apostle Islands became a National Lakeshore in 1970, but the Park Service there tore down many other buildings, like cabins and fishing camps, as part of turning the Islands into a Park.
Today, though, those old attitudes are starting to change. Places like Hermit Island, and the people who care about both the natural and human history there, are forcing the National Park Service to think differently about what it preserves and how it presents the re-wilded wilderness to visitors. The trouble is, nobody is really sure of the best way to do that just yet.
The life and times of St. Anthony Falls
Posted at 10:31 AM on August 3, 2011
by Bob Collins
(6 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
Something I didn't know when the day started: "St. Anthony Falls is the only waterfall on the Mississippi River, and the now flooded gorge below is the river's only gorge."
The website, Nokohaha, provides that nugget in a post today, passed along by Facebook pal Jeanne Souldern.
At one time Saint Anthony Falls was not the biggest or the only falls on the river. 11,700 years ago, the "River Warren Falls" believed by geologists to be the biggest waterfall ever seen in America, took up most of what became downtown St. Paul. Back then the falls may have been 200 feet high and over a half-mile wide and kept going by a enormous flow of meltwater from Lake Agassiz that came barreling down the Minnesota River valley.
For some reason, this is one of those days when a reminder that things that predate us and our institutions will likely continue after we're an archeological dig, is oddly comforting.
End of the line for Lake Calhoun?
Posted at 10:39 AM on May 20, 2011
by Bob Collins
(13 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
Minneapolis Lake Calhoun was named after Secretary of War, Vice President and South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, which is odd. Why on earth was Minneapolis naming lakes after a guy from South Carolina? Now, KARE 11 reports, some people want to change the name because he was also a proponent of slavery.
"I am looking at all of this information on Calhoun and the more I see, I think this is one of the worst people ever born in this country," John Winters told the station.
Calhoun sent the Army to survey the area and authorized the construction of Fort Snelling. That's his Minnesota connection, apparently. Good enough, it appears, to get a big lake named after you.
There'll probably be a Parks Board hearing soon on whether the name of the lake should be changed, considering the beliefs of Mr. Calhoun. Perhaps its original name -- Mde Maka Ska -- would work.
Minnesota's underwear
Posted at 10:33 AM on March 22, 2011
by Bob Collins
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
A new book trailer from the Minnesota Historical Society Press has certainly opened our eyes to the fact underwear advertising was a lot more interesting in Minnesota's relative youth.
The book from Susan Marks accompanies an exhibit on Minnesota's claim to underwear fame that opens in May.
Munsingwear operated in Minneapolis for 100 years, until 1986.
Edgar Hetteen
Posted at 11:25 AM on February 14, 2011
by Bob Collins
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Icons, Regional history
Edgar Hetteen has died, the Star Tribune reports.
He started a company that made newfangled machines called snowmobiles.
Here's a profile of the man that MPR News did in 2004.
Here's a piece Twin Cities Business Journal did on him a few years ago.
Photo: Original Polaris partners (l-r): David Johnson, Allan Hetteen and Edgar Hetteen. Source: Polaris
Johnny Cash and the Iron Range
Posted at 11:05 AM on December 9, 2010
by Nate Minor
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
Photo courtesy of Mary Ann Vukich
Being a music fan in Minnesota, I'm well aware of the more famous concerts from rock 'n roll's hey days in the 1950s and 1960s: The Beatles in Bloomington in 1965 and Buddy Holly in Duluth in 1959 come to mind.
But until I read Jason Scorich's excellent history column, I didn't know about Johnny Cash's show in Eveleth in February of 1958. Though he had only released one album at the time, Cash had already released some of his most famous songs, including "I Walk the Line" and "Folsom Prison Blues."
Scorich writes that Cash wasn't thrilled with playing in Eveleth in February. He certainly doesn't look it in the above newspaper photo. But for Iron Range youth, Scorich writes, the concert was "manna from heaven."
Cash's boom-chuck train rhythms and rock energy were a validation of those unnamable feelings and emotions that welled up inside them. In short: In February 1958, a tough, hardy little seed of rock and roll history was planted in the frozen Range soil.
One of those youths, though he probably didn't attend the show, wasn't impressed.
According to young Bobby Zimmerman (Bob Dylan), Cash needed more "expression." Of course, what Dylan and the rest of us came to realize was that Cash's stony, John Wayne-like lack of expressiveness was, in fact, his most "expressive" stylistic trait.
Writer, college instructor and blogger Aaron Brown argues that fits in much better with the Iron Range than their native son Dylan:
Johnny Cash's music more deftly describes the pathos of the Iron Range: rhythmic, rough around the edges, traditional and yet warped into something rebellious.
Sounds like the Iron Range to me.
Eventually though, Dylan warmed to Cash -- and we're all a little richer for it:
The winds of heck
Posted at 12:40 PM on November 9, 2010
by Bob Collins
(7 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history, Weather
No story ever posted to the Minnesota Public Radio website has generated as much audience traffic over the last 10 years as Mark Steil's 2000 story on the 60th anniversary of the Armistice Day blizzard. It killed 49 people in Minnesota, many of them hunters who were caught by surprise by the storm. The weather up to then was very much like today: unseasonably warm.
Thursday marks the 70th anniversary of the storm and we heard today from Father Roger Kasprick at St. John's Abbey, who grew up in Angus, Minn. He was kind enough to share his e-mailed answer to an acquaintance who asked him recently if he'd heard of the storm.
Here is his response:
So my response to your question: Yes, I have "heard of this story of the 1940 snow storm." I also lived through this storm and survived it. One of our neighbors a mile the other direction from our one-room school just about didn't survive it. His ears froze, and I guess his lungs froze, and I don't remember all the details, but I guess one eye was damaged.
George Goodwin was a nice guy, and a nice neighbor. Their two sons, Murry and Dennis, went to the same school as we did, and later their daughter, Carol, as well. George had gone to Warren [local parlance="went to town"] wearing a light jacket and his man's dress hat, just right for a summer day because it was an unusually nice warm fall day. We had no idea of what was coming at us so suddenly.
Anyway, George somehow managed to get his car almost home on the country roads, something almost miraculous in that white-out blizzard. But he finally couldn't get it any farther, couldn't get it into his yard. He got out of his car to try to make it to his farmstead, barn, house, all the possible shelter. He could not get that far; he got all confused. But he did end up across the county road from his house, and he had some machinery parked there, including a truck box. He took some shelter in the truck box, and since he knew where he was, he tried again and again to get across the road to his house. He just couldn't do it. In the white-out he merely got confused and was sort of blown back to the area where the machinery was.
Here my little boy memory starts to fail me, but I think someone the next morning found his car, so started to look for him, found him, dug him out and got him inside the house. He did lose at least one ear, the outer portion, and part of the other. In those days they didn't have plastic surgery available, so he ended up mutilated. The family had to nurse him back to health for a very long time. Neighbors had to come in to help milk the cows and take care of the chores. He didn't die in that storm, but sometimes people said perhaps some times he might have wished he had.
Me? I was a lot luckier. Us kids (including at least George's son Murry Goodwin, one grade ahead of me; perhaps Denny had not yet started school.) were all in our one-room schoolhouse. I was six years old, so I suppose Miss Smith had promoted me to second grade by that time, but I was a pretty small kid.
It felt like that wind was going to blow the little building down, just the way the big bad wolf did it to the three little pigs' house. The stove was having trouble burning, with the terrible down draft of the strong wind, so we had very little heat in that poor drafty frame building. But we all put our coats or jackets on, even though we too had started out that morning with only light outer clothes because it was such a pleasant day.
Some of the big boys wanted to start walking home, as I recall--"get out of here before it gets any worse" was the attitude. Miss Smith tried to keep school classes and activities going; I suppose she thought it would be best to keep our thoughts engaged with our lessons. We were used to winter storms in winter time, but this one came as such a nasty surprise, and it was a corker.
I don't remember all the details any longer, but I suppose Miss Smith probably wouldn't let any of the kids go outside. We were safer in the school, piled against one another for warmth and assurance. Some cars got there from the farms that were closer to school, especially those whose mothers usually drove their kids to school (usually little girls were more likely to have "a ride" than the rest of us). Some parents told other kids they were supposed to go home with them, ride to their house, and their folks would pick them up there when they could. But us? No such luck. We lived 1 1/2 miles east of school on a township dirt road (not graveled), and nobody else lived in our direction from school. I guess we farmed all or nearly all of the land, so there were no other farmhouses along the way. And normally, nobody gave us a ride, either to or from school.
I think at that time there were four of us younger kids [my sister, and then the 3 younger boys, spread through 8 grades]. We walked to school together, and home again each day. So we didn't have any reason to expect that anyone would come to give us a ride.
(Several years later the two youngest of us boys got bicycles so we could do the trip much quicker during clement weather, but in winter we were back to walking. The bikes were a good idea because we could get home quicker and get to doing chores, since by that time the two older brothers were off in boarding school all week, at the school now known as University of Minn - Crookston. Mom and Dad wanted to make sure that all us kids got to go to high school. My two sisters were not usually expected to work in the barn, and anyway they both got out of Dodge and got jobs as secretaries. They became townies as soon as they finished high school, so they weren't much available for the barns during the winter. Too bad; they missed out on a really enriching experience.)Before it got too dark, we stepped outside of school to see if we could make it home. We couldn't. Back into the schoolhouse. At some point in late afternoon someone thought she/he saw something dark on the road from the East. Perhaps someone coming to the schoolhouse? We had to wait for a time; finally the dark spot got close enough that we could see that it was real, and it was moving toward us, very slowly. Good feeling. But what the heck is it? Eventually we could make out that it was a team of horses fighting their way into the teeth of the NW wind and fiercely driven snow. What the heck were they pulling?
Finally the team turned in at the schoolyard, and a figure rose from under something heavy, and stood up in the horse water tank he'd been riding in. He was covered in very strange ways since parkas had not yet been invented for us, but we now knew that it was our Dad. Yep, he and Mom had dug out the outside horse watering tank and put it on the manure sled, also known locally as a "stone boat". It was a big sled of boards strung across two sturdy "runners", so it slid along only about 5 or six inches above the ground, the easier to muscle big rocks onto it. In spring or summer farmers might drive these stone boats through the fields to pick up the rocks to clear the fields. In the winter time we used it for cleaning the cow barn every morning. In winter there was no way to use the fancy manure spreader with its box on wheels, which gears could be engaged to self-unload the manure load. In winter we hitched a team of horses to the stoneboat/manure sled or sleigh, and had the horses drag it through the barn from one end to the other and go out the door on the other end. All the way along we forked or shoveled out the barn, with the cows still stanchioned in place and the other horses tied in their stalls. We got to know their hind ends close up and personal. I was never kicked by a horse, for which we give thanks and praise, but I sure didn't like it because one mare decided she should be in charge, not me, and would crowd me against the plank stall, or nip at my hands and arms when I was trying to feed them their grain portions--again and again. She made it really hard for me to like her. Even scarier when I was told to take off their halters and put on the bridle and harness, to go out to work. Now that is not a decent job for a little kid, but we had to do it to get all the work done.
Now, on November 11, 1940, this nasty mare and her regular teammate, a very decent sort of gray mare -- evidently our most trusted team -- came out into the blizzard of the century to collect us, haul us home safely, to safety. It gave me a new appreciation for the horses, for my Dad, and for the manure sled which was the symbol of an awful lot of hard and unpleasant work at home.
Dad faced the elements in order to make sure that us four kids got scrunched down into the water tank, and he put a couple of very heavy horsehide (with hair still on them) "horse robes" over us for our ride home. The mare didn't really think that that one day of horse heroism required her to be much nicer to me the rest of the time. But I knew what she was really made of, a stout heart of pure gold when the times got tough. We kept that team of horses the longest of any. They were the last ones to go, and Dad did not part with them easily. He couldn't think of a single tractor that he could count on to do what that team had done for him, and with him, for a good many years. As for me, I had a new way of estimating the manure sled. Still, through the years when someone asks if our folks gave us a ride the one and a half miles to or from school, I've had to summon a bit of courage to say, "Well, sometimes they would haul us on the manure sled." I guess it doesn't sound elegant.
Thanks for asking. Yes, I have heard of the 1940 Armistice Day storm. It was there with us on the open prairie of the Red River Valley.
(Photo: Minnesota Historical Society)
A look at the 'alien enemy' camps
Posted at 12:05 PM on September 20, 2010
by Bob Collins
(3 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
We've been getting a fair amount of e-mail today about Youth Radio reporter Mara Fink's report on her grandmother's internment in a camp during World War II. Most of them has this message: It wasn't just the Japanese-Americans.
"You should also cover the internment of both German Americans and Italian Americans," wrote Arthur Jacobs of Tempe, Arizona. "They were held in more than 50 camps across this Great Land!"
Jacobs should know. He was held at Ellis Island and Crystal City, Texas. Jacobs was born in Brooklyn, but he's of German descent.
Writer Robert Seward of Idaho says he's working on a book about the Crystal City camp. "Ten out of eleven Japanese Americans were in all Japanese family camps like Manzanar," he said today. "The eleventh was in mixed-race internment camps run by INS. Eleven-thousand German Americans and 3,000 Italian American were also swept into internment camps due to the same type of hysteria that swept up the Japanese. Thousands more Italian Americans were strongly encouraged to leave San Francisco under threat of internment. The Crystal City Internment Camp was about half Japanese and half German."
Seward called our attention to this propaganda film about Crystal City called, 'The Alien Enemy.'
Here's an account of one German-American, Eberhard Fuhr of Illinois (he also lived in Minnesota as a boy), who described the camp in fairly favorable terms:
Update 4:04 p.m. The gentleman in the video above writes to us:
I lived in Edina seven years, before transfer. I was interned as a dangerous alien enemy at age 17 to 22 from 1943 until 1947, but I was German born, not Japanese with whom I was interned in Crystal City Texas. We lost our home in Cincinnati to looters/pillagers and finally foreclosure. Unlike the $20,000 each Japanese received, none of the 30,000 German internees received a dime of compensation. We neither broke any laws,or destroyed people or buildings. Our internment was not racial. What it was is for someone objective to determine. I can only guess surmise and remain puzzled. But to stay angry, bitter, or whatever, does little to move forward or to assuage the tangible and/or intangible losses. the loss to looters of a worthless photo of a grandparent,or a memento of no intrinsic value can be a priceless loss for my mother.
I would venture that I was interned longer than any Japanese, but then that means little.
I am forever grateful that I was able to matriculate Gustavus Adolphus, in 1948 earn freshman numerals in football in St Peter before I transferred to Ohio U.
Meeting Miss Mitchell
Posted at 11:34 AM on July 15, 2010
by Bob Collins
(6 Comments)
Filed under: Aviation, Regional history
Julia Schrenkler, interactive producer for Minnesota Public Radio, time traveled to the exotic land of South St. Paul yesterday, from where she filed this report.
There's history in Minnesota. Some stories are undiscovered, and others can be found if you're willing to visit Hangar #3 at Fleming Field in South St. Paul.
The Minnesota Wing of the Commemorative Air Force tends and flies some of the aircraft that shaped history. The goals: preserve and educate. They restore, maintain and show the planes. The Quonset hangar a short distance from the Twin Cities International Airport is the home base for the flying machines and the people who love them.
The planes dominate the aircraft entrance area while maintenance tool chests are scattered around the edges. In the back are historical displays (complete with propaganda and a collection of unopened rations) and where the men in uniform were waiting.
These men aren't pilots. They're not a functional flying crew. They're re-enactors and they were willing to deliver a crash course on their passion for history.
The pursuit of historical truth
"We're research geeks," Eric Cheever said, "I've always been obsessed with history, and I read as much of it as I could." Cheever seems to favor researching mid 20th century events and explained his father's friends were WWII veterans, "To sit and hear this history from a participant - you can't get that from a history book." He explained that once he started re-enacting, his understanding of what these people did "took a quantum leap in understanding."
But you may get it from someone willing to research it, experience it, and expose you to it.
The search - and perhaps rescue - of lost information is a first focus for the group. Troy LaFaye has ten years of reenacting experience. He simply stated, "If we are not historically accurate, it defeats the point of the hobby." LaFaye carefully elaborated that this activity isn't a glorification of war, but to demonstrate the people involved in the war and life at that time suffered. It is also LaFaye's goal to share that knowledge, "A lot of people that join think it's like playing airsoft or paint ball, but the whole point of reenacting is not to go out and 'play Army' by shooting blanks - although that's fun - the whole idea is to commemorate the men and women who were involved. The purpose is to teach history to other people, like a live version of a history book."
Gearing up to be living history
Eric Cheever suited up, gives a gear lesson.
Continue reading "Meeting Miss Mitchell"
Carl Larson, 1914-2010
Posted at 5:06 PM on February 12, 2010
by Bob Collins
(2 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
We were very sorry today to hear of the passing of Carl Larson of Oklee, Minnesota, six days after his 96th birthday. (He's pictured on the left above)
MPR's Dan Gunderson profiled the brothers in this 2008 piece. But it was a winter of tragedy in Oklee. Carl's 98-year-old brother, Bill (right above), died of exposure in November after looking for Carl, who had wandered off.
Carl died yesterday at a nursing home.
A funeral service will be held at 11 Tuesday morning at Salem Lutheran Church in Oklee.
Memorial Day: Bonnie Brodie Hassebroek
Posted at 9:13 AM on May 23, 2009
by Bob Collins
(2 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
News Cut will present stories about those who served in whatever capacity and have died. Please send me a few paragraphs about them and, if possible, a picture and I'll be sure to add it here.
My maternal grandmother, Bonnie Brodie Hassebroek, passed away September 12, 2008. She was 87 years old. Both Bonnie and my grandfather, John Hassebroek, served in World War II. Bonnie was a member of the Women's Army Corps (known as the WAC).
A native of rural western Iowa, she was ready to see the world at 18. Much to her disappointment, she was stationed at Fort Des Moines in Iowa! She attended boot camp there and lived at the Savery Hotel, which they called the "Hotel Slavery." The hotel has many photographs and memorabilia from this era.
Bonnie soon got her wish to travel, and was stationed in France, working in an accounting office. Not too long after that, John was stationed in Germany. One of their best stories during this time was winning the Ripley's Believe it or Not War Story of the Year for their coincidental meeting on the date of their first wedding anniversary, during the hour of their wedding ceremony.
- Amalia Vagts
Decorah, Iowa
Memorial Day: Joseph Moffitt
Posted at 12:47 AM on May 23, 2009
by Bob Collins
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
News Cut will present stories about those who served in whatever capacity and have died. Please send me a few paragraphs about them and, if possible, a picture and I'll be sure to add it here.
My late uncle, Joseph Moffitt, was the pilot of a B-17 (416th Squadron, 99th Bomb Group)during WW II. He and his crew were shot down during a raid on Steyr, Austria on April 2,1944.
He and his crew survived and were hidden by local partisans under Tito's command. Unfortunately, the locals were betrayed and my uncle's crew were captured by the Germans. They were taken to Stalag 17-B, the prisoner-of-war camp in Austria notable for the being the basis for the 1953 William Holeden film "Stalag 17" and (in name only) the TV series "Hogan's Heroes."
After the war, my uncle became a car salesman and rasied a family in Indianapolis. He died of COPD about 15 years ago.
- Bob Moffitt
Memorial Day: PTSD
Posted at 9:41 PM on May 22, 2009
by Bob Collins
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
News Cut will present stories about those who served in whatever capacity and have died. Please send me a few paragraphs about them and, if possible, a picture and I'll be sure to add it here.
A friend of mine who retired a few years ago comes to mind. When she was just out of high school, her boyfriend was drafted for the war in Vietnam and was killed in action. We were in D.C.on business a few years ago and visited the wall. Very emotional as you might expect.
She, of course, moved on with her life and married a great guy, raised some great kids, lived up north on a lake, and then retired. About a week after she retired, she found her husband in the garage with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. PTSD is a terrible, awful mental illness which this vet hid successfully for many years.
She again has found a great partner after her husband's death, so I would just like to salute Brenda, her boyfriend, and her husband for all of the sacrifices she and the men in her life made-and continue to make by living with the horrors of war.
-- Lance Lindeman
(File photo via Getty Images)
Memorial Day: Glenn Knoblauch
Posted at 4:51 PM on May 22, 2009
by Bob Collins
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
News Cut will present stories about those who served in whatever capacity and have died. Please send me a few paragraphs about them and, if possible, a picture and I'll be sure to add it here.
Part of America's Greatest Generation, my grandfather, Glenn Knoblauch, served in WWII. He was one of the men who grabbed a California cruiseliner-turned-warship and headed to Hawaii just days after Pearl Harbor, bent on saving America. He spent most of his days in the Pacific, encountering Banyan trees and blades of grass which could cut your shoes.
At least I think he did. Grandpa, who died two years ago, was known for his good-natured approach and not for his ramblings about the war. Although he would never purchase a Japanese car, he loved all his neighbors. I know the war changed him, but I only heard a few stories.
Once, as a guest speaker in my history class, he told a story about his friend leaving his foxhole only to be killed by his other friend. He had mistakenly fallen into the other foxhole on his way to the bathroom. Grandpa said "We all learned to shit in the hole," and the kids sat in silence. The kids had been asking for blood and gore, and now they had it.
Only I probably knew the magnitude of his statement; my grandfather never swore. It was then I first realized there was another side to my grandfather... I never did get to know that side of him.
What I do know: He won a lottery and was sent home days before his unit saw extremely heavy action, a battle where most of them died. He returned home after three long years, knocked on my grandmother's door, and said: "Your hair is darker!" They were married three days later. She had waited so long.
This Memorial Day, I'd like to thank my grandfather and other vets for putting their life on the line for me and my country. I truly appreciate it. My grandfather's courageous actions changed the world, and really, he lives on all around me.
-- Holly Cairns
History or legend?
Posted at 12:17 PM on February 12, 2009
by Bob Collins
(4 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
It's Abraham Lincoln's birthday and the nation's leaders are making the appropriate tributes today. President Obama, speaking in Illinois, said without Lincoln, he would not today be president. No quibble there. But there is history, and there is legend, and on this day, particularly in Minnesota, we find ourselves consumed by the legend, and ignoring aspects of history.
Truth is, there's far more to the history of Abraham Lincoln than black and white. There's more to him than the Civil War and the Gettysburg Address. There's more than what they teach about Lincoln in the classrooms of America.
There is Minnesota and the Dakota Indians.
The Dakota gave up their homeland -- most of southern Minnesota -- in an 1851 treaty. The U.S. agreed to pay $500,000 to move them and pay the Dakota debts to traders. They saw very little of the money.
President Buchanan told the Dakota they had to move off a portion of the reservation the treaty created. A white family in Acton, Minnesota was killed and the Dakota leader -- Little Crow -- declared war on the settlers. Only women and children were taken prisoner by Little Crow.
After many battles, Little Crow fled to the Dakota Territory. Gen. Henry Sibley eventually rounded up the Dakota who participated in the uprising.
This is where the opportunity for a more scholarly discussion in Minnesota of Lincoln has its greatest opportunity, and suffers its annual disappointment. Hundreds of Native Americans were sentenced to death. Lincoln commuted all but 38, whom he believed to be guilty of the most heinous crimes.
Their trials were considered by many historians to be farces. According to Douglas O. Linder on the Dakota Trials Web site...
The trials were quick affairs, getting quicker as they progressed. The commission heard nearly forty cases on November 3, the last day it met. The commission believed that mere participation in a battle justified a death sentence, so in the many cases, perhaps two-thirds of the total, where the prisoner admitted firing shots it proceeded to a guilty verdict in a matter of a few minutes. Somewhat more deliberation was required for trials in which the charge was the murder or rape of settlers, because admissions were much rarer in these cases. After the defendant gave whatever response he cared to make to the charge, prosecution witnesses were called. Where prosecution witnesses contradicted the testimony of the defendant, the commission almost invariably found the prisoner to be guilty.
On December 16, 1862, 38 were hanged in Mankato. The largest mass execution in the history of the United States took place under orders of Abraham Lincoln.
Was Lincoln an example of compassion for sparing the deaths of hundreds? Or were 38 sent to their deaths because of the political pressure of responding to the deaths of over 400 white people? Lincoln reportedly was shaken by the hangings and vowed to change U.S. policy toward Native Americans. What if he had?
They're fascinating questions, but -- for the record -- no mention of Mankato was mentioned in either Midmorning's hour-long discussion of Lincoln today, nor Midday's broadcast of the NPR special on Lincoln this afternoon, and a tribute at the Minnesota House of Representatives made no mention.
It's almost as if the events in Minnesota never happened.
(Image: Minnesota Historical Society)
Harvesting memories
Posted at 10:16 AM on November 12, 2008
by Bob Collins
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Arts, 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.
Vets
Posted at 3:03 PM on November 11, 2008
by Bob Collins
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
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.
Tales from the 'Greatest Generation'
Posted at 10:17 AM on November 9, 2008
by Bob Collins
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
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.
Revisiting the Wellstone memorial service
Posted at 1:25 PM on October 24, 2008
by Bob Collins
(8 Comments)
Filed under: Politics, Regional history
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.
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.
Reading suggestion: Small-town America from the front porch
Posted at 8:33 AM on October 9, 2008
by Bob Collins
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
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.
In Chuck Doyle's words
Posted at 7:21 AM on May 2, 2008
by Bob Collins
(4 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
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.
The women of WWII: Mary Baruth
Posted at 11:38 AM on May 2, 2008
by Bob Collins
(3 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
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.
The Women of World War II: Two Harbors' vets
Posted at 6:33 PM on April 30, 2008
by Bob Collins
(4 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
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.)
Chuck Doyle's journey
Posted at 3:45 PM on April 25, 2008
by Bob Collins
(6 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
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.
The women of World War II: Virginia Claudon Allen
Posted at 6:36 PM on April 25, 2008
by Bob Collins
(5 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
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
Over the next few weeks, I hope to provide a handful of profiles about the women who went to war. If you have any suggestions for the series, please contact me.
Stockyards in the suburbs
Posted at 7:19 AM on April 14, 2008
by Bob Collins
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Regional history
South St. Paul gets some national attention today... for what it doesn't have anymore.
The New York Times takes a look at stockyards in the suburbs, specifically the end of the line for the South St. Paul stockyard, with an article and a nifty audio slideshow.
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