Maybe They Can Call It “Sears Stadium”

We have never had a team playing at the highest level in a major professional sport in our city. Yes, I know we have the Wilds and used to have the Norsemen, but while those teams played at what seems to be the top level in their sports, they did not play one of America’s three major team sports and the 1884 baseball team played in the Union Association team which was not deemed “major league” until after long after its demise and it never played any home games, anyway.

Noting the disappearance of Saxon Ford and the financial difficulties of Sears and Roebuck, City Hall Scoop ["A Blue Light Special for Zigi Wilf?"] today has a suggestion for putting a Vikings stadium at their locations.

They cite the proximity of the proposed Light Rail and the Capitol.

Although I would be opposed to using any Saint Paul or Ramsey County taxes to build the thing and while I would miss the Sears store a bit and would likely be disturbed by the traffic tie ups big events would cause, the idea might be worth looking at. There would be/might be problems for nearby residential area to the west and north, but perhaps they could be addressed.

And if it were built as a domed stadium, it would give us three domes almost in such a nice small area, a good theme for postcards and local web site home pages. Let’s see . . . Capitol, Cathedral, Stadium. Which one do you think will come down first?

Transition

It was announced today that Martin Lumber is closing and that we will no longer have any independent lumber yards in the city. We recently lost our last new car dealership. We are very low on local pharmacies. We still have some hardware stores, but not as many as we used to. We have food deserts from the disappearances of grocery stores. Local banks are disappearing although some local credit unions are filling part of the gap.

Thankfully, we still have a few restaurants and one can still get a pizza locally made by a local outfit and eggs and bacon cooked by somebody who knows where the capitol of the state is.

Some Wednesday Hash

Dr. Robert Cade, the inventor of GatorAde, died of kidney failure. A coincidence?

When did “became missing” or “disappeared” become “went missing”? The use of such an active verb leaves a reader thinking that a person decided to become missing, but the stories this phrase gets used in, when examined, do not usually convey such an intent.

Governor Plenty names his attorney from his 2002 campaign to the Supreme Court. Have we all forgotten that his 2002 campaign was cited for improper collusion with the GOP and that it paid a substantial fine and had its spending limit decreased? That must be good qualification for the Supreme Court.

The December 25 holiday is approaching and all those who hope to make a buck off of unsuspecting saps who feel obligated to observe the birth of the Prince of Peace by targeting suckers are in their usual good form. One of the recurring scams is making its appearance again. You will also find this one for St. Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and other Hallmark Holidays. Did you know you can name a star after somebody?

I have a new scheme, a million dollar idea for somebody. For a modest amount you can name a street after somebody. And when the vendor has sold enough street names, he/she can publish a map, duly registered with the copyright office of some country [maybe even ours] and show people just where the street they have bought is. Of course if you actually drove or otherwise went to it, you wouldn’t see that name on the street sign. The jurisdiction entitled to put the name on signs would never have known to put that name on it and the people who had addresses on the street would have never known to put it on their return address spot of their outgoing mail.

That’s why stars are better. Nobody will be going to them to learn what name is used locally until well after the statute of limitations has taken effect.

The Dog-gone Facts About a Dog Park

The last recommendation from Payne/Phalen District Five Planning Council’s Arlington/Arkwright Dog Park subcommittee which came from meetings this summer with neighbors, park staff, police, and dog owners, has now made its way through its land use committee and been approved by the Board of Directors.

I won’t publish all the details of the recommendations. I chaired that subcommittee so it might seem self-serving and I really don’t have a good angle to view it all from. Except for the first one which called for a new gate on the southwestern side of the park on Arkwright and has already happened, they will all have to work their way through the various processes.

But I do think that one truth came through clearly in all of this. I haven’t ever owned a dog, but I can see this:

THIS CITY NEEDS MORE DOG PARKS.

Most of the problems which had neighbors concerned in the first place at Arlington/Arkwright were caused or aggravated by overuse. That the city only has one such place is the problem.

When the dog park was established six years ago, it was established on a one-year trial and the District Council agreed to monitor matters in a half year and after one year before recommending that the park be continued. There were no complaints in that first year, and indeed In six years there have been almost no complaints to the District Council office.

The ones we did receive came from overuse, from too many people parking and parking by the back entrance on Clark for easier access.

And we learned that while many of the users did come from the East Side, that many come from suburbs where the people are quite accustomed to leeching off city people and quite a few people came from Saint Paul neighborhoods across town – Mac-Groveland, Merriam Park, St. Anthony Park, and West Seventh were mentioned.

These people don’t come here for anything else. They don’t eat at Serlin’s or Governor’s or buy their hardware from Kendall’s. They don’t attend services at our churches. One of them did mention buying tires at a now gone Tires Plus, but I’m not sure how much play that should get.

We need a new dog park for them. At one time Councilmember Thune suggested one at the site of the soon-to-be removed NSP High Bridge Plant. I don’t know if that is still in his mind yet, but it makes sense to me. I would even go along with closing the Kelly Crosstown [aka Short Line Road aka Ayd Mill Road] and making it a linear dog park. But we probably need one further north.

Any suggestions?

Election Strategies

It’s been up there for several days, but I just noted a post in City Hall Scoop [link here] suggesting that Pakou Hang’s candidacy might have cost Kevin Riach election to the school board.

I’m not sure that I agree, but the case is made interestingly. The article suggests that the increased turnout in Ward Six caused by the unsuccessful Hang candidacy brought out more Conlon voters.

People always need to be reminded that people and referendum items on ballots do affect other things on the same ballot. This is why we had a constitutional amendment on the right to fish and hunt a few years back and it is why Michele Bachmann and Governor Plenty wanted us to vote on one to outlaw gay marriage for last year’s elections, a move echoed [with varying degrees of success[ in several states.

GLBT issues have been used this way by the right for some time. Old timers can remember that Rosalie Butler won her last election in the 1978 city election when the city’s gay rights ordinance then in effect was defeated in referendum. One commentator noted that, if you believed all the hype the various parties were giving out before the election that 50,000 bigots had outvoted 30,000 perverts. [That is why it is not out of line to suggest that Dave Thune had courage when he introduced a new gay rights ordinance several years later.]

Other subjects have also skewed elections. It seems hard to believe now, but the GOP came close to taking control of our city council as recently as 1982 [the first year for ward elections]. The DFL elected Bill Wilson, Leonard Levine, and Victor Tedesco solidly enough and the Republicans picked up three seats with Bob Fletcher, Hugo Masanz, and Chris Nicosia. [Purists will note that the GOP had not endorsed Masanz and that indeed the DFL endorsed him in the next election, but the GOP did publicly note its “support” of him in his run against the DFL-endorsed Liz Anderson.]

In the seventh race, the Ward Two seat, the DFL candidate Jim Scheibel narrowly beat his GOP opponent by 25 votes. If thirteen of those people had thought differently the GOP would have won the Council. [Historians may note that his opponent was a man named Dave Thune, but I suspect that it must have been a different guy.]

What made that election so tight? A referendum on whether the City should be allowed to investigate municipal ownership of cable television. It wasn’t to have municipal ownership, it was just to be able to consider it as one possibility.

Sometimes other things on a ballot have an effect and once in a while the effect is not what the candidate or cause expected.

There is no great lesson here. But before you sign that referendum petition or suggest to somebody that he/she should run for something, you might want to think twice, reflecting on the bigger context of things.

Thoughts on 1963 [and 2001]

WARNING: This is a ramble.

Today marks the forty-fourth anniversary of the close of a weekend that probably anybody over fifty won’t forget, the weekend that Presdient Kennedy was killed, mourned, paraded, and buried.

I’m not sure what makes the people in mainstream media choose what is newsworthy and how much to focus on something, but it seems that this year there was little attention given to the anniversaries.

November 22, 1963 shares a lot with September 11, 2001.

In 1963 the nation was steeped in the post-war idea that we were a strong and invincible country, that our only real enemies were the Communists and their sympathizers among us. We thought we were entering on a new era with a young president, the first one born in the twentieth century.

In 2001 we were beginning a whole new century. We still felt the euphoria of the end of the Cold War. We knew that we had some discontent in the country, but nobody took that seriously.

We all woke up on both of those days. And those who were old enough will never forget where they were or what they were doing when they learned about them. [Personally, I was in high school American History class when the word that JFK was shot was put on the school intercom and at home listening to Barbara Carlson when I heard her saying that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I thought she meant the one downtown, so I turned on my television to see if one of the local stations had any video. I got a surprise.]

On November 25, 1963 people all across the nation were watching their televisions. Most people only had affiliates of major networks available to them and the major networks had shown nothing but news and commentaries [no commercials] related to JFK or the new president, Mr. Johnson and what might happen in the future. The television and other media had crowded the Dallas Police Department headquarters and we had seen Oswald moved from room to room several times, protesting his innocence to all the cameras and reporters present. On Sunday the 24^th with the whole country watching he was killed. Talk of conspiracy has gone on ever since and probably will never stop. The 29^th century version of the History Channel on whatever the 29^th century replacement we have for television will probably still be asking questions about it.

There was a late morning memorial service in the city I lived in at a theater downtown and my brother and I went to it. [School was canceled almost every place in the country.] We heard the various civic leaders and clergymen from almost all of the big religious traditions speak or pray about how it shouldn’t have happened.

When we got back home we saw the conclusion of the funeral and the burial at Arlington Cemetery. I remember that the bugler who was to play Taps had not kept his mouthpiece warm and bungled it a bit, something that my band teacher found incomprehensible.

But later on November 25 things started to get back to normal. After the funeral regular programming and commercials resumed and our teachers tried to find ways to get back to us the day of learning they seemed to feel that we had lost. Actually, I had learned a lot.

On this anniversary of the Kennedy burial, it does us well to remember all of our national traumas, to think about their similarities and differences, and learn from them.

TOAST THANKSGIVING [if you’re old enough]

Yesterday many of us had turkey, farm-grown, fattened and accompanied by a lot of trimmings – dressing, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes with gravy, and pumpkin and/or mince meat pie. Often this meal was shared with extended family or friends. And in houses around our republic, wine was an accompaniment to all of this gustatory bounty.

But if in any of those houses somebody born on or after November 23, 1986 partook of that wine, a law was broken.

That same person could legally have had coffee, and if over 18 enjoyed a nice, postprandial cigar, other things usually done more by adults than children.

The basic fact is that in Minnesota that the legal age for just about anything is 18 except to drink [21] and to consent to sex [16]. In a way it seems funny that one can consent to sex before one can sign a contract and one can sign a contract before one can have a glass of wine with the family on a festive occasion. These are two subjects which have preoccupied America for a long time, sometimes to a very obsessive degree, and, on the surface at least, we would seem to have resolved them differently.

The higher age for drinking was influenced by Mothers Against Due Process [MADD] who managed to convince Congress to coerce states to lower the minimum drinking age or lose highway funds.

One of the reasons given for lowering the age was that too many 18-, 19-, and 20-year old people were legally obtaining beer, wine, or spirits and then illegally making them available to 16-and 17-year olds. Rather then enforce those laws,, they found it easier to take rights away from all the elders.

It seems to have some of the same logic as saying that because illegal Mexican immigrants might hide in the local Chicano community, that we ought to deport the entire Chicano community to make enforcement of immigration laws easier. [I suspect that Paul Harvey, Lou Dobbs and a lot of politicians have thought of that one, but a little technicality called the Fourteenth Amendment got into the way.]

There is no direct correlation between drinking and road construction, but that did not stop them from pushing their idea. So if you are twenty years of age and have never driven a car, are blind and never intend to, and live in a transit-orientated place like Manhattan or Chicago, you still cannot drink because a 17-year old in Nebraska might somehow illegally obtain a beer and get into his big brother's pickup in a vain attempt to impress his girlfriend.

If we abolished the minimum drinking age we could minimize some of our problems. A child could learn to drink the same way he/she learns other things that come with maturation, from family, educational and religious organizations, and friends, just as a child learns other things an adult does [dressing, shaving, eating, consuming other liquids, personal hygiene, thinking, reading, etc.] as one matures. There would be no magic moment at which one could get up just before midnight to imbibe as much as one could before closing time, no “power hour.”

I know that seems too radical a change for many. It won’t happen, I am sure. But I do advocate that people start thinking of it.

Sometimes just showing up has strange consequences.

Chuck Repke has an interesting post in Saint Paul Issues Forum [SPIF] [see link in the links box, lower right] about Dave Thune’s trip to our sister city of Nagasaki for the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the bomb dropping and how he ended up being highest elected official there.

The link for his post is is http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/stpaul-issues/messages/topic/bxyhRnSISrPaFnvqZau0x.

You will need to scroll down about seven items.

One Word and LIberation

The word “bitch” is being thrown about a lot lately. It used to be an offensive term thrown at females. Primarily it still is, but I know of several recent episodes where it has been thrown at male persons also lately. I guess that is equal opportunity.

But it is still offensive. And because it is offensive and is still in disproportionate frequency toward women, its use needs to cease.

Leonard Pitts, jr. in a recent column notes a recent incident in Iowa where a woman asked the senior senator from Arizona a question about the junior senator from New York, using that word.

Pitts notes

Can you imagine if the Democratic front runner were Sen. Joe Lieberman and the woman said, ``So, how do we beat this Hebe?''

Can you imagine if it were Gov. Bill Richardson and the woman said, ``So, how do we beat this spic?''

Can you imagine if it were Sen. Barack Obama and the woman said, ``So, how do we beat this coon?''

I guarantee you, McCain would not have laughed and if he had, we would now be writing his political epitaph.

I think he has a good point. Senator McCain may well be taken to task for this.

Pitts goes on to note that women who have succeeded in politics and in business have taken on the traits traditionally associated with men.

We demand certain ''feminine'' traits from women -- nurturing, caring, submission -- and the woman in whom those traits are either not present or subordinated to her drive, ambition and competence will pay a social price

.

When I first began hearing of “women’s lib” about three and a half decades or so ago, I wondered if it might be an opportunity to liberate men also. I wondered if opening opportunities for women would create a world in which men did not always have to do the things which seemed to make them men. Ideally nurturing and caring would be gender-neutral qualities and not regarded in lower esteem than drive and ambition and would be manifested in persons of both genders.

It obviously has not happened. We have made more opportunities available to women, but only if they seem to be more like men. There are successful women in almost every area of life now, but they are still considered successes only if they do not seem what we have somehow behave in ways we think feminine.

And we still regard men in what were women’s professions and trades with a strange eye. Men who are nurses, flight attendants, or elementary school teachers are not seen as totally male.

It doesn’t mean that “women’s lib” is a failure. It has indeed been a success, even if only a partial one. But it still means that we are a long way from liberating everybody.

And “bitch” is still not a nice word, except perhaps in certain dog-owner groups.

Rachel Paulose leaving

There has to be some manifestation of the Peter Principle here. We will be getting a new U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota. Paulose is off to Washington. Those radiclib attorneys in her office must be jumping up and down and singing a song from The Wizard of Oz.

People will say that she was too young for the job. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they aren’t. People acquire different competences at different ages. [This is peripherally related to an issue I intend to post soon, dealing with drinking age.] But Ms. Paulose is only a year or so too young to be President. [Note to all original intent people: The framers thought that 35 was old enough to run the entire Executive Branch of our republic’s government.

In our military we have a lot of people in charge a lot more who are younger. Potter Stewart was appointed to the United States Supreme Court when he was only a few years older.

There has to be another reason for sending her back to Washington. The new AG must think he really needs her insights there.

Does anybody believe this?

Did Heffelfinger resign voluntarily?

Is there a tooth fairy?

Up the River Without a Exemption?

Katherine Kersten of the Mpls. paper has written a column suggesting that Rep. James Oberstar is blocking a continued exemption to allow the Delta Queen to continue to sail our inland rivers.

She noted that the congressman has voted to support previous exemptions, but now seems to be balking and wonders what has changed.

Then she noted that Seafarers International Union had supported previous exemptions but no longer does since the boat’s new ownership refuses to sign a contract with it.

Oberstar’s spokesperson noted continuing Coast Guard opposition to the extensions and Ms Kersten cites a quote from Oberstar that it would be “immoral” for the congressperson to put people’s lives at risk to placate a union.

I don’t know all of the facts, but find the posturing all around interesting.

If you are the owners and you refuse to negotiate collectively even though there are those entitled to negotiate with you, can you really expect representatives of the people of our republic to do anything for you beyond whatever is absolutely required?

If you are a congressperson, especially one who has been elected with the support of those whose mission is to protect the rights of working people and who has been entrusted with such a powerful place in monitoring our country’s transportation systems, why would you lift one finger to work against those who put you there, especially when the Coast Guard suggests that you do not?

A job worth doing is worth doing right. If you want to own a boat and don’t want to own it right, maybe you should let somebody else own the boat.

Randolph and Lexington OR Where can a Starving Yuppie Find Nutrition

Today the Planning Commission is scheduled to approve a rezoning request to permit a retail development on the southwest corner of Randolph and Lexington to allow what a large retail development, the primary tenant of which has been described as an upscale grocery store called Trader Joe’s.

I don’t really know much about the store. I know that they recently opened a Trader Joe’s store in Woodbury which was accompanied by gratuitous [free?] news storied in the DPP.

I suppose the location would be fine for this kind of store. After Summit Hill, Mac-Groveland, and Highland Park can all come there easily, along with whatever sufferers of affluence live in West Seventh. It’s not even a bad shot for Merriam Park and the yuppie part of Summit-University.

But it looks like they will be putting an awful lot on a small place.

And when you have Kowalski’s, Whole Foods, and Lund’s, how much more can the market bear?

Is it impossible that you won’t soon have a big commercial site begging for a new user, possibly even seeking public assistance to make the conversion?

What's in a Name?

The New Castle, Indiana, school board has decided to drop the name “Chrysler” from its high school’s name. [article] Chrysler apparently sold its factory there a few years ago.

Isn’t it about time that we changed the name of Stroh Lane?

There are other street names in our city named for companies no longer here or people associated with them. We might wonder about Case. We might wonder about Bush if/when the Mining ever leaves the city completely.

But these streets are also part of the addresses of a lot of people who would be affected. And they may be perceived to have some historical value. Stroh Lane has no great historical value and no residents. The name was given to two blocks of Walsh as a sop to Stroh’s for taking over the Hamm’s/Olympia/Pabst operations which they gave up ten years ago. And since they no longer even own part of the real estate, there would not seem any reason to keep the sop in place.

So has anybody thought about it?

Some comments on voting procedures

Rep. Keith Ellison wants national legislation to allow for Election Day voter registration. He also wants to outlaw the requirement of photo ID to vote. I agree with him in part.

Election Day registration seems to have worked well in Minnesota. Whether it h as increased voter turn out is not clear, but I don’t think it important, either. As I asked last week in a post on voter turnout, “What good does it do me or the people on my side if the other side shows up?”

And ending Election Day registration here would cause problems. After over three decades of having it, people who have moved would forget to re-register before the election and would become disenfranchised. And it would likely mean added staff time for counties, since full-time civil servants would end up doing work now being done by minimum wage election judges.

Photo identification is not perfect and it can be an unnecessary expense for somebody who otherwise does not need to carry photo identification around. While stopping voter fraud seems like a worthwhile thing, the way this requirement has been implemented in other parts of our republic would seem to indicate that voter fraud is not what the enforcers fear.

I do wonder if it would work so well in other places though. [Hint: Think Chicago.]

Before 1984 voters in Saint Paul had to sign cards that they were registered and eligible to vote. The election judge then checked the signed card with the signed registration on file. The method was not perfect. For one thing, a person who had just registered probably would not have difficulty forging a signature he had just given, but as we noted photo ID is not either, and it imposes a means test However, if we find that we are having problems here it would make more sense to try going back to the old system first, even though an election judge or two will have to tote the signature cards..

A Person's Home is His/Her Castle?

If it sometimes looks as if I keep harping on one topic, it is at least because the Tobacco Taliban just won’t agree that enough is enough, never mind more than enough.

I might ask them, “Don’t you have any sense of decency left? Has your bigotry so obsessed you that cannot ever let people live in peace?”

Of course, they have demonstrated very clearly what kind of people they are and what kind of answer they would give.

The latest thing they want to attack is people smoking in their own private residences, trying to get landlords and/or government to outlaw smoking in apartments and condominiums. [It seems that the plural should be condominia, but my spell checker doesn’t agree.] While condominiums may be disproportionately inhabited by the affluent, rental apartments are disproportionately occupied by lower-income, working class people. It may be that those in the Tobacco Talilban have overlooked this or it may be that they seem to have some strange concept of noblesse oblige which makes them feel that they need to enlighten us tenants on how to live.

It is becoming very hard to keep a tolerant attitude toward them. Maybe that is because they have been making it so hard. I am aware that history has a lot of stories of both saints and sinners who have suffered a lot more without bitching, but I guess I am not made of the same fabric.

Armistice Day Blizzard

Sixty-seven years ago today was what my parents and their contemporaries called the “Armistice Day Blizzard.” I can remember my father and his brother talking about the storm and they were in southern Iowa at the time. I remember hearing about it since I have been in Minnesota

where it seems that the storm was at its worst.

This blizzard seem strange because it was so early in the year. We who remember the Halloween blizzard of 1991 know that blizzards can happen earlier in the year, but this had to have been a major surprise for people across the Midwest since reports indicate that the day started out unseasonably warm.

The blizzard also seems strange because it covered so much area. From the Great Plains to the Great Lakes, Kansas to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, is a lot of area for one storm. How often have we heard of Willmar or Rochester being blanketed in frozen H₂O while we get off with no more than an inch?

I don’t know that I swallow all of the “Greatest Generation” stuff, but I know that this would be one of the things that a lot of them had to persevere.

Weather people then did not warn anybody. The Weather Bureau in Chicago did not catch it. We forecast weather a lot better now, almost so much that their ubiquity tends to make us ignore them more than we ought to sometimes. [I remember in another forum several years ago somebody referred to a summertime “WCCO Sprinkle Alert.]

But maybe just once in a while we really should be thankful that we do have better ways of detecting approaching disaster, even if we sometimes don't pay attention.

Veterans Day Observations

Eighty-nine years ago the “War to End All Wars” came to an end with an armistice on November 11. Anniversaries came to be known as “Armistice Day.”

After another World War, Congress decided that if wars were to become this common that there just weren’t enough dates to have holidays for each and changed the name to “Veterans’ Day” so it could commemorate the fighting men and women of all the wars our country gets itself into.

The War to End All Wars did not do the job.

During most of our wars, including our present aggression in Iraq, the government has begged us to “support our troops” and, as a rule, the American public has done a fairly good job.

But as Paul Wellstone noted, we do not do nearly as good a job of supporting our veterans as we do supporting our troops.

Viet Nam may be the best example of our negligence there.

I remember picking up a young man in about 1970 at the airport who wanted to get home to Mendota Heights or Eagan. [I don’t remember exactly where. It was off Highway 55 someplace.] The man told me he had just returned from Viet Nam. We did not discuss the matter much, but he made it clear that he was glad to be back. I remember being dragged out of bed early one morning when I was about five to go to an airport to see my cousin return from some strange place called “Korea” and I did wonder why he had to take a taxicab home from the airport.

What I really remember was what happened when we got to the house. When we arrived there was a middle-aged man mowing the front lawn. As I was removing the luggage from the trunk, the older man said to the younger man something to the effect of “Oh, you’re back” and returned to mowing while the soldier picked up his gear and went on up to the house.

I have always assumed that the older man was the returning soldier’s father, but never knew for certain. But it seems that if he were something else – uncle, neighbor, cousin, whomever -- that he still must have known where the man had been and could have given a better greeting. Usually when I have taken somebody with luggage home or to visit their kinfolk, whoever is waiting has offered to help with toting the gear.

Even to a war opponent like I was, it seemed strange. After all, the Viet Nam military was made up of conscripted men and men who enlisted to avoid conscription. In all wars, it seems to be the old who decide that young must fight.

Minnpress.com and Saints

Most of what appears here is about political and social matters and the things which affect them, such as the media which tell us about these things.

I decided to check up on the newest professional internet news concept [minnpost.com which has received a fair amount of hype in non-print media] which debuted this week.

I will probably say more about minnpress.com later. There is more I want to check out. But I found an article about the 1920’s New York Yankees, one of the most famous dynasties in the sport’s history.

While I have noted, although not here, that perhaps the Red Sox are becoming a new dynasty [although they have a long way to go before reaching that level] that they have not won a World Series without having a former Saint on the team [Millar in ’04, Drew in ‘07], Pat Borzoi has written about those Yankees and notes the presence of a former Saint [Mark Koenig] on those teams, and of his role in winning the 1924 Junior World Series for the Saints.

It is an interesting article which reminds us of independent minor league teams, of the Junior World Series, of Lexington Park – of a different era.

The era was not perfect and I wouldn’t want to minimize the problems. Most of them were reflections of the society from which that era of baseball derived. Labor relations were poor, health and training attitudes of both management and players left a lot to be desired in both majors and minors, and playing was limited to white men.

But the article is interesting and worthy of reading. And you can follow links off of it to learn more about minnpost.com.

Friday Hash

Four [or five, depending on who is counting] brief and disjointed observations on a Friday morning.

Al Oertwig got twenty votes for school board. I know where one of those came from. It seemed like a minimal tribute to a man whose over two decades of public service came to an end in such a way.

I haven’t seen Dick Radman in quite a while and never knew him well, but I always knew to appreciate who he was and what he had done. He and I haven’t always been on the same side, but one has to concede that our city’s and state’s working people are a lot better off because of people like him. I commend Don Boxmeyer’s article today to everybody’s attention.

When I read commentary that this year’s election meant that Maplewood is going more “liberal” I found myself wondering whether ideology played any part at all in the dysfunctional suburb’s election, or if it was just that the electorate wanted to rejection some of personalities involved.

Then I got to wondering if that same concept might have played a role locally. While I hate to think that people rejected David Haas or Debbie Montgomery because they did not like either’s personality. Brief meditation makes me think otherwise, but maybe somebody else has an idea.

Nick Coleman, jr. wrote in yesterday’s Mpls. Star[-Journal and] Tribune about the regional Taco Bell affiliate’s poor treatment of a veteran employee. You can read it and make your own judgments, but remember that this is an organization whose human rights record is already dubious and make your own choices of where you get your fast food.

Have you ever wondered what must possess a man to name his son after himself.?

There are great examples of men who have named sons after themselves and had the sons grow up to be a great reflection. Martin Luther King, Sammy Davis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hubert Humphrey are good examples that come to mind. But then you have to consider some of the others, John Wayne Gacy, John Hinckley, George Bush, Hubert Humphrey, jr. and others. It is risky. I wonder why they take these chances.

Spinning 2007

We will all be spending a while longer trying to spin yesterday’s elections.

One thing is clear. School Board incumbents, regardless of party, must be generally acceptable as they all clearly won.

The City Council would seem to be skewing left, although I don’t know that this actually appears since it seems to me that we have so few true leftists in this city or country in the first place.

Maybe this years elections signal a change in the way this city does things. Maybe they do not. American politics are based on people and people change.

In 1964 people thought the LBJ>Goldwater race signaled a new era of liberal politics for the United States. But four years later Richard Nixon and George Wallace combined for almost sixty per cent of the popular vote.

In 1970 Wendell Anderson was elected governor. In 1974 he carried every county in his reelection. In 1978, the governorship, both U.S. Senate seats, and the state House slipped away from the DFL. In fact, the DFL has never been to elect a non-incumbent governor since Wendell Anderson.

Trends people thought they were seeing did not develop.

On the other hand, Republicans controlled the Minnesota Senate from statehood in 1858 until 1973. Who would have thought that the 1972 election would mean a change to last for almost four decades at least.

Together, this year's elections certainly were not a victory for people who believe in freedom. [Cf. October 1, 2007 post] And they certainly weren’t a victory for common sense on transit, although I am not sure that there is/was any way for common sense on light rail or other transit to make itself evident.

We’ll have to wait to see if this year was the beginning of a new trend. Was Dan Bostrom’s party at Yarusso’s last night the last hurrah of an old crew or just something that in four years people will look back at and wonder why they had all of the concern? Was Debbie Montgomery’s defeat to Melvin Carter the end of a lifetime of one person’s service to the city and a sign of transition to a new generation?

We’ll find out in time, I guess.

A Note on Voter Turnout

Well, I just returned from my polling place. Things seemed slow. I think it is still verboten for election judges to make public announcements of how many have shown up so far during the day, but I can read a public counter and I was vote number 67. I am not aware of the pre-registered total.

One of the judges was bemoaning the cost per vote. I was an election judge in elections both slow and busy and know the fixed costs are pretty much the same. A busy election may result in an hour or so overtime for five or six minimum-wage judges and maybe some overtime downtown, but almost everything else is pretty well fixed.

There is a lot of hypocrisy favoring big election turnouts, but I have never wanted them big just for the sake of having them big. I have wanted and worked for big election turnouts of like-minded people. After all, what good does it do me or the people on my side if the other side shows up?

DPP Endorsements

Over the years I have noticed that the Pioneer Press almost always endorses incumbents not named Tom Foley.

So it was no surprise that they endorsed the three incumbent school board members running or that they endorsed Montgomery, Thune, Harris, Bostrom, and Lantry for their City Council races. That is two from the three “gang of four” members seeking reelection and all three of the others. They must not be blinded by any obvious doctrinaire criteria.

The only incumbent they did not endorse is Lee Helgen.

I wonder if anybody knows why.

What time is it? Are we free to say?

Early this morning I reset some clocks. I’m getting used to the drill. My computer changed itself without even asking me for permission and my VCR’s were so eager for this that they could not wait and changed themselves last week.

I really don’t get very excited about this twice-a-year charade, but it does make me wonder about a few things.

>Where are the libertarians twice a year when the government tells us to move our clocks and we all ignorantly and unquestioningly follow the dictates of our goverment?
>For that matter, where are the libertarians when the government tells us to have time zones in the first place?
>Wouldn’t you think that somebody someplace, a big company or something, would decide that it won’t change its clocks?
>Since the time we call Standard is not in use for more than seven months of the year, does it really earn the name “Standard”? Maybe we should change the names.

Some people blame the whole thing on Ben Franklin. But he advocated retiring and rising early so it really would not make much sense for him. I am more inclined to blame it on the people who run golf courses and Dairy Queens.

Revealing the Sign

There was a time when people decried the displacement of local merchants by large chain store supermarkets.

Times have changed.

I just returned from a sign unveiling for a new Cub Store on Clarence south of Maryland. It wasn’t groundbreaking. Probably fifty others were out in the wind for the festivities. Nobody brought any shovels. Borings are already being done. There were some speeches and the bigwigs removed the cover from the sign.

The required officials were there, from the developer [Oppidan], Cub Foods and from the local officialdom. Councilmember Bostrom served as sort of an emcee and Mayor Colemsm the Second spoke.

The Cub exec spoke of this as their fourth Saint Paul Store. I am wondering where the third one is to be.

After the speeches most of the crowd managed to make it up to the Parkside Lounge for sandwiches and drumsticks. The Parksdide will soon be disappearing to make room for the new store..

As these events go, the event was not especially notable, but it does indicate that there will soon be another place for Saint Paul people to get their vittles.

Kudos should probably be given to North East Neighborhoods Development Company, Councilmember Bostrom, and city PED for getting the project this far. Mr. Bostrom certainly made sure that Mr. Chuck Repke of NENDC got his recognition.