Duluth’s Granny: Nazi Sub Hunter
August 8, 1945. Duluth, Minn. Heavy with depth charges and a crew of four, the B-25 bomber Beach Baby grumbles off the dusty airfield into the sky on routine sub patrol. The pilot, a Jewish kid from St. Paul, heads into the sun over gleaming Lake Superior. He is the oldest aboard at 22. Light moves around the cabin. The shore drops away and open blue water comes into view all around.
The tail gunner, a mook from Milwaukee, pipes up on the com: “Everybody knows there ain’t no Nazi subs in the Great Lakes. Hitler’s been dead three months.”
“Tell that to Granny down there,” the pilot says, “War’s not over.”
They spy the fishing boat to starboard and the zig-zag black-and-white lines of its weird paint job. The navigator speaks with his Michigan accent:
“She’s doing up here what Hemingway’s doing in the Caribbean: hunting for U-boats at the bottom of a whiskey glass.”
The side gunner laughs like the North Dakota yahoo that he is. “Well what do you expect, she’s from Duluth.” Now they’re all laughing. (more…)
Celebrating the 9 o’clock Meltdown
I don’t know Crystal Abernethy well, though I am filled with a deep respect and admiration for her work and her commitment to making a thing. The 9 o’clock Meltdown was a good companion when I was a radio listener. I missed it when it went away, briefly, without realizing that it moved online. There, it’s still a great companion.
See a just-published interview with Crystal on Voyage Minnesota for more.
Duluth Grill makes big Lincoln Park land moves
Duluth Grill Family of Restaurants co-owner Tom Hanson stands atop OMC Smokehouse. The former Kemps Dairy property and new parking lot are in the background. (Photos by Mark Nicklawske)
A popular Duluth restaurant group has acquired the largest piece of open land in the Lincoln Park business district and plans to build apartments, a parking garage and new street-level business space on the property — similar to plans announced by its previous owner.
The purchase is part of several big land moves revolving around the Duluth Grill Family of Restaurants. (more…)
PDD Shop Talk: Last call for a calendar editor
There are just a few days left to apply to join the team of editors that produces the Perfect Duluth Day event calendar. But before we get further into that, we lead with the standard plug for donations to ensure the PDD Calendar remains solvent. So if you appreciate Duluth’s most thorough listings of hoopla, kindly drop a few bucks in the PayPal account. (more…)
Duluth in MUFON
I found a reference to Duluth in the Mutual UFO Network newsletter. The Minnesota MUFON chapter is still alive and well. (more…)
Shippee – “Song in a Letter”
The third video release from Blake Shippee’s new solo album, It All Started from a Whisper, was produced by Laura Jean.
Loaves and Fishes Zine
Last semester, my students did a research project on Loaves and Fishes. Now, a semester too late, I find this electronic archive of quarterly newsletters from 2010 to 2017.
Telling the Stories of Coming to Duluth at LSC
So I sat around a table in the Intercultural Center at Lake Superior College, filling my belly with food from Zhong Hua and filling my heart with stories of people coming to Duluth. It was all part of “We are here. Hear us.” (more…)
Def Leppard at the DECC Arena in 1999
In 1999 I was living in Minneapolis, listening to the Legendary Pink Dots. In Duluth, Def Leppard was playing. The audio is available on the Internet Archive. (more…)
His Body
It was his 73rd birthday. He’d been taken into inpatient psychiatric care the night before, a phone call I had received while out at a bar with a group of friends. We were watching a Minneapolite musician, Dessa, play at Pizza Lucé in downtown Duluth. I liked Dessa’s music, but I really liked her writing. She’d detailed her experience rewiring her brain to forget a dangerous, almost obsessive love affair: the mechanics of love, told in poetry and electromagnetic imaging. Before the psychological intervention, she said, she had a kind of wild and inevitable connection to this man who could not be trusted with her heart. They were incendiary together, in good ways and not: a fire started with a glance, burning down the house with everyone inside. I’ve never had a love like that, but I could feel it anyway — her despair, her passion, and the terrible realization that whatever was happening in her was above or beneath her conscious mind, scratched into her whole brain. Every thought she had about anything traversed the rough path of that scratch — removing him from her heart was reductive: she needed to remove him from the apparatus of her Self, the thing that made her her.
I didn’t understand why this was so moving to me at the time, but now I do. (more…)
Postcard from Lakeside Presbyterian Church
Lakeside Presbyterian Church was founded in 1890 and the building shown in this undated postcard went up at 4430 McCulloch St. in 1921, replacing the church’s previous building there. (more…)
Shippee – “Moonlight”
Duluth’s Blake Shippee has a solo album titled It All Started from a Whisper. The second music video release is directed by Shane Nelson. (more…)
The Slice: Fall Colors at Downer Park
A look at the fall colors and the general peacefulness of the season in Downer Park, a 17-acre undeveloped space in Duluth’s Woodland neighborhood.
In its series The Slice, WDSE-TV presents short “slices of life” that capture the events and experiences that bring people together and speak to what it means to live up north.
OMG, that’s a lot of smoke in this video
I’m plunking about in the Archive.org site, and this video shows the Duluth harbor as a dystopian nightmare of smoke at about 2:30.
What an amazing transformation how we fuel our ships and how we imagine our port.
Meet the Candidates: Duluth General Election 2022
Meet the Candidates offers up to five minutes for candidates on the Duluth General Election ballot to speak to their platforms. (more…)
Maya Hawke – “Sweet Tooth”
The latest reference to Duluth in song comes from Maya Hawke, daughter of actors Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke. She released her second album, Moss, in September. The song “Sweet Tooth” mentions an empty theater in Duluth around the 30-second mark. (more…)
Mystery Photo: Duluth Home Builders
Who are they? Where are they? When was this? The only clues come from a few scribbles on the back of the photo. (more…)
Former St. Louis County Jail renamed Leijona
Transformation of Duluth jail into apartment building nears completion - Duluth News Tribune | News, weather, and sports from Duluth, Minnesota
The historic building is expected to welcome its first tenants come January.
duluthnewstribune.com
The Duluth News Tribune reports that remodeling of the former St. Louis County Jail is near completion. It is expected to open in January as a 33-unit apartment building named Leijona, the Finnish word for lion.
PDD Quiz: Halloween Happenings 2022
Get your spooky on with this week’s quiz about upcoming Halloween events! For more seasonal hijinks, check out the Halloween filter on the PDD calendar.
The next PDD quiz will review this month’s headlines; it will be published on Oct. 30. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at aklawite@d.umn.edu by Oct. 26. (more…)
Know Your Candidates: 2022 County Sheriff Race
As promised following the initial coverage of the St. Louis County Sheriff race in the primary election, the embedded PDF below contains in-depth interviews with the two remaining candidates, Jason Lukovsky and Gordon Ramsay, about issues that are important to LEAN Duluth. The Law Enforcement Accountability Network is a volunteer-run data-analysis group and public communications resource for organizers working for police accountability. (more…)
Video: Fall Colors at Enger Park
Videographer Adam Jagunich captures the fall colors around Enger Tower in Duluth via his Yuneec Typhoon H Plus hexacopter.
Dick Anthony: Basement Popcorn Entrepreneur of Duluth
Dick Anthony of Duluth made popcorn in his basement circa 1952 for distribution to local stores, where it was sold in dispensers. The video clip is from the television series “Industry on Parade,” which was created by the National Association of Manufacturers and ran from 1950 to 1960. (more…)
Climate>Duluth: Kat Soares of Deep Adaptation Forum
Climate>Duluth host Tone Lanzillo interviews Kat Soares of Deep Adaptation Forum, which offers free events and online platforms for people who are seeking and building supportive communities to face the reality of the climate crisis.
Big, fat black bear montage / wolves eating blueberries
The folks at the Voyageurs Wolf Project keep rolling out the hits with their trail camera videos. Above, clips of the chubbiest bears in Voyageurs National Park this summer. Below, rare footage of wolves eating blueberries — and perhaps the first footage of a mom and her pup foraging for blueberries together.
‘The bridge between Duluth and Superior’
1950s MOBILE HOME PROMOTIONAL FILM ALASKA to CANADA TRAILER TRIP 56784 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
AL-CAN TRAILER TREK is a short film, produced by Kennedy Productions in 1957 or 1958, that promotes and popularizes trailer traveling and RV'ing. Sponsored by...
archive.org
“The bridge between Duluth and Superior” appears at just after the 1-minute mark in the circa-1957 short film Al-Can Trailer Trek, which promotes trailer traveling. After the quick bridge shot, zoom, it’s straight to International Falls.
This bridge is the Duluth/Superior Interstate Bridge, which was replaced when the Blatnik Bridge opened in 1961. Parts of the Interstate Bridge still exist as a fishing pier on Rice’s Point. (more…)