The Merriest Christmas You Can Manage!

I’ve probably written this before. And that’s OK.

I make a point of being – in modern parlance – “radically joyful” during the Christmas season.

Let me explain.

As I pointed out in memorializing my mom last year, her and my father gave us what I now know to be a priceless gift; a boring, mostly drama-less childhood. Christmases were always low-key, but – crazy as this may seem – they were *happy*.

I get it – there are people with all manner of trauma in their lives. Not everyone has great associations with the season. But there’s also a cynicism to modern life; a crowd that seems to think that whizzing on the idea of a *happy Christmas* is the thing to do.

I went through a stage in my life where I was around people whose primary emotion around Christmas was stress. The names, and for that matter the stages, aren’t that important, and I’m not judging, or even discussing, the motivations – the point being, Christmases exuded stress, panic, misery and tension.

I hated it.

And I had little kids at the time. And for what it was worth, I figured I was going to try to pass on some of the joy I still held onto.

And so, on some dark, tense, difficult Christmas long ago, I resolved that I was going to be happy, whatever it took. To “crap sunshine”, as one of my more charming mentors put it.

There was some psychology to it. I’d read a biography of photographer Robert Capa, which had included an old Hungarian saying – “the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are”. And while I didn’t know it at the time, that’s true in a lot of things in life – “fake it til you make it” can be a very helpful principle. For everyone, in every situation? Of course not.

But it worked for me. The less counsel I took of the stress and tension, and the more I pushed “joy”, the less I needed to push, and the further into the back that stress and tension faded.

The best way to become happy is to act as if you already are.

Anyway – whatever Christmas is to you, and yours, I hope you have a happy and blessed one!

Submitted With Comment

The comments have been off for, if I’m counting right, two weeks.

I’ve missed them. Well, most things about them.

I’m going to bring them back.

But there will be some changes.

Call Me “Pollyanna”. Once. As I pointed out last week, the goals of the comment section, like the blog itself if you think about it, are:

  • To have debate (where debate is needed) without a whole lot of regard for what the various parties feel about the issue…
  • While observing some standards in the argument – the basics of human respect, not to mention logic and social decorum.

If I want a barroom brawl, I’ll go to a bar. And since I got more than my fill of that kind of bar in my 20s, and of online universes that act the same way without the fun of girls and booze, it’s safe to say my cup has long since run over in that department.

Debate. Argue. But treat each other with basic respect, which means if you don’t respect someone, and feel the need to express it especially directly…

…don’t.

Take it elsewhere.

Maybe take it to Twitter, and have your ire swallowed up in the frothing sea of it. Or try your luck with Facebook’s censorship. Come up with things worth discussing. Perhaps start a blog, or other online outlet of your own, and build yourself an audience. Let them debate in your comment section any way you want to. See how it goes.

It’s a free-ish country.

Stick. Otherwise?

If you make a habit of threadjacking, or especially obnoxious dick-measuring, I’ll mark your comments as “spam”.

Which means your future comments will go into the spam queue until I get a chance to look ’em over. All of them. .

Which means a couple of things:

  • As we’ve seen in this comment section over the past couple of years, not only do I not have a lot of time or energy to spend on playing comment police, I don’t want to. Your comments may just stay in the mod queue forever. I’ll try to stay on top of things – but there’s no guarantee stated or implied. So just don’t do it.
  • Given that my spam moderation tool (“Aismet”) has gotten more opaque and automated over the years, it’s entirely possible I”ll never see your comments. I honestly don’t know. And if it gets to that point, I’m OK with that.

Unreasonable? Nah. Not for grownups.

So – if you’ve got it in your head that you want to try to change the subject in the comments, and make a practice of it (you know who you are)? You can’t. So don’t.

If your go-to is volume? Volume is for guitars and cars. Not arguments.

Carrot? I”ll be re-opening comments on Monday.

No, not today. The “rules” aren’t really open for debate.

Gratitude

It’s Thanksgiving.

I’ve written before about what Thanksgiving means to me, personally – on this blog’s first Thanksgiving (checks notes) twenty-one years ago. It’s still true in every respect.

I was on the road, driving somewhere the other day when the notion of listing the things for which I’m grateful popped up. I started trying to list them all – and the list only really came to an end when the car stopped, far too soon, at my destination.

So what the heck – I’m just going to start a stream of consciousness list of things for which I’m grateful on this, our country’s festival of thanksgiving.


I’m thankful for my family, and my family in law. Looking back over the past twenty years since I’ve been writing about all of us, there are so many ways things could have turned out differently, and much worse – but yet here we all are, and things are all right.


And I’m thankful for the family I grew up in – my sister and my brother, of course, and my father, who is blessedly still with us. And for my mother, who we’re spending our second Thanksgiving without, this year. And as I noted back last spring, I’m profoundly grateful for one of the greatest gifts my mother and father gave us all – boring, non-remarkable childhoods, free of the sort of pointless, mindless drama that has always afflicted less fortunate families, and that a certain segment of society has taken to celebrating these days.

The more families I get to know, the luckier I know we all were, and are.

So for Bun, Zam, Syd, Watermelon, and of course Barb, Jim and Dad, I’m happily thankful.


Oh yeah – and Pickle, the cat. I lost him last summer – one of those cancers that hits cats like tornados out of the blue. I’m thankful to have had eight years with the best cat ever.


Beyond just family, I’ve had some people who affected my life pretty immensely, mostly positively. I wrote about a bunch of them last month – and the more I wrote, the more people and events and priceless gifts of influence I thought of.

So for them, all of them, I’m grateful.


I’m thankful for the career I have. I blundered into it 25. years ago, more out of boredom with my short career writing instruction manuals – and yet after all this time, I still look forward to going into the office every day, literally or virtually.

I’m grateful in particular for the job I have with the company I’m at. Not naming names – but it’s a place I genuinely enjoy being, with people I genuinely enjoy working with. There aren’t many places where a UX designer with a BA in English could land on two engineering patents. For that story alone, I’m exceedingly thankful.


I’m grateful for the path I took to get there – all its myriad chicanes and hairpin turns. Starting in radio at 15, burning out on it when I was 21, getting back at 22, out again at 25, nightclub DJing, technical writing, and the various twists and turns that got me here.

At the very least, there are a lot of stories to bore my kids stiff with.

On the other hand, every once in a while I can offer someone a perspective they don’t have. And that is a great feeling. For both of us, I think.


I’ve become keenly aware in recent years that there are people who’ve been very important at one time or another, that I will likely never see again. The time for chance serendipity random encounters gets shorter every year. So one thing I didn’t expect, but for which I’m intensely grateful – my show and blog and, to an extent, social media have led me back into contact with a lot of people I likely wouldn’t have via the normal course of random encounters – high school and college classmates who tune in, and occasionally shout out on my show’s various social media feeds. In three particular cases – my college friend Ray Zentz, and my high school and colleg4e classmates Eric DeMar and Pennie Werth – they passed away, very unexpectedly, and (gulp) way too young. And in this past couple of course, I’ve been blessed to have had at least some contact with each of them, while I still could.


And for my many friends who are still with us, and who I do get to see and hang out with? Yes, I’m even more thankful for each and every one of you!


It’s easy enough to say “I’m thankful to be healthy”, and it’s true. But in the five years since my crash weight loss I’ve become humbly aware that most guys who spend as many years sedentary and overweight as I did, aren’t nearly as lucky as I am, to be as relatively healthy, after all that, as I am. I got another warning last spring – I’d found a little under half the weight I lost in 2018, and had to get back on the program – and it worked, again. I’m very aware I’m as lucky as can be. “I’m healthy” is, in this case, delivered with a bit of “whew – close call” as a happy nod. And for that, I’m thankful.


Back to a bit of nostalgia – I’m thankful for my entire high school class. I can’t say I’m friends with everyone in the Jamestown High School Class of 1981 – but this past couple of reunions have blessed me with a deeper appreciation of quite a few people who, between cliques and crowds and circumstances I barely knew in the day, with whom I’ve spent more time over a few drinks at reunions than we ever did in high school, and intensely glad for the opportunity.


I’m glad I got the education I did. It’s become the fashion these days among a certain crowd of conservatives to dunk on the modern college education – and from what I see among 20-and-30-somethings today, there’s something to it – but my BA in English has served me far better than I’d ever thought it could when I graduated from college. It taught me how to think, reason, look for the question behind the question, for the additional questions that every answer launches.

And of course, “education” is more than just curriculum and schooling. I’m thankful the many unintentional lessons I learned from some of the amazing people I met, and the collateral effects of the things I learned, in class and out.


I’m grateful that this version of the RIchard Thompson Band released this version of this day-appropriate song:


Perhaps a bit less ethereally? I’m so happy to have a band again. Oh, it’s just a classic rock cover band – it’s not the flaming-hot passionate “mission in life” vibe the twenty-some me wore back in the 1980s, when I took my swing at being a rock star, or at least a songwriter, producer and whatever else came my way. But I get to play guitar in front of rooms full of people who seem to enjoy it. And even if it’s a slow night at an out of the way bar, my Fitbit says I burn 6-7000 calories and rack up a zillion steps, so even then it’s a win-win.

Anyway – for that, I’m thankful.


Given the sturm und drang of this state and nation’s political scene, I’m deliriously grateful for the voice this blog, and the NARN, have given me over the years. On the one hand, social media have given everyone a voice, of sorts – and what people have done with that voice is another entire subject. But being able to do this on my own terms (within FCC and Salem Communications rules, natch) for all this time? To the extent I’m still sane, that’s probably why.

Of course, I’m grateful for the friends I’ve made during all these years of writing – Professor Reynolds, Gary Gross, Joshua Sharf, Sheila O’Malley, and the group of local bloggers that, about this time 19 years ago, started coalescing into that radio show: Scott Johnson, John Hinderaker, Brian Ward, Chad the Elder, Atomizer, Michael Brodkorb, and of course Ed Morrissey, King Banaian, Brad Carlson and Jack Tomczak. And of course, for the many friends I made in the “Minnesota Organization of Bloggers” days – including the three whose contributions still bless this blog, Mr. D, Jeff Kouba and First Ringer.


Why, yes – even Paddyboy! I’m thankful that Pad – someone I’ve considered a friend for over three decades, and to whom I owe an odd little debt of gratitude from back before the word “blog” meant anything but something that happened about an hour after you ate a gas station burrito – drops by, pique and all. I owe you a drink or two. Have your people call my people.


And I’m thankful for this little ephemeral bit of internet I’ve been wrangling this past 20.75 years. It’s been a sporty year – as I write this, the comment section is still shut down. And since you mention it, yes – I’m thankful I shut it down. It’ll be back. Yep – also grateful.

As I noted elsewhere around the time of the 20th anniversary, writing this every weekday morning has been sort of a Zen-like lesson – come rain or shine, feast or famine, writer’s block or fit of logorrhea, the exercise of sitting down and writing, five mornings a week, has been a way of centering myself for this past two decades. For better or worse – I have to think it’s better – one of the great takeaways from doing this has been, I think, one of the great lessons of life; keep plugging away, and things eventually explain themselves.

Of course, I’m profoundly and humbly thankful that people still choose to read it, after all this time. Thank you all!


I could keep at this for hours more. And perhaps one day I should. But cooking calls, same as last year.

And so to borrow a line from that first Thanksgiving post on this blog, way back when:

But I forgot one. I’m thankful to be here. Now. Doing what I’m doing, and with the chance to be doing the same thing – or better – next year.

Thanks to all of you. I hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving and a blessed holiday season.

This post is an update of a post I wrote last year. Not much has changed – for which I’m also grateful.

Things I’m Thankful For Today, Part 1

We’ll start with this thread on Twitter. I urge you to read the whole thing; it distills the response I have to the modernes attempt to cheapen and undercut everything Western Civilization stands for into a hot red crystal of truth:

Misplaced

One of my great strengths is I’m a very loyal person. If you’re a colleague, a romantic partner or a friend, I’ll stick with you – sometimes to absurd lengths.

One of my great weaknesses is I’m a very loyal person. I’ve stuck with some friendships, and other relationships, that didn’t deserve it. If you’re a colleague, a romantic partner or a friend, I’ll take a lot of fairly pointless and demeaning abuse on what my inner critic thinks is “principle”, but is really more equal parts inertia, a childhood of not having a lot of close frieends, and excessive self-doubt (as noted by others).

A great example was the long-gone and utterly unlamented “Dog Gone”. She’d been a social acquaintance, even a friend of sorts, going back to the ’80s. She’d known my kids when they were babies. And when she turned up on the blog, a few years later, I figured “good – let’s see what happens”.

We all know how that turned out.

I mean, things started out OK.

And then, as the wheels slowly wobbled off, I figured “Dogs are gonna Dog”.

For a while, it devolved to the fact I just enjoyed watching the smart people in the comments curb-stomping her, week after week – although as her “technique” degenerated into “pooping and running”, that fun didn’t last long.

Finally, of course, she used her 20+ year old contact with my family to take a deeply bizarre and very personal swipe at me. Something so over the top, so biliously narcissistic that even I had enough.

That arc took about a decade.

Because loyalty is wasted on some people.

No, that’s not accurate. It’s more true to say I waste loyalty on some people.

I’m not going to say that changed me, particularly – “Dog Gone” wasn’t a close friend, and jettisoning that fairly peripheral relationship had no effect on my life or how I live it.

But it’s a bit of a cue that I have a tendency to misallocate loyalty.

Apropos not much.

More later in the week.

Submitted Without Comment

I had a long drive over the weekend. I spent it listening to Jordan Peterson.

I caught an excellent episode with Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation. It’s a sprawling 97 minute discussion of everything conservatism is, everything it should be, where it falls short, how to make up the difference…

Here’s the episode:

…and, toward the beginning, a concept I’ve been struggling to put my finger on.

The topic was the American university’s new obsession with “safety”, especially intellectual safety. A higher education is, as Peterson notes, supposed to upset one’s adolescent stupidity, and thereby teach you how to think critically about all your, and everyone’s, preconceptions.

Roberts pointed out that in the traditional University system – especially in Europe – the goals are:

  • To have an intense, probing debate without a whole lot of regard for what the various parties feel about the issue…
  • …while observing some standards in the argument – the basics of human respect, not to mention logic and social decorum.

Now, call me a dreamer, but that’s what I’ve always shot for on this blog, and in the comments.

We’ll come back to that.


I’ve had plenty of feedback about the disabled comment section. I do appreciate it. I miss having it turned on as well.

It’ll be back.

But in this past week, I’ve done a bunch of thinking.

As I pointed out last week, I’ve always treated “managing” the comments with a certain amount of idealism. Pragmatic idealism – I also barely have enough free time to read the comments, much less play manager – but idealism nonetheless.

I figured “we’re all adults”. I asked a bunch of adults, respectfully, to mind their manners and treat each other with the same basic respect.

It didn’t seem like that big an ask at the time. And for about 20 years, I was mostly right.

And, let’s be honest – this blog is more a personal exercise in self-discipline and thought-development than “citizen journalism”, to say nothing of a money-making venue. I’ve been amazed to have an audience for a couple of decades, now – and, yes, blessed. Much of what I genuinely like about my life, particularly my social life, springs from the connections this blog started for me.

I figured the input should match the output.

But there’s been more than enough output for me to make it worth making things work.

More tomorrow.

Experience Vs. Idealism. 15 Rounds.

This blog has had a constant, self-imposed tension to it, at least to me.

Idealistic, Small-L Liberal Mitch is a free speech absolutist for reasons not the least of which being when people who find not only disagreeable but hateful are speaking in the open, then they’re doing less skulking through back alleys and plotting and scheming.

UX Pro Mitch sees the data, and knows there are four kinds of online forums:

  1. Small forums that take care of themselves, because the participants fundamentally agree on everything they talk about. . And I do mean everything. A forum on bird-watching can turn into an online barroom brawl over punctuation, or Trump, or the Green Bay Packers.
  2. Large forums that police their traffic pretty relentlessly. Aggressive moderation keeps things under control.
  3. Forums where the “owners” don’t really care, and degenerate into a nonstop flame pit. See: The Strib comment section.
  4. Forums that don’t exist anymore, because the owners got frustrated with the un-usable maelstrom they’d turned into, and shut them down. See the MinnPost comment section.

I’ve been running this blog for almost 22 years, and installed the comment section over 20 years ago – and for that entire time, I’ve striven to keep things in the #1 category above; to keep a light hand on moderation, sticking to the ideal that the best defense against bad (or annoying, or dumb, or trolling) speech speech is more good speech.

Part of that is principle. Part of that is, honestly, I don’t have the time to be a heavier hand. I don’t make enough money off this blog to hire moderators, like Powerline or Hot Air. I do 90% of the writing between 5:30-7AM – and then I go to work. All day long and, given that the team I lead stretches from the Bay Area to Bangalore, sometimes into the wee hours of the late night. I don’t want to exert a heavy hand on the comments, because I can’t.

In all that time, I can list the number of people I’ve banned on two hands, and list most if not all of them by name. And as a very general rule I’ve only banned people for three reasons:

  • Picking personal fights with me that involve some variant of stalking or other hyperpersonal attacks. That’s why Bill Gleason, Dog Gone and a few others wound up pining for the electronic fjords.
  • Genuine worries that letting them air their inner monologues here was harming their mental health (and, possibly, my actual health). “Doug” was one of those.
  • Thinking they could take the blog over from the comments. Mitch, please.

There’s been tension between order and chaos – but the de facto “gentlemen’s agreement” to speak freely and meet bad (or dumb) speech with more better smarter speech worked for a long time. There are some blazingly smart people here, and I have learned a hell of a lot from many of you. And there’ve been some unintended but salutary consequences; for example, the impetus to turn a couple of sarcastic posts about Twin Cities Ron Paulbots into a Dickensian serial, and then a book, came from several of you in the comments.

The “gentlemen’s agreement” worked for probably 19 of the past 20 years.

Because for most of that time, while I don’t have a lot of time to read what goes on in the comment section, when I did it was almost always fun.

But it’s not fun anymore. Worse than that, it’s not especially interesting.

My hands-off approach has stopped working. The comment section has gone from a #1 to a #3.

#2 isn’t really an option. Not only do I not want to be like Sally Jo Sorenson, manically (and, it seems to me, dreadfully insecurely) screening e v e r y single comment to keep things on track – I literally can not do that. There aren’t enough hours in the day to produce and police the blog, and everything else that needs doing.

But for all that, #4 is off the table. It matters too much to me for that. Between the show prep it provides, the zen-like self-discipline of getting up early and going this every weekday, the interactions that I do like and value, and maybe (who knows?) some “sunk costs fallacy”, this place is important to me.

But there are going to be changes.

In fact, they’ve happened.

Brass Tacks: I’ve shut down the comment section. It’ll stay shut down – not permanently, but for a bit. Maybe a day, maybe a year, most likely somewhere in between.

When it comes back, things will be different. Not radically so – but different.

More later.

So What Was With All That Stuff About Music And Relatives And Old Bosses, Merg?

I took a little vacation.

That’s kind of a big deal. I don’t take vacations. It’s a running gag among my European co-workers that I”m the classic American. I’ve never taken a vacation of longer than five days that didn’t involve visiting family or some major household project.

So I went to Norway from October 1-13.

And it looked a little something like this.

I landed in Oslo, and meandered my way down to Drøbak, where this historic episode happened:

I took a picture with the star of that particular show:

Then it was back to Oslo, for a flight to Trondheim, where I rented a car and started driving.

Now, I said earlier that I’d never taken a vacation that didn’t involve family, and I guess I still haven’t. I drove about an hour southeast of Trondheim to the little village of Græsli. Population about fifty – and I’m related to about twenty of them.

The Ned River in Græsli. We’ll come back to this.

My third cousin – more below – took me on a little sightseeing trip, thirty or so miles east to the Swedish border:

Just across the border in Sweden. I actually crossed the border a few times – they’re not really patrolling it out here. Because, who’s going to cross?

That’s right – reindeer. And fishermen.

I met the grandchildren and great-and-great-great-grandchildren of my great-grandfather’s little brother, the only one of four siblings that stayed in Norway.

My Great-Great-Uncle Bersven, 2nd from left in the first row. I met some of the guys who are little boys – Bersven’s grandsons – in this photo..

My visit was apparently an excuse for about thirty people from all over central Norway to get together for an evening at the village community center, where everyone brought all the photos, letters and other family memorabilia they could find.

That’s my great-great-grandfather, Ole Bernson, and his wife Karin. His father, by the way, was Bernt Oleson. .

Turns out my great-grandfather’s little sister was something of a mystery;

That would have been Friday evening, October 6 – before the events in Israel, so as luck would have it the subject of the Middle East never came up, for those who are curious. . We had plenty of other stuff to talk about.

The next day, it was off to follow my fourth-cousin to her family’s place, about four hours south.

I didn’t take many pictures of this leg of the trip – because my hands pretty much needed to be pried off the steering wheel. . I’ve driven on ice – lots and lots of it – and I’ve driven in the mountains. In the summer. Twice.

I’ve never driven on twisty, turny Norwegian roads through a mountain pass after an unexpected snowstorm, though. They don’t build shoulders on roads over there – the edge of the road, in some cases, was a forty-foodt drop into a mountain lake.. So I kept my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel.

Eventually, though, we got to Røros…

That’ Røros cathedral in the background. There was a big wedding going on, and a lot of the people in this photo were on their way to or from that.

After that, I drove down to the coast at Āndalsnes, where I jumped off on two days of driving up the Atlantic Coast Highway – a trip that had me wondering “is there such a thing as too miuch beauty? Is it possible for natural beauty to bludgeon you over the head so hard you become desensitized to it?

Åndalsnes, from across the Eisfjord. If Hallmark shoots a “film” in Norway where the plucky young superwoman takes a break from her high-pressure job running an Oslo ad agency, it’s probably Āndalsnes where she finds love running a bookstore with a rugged but sensitive fisherman.

I lost count of the number and name of the fjords that prompted me to stop, snap a photo, and think “this one makes the last four or five I saw look like wet garbage”.

Depending on the map, the Allantic Ocean Highway fronts the North Sea or the Arctic Ocean – both of them synonyms for stark dangerous beauty:

I could have probably driven from Āndalsnes to Trondheim in a day, but there was just too much to see and do – so I stopped for an evening in Kristiansund…

Kristiansund – Christian’s Sound – from the, er, sund. .

…and then to Trondheim the next day.

Trondheim. This is the part everyone knows – the Nedelva (the same river we saw above up in Græsli) along Kjøpmansvei. .

Trondheim reminds me of Duluth. It’s a port city, that got its start exporting minerals, and fy da, the. hills have got to make ice storms really. miserable. . .

And then it was back to Oslo.

The Oslo waterfront, from Akershus, looking toward Aker Brygge. . .

I spent some time doing one of my favorite things in the world – wandering around a strange city with no particular aim in mind. But I did do a little sightseeing.

I went to Akershus, the ceremonial seat of roal power, and hit the Hjemfrontmuseet (“Home Front Museum”, commemorating life, resistance and yes, collaboration in Norway during the war:

“Milorg” guerillas coming literally and figuratively in from the cold at the end of the war . . .

And the Forsvaretsmuseet, the National Defense Museum…:

A part of a diorama of the Norwegian Navy in 1909. Which wasn’t, unfortunately, much different than a diorama of the Norwegian Navy in 1940. . .

Disconnecting from daily life wasn’t easy for me. I’m not sure I quite got it down. I may need more practice.

Where Credit Is Due: Epilogue

Those of you who’ve been watching this blog for years may have figured it out – when I have a loooong anthology series, I’m often doing something other than writing every morning.

Two anthology series at the same time – “Soundtrack” and “Where Credit Is Due?” Unprecedented, right?

It was. I actually took an honest-to-God vacation. I spent two weeks in Norway (by the time you read this, I’ll be home again).

I spent that time visiting relatives – in this case, the grand, great-grand and great-great grandchildren of Bernt Oleson Græsli, who I talked about last week. In getting ready for the trip, I started thinking about all the things that go into a generation of people – decades, generations, even centuries of work, wins, defeats, triumphs, disasters and innumerable lessons and traits and legends passed down to those who follow.

I had a distant relative tell me I resembled my great-great-uncle (who died in 1965 at 93 years old)

My great-grandfather’s little brother (front row, 3rd from left, his five sons, and their families, seventy years ago. The farmhouse behind them was built in 1850, has been the setting for generations of family photos, and still stands today. I spent a bunch of time this past week with some of the younger kids in this photo, and their children.

I got some questions answered (how did my great-grandfather get the idea to come to America), answered some questions (nobody knew what happened to his little sisters – but I did!), and had a great time thinking about what is family, and what are the motivations and influences and good times and bad times that make people who they are.

And there’s more to come. Maybe on the blog, maybe not.

But it’s been a couple of fun weeks, both in real life and blog-time.

Soundtrack, Part 9

Of all the music I’ve talked about this past two weeks, this one may be the closest thing to an emotional time machine.

My own baggage notwithstanding, if you built a time capsule and wanted to put “The perfect 1980s song” in it, this would be a candidate; the shufflying synth drums and faux orchestra skirling about with Mike Campbell’s ultra-minimalist punctuation on guitar (which is backwards rock and roll!) – it tied the whole decade together.

And the song itself – all about getting your arms around what you’ve lost? It felt perfect then.

And a couple of decades later, it still does.

Back to more regular blog material Monday.

Where Credit Is Due: Don Vogel

The Twin Cities remembers Don Vogel as one of the most instinctively funny people ever to appear on the radio. “The Round Mound of Sound”, the blind guy who was going to drive you home.

I remember a lot of different Dons.

He was a guy who’d been blind since infancy, and who lived with it as gracefully and powerfully as anyone you’ve ever seen.

Notwithstanding that, he was a frighteningly vindictive man who never forgot a slight or a miscue. Once you were out with Don, you were out. The man had no loyalty or sentiment.

And if dark were energy, his dark side could have powered half the state. A morbidly obese epicurean with blood chemistry could qualify for Superfund cleanup funding, he always said his goal was to die by fifty. And he made it with weeks to spare, of metastatic bladder cancer.

He was the guy who gave me my big break out of college, not once but twice; once when he hired me to be his screener, and once when he went way out on a limb with management to get me on the air.

He was the guy at the enter of one of the most formative experiences of my life – my first job after college, where I got to do juvenile comedy all week and argue politics with strangers all weekend – perhaps the most perfect time of my life in many ways.

And he taught me a few lessons that have formed my approach to my entire life: always think three questions ahead; always be ready for the guest to not show and the phone lines to break down; never lose control of the conversation; there are four kinds of callers – great ones, average ones, crazy ones and boring ones; stick with the first three kinds.

They sound like radio lessons, but they work for life in general, if you think about it.

Soundtrack, Part 8

My first couple of weeks in the Twin Cities, I spent a lot of time in the car.

And Twin Cities radio stations spent a lot of time playing this song.

I’m not sure if it ever went to #1, but in a month of memorable music, it was perhaps the most chant-along-worthy thing on the radio…

…which led us to hours of racing around freeways or sitting in traffic, rocking back and forth and singing “Shout…Shout…””, and waiting impatiently for the reward of the fat, glorious guitar solo at the end.

I still feel like I”m in traffic, and don’t mind that much, when I hear this one. .

Where Credit Is Due: Dr. James Blake

“Mitch, you’re not a Democrat. And I can prove it”.

Dr. Blake looked across his desk at me. I was afraid he might be right.


Jim Blake was the son of a New York cop, and still had the Queens accent to show for it. I didn’t know much more about his background, other than he had gotten a Masters at Rutgers and his PhD at Marquette – a school he’d chosen because he wanted to be in a city with an NBA team.

I didn’t know the whole story:

Born in Brooklyn, NY on April 26, 1947 he was the son of the late James and Louise Blake. By all accounts he was a very shy, sweet little boy who seemed beyond his years and would at times be sad and “ morbid” as his grandmother put it. At the age of three, he was presented with a baby sister, Pamela Louise. At the age of six, his beloved mother passed away with cancer. He was unfortunatelyl eft in the hands of a very uncaring parent and thus began a very rough and tumble childhood.

When he was eleven, a stepmother and a stepsister joined the household. He spent the next several years protecting his sisters and endured continued physical and emotional abuse. He spent many nights in the car outside of a bar watching his sisters until the bars closed and his “parents” returned. His sister still remembers the pain of watching her brother being abused even during times of illness and always having to “man” up.

But fatherhood and academia were where Dr. Blake found a footing in life.

Although Jim was the first in his family to attend college, and was successful wherever he went in one way or another, his family loved him for other reasons. He broke the cycle of abuse he experiences. He was a loyal husband and friend. A wildly amusing and unique father. Bedtime for his son was having a father that became a robot and would obey his commands by pushing”buttons.” His daughters were not read bed time stories but would be visited by a “creature from the cellar.” There were eight at one time; each with a different voice and personality. One was Sidney a particularly obnoxious, bratty character which gave him full rein to be just that. Some of the characters wore a wig or an old suit picked up at a second hand store.

He taught in Memphis before getting a job running the small, ailing English department at the small, ailing college where my mother worked, giving me the 80% tuition break that got me into college.

He arrived to find the English Department with only two majors and this at a liberal arts college. One year after arriving, he was made department chair and at the end of the first year there were more than 50 students enrolled as English Majors.

I didn’t know I was going to be one of them until the end of my Freshman year – because, after taking my first class with Dr. Blake, I found I had a facility, and before long a fascination, for analyzing narratives and finding the point behind the story. By the end of my freshman year I’d changed my major to English. I’ve never regretted it.

Along with analysis and ferocious logic, Dr. Blake had two traits that would make him a pariah in education today.

First – he was utterly up-front about the prospects for English majors after graduation. He never promised that we would find a “job in our field”; indeed, he was drearily realistic about the jobs that were “in the field” for English majors (who didn’t want to be high school teachers) back then; years of graduate school leading to years on the tenure treadmill (the situation was bad then, and worse today), years of work in literary or refernce editing (working for $15K in 1985 dollars a year in New York or Los Angeles), or the endless grind of trying to actuallyl be a published author that earned a living. Instead, he emphasized the strengths the degree did give us; thinking outside the box, digging for the narrative needle in haystack, and turning it into a living, The degree didn’t teach us the “how”, but it taught us how to find the “why”. Without Dr. Blake, I’m not sure I’d have had the mental agility to blunder into the career I’m in, one which didn’t exist when I was in college.

Also – he was a conservative. He referred to himself as a “Monarchist”. And while he didn’t push anyone, he represented for the value of the traditions that made Western Civilization the hotbed of intellectual liberalism and economic humanity that it is.

I’d been getting little precursor echoes of my worldview changing for years; my anger at Jjmmy Carter’s “Malaise” speech, watching the crackdown on Solidarity, talking with boys my age from Polish and Vietnamese refugee families…

…but it was Dr. Blake who helped me tie it all together. I doubt I’d have pulled the lever for Reagan in 1984 without Dr. Blake.

Dr. Blake took a job as a dean in Marshalltown, Iowa the year after I graduated, and in 1992 moved to take a job at a school in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Marriage and kids and divorce led me out of contact with him until 2016, when I started looking him up and found his obituary from the year before.

I’ve never regretted procrastinating more.

Soundtrack, Part 7

Throughout this series, I’ve focused on memories triggered by music that is cemented into my brain as sublime.

But it wasn’t all good.

There was plenty of music that ranged from awkward to awful. And the more I write about it, the more of it comes back to me..

This was the second or third song I ever saw on MTV:

I gave ’em extra points for sneaking Christian imagery onto MTV (at a time when it wasn’t quite as uncommon as today) – and removed a few for it being…it.

But I never could find a reason to give this then-MTV staple any points at all…

…and am somewhat distressed to say I hear the one on the radio waaaaay more than I should.

It wasn’t all bad, per se. Some of it was just background music. This one was on the charts around this time in 1985:

Have you ever wondered what it looked like to watch two music legends deflate before your eyes, early October of 1985 brought that as well;

Of course, all of the above build up – or, rather, sink down – to the level of this song, which was peaking on the charts around this time…

…and remains , by acclamation, the worst song in pop music history.

Not all nostaliga as good.

I’ll get back on track tomorrow.

Where Credit Is Due: Bob Richardson

It was the long, hot summer after tenth grade when I was looking for a way to make more money than the buck a lawn I was getting from mowing and raking (In retrospect, I think my parents and grandma had quite the racket going).

But I had no idea what I actually wanted to do.

There weren;t a lot of jobs for cripplingly awkward teenagers back then. And I talked myself out of many of the ones that were.

Perhaps as much out of exasperation as anything, one day around the time school let out, Dad suggested maybe I should call Bob Richardson at KEYJ, one of the local radio stations.

And one day, somehow, I drummed up the nerve to do exactly that.

They say you can find anything on the internet. Photos of Bob from 1980 or thereabouts, however, don’t count. This is Bob and his wife of close to 70 years, Norma, from 2012. He doesn’t look a whole lot different today than he did when I worked for him.

Bob was the voice of Jamestown. With a booming voice that gave up nothing in authority terms to a drill sergeant, Bob had an easy sense of absolute authority about him that left me pretty much shaking in my shoes as I dialed. As I waited on hold, I took three deep breaths, and he picked up.

“This is Bob”.

I introduced myself, and asked if I might, maybe, apply for a job.

He audibly thought for a moment.

“You’ve got good diction”, he started. “And your dad knows something about speech – he can teach you a think or two…”

He thought for a moment.

“Let’s see how things look in the fall. In the meantime…”, he said, leading into a list of homework I needed to do. Read newspaper stories into a cassette deck, and listen to myself to see if I liked the way I sounded. Learn to read to a rhythm. Become familiar with local and regional politicians – the job involved not only reading the news, but writing it.

And so I waited, and read news stories, and listened to the horror that was my adolescent voice, and crossed my fingers.

It took three months, but one day in late July, Bob called, asking me if I was still interested. I jumped. I spent the next three Saturdays and Sundays waking up at 4:30AM, walking to the studio (above the White Drug store in Jamestown), and learning the basics – how to run the board, how to talk on the air, how to juggle all the elements of doing live radio, the news and weather and sports and fire calls and, least of all, records.

The main control room board at KEYJ. It was built in the late 1930s, which used to seem like a long time ago. That’s nothing; the production room board had a stamping from the 1920s, and I believe it completely. I can still remember what every knob, toggle and button does.

And on August 12, I soloed for the first time.

The rest is history. Lots of it.

I’m writing about Bob, partly because he gave me my first radio job – the job that vaulted me from “cripplingly shy, socially toxic, athletically inept adolescent” to “young fella who was kinda starting to believe in himself”.

It went way beyond that.

I was just the latest. and, as it turned out, last – of a long line of high school kids who got their start under Bob’s wing. Bob had seen it as part of his mission in buying and running that little 1,000 watt station to help teach kids how to do radio. He was uncompromising in his demands; be on time; cover the news, including writing up stories that haopened on our shifts; remember the station’s mission in the community; pronounce names right (Bob would have had a great time teaching Hugh Hewitt to do radio); learn and practice the craft of doing good radio. There was no time of the schedule, from sign-on at 5:55AM to sign-off at 11:55PM, where flubbing a name or writing a clumsy bit of copy wouldn’t get you a phone call, a stern talking to and a crisp invitation to do it better, then and there. You don’t repeat mistakes on Bob’s station.

And generations of local kids got their starts at KEYJ and went on to bigger things; legendary LA disk jockey Shadow Stevens (who started as Terry Ingstad at KEYJ when he was 12), as well as his younger brothers, including his youngest brother Dick, himself a highly respected morning guy; North Dakota radio news legends Dan Brannon and the late Mark Swartzell; Mick Wagner, today a very prominent jazz jock; radioman turned state politician Dave Nething. They are just the top of the heap; going to stations like KEYJ was, for a generation of radiomen and women, the best possible job to get out of broadcast school; in your first year, you’d do literally everything one could do in a radio station.

Bob’s still with us. I told him, 5-6 years ago, that he was one of my bucket list interviews. I could never close the deal to get him to come on the show; I’m not sure he thinks anything he did was worth an interview.

He was wrong. I never got to tell him that when I worked for him. There’s a first time for just about everything.

Soundtrack, Part 6: Notes From Underground

Long ago, I told the story of my first Sunday in the Twin Cities. It was a free day, without job hunting or much of anything to do.

So I drove downtown. I visited First Avenue, had a burger, looked at Murray’s and vowed that someday, when I had a cool job and an awesome girlfriend and had made it in the Twin Cites I was going to get a butterknife steak at Murrays.

And I bought a tape – my first tape in MInneapolis, from my first Minneapols band. The Replacements.

And given my situation, this song seemed apposite…

…and I may have played it a few hundred times in the first week, and thousands more since then.

And this article reminds me – I gotta get down to Murray’s.


While we’re talking underground? REM hadn’t quite graduated to annoying me completely yet. This song came out too:

And, since we’re on less well-known music that bobbed up on the radio during this, perhaps the most exciting and diverse period in top forty music radio, there were these two songs, also rattling around MTV at the time:

“Whisper to a Scream” by Icicle Works,

And “Litarny” by Guadalcanal Diary:

As I kicked this series off, I allowed it might be possible that my situation was what welded the music from this entire series into my brain.

That’s probably true. But dang, there was a lot of good music.

Not all of it, of course . We’ll visit music tomorrow that was memorable in all the wrong ways.

Where Credit Is Due: Bill King And His Employees

Bill King wasn’t your typical Presbyterian minister.

He spent, by his telling, a good chunk of his teenage years in one form of juvenile detention or another. He was a bit of a hoodlum until well into his teens. As he described it once, he didn’t get the right to vote until he was into his early twenties, as backwash from his teenage legal issues.

But somewhere along the way, he straigtened out, and literally “got religion”, went to college and then McCormick Theological Seminiary, and then sometime in his thirties got called to the FIrst Presbyterian Church in Jamestown.

And he created a bit of a stir.

Presbyterians were known as “God’s Frozen People”. King was far from frozen; he was an ebullient man with a sense of humor that could have found a home at a comedy club.

He encouraged the church – divided between older folks who’d been there forever, and younger parishioners, many of them college staffers – to loosen up. To engage. And, in a move that horrified some of the traditional Presbyterians, to applaud the special music – unthinkable to generations of staunch Knoxists. This actually launched a bit of a dispute – some people actually left the church.

But the Presbyterians have always valued a good, or ideally a great, sermon. It’s a trait that’s kept me in the Presbyterian church – albeit not the same one King presided over.

More on that later.

One of the things that drew my Dad, a speech teacher who gave speaker points to everyone, was the fact that King’s sermons were freaking brilliant; if you could get past all that clapping, it was absolute gold. And so when I was 11, we “converted”.

And King had a way of engaging even the pre-teen, and adolescent, me. Mitch the child had been bored and fidgety in the Lutheran services, with their endless up and down and aaaaaaal thaaaaat chaaaanting. King’s sermons had an uncanny way of having enough intellectual “oomph” to engage Dad and Mom, but were direct and clear enough to cause me to sit up, pay attention, and think “there’s something to this faith thing”.

And in ninth grade, in confirmation class, he gave me a lesson – more secular and psychological than theological – that redounds with to this day. Confirmation was serious in his church; kids could, and did, flunk; it wasn’t easy, but it happened. And there was a final conversation with him before the actual confirmation service. I ran over to the church, not quite sure what to expect, over lunch hour one spring day, and sat in his office, where he quizzed me on what i”d learned.

And then, a few minutes of his own observations. Where he started: “Mitch – I’ve noticed that you are far and away your own nastiest critic”.

He was right. And he still is. That internal critic still howls at me every day – and the voice of Bill King pops up, most every time, and reminds me to be as forgiving to myself as God wants to be.

It’s hard to describe, but was an amazing gift in its own simple way.


King didn’t run a big church – but he had a little help.

First came intern Jim Jacobson. Also from Chicago, aso with a past out of a Hunter S. Thompson novel, “Jake” was 27 and in his senior hear at Jamestown College, after having been a heroin addict for many years, he was also a great guitar player. He sold me my first electric guitar – a 1960 Fender Jazzmaster – and taught me a lot, about playing guitar and other even more important things. He was a minister in Hallock the last I heard of him. I’ll have to look him up sometime.

Then, Mick Burns and his on-again, off-again girlfriend Joni Jordheim. Twin Cities natives, they ran the youth group at a time when Presbyterian churches still had enough families to warrant having youth groups. It’s hard to explain how important that group was for me. Mick and Joni gor married 45 years ago, by the way, and after a career running churches in Fargo and Baltimore, they just retired back to Oakdale.

Mick was a drummer in a Christian rock band up at the college. Along with Jake, there was another guitar player, Ron Allen. Ron was the fullback on the college football team, and a great one at that. He could have been playing at a higher division – but he’d been dragged to Jamestown by his then-fiance, Jenny, of whom more in a moment. Ron had an amazing talent for relating the stories of the life-changing importance of faith in his life – stories that stuck with me during some of the more parlous times of my life. Ron was semi-famous for having been one of very few NAIA Division 3 players to get a tryout with an NFL team – he did a walk0-on with the Raiders in, I think, ’79. He’s also semi-famous because of his son, Jared, whom Vikings fans may remember.

Jared was not the son of Ron and Jenny – they broke up shortly after they arrived in North Dakota (although I do remember Jared’s mom, too). But Jenny was a huge influence; a student of my dad’s at a class he taught at the college, she became a long-time friend of the family. And in the summer after eighth grade, as I was struggling to teach myself to play a wrecked, cheap, borderline useless guitar, she lent me a Yamaha acoustic guitar that she wasn’t using. Which may have been what made teaching myself guitar actually do-able.

And playing guitar certainly had an impact on the next ten years of my life.


Reverend King was a “progressive” minister at at time when that was simultaneously a little out of the norm in mainstream Protestantism, and not all that remarkable to me. He was working in rural North Dakota; he could read a room.

His next calling, my sophomore year of of high school, was to a church in Madison, Wisconsin, where he got to let his Progressive flag fly. He was there until he retired, probably 20 years ago.

My politics changed – and, one day in the fall of ’86, after I’d not only changed politics, but become a conservative talk show host, I called Reverend King – partly to say “hi”, partly to nudge him a bit over the fact that the critical thinking he’s helped teach me had led me to that particular fork in the road.

He sounded disappointed. Probably not theatrically. But that was OK. I took one of his lessons to heart, and didn’t castigate myself too hard over it.

Soundtrack, Part 5

Nothing about my first week in the Twin Cities ever smacked me upside the head quite as hard as my first rush hour.

I drove Cedar to 494 to try to get to 35W, to drive from Burnsville to Vadnais Heights for an interview.

And 494 during the morning rush hour is still a cardio workout.

Back then? In a barely roadworthy car, learning the few rules that the road had?

I flipped on WLOL. This song started:

The buildup, in my memory, went hand in hand with the traffic, the weaving and ducking and lane-changing, built up around me, mirroring the mental frenzy I’d just merged into.

I’m sure my blood pressure and heart rate still rise when this song come on, anywhere.

Where Credit Is Due: Don And Pat Hall

In couples terms, Don and Pat Hall were the American Dream.

Don was a kid from a fairly unsuccessful farm in Starkweather, North Dakota, who nonetheless had athletic talent to burn. He got a scholarship to come to Jamestown College, in Jamestown, where he lettered in Football, Basketball, Track and Baseball for all four years, setting some records that still stand at that school.

Pat Hendrickson was, if not the homecoming queen, the girl who got the queen through English class. The daughter of Sven Hendrickson (of which see earlier), a rural pharmacist, she came to Jamestown to major in English and become a teacher.

Don and Pat met at Jamestown College in, I think, 1931. And they were married until death, indeed, parted them temporarily, about seventy years later.

Both of them went on to teach; Pat taught English, Don covered Chemistry when he wasn’t coaching. And he was a superlative coach; he led Grand Forks Central through the only undefeated regular/post-season/championship march in the history of North Dakota high school basketball (until Jamestown pulled it off a few years ago), in (I think) 1940,

They had three kids – Jan (of whom more later), Jerri and Roger.

And then – sometime around 1952 or so – Don decided to chuck it all and become a businessman. He got a franchise for Lystads Pest Control – now a division of Ecolab – in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He packed up the family and moved…

…and spent a couple years crawling around under porches on hundred-degree days chasing colonies of wasps, and decided before long to take independence a different way.

As I used to say, to the delight of my classmates and the consternation of my teachers, he “sold drugs”.

Which was a breezy, sixth-grader’s way of saying he took his chemistry degree, and spent the next twenty-odd years of his career as a traveling pharmaceutical salesman.

I got to know Grandpa when he was at the top of his game – he had a pretty rocking route going on in the seventies.

He took me on his route once – a couple of days of driving from one small-town North Dakota drug store to another. Montpelior, Gackle, Wishek, Richardton, Medina, Glen Ullen, Dickinson, and a whole bunch I’m sure I can’t remember. He was on a first-name basis with all the pharmacists and owners.

It didn’t occur to me at the time that it was his third shot at a career. That didn’t really hit me until I was into my thirties, really.

Don and Grandma were married for close to seventy years before they passed away in Arizona, about a year apart, close to 20 years ago.

More on them later.

Soundtrack, Part 4

Yesterday’s (and Tuesday’s) entry was a bit of eighties apocrypha, meaningful maybe only to me.

Today’s? Sublime, and a pretty universal pop culture reference.

Do I even need to introduce it?

The video isn’t just representative of the golden age of music video. The rotoscope noir-in-color is the golden age of music video. MTV would certainly have existed without it – but nobody would have cared nearly as much.

And the song itself – the bubbling syths and synth drums, the descent into the choruses, and of course Morten Harket’s iconic falsetto in the chorus?

I heard and saw this for the first time sitting on a friend’s couch, watching MTV for the first time. On top of everything else, this song says “Welcome to Minneapolis, and the Rest Of Your Life” to me.

Whevever I am, I feel “1985” down to my marrow.

Where Credit Is Due: Grandma Bea

My Grandma Bea was not an effusive woman. If there’s a stereotype of rural Scandinavians in America, it’s that they are pretty emotionally reserved, in a way that comes across as cold to some, passive-aggressive to others, and often just funny for those who get it.

Example: when I was born, Dad called his mother to tell her it was a boy.

“What’s his name?”, Bea asked.

“Mitchell”.

There was (so the story goes) a few seconds of silence on the line.

“Well, it’s not too late to change it…”, she averred, before the conversation moved on.

We lived six blocks from Grandma Bea for my entire childhood. Sundays, every week, involved dinner at Grandma’s, followed by “Wild Kingdom” and “Wonderful World of Disney”. Grandma was an amazing cook, and even made lutefisk that was utterly edible and enjoyable (if only as a garnish – never an actual meal). And her lefse was the highlight of most holidays.

She died when I was 17 – and while shes didn’t talk about her childhood a lot, I learned a thing or two over the years.


Bernt “Oleson” Greslie married Mary Nilson, the daughter of the postman in New Solem, Minnesota – a township that is the “suburbs” of Thief River Falls. They had four kids.

The youngest was my grandmother, Beatrice.

They spoke Norwegian at home; Bea didn’t learn English until she was in third grade. Like a lot of immigrants and their children, they kept the old language at home in the new country – which, as a young language geek, used to frustrate me immensely. I wanted Grandma to teach me Norwegian.

In retrospect, it may have been a good thing she didn’t; Berndt spoke the Trøndelsk dialect from the hills east of Trondheim – more or less the Appalachian accent of Norway. Still, it would have helped…well, today.

The family moved to a house up in Middle River, Minnesota when Grandma was very young. As always, I don’t know a lot about her childhood.

What I do know is that she had two aunts who must have been absolutely fascinating people. They were a couple of sisters who were proto-tycoons in the photography business. traveled the wilds of Minnesota and the Dakotas. starting photography studios all over the place and selling them off to new photogs. Some of those studios still exist. One that still does – thanks to a Chamber or Commerce that knows where its bread is buttered – but in any case has lived on in Minnesota lore, was the Eric Enstrom studio in Bovey – a stone’s throw from Coleraine. Grandma apprenticed with Enstrom, and one day in the early ’20s was involved in the staging, shooting, development and hand-coloring of this photo:

Bea carried on as a photographer’s assistant, and then photographer, in Bovey for another 7-8 years, until one of her aunts heard that a photographer in Jamestown, North Dakota needed another photographer. And one thing led to another…

….anyway,, we talked about that yesterday.

The interesting part, to me at least, was what came 15 years later.

In June of 1942, as the grit from the dust bowl was still getting swept out of corners, and while World War 2 is at its most uncertain moment, Oscar died, leaving (as the legend goes) $50 in the bank [1].

And Bea…just kept on. She worked, as Dad described it, sixteen hours a day for the next twenty-odd years, keeping the studio going.

Mommybloggers and child psychologists use the term “grit” today. Grandma Bea had grit. Forget the modern fripperies – she was tough.

I often think of Grandma Bea (not to mention the aunts who helped her get started) when I hear modern feminists – most particularly some of the Twin Cities feminist-bloggers of the 2000s – yapping about being warriors. I don’t think they’d have been able to keep up with Bea for 24 hours.


[1] Of course, after inflation, $50 in 1942 would be closer to $1,000 today, but still. .

Soundtrack, Part 3

My first couple of days in the Cities, I was staying on a friend’s couch in Burnsville, working through my list of job leads (which was short) and going through the want ads to try to find some kind of income.

Which left a little time for watching that new toy I’d found, MTV.

And I’m fairly sure this was the first song I ever saw:

It was Simple Minds’s followup to “Don’t You Forget About Me”, their megahit from earlier in the year.

And it was peak SImple Minds; arty, ingenious, pretentious, memorable, full of Jim Kerr’s preening, roiling with Charlie Burchill’s insidious guitar and Mel Gayhor’s sublime drumming.

I heard it on the overhead at happy hour the other day – for maybe the second time since 1990. And it transported my brain back to that living room in Burnsville.

But rather than waiting for a phone call that never came, iti promped me to write…

…well, this entire series.

Where Credit Is Due: Oscar Berg

Nobody really knows where the name “Berg” came from. Oscar’s father, Andrew, was named Anders Olafson – “Andrew, son of Olaf” – in his home village in rural Sweden. He came to America in the late 1870s, and wound up in Lake Lida, Minnesota with the name Andrew Berg.

Berg? I have no idea. I have this 20%-serious theory that he arrived at the bureaucrats design at Ellis Island at the same time as a group of Hasidim from eastern Poland, one of whose descendants is trying to figure out why his family are the only Olafsons in their synagogue.

Andrew married Caroline Slorby, of and had two kids before she died in childbirth. Andrew them re-married Ida Venholm, another immigrant from Sweden, and their first son Oscar, born in 1889, was the first of ten more kids.

Oscar was born in Lake Lida, and grew up working on Andrews farm – but he had other plans.

Sometime in the 1910s, he headed to Saint Paul. There’s a photo, somewhere, of him in a Saint Paul streetcar driver’s uniform, in front of the Como Park streetcar station, the one at the south end of Como Park. And then the trail goes cold again.

He popped up again in 1927, starting a photography studio in Jamestown, North Dakota. Business was good enough that he needed an assistant. He wrote to a couple of women in northeastern Minnesota, XXXXXX, who’d spent years establishing photography studios all over the upper Midwest, including one in Bovey run by Ralph Enstrom that’d already produced a photo that would become iconic in the upper Midwest…

…but that’s coming up later on in the week.

But one of the aunts knew that one of the girls working at the Enstrom studio, their niece Beatrice, was looking for a move. Bea moved to Jamestown to take over as the assistant at Berg Studio.

They got married not too long later – 1930-ish, I think.

Grandpa Oscar and Grandma Bea.

My father, Bruce, was born in 1936.

Oscar was, by all accounts I’ve heard, quite the outdoorsman; a hunter, a fisherman, a golfer, a man about town (in a fairly small town).

But neither I nor my dad knew much about that. Oscar died of a cardiac arrest in March of 1942.

It’s been said that my brother, sister and I would have been very different if Oscar had lived longer. Oscar was, by all accounts, a lot more brusque, a little more “direct”, much more “Type A” than Grandma. We’ll touch on that later next week.

All I know is that Oscar, like a lot of guys in that era, had to adapt to a lot of circumstances in his day. I can’t imagine they romanticized it enough to call it “Reinventing Oneself” back then – it was more a matter of necessity spawning invention.

But as someone who’s had to do the same over the years, I would have so many question for Oscar.