The Power of Education
2013
Relax. Think. Who was your favorite teacher? Hold that thought. James Dee Cook doesn’t recall the male teacher’s name but confirms that his third grade teacher was a major force throughout his lifetime. James was born and raised in the Rice neighborhood at the height of the Great Depression and rode the bus to elementary school. Math was James’s art. Like a human calculator, he doodled numbers in his right brain as he played in his sandbox.
Back Again
2013
I took my first breath in St. John’s Hospital at Seventh and Maria. That makes me a native Saint Paulite, even though I grew up in the suburbs. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, many suburban parents-to-be chose Saint Paul hospitals to welcome their babies into the world. As a suburban child, it was a big deal to go shopping at the downtown department stores, and each trip we took, my mom never failed to point out St. John’s at the top of the bluff. “That’s where you two were born,” Mom would remind my brother and me. Anytime my brother and I were fighting in the backseat, Mom would remind us that we’d all wind up back at St. John’s if she crashed the car because we had distracted her.
Not Afraid of the Dark
2013
My father has “old age of the eyes.” That means he’s going blind slowly from the inside out. He says I look like a model with my hair swooped back. He points out a covenant of blackbirds....
Kwvtij/Brothers
2013
Wang Ger, also called Joe, has been trying to teach me to speak more words of Hmong. “I have learned English; you can learn more Hmong.” I am not a good student, but he does not give up...
Saint Paul’s Big River Journey
2013
Each fall and spring since 1996 we’ve loaded students aboard one of the Padelford Packet boats at Harriet Island. Their mission is to learn about how they are connected to this amazing body of water. The joint project between the Padelford Company, the DNR, and the Science Museum of Minnesota is called the Big River Journey. Six times a day we squeeze fifteen to twenty fifth and sixth graders into the wheelhouse to talk about the school subjects that help a person become a riverboat pilot. Anyone who thinks smaller classroom size has no impact on the quality of education can come spend a day of Big River Journey with me.
The Little Guy
2013
Dale Massie pulls for the little guy. “I’m pulling for the little guy, like you and me. God gives us free will. We have no excuse. You know what I’m saying?” While he smoked his break away, we engaged and enjoyed a free-ranging dialogue that touched on aliens, human violence, the many names for God...
Micheal “Eyedea” Larsen—A Great St. Paul Poet
2013
We flip through the pictures You are moving We listen to each song You are undoubtedly alive...
Reflections on Patricia Hampl’s “A Romantic Education”
2013
I never saw the Schmidt Brewery that Patricia Hampl presents here, alive with its reverie-enhancing, rhythmic, red neon sign. But the first time I discovered the hulk of the brewery’s abandoned buildings sprawled out along West Seventh Street in the fall of 2004, I recognized immediately what I was looking at; its vacant structures flooded me with the memory of reading about that flashing sign in Hampl’s acclaimed 1981 memoir, A Romantic Education. Soon the Schmidt site will take on a different look as “developers” trick it out to new purposes—a welcome change.
The Goddess of Film
2013
“Sally Dixon is the Goddess of Film,” asserts digital artist Bonita Wahl. A dancer with Kairos Dance Theatre, a cultivated soul, and a legendary angel for artists of all sorts, Sally was one of the first curators of avant-garde film in America. She exhibited pioneering experimental works by the likes of Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Breer, and Kenneth Anger at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art during the 1960s...
Looking for Daisy in the Archives of the Saint Paul Public Schools
2013
I wanted a class photo, your name on a staff list. From old city directories I have pieced together a list of the schools where you taught— Cleveland, Lafayette, Edison, Ericsson, Drew— not a one of them standing in the next century. Old photos at the History Center show their stern facades. And what of the faces looking at you every morning?
When Our Elders Perish, an Entire Library Burns to the Ground (African Proverb)
2013
Private Ivy Hagan and Josephine Hicks Hagan became the twenty-something ensemble known as “Aunt Jo and Uncle Ivy.” They mentored children of all ages and needs throughout Saint Paul between 1933 and 1994. They were gifted storytellers, speaking in parables of their African American memories between Lake Charles, Louisiana, and Saint Paul, Minnesota. I listened, observed, and learned.
Open House at the Minnesota History Center
2013
I have been a public employee for nearly a quarter century, in several local and state agencies, doing important yet mundane work that the public never sees. In cynical moments, I have often wondered if anything I do has enduring significance. Then in the autumn of 2009 my wife and I attended a special “open house” at the Minnesota History Center.