Public Spaces
The quality of the public schools in St. Louis Park and the pride we took in them were part of a larger respect for and celebration of public spaces and institutions. These public spaces were both a product of and an engine of trust, pluralism, and social capital generally. Each was a Mixmaster that brought people from diverse economic, religious, and racial backgrounds together. Virtually every person I knew went to public school. Growing up, in fact, I thought private school was only for kids with some kind of social or emotional problem—a place your parents sent you as a kind of punishment. The mere idea that someone would pay extra money, over and above their tax bills, to send their kids to private school because it was superior was simply not in our consciousness.
Even if we did not realize it at the time, a lot of us have since realized how good this public school was.
When I arrived at St. Louis Park High in September 1968, I took journalism as a sophomore from our then legendary high school journalism teacher, Hattie M. Steinberg. People often speak about the teachers who changed their lives. Hattie changed mine. I took her introductory journalism course in tenth grade, in room 313, and have never needed, or taken, another course in journalism since. It was not that I was that good. It was that she was that good. As I wrote in a column about her after she died, Hattie was a woman who believed that the secret of success in life was getting the fundamentals right. And she pounded the fundamentals of journalism into her students—not simply how to write a lede or accurately transcribe a quote, but, more important, how to comport yourself in a professional way and to always do quality work. I once interviewed an advertising executive for our high school paper who used a four-letter word. We debated whether to run it. Hattie ruled yes. That ad man almost lost his job when it appeared. She wanted to teach us about consequences.
Hattie was the toughest teacher I ever had. After you took her journalism course in tenth grade, you tried out for The Echo, which she supervised. Competition was fierce. In eleventh grade, I didn’t quite come up to her writing standards, so she made me business manager, selling ads to the local pizza parlors. That year, though, she let me write one story. It was about an Israeli general who had been a hero in the Six-Day War, who was giving a lecture at the University of Minnesota. I covered his lecture and interviewed him briefly. His name was Ariel Sharon. First story I ever got published while on the staff. Little did I know how much our lives would intersect fifteen years later in Beirut.
Those of us on the paper, and the yearbook that she also supervised, lived in Hattie’s classroom. We hung out there before and after school. Now, you have to understand, Hattie was a single woman, nearing sixty at the time, and this was the 1960s. She was the polar opposite of “cool,” but we hung around her classroom like it was a malt shop and she was Wolfman Jack. None of us could have articulated it then, but we enjoyed being harangued by her, disciplined by her, and taught by her. She was a woman of clarity in an age of uncertainty. Her high school newspapers and yearbooks won top national honors every year. Among the fundamentals Hattie introduced me to was The New York Times. Every morning it was delivered to room 313 (a day late). I had never seen it before then.
Besides Hattie, I had other remarkable teachers who remain cherished friends to this day—particularly Miriam Kagol, my English teacher, and Marjorie Bingham, who taught me AP American history and indulged my fascination with Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories and my early obsessions with Israel, the Six-Day War, and the Middle East. I was intrigued to hear them both reminisce about the high quality of the public schools. “I had money to buy whatever books I wanted,” Bingham remarked. “There were NSF [National Science Foundation] grants, there were national conferences you could go to. You never felt isolated in your classroom. [You felt as though] you were on a bigger stage and could talk to people from Illinois or California. [Today] a teacher will spend four or five hundred dollars of their own money on supplies. That just didn’t occur” back then. St. Louis Park “teachers were encouraged by the administration to be creative.”
This was an era in which Title IV-C Education Department grants enabled public school teachers to apply through their districts to create new curricula that other districts could purchase for low or no fees. It made high school teaching, for those who aspired to it, a very creative job—it wasn’t just a matter of rinsing and repeating what was handed down from the central school’s office. For instance, my World Studies teacher, Lee Smith, and his colleague Wes Bodin created a World Religions curriculum, stimulated by the multireligious nature of the student body in St. Louis Park and the desire by the St. Louis Park School Board to set some guidelines in 1971–1972 on what could and what could not be done religiously in the local schools. Their curriculum was adopted by schools all over the country. Bingham recalled that in 1977 she and Susan Gross, a teacher from Robbinsdale, one suburb over, won a Title IV-C grant to create an area studies program called Women in the World, to introduce high schoolers to women’s history. They ended up distributing the curriculum they wrote nationally—more than a hundred thousand books.
I first met Miriam Kagol when I was a senior in high school. She taught my survey course on British literature and was the adviser to our literary arts journal, which she also founded. She taught me to enjoy Byron and Shelley and Keats and Yeats and great fiction in general—no easy task. She remembers that I often inquired of these great romantic poets, “Why don’t they just say what they mean?” Kagol came from southern Minnesota, where her family had a hobby farm. She was twenty-two at the time and it was her first teaching job. “When I was hired at Park in 1967,” Kagol recalled, “I signed a contract for fifty-six hundred dollars, and I told my dad and he looked at me in shock and said, ‘You better earn every penny of it.’”
Kagol and I have been friends ever since. Reflecting on the role of the community as a value setter, Kagol mused:
I remember I had one kid who plagiarized a poem for The Mandela [the high school literary arts magazine] and we published it, not knowing it was plagiarized, and found out after, and when we took him to the principal he told that student: “You have disrespected what this teacher stood for.” I knew the principal would back me up no matter what the situation, and I had no worry that a parent would call up and ask for my head if I chastised their child. There was a community respect for the system and for the teacher—even if the parent thought the teacher was wrong.
There were no gated neighborhoods in St. Louis Park back then, or today. Before my friends and I could drive, we all used the same public bus system. When we were as young as ten or twelve years old—well before anyone had their driver’s license—our great weekend treat was “going downtown.” We’d catch the bus from St. Louis Park to Hennepin Avenue in the heart of Minneapolis, which cost ten or fifteen cents at the time. We would go shopping at Dayton’s, which never involved purchasing anything. We’d just window shop, buy some caramel corn, and eat lunch at the Nankin, the most famous Chinese restaurant in Minneapolis. Then we’d take in a movie and catch the bus back home to St. Louis Park. We were just kids, but our parents never seemed to worry about our freely roaming the city. Apart from the schools, the great public Mixmaster in Minneapolis was its string of lakes. The lakes were surrounded by some of the wealthiest homes in the city, but each lake was ringed by walking trails, bike paths, and public beaches open to all. I grew up walking with my mother around those lakes, and you inevitably saw everyone you knew there.
But the powerful spirit of community that generally characterized Minnesota was also a by-product of the harsh climate—subzero temperatures with frozen roads and slippery sidewalks, broken water mains, and snow that had to be removed—that characterized every winter. They all “made cooperation a necessity—not just a nicety,” remarked Fred Astren, who now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. “You may not like your neighbor, but you will always help him get his car going in the morning. He will help you up after you have fallen on the ice. And yo
ur boss will let you go home to deal with a winter emergency. As a result, people always know their neighbors, unlike the Bay Area, where there are few circumstances to bring neighbors together. The uncooperative neighbor in Minnesota is rare, because everyone knows that there will come a cold day when help is needed: Winter is always coming…”
Our next-door neighbor, Bob Bonde, moved to suburbia from his family’s farm, and every winter he banked up the snow on the periphery of his backyard to form an ice rink that he filled with his garden hose. That is where I learned how to skate and play hockey. And then in the summer he plowed the same space into a garden plot, with perfect rows of corn, carrots, lettuce, and tomatoes. My sister Jane would lie on the ground and literally watch the carrots grow and constantly pester Bob about when it would be time for her to pull one out to eat. Our house was also at the top of the street, and our backyards and those on the parallel street all faced each other, without any fences between them. This arrangement created a long, natural football field of green space. As soon as most of the snow melted in April, I would take out my golf clubs and stand at the top of our backyard, which was slightly elevated, and hit five-irons 175 yards all the way down the block through the six backyards of our neighbors, sometimes reaching the open field at the end. I never once knocked out anyone’s windows, and none of the neighbors ever complained. I have been very straight with a five-iron ever since!
That undeveloped open field at the end of our block was our wild frontier, where we played hide-and-seek among the tall shrubs, weeds, and trees. We did not know it, but it separated us from a giant factory owned by the Lithium Corporation of America. In researching this book, I learned from a story in Twin Cities Business on November 1, 2006, that “from 1942 to 1960, two firms, Metalloy and Lithium Corporation of America, produced lithium carbonate for the U.S. military, primarily for use in batteries and lifesaving equipment, from a property located at the end of Edgewood Avenue just off Cedar Lake Road in St. Louis Park. [That was only a few blocks from our house.] But while the company was carrying out its patriotic duty, it was also leaking lithium, fuel oil, and miscellaneous metals into the soil and groundwater beneath its plant.” John C. Meyer III, in his memoir Don’t Tell Douglas, claims that Metalloy used that factory in World War II to produce “an ingredient necessary for the Atomic bomb that was used on Hiroshima.” My God! Between that plant and the creosote factory a few miles away, it is amazing that my sisters and I don’t glow in the dark today. Two blocks in the other direction was a big public park filled with baseball diamonds in summer and hockey rinks in winter. There was a warming hut with wooden floors where we changed from boots to skates and came in for shelter from the cold when temperatures plunged far below zero. I can still smell that gas heater. You could pick up a hockey game any afternoon or evening, and the city provided lights to play by night. Marc Trestman was the quarterback of the St. Louis Park High football team, and three years younger than me. He went on to play for the University of Minnesota and then had a distinguished career as an offensive coordinator or quarterback guru for two college teams and ten NFL teams, capping his career as head coach of the Chicago Bears from 2013 to 2014. Being middle-class in Minnesota back then meant that almost everything you could imagine was accessible. After midnight on weekends, Trestman and his fellow jocks would occasionaly rent out the rink at the Metropolitan Sports Center, where the local NHL professional hockey team, the Minnesota North Stars, played. “There were no social messaging services at the time, no cell phones, nobody had credit cards,” he recalled. “There were no ATMs. It was a hundred fifty dollars an hour after midnight. So, I think back now, ‘How did we get twenty guys out to the [professional] ice arena at four in the morning on a Saturday, scrape together the cash, with no coaches, and just walk in and there was the Zamboni [ice-smoothing machine] and we just split up and played hockey for an hour?’”
A middle-class life then included a lot more spontaneity; money had not completely taken over public spaces, as it has today. “I remember one day my mom just said out of the blue, ‘Let’s go to the baseball game,’” Trestman told me. “The Twins were playing the Red Sox. So we just showed up and got tickets in the first row of the second deck. And Reggie Smith hit a foul ball and my mom reached up and caught it with one hand.”
In 1970, the U.S. Open golf tournament was played at Hazeltine National Golf Club, in Chaska, Minnesota, forty minutes from downtown Minneapolis. I was in eleventh grade in high school and caddied regularly during the summer at our club, Brookview. Most of the clubs around Minneapolis were invited to nominate four caddies to caddy in the U.S. Open, and I was one of those selected by my club. In those days—and this is the real point—professional golfers were not allowed by the U.S. Golf Association (USGA) to bring a professional caddy to an “open,” because amateurs were also invited and it was seen as giving the pros an advantage. A couple of weeks before the tournament, all of us local caddies gathered at Hazeltine and walked all eighteen holes of the course with its then head pro, Don Waryan, filling in a yardage notebook they gave each of us, detailing the distances to the greens from different trees and traps. Then we retreated to the clubhouse dining room. There, in the middle of the room, was a big silver bowl that had the names of every player in the tournament folded up on little pieces of paper inside. They called your name, you walked up to the bowl, stuck your hand in, and pulled out the pro for whom you would caddy. Talk about egalitarian! Some kid picked Jack Nicklaus, someone else picked Arnold Palmer, someone else picked the eventual winner, Tony Jacklin, and I picked … Chi Chi Rodríguez, the great Puerto Rican golfer and showman. He was tied for second place after the first day, made the cut, came in twenty-sixth, paid me $175, and gave me all the balls and gloves in his bag. I had the time of my life—and it could never happen to a seventeen-year-old kid today.
Because a few years later the USGA rescinded the ban on professional caddies at the Open, no high school junior would ever again get the chance to pull Jack Nicklaus’s or Arnold Palmer’s name out of a silver bowl and walk inside the ropes with him. Outside the men’s locker room at Hazeltine today there is a picture of us crew-cut high school boys plucking our professional’s name from that bowl—a lovely but distant memory of an age when, to paraphrase my childhood friend Michael Sandel, the Harvard philosopher, there were still things that “money couldn’t buy.”
Middle-Class Minnesota
But what made those public spaces possible was the confluence of two things: a generally rising American and Minnesotan economy that elevated a rising middle class, and a unique generation of progressive politicians. And the two reinforced each other. There is nothing like a growing pie to sustain both public works and a politics that works, a politics of inclusion. I now fully appreciate that those of us who grew up in the middle class from the end of World War II to the early 1970s grew up during an extraordinary moment of American history. Or, as the Stanford University historian of America David Kennedy put it to me: “It was the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history—the country was giddy with pride and opportunity.” It was a time of “great compression of incomes and great shared prosperity—high growth and high equality.”
The February 2015 annual report of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) looked at productivity growth in America post–World War II and labeled the years from 1948 to 1973 “The Age of Shared Growth,” because of the way that
all three factors—productivity growth, distribution, and participation—aligned to benefit the middle class from 1948 to 1973 … Income inequality fell, with the share of income going to the top 1 percent falling by nearly one-third, while the share of income going to the bottom 90 percent rose slightly. Household income growth was also fueled by the increased participation of women in the workforce … The combination of these three factors increased the average income for the bottom 90 percent of households by 2.8 percent a year over this period …
This period illustrates the combined
power of productivity, income equality, and participation to benefit the middle class.
I came of age exactly during that era. No wonder growing up then left me and so many others with an optimism bias and with an expectation that this kind of broadly shared prosperity should and would continue. It was a virtuous cycle of ascension. You felt the wind at your back—not in your face. Indeed, Representative Rick Nolan, a congressman from Minneapolis, likes to say that for my middle-class generation growing up then in Minnesota, “you had to have a plan to fail.”
Senator Al Franken went to both public elementary school and junior high in St. Louis Park, but his parents shifted him to Blake, the main private school in Minneapolis, for high school. Franken was a rare exception in going to a private high school. In a February 28, 2015, speech to the Colorado Democratic Party, Franken elaborated on this moment:
I remember back in 1957, when the Soviets launched Sputnik. They had nuclear weapons, and suddenly, they were ahead of us in space. Americans were terrified. I was six. My brother, Owen, was eleven. And my parents sat us down in our living room in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, and said, “You boys are going to study math and science so we can beat the Soviets.” Now, I thought that was a lot of pressure to put on a six-year-old. But we were obedient sons. And so Owen and I studied math and science. And we liked it! And we were good at it. My brother became the first in our family to go to college. He graduated with a degree in physics from MIT. And then he became a photographer. I also got into a really good college. And graduated. And then I became a comedian. My poor parents! But—we beat the Soviets. You’re welcome!
Thank You for Being Late Page 46
