Hint: Yes, it was real. Yes, those engines are still working. Yes, the challenges are a lot harder now. And yes, the end of the story has yet to be written, but it matters now more than ever. Let me explain …
Long before I met Ayele Bojia in the Bethesda parking garage, I was aware that I brought a heterodox value set to column writing. I could put my core values on a bumper sticker, but I would need your whole bumper: I am a socially liberal, deeply patriotic, pluralism-loving, community-oriented, fiscally moderate, free-trade-inclined, innovation-obsessed environmentalist-capitalist. I believe that America at its best—and we’re not always at our best—can deliver a life of decency, security, opportunity, and freedom for its own people, and can also be a bulwark of stability and a beacon of liberty and justice for people the world over. How did I come to this worldview? As I said, not by reading any particular philosophers. Rather, it emerged bit by bit from the neighborhood, the public schools, and the very soil of the community where I spent my first nineteen years.
I grew up in a time and place where being in the middle class was a “destination,” somewhere you could actually arrive and stay. In the 1950s my mom and dad got on an elevator and pressed the button labeled “MC,” got off on the middle-class floor, and stayed there their whole lives. I also grew up in a time and place where politics, though still partisan, worked, where, at the end of the day, the two major parties and community leaders collaborated and forged compromises to do big, hard things together. I grew up in a time and place where big businesses helped to pioneer corporate social responsibility by donating 5 percent of their gross revenues to the arts and education.
I grew up in a time and place where my parents bought their first house on the GI Bill, thanks to my mother’s service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, where my dad never made more than twenty thousand dollars a year before he died in 1973, but where we still could afford to belong to a local golf club and just about all my friends lived in the same size rambler house as we did, went with me all the way through the same public school system, and drove the same kinds of cars—and if anyone was richer than anyone else, it didn’t seem to make that much difference. That is, it was not yet true what Dorothy Boyd, the secretary played by Renée Zellweger in the movie Jerry Maguire, tells her son about flying first-class: “It used to be a better meal, now it’s a better life.”
I grew up in a time and place where the word “public” had deep resonance and engendered the highest respect as a source of innovation—as in public schools, public parks, public deliberations, and public-private partnerships. I grew up at a time and place when I was anchored in concentric communities and where the American Dream—“my parents did better than their parents and I will do better than mine”—seemed to be as certain as spring following winter, and summer following spring.
And I grew up in a time and place where Jews were the biggest “minority” but gradually integrated themselves and were integrated by the dominant white, non-Jewish society and culture, and while it wasn’t always easy or pretty, somehow it happened.
So where was this place over the rainbow and when was this time?
The Land of Oz that I speak of was the state of Minnesota, and, for me, its Emerald City, where I grew up, was, as I said, a small suburb/town just outside of Minneapolis called St. Louis Park. The time (I was born July 20, 1953) was the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. Growing up in that community at that time was a gift—a gift of enduring values and optimism—that has kept on giving my whole life. Three decades of reporting from the Middle East tried to leach that out of me. So, today, mine is not a naïve optimism that everything will turn out well; I’ve learned better. But it is an enduring confidence that things can turn out well, if people are ready to practice a politics of compromise and pursue an ethic of pluralism.
I know it sounds corny, but there really is something called “Minnesota nice.” In August 2014, I was back in St. Louis Park for a wedding and sitting with my childhood friend Jay Goldberg. Jay told me that his wife, Ilene, had come home that day very flustered and angry. She had been driving on one of the main highways around Minneapolis and another driver cut her off, nearly forcing her off the road.
Ilene told Jay when she got home: “Jay, I was so mad, I almost honked.”
When Jay told me that story, I said to him: “Is there a better definition of ‘Minnesota nice’ … ‘I was so mad at another driver who nearly ran me off the highway, I almost honked!’” That is Minnesotan for road rage. Ilene’s reaction was that of a fundamentally decent person shaped by a fundamentally decent place.
This story of St. Louis Park is the story of how an ethic of pluralism and a healthy community got built one relationship, one breakup, one makeup, one insult, one welcoming neighbor, one classroom at a time—from bricks and logs that were not automatically destined to fit together easily. And I tell it here because St. Louis Park is a microcosm of the “ordinary miracles” that make America what it is when it is at its best. I tell this story because we are going to need these ordinary miracles more than ever—communities whose inhabitants feel connected, respected, and protected and that can both anchor and propel their citizens in the age of accelerations.
And that’s why all these years later, as a reporter-columnist, I am still always looking for Minnesota, always looking for ways to re-create that spirit of inclusion and civic idealism that was imbued in me in the time and by the place where I grew up. In short, ever since I left in 1973 for college and then a career in journalism, I’ve just been trying to get back home.
Something in the Water
Whenever I look back on the impact growing up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, had on me, I can’t help but recall that opening scene in the musical Jersey Boys. The group’s founder, Tommy DeVito, locates their beginning. DeVito comes onstage, following a French rendition of the Four Seasons’ classic “Oh What a Night,” and declares: “That’s our song. ‘Oh What a Night.’ ‘Ces soirées-là.’ French. Number one in Paris, 2000. How’d that happen? You ask four guys, you get four different versions. But this is where all of them start—Belleville, New Jersey. A thousand years ago. Eisenhower, Rocky Marciano, and a few guys under a streetlamp singing somebody else’s latest hit.”
That riff always transports me back to my roots. It was a long journey from that little town to the op-ed page of The New York Times. How’d that happen?—Minnesota. Sixty years ago. Hubert Humphrey. Walter Mondale. The Minnesota Vikings. Target. The State Fair. And a few guys and girls growing up in a one-high-school suburb called St. Louis Park.
St. Louis Park was incorporated as a village in 1886 and assumed the status of a city in 1955. By the late 1950s and 1960s, something was in the water—both figuratively and literally. The literal part is explained on the Minnesota Department of Health website: From 1917 to 1972, the Reilly Tar & Chemical Corporation, known as Republic Creosoting Company in St. Louis Park, “distilled coal tar and made a variety of products, including creosote that was used to treat rail ties and other lumber at the site. The area was sparsely populated initially, but as the community grew following World War II, the appearance and odors of the site became a cause of increasing concern to residents as well as city and state officials.”
They sure did. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Reilly disposed of waste on-site in several ditches that flowed to an adjacent wetland. In 1972, the facility was dismantled and sold to the City of St. Louis Park … The main contaminant was polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which contaminated soil at the site, a nearby wetland and groundwater beneath the site.” In September 1986, St. Louis Park became one of the first enforcements of the 1980 federal Superfund law, after a settlement was reached requiring Reilly to clean up contaminated groundwater and pay $3.72 million to the city, state, and federal governments. During the 1980s, the peat bog was replaced with clean soil and the site was redeveloped into a city park and multifamily housing. As the EPA put it: “It is estimated that approximate
ly 47,000 people use the groundwater from aquifers near the site, which are now treated to meet all required health standards.”
I, my parents, my two sisters, and all of our neighbors grew up drinking that water.
But there seemed to be something else in that water besides PAHs.
During the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, the 10.86-square-mile township of St. Louis Park, with its roughly forty-five thousand residents, was the childhood home of the movie directors the Coen brothers—Joel and Ethan Coen; the political scientist Norm Ornstein; the senator and former comedian Al Franken; the two-time Grammy Award–winning classical guitarist Sharon Isbin; Bobby Z (aka Bobby Rivkin), the drummer for the late R&B megastar Prince; and the former Chicago Bears head football coach Marc Trestman (our high school quarterback, who formed a neighborhood band with Bobby Z when they were in junior high). It was also the home of the feminist historian Margaret Strobel and the Grammy Award–winning songwriter Dan Wilson, who cowrote, with the British singer Adele, her hit song “Someone Like You.” The New York Times bestselling authors Peggy Orenstein, the author of Girls & Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter, and the environmental journalist Alan Weisman, the author of The World Without Us (named the best nonfiction book of 2007 by Time magazine) both went to St. Louis Park High. So, too, did the Hautman family. Pete Hautman’s book Godless won the 2004 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and Joe, James, and Robert are nationally renowned wildlife artists who won ten Federal Duck Stamp Contests and inspired the duck stamp subplot in the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo. The Coens and Hautmans were childhood friends. One of Harvard’s most popular professors, the philosopher Michael Sandel, was raised just across the St. Louis Park boundary in Hopkins but attended the St. Louis Park Talmud Torah Hebrew school (in my class), and the same was true for Oprah’s favorite interior designer, Nate Berkus, also a graduate of the St. Louis Park Hebrew school.
All of us, and there were many others propelled by this small town, either grew up in St. Louis Park or went through its public schools or Hebrew school in roughly the same fifteen-year span. The Coen brothers based their 2009 movie A Serious Man on St. Louis Park, circa 1967, and our Hebrew school. When they were young, the Coen brothers often hung out at Mike Zoss Drugs on Minnetonka Boulevard, a few miles from my house. If you look closely at their classic film No Country for Old Men, you’ll see that the pharmacy just across the Mexican border that the lead character, Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, enters to steal medicine after he blows up a parked car is called “Mike Zoss Pharmacy”—one of many homages in Coen brothers movies to our hometown and its unlikely Jewish community who settled in these wintry midwestern plains and called themselves “the Frozen Chosen.”
To this day I am not sure any of us knows what was the dynamic that unlocked all this human energy, but in my mind it had something to do with pluralism—with the combustion that happened when a new generation of American Jews got unlocked from their Minneapolis ghetto in the mid-1950s and were thrown together with a bunch of progressive Scandinavians in one little suburb. If Israel and Finland had had a baby, it would have been St. Louis Park.
After he left government, Vice President Walter Mondale once invited the Coen brothers, Franken, and Ornstein to submit letters for a dinner event Mondale and I were doing together back in Minneapolis—letters that would try to explain what they thought was going on in St. Louis Park back in the 1950s and 1960s. He later published them in the Minnesota Star Tribune on December 5, 1999. Here are some excerpts of what they wrote:
Dear Mr. Vice President,
It is my honor to write a letter that you can read aloud in your introduction of my friend Tom Friedman. I understand that it will save you from having to write something yourself and give you more time to take on your enormous workload at [your law firm] Dorsey … When people hear that the five of us all grew up in the same suburb, they are astonished. “What’s in the water?” they sometimes joke. But it’s not a joke. During our childhood, St. Louis Park was home to a large creosote plant, which leached tons of the toxic chemical into our groundwater. Studies have shown that ingesting large quantities of creosote can lead to two things: increased intellectual creativity and/or prostate problems. This is why Tom insists that we all get regular prostate exams, and why neither Norm nor Tom nor I drink a large Diet Coke before watching one of the Coen brothers’ movies.
Have a great lunch (dinner?),
Al Franken
To: Walter F. Mondale
From: Norm Ornstein
Re: St. Louis Park
I didn’t know Al Franken, Tom Friedman or the Coen brothers growing up (although my sister did go out on a date with Tom). They were a couple of years younger than me … We are tied not just by our similar backgrounds and experiences, but by our love for politics and government. We all feel the link that St. Louis Park, and more generally Minnesota, creates for us. And frankly, I attribute a major share of it to you and your contemporaries. We are all children of the Humphrey/Mondale/Fraser/Freeman era—an era when Minnesota politicians were all substantially above average, when they aspired to do something for the disadvantaged and for world stability … Not that you aren’t good-looking, but you and your contemporaries were not chosen because you were blow-dried TV anchormen, but because of your ideas and your passion. Because of the Humphrey/Mondale/Fraser/Freeman connection, we felt that Minnesota was special, and so we must be special too. That, and the creosote.
Norm Ornstein
Dear Tom,
It is an oddity often remarked upon that at the turn of the century, one small, obscure provincial area of Hungary, then under the benign tutelage of Emperor Franz Josef, spawned several towering figures in the fields of physics and mathematics—among them Edward Teller, George de Hevesy, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard and John von Neumann. This group, many of them Nobel Prize winners, all of them products of the Jewish middle class, were referred to in their diaspora as the “Men from Mars” because of their obscure provenance and their thick Finno-Ugaric accents. What explosive tinder in this remote corner of the Carpathians had nourished such a forest fire of genius? No one knows. Many years later, the Jewish middle class of remote and obscure St. Louis Park, Minn., produced a group of people who also emigrated and overcame funny accents to achieve their own measure of success. Their goyishe tutelary spirits were not Emperor Franz Josef but Don Fraser, Hubert Humphrey and, yes, Walter Mondale. What created this oddly local flowering of intellectual activity? Why, indeed, is St. Louis Park commonly called the City of Flowers? Because there’s a “Rosenbloom” on every corner? Coincidence? We doubt it … Maybe St. Louis Park, like the cosmos itself, defies easy explanation—even though, unlike the cosmos, it is next door to Hopkins. Maybe [the local commentators] George Rice or Al Austin could have explained it—or, if not them, Roundhouse Rodney. But they are gone. Maybe you, Tom, who have explained so much, could turn your attention to it.
We wish you all the best.
Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
In and between the lines of those letters, there is not only an affection for this place we all called home but also an appreciation for the fact that the community that emerged from this mix of cultures didn’t happen by accident—we were blessed with extraordinary local and state leaders, school principals, and parents, who time and again made decisions about the kind of inclusive place they wanted to build and who fought for those values against, at times, entrenched opposition. Pluralism doesn’t just happen because diverse people are thrown together. Like other communities in America in this period, these local leaders had their blind spots—Jews could be welcomed or at least tolerated, but African Americans were a bridge too far for many back then; and some came along slower than others, but in time they built a community that became unusually welcoming for its era to misfits, different ideas, and different people with funny accents.
The Frozen Chosen
Let’s start at what for me is the beginning: How did all these Jews get out to the
Minnesota prairie and then gather in this unlikely town called St. Louis Park, where the biggest industry was a creosote plant? Minnesota was not the most natural or obvious place for Jews to settle. Indeed, in the press kit for the Coen brothers’ movie A Serious Man, Ethan Coen observed to the website MinnPost.com on September 25, 2009, that “to us the [flat midwestern] landscape with Jews on it is funny, you know? Maybe this is part of why we put in that little story [set in a shtetl] at the beginning of the movie, to kind of frame it. You look at a shtetl, and you go, ‘Right—Jews in a shtetl.’ And then you look at the prairie in Minnesota and you kind of think—or we kind of think, with some perspective on it, having moved out—‘What are we doing there?’ It just seems odd.” Joel Coen added: “Mel Brooks once had a song called ‘Jews in Space.’ I guess that’s sort of the idea.”
That space where they settled was not originally St. Louis Park, but the inner city of North Minneapolis, where many Jewish immigrants—our grandparents—took root between 1880 and the early 1900s. That, in fact, is where I was born, as were my parents, Margaret and Harold Friedman. Minneapolis North High School, which both my parents attended, was a heavy mix of blacks and Jews. One of my predecessors at both UPI and The New York Times, Harrison Salisbury, was also part of that Jewish community and graduated from North High a few years before my parents, in 1925.
My grandfather on my mother’s side was a junk dealer and on my father’s side a photographer, although both saw their businesses crushed during the Great Depression. My dad was vice president of a ball bearing distribution company, United Bearing, started by a friend, and my mom was a housewife and part-time bookkeeper. When I was born we lived in a duplex on James Avenue North in Minneapolis with my mom’s sister’s family, who owned a cigar store with a three-stool dinette—Burt’s Smoke Shop—where my uncle and his partner made breakfast and lunch out front and augmented their income by running a little betting operation out back.
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