Thanks for the note on the vacuum cleaner. Wish I’d had that, we went through about 5 vacuum cleaners/carpet scrubbers in 8 months. And many, many belts. That’s a lot of carpet to clean.

Also I remember your article in the RIpsaw really touching off the consciousness raising that led to the CJM memorial. And that is great all by itself, but I enjoy reading about the very personal background on it.

In the end, everything is deeply personal to someone, isn’t it?

I thought I lost it. Need. It.

I still have your file on the Old Man, hbh.

“This is a voodoo hotdog representing Rick Boo, mismanager of the Norse Whore Theatre. He’s a mindfucked hip-o-crite not letting Duluth’s coolest cartoonist drink in his fucking “hipster” bar, and is thus fucking doomed to the fate of this motherfuckin’ weenie.”

The vacuum cannot suck up shit like paper clips, pennies, guitar strings, beer bottles, shoes, dead bodies, your broken dreams, or other huge shit. So if you are vacuuming the entire bar, or just the Mez, please do a pre-sweep for stuff that will damage the vacuum.

The NorShor’s tower came down in March, 1967.
(Article and photo in Duluth Herald, March 8, 1967.)

I’m heading to the library tomorrow and will make a copy of the story and report back any fun details about the tower coming down.

I myself spent some time up there, and when we cleared out that stairwell in preparation for the fire inspector, we found a huge cache of Harlin Quist’s stuff, which I rescued from the dumpster. He deserves a book unto himself, that guy.

Ringsred had little to nothing to do with the publishing of the second edition of Fedo’s book. The first edition was published in the 70s by a company up in Canada. It was titled “They Were Just Niggers” because that was what one of the lynchers said after the murders. It did not get wide distribution because the company went under. Then Quist, who was in the publishing biz in NYC, came back to Duluth and wanted to bring a little bit of NY to the NorShor. And, in a huge departure from his usual fare (whimsical children’s books with surrealist art--that’s a whole other story, and his books are *very* rare and worth a lot of money) he decided to publish Fedo’s book as his last foray into publishing. But Quist always was broke, and both the theatre effort and the book publishing thing went bust almost before it happened. Very few people got copies of that edition (Trial By Mob). None were sold publicly I don’t think.

Back in the late 90s, I was hanging out at Marv’s place, and Jason Owen was bartending. I had just run across a vigil put together by Kwiesi Jahi (a guy who gave the local police force and NAACP conniption fits in his efforts to confront police profiling of young black men in Duluth) where he memorialized the lynching victims. I’d never heard of this incident before.

So, I was talking about it to Owen, and he mentioned that there were copies of a book on it back in the back of the theatre. He gave me one, and I read it. I was also a member of a book group at the time, and I got enough copies from Owen for us to read it. The discussion on this book turned into a mini anti-racism exorcism that made a lot of people cry and feel awful, mostly because I invited Kwiesi Jahi and he was like having Malcolm X in the room--he didn’t let you get away with anything.

It is because of my having been given this book, the subsequent many discussions following, and my own obsessions, that the Ripsaw published my article on the lynchings in 2000, the 80th anniversary. Not coincidentally to the anniversary, the MNHS published the first widely distributed copy of Fedo’s book.

All of these little incidents led to a group of people getting together to create the memorial.

As for the Orpheum, one of the chief witnesses to the lynching was 19 yr old Francis McHugh, who was a stagehand at the theatre. If you go to the Duluth Lynchings Online Resource, created by the MN Historical Society, you can read his first-hand account of what happened. (It’s hair-raising and awful, just to warn you.)

I hope the NorShor will be rehabilitated someday soon!