This Duluth apple tree has brought many hours of joy to its owners. (September 2022 photo by Maija Jenson)
There is redemption for bad apples; at least for the apples on your backyard tree. You might have a bad apple tree of your own or just wonder “Are those apples on Skyline good to eat?” A little tree love and your Halloween party guests will be bobbing for apples they can actually eat.
The 1971 educational film Part Way to the Majors, a documentary produced by ABC News for the Sunday afternoon series Discovery, follows the Duluth-Superior Dukes as they road trip to Sioux Falls, S.D. The film starts and ends at Wade Stadium in Duluth.
800 entries, 250 illustrations, 50 footnotes
Co-written with Allen Richardson. Illustrations by the Richardson brothers using craiyon.com, stablediffusionweb.com, and DALL-E 2
Contents
1. Preface: I Destroyed the Universe
2. Introduction: Superhero Exegesis
3. Index of the Duluth Superhero Community
4. Footnotes
Preface: I Destroyed the Universe
From the Journal of the Morphogenetic Field Technician: I am trapped far beneath the UMD campus in the Novelty Sphere as the global catastrophe intensifies. My team’s experiments in this underground lab are directly responsible for the apocalypse overtaking the planet. The quakes grow steadily. Portions of the lab visible through the Sphere’s cyclopean porthole have caved in. Soon the roof will collapse releasing tons of basaltic bedrock. If the Sphere’s integrity holds, I will have limited air. One thing I have an unlimited supply of: claustrophobia. It is as if I am in an untethered bathysphere sinking into the mounting pressures of the deep. The Sphere’s instrumentation confirms my worst suspicions: this is no mere global extinction. We destabilized probability itself, and the vertical line on the catastrophe graph indicates structural failure of the universal constants. Like a landslide, the cosmos races toward physical destruction. Gravity will be the first to fail, centered on the Sphere. The well of the Earth is popping like an old spring.
JS Print Group moved into the Lincoln Park neighborhood about five years ago. The business then outgrew the location at 1927 W. Superior St. and moved this summer to a larger facility in the Central Hillside.
(Photos by Mark Nicklawske)
A fast-growing print shop has moved out of Lincoln Park for a bigger building and plans are in the works for two new businesses — including an Indonesian restaurant — to take over the prime Superior Street location.
Co-written with Allen Richardson
Dr. Mallard McPurdy disappeared in 2005 while surveying regional probability for the University of Minnesota Duluth’s short-lived Anomalies Department. A team led by Dr. Leon Oswald recovered McPurdy’s yellow pressure suit on Skyline Boulevard, but McPurdy remains at large. His suit contained video files from which the following transcriptions were made; we obtained these with a Freedom of Information Act request.
Duluth 1. Air analysis complete: Bacteria Spore, Origin Unknown. I hope these cheap-ass containment suits actually contain.
The dim, overcast light coming through my smeared faceplate told me little about season or time of day. “Dr. Oswald!” I screamed, weeping as the dread and isolation overwhelmed me. I put on a brave face, clenching my fists, unimpressed by the amount of courage I could muster.
I push through the door — it’s late, but the massive cowboy hat on the roof glows red — and step into something more like a nightclub than an Arby’s. Steady, throbbing beats pulse across the rafters of the dim dining room, threading through stacks of waxed cups, snapping plastic straws with reverb.
This roast beef hashery is my kind of joint.
Eyes float to the menu board; simultaneously, my chin begins to bob. Anticipating the imminent rush of potato cake puissance, my body ticks with the vocals.
Suckin’ on my titties like you wanted me,
Callin’ me, all the time like Blondie
“OH MY GOD!” the blondie behind the counter shrieks as she looks up from tying a trash bag. My presence has startled her.
Her first reaction is to hunch low, bending torso toward linoleum, hiding her body behind the cash register. Her second reaction is to screech, barely audible over the racy lyrics shaking the dining room, “JOE. TURN IT DOWN. TURN IT OFF. TURN IT DOWN. OH MY GOD. TURN IT OFF NOW!”
Back in January of 1997, my friend Keith and I took a drive across Wiscosota and Minnesconsin with my cousin Matt, a California beach boy searching for a real northland winter. Our road trip launched on the eve of the Green Bay Packers Super Bowl XXXIII appearance. A handmade Packer flag crafted from a pillow case was taped to the bumper of Keith’s sedan as we drove 300 miles across frozen farm fields and snow-covered forest to Title Town. The idea was to celebrate an inevitable Packer victory in the shadows of Lambeau Field.
I’ll save our tales of mischief and revelry for another time. This essay is about gas stations – very cold gas stations.
Gas is needed to get from St. Paul to Green Bay in a V-8 Chevrolet. Somewhere in the middle of Wiscosota we stopped at a convenience store and pulled up to a service island. A snowmobile was parked at an adjacent pump and its driver was filling a tank under the seat. Matt’s jaw dropped like he had just spotted Bigfoot munching on a cheeseburger.
“Whaaaaatttt????” he said, as he grabbed a cheap point-and-shoot camera and jumped out of the car.
It started about five years ago with an ordinary stomach ache after eating late and poorly — a speedy meal en route from a client visit in Wisconsin with several coworkers. I felt like maybe I’d eaten something that disagreed with me, and thought really no more of it. Except, I kept getting sicker.
That night, I thought certainly I’d vomit, or at the very least I’d spend a not-inconsiderable portion of my evening in the bathroom. No such thing occurred, but the discomfort in my body continued. My gut felt raw and painful, as though I’d consumed many cups of coffee on an empty stomach, and my stomach filled with what I thought was gas, except it was in a really weird spot. Rather than the typical lower abdominal fluff of my lengthy experience with daily human digestion, this bloating was in my midsection, between my belly button and sternum. I felt like someone had filled me to painful expansion with air. It felt like something inside of me might tear or burst.
Over the next three weeks, it got slightly worse, and slightly better, depending on conditions I couldn’t plainly discern. I made an appointment with my general practitioner, an allopath I trust and respect. As I prepared to head to the appointment, I said to my husband, “This is crazy! I can’t believe I’ve been this sick for three weeks!” What a mouthful of macabre prescience: I would remain that sick or worse for the next two years.
Twenty years ago today — Feb. 6, 2001 — City Pages published a cover story on Duluth’s “tiny counterculture.” The Twin Cities alternative weekly paper ceased operations last fall and its online archive is on hiatus, but Perfect Duluth Day is here with the flashback goods.
Growing up in Alaska, the wild space around me was something invisible. I had no awareness that the world was something other than myself. My friends and I perambulated the wilderness with the careless disregard of youth, clambering to the peaks of 100-foot-high pine trees and swinging from the soft tops on dares.
There was a tree fort out in the woods that was 25 feet in the air — not even halfway up the tree. The way up was almost entirely crumbling chunks of boards nailed erratically into the trunk to form rungs. At the top, one had to stretch out and grab the floor of the fort and sort of clamber up over the lip of the platform. Conveniently, the platform was disintegrating, so the edge was rougher and shallower than it once had been, making it less a switchback climbing maneuver to swing to the platform than a lean of faith. I wonder if the kids who live in those houses now even know it’s there — some aeriform retreat hovering above the houses like a mossy cloud.
Located in the AICHO building at 202 W. 2nd St. in downtown Duluth, Indiginous First opened in 2017, and has been promoting and investing in Indigenous artists and entrepreneurs through their physical space, and now through their online store. This week, Jazmin Wong, coordinator for Indiginous First, discusses the mission guiding the shop, challenges and adaptations due to COVID-19, and a new CSA partnership to bring farm fresh foods to Duluth and Superior.
JW: We sell quality gifts and goods with a mission of advancing, promoting, and investing in Indigenous and diverse artists, authors, agriculturalist and entrepreneurs! Indigenous First is a continuously expanding social enterprise run by the American Indian Community Housing Organization (AICHO) in Duluth, MN. Our doors opened in July 2017!
Eight years ago the concept of neighborhood book exchanges made its way to Duluth. The original Little Free Library was built in Hudson, Wis., in 2009. Duluth had its first in 2012, and by 2013 there were about 20 in the city. Today there are roughly 40.
It’s a global movement. The nonprofit Little Free Library organization estimates there are now more than 100,000 registered book exchanges in more than 100 countries worldwide.
If you’re unfamiliar with these little libraries, their appearance consists of a bird-house looking box, around 20 inches by 15 inches by 18 inches, typically with a Plexiglas door. Inside is an array of books assembled for the purpose of sharing. Anyone is welcome to take a book or leave a book.
There are 38 book exchanges in Duluth cataloged on littlefreelibrary.org, and several more are in surrounding communities. If you’re interested in where to find them, visit the Little Free Library website and search “Duluth,” “Superior” or the area of your choice. The locations will pop up and you can find the one closest to you.
In 2019 I celebrated the first day of summer with my grandchildren on a day trip to Two Harbors. This summer COVID-19 could put a damper on our adventures, but we can still day trip down memory lane.
I was raised by immigrants from a big Turkish-Armenian family. It’s an old family, sprawling across Istanbul, across Turkey, across the globe. If I mention reading a study from New Zealand or Brazil or Lithuania or Poland or wherever, the response is inevitably, “Oh, we have cousins there!”
It takes a village to raise a child, and while most of our village was overseas I still felt their presence. I was singularly blessed to have a veritable metropolis of strong role models supporting me. Despite having been born and raised in America, my roots grew too deep in foreign soil to be pulled free.
Now I have a daughter of my own. A wide-eyed, strawberry-haired little gummy bear. She already loves dolma and a lengthy duduk solo. She is being raised not just by her Mama and Papa, but by a rambling expanse of extended family. In raising her, I have a new appreciation for the love and devotion of my grandmother, my aunt, and my mother.
Top 20 list of my Lake Superior Aquaman videos, with commentary, from a billion years of posting at Perfect Duluth Day:
#1.) Official video for the Low song “Gentle.” 2015. My one paying video gig and crowning achievement. Low saw Lake Superior Aquaman footage I posted here and requested I fit it to this song. The imagery is of the collapsed column of Uncle Harvey’s Mausoleum/The Icehouse in Duluth’s outer harbor off the Lakewalk.
