Build a New Stadium

My father-in-law sent me this message during the night – from his spot out there among the stars: “Build a new downtown stadium for the Vikings, damn it!”
by Charlie Leck

I don’t often agree with a local sports columnist by the name of Patrick Reusse. He normally looks at local sports situations with eyes too jaundiced by his tired attitude – the result of years and years on the job. Reusse forgets that competitive commercial sports, and the spectators who enjoy them, are built on attitudes of hope and the dreams that hope inspire. He’s constantly ragging on the negative rather than looking at the heroic and hopeful. I’ve put him in the bad-ass category and, to avoid gas, I rarely read him.

This morning, however, the headline on his column caught my attention and I decided to work my way through a few paragraphs. I ended up reading the entire thing in fascination.

“POLITICOS PLAY DUMB AND BLIND TO A STADIUM’S DAZZLING UPSIDE!”

Our region has been caught in the National Football League’s sharp-toothed, steel trap. We must provide more than half the cost of building a new stadium for one of the league’s owners, or else! So, the debate has raged on here.

Frankly, I didn’t expect the kind of thesis that Reusse developed in his column this morning to ever come from him. He began…

“This is now a metropolitan area of 2.85 million. Nothing is more important to this sprawling place than a downtown with a strong heartbeat. And what provides the heartbeat are people coming to the city on a daily basis to work, and suburbanites, outstaters and regional and national visitors enjoying that downtown.”

That’s exactly true. My late father-in-law was always very involved in the Minneapolis Downtown Council, an organization of downtown businessman who promoted virtually the same message that Reusee opens up with in his column this morning. As a member of that Council, my wife’s father was extremely involved in bringing the Washington Senators to Minnesota in 1960 and then downtown in the early 80s. Oh, how thrilled he would have been to see the incredibly beautiful and successful new ballpark that the state and county helped the Minnesota Twins open just a couple of years ago. Target Field! What a contribution that ballpark is to the entertainment industry in downtown Minneapolis and to the overall vitality of this community and region.

As expensive as it will be for the state, the construction of a whopping, beautiful and dynamic new stadium in downtown Minneapolis for the Minnesota Vikings (NFL football team) will be an extraordinary boost to our entire metropolitan region.

My readers from around the nation have probably seen the same kind of economic boosts that an NFL stadium can bring to communities in their area – Atlanta, Dallas, Tampa, Charlotte, Seattle, Denver, NY/NJ…

Let me tell you, Reusse’s column this morning isn’t only right-on – it’s completely right on – and has a sound and feeling of sympathy and empathy that one rarely sees in Reusse’s columns. You only have to read the first five paragraphs of this piece to hear a compassionate heart beating loudly and clearly in the surly old newspaperman.

It’s not easy to agree that our state, county and metropolitan region should pony up so much money to help billionaire owners build stadiums for their teams (their private corporations). The problem is how much it will hurt our economy if we don’t.

“We could so easily be another decayed downtown, if not for the corporations, and the law firms and the accounting firms, and the retailers that remain committed to being in the city, when everything could be cheaper and more convenient by joining the sprawl in Maple Grove or Eden Prairie or Eagan.”

Oh, Grandpappy Lyman, the man is singing your song! You must be hooting and hollering up there and doing triple salchows in the sky.

“Last month, Sandra Colvin Roy, another of the dedicating lefties on the Minneapolis City Council, announced opposition to the plan for a new Vikings stadium in downtown Minneapolis without a city-wide referendum (that she knows would fail).

“Roy was moved to do this, she said, after ‘looking across the street at Occupy Minnesota and thinking about what’s going on in our country…’

“…One wonders whether she ever made the short walk to the Nicollet Mall, between ninth and tenth streets, and watched employees by the hundreds enter and exit the Target Corp. headquarters.

“I’m saying Minneapolis might be better off with politicians more impressed by the presence of an exceptional corporate citizen bringing a parade of employees downtown on a daily basis than a couple of hundred protesters sleeping over-night during an uncommonly warm fall and early winter.”

Reuse is right on – and I’m saying that from my usual perch way out here on the left. A new stadium means construction jobs by the hundreds and hundreds. It also means more vibrancy for downtown and thousands of jobs that will be stimulated by the new stadium.

“Some way, we have wound up with politicians who would put the cleaver to a great asset for the state’s largest city, and then offer the silliest of explanation, like 1) several score of people sleeping outside on government property, and 2) a few guys from Plymouth who would rather not pay an extra 3 percent for a Dewars and water at the Seville.

“What stands in the way of a stronger heartbeat for downtown Minneapolis are the collections of the nearsighted that we have elected.”

And that, my dear, late father-in-law,is how the Reusse column ends. If you were still around, you’d be on the phone to him to congratulate him on some handy writing and sound thinking.

_________________________

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Northwest Orient Airlines

The possible merger of Northwest Airlines
with Delta Airlines causes us to pause for a
moment to remember Lyman E. Wakefield, Jr.
by Charlie Leck

He was one of the finest gentlemen I ever knew. I loved him deeply, though I was never able to say that to him because he just didn’t operate at that level. It is natural that I am thinking of him a great deal today – the day on which the likely merger of Northwest Airlines (NWA) and Delta Airlines was announced jointly by the two boards of those airlines. I wish Lyman were hanging around, so I could ask him what he thinks of the news about the big merger. From a personal point of view, Lyman would have some sad and sentimental feelings about the announcement; however, he really didn’t function at that level very much and, so, he would have positive feelings about it from a business perspective, which is where he really operated most of the time.

Lyman E. Wakefield, Junior, was my father-in-law. What a guy! For the record, he thought and lived business 95 percent of his waking hours. I tried to squeeze my way in on him during that other 5 percent of the time. When you could get him thinking outside the business box, he was an extraordinary guy.

NWA was one of his babies and he loved talking about those years of its infancy.

Well, that was the beginning of a blog I began fashioning last week. It was going to lead to a little history of NWA. The more I worked, the more boring it all sounded – “NWA began in a modest sort of way toward the end of 1926. There were two planes that carried mail back and forth between the Twin Cities and Chicago. The planes were open cockpit and rented. Twenty years later they were called Northwest Orient Airlines and they were flying to Tokyo, Seoul and Manilla.”

I struggled. How could one write something that might seem beautiful and meaningful about an airline that was important in our family-life. Lyman was invited to serve on the Board of Directors of NWA in the early fifties. It needed some big-time money to “stretch its wings” (if you’ll forgive a terrible pun). As a Vice President of First Bank Corp (a company his father help found and served as President for 20 years), Lyman had connection to solid credit for NWA. He began a very close friendship with Don Nyrop, the CEO at NWA. They worked over-time to bring NWA into the grand world of fabulous flying.

As a teenager in the fifties, living on the east coast, I can remember listening to pop music on the radio and hearing the NWA commercials and that magnificent jingle – Northwest Orient… Airlines! Never dreamed I’d end up being the son-in-law of one of the guys who put the airline on the map. And he was proud of it. Lyman served on the board for nearly 35 years. We got some benefits out of that because our coach tickets, while Lyman was on the board, were always converted to first class. We’d fly with the kids to Europe and we’d be up there with the big-timers and Mark would be screaming and running around and driving the businessmen crazy!

Well, as you can see, this blog is stalling-out big time at a high altitude and the crash could be awful. I won’t go on.

I was upstaged anyway, by Garrison Keillor’s extraordinary column in this Sunday’s newspaper. He writes about the merger and the end of a grand airline name and history that was special in our part of the world. Go there and read his lovely rambling.

“The company used to be called Northwest Orient and was founded in Minneapolis in 1926 to carry mail to Chicago. I used to live in a house in St. Paul once owned by Croil Hunter, a president of Northwest Orient, who, when Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt was stranded at the airport by a blizzard, put her up in the guest room of his house.”[Garrison Keillor]

Here’s some final tid-bits about NWA that I find interesting.

Northwest Airlines has operated continuously under one name longer than any other U.S. airline.

Camille "Rosie" Stein was a director and assistant secretary at NWA in the thirties and, as such, she was the first female executive in U.S. commercial aviation history.

In the early fifties, NWA pioneered the "Great Circle Route" across the Pacific Ocean to Asia when other airlines said it couldn't be done.

Northwest Airlines was the first airline to prohibit smoking on its flights.

The story of D.B. Cooper is about one of the great legends in U.S. aviation history. Remember him? On November 24, 1971, he demanded and received 200 grand and then parachuted out of the tail exit of a 727 into a very cold, dark night near Mount Saint Helen’s – either into a much richer life or to his death. No one knows. It’s the only unsolved sky-jacking case in the U.S..

Thank Goodness

Is Thanksgiving a great holiday, or what?
by Charlie Leck

Almost everyone we know across this nation considers Thanksgiving Day his or her favorite holiday. We're with them. We think Thanksgiving is the only holiday to which we actually look forward. If we were to ask all these folks the reason for this, their answers would be pretty much the same as ours. Thanksgiving Day is laid back and it's all about family and very close friends. There is no pressure to come up with gifts. Just relax and enjoy the day. Granted, there is lots of work involved. It's not easy to lay out a feast for a dozen or more people.

We're going through the pre-Thanksgiving period right now and it is pressure packed. Our list is long. Get the yard looking as good as possible. Clean the entire house top to bottom. Take the shopping list to the grocery store (boy, is this a job). Line up the perfect wine and an acceptable beer. Figure out the seating arrangements. Around here, it's the woman of the household who goes nuts getting everything ready. She truly loves Thanksgiving and she gets very excited about seeing family and friends, but she puts enormous pressure on herself to make everything just perfect. It was pretty intense this past weekend. We think the vacuum cleaner motor must have been worn out. It was running constantly. The whip the mighty woman carried was cracking pretty loudly. It kept us jumping – at least as well as an over-weight, old-timer can jump.

On Thursday it will all be worth it. Grandkids will show up with shiny, beautiful faces. Daughters and deeply loved and appreciated sons-in-law will be on hand. A few friends will be here, too.

And, as we gather at the table, anxious to dig in to the incredible feast prepared by many people, we will bring everything to a halt. We won't ask for time to pray; however, we will suggest we all spend a brief moment thinking about something very specific.

Dear, departed Grandpa Wakefield always had thanksgiving dinner at his lovely farm house. There would be 20 to 30 gathered. Grandpa would always bring everyone to a stop at one point during the day and ask that each person say something special in accordance with his instruction. One year it was: "Express what you are most thankful for about this past year." Another year it was: "What are your goals for the coming year?"

All the diners were always embarrassed and it was difficult to get the expressions from the gathered crowd; but one by one each of us would respond to Grandpa's request and it was always touching and wonderful. It was also the moment each of us always remembered about our Thanksgiving Day.

Since Grandpa died, we've tried to pick up this tradition, but we don't have his "balls" about it. Grandpa never got embarrassed. He was totally sincere and he expected people to respond sincerely. Grandpa Wakefield made Thanksgiving wonderful for us and we will always remember this wonderful thing about him.

In Grandpa's spirit this year, we'll ask everyone to think about him and all our memories of him and to say something about what they remember most about him. This is the first time we've given gatherers an advanced warning.

We hope you have a wonderful and happy Thanksgiving Day!