Jim Klobuchar - Remembering Dad's Only Flight
Editor’s note—In 1986 Jim Klobuchar was a finalist in NASA’s projected Journalist in Space flight. Shortly before the candidates were to enter a training regimen in Houston, where NASA would make its choice, the program was canceled in the wake of the fatal accident of the shuttle Challenger. One of his qualifications for the flight was his prior experience as a licensed pilot. In a few days he plans a reunion with the light plane he flew then—and an unforgettable hour with his dad.
My friend Mike owns a single engine plane called the Cessna 172, not all that much changed today from the same plane in which I trained and flew for nearly ten years in the 1970s. A forgiving plane, it was called by the manufacturers and pilots I knew, meaning it was and I’m sure still is relatively uncomplicated and can absorb most of the predictable mistakes the amateur pilot is likely to make in his or her early seasons.
Mike is well beyond his early seasons with the plane, and he’ll be the pilot. Chivalrously he may offer me a few moments at the controls and I’d be amazed if I don’t accept. Yet that wasn’t the main inducement for me.
It wasn’t until later that I told him about my father’s first and only experience in flight more than 40 years ago, his burst ofexuberance seeing his hunting and fishing grounds from the air. He didn’t blush to show his wonderment; sounding like a kid, experiencing something very close to a fairy tale.
For most of his adult life he had been an iron ore miner, part of the first generation of men and women whose parents had emigrated from what they called “the old country.” In their case it was the Balkans in the late years of the 1800s. Many of the families settled on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota. In the ledgers of the time they were carried as Cheap Labor. The immigrant families might have been aware of that unflattering description. It wouldn’t have mattered if they were. America was huge and full of energy and ambition, offering a new beginning for families whose sons in the old country were being conscripted to fight the wars of the foreign monarchies that ruled them. But this was America and they would become citizens. America had public schools their kids could attend and learn to read and write English and some day they would graduate from college.
My dad was part of that first generation. He didn’t have the opportunity of college but he wanted to go to sea. He brought home geography books when he was a kid. His grades were good but when he reached 15 in the early 1920s his parents had both died and he was the eldest son with eight younger siblings. Social workers said they could place the children in foster homes and orphanages. He had a better idea. The mines needed workers. America had adopted the beginnings of child labor laws in those years, but the mining company superintendent listened to the teen-age kid who was trying to keep the family together. He offered him a job in the underground mine, where the iron ore lay in caverns 1500 feet beneath the surface. Within three or four years he became a foreman, married when his siblings had finished high school and had two sons, my brother and me.
The regret of my life is that we were never close. He provided, he was devoted to our mother, insisted that we study and examined the report cards. He established rules of behavior in the house, and in our personal lives as we grew older, but this was 60 years ago and more, and the habits of family in “the old country” clung. Small talk, laughter and tears, were pretty much consigned to the moms. When Dick and I became adults the distance closed and I now understand the sacrifices he had made and the direction he and mother had given us. But it was still hard to confide, and to understand the true measure of his gifts to us.
So one day in the 1970s I flew up to my home town of Ely in northern Minnesota in a rented Cessna 172 and hangered the plane for the few days of our visit. On the second day my father took our two girls fishing, a skill that somehow had escaped me despite the presence of 75 or 80 lakes within a few miles of the town. They got back in mid afternoon and I said to the undisputed head angler of the house: “Dad, have you ever flown?”
He said he hadn’t. “Have you ever wanted to?” Uncertain silence. He had the usual paternal wariness about some of the wilder schemes of their offspring. But he had also seen me land the plane, understood I was licensed and said, rather valiantly I thought, “well, sure.”
So we took off into the west from of the sand runway of the rinkydink little airstrip that then served as the community airport.We had climbed only a few hundred feet when the great expanse of Shagawa Lake on the town’s edge erupted in view, and my passenger gasped. He had lived there his entire life, fished the lake hundreds of times, but had never seen it in full dimension, miles in length and radiant blue, motor boats flitting on the water with wakes hundreds of feet wide.
I handed him an aerial map and told him he was the officially designated navigator of the flight. We went through a 30-second orientation. Not unlike a train conductor, he began calling out the names of the lakes and rivers where he had fished, swiveling in his seat, suddenly a kid again, excitement building up into to a runaway exuberance, soaking up the great green spread of spruce and Norways below, and the blue threads of the streams and the sprawling lakes. After a half hour he had a proposal, “Would it be okay to fly a few miles into Canada?” I couldn’t honestly tell him it was but I doubted that the Royal Canadian Air Force was going to scramble a squadron of attack jets at us for violating its airspace with a Cessna. So we flew a few miles into Ontario and came back to Minnesota using the Echo Trail of my childhood as our check point to the air strip in Ely.
The town’s airport today is lit, paved and modern. In those years the airstrip resembled a weedy gravel road. It also had power lines nearby and the town cemetery flanking the north-south runway. As we made our approach into the south wind, my father offered an estimate of the situation, trying not to sound worried. “That runway,” he said, “it doesn’t look very long from here.” His shoulders looked a little hunched. I slipped into my flight jargon. “Affirmative your last transmission,” I said. “It doesn’t look very long from here, either.”
But we landed uneventfully and taxied back to the hanger. Before we got into the car he put his arm around me and thanked me, his cheeks dampened.. “I never thought I’d fly,” he said. “That was something. Seeing Snowbank Lake from the air..” I hugged him.
I don’t know what took me so long.
About Jim Klobuchar:
In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota's senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Ecumen CFO Dennis Johnson appointed to Minnesota Veterans Health Care Advisory Council
Dennis Johnson, Ecumen's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, was recently appointed to the Minnesota Veterans Health Care Advisory Council. Mr. Johnson leads Ecumen’s accounting operations, financial budgeting, planning and reporting, and investment management. Before joining Ecumen, he was vice president and controller of International Multifoods, a multi-national Fortune 500 company.
The Veterans Health Care Advisory Council was created in 2007 to provide the Department of Veterans Affairs with advice and recommendations from professionals experienced in providing quality long term care, who are familiar with current and anticipated future needs of veterans. It is comprised of nine members appointed by the Governor. Read the Governor's Executive Order creating the Council.
Mr. Johnson's term will run through January 4, 2016.
Baby Boomers Driving Social Media
Baby Boomer have been a topic of conversation since – well, since they were born. By sheer numbers alone, they’ve been trend-setters and change agents, and now they’ve taken to technology and social media like teenagers. Over half of Baby Boomers use a computer as the primary way to communicate. They’re smartphone users and using technology to job hunt, shop and date. Check out “Plugged In: Boomers on Online in 2012” – a fast-paced and fun video from AARP.
Jim Klobuchar - Sweaty Fingers in Minneapolis, and an Election
Our table talk at a restaurant luncheon got around to the trials and joys of the workplace we most remembered: its satisfactions, pratfalls pressures, rewards, all of that. It came my turn to testify, and I offered a long-ago morning on a November day Minneapolis.
We’d been yakking about politics, and the story seemed to fit. The day I remembered was all about American politics in one of its most excruciating hours of suspense.
The race was for the American presidency, John F. Kennedy vs. Richard Nixon. My employer was the Associated Press, the world-wide news gathering organization. My role in the Minneapolis bureau was to write the stories based on election returns as they progressed in Minnesota and neighboring states, involving not only the presidential election but other statewide contests. The year was 1960, than 50 years ago. Exit polls were still years into the future. So were the speed of light computerized returns of today. The county auditors actually phoned in their results. Eric Sevareid’s scowling analysis of the trends on black and white television was handicapped by the trudging tempo of the results from the nation’s voting booths.
There were status stories to write: trends and results in congressional races. But in the presidential race, from ocean to ocean, nothing definitive. The Kennedy-Nixon race was volatile. By midnight the electoral college projections were not decisive. In Minnesota, the vote was large but still inconclusive. At 1 a.m. George Moses, the AP bureau chief, suggested I drive home for a couple of hours sleep and to return at, “well, how about 3 a.m?” George said helpfully.
By 6 a.m. , John Kennedy had climbed to within six electoral votes of clinching the election. Only three states remained uncommitted—Illinois, California and Minnesota. The world was clamoring for the identity of the new American president.
In those years, it was considered a kind of original sin in wire service coverage to project returns on the basis of past voting trends. Everybody remembered the early edition Chicago Tribune headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Associated Press staffers remembered its own premature dispatch ending World War One. In our second floor newsroom in downtown Minneapolis, all that separated us from our wire service competitor was an office wall. George Moses now organized a huddle. Adolph Johnson, our veteran political expert and I joined him. The large bulk of the uncounted Minnesota votes were in northeastern Minnesota, Duluth and the Iron Range, historically strong Democratic turf.
With Kennedy leading but much of the northern Minnesota vote still out, Moses didn’t think Nixon could overcome Kennedy’s ultimate count. He asked for our opinion and we agreed. Moses then called the AP’s general desk chief, Sam Blackmun, in New York. “We’re going to elect Kennedy,” he said. A kind of dark silenced followed on both ends. And then “I’ve got two words for you guys in Minneapolis.” Silence again. Then, “ be right.”
It was now breakneck stuff. Moses handed me some copy paper. There wasn’t time for the usual carbons. Moses began pulling the copy out of my typewriter—computers were still years away—one paragraph at a time and running it to the teletype. Touch the bases, I told myself: The significance of the election, Kennedy’s campaign themes, the closeness of the race, the first Roman Catholic elected to the White House, Kennedy’s probable agendas.
Moses kept running the copy to the teletype operator, Bob Mexner, with each new paragraph; and now without a carbon I had to yell to Mexner, “how did that last paragraph end?” With fingers flying, Mexner tried to be helpful and yelled over his shoulder “With a period!”.
The story stood up, the global suspense was over, John Kennedy did in fact become the president, and color returned to the cheeks of the bureau chief.
I walked down to the end of the block to a small Swedish Café and had a sandwich and a cup of coffee for lunch. When I got back to the office the first call I took after we had elected an American president was from one of our wire service contributors in southern Minnesota. The story told of a mini-crisis in a little farm town near Mankato. Three pigs had fallen into a deep mud hole and it took all of the town’s resources to get them out.
Life goes on. We put it on the wire.
About Jim Klobuchar:
In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota's senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.
New Twist on Senior Pictures -- Ecumen Bethany Community in Alexandria does Glamour Shots
Today at the Ecumen Bethany Community Home in Alexandria, a group of senior citizens were spending the day dressing up to get their photos taken... Read the full article and see the KSAX-TV coverage of Ecumen Bethany Community's Glamour Shots.
Ecumen's Volunteer of the Year!
Ecumen Oaks & Pines senior living community volunteer, Ben Jenum, was honored as Ecumen’s Volunteer of the Year at the annual Ecumen Leadership Conference on May 17. Ben accepted his award, presented by Kathryn Roberts, Ecumen President & CEO, and offered a heartfelt thank you and remarks about his volunteering to a crowd of 400 Ecumen leaders, gathered at the Earle Brown Heritage Center in Brooklyn Center, Minn.
“Ben has shared his compassion, conversation and humor with our residents for over three years. He’s made a real difference, especially in the lives of our memory care residents,” says Jane Messner, Recreation Coordinator at Ecumen Oaks & Pines. “Our residents look forward to seeing him on a daily basis to read, play games, take a walk, or just visit.”
Most remarkable about Ben’s daily commitment as a volunteer is his age. Ben is 15 years old and finishing his freshman year in high school. He’s active in sports, enjoys camping, fishing and hunting, and is involved with his youth group at St. Anastasia Catholic Church. “He’s been called an ‘old soul’ more than once in his young life,” according to Ben’s mother, Melanie Jenum.
“I have thoroughly enjoyed myself calling bingo, one-on-one visiting, doing exercises, enjoying a snack and just being around the residents. There are some people I will never forget,” said Ben in his acceptance remarks. He added, “I enjoy every walk, talk, snack, hug and smile from each of them. And their smile is the reward that I seek every day.” Ben received a standing ovation from the 400 Ecumen leaders in attendance.
Thank you, Ben, and congratulations!
Pointing the Path for Innovators at Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation
How do you innovate? I was at the Mayo Center for Innovation the other day and this sign in the entryway struck me as a good path.
Innovation in Senior Living Essential and Not for the Faint of Heart
New white paper looks at innovation in senior living across country, including Ecumen.
Ecumen Apple Valley Customer and Her Dog Show Anything is Pawssible
The friendship and partnership between human beings and dogs can be pretty cool. Channel 9 in Minneapolis shares this story that includes Ecumen Seasons at Apple Valley customer Susan Youngberg and her dog Bali (nickname: Wiggle Butt) and how they work together . . .
Jim Klobuchar - Broadway Meets Tim Tebow, and Gulps
With the NFL draft just passed, Ecumen blogger and former Minnesota Vikings beat writer Jim Klobuchar discusses Tim Tebow, whom many football fans will have their eye on in the upcoming season.
The first time I saw Tim Tebow on a football field, I took off my glasses, wiped them carefully, and said “Oh, my.”
He had just scored a touchdown for the University of Florida and was kneeling in prayer on the sideline. A quotation from the Bible, somewhere near his eyelashes, greeted the arrival of the television camera.
Public declarations of faith are not uncommon in the athletic battlegrounds. Some of them are intended to announce the grateful warrior as a pilgrim and a humble servant, for all of his touchdowns and his appearances on ESPN.
For other athletes and public figures, most of these scenes create scant controversy. We all express some of our emotions or commitments publicly. We pray quite publicly in church or at a political rally. We make sure we bow to the flag or salute when it passes. We don’t mind creating a mild spectacle by standing up and yelling BRAV-OH or, in the cornbelt version, ALL RIGHT when the piano soloist comes galloping down the keyboard of a Rachmaninoff concerto, finishes on time with the cellos and leaps up to hug the conductor.
So such public displays become part of the fabric of the event. But Tebow’s act, especially after he joined the professionals, helped galvanize millions of detractors—especially those who didn’t think he had the tools to play quarterback in the National Football League. Among those skeptics was the brain trust of the Denver Broncos, for whom Tebow played quarterback for all of one full season, and in that time brought them from behind a half dozen times and actually lifted them into the National Football League playoffs. So where he goes, he wins.
The other curious part of all of this is that even for his most exasperated critics, it almost impossible to get mad at the guy. He was always forthcoming answering questions. Almost all of his teammates liked and respected him, not only for his decency and courteous manner in the lockeroom and on the field, but for his growing skills as a professional football player. Eventually most of his off-the-field life got a fair airing. He did spend hours and thousands of dollars helping underprivileged kids. He played with them and hugged them. If this was acting his faith, it was also expressing a humanity he felt. So that was not your every day public relations. Players don’t usually like posturers. This one was not that, and he was a regular guy in the lockerroom, taking part in the jokes unless they they drifted into the crude.
His rap as a quarterback, was his style of launching the forward pass. To wind up and let go of the ball, they said, it took him forever. Which it does. But where he goes, he wins.
His new employers, the New York Jets, at least publicly are planning to use his gifts as a runner and occasional passer from the so-called wildcat formation that gives the player an option to do either. Tebow is a powerful and gutsy runner. He also has a brain livelier than most.
But it has been the almost overnight conversion of once crusty critics to this man’s reality as an earnest and thoughtful human being that has been upside of the Tim Tebow saga of the last few weeks.
He recently went before the most volatile jury in American athletics, 200 New York sports writers and broadcasters, who have rarely been charged with being romanticists. The baiting material was available to them. Is this guy actually for real? Apart from the Gospel, can he play quarterback in the NFL? And whether or not Tebow is used as a hammering runner (he weighs 240 pounds) in the wildcat, he wants eventually to play quarterback. And the current Jets quarterback, Mark Sanchez, is already in trouble with the fans, the writers and probably the coaches.
So Tebow and Sanchez have already talked by phone, respectfully. Tebow said it's in earnest and with mutual respect. Why argue. Even in New York, how are you going to create a feud out of that? And then there is Rex Ryan, the Jets head coach, whose workaday language and routine supply of four letter words could melt glaciers on Mt. Rainer.
None of which seemed to curb Tim Tebow’s excitement about playing pro football in front of the least forgiving fans on earth. “We’ll be friends,” you know he is telling himself today; as though Tim Tebow knows something about life that some of the rest of us may have missed.
He may be right.
About Jim Klobuchar:
In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota's senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.