What did it cost to bury a loved one in 1959? This Enga-Billman ad in the Minneapolis Star promised a “finer funeral” – including a cloth-covered casket and professional embalming – for just $195. That’s less than $1,400 in today’s dollars. You can barely plant a cat in a decent pet cemetery for that price these days.

To dispel any doubts about the quality of the service, Enga-Billman invited folks to look the place over, though it’s unclear if kids were welcome or whether popcorn or balloons were part of the open house. Probably no kids, and just coffee. Johnny, get out of that casket!

Some of the type here is small – sorry about that, but it’s tiny in the original as well – so I’ll reproduce the choicest paragraph here:

Our Prices Include:

Casket, embalming of body, cosmetology and hairdressing, plastic duro-surgery when necessary, hearse for funeral, flower car, wooden cemetery box, use of chapel, use of Catholic equipment, funeral services at Enga-Billman chapel of church of your choice within a radius of 25 miles, general assistance with memorial records, flower acknowledgements, insurance forms, U.S. Government forms, services of professional staff in accordance with the highest standards of conducting funerals and skilled attendants. Concrete box, cemetery charges, clergy, music and obituary notices not included.

Owner Leonard Enga took considerable heat for touting prices in ads like this one.

At the peak of their popularity in the mid-20th century, American newspapers were packed with useful information, such as radio listings, pro wrestling results, school lunch menus — and the home addresses of crime victims. This cop short appeared inside the Minneapolis Morning Tribune:

Customer Beats
Man in Dispute
Over One Penny

A Minneapolis filling station attendant took a beating from a customer Tuesday night in a dispute over a penny.

The 27-year-old customer was jailed for questioning.

Larry L. Ludford, 19, 715 N. Upton Av., said his assailant drove into the Clark station at 301 S. Washington Av. and put $1.01 worth of gasoline into his car.

Ludford said the man offered him $1, but he demanded the penny. A passenger in the car gave it to him.

“I’ll come back and put something under your nose and take all your money,” the driver threatened.

Ludford called police and reported the incident and the car’s license number. After Ludford made his report to detectives the man returned and beat him up.

Police soon arrested the assailant, who struggled with officers.

Ludford went back to work. He was interrupted by a caller who said, “Pray.”

It’s doubtful the thug who beat up the Clark gas station attendant would have messed with Bronko Nagurski, shown here shaking hands with gubernatorial candidate Elmer L. Andersen at Nagurski’s gas station in International Falls in 1960. Check out how the pro football legend’s hand dwarfs that of the future one-term governor. (Photo courtesy mnhs.org)

I’ve been trying to find out who leaked this story to the Minneapolis Star more than 30 years ago, but all the leads have dried up.

‘PEOPLE COULDN’T SEE US’

IDS glass washers urinate to street

By RANDY FURST
Minneapolis Star Staff Writer

Men who wash the windows for the IDS tower say that it’s not unusual for them to urinate over the street below.

The window washers say that they think that because the urine must fall 30 or 40 stories, it dissipates before it hits the ground.

	The IDS in 1972: Tut-tut, it looks like rain.

“We usually did it when we got to an empty floor,” said one window washer who cleaned windows for several weeks. “That way people (in the building) couldn’t see us.”

Window washers for IDS work from a cage-like car that is lowered from the top of the building.

Each crew is made up of three persons. Once or twice a day each one urinates out of the car, several men said in interviews.

The window washers are not employed by IDS but by a firm that is contracted for by IDS.

A spokesman for IDS Properties said that Sanitas Services of Minnesota does the window washing. Beginning next summer, IDS will assume the window washing job itself.

Jerry Finkelstein, president of Sanitas Services of Minnesota, said he did not know if his employees were doing it, but that it was contrary to “what the company instructed them, what the company believes in and what the company provides them.”

He said that he could not say at this time what the company provides.

“Our reputation is on the line,” said Finkelstein. He said that any men who he found had been urinating from the platform would be reprimanded and if they were not providing the Minneapolis Star with truthful information, and The Star’s story was in error, he would sue the newspaper.

“I would say it’s not impossible,” says Paul Lucas, operations manager for the IDS tower, when told about the reports.

Lucas said the men are not under his control but if he “got wind of it” he would order the situation corrected.

One window washer remembers the first time he had to urinate and was told by another man to do it over the side.

“At first I was taken aback,” the window washer said. He said that sometimes, he’d urinate on the building, and then throw some water on it to wash it away.

The window washer said it would take too much time to raise their platform back to the top of the building every time someone had to go. “The bosses would lose money,” the window washer explained.

Another window washer said that at first the crew used a bucket to urinate in, but “they took it off for some reason.”

Lucas emphasized the IDS was concerned about all aspects of safety, and had established a remarkable safety record since the time the building was constructed.

A Star-Journal headline writer’s fine work on this page one story is still effective nearly 70 years later. Who could resist reading a story about a marooned mother and baby surviving on goat meat and flour? The baby indeed survived and lives to this day. An interview with him follows his mother’s first-person account of a flood that killed tens of thousands of people in Tientsin (now Tianjin), China.

Minneapolis Girl
Describes Tragic
Tientsin Flood

Marooned Mother
and Baby Lived on
Goat Meat, Flour

Aug. 6, 1938: Miss Ada Ruth Hanson visited the Star-Journal office to report she was going to China – to become a newspaper woman, to write a novel, to find adventure.

Miss Hanson wished to send stories back to Minneapolis from China. This letter is the first received from her. It is addressed to Nat Finney, features editor of The Star-Journal.

By ADA RUTH HANSON WOSHINSKY
Formerly Miss Ada Ruth Hanson

It has been a year and a half since you and I talked about my trip to China.

I remember that it was a boilingly hot day, that you had my picture taken, and that I sat in your office telling you about the book that I was going to write when I got to China.

* * *

Well, I did get to China and married Harry Woshinsky, who is a former student at the University of Minnesota. (Mr. Woshinsky attended the university from 1935 to 1937.)

Now a year later I am still thinking about writing a book though by now I am rather vague about the whole project.

	This studio portrait of Ada and Oliver Woshinsky was taken about the time this story was published in the Star-Journal. Doesn’t he look a little … professorial?

We have a son, born August 6, who takes a considerable amount of my time to care for.

The son, Oliver, arrived exactly two weeks before the Tientsin flood. We were dismissed from the hospital Sunday morning, Aug. 20, and by noon that day water was rushing into the city.

Mother and I fled to the second floor of the house and there we stayed for the longest eight days I ever experienced.

* * *

That first night was the worst. Chinese who did not have second-story houses were clinging to roofs shouting for help. Explosions lit up the water since fires were raging in all parts of the city. Electricity was cut off.

Fortunately we found a small candle so I could feed my baby by its light.

As soon as it was light we shouted across to the people in houses near us to find out who had supplies.

We had a bag of flour so had pancakes quite regularly that week. Someone near had killed a goat rather than give it roof space, so sold us a hunk to be eaten in two days as of course we had no ice.

During the second day the sound of wailing had given place to hammering. Every family with tools was busy constructing boats. Peculiar crafts, also inner tubes and bath tubs were soon seen navigating the filthy water.

Men and boys got about and did business with their neighbors and then returned to their precarious roofs for the night.

Authorities soon obtained barges and were dragging in bodies to be identified.

Because my own baby was safe two stories up from the water, I was particularly shocked at the number of bodies of babies found drowned and floating in the scum of the streets.

Chinese mothers with bound feet, several small children to save and food to drag up from their room to the roof could only hope that the smallest tot would not roll off into the water.

The third day found organizations at work on the tremendous task of relieving the immediate suffering of families made homeless.

Missionaries opened school buildings to refugees and then made huge caldrons of gruel to feed them as they crouched in classrooms huddled together with their scanty belongings.

Many Chinese families preferred to take the chance of existing on their roofs rather than to be separated since it is doubtful if such families are ever reunited.

The men are often sent north to do manual labor in Manchuria and Mongolia. The children are sent to Japan to be raised in Japanese traditions, and I don’t know what happens to the women, though I can imagine them, like Evangeline, wandering for a lifetime searching for their loved ones.

Mother and I were not forgotten by Uncle Sam in our predicament. A motor boat brought out a representative of the American Consulate to ask us how we were getting along and to advise us to get to Peking as soon as we thought the baby and I could stand the trip.

Next day another motor boat brought American Marines to our front door.

* * *

They came up a ladder to our second floor to give us typhoid shots and cholera injections, and brought several cans of food to vary our pancake-goat meat diet.

We were glad to see them and decided to follow all the advice of getting out of the city, for mosquitoes and flies were thick, while the smell of decay that came from the bodies floating in the water was unbearable.

The trip to Peking, made via ladder from the house to a flat-bottom boat, from the boat to a rickshaw and then by train, was rather tiresome and uncomfortable.

* * *

We made it safely, however, with the baby sleeping most of the time. We shall probably bore him in later years telling him about the dangerous trip he took when only 22 days old.

Once in Peking, there was nothing to do but wait for the flood waters to recede in Tientsin. Harry went back to work. Mather went back to Taian, baby and I stayed on in Peking.

But now the Woshinsky family is reunited in Tientsin. Harry, young Oliver, and I have a tiny house rented from the English missionaries and are busy these days trying to get it settled.

Drying out furniture, repairing warped doors and straightening out floors are tasks that are keeping all the local workmen busy.

The only good from the flood is that local workmen are able to get higher wages than they have ever had before.

* * *

In spite of the overwhelming tragedy the people are valiantly trying to recover their losses. Drying in the sunshine these days are ledgers and bank books from offices on first floors.

Secondhand stores have bought up water-soaked article for resale. One man has cigarets drying outside his shop, another is painting rusty stoves and kettles.

The Chinese merchant is a plucky individual working day and night with no time out to moan his losses.

In every back yard and alley are discarded boats which perhaps will never be used again. Certainly Tientsin has never had a flood like this before, and everything will be done to ensure security from such another one.
 

DECEMBER 2008 UPDATE: Oliver Woshinsky, now 69, lives in Portland, Maine. He taught political science at the University of Southern Maine for 30 years, retiring in 2001. He’s married and has one son from a previous marriage.

He remembers his mother as a “gentle rebel” and “a bit of a noncomformist.” At age 21, while the rest of her family voted for Herbert Hoover for president, she cast her first ballot for the Socialist candidate. She trained as a journalist, Oliver says, but always had trouble finding work as a journalist.

	Oliver Woshinsky

She met Oliver’s father in Minneapolis in the mid-1930s. Along with several of her siblings, she was in town to be with her father during the year of his 60th birthday. Harry Woshinsky, who was born to a poor Jewish family in Odessa, was in town to pursue an engineering degree at the University of Minnesota.

Harry and Ada had attended the same American school in Tientsin years before, but had never met because of their age difference (she was seven years older). Ada’s family was in Tientsin because of her father’s work as a Methodist missionary. Harry’s family had sent him to Tientsin to live with a prosperous uncle. Two of Harry’s friends and classmates at that American school – Ada’s brothers – persuaded him to travel to Minnesota to go to college, and it was these brothers who introduced Ada and Harry to each other in Minneapolis.

“How she got back to China was kind of romantic and crazy,” Oliver says. She and Harry dated for two years in Minneapolis before Harry’s uncle sent him a one-way ticket back to China after finding out the young man was no longer studying engineering. During a yearlong separation, he wrote long letters to Ada, pleading for her to come to China to marry him, which she did in 1938. But not before visiting the Star-Journal offices. How did she end up pitching her story ideas there?

“She always subscribed to papers in the towns she lived in, and read them cover to cover,” Oliver says. “She realized she was going into war zone and might be able to parlay the writing into a full-time correspondent job.”

While in China, Ada wrote for the North China Star, an English language paper in Beijing. As an “ambulance chaser,” she covered fires, accidents and crime — and her work did not go unnoticed. “She was several months pregnant with me when an AP editor asked to meet her to ask her to be a stringer. When he saw she was pregnant, he just smiled and said this isn’t going to work.” Harry worked in journalism as well, mostly as a proofreader.

The new family fled Japanese-occupied China in 1941, just six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ada had an American passport; Harry had a Soviet passport. She suggested they go to Russia, but Harry convinced her that America was a better option. “Russia was not a pleasant place in 1941,” Oliver notes.

“My grandfather [Ada’s father] had to pull a lot of strings to get the family U.S. permission to settle in the United States,” Oliver says. They lived first in Texas, then Kansas and finally Vermont, where Harry had landed a job on a farm before sending for Ada and Oliver.

“My father was not good at holding down jobs,” Oliver says. He “just bounced around” after the family moved to the United States. He enlisted in the Army and ended up in Berlin as a Russian translator at the end of World War II. He and Ada had three more children, and Ada eventually found a job as a proofreader at the Hartford Courant, where she worked for 20 years until her retirement. Harry died in 1993, Ada seven years later.

Oliver earned a bachelor’s degree at Oberlin College and a Ph.D. at Yale. He has written a few academic books, including “Explaining Politics: Culture, Institutions, and Political Behavior,” published this year, and is just now starting to sort through his mother’s papers.

“She was always writing stuff,” Oliver recalls. “She was always jotting things down in a writer’s notebook. Not deep, but much of it was quite interesting, quite good.”

The Star-Journal of 1939 is not among the most tightly edited newspapers I’ve encountered during my three years of browsing microfilm for Yesterday’s News. This holiday column by “the Office Boy” is typical: The writer has a few interesting nuggets to share, but the reader had to plow through a meandering, disjointed mess to collect them all. It’s doubtful that any of his assertions were fact-checked. But give him credit for displaying a little attitude. All in all, it has the slapdash, know-it-all feel of … a blog.

MISTLETOE A VIKING MYTH

But It’ll Get You a Kiss, Gals!

By THE OFFICE BOY

That kiss you’ll get under the mistletoe, girls, you can chalk up to Scandinavian mythology.

So, when he plants that smack on your lips you can tell him how this mistletoe business started, and maybe he’ll kiss you again on account of he’ll think you’re so smart.

The custom goes way back to a dream Baldur, god of poetry and eloquence, had. He dreamed he would be killed in battle. To avert this his mother, Freja, invoked the powers of nature to an oath that they would not harm Baldur.

Only the mistletoe, a parasitic plant considered too insignificant to do harm, was left out.

	Pucker up, buttercup.

Loki, most powerful of the gods, discovered the mistletoe could harm Baldur. He gave an arrow of mistletoe to the blind god Heda, who shot it and killed Baldur.

The gods then dedicated the mistletoe to Freja, and those who pass under it receive a kiss from her to signify it is no longer an instrument of death and hatred – she has forgiven.

And when you admire that tree, you’re looking at something else that dates way back.

Martin Luther supposedly cut a small pine and placed candles on it to represent the stars in the heavens. But it is a half century after his death before any reference to a Christmas tree is noted in history.

A Viking myth relates that three angels sent by God to find a suitable Christmas symbol chose the balsam, as it was as high as hope and as wide as love, and bore the sign of the cross on every bough.

Another legend says the fir is the tree of life. After Eve picked the forbidden fruit, the leaves shrank to needles and the fruit dried to cones.

Adam brought a branch of it when he was kicked out of the garden of Eden. The offspring of that branch, it was said, was used for the cross.

Another legend tells that Joseph, Mary and the Christ child found shelter in the branches of a huge pine. An angel raised his hand and blessed the tree.

If you cut a pine cone length-wise, the hand of the angel may be seen embedded in its heart.

Want some more education? Remember all this, girls, and keep the fella spellbound.

The original Santa Claus was the bishop of Myra, in Lucia, Asia minor. He lived in the third century. He inherited huge sums of money and spent his life giving it to the poor.

The Santa Claus we visualize is the conception of Thomas Nast, illustrator who created the GOP elephant and the Democratic donkey. Santa, however, is no politician.

The little act of squeezing down the chimney Santa does exclusively for American kids. It’s a Yankee invention.

He’s a pretty busy fellow. He made a quick trip to Holland and Belgium Dec. 5. In Holland he wore a silk robe with gold embroidery and glistening gems and rode a white horse.

In the Scandinavia countries he is an elf named Tomte Gubbe or Vissen.

In Italy, Siberia and Russia he changes into a bent old woman. In Italy they call him (her) Belfana.

In Russia it’s Baboushka.

In Switzerland he appears as an angel in a sleigh with six reindeer.

In France he’s a child and is called Petit Noel.

The Africans call him Sanga, and he comes as a spirit.

Santa’s as good as Charles Laughton at this character stuff.

In the far east they call him Hotie. He covers Spain on a camel, and is called Balthasar. He goes to Hawaii by boat, and flies to Puerto Rico. In some Balkan sections, where the calendar is 13 days behind, he doesn’t show up until Jan. 7. The mountain tribes there call him Boshitch.

It’s all right if you know what it means.

Santa’s really a very busy person these days.

No wonder I didn’t get an answer to my letter.

A creepy-looking Santa Claus leaned out of his car to unload “gifts” on poor, unsuspecting children in Minneapolis in about 1938. (Photo courtesy mnhs.org)

The message on this spectacular light display at 4719 Aldrich Av. N., Minneapolis, in 1939: Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men — and Keep Off. (Photo courtesy mnhs.org)

I invite you, dear reader, to participate in an online version of this contest, using this marvelous Nell Brinkley illustration, which appeared in the Minneapolis Star on Thanksgiving Day, 1929. You have two options:

1. Click on the image below to view a larger version suitable for printing. Work it up old-school-style, with crayon, paint, glitter or what have you and mail it to:

Ben Welter
Star Tribune newsroom
425 Portland Av. S.
Minneapolis, MN 55488

2. Or click here to view a version suitable for Photoshop, ArtRage, Artweaver or other image-editing software. Modify the file electronically and e-mail it to me at bwelter@startribune.com.

The first five entries submitted in each category – old-school and digital – will receive a genuine Beanie Baby from my extensive and virtually worthless collection. In addition, the best entry in each category – as judged solely by me or my minions – will receive a special Beanie Baby, such as a Zodiac Dragon or Gobbles the Turkey. And the top three entries in each of the categories will be posted at startribune.com/yesterday.

The rules: No purchase necessary, void where prohibited, judges’ decisions are final, etc. Employees of the Star Tribune and Ty Inc. and members of the extended Welter family are not eligible for this contest. There is no age restriction. If you’re 35 years old and eager for the chance at a $2 stuffed toy, God bless you.

The deadline: Your entry must bear a postmark or timestamp no later than midnight Thursday, Dec. 4. Good luck!

Illustrator Nell Brinkley’s syndicated work graced the pages of American newspapers and magazines from 1907 until her death in 1944.

An anonymous flame war got off to a good start on the opinion pages of the New York Times.

A Plea for the Birds.

To the Editor of The New York Times.

	Absolutely no birds were harmed in the uploading of this 1905 photograph of Hazel P. Patrick and her astounding headgear. (Photo courtesy mnhs.org)

Is it possible that the women of New York are going to be the last in the country to give up wearing birds on their hats? The merchants of Boston and Chicago have taken the lead in refusing to sell them. I saw in a paper recently that Marshall Field & Co. of Chicago had announced that they would no longer use in trimming hats the feathers of birds which were designated by the society organized for the protection of songbirds against the slaughter of milliners.

What a noble step! If the New York houses would do the same, what progress would be made! Women who now wear birds from thoughtlessness would no longer have the chance to purchase them. ‘Tis painful to see such pretty girls as one meets every day, and whose faces look kind as well, with dead birds of every description on their hats. If they only stopped to think of the suffering they caused, I am sure they would be the first to give them up.

Then, too, how can Sunday-school teachers, who are supposed to teach the children to be kind to God’s creatures, sit with hats ornamented in this way and expect the children to listen to their teachings? The little ones are very observing, and learn more by example than precept. Example is a great leader, and if those who have it in their power to do good would only exercise it, I am sure there would be a great stride made toward saving the birds.

Let all try, and let us hope that next season not one bird will be used for ornamentation. — A.A.C.

New York, Nov. 15, 1897.

For an Anti-Audubon Society.

To the Editor of The New York Times.

	Ruth Berkheimer Donald wears a hat made by milliner Besse Berkheimer of St. Paul in about 1890. (Photo courtesy mnhs.org)

In The Times of the 15th is a contribution headed “A Plea for the Birds,” and signed “A.A.C.” For some years I have been inclined to start an Anti-Audubon Society, and the contribution referred to is one of several recent new incentives to carry out my intent.

Fifteen years ago I refused the importunate request of a member of the Audubon Society to join its ranks, for the same reasons that are my objection to the society to-day, viz.: that it carries its good intents and work to such an extreme that many reasonable women who are inclined to aid its cause are debarred from having the privilege. Added to the extreme charter of the society, we every now and then have an appeal (like that of “A.A.C.”) which is so full of mock sentiment and absurd extreme that the cause is injured far more than aided.

Will any sensible being say why we women should not use any one of thousands of feathers and birds as adornment, just as much as to wear furs of all animals?

What is needed only is a national law, and its enforcement, protecting in each country the song birds and rare birds from wanton and ruthless slaughter, and placing the heron on a perpetually proscribed list, (with other birds as proved needful,) because she can only yield her beauty of dress up to us at a cost of not only her own life, but that of her young, the mother bird being in perfection of the fine, delicate feathering only when nesting, and the stripping her of these feathers kills the bird and also ruins the eggs, of course.

	The modest hat featured in this 1890s photograph by Floyd’s Studio of Minneapolis is nothing compared to the yeti costume worn by the model. (Photo courtesy mnhs.org)

The mock sentiment of much of this wholesale outcry against the wearing of birds is also proved by an incident. Last Winter, in calling upon a friend, I was met with the remark, “I am, indeed, astonished. I thought you – a woman so deeply engaged in Christian and philanthropic lines – regarded the poor birds! Fie upon you!”

My reply was: “I refused to join the Audubon Society years since, because I deprecated sentimentality and a lack of common sense. Now let me tell you that the birds on my hat never saw the light of day, but are manufactured birds for milliners’ supply. But, suppose they were originally barnyard fowls, or sparrows, or equally valuable and rare birds, utilized with or without dyeing for you and for me, or even had they been robins and birds of such sort, I can feel we women merit no possible ground of censure for wearing such birds and feathers. And I for one shall continue to wear all such as an added protest to my spoken one, that the Audubon Society and its ‘echoes’ are making a mistake in their extreme views and exactions.”

The lady fully admitted the truth and justice of the reasoning, and I am persuaded that an Anti-Audubon Society, with conditions above named as its by-laws, would disclose a large numerical strength. — A.B.C.

New York, Nov. 16, 1897

Minneapolis Tribune editors picked up this piece from the San Francisco Chronicle:

MAKING WOMEN SLAVES.

Polygamy as an Investment – a Talk
With a Utah Farmer with a Plu-
rality of Wives

Utah Letter in San Francisco Chronicle.

We halted at a way-station for dinner. A white-haired but not very sanctimonious saint occupied the chair next to me. “A resident of the country?” I asked. “Oh, yes: for twenty-five years.” “Married?” “Some.” “More than one wife?” “I think so. I’ve got a few scattered about here and there.” “Believe in polygamy, I presume?” “Certainly. I’d never have made a living if I hadn’t.” “How’s that?” “Well, you see, stranger, I used to think a good deal as you do. I had 160 acres of land and one wife, but didn’t make much headway. There was too much work for one man to attend to. Finally I froze to a second wife. She took her share of the burden like a perfect brick, and affairs moved on in better shape. Then I got to thinking that if two wives were better than one, three would be better than two; consequently I took a third and my affairs improved still more. I mapped out the business of the ranch, and gave No. 1 her part, and gave a part to No. 2 and part to No. 3, and took a part myself. Everything went on like clockwork. Our little community was thoroughly organized. Finally I concluded a fourth wife would be quite an advantage, and I looked around and secured her. I found that the more wives I had the more land I could work. I now operate 240 acres of one kind and another, and have six wives to assist me, and I’ve got things so systematized down that everything goes on quite lovely, and I don’t have much to do myself. Polygamy is a great institution, my friend, and you’ll never succeed in the world until you marry a few times. Sometimes one of my wives gets a little offish like, but, instead of making a great row about it and getting a divorce, as you do in California, I simply stay away from her for a day or two, and then when I do happen around she smiles all over her face and loves me in a desperate fashion. Oh, yes; I may marry several times yet before I die; and the more women I marry the richer I expect to get.” This talk was by no means sophistry, as I afterwards ascertained. A large portion of the women of Utah are slaves.

Farming has never been an easy way to make a buck, but it must have been especially daunting to carve a living out of the raw fields of western Minnesota in the decades after the Civil War. Here is the Elwood S. Corser farm, near Crookston, in about 1882. (Photo courtesy mnhs.org)

	A family-size “fruit cake” cost $1.19 at Klein’s.

Several supermarket chains came and went in my part of Richfield in the 1960s and ’70s, among them Red Owl, Piggly Wiggly and Kroger. I don’t remember Klein’s, which had at least six stores in the Minneapolis area, including one at the Hub at 66th and Nicollet, as late as 1958. Photos in the Minnesota Historical Society’s online collection suggest that Klein’s stores were clean, well-lit, spacious and organized. Which is surprising, considering the quality of the artwork and writing in a double-truck Klein’s ad that appeared in the Minneapolis Star 50 years ago. Don Draper would be appalled.

TRADITIONAL OLD-TIME PRE-THANKSGIVING SALE

REMEMBER ….

When you were a youngster (Like this young lady [below]) … you wanted the drumstick or maybe a wing or a thigh … chances were you didn’t always get your favorite piece.

TODAY ….

Klein’s makes it possible for you to serve not only the whole chicken, but you can select the extra parts that your family likes most of all. That’s what makes dinner time pleasure time. So when you shop this weekend, pick out the separate pieces that your family likes most of all … until you serve Klein’s golden fryers you’ll never know how wonderful fried chicken can be.

What is that supposed to be in this poorly drawn girl’s poorly drawn hand, a charred coelacanth?

How much would you have paid to see Jimi Hendrix perform at the Minneapolis Auditorium in his prime? Well, the Tribune paid its music critic to be there, and he wasn’t happy about the assignment.

MUSIC REVIEW

Jimi Hendrix Show
Plays at Auditorium

By ALLAN HOLBERT
Minneapolis Tribune Staff Writer

	Jimi Hendrix on the Isle of Wight in 1970.

The Jimi Hendrix show at the Minneapolis Auditorium Friday night was billed as “an experience,” and that’s a good name for it. It was an experience, an undesirable one.

For those of you who are not yet aware of this shining new talent, Jimi Hendrix could be best described as a black Elvis Presley.

That is to say, he doesn’t sing too well, and he doesn’t play his white guitar too well, but he does have a lot of sex.

HE HAS long hair. He wears a pink, flowery shirt and pink pants and white shoes. He twists and moves around a lot as he sings and caresses his guitar.

So his talent is really not significant and neither is that of something called [Mother] Cat and the all night newsboys, the rock band that preceded Hendrix before intermission.

The things that made the Hendrix experience an experience was the behavior of the love-oriented (remember) hippie types in all their conforming nonconformist costumes who crowded and forced themselves up to the front of the stage when Hendrix came on.

THE MUSIC by Hendrix and his two white sidemen was loud but not too clear. Among his songs were “Foxy Lady” and “Are You Experienced,” which he dedicated to “all the narcotics agents and detectives and a few other bastards.”

People sitting in the balcony probably had no trouble seeing Hendrix. For those sitting up front it was quite difficult because of those rude, smelly long-haired kids who pushed their way up to the stage, completely intimidating law officers and Andy Frain ushers.

It was possible to see if you stood up, but Jimi Hendrix isn’t worth standing up for.

Here’s what the Minneapolis Auditorium looked like in 1966, two years before the Hendrix concert — and nine years before I witnessed Rod Stewart kicking soccer balls into a crowd there in the fall of 1975. (Photo courtesy mnhs.org)