#367 – Dick Bernard: "I Am", the documentary

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May 4, largely on the recommendation of our friend, Annelee, we went to the documentary, “I Am”, at the Lagoon Theatre in Minneapolis.
Wherever you are, I would highly recommend you see this extraordinary and thought provoking film.
Then seriously consider the implications of what you just saw.
The official website is here.
Doubtless, there are other on-line commentaries.
For me, it was one of the most powerful commentaries on the titanic clash of contemporary western culture versus the natural order of things that I have ever seen.
The film boils down, in my opinion, to a conversation about “competition” versus “cooperation”. Of course, our contemporary world is ruled by competitors, who won’t like this message (and who control the media message we daily consume). But the outcome for their descendants is inevitable…competition is a fatal disease.
In the long run, competition doesn’t have a chance and thus we who play by competitions rules don’t either.
But, see the film for yourself, come to your own conclusions, and hopefully let others know about it.
Because it is an ‘art film’ release, it is guaranteed a low audience, initially.
My recommendation: everyone should see it.
SUPPLEMENT: 100 Years
Not from the film, but (in my opinion) directly related.
For a time last fall I watched a most interesting TV ad. The actors were a Mom and her little girl. The little girl was trying to blow out a hundred candles on a birthday cake. The message was that it was really, really hard to blow out a hundred candles, and that we had at least 100 years left of Natural Gas in this country, so not to worry.
The ad didn’t play very long…I’m guessing there were people who saw it as I did.
Recently, the exact same text has surfaced, from the same company, on the same topic. The only difference is that there is a single actor, a nice/Dad-like/young middle-age Engineer Type man conveying the exact same message: we have at least 100 years of Natural Gas left, and isn’t that reassuring?
In the recorded history of humankind, 100 years is but a tiny fraction of a second in time; far, far, far less if one considers the time it took to create this natural resource now all but depleted.
But the message is everything: not to worry.
When the gas is gone there’ll be something else…or so we hope.

#365 – Dick Bernard: A Troubling National Teacher Day, May 3, 2011

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Since May 3, 1985, National Teacher Day in the United States has been observed on the first Tuesday in May. About 1944 an Arkansas teacher first had the idea of a National Teacher Day, and in 1953 the first such day was observed.
May 3, 1985, I was Minnesota Education Association field staff (some would say “teacher union rep”, which I was), on Minnesota’s Iron Range. Home base was Hibbing; my area was from Ely to Deer River and beyond. I don’t recall the specifics of that Teacher Day, except that it was a time of pride to be a public school teacher. I would work for teachers for the next 14 National Teachers Days. They were always good days….
While international events may have scuttled my (and other) submissions on the value of teachers this date, here’s what I sent to the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Sunday:
“Today [May 3) is National Teacher Day in the United States; and this week is Teacher Appreciation Week.
Take the time today or this week to thank a teacher, or two, or more.
First on my own list are my parents who were public school teachers for a total of 71 years between 1929 and 1971. I was a student in their public school classrooms from 8th grade through high school graduation. Thank you, Mom and Dad.
But my parents were only two among many teachers, remembered and not, who made a huge difference in my life, in small and large ways over many years.
To college Prof. George Kennedy, who finally had it with me when I was being lazy and not doing my best in my college Geography major, thank you for getting angry at me. I remember….
To Mr. H, who was, yes, somewhat odd, but was always there and did his best with we “scholars” in high school: thank you. He taught me a great deal about accepting differences, just by being different, himself.
The list could go on and on.
These are harsh days for our teachers.
Today, more than ever, thank them.”
As noted above, this May 3 is not a very kind and gentle time for America’s teachers (which includes school administrators), and particularly for their and other public unions. One hardly needs a PhD to see the success of a campaign to demonize a great profession and the unions which represent public workers. The architects of the movement to enshrine as symbols of “teaching” the always-anonymous persons called “bad” or “ineffective”, and their unions, have been successful, probably beyond their wildest dreams. This campaign to denigrate began years ago.
There are big long term dangers to labeling groups based on actions of the few, but in the short term negative labeling does work….
The amateur “experts” are legion: from the guy I’d never seen before, who recently and loudly declared that teaching was too lowly an occupation to need a license (he noticed the headline of an editorial I was reading); to a freshman legislator wringing her hands in a public meeting about the problem of “bad” teachers – a topic about which she quite obviously knew nothing, beyond the script she was holding while reading.
Then there’s a good and respected friend who spends much of his time in the company of ‘movers and shakers’ of this major city and has apparently come to think, sincerely, that things like unions, seniority, salary schedules, contracts and due process protections are destroying good education by protecting “bad” teachers who should be replaced by fresh young faces unblemished by union things.
I’ve about heard it all.
(The amateur experts take their cue, of course, from the ‘movers and shakers’ who by and large control information. As stated so well by Connecticut Superintendent Gary Chesley in an Education Week commentary accessible below, there is “a national search for a scapegoat…teachers and the tenure laws present a fertile target for bombast and demagoguery.”)
There are, of course, big gaps in the information provided, like the specific names and circumstances of these supposedly “bad” and “ineffective” people who supposedly represent teaching. Revealing the names is apparently a risk (and responsibility) no one wishes to take. But that’s not relevant. If you can make an anonymous and supposedly defective teacher the symbol of an entire profession, why not? Indeed, creating a caricature – a cartoon – is even better than a fact.
There are other conjured issues: a friend who trusts me asked about teacher pensions, pretty obviously resenting the fact that teachers even receive pensions. Luckily I had an informed answer (which I don’t think he liked): Pensions Public001
But, this is National Teacher Day: If one can get past the negative, there is a huge amount of good out there, not hard to find. I saw it Thursday night at my Kindergarten granddaughters spring music concert for family and friends (click on photo to enlarge).

Kindergarten program at Lincoln Center elementary So. St. Paul MN April 28, 2011


I saw it Sunday morning at Church when a wonderful A Cappella high school choir (directed by a teacher) from a northern Minnesota city performed for us after services.
There was an excellent column in Sunday’s New York Times.
There is infinite room for true dialogue IF people are at all interested. There are ideas out there just begging for conversation. But dialogue and ideas require openness to other points of view; the possibility of other conclusions.
But the overall official mantra I feel this National Teacher Day 2011 is distinctly vicious and negative.
It’s time for teachers and administrators to buck up and go to work where they live, delivering an alternative (and more honest) message about teachers and teaching and public schools.

Mom, then Esther Busch and in first grade, front left, in 1915 at Henrietta School, rural Berlin ND. She and her sister Lucina, front row right, both became career public school teachers. Their teacher is Miss Gates.


Dad, Henry Bernard, with his first class at Allandale School near Grand Forks ND, 1929.


Teacher Mary Garvey with her 30 students in rural St. Paul MN ca 1939

#363 – Dick Bernard: The Tyranny of "Circles"

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Back in the 1990s I participated in a workshop in which one of the activities was to identify the “circles” of which I was a part.
It was surprising to learn how many circles, and thus associations, I really had. These circles would include groups like “family”, “church”, “work”, “political party” and on and on and on.
As part of the exercise we identified individuals we knew in each of these circles. Potentially there were a lot of people.
I drew a rough graphic of the circle exercise:

In more recent times I’ve had occasion to revisit this business of “circles”, and it is distressing what I seem to see.
Even in the relatively short time period since the 1990s I have noted an occurrence which is, ultimately, very dangerous to our very survival as a society.
As our world has become more complex, and our country more politically polarized, I am finding that people of all persuasions are retreating into ever smaller and more limited and thus mal- or mis-informed “circles”. I’d call the phenomenon the “I can’t deal with it” response, “it” being some other point of view. People retreat into their belief or absolute interpretations of what they consider ‘truth’, often with little or no evidence to support their position.
They figuratively fight to the death to make sure that their point of view ‘wins’, whether it makes sense or not.
A society such as I describe has relatively little chance of enduring short or long term.
Examples abound.
As I write I think back to the terrifying times of Y2K in the later months of 1999.
There was almost hysteria, then, about the probability that computer clocks would end at midnight on December 31, 1999, and our world would descend into chaos. Even then, computers were omnipresent, though nowhere near what we experience in today’s world.
Of course chaos didn’t ensue when midnight first struck late at night somewhere in the Pacific January 1, 2000. By then lots of people made lots of money fixing those computer clocks; I doubt that anybody really knows whether there would have been chaos without the fix, but that is how hysteria works….
I remember particularly two vignettes from that time period – vignettes that I think are instructive in the present day.
A short distance to the east of where I write, in a Wisconsin border town, a story was published about a survivalist couple who lived in a regular house in the town and were preparing for dooms day: generators, bottled water, you name it. They were ready for the literal millenium they were certain was coming.
I thought to myself, then, what if their worst case scenario actually happened? How safe would their stash be, regardless of how ‘armed and dangerous’ they made themselves. They were simply a tiny little island in a mass of humanity. A hugely vulnerable ‘circle’ unto themselves. They would have been overrun by the local rabble.
On December 31, 1999, I recall a friend of mine telling about her flight (literal, in an airplane) from here to California to beat Y2K. It didn’t dawn on her till somewhere over the western U.S. that midnight happens at different times in different places around the globe. To what time zone was her planes computer clock set…?
She landed safely.
There are those, now, who think that they have control and can manipulate the future because of their particular means of domination.
They should not rest easy.
Neither should we, particularly if we can survive by ourselves, or with our hand-picked tiny ‘circle’.
We live together, or we collapse.

#362 – Dick Bernard: The Challenge of Change, and "Spin"

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Back in the 1970s, when overhead projectors were the way of conveying information, and handouts were the takeaway record from attending a meeting, I once attended a meeting where the below handout left, and stuck, with me. (Click on it to enlarge.)

The premise of the handout is very simple and timeless: change is not only inevitable for everyone, but is desirable, and often essential. It doesn’t take much thought to identify someone – maybe ourself – whose ‘bad habit’ may have all but killed them.
BUT, even if one knows that a certain change can be demonstrated to have long term positive benefits, there is a huge challenge to actually changing the behavior (see the chart). Adjusting to the change, whatever it might happen to be, is extremely hard work until the new behavior has become a new habit.
While change is terribly difficult for individuals; it is far more difficult for organizations of any kind. Change can be imposed by law, threat or whatever, but lack of buy-in is a real problem. A surly undercurrent of attitudes held by people who weren’t sold on the great idea can sabotage change.
It’s even worse when competing ideologies demand change, as is true in our country today. Change is what the other side must do, since we know what is right.
So, politically these days we have constant talk about the need for deep change in how our American society does business. It comes from left, right, center about most everything…. But precious few are talking with each other. More prevalent is talking AT each other. The objective is to win the war of ideas. The win is always temporary. The war is continual.
Almost always this conversation is premised on the need for the OTHER person or group to change. The initiator gives him (or her, or their) self a pass: “if you accept my superior idea or wisdom, and change by conforming to my views, all will be good. But I don’t need to change my own attitudes or beliefs.”
It just doesn’t work out quite that simply. Societal change is a team sport.
An immense contemporary impediment to positive change is “Spin”.
“Spin”, the increasingly black art of buttressing one’s argument, while simultaneously dismissing an opposing point of view, essentially sabotages change initiatives. These can be perceived as positive or negative changes (depending on one’s point of view).
Spin has always been a part of the political conversation, but until fairly recent history, a receiver of information would have at least some assurance that “facts”, while skewed, did indeed exist, and could even be found, to support or refute an argument.
Today, almost anyone on any side of any issue can successfully avoid personal accountability by choice of information, image, expert…. It takes very hard work to find some semblance of “truth” in any political positioning statement. Even ‘truth’ becomes suspect. Most recently, The President’s release of his full birth certificate does not quiet the birthers. For assorted reasons, they deny reality to keep the issues alive.
I don’t think it is possible to find a well known pundit or personality who is ‘objective’. Their bias is embedded somewhere in their writing or script. If we share their bias, we like their thinking; if we don’t, we reject it.
We pick and choose who we wish to believe. “They’re all liars”, I’ve heard a good friend say, then she selects the liar she wants to believe – the one which confirms her bias.
If you’ve read this so far, you’re already thinking of the people you don’t like who are the real culprits in this deadly game.
Best we think of ourselves, and how we’re complicit as well.

#360 – Dick Bernard: Returning to the Eighth Grade

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April 15 we were invited to an event at Friendly Hills Middle School in Mendota Heights MN. “Telling the Story of WWII and the Holocaust” was the event: “An Interdisciplinary Project between Language Arts & Social Studies” involving eighth graders in five classes at the school, each of whom had worked on a particular project for the preceding three weeks, culminating in their own museum display.
It was a fascinating program: great learning and great public relations. I congratulate the students, teachers and school.
I remembered back to the 1960s when I taught 8th graders for nine years. Yes, the ‘genus and species’ remains the same: kids are kids. I remembered further back, to 1953-54, when I was in eighth grade. The same….
We went from display to display. They were as one would expect, many very nicely done. In 1953-54 and my last year of teaching, 1971-72, they would have been assembled in roughly the same way: paper glued on pieces of recycled cardboard, etc. But such a gathering would be very unusual.
The difference, and it is a huge one, is technology and accessibility to research data. In 1953-54 we perhaps had one old encyclopedia on which to rely, and no copy machines, or newspapers to clip from. No television and (to my recollection) no movies. Such projects would be very difficult and thus very unusual. Only in recent years would you see, as we saw on Friday, kids with laptops and movies pulled off of the internet. Pretty incredible.
We didn’t have time to visit every display. There were a great number of displays and a great number of visiting family members. At each one I visited, I asked the student what was the most interesting thing that he or she had learned. Every one of them was able to answer the question confidently.
World War II was a long time ago. One student said her great-grandfather was in the War. Even though that made sense to me, it still took me aback. My oldest Uncle in the war – my Dad’s brother Frank – died at age 26 on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. I was 5 years old when the war ended in Europe in 1945; and when I was in eighth grade in 1953-54, my uncle Art, the youngest family member to join the military in June, 1945, was only 26, and not yet married. Time flies.
At Friendly Hills, students picked from a potpourri of potential topics. The brochure said:
“We have discussed
Why do people look for strong leaders when times get tough?
How can “good”people get caught up in “bad” things like the Nazi movement?
How are the ideas of community, identity, discipline, and power connected?
How can the ideas above also lead to conflict among people and nations?
What is our responsibility when we see things happen that are against our values?
How can each of us take ACTION to stand up for the things we believe in?”
These are all good questions for all of us.
A number of students did their research on the dropping of the Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945.
One of them was taking a poll, where respondents could pick one of three choices:
“1. Yes, I think it was a good decision[to drop the bombs], and it helped end WWII.
2. I don’t really like what we did, but I don’t have a better solution for it.
3. I think it was a terrible idea to kill so many people to destroy two major cities.”
I picked #3, and joined three others in so voting. #1 had 5 votes, and #2 had 20. Our 29 hach marks added to the conversation.
I felt and feel that killing someone else is never a solution…it only creates a new problem. But that’s not a very popular concept.
War, then and now has its moral dilemmas. The morning after the display the paper had a front page article about the Libyan leaders disgraceful use of cluster bombs against its own citizens. Nestled in the same article was reference to our own countries recent use of cluster bombs in places like Afghanistan. There was nothing about who developed and later perfected and profited from the cluster bomb concept.
Late today came a photo montage of the reality of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Let us never forget.

#359 – Dick Bernard: Teachers and Teaching – searching for "truth"

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April 11, 2011, found me in a hotel near Bernalillo NM. The hotel offered complimentary newspapers, and as I usually do I picked up the local paper, in this case the Albuquerque Journal.
Front page, front and center, was a “Beyond the Classroom” story about teacher Kathleen Cox, and her 12 year old student, Elizabeth, whose Mom is struggling with cancer. [To read the article, and the editorial which follows, you need to sign on for a temporary access pass, which is a very simple process.]
The column was a wonderful story about a teacher going above and beyond. It had absolutely nothing to do with test scores, or classes. It had everything to do with relationships. And most likely Elizabeth was not able to perform academically as she normally might have because of difficulties at home. Kathleen was doing what she could.
I migrated, as usual, to the editorial page or the paper, and the lead editorial was titled “Most Important School Unit is Accountability“. It was an interesting counterpoint to the lead article on the front page. It was about bean counting, and holding people accountable for the number of beans.
Therein seems to lie the struggle in contemporary public education. Relationships versus quantifiable data (“accountability”).
Of course, there has been massive effort over the last few years to figure out some way to get rid of “bad” or “ineffective” teachers. It is some kind of generic label, and I have yet to hear someone say publicly the name of the “bad” or “ineffective” teacher(s) they have in mind. They just must be out there somewhere. Apparently Ms Cox is not one of those marked for extinction, but we really don’t know.
I was in New Mexico to talk with retired teachers of the the National Education Association. Enroute from the airport to the conference center a retired teacher from Nebraska was remembering some teacher who’d made a big difference in her life. It just came up in conversation.
One of my handouts was a list of positive school employee qualities generated by teachers at a 1999 leadership conference I had led. I had asked the participants to think of a school employee who had had a particularly significant impact on them. Having thought of this person (it could be any school employee), I asked them to come up with a one word descriptor of that person: what was it about the employee who made a difference in their lives? In all there were about 60 participants. Only one of the 60 could not think of a single education personnel who he had positive feelings about. I have no idea why this was. The purpose of the exercise was not to probe or value judge but just to establish criteria used by teachers themselves.
In all the teachers identified 47 different characteristics of educational personnel who made a difference in their lives. Here are the characteristics, as identified by the participants: OUTSTANDING-BEHAVIORS-OF-EDUCATION-PERSONNEL
If you look at the qualities that made a difference in school personnel, one is hard pressed to find a single quality that emphasizes directly or indirectly test scores or such as that.
The employees who were remembered were the ones who were very positive in their relationship with their young person.
Is there a need for accountability? Absolutely.
Are there school employees who shouldn’t be school employees? Of course. In a cohort of millions of school employees serving 50 million students, there is without any question at all less than desirable “apples”.
But until the labelers attach names of actual people to these supposed “bad” or “ineffective” anonymous teachers, I am going to challenge them every time to show me the evidence.
They don’t show the evidence, because they can’t…or are afraid that they might be wrong in their judgment.

#358 – Dick Bernard: Averting a shutdown. A tiny bit of optimism.

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April 7 I was at committee meeting unrelated to politics or political parties, and my colleague sitting next to me showed me a book he was reading, which he felt was a must-read for anyone interested in politics. The book: “Winner Take All Politics” by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. I have yet to pick up the volume, but I will.
A day later, late the evening of April 8, a government shutdown was averted by an agreement between House, Senate and White House. It is much too early to know what it means, and most of us will never know as the aftermath will be buried in the same rhetorical fog that accompanied the negotiations of the agreement. I kept thinking of assorted cliff-hanger negotiations I was involved with from time to time in my career. If people we were negotiating for only knew…. Sooner or later you’re stuck with making a deal.
Like the old story about the optimistic kid who comes into a barn full of manure and starts digging because “there must be a pony in here somewhere”, I have a little bit of optimism that maybe a tiny bit of sanity is beginning to prevail in this country. There needs to be a whole lot more, but at least there’s a start.
Even the sudden turnaround in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election due to quite certainly administrator incompetence rather than fraud is a hopeful sign for me. What had appeared to be an easy race for the apparent winner, turned into a near loss for him. What normally would have been a low profile boring election with a certain outcome turned into a cliff-hanger in the national spotlight. People are paying attention.
Winner take all politics is killing our country, and maybe, finally, some of us are paying attention. Maybe there is that pony down there. But if so, it’s a long ways down, and there’s a whole lot of digging to be done to find it.
Between the meeting and the drama in Washington, I attended a hugely informative two hour session entitled “Reality Meets Rhetoric: The Hidden Costs of State Budget Cuts“.
There were about 50 of us in attendance at the gathering. The session was expertly conducted. (click on photo to enlarge it)

Citizens generating questions after one of the presentations April 7.


Four outstanding panelists gave an overview of and some context for our state’s deficit situation*. None of the presentors were politicians; all of them were in high level positions of advising, administrating agencies or lobbying. They know the lay of the land – what is inside that fog bank of political rhetoric. I could name their names and their credentials, but it wouldn’t matter. They were talking straight about a pretty harsh future if our lawmakers don’t grow up (my state is like most these days: politically divided and polarized. Not a whole lot unlike Washington DC or even Wisconsin.)
I was tired when I got home from the meeting, but nonetheless I felt better informed.
I wrote a thank you e-mail to one of the people who seemed to have an important role in helping set up the meeting, and she wondered: “It will be interesting to see what percentage of the participants are the same people who are super involved in the political process already and what percentage are just getting their feet wet. My goal was to start reaching the latter. How do we do that?”
“How do we do that?” is a legitimate question with an easy answer:
One person at a time.
I will always believe in the long term benefit of what I call “each one reach two”. It seems so simple. If the 50 of us who were in that room reached two others, that would be 100 more. If those 100 each reached two, that would be 300….
But you need to actually start doing this, first; and become as good at listening as talking. Results generally don’t come by just wishing for them, or blaming somebody else.
* – “Scribbles”: of course, in such presentations, the macro is emphasized. So, for instance, we’re dealing in Minnesota with a $5 billion dollar deficit which seems awful. But if one does the calculations, that is roughly $1,500 per Minnesotan, which MOST Minnesotans could absorb quite easily, and which SOME (the wealthy) could very easily handle, and MANY (the poor) could not. It would take very little creativity and little sharing of the wealth to deal with the entire deficit. Of course, the $5 billion was a deliberately created mess due to a refusal to “tax” to fund the programs Minnesotans demand.
Similarly, one of the presentors talked about the most expensive students to educate in Minnesota Public Schools. I recall the number was $12,000 per student per year (the average was, if I remember right, about $8,000 per pupil). This covers every cent of every expenditure by schools for educating our youth. For the most expensive student, it amounts to about $70 a school day, less if you factor in that the buildings must be maintained during the rest of the year etc. Is $70 a day for a child’s education too much? Where would you cut? I recalled being at a fundraiser for a private school for special needs kids – kids whose needs are beyond the capacity of public schools to serve. That school, two years ago, said the cost per student was $25,000 per year, double the most expensive public school student this year.
In short, talking MACRO can be scary; talking MICRO is more real….
Related Posts are here, here, and here.

#356 – Dick Bernard: Bottineau Jig, Untold Tales of Early Minnesota

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Two sold-out performances of Bottineau Jig, Untold Tales of Early Minnesota, attested to the interest in Dance Revels Moving History’s interpretation of the life and times of legendary Pierre Bottineau.
The program was performed at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, Friday and Saturday evening, April 1 and 2. The production was a creation of Jane Peck of Dance Revels. Jane is a long-time student of historical dance forms. The program proudly noted that the activity was “funded, in part, by the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008” (This is the Clean Water and Legacy amendment approved by Minnesota voters November 4, 2008.)
Pierre Bottineau (played by Dr. Virgil Benoit) was a legendary early founder of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and he was renowned guide in the white settlement of the upper midwest. Bottineau, Metis (Michif) born in the area of present day Grand Forks ND, was gifted in languages and a larger than life presence. He was one of eight pioneers who built the original log cabin St. Paul Catholic Church (the first Cathedral of St. Paul MN); he owned land and built the second frame house in what was then St. Anthony, later to become Minneapolis; he founded Osseo and later Red Lake Falls MN.
Jane Peck’s program was an extraordinarily rich demonstration of period fiddling, music and dance.
The program interspersed spoken word, ethnic music and dance, covering the period from Bottineau’s birth in 1817 through 1870. At the conclusion of the program the cast of 14 invited the audience to join them in a Red River Jig, and then engaged in discussion with the audience. (Click on the photo to see an enlarged version.)

Audience and Cast participate in Red River Jig April 2, 2011


The program specifically intended to showcase an assortment of characters, not all well known in Minnesota History. So, Sarah Steele Sibley was emphasized over her more well known husband, Henry Hastings Sibley, and Franklin Steele, builder of the first house in to-be Minneapolis. Jacob Fahlstrom, early Swedish settler via England and years with the natives in Canada, and his wife, Marguerite Bonga, whose ancestry was a freed Haitian slave well known in what is now the Duluth area, spoke powerfully to the dilemmas of cross-cultural relationships in the newly emerging Swedish community northeast of St. Paul.
Among other purposes of the Bottineau Jig Project are, according to producer Jane Peck: “1) Offering the contributions and points of view of the mixed bloods and Metis in Minnesota history. They have been ignored as much or more than the French; 2) tracing the modern-day communities of some of the cultures represented in the play, including the Metis as the only modern mixed blood community.”
An expert cast was augmented by three fiddlers, all well known interpreters of Metis and French-Canadian music: Legendary Metis Fiddler from Turtle Mountain ND, Eddie King Johnson, gave his usual great performance, as did Twin Citians Linda Breitag and Gary Schulte. Larry Yazzie and Ricky Thomas provided outstanding dance, native and Metis. Other performers, all very engaging, were M. Cochise Anderson, Josette Antomarchi, Jamie Berg, Paulino Brener, Kenna Cottman, Craig Johnson, Scott Marsalis and Jane Peck.
Jane Peck has begun and will continue a blogging project on the Bottineau Jig at her website. See her site for more stories about Bottineau Jig.
Also visit the website of IFMidwest for upcoming activities in Virgil Benoit’s French-Canadians in the Midwest organization. The annual conference of IF Midwest is planned in Fargo ND October 7-8, 2011. Details will be at the website.

#352 – Dick Bernard: August Wilson: the Triumph of an Ordinary Man….

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On check-in at my hotel in downtown Pittsburgh, I asked if the August Wilson Center (AWC) was somewhere in the neighborhood.
That was an easy question: it was three short blocks away. I walked there, and found the back side of it was visible from my 15th floor room (the orange traffic signs are alongside AWC in the photo – click to enlarge).

August Wilson Center from Omni William Penn, Pittsburgh PA, March 25, 2011


August Wilson?
If you don’t know who he is, note the Center website link above. There is plenty of information. He is one of America’s most noted playwrights, one of the very few winners of two Pulitzer Prizes for his plays; the only African-American playwright ever to have two of his plays performed simultaneously on Broadway.
I met him when he was, literally, a “nobody”, like me….

Portrait of August Wilson at August Wilson Center, Pittsburgh.


Best as I can figure, it was sometime in 1979-82 time period when I met him, briefly, when he was a part-time cook at Little Brothers in Minneapolis MN. I was a sometime volunteer there, and August was the cook. Laura, my friend who introduced me to Little Brothers and got to know August better than I, says he was an outstanding cook, and I’ll take her word for that. My specialty is eating! She spent more time than I at Little Brothers; I was more part of the Catholic Charities circle in those years.
But I did meet August.
Later, I saw eight of the ten plays in his Pittsburgh Cycle – the plays that led to his fame. All of these were produced locally at St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre. Gradually, I came to know that the playwright August Wilson was the same August Wilson who I’d met as a cook at Little Brothers some years earlier.
In April, 1998, my daughter and I visited Pittsburgh and were privileged to be given a tour of Augusts Hill District by his older sister, Freda, including going into the tiny home in which they grew up. (In the photo it is the last building on the right, and it is now a historic site in Pittsburgh at 1727 Bedford Ave. Its backyard was the setting, August said, for his play “Seven Guitars”. Note the skyline of downtown Pittsburgh in the background. Indeed, the Hill District is on a hill overlooking downtown.

August Wilson Boyhood home, 1727 Bedford, Pittsburgh PA, April, 1998


Freda remembers her younger brother as always being serious. It was not an easy road for he, his siblings or any persons of color in his growing up years. He wrote a paper in school, and it was so good he was accused of plagiarizing it, and dropped out. No one seemed much interested in his re-enrolling. Ultimately, he received an honorary high school diploma from one of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Libraries, which is where he delved deeply into history, particularly African-American. He wrote, and wrote, and wrote.
My friend, Laura, remembers August as very modest and humble. When he won his first Pulitzer (1987), Laura recalls him as being excited to be able to take pictures of the famous people he would see there, not much aware of his own fame…that, in fact, he was now famous, too.
At the conference I attended in Pittsburgh, I invited August’s sister to speak to the 200 retired National Education Association educators in attendance, and publicize the new Guidebook (it is excellent) which has been published about August Wilson’s Pittsburgh. Here is the flier she distributed: August Wilson book flier. Her picture is below:

Freda Ellis, Pittsburgh, March 27, 2011


As for me, I’m working to learn more about how Little Brothers in Minneapolis assisted in August Wilson’s career development, and to help get Little Brothers recognized as well. As best I know, he completed at least one of his plays while there, and refined one or more of his “Pittsburgh Cycle” in his two or three years there. Yet Little Brothers merits hardly a sentence in any descriptor of August Wilson. Minneapolis’ Little Brothers is a very important part of his ‘roots’.
We all have our heroes and sheroes: August Wilson, and Freda, too, are among mine. I’m so happy we crossed paths….

#351 – Dick Bernard. A Cup of Coffee at Wally's in Westchester

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A brief trip to Chicago in early March was to attend the burial of my Uncle Art.
As it happened, my hotel was in the “village” of Westchester (pop. app 17,000), a middle class suburb where my Uncle and family had lived for over 20 years till his first wife died and he remarried and moved about 1980. I had visited Westchester with some frequency back then, so I knew the town pretty well, and it was an opportunity to re-see it.
For many years I have made a practice of seeking out the local “flavor” when I travel. So, on Saturday, March 5, the hotel offered breakfast with the room charge, but I got in the car and wandered back into Art’s old neighborhood to find something in the neighborhood, and finally noticed a promising sign:

Wally’s was in one of those ubiquitous small shopping strips that dot American communities. It was your standard “coffee and donut” place. I was the only customer at the time I entered.
Westchester is a middle class professional community, and Wally’s was not fancy as I would have expected, actually quite spare in its decor.
Something immediately caught my eye. Posted very visibly, twice, was an article from the April 9, 2010, Chicago Tribune. I read the article. The proprietor Walid Elkhatib, had been a franchise holder for one of those immense donut and coffee chains, and in 2010 had lost his franchise after a long legal battle over his refusal to market a certain kind of sandwich which went against his Muslim beliefs. The article was fascinating, and I wanted to talk to “Wally” but he wasn’t there at the time.
A little later he came in, a very engaging sort of guy. Customers came and went. Wally had a particular affinity for youngsters, and had a bowl of donut holes he called “munchkins” for the young children.
I lingered a bit longer and had an opportunity to talk briefly with him. He’d been in business since 1977, he said. With full knowledge of the franchise company, he didn’t market the sandwich because of his beliefs, and there were no questions.
But ultimately after September 11, 2001, the corporation turned up the heat, and the end result was his losing his franchise – huge loss. All that remained was his storefront, on which he held the lease, and a local trade which he had known for many years.
When I walked in the place, I had no idea of the earlier corporate link. After I knew, it all fit together (his apple fritters are delicious, just like in the old corporate stores you’ll find in every state.)
He and I had never met before, and didn’t have much of an opportunity to chat, but there was lots of content in those few minutes we visited.
It is clear to me, particularly from an earlier Chicago Tribune article, that the sandwich really wasn’t the issue; it was Wally’s religion and the post-9-11 hysteria that led to his downfall.
The community? It is predominantly white, Christian, middle class, professional.
He said that the local community gave and gives him very strong support. The legal issue was between the Corporation and himself. He lost.
He’d planned to retire, but the legal case did lots of damage to his savings, and he needs to keep the business.
I hope to be able to stay in touch with him.
I wish I had a photo of Wally behind the counter, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a photo at the time. I came back later, and he’d left for a couple of hours, and I couldn’t return….
(I couldn’t come up with an internet copy of the Chicago Tribune article posted in his shop, or the specific court case. I will keep looking.)
NOTE: This history of this post goes back to a simple act of kindness shown by a Muslim family in western North Dakota in 1953-54, as described in my September 5, 2010, blog entry.