Star Tribune
Pioneering bird-in-hand magician went from Mankato to stages around the world
A self-described loner, Jack Kodell bounced around southern Minnesota as a kid before — presto! — blossoming into a world-renowned magician.
With his first-ever live bird act, Kodell wowed everyone from Queen Elizabeth to Ed Sullivan. He made tiny parakeets appear and vanish from Paris to Las Vegas, where he performed the Strip’s first magic act in the 1940s at just 17.
Only a few people today remember Kodell. One of them is Roger Jennings, 80, a Mankato-born former Drug Enforcement Administration agent and lawyer who lives in Simi Valley, Calif. Jennings learned magic from his ninth-grade algebra teacher, Ronald Hibbard, who started a magic club in the 1950s at Lincoln Junior High School in Mankato.
“All of the seven members knew about Jack Kodell and his success in performing magic around the world,” said Jennings, a member of various magicians’ organizations for nearly 50 years.
Online there is a 5½-minute clip of Kodell’s act, recorded in France in 1958 , when he was nearly 30 and wearing his full-tail tuxedo.
But things weren’t always so glitzy for Kodell — a stage name for John Koudelka, born in Mankato in 1927.
His father sold Firestone tires in southern Minnesota before World War II, moving every year to open new territory. The lifestyle was tough on young Jack, the only child of Ed and Ida Koudelka, a school teacher.
“We lived throughout the state of Minnesota in a different town every year, Mankato, Albert Lea, Austin and some small towns, too,” he wrote in “Kodell: Do Something Different,” his 2011 autobiography.
Making friends proved tricky, he said, because “each town held a different school and different kids … one year really does not cement any solid bonding of lifetime school pal relations.”
Kodell said his parents felt sorry for all the uprooting “and made every effort to make up for it in any way they could.” Or as a 1952 profile put it in Linking Ring, a magic journal: “His folks catered to his every whim.”
That included occasionally driving the family car at age 7 under parental supervision and moving beyond his model airplane hobby to fly real airplanes — logging 79 cockpit hours aloft between ages 8 and 13 (three years before he could get a license).
The turning point for the adventurous kid came in 1941 when Jack won the Soap Box Derby in Minneapolis, prompting a Sunday front-page photo with his trophy and a big grin. He qualified for the international title in Akron, Ohio, but lost in the first heat to a kid from West Virginia.
While in Minneapolis for the derby, Jack stopped at a downtown magic shop and purchased a set of multiplying billiard balls. He mastered the trick “after countless hours and weeks of practice,” studying under a Mankato meat merchant who “dabbled in the ancient art” of magic, according to the 1952 profile. “Under the butcher’s tutelage Kodell soon developed into Mankato’s favorite and busiest young performer.”
Jack moved with his parents to Chicago when he was 16, just as he was developing his parakeet trick. By 17 he was performing in Las Vegas, a town that Kodell said “didn’t want any association with cheating involving cards or coins,” the two staples of magic shows. His bird act changed all that.
Kodell took the stage in several countries, including England where his 1950 marriage in London to popular British singer Mary Naylor landed him on the front page of the tabloids. But after 15 years as a headlining magician, Kodell walked away from magic in 1962 while still in his 30s.
“His type of top-hats-and-tails show, accompanied by a live orchestra, was on the way out, and he was not interested in changing his style,” the Orlando Sentinel reported in 2001.
After Jack and Mary moved to Florida in 1991, opening a dinner show theater and managing a hotel, Kodell said: “Now everyone does a bird act.”
Kodell died at 84 in Orlando in 2012, two years after a Florida theater honored him as a Legend of Magic. “It feels so good to walk out on stage one more time,” he told a magazine writer.
Kodell returned to Minnesota to perform at the State Fair in 1960. Minneapolis Star columnist Cedric Adams wrote that the former Soap Box Derby winner had visited 18 countries in the nearly two decades since leaving Minnesota, and noted that the Kodells had to fork out 50 cents each to get into the fairgrounds and 75 cents to park their car there. “Neither Mary nor her husband can quite get used to having to pay to go to work,” Adams wrote.
Curt Brown’s tales about Minnesota’s history appear every other Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.
Star Tribune
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, legislators celebrate passing of new law designed to kill 2040 Plan lawsuit
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, legislators and developers gathered Tuesday on the rooftop of Wakpada Apartments in south Minneapolis to celebrate a new state law exempting the comprehensive plans of metro-area cities from environmental legal challenges.
The law states that the broad plans cities create to guide growth cannot be considered conduct that could lead to pollution or environmental destruction, as plans for specific projects may be. That means a six-year lawsuit that had repeatedly interrupted Minneapolis’ pro-density 2040 Plan is “functionally” dead, said Rep. Mike Howard, chair of the House Housing Committee. The plan made Minneapolis the first city in the nation to end single-family zoning.
“Without legislative action, this lawsuit was holding up the status quo (of exclusionary zoning,)” said Howard, DFL-Richfield. “Nothing is more dangerous to addressing our housing crisis than the status quo, because it’s the status quo that has got us into this mess. We will not build the homes that we need to meet this moment without ingenuity at all levels of government.”
Wakpada Apartments, where the gathering was held, was completed in 2022 by Hall Sweeney Properties, and includes 8% of units affordable at 60% area median income; that would not have been possible without the 2040 Plan, developer Sean Sweeney said.
The liberated zoning restrictions for the property, located at Minnehaha and East 46th Street, allowed him to build six stories of 126 units instead of four stories of 60 units. That difference balanced the project financially to allow for the inclusion of affordable apartments, Sweeney said.
“Without a doubt that being a developer in Minneapolis, especially now with the 2040 Plan, is an absolute dream,” Sweeney said.
The Audubon Chapter of Minneapolis, the Minnesota Citizens for the Protection of Migratory Birds and Smart Growth Minneapolis sued the city in 2018, arguing the 2040 Plan could pollute natural resources and usher gentrification and displacement, warranting a study to identify the environmental tradeoffs of densification. Nonstop injunctions, appeals and reversals since then injected chaos and uncertainty into development in Minneapolis.
The Minnesota Supreme Court decided in 2022 that citizens were entitled to challenging municipal comprehensive plans under the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act. But in May, the Court of Appeals threw out a prior ruling halting the 2040 Plan pending environmental review. The appeals court allowed Minneapolis to immediately resume approving stalled projects, but city officials feared it would not last without a law change.
Six days later, the Minnesota Legislature passed Rep. Sydney Jordan’s comprehensive plan bill in the chaotic final hour of the legislative session as part of a 1,400-page Omnibus Tax Bill.
“As a Minneapolis house delegation, all 11 of us were united and made this our no. 1 priority and stood strong to ensure that it was passed,” said Jordan, DFL-Minneapolis.
The lawsuit’s plaintiffs have petitioned the Supreme Court to reinstate the injunction against the 2040 Plan in part because of how it had been incorporated into the tax bill. A provision of the state constitution, adopted in 1857, states legislators may not roll bills on unrelated topics together in the interest of transparency.
The Attorney General’s Office has filed a motion to defend the constitutionality of the new law.
Frey said the city would continue to fight the lawsuit if needed.
“When we recognized that we had a long-term issue with exclusionary zoning that segregated both people and neighborhoods, we knew that we had a lot of work to do to be more inclusive,” he said. “We are seeing right now some of the lowest rent increases in the entire country. That’s in part due to the supply increase that we’ve seen … and of course that’s due to the 2040 Plan.”
Lori Tocholke waited nervously near baggage claim carousel 11 Tuesday afternoon at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, her heart “beating a thousand miles per hour.”
On March 12, Tocholke’s newest grandchild, Greyson Leo Phillips, was born, 2 pounds 2.6 ounces and 12 weeks ahead of schedule.
The premature birth was traumatic enough for Tocholke’s daughter, Cheri Phillips. Worse was the fact that Greyson was born while Phillips and her husband, Chris, were vacationing in Brazil.
Because of a technicality, Brazilian authorities refused to issue his birth certificate. Without a birth certificate, Greyson couldn’t get a U.S. passport. And without a U.S. passport, Greyson couldn’t go home to Minnesota.
The family’s travails caused a storm in Brazilian media, held up as an example of how the country’s bureaucracy can tie up daily life for no good reason.
At the airport Tuesday, a half-dozen news cameras encircled the entry to baggage claim.
All Tocholke wanted?
To hold her newest grandchild for the first time, 105 heart-wrenching days after he was born. Tocholke told the other waiting family members she had first dibs.
The plane landed at 1:48 p.m., seven minutes early. Tocholke bided her time as Chris, Cheri and Greyson gathered their things from the plane and made their way from gate G19 to baggage claim.
Suddenly, a stroller burst through the doors, then Cheri, then Chris: a happy, exhausted family, finally home. Applause erupted. Tocholke hugged her daughter, then she got down to the business at hand: That sweet baby boy.
Greyson’s silver-blue eyes peered up at his grandma as she scooped him out of the stroller and cooed. He cried a few times. “Oh, I know!” his grandma soothed. She snuggled him and jiggled him, and he quieted. She held him like a football, then passed him to another family member, who passed him to another, then another.
“Everybody’s here, everybody’s safe, my heart is full,” Tocholke said.
A few feet away, tears and sweat streamed down Chris Phillips’ face and chest, exhausted after three days of travel and months of uncertainty. The family had gone to Brazil to visit Chris’ 8-year-old daughter, who lives with her mom in the Brazilian coastal city of Florianópolis.
“It was an ordeal, and not something we ever expected,” he said. “We went down for 17 days, just to visit my daughter on her birthday. Along this entire process, it seems like every time we made one step forward, it was three steps back.”
During their sojourn in Brazil, the family did interviews with a slew of Brazilian media outlets, focusing on the gaps in Brazilian bureaucracy. Their story resonated. Three days after Minnesota media first published the family’s story, two representatives from the Brazilian cartorio, like a public notary, came to their AirBnb with Greyson’s birth certificate.
“We love Brazil; this wasn’t us hating Brazil,” Chris said. “I go there three times a year. My daughter is half Brazilian. Now my son’s been born in Brazil. I feel part Brazilian. It’s a wonderful place. But what do I hope changes? I hope Brazilian bureaucracy is behind us, but for hundreds of millions of Brazilians, it’s not.”
Before they left the airport for the hour drive to Cambridge — to the new home they closed on remotely from Brazil — Cheri pulled out a bottle and fed Greyson.
“He’s been alive for three and a half months and never been home,” Cheri said.
“We’re home, bud,” Chris said, patting his head. “We’re home.”
The Mississippi River lapped at the edges of the Minnesota Boat Club on Raspberry Island in St. Paul Tuesday afternoon, as waters in the capital city approached “major” flood stage.
The river, on the rise with recent heavy rains, has also overtaken some bike and pedestrian paths near its banks, and high water has led to the closure of flood-prone park areas and roads, including Shepard Road from Eagle Parkway to Highway 61 and Water Street.
As of 3 p.m. Tuesday, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) gauge on the Mississippi River at St. Paul put the stage of the flood at 16.83 feet — just below what’s considered “major” flood stage at the site, 17 feet, which it was expected to hit by 7 p.m.
The river is forecast to continue rising through the end of the week, cresting at 20.9 feet in the early hours of Saturday.
That’s well below the record crest for this site: Waters reached a flood stage of 26.01 feet in 1965. The river last surpassed 20 feet at the St. Paul gauge in 2019. Many low-lying areas in St. Paul are parks.
The St. Paul Parks and Recreation urged St. Paul park users to be cautious around high water, noting water levels can change quickly and without warning. Information on St. Paul Park closures can be found at https://www.stpaul.gov/departments/parks-and-recreation/special-notices-closures.
