Star Tribune
Columbia Heights memorial will honor fallen WWII airman 80 years after his death
In 1937, Minneapolis motorcycle cops escorted 12-year-old Walter Shimshock and his 13-year-old brother Bernie to the Great Northern Depot, along with the other outstanding Tribune carriers about to embark on an all-expenses-paid trip to Chicago.
Seven years later, Nazis executed Walter in Poland — pouring bullets into the 19-year-old U.S. Army Air Force rear gunner from northeast Minneapolis, fresh out of DeLaSalle High School.
Staff Sgt. Shimshock had bailed out of his burning B-17 bomber that was dropping supplies for Polish resistance fighters, who were then locked in a two-month clash with occupying German forces, now known as the Warsaw Uprising. He broke his leg parachuting down to the waiting Nazis, who interrogated and tortured him before killing him.
Bernie clung to memories of that Chicago trip with Walter, and watching the Cubs play the Dodgers, until his own death in 2005. His brother was just a kid when he entered World War II, Bernie told the Star Tribune in 2004.
“Biggest thing we ever did before he went in was a trip to Chicago in 1937 to see our first baseball game and ride on the El,” Bernie said.
(Ramin Rahimian/Star Tribune))
Now, despite dying as a teenager 80 years ago this September, Walter Shimshock will further cement the ties between sister cities nearly 4,700 miles apart — Columbia Heights and Lomianki, Poland.
A memorial to Shimshock and his nine airlift crewmates will be unveiled next month at Huset Park in Columbia Heights, a couple miles north of Walter and Bernie’s childhood home in northeast Minneapolis. The Warsaw Uprising Airlift Memorial, a triangular obelisk and plaque, mirrors a similar monument that Polish leaders erected two years ago at the crash site of Shimshock’s bomber outside Lomianki.
Never mind that Shimshock’s B-17 was the only one of 107 Allied bombers shot down while dropping hundreds of canisters of food, ammunition and medicine on beleaguered Warsaw on Sept. 18, 1944, during a mission called Operation Frantic 7.
St. Paul is among the cities that have tried sending money to very low-income residents, studying the results. When Springboard launched its project in 2021, it was one of the nation’s first guaranteed income programs aimed at artists.
“It’s not because we think artists are more deserving or more worthy than anyone else,” said Laura Zabel, Springboard’s executive director. Creative work is one form of labor that, like caregiving, “our economy doesn’t value” but that communities need — now more than ever, she said.
“I love thinking about guaranteed income as a way of honoring that we all have contributions to make to our community, and we need a little bit of time and space and breathing room to make those contributions,” Zabel said.
A similar experiment also started in 2021 in San Francisco, run by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, has ended. In 2022, the Creatives Rebuild New York program began providing some 2,400 artists in New York with $1,000 per month for 18 months. That same year, Ireland’s government began providing 2,000 artists about $350 a week, or about $18,200 a year, as part of a three-year pilot program.
Every 18 months, Springboard has extended its program’s funding. Now, it’s guaranteeing artists five years of income. The first 25 participants, who have received income since 2021, will see that money continue for two more years. Those who started receiving it 18 months ago, including 25 artists in Otter Tail County, will continue. And the 25 new recipients there will begin the program knowing they’ll get money for five years.
“So, from a research perspective, that’s very exciting — to be able to research and understand some of the difference between folks who know from the beginning the longer time horizon,” Zabel said, “and what that allows them to do in terms of planning and commitment to their community.”
DULUTH — A Duluth man who said he doesn’t remember killing his girlfriend pleaded guilty to second-degree murder without intent Tuesday in St. Louis County court — a plea deal that could land him in prison longer than sentencing guidelines would dictate.
Dale John Howard, 25, told Judge Theresa Neo that he doesn’t remember it but believes he caused the death of his girlfriend, Allisa Marie Vollan, 27, on March 22. Vollan, described on a fundraising site as a “bright young lady” with “an abundance of friends,” had a no-contact order against Howard at the time of her death. Howard could be sentenced to 20 years in prison — more than seven years longer than Minnesota’s presumptive guideline for the murder. According to the county attorney’s office, the longer sentence is legal because of the active domestic abuse no-contact order against him.
Howard’s sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 14.
According to court documents, officers responded to a morning call at Howard’s Central Hillside apartment and found him beneath a blanket with Vollan, who was dead. He told officers that he had hung out with Vollan late the previous night, then left to meet friends at a bar, and Vollan went to sleep in a guest room. When he tried to move her into his bedroom the next morning, she wasn’t breathing. He called his father, who was at the apartment when Duluth police arrived.
Neighbors in the upper level of the duplex told officers that, in the time before Howard would have left for the bar, they heard a woman crying and an angry male voice. They heard muffled moaning, thuds and the sound of something being dragged. They recorded it.
A preliminary autopsy by the Midwest Medical Examiner’s Office found that Vollan had likely been smothered.
Earlier the same month, Howard had been arrested after neighbors saw him repeatedly slam Vollan’s head into a door. The no-contact was issued by a St. Louis County judge.
Minneapolis School Board Member Fathia Feerayarre, who represented District 3 in the city’s center since January 2023, has resigned effective immediately, the district announced Tuesday.
Her departure comes too late to add the seat to the November ballot, however, meaning her colleagues will have to appoint her successor in a process and under a timeline to be outlined next week.
Feerayarre ran unopposed in 2022 as part of a four-candidate slate endorsed by the Minneapolis DFL and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, and was set to serve until Jan. 4, 2027.
Board Chair Collin Beachy, who also was part of that four-person slate, said in a news release: “I thank Ms. Feerayarre for her service to the Minneapolis Public Schools community as a member of the school board. We all wish her the best in her future endeavors.”
