Star Tribune
Ad man turned Paul Bunyan into a folklore icon
“The work was an instant success with the public, especially with children, who viewed Paul Bunyan as a national hero rather than just a folk character,” according to the Forest History Society.
Red River Lumber made Bunyan as its pitchman, copyrighting Laughhead’s illustrations that showed a moon-faced and amiable Bunyan wearing a plaid shirt and smoking a pipe beneath his long cat-like whiskers and woodsy cap. A photo from the 1920s, in the University of Minnesota Libraries Paul Bunyan Collection, shows Laughead at his desk in a white shirt and tie, smoking his own pipe beneath a framed image of his Bunyan sketch.
William Barlow Laughead dropped out of school for work in lumber camps — but his artistic flair is what made his career.
“The Paul of Laughead … was friendly, kind to his men and involved in good-natured japes,” Brown writes in her new book. “He had the rough constitution of a thoroughly masculine American hero with the gentlemanly demeanor and generous big heart. … He served as the industry’s figurehead, a sign that the lumber industry, unlike oil or steel, was made up not of giant corporations but of small, romantic camps filled with strong, jovial and fundamentally classless white men.”
Before his death in 1958, Laughead served on the Western Pine Association in California and painted several acclaimed forest and mill scenes in oil. But it was his cartoons of Paul Bunyan that defined his career — a fact that likely made him shrug in amazement.
“It was just an advertising job,” he said. “It never occurred to me it was ‘folklore.’ … All I wanted to do was sell lumber.”
Curt Brown’s latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.
The U is asking the Legislature for $200 million for repairs as the number of crumbling, outdated buildings reaches a crisis point.
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Star Tribune
MN kids with mental health needs cycle through juvenile justice system, often without options
“I will be blasted for this, but sometimes you are hoping the kid commits a crime because then there’s a place for them to go where you’re not worried where they’re going to sleep tonight,” said Benjamin Stromberg, an assistant St. Louis County attorney whose office handles child protection and juvenile delinquency cases. “Nobody wants these kids in detention — we all understand that. But sometimes it’s the one place where they are not going to be hurting anybody or hurting themselves.”
Residential facilities often have long waitlists and deny kids if they aren’t able to handle their specific issues, such as sexually aggressive behavior or substance use disorder.
Psychiatric residential treatment facilities, known as PRTFs, are one step below hospitalization and are supposed to take children with severe aggression, who present a safety risk to themselves or others. This year 281 kids were referred for placement in the four such facilities in the state, according to Department of Human Services (DHS) data, but only 66 got in.
While the facilities are licensed for 150 kids, they were only serving 85 as of June, according to the therapeutic provider association AspireMN. Staffing challenges keep them from taking more kids, executives at several PRTFs said, and while they want to accept as many children as possible, they have to ensure a kid is the right fit.
“Can they manage the [child’s] behavior with the culture, with staff and kids that they have?” said Larry Pajari, CEO of Northwood Children’s Services, which runs a PRTF. “Nobody wants to put other kids that may be vulnerable at risk either, so that’s the balancing act.”
Only 25 children from Hennepin County, the state’s most populous, have gotten into the psychiatric facilities since the first one opened in 2018, county children’s mental health area manager Neerja Singh testified in court, citing DHS data. Singh, a former deputy director of behavioral health at DHS, said children of color generally have not been able to get mental health services at the same rate as white youth.
Star Tribune
Faith leaders toe the line talking politics from the pulpit in advance of divisive election
This story was reported by Reid Forgrave in Minneapolis, Jenny Berg in St. Cloud, Jp Lawrence in Mankato, Trey Mewes in Dundas, Sean Baker in Rochester, Jana Hollingsworth in Duluth, Kim Hyatt in Lake George, Minn., and written by Reid Forgrave.
ST. CLOUD — Congregants filed into Jubilee Worship Center, an evangelical church just off Highway 15 here, on a recent Sunday. All around were indications of election season.
On church property, visible from the busy highway, were political signs: A Republican candidate for Minnesota House, a nonpartisan candidate for St. Cloud mayor. (Any candidate may pay the church to place signs there.) On a table inside, a sign read, “1 in 3 Christians doesn’t vote. That’s about 25 million people.”
A voter guide detailed policy differences between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on immigration, inflation, guns and abortion. A church member handed out instructions for a letter-writing campaign asking Christians in Michigan, a crucial swing state, to “vote for the candidates who stand for biblical values.” The script mentioned “transgender ideology,” high grocery bills and criminals crossing America’s borders.
“All we do is encourage people to vote and do their research so they know what the positions are, seek the Lord and vote accordingly,” Rev. Mark Johnson, senior pastor at Jubilee, said after the service. “We don’t promote any candidate.”
Some 70 miles away in southwest Minneapolis, Mayflower Community Congregational United Church of Christ took a very different tone. “PROTECT MULTIRACIAL DEMOCRACY,” read a big sign facing Interstate 35W. Other signs proclaimed progressive values: protecting queer kids, the environment, immigrants and refugees.
From the pulpit, the Rev. Susie Hayward talked about humans building walls: In Palestine and Israel, along our southern border. A couple weeks before, the church’s senior pastor, the Rev. Sarah Campbell, discussed this election in stark terms, drawing on the analogy to German resentment and grievance that led to Adolf Hitler. She spoke of two types of churches, those that enable fascism versus those that resist it.
Neither the church in St. Cloud nor the church in Minneapolis endorsed a candidate. But it was plain where they stood.
