Star Tribune
Girl, 13, took charge amid 1925 storm chaos on Minneapolis lake
Skies blackened 99 years ago over Lake Harriet, where 13-year-old Marjorie Gray came to picnic with her mother, aunt, younger brother and 3-year-old cousin.
Soon, winds roared from both north and south, reaching 44 mph and splintering 1,000 trees as the storm tore through south Minneapolis just after 6 p.m. The shrill blast from the storm siren screamed from the Lake Harriet boathouse — warning foolhardy canoeists to paddle ashore as 3 inches of rain fell July 8, 1925.
Marjorie and her family hurried to join more than 250 people, flocking to the Lake Harriet Municipal Pavilion and its soda fountain and cafeteria — seeking shelter “in an exposed position on the shore,” a local newspaper reported the next morning.
The roof they huddled beneath had been considered unsafe for years. Park Board Superintendent Theodore Wirth had been lobbying for a new pavilion but officials insisted funds were unavailable.
“The lights flared,” a witness in the cafeteria said, “then there was a fearful moaning.” Newspaper accounts described how part of the roof covering the soda fountain “rose in the wind, hovering for a second above the frightened gathering in the building, and then crashed down upon them.”
“Beams and timbers rained down upon the 50 in the [soda fountain] room,” the newspaper reported. “The pavilion was converted in a second into a scene of terror.”
A firefighter found the bodies of Emma Miller, 35, cradling her 3-year-old daughter, May — both crushed beneath a wooden pillar. They were Majorie’s aunt and cousin.
“They were all together and my mother told me they died instantly,” Majorie’s daughter, Mary Vogel, 84, told me recently. “So she must have known.”
Rather than letting the trauma paralyze her, Marjorie put her Girl Scout first-aid training to action.
“With bobbed hair matted to her head but with no evidence of fear this lass of 13 crawled about in the wreckage ministering to the needs of youngsters pinned beneath fallen timbers,” the Minneapolis Daily Star reported.
At one point, Majorie yanked off her silk stockings and used them as a tourniquet, stanching the blood flowing from a little girl’s jagged cut.
“With exceeding calm” the teenager took charge in the chaos, the paper reported, directing rescues and barking first-aid instructions to adults on the scene.
“She is a wonder,” that cafeteria witness, F.A. Anderson, told the Star, which reported his surprise “to learn later that she was but a child as her calmness and entire command of the situation seemed to be anything but that of just a fine looking, lithe little girl with bobbed hair and blue eyes.”
Marjorie’s mother, 36-year-old Marie Gray, suffered head and internal injuries during the roof collapse that killed her sister and niece — but it could have been worse.
“Mother used to talk about using her thumb to stop the bleeding in her mother’s head until first responders arrived,” Mary Vogel said. “Her mother was bleeding profusely, and she saved her life.”
All told, the 1925 storm killed four, injured 34 and wrecked 40 homes and buildings in a five-mile swath of south Minneapolis.
The 21-year-old pavilion, which had replaced two earlier versions destroyed by fire, was a total loss. Wirth shut it immediately, paving the way for a temporary bandstand that stood for 60 years before the current bandshell went up in 1986.
So what happened to our 13-year-old hero, Marjorie Gray, who the newspaper said “quietly drifted away from the soaked and shocked crowd,” limping home on a bruised knee?
Well, she joined the first graduating class at Washburn High School, her daughter said. She studied art and English at the University of Minnesota, where she met soon-to-be attorney Arthur Vogel at a sorority party. Her teaching career ended, by custom, when she married Vogel in 1936 and they moved to Red Wing.
She continued to give art lessons as she raised four children, serving for years on Red Wing’s Planning Commission and fighting to preserve the river town’s historic buildings. She founded the Red Wing Arts Association and served on the nonprofit’s board for nearly 60 years. Her name is on one of the organization’s galleries and the port along the Mississippi in Red Wing is called Vogel Harbor.
Marjorie Gray Vogel died in 2015 two months shy of 104. Her mother, whose life she saved, died in 1989 at 100.
“My mother was energetic and creative,” said Mary Vogel, who lives in Marine on St. Croix. “She endured a traumatic experience, but didn’t let it wound her. She responded effectively and performed sensationally — some would say heroically.”
Today, Mary joked, mothers don’t let 13-year-old daughters cross the street. But 99 years ago, one was twisting tourniquets.
“For some people, traumatic events mark them,” Mary said. “My mother didn’t dwell on it and just went on and did well for the community. … She was always a doer who took on and responded to challenges.”
Marjorie’s brother, Richard S. Gray, who was 7 during the storm, was treated for cuts and bruises, escaping otherwise unharmed. He went on to study geology at Dartmouth College and served as a World War II naval officer, president of IDS’s investment company and co-founder of the Freshwater Society research lab at Lake Minnetonka. He died at 95 in 2014.
Minneapolis police are boosting patrols around synagogues and Jewish community centers during the ongoing High Holy Days, amid a global rise in anti-Semitic threats and violence.
“I am concerned with all the hateful rhetoric that is online,” Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Saturday at a City Hall news conference. “I am concerned that there could be a lone actor out there that could see something online and be inspired to commit an act of violence in our community.”
Already police have arrested a man on suspicion of making terroristic threats for reportedly carrying a gun outside Temple Israel in Minneapolis last week — and authorities say the 21-year-old had previously called in threats to shoot up the synagogue using a voice-masking app.
The man has not yet been charged for the incident which occurred during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year that began at sundown Thursday. The holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, starts Friday and ends Saturday.
O’Hara said that a gun has not been recovered and that police didn’t have evidence “to suggest that this incident was anti-Semitic in nature or motivated by hateful bias.” He said there were no ongoing direct threats to which the increased patrols are responding.
However, he said, “the police department has been seeing an enhanced level of threats towards our Jewish community over the last year,” and is especially mindful of the impending anniversary Monday of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists that killed nearly 1,200 people.
Mayor Jacob Frey, who is Jewish, said he was at Temple Israel with his wife during Rosh Hashanah.
“We all have an obligation here not just to act with peace, but to encourage peace from our neighbors, regardless of what happens around the world,” he said.
Star Tribune
Nine years after his murder, Barway Collins returns to a community that won’t forget him
Gary Hines, music director for the Grammy award-winning group Sounds of Blackness, played “Tears in Heaven” as the family sang. Barway’s sister Lulu, 2, babbled through the harmonies, saying “Hi” to her brother’s statue before hugging and kissing it.
For Hines, celebrating Collins’ life represents Sounds of Blackness’ mission to connect communities through music.
“I would hope that the unity in the community that we see right here, at this beautiful memorial event and service, would be sustained — would proliferate from community to the cities, state and nation,” he said.
Barway’s death has haunted Keith Demmings for years. The 61-year-old bus driver often thinks about what could have been done to prevent his death, and about what his son could learn from Barway’s life. Demmings said he hopes more adults will watch out for and care about youth in the community.
Barway “could have been a basketball player. He could have been a senator or something. He could have been the president of the United States, but we were robbed of that,” Demmings said. “I feel that our youth are being cheated. We can’t just brush it off, we need to be more involved … [in] raising our kids.”
As Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump begin the final 30-day push for the White House, they are locked in a neck-and-neck race from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt.
With polling averages showing all seven battleground states nearly tied, many Democrats believe their biggest advantage may be an extensive ground game operation that their party has spent more than a year building across the country. Trump’s campaign thinks that recent events — the escalating conflict in the Middle East and deadly hurricanes that have killed more than 200 people across the Southeast — will give it an edge in the final weeks.
In some ways, the two approaches mirror the final days of the 2016 race, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign boasted about a massive, data-driven field organization, while Trump pressed a national message based on stoking anti-immigrant sentiment and improving the economy with a relatively meager staff and almost no field operation in the key states. Trump, of course, prevailed, helped by the FBI director’s reopening of an inquiry into the Democratic nominee’s emails.
This time, Democrats have no such overconfidence. Although Trump and his party have lost or underperformed in every major election since then, many Democrats believe this year is one they could lose.
“Anybody would be a fool to write Trump off,” said Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor who ran for president in 2020. “I think she’s going to win, but am I absolutely sure she’s going to win? No. The 2016 experience taught all of us that you can’t count this guy out.”
Veterans of presidential campaigns say this year’s contest is distinct for how little impact major political events seem to be having on the relative standing of the two candidates. Two assassination attempts on Trump, a presidential and vice presidential debate and the party conventions have brought both him and Harris temporary bumps in support but no enduring shifts in public opinion.
The result is what top officials in both campaigns describe as a grind-it-out race, where movements measured in a few thousand votes could sway the outcome of the entire election.
Ralph Reed, a socially conservative activist in Georgia who is helping turn out voters for the Trump campaign, said he could not recall a presidential race since 2000 in which so many states were effectively tied this late in the campaign.
