Fox9’s Tom Lyden interviewed me about “The King of Skid Row” for a report on modern homelessness

https://www.fox9.com/news/minnesota-untold-the-unwanted-lessons-from-the-gateway

Posted in King of Skid Row | Leave a comment

Just leave your children with us

Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 2020

Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 2020

Posted in Signs of wonder | Leave a comment

The fried foot in your freezer

Dateline: Durham, North Carolina. It’s July 2004, and a family has bought a box of Banquet brand frozen fried chicken. When they brought it home and opened it up, they got a shock. Inside was what appeared to be a small human foot, battered and fried just like the chicken pieces all around it. Five little toes looked bite-sized, but their appetite was likely gone by then. They called the police. The police came, and took the foot and put it in a city freezer. The next day they brought it to the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Chapel Hill. The X-ray revealed no bone structure. It was merely dough, intricately sculpted for maximum shock value. No crime here. But the investigation wasn’t finished. Conagra knew its reputation was on the line if more customers found deep-fried phony human body parts intermingled with authentic frozen fried chicken. Somehow they discovered the perp at one of its plants in Batesville, Arkansas, and promptly fired that person, along with three others who presumably could or should have been aware of the fried foot caper. Having supervised our coverage of this story when I was a newspaper editor in Durham, I have since wondered what motivated the sculptor. Was it a subtle critique of meat-eaters? A quiet rebellion against the tedium of the assembly line? Or was it a long-suppressed creative urge finally expressing itself with the only medium at hand, a pile of gloppy dough? And then I think of the moment when a supervisor or security summoned the person to a meeting, and a photo, perhaps this one, of the evidence was displayed. Then HR would read the section of the company rules that prohibited employees from making phony human body parts and putting them in with the chicken, and that would be it. I hope this was the moment an artistic career was born. 

Posted in True stories | 1 Comment

Where is this city?

I have no idea where this city is

Posted in Mysteries | Leave a comment

Secrecy Rules: A continuing series in the Star Tribune in 2017

Secrecy is emerging as a reflex at all levels of government in Minnesota and across the nation. Mounting demands for corporate confidentiality, individual privacy and security have dramatically restricted the public’s right to know. Lobbyists representing local governments, law enforcement and businesses are chipping away at Minnesota’s public records law. State legislators have added hundreds of exceptions to the public disclosure law, raising the number of secrecy provisions to at least 660. Read more about my Star Tribune project, which debuted on March 12, 2017 and continues through the year.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The painting in my garage, and the unclaimed reward

Steve and Betsy Nelson, why do you want this?

A short time after I moved to Minneapolis, I was in the garage searching for a tool. I happened to see something tucked at the back of a shelf, so far that I hadn’t noticed it earlier. I pulled out this painting. It’s an ugly still life on canvas, mounted by an amateur on a wooden frame. Not the work of an incompetent, but the sort of thing that wouldn’t even sell at a garage sale. Then I turned it over, and everything changed.

The text is faded, but still legible

Someone wrote “De Colores!” with an exclamation point on the wood frame. On the back of the canvas itself, are some illegible words, possibly a name. What set my mind spinning was the neat writing, in pencil:

If found

Please Return

to Steve + Betsy

Nelson

There will be

a reward

A reward! What could it be? If this painting was valuable enough for Steve and Betsy to promise a reward, how could they let it out of their grasp? How did it end up in my garage? No one named Steve and Betsy Nelson ever lived in this house. I checked. Having tracked down plenty of people in my time, I know that there’s nothing worse than trying to narrow down all of the Steve and Betsy Nelsons to the ones you want. They didn’t leave a phone number or an address, only that tantalizing promise. Steve and Betsy, if you read this, I’m ready to claim my reward.

Posted in Mysteries | Leave a comment