Duluth link figured in early Trump show firing...

Jarvis, 2022/Wikipedia

Written by Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNews Tribune/4-5-25

I only viewed Donald Trump’s TV show “The Apprentice” one time. I tuned in because the granddaughter of a good friend here in Duluth had made it to the final segment after surviving for several weeks.

 

In this half hour, she would either win it all or be fired.

 

Of course, I was aware of Trump’s celebrity but I’d never paid close attention to him before. This all took place around 20 years ago, long before he entered politics.

 

As he appeared as the “boss” on the program, I found myself fascinated by his coiffure. Over the years my hairline had been receding, and, lamentably, I’ve had to live with it. I’d never seen a “comb over” quite like the one Trump sported.

 

But enough about hair for the moment. I tuned in to his “reality” TV show to see the granddaughter of my long-time friend and his wife, a Duluth couple who raised their family here. My friend and I had met when I took a news reporter job at the Duluth Herald and News Tribune in the early 1960s.

 

He was a seasoned journalist who had had considerable past experience as a newspaper and wire service reporter. He had left journalism to operate a business started years before by his wife’s family in Ironwood, Mich. Hard economic times had led to the demise of that business and my friend returned to journalism, moving here and taking a job as a newspaper reporter.

 

He was quite a bit older than I, but we became fast friends in spite of the difference in our ages. He and his wife had started a family, two daughters raised largely in Duluth.

 

A few years later, as his kids were growing into their teen years, my friend left the newspaper and went to work for the city of Duluth in a job as a business developer whose main objective was to seek out and persuade businesses to start here or relocate from elsewhere. Goal? Jobs for Duluthians.

 

His moving on didn’t end our friendship, though. After all, his office in Duluth City Hall was just across the street from the newspaper, so we continued to frequently have lunch together and have other contact, including socially with our wives.

 

As years went by, his daughters went to high school here, one of them continuing her education at UMD. It was there that she met her future husband and after graduating, marrying and moving to the Twin Cities, she had her first child, a girl, my friend’s first grandchild.

 

As with most who welcome a grandchild into the family, my friend was overjoyed and captivated. His love prompted him to talk about the little girls they named Rebecca, nickname Becky — Becky did this, Becky did that, Becky’s so smart — so often I and other friends would good-naturedly kid him about it. I found out some years later how that happens when we welcomed grandchildren.

 

Time marched on, as it always does, and my friend’s granddaughter grew into a stellar high school student who gained some public attention in the Twin Cities even then. Following graduation, she went on to the University of Chicago, after which I lost track of her for a few years.

 

Then we heard she was competing on “The Apprentice” on which host businessman Donald Trump conducted “job” interviews with a group of contestants, eliminating several by “firing” them until the final segment, with two contestants left, one of whom would be fired and the other offered a job.

 

That’s when I tuned in to see the fate of my friend’s granddaughter, whom I’d met once at her grandparents’ anniversary celebration. Coincidentally, she had broken her ankle and had appeared on the show with crutches. The other “survivor” of weeks of firings was a male of similar age. He seemed like a fine young man, but, of course, I was rooting for my friend’s granddaughter, Becky.

 

Trump fired Becky at the end of that segment, and he offered her opponent a job in one of his real estate enterprises. I’ve never heard of him again.

 

But Becky has been heard from. She is Rebecca Jarvis, chief business, economics and technology correspondent for ABC News in New York. In addition, she appears regularly on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” frequently co-hosting with George Stephanopoulos and the other regular morning hosts, and also on other ABC programs.

 

So there’s a connection with Duluth. Her grandfather, my good friend, was Jerome “Jerry” Marks, who ended his career as an industrial developer for the city and the Seaway Port Authority and retired to Florida, where he passed away a few years ago. But he and his wife, Helen, lived long enough to see Becky on “The Apprentice.”

 

Rebecca’s mother, Gail Marks Jarvis, a graduate of Duluth Central High School and UMD, also worked for the Duluth and St. Paul newspapers and later became a syndicated financial columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Rebecca’s father, Jim, is a lawyer.

 

Donald J. Trump, he of the incredible comb over (Trump Hair Arrangement Syndrome?), went on to get elected president of the United States…twice, and is still firing people. And I’m still losing hair, darn it.

 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org. 

Working class doesn’t have to involve actual work...

Written By Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune/3-8-25

Looks like Musk and Trump have taken over the Republican Party’s elephant from tusk to rump.

Hey…that has a ring to it.

I’m a donkey guy myself. Can’t help it; I come from a “working class” family, although I’ve never been that nuts about working. I think my father, a union man, voted for the GOP’s Eisenhower.  Practically everybody did. I’m so old I saw Eisenhower twice, more on which later. And don’t get me started on Truman. Saw him too. Missed Lincoln.

(Side note: Proper journalism requires using first names as well as last on initial mention. So, for the preceding paragraphs the first names are Elon, Donald, Dwight, Harry and Abraham. Thanks.)

I was never that comfortable with coming from a working class family because of my lack of affinity for work. I had an older relative on my father’s side who was infamously lazy and when I was young, I was constantly warned not to be like him.

But I couldn’t help it. I was never that nuts about “work,” preferring to sit around in my youth doing not much. Some young men of my generation were proudly known as “good hard workers.” I never had that problem.

It was noticed by an observant neighbor woman who told my mother I sat around too much. I didn’t even care for playing sandlot sports; too much work running around the bases or up and down the field. And don’t get me started on golf, and I never did. I preferred lying in hammocks, looking at the stars or going to theaters and looking at the movie stars.

When I got older, I held a few jobs that actually involved physical work, but then I discovered journalism, much of which involves sitting around until a house burns down, somebody gets shot or a flood occurs. Fine with me.

Before I found journalism, I found the study of economics in college encouraging (you get to sit around a lot in college), especially economist Thorstein Veblen’s “The Theory of the Leisure Class.” Finally, a social class I liked.

Veblen was a colorful Norwegian — yup, it can happen — who spent much of his life in Minnesota well over 100 years ago. He was highly respected in academic circles but not so much by the very wealthy, his “Leisure Class.”

I don’t sense that Trump and Musk (or Musk and Trump, if you prefer) think much in terms of their class affiliation, comfortable with being in the upper, billionaire classes, even leisure, although they seem pretty busy these days dealing with lower classes.

One sign of membership in the Trump/Musk classes: French cuffs. Trump never appears on TV without French cuffs poking out of his suit coat sleeves. This is a sure sign of an affluent upper class member, especially when the cuffs are fastened with gold cufflinks.

I suspect that many of the people who voted for him have never worn French cuffs.

Earlier in this treatise I mentioned seeing Eisenhower twice. The first time was at the Minnesota State Fair when I was a child shortly after World War II. He was still a general, wearing his uniform wandering through the fair with the governor. The second time was in 1952 while he was campaigning for president in Duluth. His motorcade drove to the airport not far from my home and I saw him smile through a limo window.

Truman, who as vice president became president when Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945, campaigned here in 1948. They let us out of school early so we could see him being driven down Superior Street sitting high on the back of a convertible, smiling and waving. He won.

I believe I mentioned those presidential visits in a column several years ago, but many of the then readers are no longer with us. Now I’d better get my (Biblical word for donkey) out of here and lie down.

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.