My life: Plenty of war and little peace...

Gen. Douglas MacArthur & troops landing in the Philippines
(National Archives)

Written by Jim Heffernan/DuluthNewsTribune/8-2-25  

I might as well own up to my advanced age. I was born in 1939. For those who count on their fingers (I sometimes do) you’d need eight persons counting all of their fingers and one with a hand tied behind her back. That’d be 85.

 

Never thought it would happen to me. Or Ringo Starr, who just caught up to me. If you don’t know who Ringo Starr is, you’re either older than I (and that ain’t easy, friend) or way younger.

 

A few contemporaries of mine were chatting over a restaurant breakfast recently. Age came up. And let me put some of those 85 fingers into perspective. You are reading writings of a person whose parents — both mother and father — were born BEFORE MOTORIZED FLIGHT. Yup, before the Wright Brothers managed to get their original craft into the air at Kitty Hawk in 1903. And there weren’t many cars around then either.

 

Going back even further, my oldest grandparent, and the only one who ever laid eyes on me, was born in 1855 (I can prove it on his tombstone). So if you pay attention to history, there were a lot of people still around then whose lives overlapped with that of George Washington, who died in 1799.

 

That grandfather was 10 years old when Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 at the end of the Civil War.  It was said he claimed he could see the glow of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 from his home in southern Ontario. I never got to ask him about that or anything else: he died when I was two years old, a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor, marking entry of the United States in to World War II.

 

There’s been a lot of war in my lifetime. My birth in October 1939 came a month after German Chancellor Adolf Hitler actually started WW II by invading and massacring Poland a month earlier.

 

Welcome to the world, young James (called at the time, Jimmy).

 

I actually remember some things about World War II as I grew into in my formative years — the first five years of my life. I remember a lot of talk about war and neighbor young men who had gone off to fight it. A couple of them who were members of our church were killed overseas. I remember the collective grief over that.

 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt
signing the Declaration of War against Japan
(National Archives)

Perhaps the most significant things in that era that I remember are the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945 and the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, bringing the war to an end. I recall how happy everyone was that the war was over, as I was anticipating entering first grade, having successfully completed kindergarten. (I excelled at the daily nap.)

 

That “great” war was only the beginning of a succession of wars in the ensuing years as I was growing up. Five years after WW II came to an end, along came the Korean War. Wow, another war. I was 10 and still in elementary school. Exciting to a 10-year-old with sketchy memories of the earlier war. Not so exciting to the “kids” just a few years older in their later teens who were drafted into the military and sent over to fight it, many of whom never came back.

 

But hey, it only lasted three years. Surely that would be it with war. Yeah, right. Of course, there was fighting here and there in those intervening years until my own generation that, if called upon, could be drafted to fight. Every boy of my generation was required to register for the draft at age 18 and face induction into the army when your name came up. It was called your “military obligation.”

 

So I registered and managed to avoid being drafted until my early 20s with a college student deferment, but they finally caught up with me and down I went to Minneapolis for an army physical exam. I passed, in spite of being stone deaf in one ear since childhood. I should have had bone spurs.

 

Facing the draft, I joined the Minnesota Army National Guard where you could serve six months of active duty and six years as a weekend warrior back in your home state. I became a general…screw up.

 

While on active duty I recall sitting on bleachers with other inductees during boot camp and having a gruff sergeant lecture us for not trying hard enough in our training to become good soldiers. I’ll try to quote him. “You guys better start paying attention, ‘cause there’s a little country called Vietnam where things are heating up.” 

 

Vietnam? Where’s that? It was 1963. 

Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washinton D.C.
(Wikipedia)

 

When that one heated up and kept going for 10 more years, more than 55,000 Americans had given up their lives when it finally came to an end. I’ve stood at that long, black wall in Washington, D.C., with all their names carved in stone. Try that sometime; it’s hard to retain composure. Very hard.

 

Oops, I’m running out of space here, but not wars. Can’t recount every war in my lifetime but here we are in 2025 with war once again all around us — Russia vs. Ukraine, Israel vs. Hamas. Lots of people are dying still. Iran or Russia vs. United States? Always a question mark.

 

You hear quite a bit of talk these days about possible World War III. If it happens, I’ll probably miss it, but my grandchildren won’t. Concerns me deeply.

 

Happy summer. Enjoy. Better hurry, there’s not too much left.

 

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.

Einstein kin had role in Duluth fluoride fight...

Written by Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/7-5-25

Yikes! The fluoride-in-the-drinking-water issue is back! And I don’t use exclamation points indiscriminately (there goes two). I allow myself about a dozen a year. But I can’t help it because the fluoridation issue was so large a part of my early professional life, if you can call a neophyte “cub” newspaper reporter a professional. I really shouldn’t.

 

I came to work at this newspaper in the first half of the 1960s and ran smack-dab into the same fluoridation issue that is roiling the country now, but back then was hot right here in Duluth, and even involved Albert Einstein. (More on that later.)

 

 It shows, once again, that the more things change the more they stay the same. Except for diapers, of course.

 

Local leaders had decided that Duluth water should be fluoridated to prevent tooth decay, especially in children. Many citizens opposed such an idea as dangerous to the health of children and adults, regardless of race, color, creed, national origin, foot size or eye color (that’s everybody).

 

And now these disagreements are back, thanks largely to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s Trump-appointed health secretary and leading cod liver oil advocate. He has vociferously inveighed against fluoride, claiming it is unsafe for human consumption. Fluoride has already been outlawed in many venues: Fluorida — oops, Florida — and Utah have banned it in public water systems statewide.

 

Hmmm…I wonder what else those states have in common. Not weather.

 

I actually recall Duluth’s fluoridation fight with some fondness. Youthful memories are often golden. I worked nights in my new job at this newspaper, learning as I went along. I hadn’t majored in journalism in college so I had a lot to learn. My basket-weaving background was inadequate preparation.

 

But working evenings for the morning paper (there were two, six days a week — called by some the Morning Liar and Evening Repeater. I was assigned to cover numerous gatherings where fluoridation was debated, feeling like a big cheese reporter already. City officials would praise fluoridation by extolling its positive effect on the teeth of children as they grew up, and adults as they aged.

 

Opponents considered fluoride in our drinking water a poison that would destroy everyone’s health. Evil communism was even blamed. There was word that dentists feared it would put them out of business, but the opponents had only one dentist who would speak out publicly.

 

So off I’d go in a peppy press car to various public meetings with notebook in hand — community clubs and other meeting places where the two sides could fight it out. Many were quite well attended by people representing each side, together with others just wanting to hear what it was all about. Then I’d race back to the newspaper and, to the best of my fledgling ability, write it up for the morning edition.

 

My most memorable moment in this crusade was at a large community club meeting attended, in spirit, by Albert Einstein, thanks to one of the most strident Duluth opponents. The wife of a high-level city official, she led the antis, strongly condemning fluoridation at every opportunity. You wonder how that marriage was going, with her husband’s employer plugging it.

 

After covering the public meeting, as I was about to leave, she stopped me to further emphasize her anti-fluoride views. Her main point to me was that Albert Einstein’s nephew opposed fluoridating water, the implication, of course, being that: 1) Albert Einstein was the smartest man in the world; 2) his nephew must, perforce, be very smart too; 3) the nephew opposes fluoridation, and 4) therefore Duluth should not fluoridate its water.

 

It was different theory of relativity than the one Albert Einstein was famous for. You never know what your relatives might do.

 

All of this came to an end here in 1967 when the Minnesota Legislature passed a law requiring fluoridation of all municipal water systems. Duluth complied and I’ve been drinking it ever since, and that’s a long, long time. 

 

Hold it! Let me check my pulse.

 

The city of Brainerd, Minn., resisted, though. The fluoridation fight continued there for almost 15 years with that city finally complying in 1980, much to the chagrin of many no-Brainerdites.

 

Finally, and for the record, of course I moved on from those neophyte years and became a seasoned journalist, covering many of the important stories throughout the Northland. In recognition of that, I was once awarded the Pullet Surprise for outstanding reporting on the rooster and hen competition at the Carlton County Fair.

 

But I hate to boast.

 

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.