Welcome to the age of artificial stupidity (AS)...

 Warner Brothers movie poster
from a 2001 movie directed
by Steven Spielberg (Wikipedia)

Written by Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/9-6-25

I’m so glad artificial intelligence has arrived on the scene. It explains a lot about my own life.

I realize now that whatever intelligence might be ascribed to me has been artificial all along. Plus, for everything there is an opposite, right? So, if there is artificial intelligence (often referred to as AI) there has to be artificial stupidity (AS). You know, like black-white, hot-cold, sick-well, etc.

What a relief that is. Whenever you feel stupid — and who doesn’t sometimes? — or do something stupid (politicians included), now you can say it’s just artificial stupidity and get on with your stupid life.

Many years ago, I wrote a column about hockey, titled “The Game of Hockey Is a Lot Like Life — Stupid.” This was back when I was a hockey dad, probably he dumbest — make that stupidest — hockey dad in the bleachers watching the games. In short, I’d never taken an interest in hockey so I knew nothing about the rules of the game when I was thrust into the vortex of youth hockey in Northern Minnesota.

Here are some excerpts from that hockey column, every paragraph of which ends with the word stupid. It starts out:

“Heaven knows I try to keep up with what’s going on when I watch hockey, but it’s a fast game, and most of the time I don’t know why the referee or linesman or other guy in a striped shirt blows the whistle, so I ask somebody and when they tell me I feel stupid.”

A couple of paragraphs later it goes on:

“It’s easy for guys who have been patrons of the game of hockey to recognize infractions of the rules, but how’s somebody like me who doesn’t know cross checking from butt ending supposed to know when they’re doing it? Then, if I ask somebody, I feel stupid.”

Here’s another quote from this old column to help me make my point:

“There are certain things I understand about hockey, but then everybody understands them because how could you miss them? Like ‘charging.’ Your kid (your kid is why you see all this hockey in the first place) goes on the road for a weekend series and you have to stay in a hotel for two nights, eating at restaurants, and you pull out your Master Card and put the weekend on it, that’s called charging, and when I do it, I feel stupid.”

I wrote most of that more than 30 years ago and I’ve been feeling stupid ever since. But hold it! We now realize it must have been artificial stupidity, the opposite of artificial intelligence.

Here’s the final paragraph from that old missive:

“Sometimes I watch the frustration the hockey players experience in chasing that little black puck around a slippery surface while being knocked around by other people just for trying to achieve a goal. I think of hockey as a metaphor for life, because the same things happen to you when you try to accomplish anything — there’s always somebody in your way to knock you off balance and stop you from reaching your goal — and when my mind wanders down those philosophical pathways I miss something on the ice like ‘hooking’ or ‘slashing’ and I ask somebody what happened and when they tell me I feel stupid.

Unfortunately, hockey isn’t the only area of life where situations can make you feel…well, you know. Like if I’m at Menards or Home Depot in my yuppie khakis and polo shirt perusing the shelves and I recognize nothing on display; what the stuff is for in the home, and even the tools to install it. Then I look down the aisle and there’s this corpulent guy in bib overalls and camo cap who is intelligently filling a shopping cart with stuff that I don’t even recognize that he’ll need for some home project. I realize that the only things I do recognize in the whole place are cooking grills and toilet paper, and I feel stupid.

And don’t get me started on bird baths. We have had birth baths at our homes over the years, including today where one is located along a sidewalk leading to the street. I walk by it every day and I have never seen a bird taking a bath in it. And in past yards where we’ve put out bird baths, I never saw any birds bathing either, and I wonder why we put out good hard-earned money for bird baths that never get used, or even care about birds’ bathing habits, and I feel stupid.

Finally (and it’s about time), how about this? I’m sent to the grocery store and told to get sweet potatoes and when I get home, I’m told I got yams. I realize I don’t know the difference between sweet potatoes and yams and, yup, I feel stupid.

Oh, and what about TV remotes? They are intentionally designed to make the user feel stupid. (One of the buttons on ours I fear would send the Strategic Air Command on a nuclear attack on Moscow.)

But I am relieved to know now that all this is only artificial stupidity. I hope my intelligence ain’t. (Oops, better brush up on your usage, pal.  Ain’t ain’t no real word…stupid.) 

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.

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.

What to wear when visiting the Vatican...

Oblique/St. Peter's Square, Vatican City

Written by Jim Heffernan/DuluthNewsTribune/6-7-25

I like new Pope Leo XIV, although it remains to be seen how he’ll turn out (sainthood maybe?). Seems like it takes 200 to 300 years. There have been several Pope Leos before Pope Leo XIV — 13 (XIII) to be exact, according to all 10 (X) of my fingers plus three (III) toothpicks.

 

Pope Leo XIV is the first American to head the Holy See, prompting many to exclaim “Holy Mackerel!” — with all due respect, of course. 

 

When I was a kid in school, all of the classroom clocks had Roman numerals marking the hours I through XII. That pretty much sums up what I learned in school. Once you get beyond XII, though, it can get tough to figure out what the Roman numerals mean. I’m lost on the Super Bowl. The last one was LIX; parse that if you can.

 

I do think Roman numerals add a touch of class to individuals who achieve great fame and success, like kings, queens and popes, or descendants of rich guys like Scrooge McDuck (the Disney favorite who had so much money he had to push it around with a plow). His grandson, Dr. Scrooge McDuck III, is a distinguished physician and not a quack.

 

But enough secular stuff. Let’s get back to Leo popes, or Pope Leos, and other popes. I was brought up a Lutheran, so my pope lore is very pooped. But I have some.

 

I was scared of Pope Pius XII, the pope of my childhood. At movies I recall seeing Pius XII in a lot in the newsreels they used to screen between showings of the movies. This was in ancient times before TV became ubiquitous.

 

They always showed slender and austere Pope Pius XII (he was pope from 1939 to 1958, Google reports) being carried around seated in a portable throne on the shoulders of the gaily clad Swiss Guards, although I didn’t know then that they were Swiss Guards. They looked like classy pirates, to coin an oxymoron.

 

Pius XII never smiled, but, understanding a little bit about world history now as a grownup, he had very little to smile about. He took over the Holy See right at the outbreak of World War II (hey, more Roman numerals) and served throughout that war and the Cold War and various and sundry other wars. Dour times. All times are dour, come to think of it.

 

Still, as a youngster, and a Lutheran one to boot, I was slightly afraid of the austere pope, although I thought it was kind of neat in those pre-Popemobile days that he never walked anywhere and was carried on the shoulders of six (VI) men. I was a lazy boy and would have preferred being carried around like that myself.

 

I hadn’t given my childhood Pope Pius XII much thought since I was a kid but ran smack into him a few years ago on a trip to Rome. Walking into St. Peter’s Basilica, there he was depicted in a huge mural on a wall. He still wasn’t smiling, although he might have if he’d known about my Vatican pants.

 

This was back in the days — the ‘90s — when men’s casual pants often had zippers just above the knees and if the weather suddenly went from cool to warm you could unzip the lower legs and go around in shorts so your calves and shins wouldn’t overheat. Well, when the group we were with in Rome was told men weren’t allowed to wear shorts in the Sistine Chapel or Basilica I donned my khakis with the zippered knees.

 

After exiting the holy sites on a warm Rome day, I quickly unzipped each leg and, voila, I was in shorts. 

St.Peter's Square, Vatican City

Since then I have always called them my Vatican pants.

Vatican pants aside, as soon as the new pope declared he would be named Leo XIV I was reminded of an earlier Leo pope, Pope Leo III (just three fingers), serving toward the end of the first century in the year of our Lord 795 or so. I recalled from somnambulant world history studies in college days (History LX?) that it was Leo III who crowned the renowned Charlemagne as emperor of just about everywhere in Europe back then.

 

Everybody knows about Charlemagne, but hardly anyone remembers that his father was Pepin the Short, and his grandson was Charles the Bald and great-grandson was Charles the Fat. This was almost 2,000 years before political correctness. Learning stuff like that is what college is all about.

 

Finally (and it’s about time) I want to wish new Pope Leo XIV well. He is neither short nor fat nor bald. That should stand him in good stead. We’ll see in a couple of hundred years how it all turns out. Unfortunately, I will no longer be with us.

 

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. 

Opinion: Stubbed toe was Biden's doing, Trump tells Martian…

 

Opinion: by Jim Heffernan- published in the DuluthNewsTribune/May14, 2025

Here’s the latest fake news that’s unfit to print...

 WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, seen limping on the White House lawn, said today that he stubbed his toe in the Lincoln bathroom due to a remodeling project in 2003 ordered by former President Joe Biden.

 

“It’s Biden’s fault,” Trump asserted. He assured reporters that his stubbed toe would “heal soon” and his gait would return to normal. He said the injury would not prevent him from golfing. “That’s what golf carts are for.”

 

Describing the incident, he said he had just emerged from a shower in which “I washed my beautiful hair despite an inadequate shower head” when his bare foot hit a commode that had been ordered moved by Biden, resulting in the injury.

 

Observers said this is the first time in American history that toilet routines of a U.S. president had been a subject of public discussion and concern. A president’s bare feet have never been an issue in the past.

 

It was the latest surprise incident involving the 78-year-old president who had recently completed the first 100 days in office in his second term. Observers were shocked when the patriotic president appeared in public without an American flag lapel pin on his blue suit.

 

When it was pointed out in the daily press briefing to raven-haired press secretary Dartha Vader, the session was immediately ended and media members were ushered from the White House as Secret Service personnel converged on the Rose Garden, sunglasses affixed.

 

When the area had been secured, it was announced that the lapse was the fault of former President Biden whose remodeling project in the Lincoln bathroom had discombobulated President Trump, who was still groggy after his usual three hours of sleep. “He just woke up…er, not woke but he’d just awakened,” a spokeswoman said.  “The president is never woke.”

 

The American flag pin was returned to his lapel a few minutes later as the president presided over an Oval Office gathering honoring aliens from Mars whose arrival by flying saucer after the 2024 election had been covered up for security reasons by former President Biden before leaving office.

 

“These are fine aliens who are a great credit to Mars, where the United States soon will visit,” Trump said. “Biden placed the United States at great risk by not welcoming them to the White House when they demanded: ‘Take me to your leader,’ although Biden was no leader,” Trump went on.

 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other cabinet members praised Trump for his effusive welcoming of the Martians. “You are the greatest greeter of space aliens since the cast of ‘ET’,” Rubio asserted to the smiling president who adopted a humble demeanor for the first time since his inauguration in January. 

 

Close associates of the president said it was likely the Martians were sent to America by God when the country finally elected a leader worthy of the title “leader” in intergalactic terms. “God would never have done such a thing when Biden, who was more interested in remodeling the Lincoln bathroom than making peace with the universe, was president,” an aide rhapsodized.

 

For his part, Trump reportedly asked the space visitors if they’d ever stubbed their three-inch toes.

 

Film at 10.

 

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.

Largely true confessions of a classical music nut...

Johann Sebastian Bach (Wikipedia)

Written by Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/5-3-25 It’s not exactly Bob Dylan or Prince, I was thinking as, arms waving, I conducted a large symphony orchestra. Resounding through the concert hall was the second movement of Beethoven’s sixth symphony (the one with the great thunderstorm). The concert hall was our living room, with nobody home, the CD player blaring. My own Homegrown Music Festival.

 

I wouldn’t dare do such a thing if anyone was watching. Enter the men in white coats. (They’ll be back!)

 

Can’t help it though. I’m a classical music nut, have been since childhood, a proclivity that has survived through dozens of musical genres I have listened to during my long life, including the estimable Mr. Dylan — more on whom later.

 

I was in my teens in high school when Elvis hit and he changed everything in popular music. I thought he was great, even though I maintained my suppressed love of classical music in my high school years, attempting to be “cool” (and failing). Brahms is great, but not cool, like Chubby Checker.

 

Before Elvis, much popular music could only be looked upon today as “sappy.” The 1950s radio was humming with such songs as “How Much is that Doggie in the Window (arf-arf)” and “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane” (tribute to a newborn). How about “On the Baby’s Knuckle or the Baby’s Knee, Where Will the Baby’s Dimple Be?” Great questions of our time. Or that time, I guess. Oh, can’t forget “The Shrimp Boats are a-Comin’, There’s Dancin’ Tonight.” But not the “Peppermint Twist.”

 

I always had classical music to fall back on though, earworm-wise.

 

It goes back a long way in my life, to fairly early childhood. There was a lot of classical music in my growing-up home because my mother was an accomplished pianist who played it on our piano. Plus, we had recordings of some of the great composers.  Bach was big, Bing not so much.  

 

Once as a child I was on a program in our church parlors in which Sunday school kids were interviewed. I was six or seven years old. When they got to me, the adult interviewer asked me several questions and it came out that I liked music. 

 

“What kind of music do you like? I was asked.

 

“Certainly not Shostakovich,” was my response.

 

People in the audience roared with laughter in appreciation of this rebuke of a Russian composer. One woman hugged me. It was when the Cold War was heating up right after World War II and anything anti-Russian was appreciated in America. 

 

At that moment I decided I would grow up to be president of the United States but it turns out I had to settle for living room maestro. Ironically, later in life I grew of appreciate Dmitri Shostakovich’s music, although I’m not that crazy about trying to spell his name. Google knows how.

 

Still, the music goes on and on, as do the years. I thought the folk singing Kingston Trio was pretty cool in the early ‘60s and also embraced some jazz — Shearing, Brubeck — but classical music from the romantic era (largely 19th Century) has remained my staple although I also can also go for baroque and dip into the 20th Century. Remember that century?

 

Beatles? I missed being a fan, but they have their moments. What about rock ’n’ roll? It can’t be avoided. If it could, I would. I once I wrote “I’ve got a right to hate the blues” in a column and got hate mail. Prince is huge, but not for me. My rain ain’t purple. Sorry, kids. (My own kids, great fans.)

 

Can’t forget Country/Western. It’s tuneful, I admit. I once wrote a Country/Western song called “It’s a One Woman Kitchen/She’s Out There Cookin’ All the Time” that went over big in the doghouse.

 

Moving on in the world of music: What about hip-hop? Many of my generation are hopping to their orthopedic surgeons to see about getting new hips. Being a registered geezer, that’s all I have to say about that genre. (Don’t tell my grandchildren.)

 

Why all this now? Bob Dylan has suddenly reappeared in our lives with a recent concert in Mankato, Minn, that has received quite a bit of attention in his home state, as has the movie about his early life, “A Complete Unknown.” Saw it. Liked it.

 

Being such a stuffy classical music guy, it has taken me a long time to appreciate Dylan’s art but I have come to realize he is a brilliant thinker, a gifted poet and a talented musician with a plain singing voice for conveying his thoughts. Grand opera it ain’t, though.

 

Dylan’s ability to stay in the public eye and maintain his enormous popularity for 65 years while seeming not to care is unique. He has never sought glory in his birth town or where he grew up — Duluth and Hibbing. If I had done that well, I’d have demanded a ticker-tape parade.

  

My sticking with classical music in these troubled times can be upsetting though. In a restless overnight dream, I failed to pull the drapes while conducting the massive Gustav Mahler Second Symphony (titled “Resurrection”) and somebody must have seen me waving my arms and reported it.

 

Glancing outside in my dream I noticed two strange men approaching the house. They were wearing white coats. That was okay, though. “I’ve always trusted the kindness of strangers,” as Blanche said in “Streetcar” when they came to get her. (Oops, don’t get me started on theater.)

 

Rrrrring went the alarm clock. I was resurrected.

 

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.

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.