Dave Wood

I recently read an article about why the long-running Seinfeld sitcom show was so successful. Why? The critic opined that viewers identified with it because it was ABOUT NOTHING. Well big hairy deal! Let me tell you I’ve been there, done that, years before Seinfeld and his ace writer Larry David came up with their so-called revolutionary idea.

It all began when I left the Groves of Academe to hire on as a feature writer for the Minneapolis Tribune. Of course, I had no experience with journalism, nor big ideas like global warming, sexual harassment, and racial problems. What to do with me? My Ivy Leaguer boss came up with a new Friday section called “Neighbors.” It was to be an eight-page special which dealt with small town Minnesota, and urban readers who had never done anything special. We were two reporters, one photographer and one copy editor strong. Our job was to fan out and write stories about nothing of significant import. Just stories. Once a month, we traveled to a town of less than 3,000 people where nothing had happened and we covered it like hungry dogs on a gut cart. In one town of 95 souls, Reggie Radniecki interviewed EVERYONE IN TOWN.

Pretty obviously, no serious reporters wanted the assignment, for they all wanted to be just like Woodward and Bernstein. So our hapless crew journeyed to towns like Mahnomen and Aitkin.  Our first task was to go directly to the local weekly editor and tell him or her that the Minneapolis Tribune was in town to do some interviewing. The editors invariably asked, “What have we done this time?” or “Are we in trouble?” “Is President Carter coming to our town?” And we’d answer, “No, no, nothing’s wrong, we just want to nose around for several days and see what’s going on.” They never believed us, until they saw the stories in the Trib on the following Friday.

On those pages readers learned about local personalities. On the Iron Range, a bartender told me that the city media didn’t know how to pronounce Jim Klobuchar, Sen. Amy’s father, a well-known Minneapolis Star columnist. “It’s KloBUCHar. For God’s sake. You city guys call it KLObuchar! They learned that in Winthrop there was 93-year-old Mina Peterson, who had baked all the pies for Lyle’s Café for 40 years and told us she knows Winthrop native Roger Erickson personally and thinks he’s the funniest guy on WCCO Radio. “Once I heard him say he was glad when his dad’s horse kicked him and that the hoof landed on his hard head so it didn’t hurt him at all. He’s such a card!”

Let’s not forget my writing partner, the magnificent feature writer Peg Meier (author of “Bring Warm Clothes”), who discovered that tiny Wadena was possessed of its own private detective, who had a difficult time maintaining his anonymity. I traveled to New Prague, where I witnessed and reported a monumental argument between bartender Theophile Mares and the local well digger about the proper ingredients for making the Bohemian sausage called Jitrnice, essentially ground up pig snouts, buckwheat groats and garlic spiked with fresh pig blood. Later I returned and was assigned to peel ten large bulbs of garlic. My reportage didn’t inspire an international crisis, but it did alert the Minnesota Dept. of Health to send out an agent to see if the elderly Bohemians were planning to sell the stuff without a license. Theophile replied “Are you kidding? This stuff is too good to sell!”

Not all ideas panned out as well. For example, when my boss, the inimitable Hal Quarfoth sent me out to interview a south Minneapolis lady who was a porcinophile. She collected porcelain pig-shaped objects like cookie jars, coffee mugs, door stops. She had tons of them but wasn’t great at the interview, or at least as great as Theophile Mares. It was up to me to figure out some way to make the story sing. So I dipped into childhood and wrote the whole story in Pig Latin and sent it to Hal, a consummate professional, and HE PRINTED IT! (“Laracay Ohnsonjay ollectscay orcelainpay igspay orfay erhay obbyhay.”) I think it’s safe to say, I’m the only so-called journalist in Christendom who had a story in Pig Latin at a major U.S. newspaper.

After a few years, new management killed the Neighbors section and I was “promoted” to a plum job, book review editor of the Sunday Star Tribune. Now I’m an old man, and on the few times someone recognizes me when I visit Minneapolis, they never mention the Books section, but always mention the late lamented Neighbors section.

Years later, Peg Meier turned our collection of columns into a book we called “The Pie Lady of Winthrop and Other Minnesota Tales.” Hoping to inspire some national sales we contacted “Good Morning America” and arranged for its reporters to go to Winthrop with a camera crew to interview and photograph Mina. They agreed! Peg and I waited with bated breath and opened new bank accounts. Sure enough, there was Mina onscreen covered in pie dough and attempting to interest the anchor man with her secrets of special dough. Uninspired by her expertise, he said to the national audience, “You have to wonder how these ace investigators find stories like Mina’s!” I guess not everyone is interested in stories ABOUT NOTHING.

DAVE WOULD LIKE TO HEAR FROM YOU. Phone him at 715-426-9554.