The good, and bad of growing up in Minneapolis in the 1960s and '70s


Since I left Minneapolis in 1977, when I was 19, when people ask me, "Where ya from?" I hesitate. No, I'm certainly not ashamed of my Minneapolitan upbringing, it's just that they want to ask me about stuff that wasn't part of my world - I was just a kid. And since I live in Arizona now, I usually will tell people that I'm from California, where I lived in my twenties. That way I can remember the freeways, sporting events that I went to, restaurants, the names of the streets, grown-up stuff like that. But right now I want to time-travel back to Minneapolis in the days of Harmon Killebrew, Verne Gagne, and Bob Lurtsema.

Now calm down there if those names make you think that I knew anything about sports - I didn't, and still don't. But my mom listened to the Twins on 'CCO radio, and there were commercials featuring the big home-run hitter Harmon Killebrew, and that's how I knew the name. Verne Gagne was a wrestler that did commercials on TV for Geritol, and Bob Lurtesma was a Minnesota Viking who did commercials, too - funny ones. He called himself "Benchwarmer Bob".

The pic of me at the top of the post, at age 12, is in our backyard at 48th and Bloomington. My dad would get gigantic inner tubes from semi trucks (where he got them I have no idea), inflate them and put them in the backyard for his four sons to bounce on. There were a lot of things my dad put in the backyard to help try to burn off the nervous energy of his monkey boys, including ropes on the trees. By the time I started doing gymnastics in high school, at about age 15, I had the basic skills of the average orangutang.

Of course, my fond memories are of summer, which are short in Minneapolis, but are absolutely glorious. The winters are harsh, harsh, harsh. Some kids enjoyed winter sports, but I didn't. I delivered newspapers in the snow, and walked to school in the snow, too. Several miles, and yes, uphill both ways.

Minneapolis gave me my voice, and my Twin Cities accent, which has helped me a lot in my career. The Twin Cities accent, not be confused with the rural Minnesota accent, is considered the perfect American accent. And that means that it seems as if I have no accent. It's the accent that radio announcers have all over the country. Sometimes people in Arizona have asked me if I was a radio announcer. I never even picked up much of a California accent, even though I lived there for almost ten years.

Like I say, I hated the snow and cold, and that's part of the price you pay to live in such a beautiful city as Minneapolis (and make no mistake, it's beautiful, lush and green), so I bought a car, learned how to read a map, and headed west. And really, to be honest, I was still a kid at 19, and I spent the next few years really growing up, which for me took me well into my twenties. There were times when I would look back at being a kid in Minneapolis and shudder, and try not to think about it. But I do now.
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