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[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: A Sense of Place, a documentary series which looks at regions and regionalism in the state of Minnesota, produced by Minnesota Educational Radio, under a grant from the Minnesota Humanities Commission. This program is called Mining, Music and Much Ado about Sports.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]

A tourist, traveler, big-city sophisticate, taking a long view from a car window at 60 miles an hour and listening to Frankie Yankovic on one of the local radio stations, might determine that the Minnesota Iron Range was a place of mining, music, and much ado about sports. And so far as his observations went, he would be right.

But while he would be awed or appalled by the great ragged holes in the landscape, he would likely fail to wonder at the magnificence of the ore-rich earth. He would respond with curiosity and/or amusement to the distinctive Iron Range accent that even radio announcers never quite overcome, but never consider the potpourri of European cultures that went into making the sounds of Iron Range voices unique and the sentiments they express about the place they live so intense.

SPEAKER 2: (SINGING) --and I know it will make you feel good. Tick, tick, tick, tock goes my heart with the clock, 'cause they know I am dancing with you.

SPEAKER 3: I don't think there's anything anywhere else on Earth that measures up to it, even. My wife doesn't believe me, of course, but she was born here, just like I was. But I'm an outdoorsman. Oh, I love the winter season. I love the woods, the hunting, the fishing.

In fact, when I got out of high school, I had no definite idea of what I wanted to do, you know, in college. I got into the service, and I began thinking that, someday, I'm gonna have to go back, and what am I gonna do for a living, and the first thing I knew definite was that I want to go right back to Virginia, Minnesota.

And then I got to thinking about it, well, what is the best job to have around there? Well, it's mining, because this is a mining area. So I went right to college, took mining engineering, and got a job right here in town, exactly what I wanted to do, and I'm still here. And my business, mining engineering, is an outdoor job. It's a man's job, and a lot of challenges. This is one of the biggest mining areas in the world, and I'm a part of it. I love every minute of it.

SPEAKER 4: --uniformity and closer cooperation from individuals, and we just think that this is probably the best place in the world to work. We at least know our next-door neighbors and the people down the block, and that is really something, in my opinion. I've lived in other areas where you don't even find out who lives next door to you until the person dies and you read it in the paper.

SPEAKER 5: One of the things that I feel is good for the kids, you know, to be in a small community and to be near their families, their extended families, or whatever. It's a secure feeling, I guess, you know, when you know everyone in a community. And, you know, some people might think it's terrible to have everyone know your business, but I kind of feel it's all kind of-- You know, like, well, with the kids, if they wander off, or if someone's in trouble somewhere, everyone knows who they are. Somebody will bring them home. Someone will, you know, report to me if they're doing something wrong.

SPEAKER 6: Why? There's snow up here. I love winter. It's my favorite season. I drive a 650 Polaris Starfire, with a little about close to 100 miles an hour, or 97, or so. When you live in a city-- I know, I lived in Minneapolis, and I went to school, and I was confined, it seemed, to Centennial Hall, and I could go for an hour, driving, and I'd still be in town. No matter if you were in the slums, or in the high-class district of town, or right downtown, in the metropolitan area, in the loop, you were still in town. There's only so many things you can do.

There's nightlife, sure, but that gets dull after a while. You can go to museums, but who wants to go to a museum for excitement? You know, up here, you can go in the woods. You know, you can go back to nature. The air is clean. I've got peace of mind in the woods. Ron and I, when we go out there, we can walk for three hours and not say a word to each other.

SPEAKER 7: I guess you might say we pride ourselves, or work hard at being very flexible. Like, you know, we enjoy the very nice things in life, whatever they are, you know, the finer things, you might say, the fancy things.

SPEAKER 6: We're not typical rangers. We aren't. Ron and I both, we take the lowest person on the Iron Range, and we probably know them. And you take the upper elite socialite, you know, the businessmen, you know, the working men, we can go to the farm, for example, and reach in our cooper's barrel. Sauerkraut, we make our own sauerkraut, take it out with our hands, throw it on a plate, eat that with fried eggs. And yet, at the same time, we can go down to any hotel, or restaurant, or bar on the Range and act as refined as anyone that has been brought up in the city, more so, in fact, I think, because we don't put on airs.

SPEAKER 7: A good example would be, a few weeks ago, we went to Chicago. One Saturday night, we were having-- Well, it was five o'clock in the morning. We were having breakfast at the Playboy Club. And I think, the following Sunday, we were cleaning the outhouse at the farm. So, like I say, we pride ourselves in being flexible. That's the fun in life.

SPEAKER 1: Today, a lot about life on the Iron Range is fun. But yesterday, well, that's another story. Young people, new people feel secure with the stable year-round economy of taconite production. But lifetime Rangers have long memories. In her 1969 novel about the development of the Iron Range region, Minnesota author Margaret Culkin Banning alludes to tensions that began to surface with the first shovels of ore.

SPEAKER 8: "Some of the stories might be apocryphal, but the fortunes that began to be made were not, the tireless, dogged Merritts dug and tested, and at last, came upon the great basin of ore they proudly named "Mountain Iron." And there was no fable about that discovery, which touched off a far greater boom on the Mesabi than the one on the Vermilion Range had. The big men in the East let the Merritts have their glory, but inexorably, they moved in to take possession."

SPEAKER 1: Bill Ojala is a state representative from the Iron Range. He is of Finnish descent. When workers first began to band together to gain better conditions in the mines, his people were in the forefront of the movement, and the first to feel the brunt of the mining company's power.

BILL OJALA: Even as early as 1907, a number of Finns were on the forefront of that particular strike. They were organizers, perhaps, of strike activity, of attempted organization of the miners themselves. And, certainly, in 1916, they were very much in the front ranks of the strike, as it developed spontaneously. I think it was in June of 1916.

The IWW moved into the range in 1916, not to organize the strike, but in response to requests of striking miners for assistance in planning, and organizing, and developing the strike. I think they had been turned down by the Western Federation of Miners, so they went to the IWW for help.

But I think the story of that 1916 strike will show that it developed spontaneously in the Saint James Mine, in Aurora, and that news of the strike was carried by a young Finn who ran from Aurora, the length of the Range, shouting the news that the strike is on, and spontaneous walkouts took place along the length of the Range. I think, eventually, 16,000 miners were on strike.

And the mining companies responded by blacklisting many of the people involved in the strike, workers involved in union organization, and this is why you find that so many Finns left mining and went out to farm a 40 or 80-acre tract out in the countryside, because they were refused work by the mining companies. And you also find that many Finns were on the payrolls of local municipalities, school districts, as custodians and janitors, because they were unable to find work with the mining companies.

SPEAKER 1: Other immigrant groups did somewhat better, but distrust of the decision makers, the company hierarchy in Duluth and in Eastern cities, prevailed. Bruno is the son of an Italian miner, and is himself employed in the industry as a mining company engineer in US Steel's MinnTac Plant, in Mountain Iron. He suggests that many of the antagonisms were carryovers from life in the old country.

BRUNO SCIPIONI: It used to be that everybody on the Range thought of anybody who lived in Duluth as being a rich person, people with money. And here we were, peasants up here, miners, struggling. Everybody thought they were abused, you know, by the mining companies. And there was a lot of personal abuse, assaults on human dignity, but it wasn't just unique to the mining companies. That was a common attitude towards labor throughout the country.

But these people were feeling sorry for themselves around here, and they figured anybody in Duluth was either a rich timber man or a rich mining man, and I think a lot of it stems from the fact that this European background that we all have, you know, in Europe, if you come from a village five miles away from another village, they're complete strangers and bitter enemies. That's a vast distance. So they dislike one another. They distrust one another. And I think maybe some of that carried on in Duluth. Why, that's just like the other side of the globe. No, you can't trust those people.

SPEAKER 1: Now, of course, Duluth is a service center for the Range, providing shopping, financial, medical, and educational facilities, as well as television stations bringing in news of the world, the nation, and coverage of activities of the entire Northeastern Minnesota region. Duluth sportscaster Bob Junkert has done play by play on hundreds of Iron Range sporting events, and he has some thoughts on why sports are such a big thing in the area.

[CROWD CHANTING]

BOB JUNKERT: We have towns that are four or five miles apart. For example, the Eveleth-Gilbert-Virginia area, you have three high schools all within about a four-mile area of each other. There's tremendous rivalry among those schools. And of course, the various settlements that came from the old country, the different nationalities that settled, are all very proud, and I think this all carried through to high school athletics, as they participated. It's an intense rivalry.

As an outsider, when you grow up and you talk about the Range, now you're fighting the entire Range. You say one word against the Range, you're fighting it all the way from the East End to the West End. But they among themselves will battle with bitter, bitter rivalry in athletics or whatever, I suppose, city government, but athletics is where they keep score. So, that's why they go out, and I have never heard cheering, screaming, yelling like you do on the Iron Range. I sometimes feel sorry for the opposition that has to go in, that is, the outside opposition. The Rangers among the Rangers, of course, they're used to it.

[CROWD CHEERING]

Over the years, hockey players from the Iron Range have played all over, and of course, prior to that, they even went into professional ranks, so, therefore, they were able to make a living by playing hockey. And as time went on, way back in the '30s, for example, Lud Andolsek coached St. Cloud at that time, and there were scholarships available for any boy, for that matter, but a lot of Range players, because that's where they did play hockey ahead of just about everyone else in the Upper Midwest in the high school level.

So, even then, in the mid '30s, early '30s, there were scholarships available for hockey players, and I think, yes, there is a correlation between parents wanting their son to be an athlete, or a hockey player, perhaps, specifically, with the hope in mind that he would get a college education as a result of it.

[CROWD CHANTING]

SPEAKER 1: Ask Rangers about sports and you get another perspective.

SPEAKER 9: I guess that's the only thing that the rivalries are strong, is in the sports area. I mean, you know, we're all kind of interdependent on each other for a lot of things. We have to depend on Virginia for a lot. That's the only place we have to shop and do our business. You know, we don't have a very large business community in Mountain Iron.

But in sports, people are sports crazy around here, just absolutely insane over every-- I don't care what it is. And this, in Mountain Iron, we've got our big state football championship and all kinds of big things. Like, if we can beat Virginia in anything, that's just the greatest thing in the world. It's really pretty competitive.

And yet the kids in all the towns, and as I remember in high school, they're really terrific. You kind of get to know a lot of the kids from the other schools. I mean, I just knew so many people that, you know, I still will see that I knew from all the different towns around that you get to know through all these, you know, inter-school functions and everything, and some of them where you get to be very good friends. And so it's not to the point of being hostile.

SPEAKER 10: Sports is a big deal up here because we have so many people who devote so much of their own time for nothing to kids and to the youth program. This is why sports are so big up here.

SPEAKER 1: Kids, families, friends, schools, jobs, and how it was in the old days, vital concerns on the Iron Range, basic concerns that have insulated the region in an era of change. Somehow, every conversation eventually gets back to these themes.

BRUNO SCIPIONI: You know, when we were little youngsters, you know, little kids, about the time we learned to walk, well, a few years later, we were climbing around these mining headframes. These were all underground mines in those days, like, in 1920s. And our pastime was crawling between the ore cars, and climbing these mining headframes, and swimming in the potholes, the little ponds that were made from the runoff backed up against an old mine dump. And it was a child's paradise up in these small villages, you know?

SPEAKER 11: And you lived in a mining village, too.

BRUNO SCIPIONI: Yeah, we lived in a mining village. We didn't live in town. We lived in the village of Franklin, out here. And we had nothing, really. When you think of it, we lived in the village up there with no running water, no facilities of any kind, no police protection, no grocery stores, nothing.

You were dependent on your own ability to raise food in the garden and handle a few cows, and we had a grocery delivery, I think, twice a week from a co-operative store. I'm Italian, you know, and all of the Italians had an Italian work people's store, which was a co-operative.

And this manager who ran the store had a small Model T at the time, and he'd make the rounds of each one of these little villages twice a week, and he'd deliver groceries. And our fathers worked in the mine, when work was available, and this was our existence.

SPEAKER 11: This was during the Depression, too.

BRUNO SCIPIONI: Yeah, this was.

SPEAKER 11: And the women, in order to help their families, would have fresh butter made and different things that they would give to this fella when he came around with the things that they needed, the staples. They would trade off their home-churned butter, and their cheese, and maybe eggs from chickens, and this sort of thing too.

BRUNO SCIPIONI: We were very, very poor, but none of us, as children, ever knew that we were poor, because of the fantastic ability of our mothers to make food out of anything.

SPEAKER 11: Our mothers were just great.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 6: Yeah, he lived to the east of my parents, and between the two of us was my grandmother.

SPEAKER 7: Yeah, give her the whole story now, how the Zuniches and the Madiches feuded.

SPEAKER 6: For years and years, I don't know why--

SPEAKER 7: His father's family and his mother's family feuded, and there was a fence dividing the 80 acres, and neither dare cross. And this was, like, 40 years ago, maybe, 40 years ago?

SPEAKER 6: Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER 7: If his mother's father knew that she married a Zunich, which was on the other side of the fence, he'd turn over in his grave.

SPEAKER 6: The only time that I remember my father telling me that my his father-in-law, my mother's father, talked to him was when he had him drive the car, when they were running moonshine. And one time, even, I guess, the feds came after them, or something, and he put a shotgun behind my father's ear, and said, keep driving, kid.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]

BILL OJALA: I think the mining companies were quite successful, initially, in keeping these various nationality groups apart and, you know, antagonistic toward each other, and it was through this way that they really forestalled any attempt at organization, because, if you had the Finn fighting the Austrian, the Austrian mad at the Italian, obviously, you were not going to get any successful workers movement developing.

But over the years, this faded. In 1916, some of the magazines show just the attitude of the mining companies. I think one of the-- Was it Nation or Survey Graphic, has an article by a woman who toured the Range in the company of a mining superintendent, and she had not a kind word to say about any nationality group on the Range, the Finns were radical in their politics, the Slovenians had dirty habits, and the Italians were poor workers, you know, just unkind cuts to every nationality group.

And this, obviously, came from the mining companies, and it was through this that they, I think, tried to keep these groups apart, but you can't keep people apart forever, and eventually, the workers overcame that and were successful in organizing.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]

BRUNO SCIPIONI: The mining companies did a great thing with these guys when they put them to work. They would not put two Italians to work together, or two Finns, or two Slavs. They would mix them and force them to use English. As a result, the men spoke much better English than the wives, because the wives were at home all day, using their native language, you see.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 12: You know, if you took a personal IQ test, especially on language, in this particular area here, you would find that there are numerous and great many people that can speak as many as three and four different nationalities. Much of this was learned back in the history of underground mining, years ago, where your partner might be an Italian, or he might be some type of Slovenian, or Czechoslovakian, so you must learn to talk each other's type.

SPEAKER 13: But all of them old timers are dying off. He made a comment the other day, I think we've got three left. I'd like to go talk to them once in a while, just for practice, but there's only three left, but then they want to talk English all the time.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]

BRUNO SCIPIONI: These immigrants came over here, and they retained this foreign way of living, and manner of speech, and outlook on life, even.

SPEAKER 11: But they passed it on to their children, your generation, and you can still make wine the old way. You can do many things that your dad did the same way that he did them, but your sons can't do it.

BRUNO SCIPIONI: No, you see, we're gonna lose that, and I could never instill it in my sons.

SPEAKER 11: No, they weren't interested.

BRUNO SCIPIONI: They weren't interested, and then you're speaking the English language all the time, and you think differently. When you speak English, you think English, or American. When you speak Italian, you think Italian.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 1: It has been said that a visit to the Iron Range is like a trip to another country. Here's how Margaret Culkin Banning describes it in her book, Mesabi.

SPEAKER 8: "The towns of the Mesabi Range had grown out of their ugly infancy, and now were pretty villages, at least in summer and autumn. The towns looked, in many ways, like average American provincial communities, which had no hopes or ambitions to become great cities, but were content to be county seats, where fairs could be held and farmers dispose of their cattle and produce. But the man-made hills around them and the gigantic pits at the town limits made them forever different."

"In half a century, the waste material had built up to mountainous heights, which were squared off at the tops with a strange neatness. The landscape was not agricultural. It was what it had been for probably two billion years, an iron formation. The villages differed from other municipalities too, because they could not control their own destiny. A mayor who was ambitious for change or an active chamber of commerce did not have the same opportunities that were available elsewhere. The local people could go just so far."

"Something futile clung to the feeling of the region, although the term was obsolete, and the old disregard for human rights had disappeared. But it was still true that what was going to happen to the Range towns was decided in office buildings in Eastern cities."

SPEAKER 1: At some point in the not too distant past, a group of men meeting in an Eastern city decided that taconite was a viable, albeit expensive solution to the depletion of the region's raw ore reserves. A manufacturing process, taconite production demanded workers with specialized technical skills, thereby closing out many of the older miners and forcing the young ones to take additional training or to find other jobs, probably outside of the area. Still, taconite plants operate year round, providing Range communities with a sense of security unknown in all the years before.

SPEAKER 9: I can't imagine that US Steel would put up this fantastic plant, and it really is fantastic, and spend the amount of money they did, and possibly more in the future, I mean, this can grow, you know, and they have plans for just so many years ahead of time, that I can't imagine, right now, that we're in that situation.

But at one time, you know, they would mine a mine, and then they would reach a point where it was no longer feasible to mine this mine, and it was another place, and the mines would close in the winter, and all this, that was the time, I guess, when, probably, it was tough to live here and know that they controlled everything, even your economics and that. But I just don't feel that we have that feeling anymore.

SPEAKER 6: The Range is changing. There's more people moving in from other areas with taconite, say. When the construction of the plant started, companies from all over the United States came here, and they brought their own men with them. And then, when the construction ceased, a lot of them stayed here and got employment at the steel plant. So, the things have changed since, God, I would say, 1965. But up until then, you knew everyone. You knew everyone's problems. If there was something going on, you know, derogatory, you knew about that.

BRUNO SCIPIONI: --for these people. Previous to taconite, their existence was a seasonal one. You worked in the summertime and you did not in the winter. Now, with taconite, that's changed. And I am absolutely amazed that they had a meeting out at Pittsburgh, and, oh, this was about a month ago, where the steel industry and the union leaders sat down together, and they agreed that, in order to meet this foreign competition, they had to get together and do something about the productivity of the working man, because we were being wiped off the map by the Japanese, and the Germans, and the Austrians, and the Swedes, and they could manufacture steel and sell it here cheaper than we could make it right in our own backyard.

And the labor chieftains agreed with the leaders of the industry that it behooved both management and labor that they are going to have to get together and do something about improving productivity, and we are now having meetings here with union people, and they are agreeing that they're going to have to do something about improving their productivity, and management is going to have to do something about making the job a little more comfortable. Now, this is a real breakthrough, I think, to get union people to admit that they have to probably work a little harder for their company.

SPEAKER 14: --where I'm still living. And I think I would like just to have the mining companies acknowledge that they've made a hell of a lot of money up there, and that they owe some responsibility to maintaining municipal services, a substantial share of the cost of educating the kids, just some acknowledgment of that responsibility on their part and a willingness to deal with us.

After all, I am the elected representative of District 6A. I've been elected to public office, county commissioner, and have them come to us, as elected representatives of the people, rather than try to make their deals in the back room of the hotel in Duluth with representatives of the Iron Range Municipal and Civic Association, which is really not the body that's going to ultimately determine policy anyway. I'd like to have more openness, really, in discussion with these people, have them come out openly and honestly and talk about their problems, their aims, and objectives, so that we can maybe be of some assistance.

SPEAKER 1: From the first understanding that the Range's red earth was rich treasure to the sophisticated process that turns out taconite, all in the space of less than 100 years. Jim Klobuchar, columnist for The Minneapolis Star, grew up in Ely. On the occasion of the closing of the last underground mine in his hometown in April of 1967, he wrote the following. "It seems to sum up a lot of what can be said about the past and the future of the entire Minnesota Range."

JIM KLOBUCHAR: The red-earth catacombs that have been burrowed feet under my hometown by generations of helmeted miners are silent today, and soon will be sealed forever. I trust there was no formal observance of the closing of the last underground iron mine in Ely. The Iron Range never did produce a trumpeter who could play "Auld Lang Syne" in four languages.

Beyond this, the only function certain to draw crowds in the Range are Yugoslav picnics, come-as-you-are Finnish steam baths, and the appearance of a random faith healer from Duluth. Of the half dozen underground mines have spilled millions of dollars worth of ore into the country's blast furnaces for more than a half century. The remnants in Ely now are empty tunnels, dead earth.

The town will survive, partly because the underground successor of the taconite industry is operating nearby, and partly because the lakes and forests have outlasted the steam shovels, and the tourists will be there when the iron miner is gone. And so the red-smudged skeleton of the abandoned mining shaft is not the town's headstone, as it might have been years ago, before the years of Social Security, mining company pensions, and unionization.

But while there may be future mining in the river-seamed hills near the town, the Vermilion treasure that helped mechanize the nation has vanished. With it, I'm sure, must go part of the community's personality. Until diluted by a stubbornly advancing civilization decades ago, it was the miniaturization of the brawling frontier, peopled by lumberjacks, miners, and wenches.

But later, the grime of its tunnels and the babble of its old-world languages congealed into some tough fiber essence of the American vision. The industrialists had their millions from its vaults, and the immigrants had their dignity and the future of their children. It may be well to remember that, in a period of screaming protesters and whining beatniks, there are still people around to whom the language at the foot of the Statue of Liberty was and is more than a parody.

And so an immigrant who arrived at Ellis Island 60 years ago with his name flapping from his lapel for the inspectors and fright in his eyes could live to see his son earning a rich man's salary as a scholarly researcher in space-age electronics. The era of the underground iron mine ends in Northern Minnesota, with no grievous enmity between the companies and the workers. There were walkouts, shutdowns, and politicking, but no enduring hatreds. The mining companies, exploiters, once, in the fashions of the times, later had no stomach for it, and, finally, no opportunity for it.

They matured, as did the pick-swinging miner, and today, they are spending millions, where they are not required to, to provide for and resettle the men who raised the earth. For the men, the mines were a culture and a condition of life by themselves. They were their banks, their town halls, their prisons, because there was nothing else for them, and for a few of them, their graves.

Nobody had any secrets in those moist, cool ore drifts, where the minister's Sunday sermon underwent a blunt and enthusiastic critique each week. There were very few pretensions. You got along in whatever language was convenient. I knew an Italian grocer who listened to 6:00 AM mass in Slovenian, ordered his beer in Finnish, and for all I know, romanced in Swahili.

The ore stockpiles were the playgrounds of the kids, their ski slopes in the winter and their badlands for cowboys and crooks in the summer. People around town knew what the 15th level was producing at the Zenith Mine, and they knew what the emergency siren meant in the middle of the afternoon.

The idea of a college education for the children was an obsession with many of them, and the reason they resisted when the son would plan to go underground to help raise money for it. Once you go down there, they would say, you will never get out. But many did, of course.

And yet, as the symbol of the youngster's arrival to manhood in this mining community, wherever he planned to do in the future, there was nothing with quite the emotional jar of the day he strapped on a helmet and battery and descended into the cool red tunnels with his father. Some of the ghosts in the town are not sad ones.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 1: Music from the Polka Party album, by Frankie Yankovic, and From the Heart to the Heart album by the Graco Recording Orchestra. Excerpts from the novel Mesabi by Margaret Culkin Banning, published by Harper and Row. Special Thanks to Jim Klobuchar for reading his column. A Sense of Place, written and produced by Claudia Daly for Minnesota Educational Radio, under a grant from the Minnesota Humanities Commission. Engineering by Jerry Vanek.

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