Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

MIKE MULCAHY: With news from Minnesota Public Radio, I'm Mike Mulcahy. Reform Party gubernatorial candidate Jesse Ventura says Minnesota should work to reduce class sizes in the lower grades. Ventura's education plan calls for 15 to 17 students in kindergarten through third grade.

It also calls for more counselors, internet access in every classroom, and development time for teachers learning how to implement the state's new graduation standards. Ventura did not say how he would pay for his plan.

A Minnesota based market analyst says the economic turmoil in Asia, Russia, and other countries is affecting US financial markets more than it's affecting the nation's economy at this point. Ed Nikolsky of Piper Jaffray says currency problems appear to be spreading from Asia and Russia to Latin America and are likely to spread to the US. He says at this point, investors are pulling out of the troubled markets and helping to prop up stock and bond prices here in the US.

ED NIKOLSKY: The capital from those emerging countries, if you will, are coming to the United States because it's the only safe currency. And they're buying our treasury bonds, they're buying our blue chip stocks, and they're selling everything that they have there.

MIKE MULCAHY: But Nikolsky says even the money coming into US markets is not enough to stave off what he says appears to be an emerging bear market in US stocks.

Crews have restored power to all but about 800 Twin Cities area NSP customers. About 13,000 customers lost power during Saturday's storms. A woman injured Saturday night in savage, where a tornado touched down remains in stable condition. Last night, tennis-ball-sized hail hit Duluth and surrounding towns.

There is some rain expected in Southern Minnesota today. Right now, Sioux Falls reports mostly sunny skies and 69. Duluth has cloudy skies and 70. Some peeks of sun here in downtown St. Paul, and it's 70 degrees. That's news. I'm Mike Mulcahy.

GARY EICHTEN: Thank you, Mike. 12:06 o'clock. Programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by the travel tourism office of Cass County, inviting you to join us for fall color fun in North Central Minnesota's lakes and woods, www.greattimesnorth.com.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

GARY EICHTEN: And good afternoon. Welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary Eichten. Glad you could join us. Former law partners Don Fraser and Leonard Lindquist have taken on landlords who discriminate mobsters, trying to take over city services, and despots who violate human rights.

And today, on Midday, as part of our Voices of Minnesota interview series, we're going to hear from those two men, discuss their lives. First, former Mayor Don Fraser, Minneapolis's longest serving mayor, now, he spent 14 years in the office starting in 1979.

Fraser was elected after he had served Minneapolis for nearly 20 years as a Congressman. He was mayor when Minneapolis was in the midst of an unprecedented building boom. But he put at the top of his mayoral agenda the well-being of the city's children. Don Fraser talked with Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: You were elected-- re-elected in Minneapolis at a time when downtown was rejuvenated. Was downtown, is downtown Minneapolis saved as opposed to so many other central cities which have really been hollowed out?

DON FRASER: The fate of central cities tends to go somewhat cyclical. I believe that one of the factors that helped downtown Minneapolis was the development of the freeway system because General Mills had moved out of the city back in the early '50s.

And I think part of the problem was there was increasing congestion. People couldn't get in and out of the city easily. And the problem is that it is the managers of enterprises who make locational decisions. And if they live out in the suburbs, as they frequently do, they're not anxious to have a business where they can't get to it.

That's a view I hold that isn't necessarily widely shared, but I do think the freeways had something to do with it. But we have had in place over the '60s and '70s and then the '80s some tools to enable downtown to redevelop.

And when I came into the office in 1980, there had been some starts made by the previous city council, and we were able to continue that. And there was considerable growth and development in downtown. About the time I left the mayor's office, things had slowed down because there had been overbuilding and both cities suffered from that. But now it's coming back again, this extraordinary growth in downtown Minneapolis now, the large number of new buildings.

DAN OLSON: Even with the good times and the apparent saving of downtown Minneapolis or the rejuvenation of downtown, it does seem pretty clear, as you indicated earlier, that the wealth is not being shared at all equally by the various classes of people in Minneapolis. Is that still a big threat to the future of the city?

DON FRASER: The city is not really the adequate context in which to think about this. The metropolitan area now with about 2.5 million people has a certain number of poor folks. Well, they tend to live in the cities for housing, cheaper transportation, better social services are available.

And I think if you measure the numbers of poor people against the metropolitan numbers, you won't find a large change. It is just that they end up in Minneapolis or St. Paul and now in a few suburbs.

What we lack is an adequate social support policy in the United States. Having spent three months in Sweden, I've come back convinced that if the United States really cared about kids, they could really do some very important things.

DAN OLSON: You tried to put things in place. You did put things in place in city of Minneapolis. The swedes, I know nothing. I know little about their services. I think I know that the Swedes pay a shockingly high to American sensibilities rate of tax. Is that what is needed to support the kinds of ideas that I think Don Fraser supports for kids?

DON FRASER: Well, if one is going to use a public system to provide support for children, then clearly it's going to be paid for. The Swedish people have a fairly extensive network of social support that covers more than children.

If we just did what they do for children, I think we could easily afford it. I mean, we might pay a little bit more, but I think we paid heavily for our failure to provide support for children. When one looks at the salaries of the chief executive officers or the accumulation of wealth by the top 1% or 5% American public, and then one looks back at the bottom of the scale and how we're doing.

Maybe just one figure and then I'll stop. Back in 1960, the minimum wage was $1 an hour. Since 1960, per capita income in the United States has expanded 10 times. It's 10 times higher today than it was back then. If the minimum wage had just kept pace with the growth in per capita income, the minimum wage would be $10 an hour.

In fact, and interestingly enough, that is approximately what the minimum wage in its various forms in Europe is today. If we could move everybody up to that level, and it would take some good political leadership to make it happen, we would begin to cure a lot of our problems.

There would be a lot more intact families. There would be a lot more children getting nurturing. There would be a growth in consumer purchasing for domestic to consume goods that are produced here and abroad.

DAN OLSON: What does that do to the life of business people, especially business owners who operate very small businesses, who can't even afford to pay themselves the minimum wage granted they own the business, and they have that wealth on paper?

And they're saying, they're coming back at you and saying, well, Don Fraser, if those people can stay with us for two to five years and help us grow along with the business, they might reach $10 an hour, but we can't pay it now.

DON FRASER: Well, it's possible to work the minimum wage around so that you might offer a scaling up over a period of time. There are some complexities with that, but one needs to go back to the fact that in relation to per capita income in 1960, we were paying the equivalent of $10 an hour.

And so if we just stayed and kept that relationship in place, then we wouldn't have the complaint. It's partly a matter of how the whole system works. But most of these small businesses are not competitive with internationally, which is where, of course, we're finding some of the difficulty.

DAN OLSON: We have now, currently, the debate over how best to serve poor children with education. Let them take a voucher to a private school, the charter school movement, the public school movement were back in the neighborhoods. Where do you come down?

DON FRASER: In the end, if you think about education, you end up with a teacher and a student, and a relationship between the two. And I am skeptical that there's any particular format that will guarantee a specific outcome for the child. I think it more depends on the teacher and the child.

Now we've focused on the teachers. We've beat up on them. As far as I can tell, the teachers are as good as they've ever been. It is the children who are coming to school, they don't know their last name. They don't know colors. They don't have any mastery of numbers.

And I don't understand why the school system doesn't get out the biggest drum it can find and beat on it and say to the community, look, we will educate school ready children, but your responsibility since the families are failing, here's what we get into.

Families are not providing the kind of support and nurturing the children need. And so they arrive at school and the schools are supposed to fix the kids. And that's not what educators are trained for. And it's not clear that even if they were trained for it, that that would provide the answer.

What we need is a preschool program for, I think, all children. It shouldn't just be for poor children. It should be for all. Now, some of the better-off children get some of that. Increasingly, as both parents are working and can afford it, they will have their kids, and hopefully, in good childcare, which has an educational component. But that ought to be for all children.

If we believe in a level playing field in the United States, one of the ways to have a level playing field is to make sure that every child by the age of 5 has mastered these basic competencies that will enable them to go into kindergarten.

We have the Head Start program, which I think does a terrific job, but that only covers fewer than half of the children and sometimes only for a year. And we know this is important. The experts tell us it's important. Common sense tells us it's important, but we don't do it.

And one of the reasons we don't do it is there's nobody in charge of that problem. We have a school board in charge of K-12. We have social services to the families in trouble. We have the city that does parks and recreation, but who from a public perspective, says, we need to take steps to make sure that all children are school ready by the time of age 5. And we could do it, and we could do it, I don't think, without breaking anybody's bank.

DAN OLSON: Somewhere along the way, I think I may have read or heard that you are a critic of this country's so-called war on drugs. Is that right? Or were, maybe you no longer are.

DON FRASER: No, it's not working. I think that the war on drugs is providing employment for thousands of people in constructing new jails and prisons. We've doubled the number of people in prison.

DAN OLSON: But some of them are bad people, and we've put them away, and the streets are safer.

DON FRASER: Well, the question of whether the streets are safer is a fluctuating trend. It partly depends on the demographics. It's young people. If we could have everybody skip from age 15 up to age 35, we would cure the problem because that's the age range in which people become criminally involved.

But we make it an extraordinarily attractive for people to get involved in the drug business. And we make it extraordinarily expensive for a drug user to fund their supply of drugs that they need. And so they may commit crimes in order to get money to buy drugs.

DAN OLSON: Do you mean attractive because it's profitable? That's why--

DON FRASER: Well, for the drug dealer, yes. We can offer them minimum wage jobs at $5 an hour, or they can go out and earn $100 or more. But one of the tests of whether drug policy is working is whether the street price has gone down or up. If it's gone up, then presumably you're having some success with the interdiction because then the risks are higher and the price is up.

Well, the price hasn't really gone up on drugs, so it means that we have not successfully interdicted. Anybody, as I understand it, who wants to get drugs will get them. And the users are not treated harshly. They're treated quite leniently. And we've got a mess on our hands, and it's a mess in which we've got an improvident policies working that make it worse.

DAN OLSON: So short of legalizing what we now call illegal drugs, what are the options?

DON FRASER: I don't think I would legalize it, but I would certainly downgrade the level of law enforcement and rely on a public health approach far more than we do today.

DAN OLSON: Public health, meaning treatment for users?

DON FRASER: Meaning treatment. It means also education. Public health relies very heavily on an educated public.

DAN OLSON: We have now--

DON FRASER: It's a little bit like alcohol is another-- in some ways, alcohol is the worst of the drugs. It causes retardation when pregnant women are alcoholic. It's a more serious-- even crack babies apparently turn out better than a baby coming from an alcohol-addicted woman.

But at least alcohol hasn't led to all of the other side effects of the kind that we used to have during Prohibition where we had corruption of government and all kinds of trouble. We need a more rational policy, but it is politically difficult for people to advocate that.

GARY EICHTEN: Former Minneapolis mayor and Minnesota Congressman Don Fraser. You've been listening to our Voices in Minnesota interview here on Minnesota Public Radio. And later in the hour, we'll hear from Minneapolis Attorney Leonard Lindquist. He and Don Fraser were law partners and served together in the Minnesota legislature.

Actually, the legislature is where Fraser's political career started. The two of them, Fraser and Lindquist, worked together on a landmark law, the state's Fair Housing statute, which prohibits housing discrimination. Let's return now to Dan Olson's conversation with Don Fraser.

DAN OLSON: Why was Fair Housing even an issue in Minneapolis then?

DON FRASER: Well, whatever the number, I don't recall now the number of minorities, the fact is that they were actively and almost blatantly discriminated against. They could not live where they wanted to, even if they had the money to buy or to rent. And that just seemed fundamentally unfair.

We had had the example of a Fair Employment Practices Act adopted by the city of Minneapolis during the Humphrey years when he was mayor of the city. So that idea that certain conduct might be outlawed had already been demonstrated through the Fair Employment Practices Act. So it was a matter of extending that concept to the Fair Housing Act.

One of the active supporters of that proposal was Elmer Andersen, later to become governor. And it was while he was governor that he signed the bill that we got through the state Senate and the House.

DAN OLSON: Was it a big, contentious issue, or was it more of a historical footnote?

DON FRASER: It was quite contentious. I remember having introduced the bill early on in my next election. I remember vividly one homeowner who had had a lawn sign for me saying that when he heard about the bill I'd introduced, he'd taken it down and burned it.

But back then people just hadn't faced up to the problem of racism, just sort of pure, unadulterated racism. And that's what this law was intended to address, not really how people thought, but how they acted.

And that was one of the arguments that came up. He say, well, you can't legislate morality. You can't legislate how people think. And our answer, of course, was, well, that may be so, but that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to legislate how they act, not what they think.

DAN OLSON: Jumping ahead 45 years, it's hard to tell. But there's an unmistakable impression that Minneapolis, at least your home city, is still a highly segregated city, roughly two areas of the city, the near South side, the near North side that have predominant African-American populations.

The covenants are illegal. Fair Housing is the law of the land. But in fact, apparently, a pretty strong version of segregation continues. Is that right, or is that not right?

DON FRASER: I think that's a fair description of the living patterns that one finds in the city. I think part of the problem now lies in the economic side of the equation. We've had the experience of many African-American families, for example, are headed by a single parent who are almost always poor because they depend on public assistance. They don't get much support from the fathers. That was one of the most disturbing trends that I experienced while I was mayor of Minneapolis. A trend I think is now beginning to turn around.

DAN OLSON: Who talked you into running for Congress?

DON FRASER: I concluded that being a lawyer part time and a legislator part time wasn't working very well for me. I had trouble turning my head off and on as I moved back and forth. And so I decided I either had to become a full time lawyer or a full time public servant.

DAN OLSON: Democrats nominated you to run for US Senate in 1978, I think, it was. Bob Short challenged and won in a primary contest. I remember the bumper stickers "Dump Fraser". And what did that episode say, if anything, about the politics of Minnesota then and what they may be now?

DON FRASER: In 1978, there was a conservative trend emerging in the country. And, well, I don't know that it caught me up in that trend, I think it was a factor. Bob Short ran against me in the primary as though he were a Republican. And he talked about all my spending and so on, which was essentially supporting the Democratic programs.

One of the things I didn't very well was that he invited the Republicans to come into our primary. And there's some evidence that some of that happened. I think it's hard to characterize the state of Minnesota.

Often when one candidate wins, whether they're very conservative or very liberal, you say, well, the state is swung. The reality is that it's not much of a swing that's involved. It can be quite modest. Most people tend to stay where they are politically. But it doesn't take a large shift, a large movement of numbers to cause an election outcome to change.

DAN OLSON: Did opening up the National Democratic Party, to points of view, did it have the effect of broadening the party's base, or has it now, at this point in time had the effect of marginalizing the party?

DON FRASER: It's not very clear as to the effects of the changes that we made back in the early '70s. What happened was that when antiwar activists in 1968 were attempting to challenge first Johnson, and then I guess later the other candidates, they found a number of formidable obstacles to just being able to participate.

And they found laws that were banned. They found party rules that were nonexistent. They couldn't find out locations of meetings. And so the Reform Commission attempted to regularize all of that. And the changes that we made were not very different from what was actually happening in Minnesota. Minnesota had a relatively open and well-constructed party system.

What happened, though, was that partly, I think because of the 1968 violence in Chicago at the National Democratic convention. And then partly because of what people saw as all these new rules, states moved toward presidential primaries.

One thing the presidential primary did was to, in effect, make irrelevant the party changes that we had introduced because it meant that the voters would vote for or against a presidential candidate, and then those people would go on to the convention.

And in 1968, there were 12 states with presidential primaries. I think, 10 years later, it had slipped. There were only 12 states that didn't have presidential primaries. Some 38 states had presidential primaries. So that really meant that the reforms didn't have any meaning because the reforms were mostly directed at caucus type states such as Minnesota.

Well, our system was already quite open. So I think it's-- the one thing I've regretted is that there hasn't been a stronger effort to take a hard look at the presidential primary. I think the presidential primary system of nomination is a very bad thing and does not serve the country well and makes it extraordinarily difficult for people to run for president.

Because right from the get go, you have to be spending money not to talk to party folks, but to be talking to the public. And the only way you can effectively talk to the public in presidential primaries is through television, which is the way that millions and millions of dollars get spent.

DAN OLSON: Well, you've gotten to the issue of money and fair amount of hand-wringing over the amount of money that it costs to run a campaign and what has to be done to raise that money. Do you have a personal formula, a recipe in mind that you think would be politically acceptable that could, if not eliminate money, which seems like an unlikely prospect from the political process, would have a leavening effect?

DON FRASER: I have believed that the effort to provide monies to candidates for their campaigns, such as we do, provide in Minnesota is probably one of the tracks that we need to pursue. We have it partially in the presidential race but not in congressional Senate races. Everybody's on their own there.

Now we've got this constitutional issue, that soft money, that people have a right to go out and spend their money to say whatever they please under the first amendment. And that even if what you're doing is, in effect, campaigning for or against somebody.

So far, the First Amendment seems to give protection to that activity. I'm not sure how that's to be dealt with. And I've just assumed that the McCain-Feingold bill in Washington may represent our best effort to try to bring some rationality to the system.

DAN OLSON: People look at the voting rate of Americans who are either eligible or registered, I forget which, and it's apparently fewer than 50% who are voting in elections, and look at that and say, well, the country is truly going down the tubes. People aren't participating. Others look at it and say, no. People just aren't interested. They're content and simply don't go to vote because things are OK. They trust the institutions to take care of things. Where do you think it's at?

DON FRASER: Well, I think both of those are factors at work. If people were really excited, really excited, if we were in the depression of the '30s again, people would turn out to vote. On the other hand, I think there is a feeling by many people that it doesn't make any difference, that the two parties sound and look so much alike. And from the point of view of their lives, it won't matter whether the Republicans or the Democrats are in charge.

DAN OLSON: What were the factors that led to your interest in human rights? Did that come from family background, or did that emerge through your work in Washington?

DON FRASER: When I finally got enough seniority on the House Foreign Affairs Committee to become a subcommittee chairman, I turned it into a human rights subcommittee. And we held some 80 hearings on human rights problems around the world.

And I became educated. I hadn't fully appreciated the web of international conventions and covenants that spelled out human rights, or even the UN Charter itself is a human rights document if you look at it carefully.

What I learned was that with these international standards in place, and going back really to the Universal Declaration of Human rights, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, we really had the basic standards. People shouldn't be beat up. They shouldn't be deprived of votes. They shouldn't be jailed without a trial.

And so we were able to write into the law that where a country was grossly violating human rights, we should not be giving them military aid. We also required that the State Department every year, provide a report card on the human rights practices of countries getting assistance from the United States.

Later, that was expanded to cover all countries who belong to the UN. So every year now, the United States puts out a report card on every country in the world. I've always thought it was a very arrogant, but it turns out it's also very useful. Those reports get better every year. They're critiqued by the outside groups like Amnesty and the international human rights groups.

DAN OLSON: That seems to get at one of the fundamental points about people who want to try to make life better for people who are being abused either here or abroad is the assumption that when a report like the one the State Department turns out is issued, countries are embarrassed by it and as a result changed their practices. Is that, in fact, true?

DON FRASER: Well, they don't change that quickly. Much of the human rights problem has a long history in each country. But it is true that when we first put the reports out, or the State Department did, I think, it was Brazil and Guatemala were so offended. They said they wouldn't ask for any more military aid. Well, they got over that after a while.

But it's like everything else in the international field, if it's there, if it's coming out every year, pretty soon, you have to learn to live with it. But countries don't change by themselves. But what it does do is provide a fairly firm foundation for ongoing discussions about human rights around the world.

DAN OLSON: At one point, you, I think, made a trip to the Philippines and walked into the jail cell where you visited Benigno Aquino. What brought you there, and what brought him to your attention?

DON FRASER: Aquino, as I recall now, had, I think, won an election or thought he had won an election-- he was jailed by Marcos-- either that or he was on his way to winning. And Marcos was a pretty tough fellow in some ways, not as tough as I found in South Korea.

But anyway, we had been studying the human rights problems in the Philippines. So when we went there, I asked to see Aquino. I was the first Congressman that he had seen since he'd been in prison. And it was really interesting because they sent along a video camera, so they could tape everything that was said.

And Aquino noting that there was that video camera, proceeded to denounce Marcos at length, extensively, ripped him up and ripped him down. Well, then later, of course, Marcos was finally persuaded to let him up. But then they killed-- they assassinated him, I think, out at the airport.

DAN OLSON: What was the reference to Korea about, South Korea?

DON FRASER: Well, one of the countries that we looked at carefully was South Korea. We became aware that the president of Korea was putting opponents in jail and really very tough, hard line. And Korea had experienced a very short episode of democratic rule. And then it was taken over by Park Chung-hee.

I held a number of hearings on it. We became familiar with Kim Dae-jung and his troubles. When I went to Seoul, South Korea, I was the first Congressman that the President Park Chung-hee would refuse to see.

On the day I left, he hung nine people about whose fate we had raised a question.

DAN OLSON: Were these criminals?

DON FRASER: No, they were-- at worst, they were political opponents.

DAN OLSON: And this was apparently maybe not timed for your departure, maybe time for a little slap in the face, a big slap.

DON FRASER: I thought so. I think calling attention to the problems of the lack of democracy in South Korea, we had two divisions up there on the 38th parallel, it seemed to me that we needed to have something to say about the way the country is being run as long as our troops were at risk being there. So then history has worked its way out. I think if South Korea can come through its current economic problems, it could be a very important country.

DAN OLSON: Since president Bush, we've had this policy of what I guess is called constructive engagement with People's Republic of China. Is it working? We appear to have at some levels better relations with China than ever before. They're releasing apparently some very high profile dissidents. Religion, depending on how you measure it, appears to be somewhat freer. Is it working?

DON FRASER: I think China is changing. There's no doubt about it. And they can read contemporary history as well as the rest of us. They're not changing as fast as many of us would like. On the other hand, considering where they've been, I think we should continue to press them and raise these issues but not expect a country to change overnight.

I have believed that the United States needs to back away from the notion that it unilaterally can tell other countries how they're going to run themselves, and that it will be more productive for everyone, in the long run, if we work with other countries through the UN Human Rights Commission, through resolutions of the General Assembly or the Security Council.

In other words, if we are part of an international effort to address an issue such as apartheid, for example, in South Africa, that was an international effort, and one in which I think we properly, although belatedly joined. That's the way we should press or use our influence.

You have to put yourself in the shoes of another country citizen to see how they may perceive the American role, which is that we're trying to be the moral police chief of the world, and our record isn't that good. We've done some really bad stuff since World War II. And in the name of anti-communism, we've done some very bad things.

DAN OLSON: I think I remember you saying publicly you regretted very much being a taxpayer, knowing that some of your tax dollars were going off to what was then called low intensity warfare in Central America.

DON FRASER: Central America is one of the areas in which we really did poorly. We sponsored a coup in Guatemala. I think it was back in '57. The people of Guatemala have paid dearly ever since for that.

And El Salvador had an election in the early '70s. President Duarte had won, but it was taken away from him by the right wing. He said later, when he came to Washington, I was the only Congressman that would talk to him. Well, we continue to arm the, in effect, the right wing group. So it's been a sorry picture.

And I think in Nicaragua is another example where we've not dealt appropriately with people who want to see a better life for their people. We were too mesmerized by-- if somebody said they were anti-communist and pointed their finger at somebody else and said they were a communist, that guaranteed where we were going to come in.

And I think our military played a large role. I remember the Dominican Republic, a visit down there talking to some of the military officers and their characterization of essentially democratic forces who were left wing just astounded me. They shouldn't have been there with those attitudes.

DAN OLSON: Don Fraser, thanks a lot for visiting with us.

DON FRASER: Thank you, Dan.

GARY EICHTEN: Former Minneapolis mayor and former Congressman Don Fraser. Just a few weeks ago, Mr Fraser was named to the Minneapolis Charter Commission. Of course, while he was mayor, Fraser won charter changes, giving the mayor more power to make appointments and set the city's budget.

You're listening to Midday coming to you on Minnesota Public Radio. Voices of Minnesota interview series featured this hour. Leonard Lindquist was 14 when he hopped a freight train to join harvest crews in Montana.

His father had died, and Lindquist says he had to find work to help support the family. Of course, Lindquist is the founder of Lindquist & Vennum, one of Minnesota's largest law firms. Early in his legal career, Lindquist served on a state commission where he faced down mobsters led by the notorious Kid Cann.

Leonard Lindquist told Dan Olson that after his father died, he took any job he could find to help the family survive.

DAN OLSON: Your mother had to scramble. She had to, as you point out, open a boarding house in Minneapolis.

LEONARD LINDQUIST: Yes, we opened up a boarding and rooming house. I used to go down to the coal yards on 28th where the coal cars were and pick up enough coal to keep the furnace going. Then I had tremendous paper routes in the whole Loring Park District. I had 500 customers. I had the apartment district.

DAN OLSON: Were you-- you're a strapping guy right now. Were you a big kid then?

LEONARD LINDQUIST: I was a big kid. I was just saying, when everybody tried-- anybody tried to steal my papers in those days, and they did, we took them on with fistfights, not guns. And I always won those fist fights. I was a fighter.

DAN OLSON: And then you started out at West High School. You had to leave in your senior year. Times were still tough.

LEONARD LINDQUIST: We were going through the Great Depression in 1930, '31. I had no-- construction industry went dead. I was working in construction at the time.

So I grabbed a freight train and headed for Aberdeen, Washington for the lumber camps and lumber mills out there and stayed there a year, left-- I lost my senior year in high school. I had to come back, of course, and take it without being part of my class.

DAN OLSON: Somewhere along the line, you met your life partner, Elsie. And this was obviously a big occasion.

LEONARD LINDQUIST: I was blessed in having a very rich girl taking me to a sorority party of some kind. And here I met this poor Irish girl, Elsie Kelly. And I fell for the Irish girl. So we struggled for the rest of our lives.

She was working for the telephone company at that time, and she couldn't get married and still remained employee in those days. I had a chance to regulate the telephone companies later on, and I took care of that but--

DAN OLSON: Really, if you were a young woman employee at the time and got married, you couldn't stay?

LEONARD LINDQUIST: They let you go. She was in the business office. You were discharged. So we went down to Iowa on a secret mission with our two mothers and got married down there. And then I had to quit the company. I thought if I were going to go through the law school and university, I wanted her with me.

So she joined-- she joined-- we went to the potato fields in Northern Minnesota. He stuck up there and made enough money for our tuition, came back, got a little house in Prospect Park, little house, little room, little room in Prospect Park. And there started our university career, she with me.

And my wife, Elsie, was a great actress. And she was a leading star at the university for many years. And then Elsie went to-- I went off to war for three, four years, World War II, Elsie went off to Great Britain with the Red Cross as she went through all the bombings of Britain and was in charge of the Red Cross for Northern Ireland.

DAN OLSON: I'm curious about the stint just before your World War II service where you and Elsie shipped off to Washington, D.C. on the Greyhound bus, apparently, with the recommendation of the dean of the University of Minnesota Law School at that time. What was that all about?

LEONARD LINDQUIST: Well, I had demonstrated an interest in labor relations. I had drafted the Minnesota rules and procedure under the new Labor Relations Act that had just been passed. I was down in Hormel and set up a wage an hour employment law schedule for them in those days.

And the dean saw my interest in labor relations. And at that time, the National Labor Relations Board under President Roosevelt was getting started. And he sent me down there to become a review attorney with the board.

We got on a Greyhound bus, and we had no money. I got down. We got down there. We slept in a cheap hotel. When we arrived in Washington the next morning, I reported to the job.

And I went to Mr. Emerson, who was general counsel, and told him I had to have some money for us to live on until I could get paid. He said the US government is not interested in loaning money. But he did go out to the different lawyers of the board and raised enough money for us to live until the check came in.

DAN OLSON: Why was going to work for the National Labor Relations Board regarded in some circles as un-American or a subversive activity?

LEONARD LINDQUIST: We who were members of the board or were very active in the board at that time were called communists. And because, of course, we were moving into a new field where labor would have a right to a voice in the conditions under which they worked.

And this was the first time in the history of the country where there actually wasn't an enforceable law where the collective bargaining could take place. And any efforts on the part of the employers to impede that right to voice and to collective bargaining would call for action by the National Labor Relations Board.

DAN OLSON: The work must have been really exciting. You must have seen some really egregious examples of labor law violations.

LEONARD LINDQUIST: I was just-- those were the days when the guards would-- Pinkerton men and the guards would be at the plant gates, when the men would have to meet in the pool halls or in their basements of their homes in order to organize.

And they'd lock themselves into the plant or they would bust through the police lines. And, of course, many of them were killed. Many died in this course for rights of labor. And those were tough days, a lot of bloodshed at the plant gates.

DAN OLSON: One of the Minnesota governors along the way there took note of you and decided they'd appoint you to a state warehouse commission where I think you've told me you met among other individuals, Isidore Blumenfeld, Kid Can, mobster, racketeer, organized crime.

LEONARD LINDQUIST: Well, I was chair of the railroad and warehouse commission by appointment of Governor Youngdahl. And during my time there, the mobsters tried to take over the streetcar company, and I wasn't going to have any gangsters run our utilities.

And anyway, we brought out the revelations of their attempts to control. And out of my records and the records, of course, of others that were part of their lives why there was-- the mobsters were stopped.

DAN OLSON: How tough a job was it? How personally threatening was it for you to come up against these characters?

LEONARD LINDQUIST: I lived out in Brooklyn Center at the time pretty much of isolated area. Elsie and I had a beautiful home on the river, and we had our three boys there. And she would get these threatening calls. This was after I came back from the war and she came back, and I guess in 1950.

And the big black sedans would follow me home. And I asked a young dog for protection, and a young dog gave me protection. But they couldn't be there all the time. And the doctors advised that it was too much for Elsie, my wife, that I should move into the city where I had more-- where I wasn't so isolated. And that's the reason we moved into the city.

DAN OLSON: The threat was taken seriously by you because you knew from previous history the racketeers, the mobsters played hard. They played for keeps.

LEONARD LINDQUIST: That's right. And I could undertake it, but certainly I had to be concerned about the family.

DAN OLSON: You took on some public service. You went into the Minnesota House of Representatives. And among other things that you were involved in was something that really very few other lawmakers tried to take on.

And that was the fact that if you were Black or if you were Jewish or if you were some other minority group member in Twin Cities area, Minnesota, generally, you couldn't get housing. You couldn't find housing. Why did you take on Fair Housing as a call?

LEONARD LINDQUIST: Well, what brought all this to my attention was that I had headed up the Fair Employment Practices for the city of Minneapolis by appointment of Mayor Naftalin. And I saw what was going on in this area.

And so I just thought, well, why don't we, who are probably doing a little better, why don't we put ourselves in their shoes. And, well, how do we? So I told the legislators, who are you to be sitting here in your splendor where a Black person can't get into a nursing home that is supported in part by federal or state funds? That's wrong.

And we cleaned that up, too, by the way. We had a big fight, but we cleaned it up. And it was my bill that cleaned it up. And I took the same view about housing that anyone-- after all, we live as neighbors together in this world. That's what's all about. I've never fought with a neighbor.

Probably, I had neighbors I didn't agree with all the time. But you try to work things out. If neighbors can't live well together, no way nations can get along. And so I just felt that we should follow the doctrines of the Bible to love each other and to care for each other and be concerned about each other. And I always have been.

GARY EICHTEN: Attorney Leonard Lindquist's expertise in labor law caught the attention of the country's professional football players. And for 20 years he was the Players Association negotiator with owners. Let's return to Lindquist's conversation with Dan Olsen.

DAN OLSON: You, I gather from your resume, decided at a certain point that you would become an advocate for the players who were having a dispute with the owners. How did that come about?

LEONARD LINDQUIST: The players felt that they had to have some kind of organization or association for their own protection in relation to pension rights, injuries, and all that, and also the right to have a voice in the conditions under which they worked.

DAN OLSON: I gather conditions for football players then were quite different from what they are now.

LEONARD LINDQUIST: And they weren't getting-- they weren't getting any money then compared with now either. They weren't getting any pensions compared to now. So we went to work. John Mackey called me. Mackey was chosen president of the association. He was the great titan, of course, for the Baltimore Colts.

And John called me and asked me to meet with him at the International Hotel in Chicago at the airport. The owners would be in one suite, and I would be in the other. I had never seen a professional football game, either live or on the field, on television.

And I was reading the Chicago Tribune. John Mackey was in one part of the suite, and I was in the other. And we were getting ready to meet with a committee of the owners. John-- I was reading the Chicago Tribune and had read, John Mackey, President of the Players Association, tight end for the Baltimore Colts.

I had never heard of a tight end. I thought, my god, this must be a typographical error, just terrible. So John came in, and he was tall, way up to the ceiling and huge. He was known as the greatest tight end in the nation.

And I said, John, there's a mistake here. Shouldn't this read "right end". He looked at me. He said, of all the lawyers in this country, how in the world did I choose you? And with that, he took the Chicago Tribune and threw it across the suite. And I thought I was through.

But about in June, about six months later, at that Better Boys banquet in Chicago, he presented an NFL ring to me, NFLPA ring. I still have it today, and it's just still the beautiful ring it was then.

DAN OLSON: Are you a professional football fan now?

LEONARD LINDQUIST: Oh yes. I went to every Super Bowl game for 20 years, I think it was, during my 20 years as general counsel for the players. We went through some great crisis. We would find leading people and a team who could become the representatives for the team, and they'd get banished or traded or something, and all kinds of discrimination, which we had to fight. And it was difficult.

After all, it's not like an industrial shop where you can dress all the workers. They're all located all over the nation in different teams. So you couldn't really get the drive going. You'd have to have a national convention of some kind in order to really get them interested in fighting for the rights that they should have.

In fact, the women were more, at times were-- their wives were more active in carrying the torch than they were. But we used them-- we resorted to all kinds of discussions and arguments and presentations, and we won.

DAN OLSON: In your long legal career, you have met an extraordinary array of public figures, not the least of which is Jimmy Hoffa, not the young Jimmy Hoffa. We're talking about the original Jimmy Hoffa here, I gather.

LEONARD LINDQUIST: The Honeywell workers in Minneapolis asked me to represent them in Bob Wishart days. And also in those days when Kennedy came into power is 1960. And Teamsters were subject of investigation by Bobby Kennedy.

I'd known Hoffa very well because I was general counsel for one of the great unions, the Honeywell Union, 14,000 workers at the time. And also I was counsel for other of the teamster groups.

And Hoffa would open the doors to me whenever I came down to Washington. And I was there when he actually settled over the road contract for truck drivers in 1962 or something like that.

Hoffa had me there right in the office beside him when he would call Detroit and say, I understand your-- was in charge in Detroit at the time. I understand you're holding back on this, or are you trying? If you don't straighten out in the next 24 hours, I'll be there.

And that's the way he talked. And he was straight. He was straight with the employers. He was straight with the union members. I had a lot of respect for him. When he gave his word, his word was good.

DAN OLSON: Was it nerve-wracking working around a guy who-- around whom so many allegations were swarming that he-- swirling that he was crooked, that he was on the take, that he was not ethical.

LEONARD LINDQUIST: I had one of my assistants with me and meeting down in San Francisco where he saw me in the back room. But here was my assistant who looked like an FBI agent, to tell you the truth.

And so Hoffa kept looking at that-- he didn't know who was my assistant. He kept looking at the guy. Finally, he came back and grabbed the guy by the collar, said, who the hell are you? He is my assistant. I said, Hoffa, get your hands off of him. For heaven's gracious, he's my legal assistant.

DAN OLSON: Well, it's. It's a remarkable life, and it's not over. That's the best part.

LEONARD LINDQUIST: No, I'm kind of writing my memoirs now. I'm working with Jim Marshall and trying to provide a haven for the kids coming out of Red Wing and the Correctional Institute where they need-- we have to show them that there's a better life than going back to gang warfare and pushing drugs.

And we set ourselves up as people who they might look to and help giving them advice and other help along the way. And I find that a great satisfaction.

DAN OLSON: Leonard Lindquist, a great pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for your time.

GARY EICHTEN: Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson speaking with Minneapolis attorney Leonard Lindquist, part of our Voices of Minnesota series.

Well, that does it for our Midday program today. If you missed part of the interviews with Mr Lindquist or Mayor Fraser, we'll be rebroadcasting the program at 9:00 tonight.

Coming up next, Talk of the Nation. Melinda Pinkava behind the mic, talking the first hour about the Taliban Islamic movement in Afghanistan. That's coming up next here on Minnesota Public Radio.

SPEAKER: On Mondays, All Things Considered, Reform Party gubernatorial candidate Jesse Ventura talks about why he's opposed to public funding for sports facilities. That story on Monday's all things considered weekdays at 3:00 on Minnesota Public radio, FM 91.1. You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio.

GARY EICHTEN: We have a cloudy sky, 72 degrees at KNOW-FM 91.1, Minneapolis and St. Paul. Light showers are likely in the Twin Cities this afternoon with a high reaching the mid 70s. Then tonight and tomorrow, partly cloudy with an overnight low around 60 degrees. We can look for a high tomorrow near 80 degrees. It's a minute past one.