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KORVA COLEMAN: From NPR News in Washington, I'm Korva Coleman. For the second day in a row, President Bush stepped out before microphones to urge members of Congress to support a $700 billion bill. It's intended to shore up the financial industry. NPR'S Dina Temple-Raston reports.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: The Bush administration has been trying to convince lawmakers and the American people that the effort to buy toxic mortgages from US financial institutions is not about bailing out Wall Street. President Bush says it's about saving the US economy. While he acknowledged that the plan was expensive, he said that without it, the cost to the economy would be even greater. After the bill was defeated yesterday, the Dow shed nearly 800 points.

GEORGE BUSH: Put that in perspective. The drop in the stock market yesterday represented more than $1 trillion in losses.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: White House officials are hoping that yesterday's debacle in the markets will focus minds on how much the economy now depends on passage of the bill. Congress is out of session today. Another vote on the plan is expected this week. Dina Temple-Raston, NPR News.

KORVA COLEMAN: Republican presidential candidate John McCain says the rejection of the package puts the nation at risk. He's campaigning in Iowa, where he discussed how local business owners are starting to experience financial trouble. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama released a statement today saying lawmakers should continue negotiating, but he urged them not to start from scratch. Both Obama and McCain support expanding the Federal Deposit Insurance program that would cover more of American savings in protected accounts. Despite a massive retreat on Wall Street and the collapse of high-profile financial institutions, consumer confidence increased slightly in September. NPR's Scott Neuman reports.

SCOTT NEUMAN: By the numbers, Americans were slightly more upbeat about the economy in September, but the numbers are a bit misleading. Firstly, while the Conference Board's consumer confidence index posted an ever so slight increase from August, it still hovers near a 16 year low. Secondly, and more important, the figure is out of sync with the latest dramatic events on Wall Street. The data was compiled a week ago before the full brunt of the financial sector meltdown was known. Meanwhile, consumers have plenty else to focus on. Home equity continues to plummet. The Case-Shiller housing index, just out, shows housing prices falling at their steepest rate in years. Scott Neuman, NPR News, Washington.

KORVA COLEMAN: The National Hurricane Center says Tropical Storm Laura is headed for the northern Atlantic Ocean. This is the 12th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season. Laura is more than 400 miles Southeast of Newfoundland. It's headed-- it's rather expected to turn East. Laura could threaten Ireland or Scotland over the rest of the week. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrials are up 266 points at 10,631. The NASDAQ is up $64. It's at 2,048. This is NPR News in Washington.

SPEAKER 1: Support for news comes from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Announcing KIDS COUNT, a state-by-state look at child well-being and juvenile justice reform at aecf.org.

STEVEN JOHN: From Minnesota Public Radio news, I'm Steven John. Today is a campaign fundraising deadline in Minnesota's major party. US Senate candidates are making urgent appeals to supporters for more campaign cash. Minnesota Public Radio's Mark Zdechlik reports.

MARK ZDECHLIK: In an email to his backers, Republican Senator Norm Coleman suggests that if he ends September with considerably more cash than DFL candidate Al Franken, outside special interest groups backing Franken might write off Franken's chances and put their money into other races. In its fundraising email, the Franken campaign claims to have Coleman on the ropes but predicts that Republicans will panic and throw a lot more money into Coleman's re-election bid. That's why the Franken campaign says it needs more money. Independence Party candidate Dean Barkley, too, is appealing for cash. In his email, Barkley says if he's elected, he'll work to change the campaign finance system to reduce the influence of big money and special interests in politics. Mark Zdechlik, Minnesota Public Radio News, Saint Paul.

STEVEN JOHN: The Justice Department says Walgreens has paid nearly $10 million to settle whistleblower allegations that it overcharged Medicaid programs in Minnesota and three other states. Two Twin Cities pharmacists who reported the overcharging will divide about $1.4 million of the award. Authorities in Marshall are offering a $300 reward for information that leads to a conviction in a case of cemetery vandalism. 30 headstones were tipped over or broken at the Marshall City Cemetery sometime over the weekend. Officials say some of the damaged markers were more than 100 years old. Partly to mostly cloudy skies for Minnesota today. Some scattered shower activity possible in the Northeast. Highs should range from around 50 in the Arrowhead to the mid 60s in the Southwestern part of the state. This is Minnesota Public Radio News.

GARY EICHTEN: All right. Thanks, Steven. Six minutes past 12:00.

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And good afternoon. Welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio News. I'm Gary Eichten. During this hour of Midday, we're featuring conversations with two detectives, not police detectives mind you. Now, these two Minnesotans, Art Aufderheide and Clarke Chambers, they are sleuths of a different kind.

Aufderheide is world famous for his study of mummies and the diseases that kill them. Clarke Chambers is a Historian and the founder of one of a kind archive of Social Welfare History. Both are U of M profs. Both grew up in Southern Minnesota. One of them, Clarke Chambers, is retired and Dr. Aufderheide retires this fall. Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson spoke with both of them for our Voices of Minnesota interview series.

DAN OLSON: What did our ancestors die from? What does it tell us about how to fight diseases today? Those are among the questions Dr. Art Aufderheide is asking. Aufderheide is a paleopathologist and paleoepidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Duluth. He studies mummies and tracks disease patterns in ancient populations. He's a pioneer in this field and literally wrote the book on it. In fact, he's written four books and more than 100 articles in scientific journals.

Aufderheide and his colleagues have made some surprising discoveries, including the presence of tuberculosis in the Americas five centuries before Columbus arrived. He got his medical degree from the University of Minnesota just after World War II and found his way into the field of pathology. From there, his interests led him far back to the days before scalpels and microscopes, before written history all the way back to mummies. Minnesota Public Radio's Stephanie Hemphill visited Art Aufderheide in his basement office in Duluth.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Most days, you can find Art Aufderheide here in the basement kindergarten of an old elementary school on the University of Minnesota Duluth campus. He's a wiry man with thick, white hair and the smile of an elf. This is a man who's not afraid to wear a bolo tie fashioned from a fake diamond brooch.

ART AUFDERHEIDE: I like bolo ties. I can keep them in my pocket until I need them.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: He has plenty of the Western style turquoise bolos, but he says they get boring.

ART AUFDERHEIDE: There isn't enough variation there. So I buy pendants and pins and take them down to my basement workshop. And cut the pins off and glue the rest of the pieces together.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Art Aufderheide is 85 years old. Four years ago, he published a 600-page textbook, The Scientific Study of Mummies. It combines history, anthropology, and medicine. He says it's his attempt to help organize a field of study, paleopathology, the science of ancient diseases. At his desk, he's surrounded on all sides by floor-to-ceiling shelves loaded with books and three-ring binders that organize his research. A cabinet with glass doors holds his specimens. There are about 600 tiny pieces of skin, and bone, and heart, and lung shaved off of mummies from around the world. They're carefully packed away in plastic bags that keep out the air.

ART AUFDERHEIDE: This is a-- M016 is the name of the cemetery burial site. T is the tomb number from-- this is M16T2 and M16T3 is the next one. It starts here and so forth.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: So where is M0--

ART AUFDERHEIDE: M016 is in the extreme northern Chile on the Coast of the Atacama Desert. The Atacama Desert in South America is the driest desert in the world. Geologists tell us that probably it hasn't rained there since the end of the Ice Age. So it's so dry that when you bury a body there, in the hyperarid climate, simply together with the porosity of the soil, sucks the water out of the body. And the decay process and enzymatic process, needs enzymes. The enzymes need water to work. So if you take the water out, it stops. And because it never rains there, the decay process never starts again. And my oldest mummy radiocarbon date came back 9,000 years. So it's been lying there for 9,000 years until it was excavated again.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: And you showed me a rib. But this is skin here, huh?

ART AUFDERHEIDE: That's skin. And then we have heart.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Heart? Can we see the heart?

ART AUFDERHEIDE: Well, these are all small specimens. You won't--

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: It doesn't look like a heart.

ART AUFDERHEIDE: This one's just about used up. There's just a little but probably--

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Little pieces.

ART AUFDERHEIDE: --dried blood left. But that one specimen is almost completely gone.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Now what do you want to learn from this mummy?

ART AUFDERHEIDE: Well, diseases. I'm trying to reconstruct the pattern of diseases as they occurred in ancient populations who were living under conditions that's so dramatically different from those of today.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: And so you need more than one mummy if you're looking at progression or disease.

ART AUFDERHEIDE: Right. Yeah. The last study we did had about 300 mummies that we sampled. We traced a certain disease that's common in South America today-- Chagas disease. We traced that back 9,000 years, the way it behaved. So that's my goal, to try to do that.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: What is Chagas disease? What does it do?

ART AUFDERHEIDE: Chagas disease is a parasite. Parasite is called Trypanosome and it's a microscopic-sized parasite. Gets into the blood and affects the heart, basically.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: And are you learning something from these mummies that applies to that disease today?

ART AUFDERHEIDE: Yeah. Yes. What we're interested in is this, the disease itself, the way it impacts on the body, the effects of the disease are probably not very different. What is dramatically different at times is the distribution of it. The medical term for this is epidemiology. Epidemiology is the study of the patterns of disease, who gets it, and what conditions and so forth.

If we see a sudden change in the way the disease behaved, then we can go to the archaeologists who have reconstructed a good deal of the life of these people. And we can go to them and say, well, hey, what changed here? And from that, we might be able to get a clue to exploiting that, whatever that cause was, to try to modify the course of the disease today. That's our long term hope. But in the meantime, we're still in the process of establishing a database.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Today, about 15% of Chileans have Chagas disease. There's still no vaccine or effective treatment. Aufderheide hopes his research will provide a better understanding of how the disease works. He says there's no essential difference between ourselves and a person who died thousands of years ago. Art Aufderheide grew up in New Ulm. He says he got an excellent education at local Catholic schools. He always knew he wanted to be a doctor.

ART AUFDERHEIDE: Even as an elementary school level, I was catching frogs and bandaging their legs and so forth. So I always had an interest in it. I think it was probably just the image of the family practitioner that had a lot of influence over me. The ability to come into a home where there's a sick person and help them get well just seemed to me to be a very satisfying career.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Well, then why did you decide to go into pathology?

ART AUFDERHEIDE: It was partly circumstantial and partly intellectual. It was circumstantial to the extent that when I was taking my medical school training in University of Minnesota, the Department of Pathology had no residents. It had no residents because we were all drafted in the army. So as soon as the course was finished at the end of the second year, the department head chose two of us medical students to carry out the autopsies that residents formerly did. And that really got me interested very strongly.

The intellectual part is a more major factor, though, I think. So the intellectual aspects of the autopsy, I became impressed very quickly. The profound amount of information, medical information that's present in a body that's recently deceased. When I thought about what I'm doing now, applying this approach to ancient diseases, it occurred to me that while certainly not all of that information is there in bodies that are 5,000 years old, nevertheless, some of it must remain. At least it's highly probable it won't be. So basically, what I did was gamble on the fact that it probably is there and committed to it. And fortunately, it was right. There is information there, a lot of information.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: So he was drawn to a field that combined his professional training with an amateur interest in anthropology and archaeology. Dr. Aufderheide joined the UMD School of Medicine in 1977. He read lots of different academic journals to learn more about history and anthropology and mummies. But he had trouble finding mummies to examine. In 1982, he took a course in paleopathology from a professor at the University of Virginia. That's how he learned that South America is the place to go for naturally mummified remains.

ART AUFDERHEIDE: In 1985, Mary, that's Mrs. Aufderheide, she and I packed a small bag and on almost an impulse and bought two tickets to Bogota, Colombia. And we started in Bogota, Colombia. And I still remember that first day, we got out of the airplane, walked, got down to the city, Bogota, and the hotel. Arranged for an afternoon tour so we could just find out how the city was laid out and where we would go. Found out that the lady speaks good English, I hired her for the next day. And by that evening, we had gone to five different museums and universities that had mummies in their collections.

And two of those curators were willing to work with us. Incidentally, we're still working with them today. This is 24 hours after we got there, after several years of trying to find out where they were. So we spent the next-- we just went down the Western Coast of South America going, stopping in every city we thought was big enough, might have mummies in somebody's collection and some museum and so forth. And it worked out. It took a long time for us. It took us three months to do that, just going from city to city and so forth, playing it by ear as we go. We found them in museums, we found them in universities, we found them in private collections and so forth. Sometimes, even, we found them in commercial establishments.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Oh, like tourist traps or something?

ART AUFDERHEIDE: Exactly. I mean, we were walking down the street of Bogota and we saw a jewelry shop that specialized in reproducing and creating replicas of ancient jewelry. And they had three mannequins there, nicely adorned with their products displayed. And so we thought we'd go in and see whether there was something there that Mary might be interested in buying. And we looked at them more closely and we were astonished to find they weren't mannequins. There were three mummies and so forth. So we found mummies in a lot of different places.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Many of the museum directors were willing to share samples of their mummies. Art Aufderheide says it was in large part because his wife, Mary, had a talent for languages.

ART AUFDERHEIDE: When we go into a museum and we don't know the people there, we have a matter of minutes often to interest them. And if you can't speak their language and they can't speak yours, you're not going to gain the access you wanted. And Mary's ability to speak the local languages was extremely useful. Basically, Mary opened the doors and to provide access to us.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: It's Voices of Minnesota. And we're hearing Dr. Arthur Aufderheide describe his groundbreaking work in paleopathology, that's the study of ancient diseases. Dr. Aufderheide teaches medicine at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and he studies mummies to learn things about ancient diseases that could help in the fight against modern diseases. Over the years, he's conducted some 500 autopsies on mummies. He helped dig out a half dozen of those bodies himself. He says it's exciting to excavate burial grounds because you never know what you'll find.

After 1,000 years or more in the desert sand, everything about a mummified body becomes as hard as dry leather. Not only the bones, but the skin, the heart and even the intestines. So Aufderheide Heidi and other researchers have had to modify and invent various techniques to reveal the medical secrets of these ancient remains. The most useful procedures involve studying the DNA of bacteria, parasites and other disease-causing organisms still lodged in the mummy tissue.

ART AUFDERHEIDE: DNA techniques came out about in the '70s and the procedures evolved quite quickly and very precisely. So they work very well in living people's tissues but when we try to work, apply those exact same techniques to mummified tissues unmodified, they don't work at all. So over the years, we have gradually learned how to deal with most of those problems. There's still some that remain. Their DNA is present in two forms.

One is called nuclear DNA and that tells us about the various genes that operate in a living person. And the other is mitochondrial DNA and that's outside the nucleus in the cell. But it's a separate form of DNA. And that's mostly valuable for identification. If we use it on humans, we can get some idea of the relationship between people. And if we use them on populations, we can usually identify some parts of the DNA that's common to the population A but is not present in population B. So it's useful for that type of information, that it can be used to establish patterns of migration, for example. If you can get samples from Siberia and then from Alaska and so forth, you might be able to trace migrations.

We use mostly the mitochondrial DNA because we aren't looking at the human DNA. We're looking at the DNA of the trypanosome or the other parasite, the malaria parasite, whatever it is. Instead of culturing it like we would in a living human, we'd culture blood to find out if the malaria is there. Well, we can't culture them because they're dead and mummies. But the DNA of the parasite or the bacterium is still there. So it's the DNA of the bacterium that we're after. And for that, ancient DNA methods work extremely well.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Well, this makes me want to ask, what people died of? Obviously, there's a great range but when you study large numbers of people, is there a most common way of dying?

ART AUFDERHEIDE: One study we've done recently has gotten us to a good start to answer that question, but it's only a start. We looked at pneumonia and we looked at pneumonia over the last 9,000 years. And we found out that the pattern of pneumonia is similar to the pattern of pneumonia in the 1920s. We had no known useful treatments in the 1920s, so we wanted to compare the frequencies in antiquity with the 1920s.

It turns out that if we look at all the age groups in the population that we're studying, the one is enormously more susceptible is the first two years of life, infants from zero to two years of life. Their immune system apparently is not totally mature at the time of birth and it takes up to two years to come up to speed, so to speak. And during that interval, they're much more susceptible to infection. It turns out that in the populations we've studied to date, pneumonia killed half of the babies less than two years of age. So that was an enormous impact on their life.

Now, it's true that even in the 1920s, the babies up to two years of age died of pneumonia more frequently than their older partners in that population but not nearly as much. One fourth or less than it did in ancient times. So now we're trying to dig out exactly why that is true. So there are several interesting possibilities. For example, the pneumococcus, which is the germ that causes pneumonia, has many different subspecies, many different strains. And each of those strains has differing virulence that is there, differing in their ability to kill the host. So it might be a strain difference.

It might be also that, for example, just keeping a sick baby alive long enough for the antibodies to form and recover from pneumonia. That must have been easier to do in 1920. For example, a baby that has a fever, 104 and so forth and isn't feeding can become dehydrated and die from that alone in a matter of 24 hours. And then today, you can or even in 1920s, you can use intravenous or subcutaneous delivery of fluids and keep them alive. And finally, the simple crowding may be an enormous factor. So now we've got a difference. So now we focus in on what the differences might be and try to determine that.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Now he plans to identify the types of pneumonia to see whether it was a stronger strain killing all those babies so many years ago. If he's able to do that, it won't be his first contribution to our understanding of history. In 1994, Aufderheide and his colleagues reported they had identified tuberculosis in a woman buried in the Atacama Desert in Chile 500 years before Columbus set sail.

Historians had long thought European explorers had brought TB to the Western hemisphere. Aufderheide didn't invent the field of paleopathology but his long years of work in a relatively new academic endeavor have made him a highly respected authority. He says he's been able to make these contributions because in a field without a built-in source of funding, he's been willing to pay his own way.

ART AUFDERHEIDE: I entered this when I was in the middle 50s, I think, and that's the time most people are getting ready to retire. And so I was able. With the house paid for, and the cars paid for, and the kids all out working, and college behind them, I was able to do that. I was able to use the money that we'd save for retirement and use it for this purpose. And I was extremely fortunate and that I married a lady that thought this was a wonderful way to spend her retirement funds.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: And what does an 85-year-old man who pokes around in the remains of people who have been dead for thousands of years, what does he think about human mortality?

ART AUFDERHEIDE: I view the body as a physical machine incredibly, wonderfully structured machine but still, it's just a machine to service what we might call the spirit of the person. Now, exactly what that spirit is, I have no more information than anyone else. If I'm expected to understand that better, I think I should have been given more brains so I could do so.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Dr. Arthur Aufderheide is the author of The Scientific Study of Mummies, a professor in the UMD medical school, and a maker of bolo ties.

DAN OLSON: Minnesota Public Radio's Stephanie Hemphill. You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson. And now a conversation with another detective of sorts in this case, a history detective, retired University of Minnesota History professor, Clarke Chambers. A version of history that gets a lot of ink is how the actions of kings, queens, presidents and generals influence events. Clarke Chambers is interested in the bottom up perspective, how people at the grassroots level make history.

Chambers is a leading scholar in the field of American Social Welfare History. He's curious about the history making activities of people who were often overlooked, including women and people involved in grassroots reform movements such as farm organizations, labor unions, and groups fighting poverty. Chambers wanted to make sure there was a place where the records of those groups can be stored. So 44 years ago, he started one of a kind collection called the Social Welfare History Archives. It's located at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The archives has more than 200 collections of records and personal papers, including those for groups organized to help immigrants, poor people, unwed mothers, abused and abandoned children, the aged and many, many more.

88-year-old Clarke Chambers is a tall man with white hair, a hearty laugh and a lot of stories. Some of his most interesting stories are about the Chambers family and their history in Minnesota. Chambers was born and raised in the Southern Minnesota town of Blue Earth in the midst of some of Minnesota's most fertile farmland. A vivid childhood memory and may be, Chambers says, as the point at which he became interested in history, was watching his father, a World War I veteran march in a Blue Earth Memorial Day parade.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: The first one I can remember, I think I was probably four, maybe five, but I think four years old. And the American Legion marched on Main Street. Well, they were veterans and they weren't professional soldiers. And they marched out of step. And when they came to make the turn and march up Main Street from the side street, the wheel was all out of order. And I was a little boy and my father was in that, and he was doing his best. But it wasn't a very seemly march. And so I started giggling. It was a funny spectacle from a four year old's point of view.

And I was holding the hand of my mother and I looked up at her and tears were streaming down her cheeks. And I won't say that I knew at that time, but I think it came to be, for me, a shock that things were going on in the adult world I didn't know about. And I even say, and I think this is made up long after the fact, that that was the beginning of being a historian, that there are mysterious things. You have questions. Why is my mother crying? That simple. And--

DAN OLSON: She was apparently-- we don't know. Maybe you do know. She was, obviously, moved by the sight of her husband, a World War I veteran--

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Yes.

DAN OLSON: --marching in his hometown parade.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: And the other boys, too. She knew the dead boys. She knew everybody there had a cross.

DAN OLSON: Another story, the Chambers family from way back voted Republican and only Republican, a tradition that the young Clarke would interrupt. Clarke Chambers says his grandfather, also named Clarke Chambers, was a successful Blue Earth businessman and landowner who helped start what would become the great Minnesota get-together. Here's more of our conversation.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: After the Civil War, all the brothers and cousins began to gather in near Owatonna in Steele County. And Clarke-- well, my father used to say there was a man I knew how to have a good time.

DAN OLSON: What does that mean?

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Well, it meant that he did things civically and he must have had some kind of capital support for that. But he, along with other farmers in the South Central Minnesota, started what became the State Fair. It started as a small affair on his property because he had lots of it. And he loved horses, which is part of the fun. And he had a half-mile track behind the barn. So in the process, he bought thoroughbred horses from Kentucky, where he had been in the Civil War and is being honored next August as the person who brought in real certified horses and cattle to Minnesota.

Now, he never was a working farmer, but he kept that. And in the 1870s, he was elected Sheriff of Steele County. And from then on, he just lived his life. He had a big mansion in Owatonna. He was a Republican, of course, never ran for office except Sheriff. But he was loved. The give and take of politics.

DAN OLSON: You say a Republican, of course.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Oh. The family has been Republican since 1856.

DAN OLSON: Wow, what a string.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: And maybe I should add a little footnote there that the first time I had a chance to cast a ballot was in the primary of 1942, just before I went into the service. And I was young and I was kind of in rebellion as younger people are. So I went down from Carleton College, where I was to vote in September on the primary. In those days, they had separate ballots. The Democrats, Republicans and the Farmer-Laborites. And I went down and walked in boldly and said I wanted the Farmer-Laborites ticket. [CHUCKLES] And--

DAN OLSON: This was a headline. This was a major break for the Chambers family.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Well, we take things pretty well. My father, especially, was amused. But when I went in, the registrar there, the captain of voting, who-- we all know everybody in a small town. And she picked up the Farmer-Labor ticket in her thumb and finger and said, citizens, may I give the Farmer-Labor ticket to old doc Chambers' little boy. So that was the beginning. And of course, she did. It was all joking. And so I voted. I don't know who was on the ticket at all, but it was a break in the Republican tradition, in any case.

DAN OLSON: Still another story, this one about growing up during the Great Depression. Clarke Chambers and his sister were born into relative privilege in Blue Earth, Minnesota. His father was a town medical doctor and mother was a homemaker who traced her family's roots to early Minnesota white settlement and all the way back, in fact, to the Revolutionary War. The Great Depression, Chambers says, forced his father's patience to find innovative ways to pay for his medical services. Here's more of our conversation.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: The children, that is my older sister and I, realized that we were getting paid-- my father was being paid in kind, so we had fresh eggs and we had some farm lady who came in with a bucket of cottage cheese every Saturday. And my sister and I would look at oh, we had another barrel of cottage cheese to eat before the next Saturday. So there was a lot of exchange of that sort. The doctors were very busy in those days.

DAN OLSON: This was the day of house calls.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Oh. My father had $3 for a house call and $2 for a home. And he delivered babies at a lump sum of $25. Pre-pregnancy, delivery and postnatal.

DAN OLSON: This business of being paid in kind, health insurance, if it existed, was not common, I gather.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: In the mid 1930s, my father, who was a conservative Republican, thought that the pay for service individually was not up to what the society, even Blue Earth needed. And he went to Detroit when they were organizing the Blue Cross Blue Shield, and he brought it back and was a proponent of insurance, health insurance in the depths of the Depression.

DAN OLSON: This was viewed, how, by his colleagues as a major breaking away from the ranks?

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Yeah, but my father was such a nice fellow. He was a founder of the American Legion in Blue Earth. He was founder of the Town and Country golf course. He was on the library board. He was on the school board. So he did a lot of civic work. And--

DAN OLSON: So if Dr. Chambers--

CLARKE CHAMBERS: --a good deal of authority, just moral authority.

DAN OLSON: If Dr. Chambers said something should be, then people listened.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Well, he had more people than that. I think the doctors were resistant, but it was a good idea. But these other ideas, it was well, if old doc Chambers says it's a good idea, he carried kind of a moral authority. And when My mother's authority is an early settler. added to it, it was fine. Now, let me say that the school system also was a democratizing thing. Everybody had to be involved in sports. I was a very bad athlete. And--

DAN OLSON: How bad were you?

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Oh, really bad. I was in the second squad, but I was bad enough at basketball that when the team was far ahead so that it didn't make any difference if I played or if we were far behind and no hope, the coach would look down to the end of the bench and say, well, I guess we can put the piccolo player in. Now, I played the flute. I didn't play the piccolo, but it was a demeaning comment by the coach. And that's-- this is give and take.

And I played the flute because my father delivered a baby about that time. And the father shook his head and he said, that's-- and I'm so happy with this little baby, but I haven't got any money, not even $25. So he went up in the attic and brought down an old German wooden flute. And my father came back from the delivery and he's shoved it at me and he said, well, here you are. I guess you'll play the flute. That was fine to me. I didn't expect anything else. So I taught myself how to play the flute with a little help from local folks.

DAN OLSON: Retired University of Minnesota History professor, Clarke Chambers. You're listening to voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson. Clarke Chambers was not a star athlete in high school, but he was a star student. And he admits he knew it and was proud of it. He remembers a high school teacher he did not especially like, tossing him a challenge that ended in Chambers winning a once in a lifetime opportunity to meet two of the most prominent Americans of the time.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: The teacher of social studies in the 11th grade said, well, Clarke Chambers, you think you're so smart. Here's a contest, national contest. You join it. We'll see how you do. Well, it was a contest to write a 10-page essay, typed on why labor unions were good in American society. Blue Earth had no labor unions. But we were sure against them. But my sister was at Carleton at the time. She was older than I, and she sent me some books out of the Carleton library that I could read about the history of labor unions.

So I wrote my essay and sent it in. And in about three months, I was awarded first national prize. And I always have wondered, ever since then, maybe no one else got into it. No one else had a mean social studies teacher to egg him on to try it. In any case, I got a choice of $125 cash or to take the train or the bus to Washington, D.C. and have lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt and John L. Lewis. Well, it being the Depression, I took the money and ran and helped pay part of my first tuition at Carleton that fall of 1939.

DAN OLSON: Clarke Chambers is a graduate of Carleton College in Northfield. He got his PhD in History from the University of California at Berkeley and was a History professor there for more than a decade. In between, he served in the military during World War II as a weather observer in the Pacific. He plays down his own wartime contribution but retains a high regard for the military during the war.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Well, I came to have great admiration. I think they realized by instinct that I didn't have the making of a combat soldier, just like I wasn't an athlete.

DAN OLSON: What does that mean?

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Well, it's pretty hard to be a combat soldier. And they knew that I had done this mathematics and physical work, and the Air Corps needed people to work with that. I ended up in the, if you want to jump there, into the 29th Bomber Command in the Marianas, Saipan, Tinian, and Guam.

DAN OLSON: We're in the South Pacific now.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Yeah. Western Pacific. Nimitz was the commander. It was a Navy theater that I was in and then finally went to Okinawa just after it was secured. So it was a good assignment. And I've always admired the army or at least the ones that I touched. The army from day to day is a chaos. And the army, over four years, is one of the most efficient machines that I know of.

DAN OLSON: Having said that, Clarke Chambers acknowledges the military wasn't always an efficient machine. He remembers how part of his training from becoming a weather observer went awry. He and others were going to learn how to follow weather over Russia and how it would affect the bombing runs of American pilots flying over Japan. The instructor for the training was brought in from Russia.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: A strange Russian showed up on our field and he was to give us the tricks for transforming the Soviet weather reports from Siberia and Kamchatka et cetera. coming because the weather there comes South and East as it does here. And the form, the heavy weather. And so we went to school. And it wasn't in Russian language, but it was the different cryptographic system. And when we got down to his team in Siberia sending us messages, either he gave us the wrong instruction or the wrong books, or we were dumb. In any case, it never worked. So--

DAN OLSON: So much for the weather forecast.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Yeah, but it was a nice idea. And then the lieutenant, he got a promotion for doing it, got the idea that when the Japanese Navy was largely gone by 44 from the Western Pacific, that we could teach submarine folks to surface near Japan. We would teach them how to do weather readings. And they had a cryptographic system of sending the news back to us. So we were getting weather reports very close to the Japanese mainland at that time. And it really worked because our pilots could navigate by weather and they knew what they were getting in for.

DAN OLSON: You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson. Clarke Chambers, remember, is a scholar of how history is made from the bottom up. So it's no surprise that many of his recollections include a level of observation and detail that might otherwise escape others. Take Memorial Day observances. Chambers has vivid memories of Memorial Day observances in his hometown of Blue Earth in Southern Minnesota. There and in many communities before and for a time after World War II, Memorial Day was a big deal, lasting all day, sometimes longer, as families gathered for picnics, parades, and programs.

Chambers' view of history is community gatherings help knit a community together and that we've lost some of our cultural cohesiveness as the Memorial Day observance, for one, has been diminished of just another holiday. As our conversation continued, Chambers remembered a bizarrely tragic Memorial Day in his hometown.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Everybody was involved. The high school band led the way. We had an old veteran of the Civil War still alive, and he would be braced up in the back of a roadster and he would go along. And when we got to the cemetery, there was a circle of all the veterans who had died in the war and little girl bluebirds or girl scouts would place the wreath on the proper name when it was read. And it was kind of a routine that is very good for community. You can depend upon it.

The mayor of the town always read General Logan's orders, establishing Memorial Day in the 1870s. In rotation, Protestant ministers gave a short sermon about war and loss. And that was part of we knew the church was represented. And then, of course, they gave the benediction at the end. The high school valedictorian read, by memory, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. And at the end, of course, we blew taps. Now, one of my best friends-- this is a story that still sticks in my mind.

When I was a kid in high school, the son of the bandmaster for the town played a beautiful trumpet and he was a beautiful young man. He was popular with everyone. He was tall so he could play good basketball. He had everything going for him. And he would be just over the hill and someone down by the circle would play a bit of taps. Then he would echo it from over the hill. It was a very touching ceremony.

Now when the war was over, he enlisted in the Navy Air Corps and had seen service in the Western Pacific in that capacity. And so when he got home in the autumn of 1945, when Memorial Day came, they said, well, you know how to fly all these planes. Why don't you-- we got a little Piper Cub here and you could fly over the ceremony and come in just as we were reaching the climax. And we'll give you a whole bushel basket of paper flowers, the red curtain.

And he was a cocky little fella, lovely human boy. And so he did. And of course, he got over the service. And threw the flowers out. And his airplane nosed down and went right into the cornfield near the place. And that was the end. He lived through the war. And he was so close to so many of us because he was kind of a town hero. And there he was, dead. So Memorial Day meant a great deal, but it was a gathering of everybody. Not all 3500 but it was a large ceremony and very serious. In the meantime, after the service, everybody came back and had picnics at all the homes. It's a sense of community that I don't think you can pump it up artificially.

DAN OLSON: Does war create this sense of community? Is the struggle--

CLARKE CHAMBERS: For the time but I think it evaporates rather soon afterwards.

DAN OLSON: It evaporates rather soon.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Well, that would be my sense.

DAN OLSON: I mean, we have a couple of wars going on now but we have a bubble, a time of--

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Perhaps, but I think not like there was in the '30s at all.

DAN OLSON: Why so? Are these wars different?

CLARKE CHAMBERS: It's a professional army, for one thing. And I think there's a fragmentation of American society that we are, as the political campaign would suggest, many Americans now.

DAN OLSON: Clarke Chambers says his interest in studying how history is made from the bottom up by various individuals and groups started early in his academic career. He says good historians want to get their hands on source material, the original documents unvarnished facts as opposed to someone's interpretation of how things happened. The problem was, lots of the organizations and people Chambers was interested in writing about had a haphazard, to say the least, record keeping system. He remembers sorting through boxes of records stored in the bathroom of a mansion in New York City.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: As a matter of fact, one of them down in the basement was-- there were three cabinets that were in a marble bathroom and it was a working bathroom. So they gave me a chair and I went in. And at the card table and I worked there. And when someone knocked on the door while I went out outside and waited for the place to clear-- well, there were experiences like that all around. They were in warehouses, a big organization in New York, and many of them were, of course, in New York, used warehouses. They weren't saving their papers, but they thought someday they might use them or they threw them in the East River.

DAN OLSON: Clarke Chambers' reaction to the loss of potentially valuable historical documents of groups often overlooked by historians, motivated him to create the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota. The archives contained the papers, meeting notes, and other records from a wide range of groups, including the settlement house movement, the social work profession, records of groups interested in human sexuality, child welfare and family relations, and much more. Here's more of our conversation. Were you educated in a school of historical training, which said that history is written by the winners?

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Well, I was reared in a traditional account of economic and political history and diplomatic if we had a war.

DAN OLSON: And so does this kind of collection allow historians to turn it on its head and say, wait a minute, there were many [? more ?] players?

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Yup. And as part of that bubbling up of populist democracy again in the 1960s, we even were concerned with juvenile delinquency and with prison reform.

DAN OLSON: Here's the United--

CLARKE CHAMBERS: --field. Yeah.

DAN OLSON: Here's the United Defense Fund records very relatively narrow time span, 1947 and 1957. Operating during the Korean War, the United Defense Fund raised approximately $45 million for distribution among participating national agencies. What a strange sounding--

CLARKE CHAMBERS: There are millions of agencies, most of them private, and a few of them in this case that had a connection with the veterans administration, if that's the one I'm thinking of. But it had a kind of information that you couldn't find anywhere else. I had this what are you going to make out of a charity society records. These are friendly visitors. There are people who try to help people who are in trouble. They're middle class and they're working with a class that is desperately in need.

And what one of my students found out was that very good case records were kept by the volunteers who went into homes. And we had descriptions of the homes, and how many children there were, and where was the father, and how was the mother getting by without any money. And she took the records of a Minneapolis charity from, I think, 1880 to 1930 to examine. And she found out how close the social workers really were to these mothers, this clientele, and how active the poor women were in working the agency to get what they wanted. Now, that's a story that's never been told.

DAN OLSON: So what does that story do? Does that bust stereotypes or what does it do?

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Indeed it does. There's a larger degree of agency in these poor groups, if they're organized correctly. It's not someone giving them out money from above, it comes towards a community kind of community organizations.

DAN OLSON: So are you suggesting that the careful reader of these records will see that it isn't just the Carnegies, and the Mellons, and the Rockefellers writing the history of this country?

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Yes. It really opens up well, history from the bottom up.

DAN OLSON: And how does that make us a better country? What does this do for the country?

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Well, historians claim that if you know the past, you're better off than we always stutter when it comes to answering it. But certainly, the sense of empowerment that came from these groups they were working with, for example, the mobilization for youth in the Lower East Side in New York. The marginal income groups began to agitate in their own right and they are well led by settlement leaders in New York.

But that's part of the story that is reforms being done by a middle-class professional group, which had always been the case. But now, there's a participation of the clients and they're taking part and shaping programs to their own local needs. And that's important to know. I don't think history had much to do with it but that community action came to be the key form of social activity in the 1960s. Neighborhoods were created, communities of poor people. The early education, pre-kindergarten. It's all organized from the bottom up.

DAN OLSON: It would be--

CLARKE CHAMBERS: All stories are there. And it's important to know how they work and where they don't work and what the problems are. And you're running against a national consensus, which has been here since the days of at least Benjamin Franklin, which is to say based on individualism, self-reliance, getting ahead, keeping up with the Joneses, making your own way, paddle your own canoe et cetera and intensely individualistic. Even our philosophers, Emerson was big on self-reliance. Well, that's fine. I mean, I'm not faulting it, but it's part of a national consensus. And it's very hard to break. There still is a resistance to helping people who can't make it.

DAN OLSON: Professor Clarke Chambers, a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for your time.

CLARKE CHAMBERS: Thank you. It's always fun to talk about things that really matter to you.

DAN OLSON: Clarke Chambers is a retired University of Minnesota History professor. Chambers started the Social Welfare History Archives housed at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Earlier this hour, we heard from University of Minnesota Duluth, paleo epidemiologist Dr. Art Aufderheide. You can see photos of them and hear the conversations with them. And you can hear many other Voices of Minnesota conversations at minnesotapublicradio.org. Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio News, Saint Paul.

GARY EICHTEN: Well, that does it for our Midday program today. Gary Eichten here. I'd like to thank you for tuning in. And I hope you can join us tomorrow. We'll be talking with another interesting Minnesotan, Marilyn Carlson Nelson, Chairman and former CEO of Carlson, will be joining us to talk about her new book and her very interesting career.

SPEAKER 2: Support for this program comes from the College of St. Scholastica's accelerated degree evening program with campuses in Brainerd, Duluth, Rochester, St. Cloud, and Saint Paul. Details on the next information session at csc.edu.