Don Boxmeyer could sit down with anyone and within an hour know the person’s life story. He could spin what others told him into tales that ranged from funny, to touching, to profound. He also loved history and made a special study of St. Paul’s lost neighborhoods. Don, who wrote for the St. Paul newspapers for 36 years, died Sunday at age 67. In Don’s memory, the Pioneer Press presents a selection of columns we knew were his favorites. He included these in his 2003 book ‘A Knack for Knowing Things: Stories from St. Paul Neighborhoods and Beyond,’ published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press. We could fit in only a few; for more classics from Don, go to twincities.com.
This guy thinks lutefisk is finger-lickin’ good
Published May 21, 1989
By Don Boxmeyer
Staff Columnist
Jerry Osteraas is about 36, is married, has a family, works in a foundry and lives in Madison, Minn. He is tall, lean, bearded and in every way, except one, a perfectly normal human specimen. Then, you get to the fine print. Jerry Osteraas once sat down and ate 6 pounds 5 ounces of lutefisk in one hour.
So, as a reward for his shabby gastronomical sin, Jerry Osteraas is in Poulsbo, Wash., at this very moment, trying to out-eat the Poulsbo champion, an unidentified lout who once devoured 8 pounds 11 ounces of lutefisk in one hour. The two will have, by now, squared off in some insane Viking ritual to determine which can withstand the most misery and discomfort.
I certainly don’t want to make it appear as though I’m criticizing lutefisk, but I am. I believe it is only proper for someone like myself, who feels his inherited Northern European twinges from time to time, to warn of the perils of lutefisk.
I’ve done my part. I once tried to get lutefisk outlawed. Failing that, it should at least become a controlled substance to be kept out of the hands of the young and the very old.
It’s not that I hate lutefisk, it’s just that I can’t stand the thought of it. An old friend, Al Nie, runs a fantastically successful Polish restaurant on the edge of Northeast Minneapolis. He started it as a saloon about 40 years ago. He saw some promise in the young business, but he had a problem: Among his noontime clientele were several laborers from a nearby lutefisk plant.
Al didn’t want to run the lutefisk makers out of his joint, but the smell they brought in with them was chasing all of his other customers away, even after he got the fish workers to congregate at the far end of the bar.
Al was contemplating the failure of his business when one of those rare acts of good fortune occurred. The lutefisk plant burned down. Al thought he had died and gone to heaven.
But then he learned one of the dirty little secrets of lutefisk. Two years after the plant was gone, the smell of lutefisk still lingered heavily in his saloon. If you go in there today and stand at the southwest corner of the long bar in the original saloon, you may be able to detect the aroma of the cod, all soaked and rotted on purpose with lye.
So this is the heritage that Jerry Osteraas leaves to his children. The fact that he is able to consume more poisoned food than almost any other mortal. I couldn’t locate Jerry for comment — he was probably getting his stomach pumped — but I talked to the man who put him up to his foul deed.
Scotty Kuehl of Madison owns an antiques store and is a guiding member of Madison’s business community. Kuehl said the town is proud to foot the bill for Osteraas’ trip. Madison, in case you don’t know, is a town of 2,000 just west of the Laq qui Parle goose refuge, where hundreds of hunters go each fall to shoot at thousands of Canada geese. Towns all around Madison are billed as the goose capitals of the world.
So what was left to Madison? It had to be the capital of something, and since there were a few Norwegians out there stuffing themselves with badly spoiled cod, why not make it the Lutefisk Capital of the United States?
Madison claims that Jackson’s store there sells more lutefisk per capita than any other store in the country. Madison even has a 24-foot statue of a cod, known as Lou T. Fisk, which the community has paraded all around North America like a Lion’s Club bowling trophy.
Now, the Madison boosters have poor Jerry Osteraas. He will come back from Poulsbo, Wash., next week, and he will either have consumed more lutefisk than the Northwestern champ, or he will not have. He will either wave his hands around in the air like Rocky, or he’ll hang his head and say, “Vell, maybe next yar, ja?”
But will he ever admit the horrid truth: God, that’s terrible stuff.
World War II survivor is planning one more trip to Pearl Harbor
Published Nov. 10, 1991
By Don Boxmeyer
Staff Columnist
It was Sunday morning, and Ensign Guy Flanagan was dressing for the usual in-port weekend routine. He put on his khakis and his wristwatch, and he got into his shoes just in time to watch his ship die.
Fifty years ago next month, the battleship USS Arizona was parked in a neat row along with seven other American battleships at Pearl Harbor, even as 423 Japanese airplanes were picking the Hawaiian Islands out of the Pacific mist. The first wave of the attack broke low over Ford Island at 7:40 a.m. Ensign Flanagan began the sprint to his battle station in the bowels of Turret No. 3 as soon as “general quarters” was piped from the quarterdeck.
He slid down a ladder leading to a passageway between the ship’s after turrets. The ship was a few hundred yards aft of battleship USS West Virginia and shielded by the moored repair ship Vestal, so it escaped the first torpedoes that were slamming into the other battleships — but not the pinpoint onslaught of the Japanese dive bombers.
One of the bombs dropped right down the Arizona’s smokestack, exploding a boiler and a forward ammunition magazine. A Japanese pilot later recalled, “A shock like an earthquake went right through our formation, and my aircraft shuddered with the force of it. It was the Arizona going up.”
Flanagan was jolted by the hit, the lights in the passageway went out, and the air was filled with a nauseating gas. Somehow Flanagan found the door to the turret’s powder room, but it was secured from the inside. He was joined by other crewmen as he beat on the door with his fists; in desperation, he rapped out an SOS with his wristwatch, at the same time praying aloud to be let in. So hard was his banging that his wrist was cut and his watch shattered. So urgent were his prayers that he became known to survivors as “Father Flanagan.”
They were let in, but the powder room was only a temporary refuge. The men could not raise the plotting room on the ship’s battle circuit or even the turret itself by sound-powered telephone. The room was dark, filling up with fumes and water in its lower reaches, so Ensign Flanagan and another officer ordered the men to higher decks inside the turret: to the electrical deck and the shell room, and finally to the pits of the turret itself. Flanagan ordered the men to stuff their shirts in telescope ports to keep the fumes out, as the ruined ship continued to settle in the water. The turret crew was long gone from its position, and finally Flanagan’s survivors opened a door from the turret and escaped onto the Arizona’s quarterdeck, which was being periodically raked with machine-gun fire.
When he got on deck, Flanagan could watch the destruction of his ship. It seemed to be ablaze from the boat deck forward, and he unleashed the life raft for Turret No. 3, ordered enlisted men into it and shoved it off through the water. Then, he helped load wounded onto the admiral’s barge, and he left with it to take them to the relative safety of Ford Island.
He looked back once, and his ship was ablaze from his turret to the bow. He didn’t know it then, but more men were killed on his ship that day than on any other ship in naval history. The USS Arizona lost 1,177 men the morning of Dec. 7, 1941 — almost half of the men who died that day at Pearl Harbor. By the time the attack was over at 9:45 a.m., there were only 337 survivors of the Arizona, among them the 23-year-old ensign from Mankato, Minn.
“I didn’t know him before the war,” says Flanagan’s wife, Merry. “But before we were married, he told me about that day aboard the Arizona. He said, ‘There. That’s it. Now, I won’t ever talk about it again.’ ”
I talked to Merry a few days ago in the family room of their Roseville home. There are shelves on one wall filled with the mementoes of Guy’s war: his medals and decorations, a model of the Arizona as she looked before that day, and a small model of the Pearl Harbor Memorial that is built athwart the sunken battleship.
After Pearl Harbor, Guy recuperated from lung damage he suffered breathing the Arizona’s smoke and fumes. He joined the war in the Pacific, at one point commanding a seagoing tug that had to tow a damaged destroyer through a typhoon, for which Lt. Cmdr. Guy Flanagan received a personal commendation from Adm. Chester Nimitz.
Pearl Harbor and the Arizona did not beckon to Guy until well after the war. Merry says he did not talk about his war experiences until after they visited the memorial for the first time in 1981.
“There were some tears shed,” she recalls, “and then he could talk about it. That was a catharsis of some sort.”
Since then, they’ve been back to Hawaii twice, and they planned to return next month for the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Guy, 73, a retired state employment officer, had gradually become an active member of the Arizona survivors’ crew.
This year, as its chaplain, he’d planned to take part in the memorial service on Dec 7. Guy and Merry had bought their airline tickets and made hotel reservations. He was the only survivor from his living compartment on the Arizona, and the most profound event of his life had become very important as life itself was nearing an end.
Guy is at home, suffering from terminal heart disease in its final stages. He knows he has not the strength, nor possibly even the time, to attend the memorial service.
But he has made arrangements for his burial, from the memorial built atop his battleship. As a privilege afforded only to its survivors, Guy Flanagan will have his ashes scattered on the water that laps at Turret No. 3, his battle station, the last visible sign of USS Arizona.
Life’s a journey, not a destination: Joe loved the trip
Published July 16, 1989
By Don Boxmeyer
Staff Columnist
“Joe,” the timid, little voice on the telephone said, “I let my driver’s license expire. Can you help me?”
“Sure, kid. How long you been without?”
“Two years.”
Joseph P. LaNasa whistled and chuckled around the big cigar in his mouth. How could anyone be dumb enough to let his license die for two years?
“Meet me at noon at the parking ramp, kid. We’ll go to lunch and then see about the license.”
For reasons unknown to anyone but himself, Joe decided this kid could use some help. He couldn’t — and wouldn’t if he could — get the license restored without a driving test. He couldn’t — and wouldn’t if he could — take the road test for the dummy. But the clerk of district court in Ramsey County could take the kid out to where the driving tests are administered in Arden Hills. He could point him in the right direction.
“And you can use my car, kid. Don’t scratch it.”
That was many years ago, and it was the first time I ever drove a Buick Riviera. The first thing I did in the road test was drive down a one-way street and make a left-hand turn from the inside lane. I looked in the mirror and Joe was almost rolling on the ground, chuckling and snorting all around the big cigar in his mouth. When it was all over with, I had barely passed with a 71, but I got my lost license restored.
More important, I would learn, was the half day that Joe LaNasa gave to the young guy to whom he didn’t owe a thing.
“You got it back, kid,” Joe said. “No big deal.”
Recently, Joe’d been very ill and I’d not seen him for several months. But a couple of weeks ago, he had lunch with a few friends, among them Matt Morelli, his very close friend and traveling partner. Matt and Joe, in better days, would lunch in La Crosse or Rochester or even Winnipeg. On occasion, they’d take a passenger or two out on the road with them, and a couple of times they asked me to join them for their annual smelt run to Duluth.
They’d never fish, but they’d have lunch, and on each occasion, Joe carried two quart jars in a paper bag in his trunk. One held his secret sauce of oils and herbs to pep up the smelt they would eat by the dozens on Park Point. And the other jar was full of pickled artichoke hearts. Joe didn’t go smelting without them.
Joe would always drive, and Matt would always ride on his right — The Agent at the wheel, and The Boss next to him. These two old pros of St. Paul politics would swap stories of earlier days at City Hall and around town. Joe grew up on Grove and Canada streets in the Badlands, and Matt on Railroad Island. They talked about the old days in the saloon and grocery businesses. They both remembered the butcher who’d wind up his shift drunker than when he started, and it was Matt who finally found the guy’s hiding place. He kept his bottle buried in the sauerkraut barrel.
And they both knew old Nick, the guy from the neighborhood who had the red Auburn Roadster. They’d see him driving around and he never had fewer than three young women with him. Finally, they asked him. Where, Nick, do you get all those women?
“Veddy few eschkape!” was the happy reply, and the memory of that line would make Matt and Joe giggle all the way to Duluth.
Joe, 75, died on the second day of July. It was not unexpected, and I am told that Joe was prepared to leave. At Joe’s funeral, one of the largest sprays of flowers was decorated with a chunk of Styrofoam made to look like a section of highway. On it was a big toy car, pointed skyward.
It was from Joe’s buddy, Matt.
Copyright 2008 Pioneer Press.