Northern Lights

Arvonne Fraser | 92

Ever involved, she carved a path for herself and other women.

"I want to be a semi-elegant, outrageous old lady," Arvonne Fraser said when she turned 60 in 1985. But she didn't want to rest. So much more to do!

Her early years were spent on a farm around Lamberton, Minn., where she had four siblings. She went off to the University of Minnesota, and soon was involved in politics, joining Hubert H. Humphrey's 1948 U.S. Senate campaign.

From there, the world! Her accomplishments could fill the page: state DFL chair, a founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, senior fellow at the U's Humphrey Institute, attendee to United Nations "Decade for Women" conferences, Agency for International Development coordinator and founder of the International Women's Rights Watch. To name a few.

A 1972 Minneapolis Tribune story said her DFL positions included "perennial chairmanship of the tedious constitution committee."

Well, if anyone could make a tedious constitution a bit more lively, it was her.

Oh: she was her husband's campaign manager, too. Fellow named Don — in Congress for 20 years, had a stint as mayor for a city called "Minneapolis."

And she had six kids. It sounds like a have-it-all story, but in 1985 she advised younger women to relax, have kids if they wished, and do what they wanted to do after the children were on their own. Don't try to accomplish everything by the time you're 40.

In 1972, she'd struck a slightly different tone: "Women are being urged to have fewer and fewer children," she told the Tribune, "yet we are living longer. What will women do with all those extra years?"

Her example had the answer: get involved.

When she made her 60th birthday plans to be outrageous, she said she intended to live another thirty years.

That she did, and change.

James Lileks

Barbara Flanagan | 94

As a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist, she fought for a better city.

I discovered Barbara in the basement.

As a young reporter covering Minneapolis, I visited the bowels of our old Portland Avenue building to dig through old articles sorted into thousands of little envelopes. Before long, I was face-to-face with Barbara Flanagan — or at least her columnist mug shot.

What followed was often urban wisdom decades ahead of its time.

"I've always wondered why Minneapolis rarely refurbishes its grand old buildings," she wrote in 1967. "They do it in other big cities."

"What bus riders and bike riders need is a break from traffic engineers," she wrote in a 1972 column on parked cars slowing buses. "Should we ride on City Hall and demand equal space on our streets and roadways for buses and bikes?"

Who was this woman pushing pedestrian-friendly design and preservation in the 1960s and 70s, when city dwellers were fleeing for the suburbs and wrecking balls were claiming historic buildings?

Ask someone about Barbara and you'll likely hear about her signature legacy: persuading city leaders to legalize sidewalk cafes. But some might wish we had listened to her other pleas sooner.

She warned that the Kmart parking lot blocking Nicollet Avenue would create "instant blight." She urged a light rail line to the airport — in 1976!

By the time I called her a few years ago for a Q&A on downtown development trends, I was utterly smitten with her old columns. She did not disappoint in person — thrilled to chat and eager to weigh in on the Nicollet Mall and more. When the story ran, my voice mail flooded with calls from readers who missed her.

Barbara was well known for lighter columns about visiting celebrities. But her uncannily prescient takes on urban life are the legacy we should cherish.

Eric Roper

Elwood Caldwell | 95

Making breakfast better — and crunchier! — was just one of Elwood Caldwell's passions.

If you grew up in the '70s, Saturday morning cartoons were punctuated by commercials full of drama and peril: the valiant Cap'n Crunch, fighting a French freebooter who wanted to steal his namesake cereal. You couldn't blame the pirate — as the Cap'n would tell us after he'd won the day:

"It's got corn for crunch, oats for punch, and it stays crunchy, even in milk!"

By the '70s, kids expected cereal to stay crunchy. They had no idea how previous generations had to deal with mopey, soggy flakes, their firmness fatally wounded the moment the milk hit the bowl.

Cap'n Crunch changed all that when it debuted in 1963. It did stay crunchy.

But how?

Science! Specifically, food scientists — like Elwood Caldwell, a University of Minnesota professor. It was his contribution to crunch technology, achieved while working at Quaker Oats in Chicago, that made the news when he passed away in May. Rightly so: not many people can say they changed an entire generation's assumptions about breakfast food performance.

After his stint at Quaker, he was the first head of the Department of Food Science and Nutrition, staying for 15 years. He created the Elwood F. and Florence A. Caldwell Fellowship to assist grad students, founded a lecture series on the study of food, was executive editor of Cereal Foods World, and more.

We may outgrow Cap'n Crunch, but we never outgrow our need to eat — and thanks to people like Professor Caldwell, our food's not only good, it's safe. Ever opened a bag of rice and discovered it's teeming with weevils? No? We're not saying you should always think about his discovery of the means by which phenolic antioxidants can prolong the shelf life of rice. But now would be a good time to do so.

James Lileks

Charles McDew | 79

He battled segregation amid the turbulence of the 1960s, and for years taught others of the price paid.

A traffic stop brought Charles McDew face-to-face with Jim Crow for the first time in his life.

He was a college freshman in 1959 at South Carolina State University, far from his Ohio hometown.

The white officer wanted deference, asking McDew at one point why he wasn't saying "Yes, sir" to a white man.

"I said 'You've got to be kidding,' " McDew recounted years later to a historian.

He was jailed that night for disturbing the peace — the first of three arrests over two days, all racially based. It awoke McDew's consciousness.

Within months he was leading the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, meeting with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the vanguard of the 1960s civil rights movement. He urged protests, sit-ins, and voter registration drives to upset the balance of power.

Arrested dozens of times, McDew said he intentionally focused his activism in the cities and counties with the worst reputations for racism.

It was far from the life of pro football and small business that the former high school football player had imagined for himself while being raised by a nurse and a chemistry teacher in a Midwestern steel town.

He kept faith in education and democracy, telling a biographer that the first was vital to black Americans' futures and the second could be spread by showing "the world and ourselves that it is a viable and good philosophy that can help people wherever they come from."

After segregation crumbled, McDew spent years teaching history at Metropolitan State University, using humor, a rich baritone and a defiant spirit to keep alive the memory of the fight he helped win.

Matt McKinney

Art Blakey | 83

A gentle man with a badge, he made friends everywhere he went, some unlikely.

Art Blakey became friends with the man who shot him.

That pretty well sums up Blakey, a police officer who looked for the good in everyone and had time for anyone.

"We missed many hot meals because he was always taking the time to stop and chat," recalled his daughter Brooke Blakey.

Blakey was the first black sworn officer in the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office. In 1996, he was shot breaking up a robbery at a St. Paul VFW post.

"His sense of forgiveness was exemplified by the fact that he forgave the man who shot him, and they developed a friendship in later years," said Dag Sohlberg, a former FBI agent who worked with Blakey.

"Art was truly — he was almost like a holy man."

Blakey grew up in St. Paul's Rondo district and never left. He made his daily rounds checking in with friends and checking up on neighbors. "I could set my clock by his movements," Brooke Blakey said.

He was best known as the chief of the Minnesota State Fair Police for 37 years. Blakey loved the fair and its endless opportunities to make new friends, said his wife, Carolyn Carroll-Blakey.

"When he got shot and was released, he asked to be driven to the fair," she said. "When he got cancer and got out of the hospital, he asked to be driven to the fair."

Brooke Blakey followed her father into law enforcement, a choice he was against at first. But he was full of pride when, just before his death, he pinned on her badge as a sergeant with the Metro Transit Police.

Yet this gentle giant remained a mother hen to the end, his daughter said: "He wouldn't go to sleep every night until I called him and said I was done with my shift."

John Reinan

Deoloris Dunn | 74

The first black female police officer in Minneapolis always put community first.

It was 1975 and the Minneapolis Police, eager to entice women and minority members, took out a newspaper ad, which caught the eye of Deoloris Dunn.

It seemed a natural fit.

In those days, if you had a problem you went to Dunn. Trouble with a neighbor, hard time finding a job, call Dunn. Known then as Deoloris McKinnies, until her marriage to Jim Dunn, she was seen as coolheaded and thick-skinned.

She had to be.

As the department's first black female officer, she was among a handful of women who integrated an all-male force. Dunn, who went by "Dee," and her then-partner, Shirleen Knapp, were the first female officers to share a patrol car. The Minneapolis Star quoted her saying that she gravitated to the job because she was "seeing and doing things few women have done."

Things weren't easy.

She regularly encountered discrimination. In an interview a few years ago, she recalled more than once opening her locker and finding a dead rat.

She never surrendered her blackness, nor her femininity, to fit in, said Ron Edwards, a veteran civil rights crusader and historian.

"She brought a lot of pride upon her hiring to the African-American community," said Edwards. There were only about two dozen blacks on the force when she arrived. "The 1970s were a tough period and she had a lot to contend with."

He said Dunn was later taken under the wing of the fabled Raymond "Red" Presley, the first black officer in the city to make lieutenant and inspector. He mentored a generation of black officers, including the current chief, Medaria Arradondo.

Put the community first, Presley told her, a lesson Dunn carried with her always.

Libor Jany

Echo Helstrom Casey | 75

Bob Dylan's first girlfriend and the supposed muse for "Girl from the North Country."

He was solidly middle-class in a blue-collar burg. She was from the poor side of town. Neither his parents — nor her father — approved of their dating. But you know young love.

Bobby Zimmerman and Echo Helstrom weren't part of the in crowd at Hibbing High School. The 16-year-olds were outsiders who bonded over R&B music, broadcast on a Shreveport, La., radio station.

He'd come over to the Helstroms' tar-paper shack outside of town. She frolicked on a wooden swing as he serenaded her with an R&B tune or talkin' blues. Sometimes he'd share one of his poems. In her yearbook during junior year, he wrote: "Let me tell you that your beauty is second to none, but I think I told you that before. Love to the most beautiful girl in school."

They went to junior prom together but felt so out of place. "We really couldn't dance," she told writer Robert Shelton. "Bob was a poor leader, and I am a poor follower."

Later that year, Echo gave back Bobby's bracelet, suspecting he was seeing other girls in the Twin Cities. He denied it. You know young love.

With high school and Hibbing behind them, he became famous after changing his name to Bob Dylan. She became a footnote as his first girlfriend.

In 1969, she attended her 10th high school reunion. So, surprisingly, did Dylan, with his wife. Like a few of her classmates, Helstrom got an autograph — "To Echo, Yours truly, Bob Dylan."

A cold shoulder? She was thought to be the muse for 1963's so-Minnesotan song "Girl from the North Country."

Helstrom always thought it was about her. Dylanologists have speculated about others.

No one knows for sure. Dylan never explains his songs — or himself. Not even to ex-girlfriends.

Jon Bream

Sally Pillsbury | 93

From politics to philanthropy, she reflected a deep family commitment to serve.

When her whistle split the air, the hobnobbing of dignitaries and doyennes fell silent.

Heads whipped around in search of the woman with a thumb and middle finger looped at her lips.

Forget the gavel. Sally Pillsbury is here.

Decade by decade, "here" she always seemed to be, drumming up support for causes, candidates and charities with her husband, George.

She was a founding director of the Guthrie Theater's board of directors, a fixture at opening nights. She gave a nominating speech for Minnesota favorite son Walter Judd at the 1964 GOP National Convention. At events for Planned Parenthood and Women Winning, she made clear her commitment to reproductive health and support for women candidates from both parties.

A woman "ahead of her time," said U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

Someone who "told it like she saw it and never looked back," said U.S. Sen. Tina Smith.

The basement playroom of the Pillsbury home on Lake Minnetonka sometimes doubled as a campaign hub, the pingpong table buried in leaflets and children lending a hand.

That's where Mark Dayton, 6, found himself stuffing envelops for Republicans.

Amid political sea changes, her convictions remained as fixed as her signature blonde coiffure.

"She never abandoned us, even though her party did," said Sarah Stoesz, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota.

Pillsbury stepped out in vivid color — purples, pinks, reds — tilting forward as she walked, bracelets jangling.

"My mother," said her daughter Sarah, "was not a beige person."

Hannah Covington

Ron Meshbesher | 85

The Minneapolis attorney knew the courts, knew the law, but most of all, insiders said, he knew the judges.

If you were arrested for murder or anything else, Ron Meshbesher was the lawyer you wanted in your corner.

In the courtroom, he was smooth, confident and prepared, "the best of the best," said James Gilbert, a law partner and later Minnesota Supreme Court associate justice.

So when comedian Tom Arnold was jailed in the late 1980s in Rochester, his one call was to Meshbesher, whom he met after performing at Liquor Lyle's, a Minneapolis bar Meshbesher co-owned.

Arnold had finished a stand-up gig, got drunk and was kicked out of a McDonald's. A police officer spotted him urinating in the parking lot. "What are you doing?" the officer asked.

"I'm making a cocktail," Arnold responded. He and the officer scuffled and Arnold was arrested, then got into a fight with a jail inmate. He was put in a padded cell, facing several charges. He panicked. Roseanne Barr had invited him to appear on an HBO special in Los Angeles. He had to catch a Monday plane.

"It was my big break," he recalled. "I told her I'd quit drinking. If I don't get out of jail, I'm screwed. And there's no way I'm going to get out. I needed a miracle. … I think to myself, 'Ron Meshbesher, that's a great lawyer. He's known all over the country.' " He phoned Meshbesher, who said he'd see what he could do.

"Meshbesher called a judge who was out at a golf course," said Arnold. On Sunday afternoon, Arnold was released. "The cop who let me out was so frustrated." Arnold caught his plane to L.A., appeared on the HBO special, later married Barr (it lasted four years) and also starred on her TV show.

"I owe everything to Ron Meshbesher," Arnold said. "That is no joke."

Meshbesher never sent him a bill.

Randy Furst

Ronald Libertus | 79

A White Earth Nation member and believer in art's power, he championed American Indian artists.

In winter, when the lake had frozen over, Ronald Libertus would dash across the ice to get to and from school.

The Leech Lake reservation was poor, but there was always fresh bread in his grandmother's kitchen. Years later, Libertus would say that he could smell cinnamon rolls from across the lake as he ran home on Friday afternoons.

A member of the White Earth Nation, Libertus (Gitchi-nibi was his Ojibwe name and means "great water") left the reservation to attend Macalester College and settled in the Twin Cities.

But his American Indian heritage remained an essential part of his life, whether he was championing an Indian artist or teaching a class in the University of Minnesota's Department of American Indian Studies.

"That was very important to Ron, to be Indian," said his wife, Judy Libertus.

A big man with a gravelly voice and a soft, open face, Libertus "was a person you would gravitate toward," his wife said.

He developed friendships with artists across the country, and took graduate students from the U to meet them and learn about their work as part of a 6-week course.

"Students have told me, and told him, it changed their life," Judy Libertus said.

When his acute myeloid leukemia was diagnosed in early 2018, people wanted to come see him — "I think they didn't believe it was true," said his daughter, Sarah Libertus — but he was hesitant to have visitors. So friends wrote e-mails, and his wife and daughter read them aloud.

It was only in reading those letters, Sarah Libertus said, that they realized just how many people he had supported, quietly, over the course of his life.

Emma Nelson