Pete Seeger, Minneapolis, 1972, and Thank You Note to a Young Alan Freed

In early October 1972, folk music icon Pete Seeger came to the Twin Cities for a performance at Northrop Auditorium on the University of Minnesota campus. While he was here, he stayed with friends at their home on South Cedar Lake Road. At some point during his stay, a neighbor kid named Alan Freed showed up at the door with a new Sears cassette recorder, asking for an interview. Forty-two years later, a somewhat older Alan Freed has posted a link to that 10-minute interview as a memorial. Pete Seeger died Monday at the age of 94.

Alan Freed's interview with Pete Seeger

Alan Freed's Facebook page

"Co-op War" Factions Face Off Outside Mill City Foods, Minneapolis, 1976

Tensions between two competing factions in the Twin Cities food cooperative movement turned violent on January 9, 1976, when several members of the "Co-op Organization," or "CO," assaulted two workers at Minneapolis’s Seward Community Co-op. The CO was a group of politically-motivated activists dedicated to serving the interests of the working class. Opposing them were the more loosely organized “whole foods” folks who wanted to provide healthful and socially-responsible alternatives to the big grocery stores. The take-over at Seward was brief and helped galvanize opposition to the CO and its methods. By the end of the decade, it was clear that "hippy," whole food types had defeated the “Marxists” in what are now known as the Twin Cities co-op wars.

Photo via Minnesota Historical Society

Sears DieHard Commercial, 1970s

Immediate Aftermath of Dave Forbes's Attack on Henry Boucha, 1975

There were about four minutes left in the first period of the January 4, 1975, game between the Minnesota North Stars and the Boston Bruins when the Bruins’ Dave Forbes took out his frustrations on Henry Boucha’s head. The two skaters had just returned to the ice after serving concurrent penalties. Boucha’s North Stars teammate Murray Oliver picked up the story from there:

Forbes came out of the penalty box and let Henry have it from behind with a butt end [of his stick]. I saw the blood right away, and Henry went down, face first. He obviously couldn’t see because of the blood, and Forbes jumped on his back and was still throwing punches.

The Bruins went on to defeat the stunned North Stars 8-0. The Minneapolis Tribune called it “the ugliest hockey game in the history of Metropolitan Sports Center.” Two weeks later, a Hennepin County grand jury indicted Forbes on charges of aggravated assault with a dangerous weapon (his hockey stick). It was the first time that a professional athlete was prosecuted in the United States for a crime allegedly committed during a sporting event. The trial, held later that year, ended with a hung jury.

Boucha suffered serious damage to his eye socket as a result of the attack. He was never the same player after that.

Disrobed Customers at the Electric Fetus, Minneapolis, 1972 (above); The Electric Fetus at Its Original Cedar Riverside Location, 1972 (below)

The building that was nearly destroyed today in an explosion and fire in south Minneapolis's Cedar-Riverside neighborhood was the original location of the iconic Electric Fetus record shop. In memoriam, here's an earlier MN70s post regarding one of the more infamous moments in Fetus history:

Facing eviction from their original location at 514 Cedar Avenue, and looking to unload excess inventory, the owners of the Electric Fetus record shop hit on an idea sure to appeal to early 1970s Cedar-Riverside “freakos”—a “Naked Sale.” The promotion, which took place on Saturday, March 25, 1972, attracted about 50 uninhibited customers who were more than happy to shed their clothes in exchange for a free album (regularly $3.99) and stash pipe. Legend has it that public outcry over the “Naked Sale” led to the Fetus’s eviction, but the decision to boot the store had come much earlier. The Fetus moved into its current location at the corner of 4th Avenue and Franklin later that year.

Federal Judge Earl Larson, Minneapolis, 1972

The sweaty power walker shown in this photograph is the man who opened the door to free agency in the National Football League. On December 30, 1975, U.S. District Judge Earl Larson ruled that the NFL's long-standing "Rozelle Rule"—the device the league employed to bind each player to a single team—violated federal antitrust laws. The rule was, he wrote, an "unreasonable" and "perpetual restriction on a player, following him throughout his career." Larson's ruling was the first in a series of court decisions that forced NFL team owners to accept  free agency. It also established the U.S. Courthouse in Minneapolis as a kind of legal nirvana for NFL players.

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Target Christmas Ads, Early- to Mid-1970s

Everything from 89-cent cassette tapes to $23.98 leisure suits!

"Ground-breaking Ceremonies," 1976 (by Scott Long)

This cartoon, published in the Minneapolis Tribune in 1976, is a reminder of just how long and ugly the battle to build a domed stadium in downtown Minneapolis really was. The Twins and Vikings started pushing in the early 1970s for a new home to replace old Met Stadium in Bloomington. It wasn't until December 20, 1979, that the teams and the city broke ground on the shrine to cut-corners that would eventually be known as the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. Now, 34 years later, the dome is about a month away from demolition. Here's to planned obsolescence!

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The Willmar 8 During Their First Days on the Picket Line, 1977

On the morning of December 16, 1977, eight female employees of Citizens National Bank in Willmar, Minnesota, went on strike to protest what they considered unequal pay and unequal opportunities for advancement at their place of employment. It was the first ever strike against a Minnesota bank. The strike dragged on for nearly two years without resolution. It officially ended in 1979 when the National Labor Relations Board ruled that while the bank had engaged in unfair labor practices, the women had gone on strike for purely economic reasons. That meant the strikers had no right to back pay or rehiring. By most conventional measures, the strike failed, but the actions of the “Willmar 8” raised awareness of gender discrimination in the workplace and inspired a new generation of women’s rights activists.

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King Donovan as Scrooge in the Guthrie's Debut Production of A Christmas Carol, 1975

By the mid 1970s, the Guthrie Theater had been staging world-class productions for more than a decade, but it still hadn’t figured out how to attract audiences during the tough winter holiday season. That all changed on December 10, 1975, when the Guthrie premiered Barbara Fields’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The show garnered glowing reviews (even the Minneapolis Star’s humbug-ish arts critic, Don Morrison, admitted whistling a Christmas tune on his way out of the theater), and audiences flocked to see it. In the years that followed, A Christmas Carol established itself as a reliable revenue generator for the Guthrie and a holiday tradition for many Twin Cities families.

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