Dukes power surge is smooth as Butter Pagan
Never before has Felix (Butter) Pagan had a weekend like that. Not coincidentally, the Duluth-Superior Dukes have never before had a weekend like that, either.
The Dukes pulled off their first-ever sweep of a three-game series at St. Paul, beating the Saints 8-7, 13-9 in 12 innings, and 14-3. With four straight victories and eight of the last 10, the Dukes have climbed into a three-way tie for first place with St. Paul and Schaumburg in the Northern League’s East division. They head for Winnipeg and another three-game series before coming home for six games, starting Friday.
Pagan stunned three straight capacity crowds in St. Paul by hammering four home runs in three games, giving him seven homers for the season. Not bad, for a home run hitter, but incredible for Felix Pagan, who hit seven home runs all of last season at Fort Wayne in the Midwest League, and nine home runs for Tennessee in the Appalachian League two seasons ago.
Pagan, a Puerto Rican, apparently doesn’t do singles anymore. He used to be a singles and doubles hitter, but he had four home runs and two doubles against the Saints, and he drove in eight runs in the three games against the Saints.
“I’ve never had a weekend like that,” Pagan said. “That was the first time I’ve ever hit four home runs in one weekend. I’ve always been a singles and doubles hitter.”
He looks too slim to be a power hitter, but he has a powerful but fluid swing — smooth as butter, which just happens to be his nickname. He is not, however, called Butter because of his batting swing but because his last name is pronounced “pa-GAN,” which closely resembles “pecan,” so a couple of years ago, somebody who likes ice cream started calling him “Butter Pagan.”
Pagan’s slim facial features and wiry upper body elicits estimates of, maybe, 160 pounds, tops. But he insists he weighs 180. “People always tell me I look lighter than 180,” Pagan laughed.
That slim appearance, plus batting seventh in the Dukes order, may have made Pagan look like a soft touch to the St. Paul Saints last weekend. In fact, the Dukes themselves may have been seen as the elixir to cure a four-game St. Paul losing streak.
But in the first game, the Dukes rallied from a 3-0 deficit and won 8-7, as Bryan Warner, Anthony Lewis and Pagan all swatted home runs for the Dukes. In the second game, Lewis and Sean Mulligan hit home runs, and then Pagan hit another one in the ninth inning, which helped get the teams into extra innings, where the Dukes won 13-9 with a four-run 12th. On Sunday, Pagan smacked two more home runs as the Dukes broke to a 7-0 lead and cruised to the pivotal victory.
“You don’t need to be big to hit home runs,” Pagan said. “You just need to be patient and put a good swing on it. I’m not looking for home runs, I’m just trying to be patient and wait for my pitch. If they throw me my pitch, that’s their fault, not my fault. Three of those four home runs were on fastballs, but the one I hit over the center field wall was a slider.”
Pagan had hoped to play in the Twin Cities, but across the river in the Metrodome.
“I used to play third base, and then second base, and the Minnesota Twins signed me as a second baseman,” Pagan said. “Then, the Twins said they wanted me to be a utility player, so I started playing outfield. I hit .291 my first year, and .275 the second.
“My contract with the Twins was up this year, and I started at Fort Myers in the Florida State League. I played something like 10 games there, and all of a sudden they said I was released. I don’t know why, no idea. They just said, ‘Sorry, we just got a letter, and you’ve been released.’
“I didn’t know what to do. I went back home to Puerto Rico.”
Meanwhile, a few thousand miles north, Larry See was getting ready for his first year of coaching with the Dukes. As training camp neared, See developed a routine of going home and checking all the faxes with all the names of every available player.
“I saw his name on the list,” said See, “and I looked up his stats and saw that he hit mostly doubles. So I gave him a call.”
The call came a week before camp, and Pagan, who had never ventured as far north as Duluth, jumped at the chance. He admits that he likes the temperature to be 85 or above, but said he’s adjusted to those Duluth nights when the wind comes in off Lake Superior and you might have to add two days’ temperatures together to reach 85.
“It’s not so bad,” Pagan said. “When the wind comes off the lake, it’s an advantage for the pitchers, because the hitters can’t swing the bats in the cold.”
But going into the Winnipeg series, the Dukes bats are sizzling. Pagan is hitting .310, but that’s only good for fourth on the team behind Brandon Evans (.384), Bryan Warner (.331), and Erick Corps (.313). And the temperature is supposed to warm up for this weekend.
Even humanitarian gestures must follow rules
Clem Haskins is a stern father-figure of a basketball coach, and, from all indications, a warm and wonderful humanitarian.
At his Kentucky residence, according to news reports, he helps poor, black families out by providing a major appliance here, or a place to live there. There are families living on his property, reports say, that are there rent-free, provided they maintain the property.
As basketball coach at the University of Minnesota, Clem fought hard and well to provide scholarship opportunities, particularly for less-fortunate prospects. He lobbied to prevent higher academic standards for entrance, and went so far as to say they were racially discriminatory. Clem was wrong. Higher academic standards are discriminatory, but against substandard students. That’s what college is for. Those who can’t do the work, shouldn’t go.
If we are to believe the most serious allegations that forced Clem Haskins to leave Minnesota, then he may have slipped a little money to some of his players who needed it. We know that he arranged the splintered counseling structure that gave his basketball players focused counselors. That system led to the situation where Jan Ganglehoff, and others, wrote papers and did homework for basketball players in the enormous academic fraud case currently being investigated.
Blind loyalty has led some boosters to blame the tutors for doing the work, as if it was done by them spontaneously and without Clem’s knowledge, to say nothing of design. Absurd. We can believe that Clem wouldn’t order it specifically, but perhaps assistants and/or aides were advised to do whatever was necessar to make sure the players stay eligible.
If Clem was responsible for these things, and we must assume he was, then I believe he either executed or ordered them for the same type of humanitarian reasons evident to the folks back in Kentucky, who need Clem’s generosity to have a chance to improve their station in life. A degree, no matter how gained, clearly will give some of those marginal athletes a better chance at a future.
The only problem at Minnesota was, Clem’s well-intentioned generosity and humanity ran outside of the NCAA’s stringent rules.
Just a couple of months ago, Doug Woog was forced to resign as hockey coach at Minnesota, too.
I can recall attending the funeral of Jake Woog, Doug’s dad, a couple of years ago. Doug spoke lovingly of how everybody liked Jake, who owned a bowling alley and bar. He told of how, when he was young, sometimes the family went without, but Jake would slip a few bucks to a young man going out on a date if he thought he needed it. And if some young men were having a beer in his place, he might let an underage kid have a beer too, just so he wouldn’t feel left out. Those people appreciated Jake’s kindness and generosity, and he was liked and admired by all.
Interesting parallel, then, that among those few allegations that Minnesota’s in-house investigation discovered were that Doug gave a player some money, illegally. And that he bought beer for the players, sometimes cases of it for the busride home on road trips.
I believe that Doug, in his earnest hope to be well-liked by his players, may have done some of those things to approximate what his father had done for other young men.
But, again, these things were directly in conflict with NCAA rules. Somehow, Doug got off track, and his treatment of some players eroded until it led to serious complaints, and his ultimate dismissal, which was cloaked as a resignation.
Whatever, the University of Minnesota now replaces two of its highest-profile coaches for clearcut and obvious reasons. The boosters, including those in the media, will whine that this sort of thing happens at every Division I institution. I don’t buy that. I don’t believe that all major colleges operate outside the rules, and that Minnesota’s athletic officials were the only ones blatant enough to be caught.
I believe that McKinley Boston, who oversees the administration of activities that include athletics, is an honorable man of great strength and character, but some of the people he trusted don’t share those attributes.
We can only wait and see what happens to those in supervisory roles who have been linked by evidence of involvement. What may have started out as a couple of little attempts to stretch the rules here and there, for what might have seemed humanitarian or good-guy reasons, clearly spread and grew and worsened until illegal behavior became acceptable. Those most obviously responsible may be gone now, but at least they might have had humanitarian reasons for some of their actions. But what about those in administrative positions assigned to oversee the purity of athletics? Those administrators, especially those who insist that they were unaware of such widespread problems, are possibly the most guilty of all.
TrueRide solves new-age skateboard nuisance
[cutline stuff—
#1: Teenagers flock to the new “SweetRoll” skateboard park, installed by TrueRide, adjacent to the Shoreview Community Center.
#2: Dave Benson checks out new Quarter-pipes at TrueRide’s shop just east of Duluth. ]
Every city has ’em, teenagers with skateboards who seem to always be in the way at shopping centers, on sidewalks and in every public place with room to maneuver on their boards. To a lot of adults, those skateboarders are somewhee between a hazard and a nuisance, if not both.
How you gonna solve the problem? Who you gonna call? No, not Ghostbusters.
In this case, you put in a call to TrueRide, Inc., a new and flourishing business on the eastern outskirts of Duluth. TrueRide builds self-contained skateboard parks for cities and suburbs all over the country, and as far away as Japan. Duluth hasn’t taken advantage of its year-old hometown business yet, although TrueRide is working on plans for Cloquet and Hibbing, with Superior a potential future customer.
One of the neatest success stories is from the northern Twin Cities suburb of Shoreview, where three went to a Shoreview City Council meeting to petition for the building of some sort of facility where they could perform their skateboarding tricks. The easy way out would have been to write these kids off as problems. But Jerry Haffeman, Shoreview’s director of parks and recreation, chose to put the kids to work on the problem.
“Everybody has got the same problem,” said Haffeman. “These skateboarders and in-line skaters are everywhere, and we wanted to find a way to get ’em to stop running over seniors in our Community Center. So we talked it over with the three boys, and gave them some time to put together a plan. We had gotten a similar request from a skateboarder who was in the process of becoming an Eagle scout, so we worked with him to put together a focus group for his Eagle scout project. The kids did a real thorough job.”
Most communities might have simply put up more signs banning skateboarders and in-line skaters, but the research led Haffeman to TrueRide, Inc., owned by brothers Dave and Greg Benson and their partner, Tony Ciardelli.
“We all were from Bloomington, and we’ve all worked for companies involved with skateboarding and in-line skating,” said Dave Benson, who said the three traveled the country, putting on displays and setting up demonstrations, including helping set up ESPN’s ‘3Bs’ — Bike, Board and Blades.
But they grew weary of setting up and tearing down so many temporary facilities. “Being on the road for 80 days straight, we got burned out,” Benson said. “In 1997, we decided we could make a business out of building permanent parks for skateboarding.”
They moved their business last summer from the Twin Cities suburb of Hamel to a deserted and former missile site, a mile up Berquist Rd. from the I35 expressway.
“My brother and I came up to UMD to go to college in 1989,” Benson said. “We liked the Duluth area so much, we stayed here and bought homes. When we started our business in the Twin Cities, we had to move back down there and rent out our places up here. But we wanted to move back up here because we love the area. I enjoy fishing, camping and going to the Boundary Waters, and being in Minneapolis meant traffic, people and all that. So we found a shop up here for one-third of what it cost us in the Twin Cities.”
There are about a dozen ramp-building businesses in the country with reputations for quality work, but Benson said TrueSports’ owners, and their four employees, are dedicated to make sure nobody beats their quality or craftsmanship. All-wood ramps, made out of the best marine-tech plywood, and environmentally friendly ACQ pressure-treated plywood are covered with Skatelite surfaces of a combined plastic and wood composition. Paying premium prices for the best material will bring solid reviews and enhance the company’s already-solid reputation, Benson said.
“We build our own templates so we can make the curves and transitions just right so that beginners can do them, but experts can enjoy them, too,” said Benson. “It’s not rocket science, but we build them from the skaters’ perspective.”
For $25,000, which is less than the cost to develop a conventional playground, TrueRide completed a Tier I facility two weeks ago, adjacent to the multipurpose Community Center in Shoreview, just a long kick from a soccer field farther to the east, or a strong throw from a softball field to the north. Tier I means no jump or ramp can be more than 3 feet high, which means the facility gets a break on insurance, and requires no waivers, equipment or constant supervision, although Shoreview recommends helmets and may start renting them. Shoreview’s facility consists of a 3-foot Mini (ramp), a 3-foot Quarter-pipe, a 3-foot Spine, a 20-foot long Rail, and a 3-foot Wedge.
Pick a morning, any morning, and you can find dozens of kids working out on the odd-shaped structures — bothering nobody and entertaining themselves for hours on end. “The morning after we opened it, I got here at 8 a.m. and there were nine kids with two mothers already out there,” said Haffeman. “Two of them were little girls, wearing full armor. It’s free and unsupervised, a lot like ballfields used to be — just a place for kids to come and do things.”
The progressive thinking of Haffeman, plus the quality work by TrueRide, turned a potential youth problem into a multi-faceted success.
“Kids get a bad rap and a lot of negative reaction,” said Dave Benson. “Some kids don’t have any money, and a Tier I park like we built in Shoreview lets kids come in and do their thing for six hours, for free.
“We started out in this business with two portable parks that we moved around to Robbinsdale, Maple Grove, Golden Valley, Crystal and New Hope last summer. We did it so we could show those cities what skateboarding and in-line skating was all about. It was a lot of work, and all those cities wanted us to do it again this summer. But we’ve decided to focus on permanent parks.
“The one we’ve done at Shoreview gives us 15 permanent parks in place now. We’ve got them in Georgia, Kansas, Toledo, Ohio, and at an Air Force base in Yokota, Japan. We’ve done five more this spring, with parks in San Antonio, Texas, Seymour, Conn., Club Med in Florida, Lake in the Hills, Ill., and we’re just finishing one of the biggest ones in Grayslake, Ill.”
TrueRide also is working on another permanent facility in Maple Grove. The highly successful John Rose Speedskating Oval in Roseville also has TrueRide equipment set up for summertime use. That is a more sophisticated Tier II facility, with ramps and jumps up to 6 feet high, and it requires supervision and full protective gear.
Business has kept the TrueRide staff hopping from actual construction to trips to promote and set up their devices. They had to turn down an offer to set up a facility for NBC’s Gravity Games because they didn’t have time.
Benson said he’d love to see TrueRide build a facility in Duluth, somewhere like a waterfront site just west of the DECC.
Meanwhile, in the facility on Berquist Rd., there is a badge for the success of TrueSports. It is a sign hanging on a post shows a skateboard with a diagonal line slashing through it, meaning “No Skateboarding.” The sign was presented to TrueRide by the City of Roseville, which doesn’t need it anymore, since TrueRide’s facility provided a wholesome haven for skateboarders.
Proctor Speedway set for Summer Sizzler
At least 40 Late Model stock cars are expected to make their way to Proctor for Wednesday night’s North Star Summer Sizzler race program, the annual midseason highlight that now also is part of the special Amsoil $11,000 Bonus series.
The race is the second of five conducted between Proctor and Superior’s dirt oval race tracks, with the Late Model winner of the series getting $5,000 of the $11,000 purse. Proctor Speedway, which is in its 47th season, was to have opened the series on Memorial Day weekend, but the event got rained out. The opener was at Superior, so the Summer Sizzler becomes the second of the five. Hot laps will be at 6:30 p.m., with racing to start at 7 p.m. at the county fairgrounds track in Proctor.
Pete Wohlers, who jumped into the lead at the green flag and led flag-to-flag to beat the field and the fog and win Sunday night’s Fourth of July Late Model feature at Proctor, will take on the best Wissota-sanctioned Late Model drivers from throughout the area. The Wissota rules now govern over 2,200 racers in six division in seven Upper Midwest states and two Canadian provinces.
Amsoil, a Superior-based company that started the current trend toward synthetic motor oils, has long been a primary contributor to regional auto racing. In fact, Amsoil paid off on its $1,000 challenge to Ed Wakefield of Hermantown Sunday night at Proctor.
Wakefield, who drives a Wissota Modified, completed the Amsoil clean sweep by winning features at Superior on Friday, Hibbing on Saturday and Proctor on Sunday all in the same weekend. Amsoil makes the same offer in other classes.
Other winners beside Wohlers in Late Model and Wakiefield in Modified on Sunday night at Proctor were Brady Smith in Super Stock, Scott Lawrence in Street Stock and Scott Herrick in Pure Stock.
Twins, Vikings stadium demands ridiculous
The Duluth-Superior Dukes pulled off a good one. Ten days ago, they were in third place in the East bracket of the Central Division of the Northern League, going into St. Paul for an always-tough series against the Saints. But they swept the three-game series at St. Paul for the first time in their history, then swiped one of three games at Winnipeg, before coming home to handle Madison.
They took Monday off, as the “official” Fourth of July holiday, and went back to work in first place, as they opened a three-game home series against Sioux Falls.
The Dukes are fun, entertaining, and may yet captivate baseball fans in the Up North area with this season’s aggressive-hitting team. But if they don’t fill Wade Municipal Stadium, at least the Dukes owners won’t be whining and stomping their feet to demand a new stadium.
Think about it. A new, shiny steel and plastic stadium, with swirling escalators, huge murals on the inside walls, a retractable roof to swing over the top whenever the fog rolls in off the bay, a couple-dozen high-buck suites for corporations to buy, and maybe even some between-innings dancing Dukes, and Dukettes. That would sure draw fans, wouldn’t it?
We’re laughing, of course. Ol’ Wade Stadium, with those solid brick walls and the main grandstand flanked by no-back bleacher seats on either side, is just fine. The Dukes are in the low-budget Northern League, and they understand the realities of the game: If they win enough, they will draw fans; if they put on a good enough show, they will draw fans.
It’s not like that in the Twin Cities, where we can be baseball fans of the Twins and football fans of the Vikings from a distance, and watch the sinister economic battles. The Twins want to be guaranteed financial success, regardless of how awful their team is. The Vikings want to be assured that they can pay every player $10 million a year and still make a profit. And both of them blame the stadium, the poor, old Metrodome. Both want new stadiums, costing taxpayers something incalculable in the hundreds-of-millions range. And they’d prefer not to contribute their own money, thank you.
What’s interesting is that the newest generation of fans probably can’t remember the gymnastics we all went through before building the Metrodome.
Remember Metropolitan Stadium? It was right out there where the Mall of America now sits. It was a neat, contemporary stadium, with three decks behind home plate, rising up in steep but effective sightlines, and augmented with a long second-deck on the right-field side, and high-rising bleachers in left and right field. It had ramps winding up the sides for easy access. It had brightly colored panels to spice up the erector-set looks of the structure.
The Twins were lured here to play in that facility, and the Vikings followed. Sports fans remember sitting out there in fantastic summer weather, and also in bone-chilling cold of November, when you simply pulled on layers of down clothing or snowmobile suits, brought along your thermos of coffee, and had a great time.
The Twins filled Met Stadium, back when they had Harmon Killebrew, Bob Allison, Camilo Pascual, Mudcat Grant and the good, ol’ boys of summer, and they capped it with a World Series trip and ultimate heartbreak against Sandy Koufax and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Baseball being cyclical, the Twins then sagged. Not coincidentally, they also started to draw fewer fans.
Incredibly, they blamed the ballpark. All that lousy weather in the spring and fall, you know.
So they built them the Metrodome, roof and all, and it was a fine facility– if you like to watch a ballgame in your living room. I hated the place. It served its purpose, by bringing the fans in out of the cold, but to me if you had artificial turf, artificial sky and plastic seats, you could also have little pop-up robots, like an arcade game, running around the bases.
The Metrodome was, however, ideal for the Vikings, simply because the NFL had chosen to go after warm-weather money by playing regular-season games all the way through December. It was the Vikings who were primarily responsible for Minnesota building the Metrodome, and a few well-connected media types, who never ventured outside the warmth of the press box anyway, clamored for the need to protect the fans from the harsh winter elements.
Anyhow, remember how well the Twins drew when they were driving for, and achieving, two World Series championships? Fantastic. Sure, there were some days when you’d rather be outside in the sun and air, but there also were some frigid spring and fall days, and a few if inclement weather, when it was nice to be indoors.
Strange how things come around. Taking advantage of the fact that a new generation doesn’t remember how we were blackmailed into building the Metrodome for the Twins and Vikings, the Twins have came out and said they simply can’t survive at the Major League level without a new, outdoor stadium. Incredibly, some media types have supported this notion. I once heard a guy named Sid — who was the strongest media advocate of building the Metrodome 17 years ago and who boasted endlessly about how great it was that those games could be indoors — switched abruptly to parrot the Twins/Vikings owners in ripping the Metrodome for being inadequate, and how fans would flock to see the teams play if they were only outdoors!
Twins owner Carl Pohlad has a problem, because other teams in other cities have made much more and spent much more on competitive teams. Carl, a banker, knows what it’s like to foreclose on the downtrodden, which makes him posing as a member of the downtrodden seem ludicrous. He thinks we don’t know that if his team was better, it would draw more. Apparently, he thinks that if he spends less, and puts a minor league team onto the Metrodome turf to lose with alarming regularity, the public will take pity and fling a new, open-air stadium onto the Twin Cities horizon. Then he could reap the benefits of a couple years-worth of ballpark-lured fans to pay more for tickets before they realized how bad the ballclub was.
In case you haven’t looked, the Twins are 21 1/2 games out of first place in the American League Central. Twenty-one and a half. Twins manager Tom Kelly was apparently quoted in the New York Times as saying that most of his players simply shouldn’t be in the Major Leagues at this point in their careers.
For my money, if the owner spent a little to make his team competitive, instead of trading away all its competent players to save on the payroll, there would be a trace of merit to publically supporting a new stadium. But not this way. Not blackmail.
The City of St. Paul, and aggressive Mayor Norm Coleman, are trying to find a way to build a downtown St. Paul stadium by the river. As soon as that started to look viable, with the contingent plan that the Vikings then could have the Metrodome to themselves, remodeled as they choose, the Vikings saw their chance.
So, last week, the Vikings insisted that they couldn’t possibly survive in the Metrodome, and they, too, must have a brand new stadium of their own, for their 10 annual home dates, and they’d like a retractable roof, as well, even though that adds $100 million to any stadium scheme. The Metrodome, which is passable for baseball and very good for football, lacks the sufficient number of private suites to assure the Vikings of financial success. That’s the rub. So why not lift off the roof, build a full-circle row of suites, with new stands above, and redo a roof on the Metrodome? Not trendy enough, apparently.
So in our infinite wisdom, and presumed unlimited wealth, we the people are supposed to build a new, open-air stadium for the Twins at one site, and a new, retractable-roof stadium for the Vikings at another. And the Metrodome could, apparently, become a large indoor garden, or something. That’s all ridiculous to comprehend.
First off, I don’t think any new stadium should be built. It might be passable to consider, if the pro team owners contribute half of the total, or at least one-third as a minimum, and if they agree to sign an unbreakable, long-term lease.
If we look at the shortcomings of the Metrodome, some of the sightlines, particularly those in right field, above the “baggy” wall, aren’t very good. So what would happen if we moved north from the Metrodome, just across 3rd St., and built a new, open-air stadium right there? It could be built as inexpensively as possible, without any roof or retractable roof, and with much-improved sightlines, but here’s my concept: Build it with the number of rows of seats corresponding to the row and seat numbers of the Metrodome, and then put a few more rows on top all the way around.
So then we schedule the Twins to be playing the Indians in the new, 60,000-seat stadium, on a Tuesday night, July 6. If it happens to be a nice, 75-degree night, we’ll get a heck of a crowd. But if it happens to be raining cats and dogs, the game moves across the street into the Metrodome. In fact, if the game is in the fourth inning when the rain comes down, the teams could go by connected underground walkway to the Metrodome, and the fans could zip across the street, and resume the game indoors. The guys sitting in Section 204, Row 19, Seats 9 and 10 in the new stadium could go directly to Section 204, Row 19, Seats 9 and 10, maybe stopping for a box of popcorn on the way.
The Vikings could do the same thing, scheduling their Dec. 8 game outdoors, but with the option of moving across the street when the blizzard hits that morning.
If you think that sounds ridiculous, it is far less ridiculous than anything either the Twins or the Vikings have suggested so far. The only certainty that both those teams have overlooked is that if they are good enough, and win enough, they will draw fans whether they play in a magnificent new stadium, the Metrodome, or in the Mall of America parking lot, where the late and flawless Metropolitan Sports Center used to be. If they aren’t very good, they won’t draw. That’s the way sports is.
And it brings us back to the nice, simplicity of the Northern League. Wade Stadium is just fine, and the Dukes may start filling it regularly on their drive toward the first-half pennant, and on into the second half. It’s a different league, and a different world, two hours Up North of the Twin Cities. And this year, one major difference is that whether you measure hitting or fielding or competitive zeal, the Dukes are far more entertaining than the Twins.
About the Author
John Gilbert is a lifetime Minnesotan and career journalist, specializing in cars and sports during and since spending 30 years at the Minneapolis Tribune, now the Star Tribune. More recently, he has continued translating the high-tech world of autos and sharing his passionate insights as a freelance writer/photographer/broadcaster. A member of the prestigious North American Car and Truck of the Year jury since 1993. John can be heard Monday-Friday from 9-11am on 610 KDAL(www.kdal610.com) on the "John Gilbert Show," and writes a column in the Duluth Reader.
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