Everything You Know About Minnesota is Wrong
By TIM GIHRING
Photo by Darrell Eager
(page 2 of 4)
Edina: Monte Carlo of Minnesota
Don’t be mistaken, there are still a lot of mink coats and Cadillacs in Edina. In the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal’s 2004 ranking of the area’s wealthiest Zip Codes, Edina neighborhoods occupied the top two spots. But another study of the richest Zip Codes found Edina well below such suburbs as Afton, Woodbury, Plymouth, and Eden Prairie. So where is the state’s greatest concentration of wealth? Try Dellwood, the town of 1,073 on the shores of White Bear Lake, which made BusinessWeek’s list of the country’s most expensive suburbs. Median home price: $772,000. Median household income: $140,909, almost certainly the highest in the state. (The U.S. Census gives Edina a relatively modest median household income of $66,019.) F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald once lived in Dellwood, for God’s sake. (Meet the new aristocracy, same as the old.) Still, Edina denizens shouldn’t feel too bad. “There’s a certain segment of people who want Edina,” says real-estate agent Patricia Yorks. “Edina’s Country Club neighborhood is a hot area, though I would say the real hot spot is Lake Minnetonka.”
Hubert H. Humphrey: model Minnesotan
He’s our ideal—a progressive everyman with lofty goals and a pragmatic approach. He was our mayor, our senator, and our presidential candidate. But he was never our native son: Hubert H. Humphrey was born in Wallace, South Dakota.
High business taxes are turning Minnesota into Mississippi
Even as our governor has suggested that Minnesota is hemorrhaging businesses to supposedly tax-friendlier states like Wisconsin and the Dakotas, our Department of Employment and Economic Development is touting the state’s competitive business taxes. Who’s right? “I’m on both sides of the fence on this one,” says Federal Reserve economist Art Rolnick. “Business taxes should be low. It tends to be pretty regressive.” That said, he continues, “This is not the key to whether this economy succeeds. The key is making sure we invest [tax money] wisely.” Whatever we’re doing, it seems to be working. A 2005 Forbes study ranked the Twin Cities 18th among the 150 best places to do business. Minnesota also has been creating jobs faster than the national average and has a below-average unemployment rate. What matters most, though, is what’s in the wallet: Rolnick calls personal income “the measure of how successful our economy is.” By that standard, we’re doing better than all of our neighbors and the United States as a whole. We really are above average.
Once Minneapolis, always Minneapolis
The site of Minneapolis was probably once called many things: “that swamp near St. Anthony Falls,” “The Real West St. Paul”—who knows. But the town’s first official name was Minnehapolis, after Minnehaha Falls. Perhaps the moniker sounded too much like “hapless,” as the “h” was soon dropped. This was after the first proposed name, Albion, proved unpopular, as did the other suggested names the city came dangerously close to living with: All Saints, Brooklyn, Addiseville, and Winona. No offense to Winona.
Our lakes are mosquito fantasuites
“Lakes don’t produce mosquitoes anything like marshes and grassy depressions do,” says Roger Moon, a professor of entomology at the University of Minnesota. Lakes are too deep (mosquitoes can’t survive in deep water) and are full of fish that prey on the bugs. But Minnesota does have plenty of wetlands that serve as mosquito breeding grounds, and our frequent summer thundershowers create the kind of shallow, still beds of water that get skeeters in the mood. Looking to avoid the buggers? Consider not breathing: Carbon dioxide stimulates mosquitoes to search for hosts.
Goldy is a gopher
The University of Minnesota football players aren’t the only imposters on the field on Saturday afternoons. Mascot Goldy, with his buck teeth and stout body, is anything but a gopher, anatomically speaking. “Goldy is actually a 13-lined ground squirrel,” asserts Sharon Jansa, the curator of mammals at the Bell Museum of Natural History. A few years back, the Bell Museum created a mock criminal line-up comparing five rodents with Goldy; viewers concluded that the mascot resembled a chipmunk. The identity crisis stems from the fact that the original illustrator, an Iowa artist, didn’t know what a real gopher looked like. Instead, the story goes, he sketched some rodents he saw at rest stops while driving to Minnesota. Whatever they were, they weren’t gophers.
Loons are monogamous
It was long believed that our state bird was a winged paragon of virtue, returning to its mate year after year—until death or lakeshore development intervened. But our red-eyed rep, it seems, is a player on the level of peacocks, prairie chickens, and Colin Farrell. According to researcher Walter Piper, the birds switch mates from year to year, sometimes even within the same mating season if the first partnership isn’t productive. The bird isn’t especially romantic, either. As described on the educational website Journey North, loon mating “is a quick process. … It only takes a few moments and then [the male] drops into the water. They sometimes call after copulation.” Such animals.
The gopher state = many gophers
We don’t have more gophers than other places, we just had a whole lot of rascally railroad barons, who, in 1858, were taking Minnesotans for a ride. They had received $5 million in state money but never actually built a single railroad. In a cartoon about the scandal, the barons are depicted as gophers (which consume and destroy everything) pulling the Legislature down a train track. The “Gopher Train” cartoon proved so popular that people began calling Minnesota the Gopher State. By the time the University of Minnesota had adopted the rodent as its mascot, most people had forgotten the nickname’s origin. So apparently we’re gullible and forgetful.
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