Yanking Edinans' Chains

Monday when Mayor Hovland said hello, it was so much fun to tell him that I am looking forward to picking on him on Edina Patch.

I appreciate Editor Ryan Gauthier’s encouragement for me to “yank [people’s] chains” here in Edina, something I certainly have done now and then over way-too-many years. Of course, I’ve done much of that chain yanking in political venues. Yet, it will be hard for you to find a prouder and more enthusiastic Edina booster than I.

Ryan may not realize what he acquired when he invited me to write a blog. Regular sufferers already know that this verbose writer will use 1,000 words where only 200 are needed. Ryan certainly doesn’t know that I’ve caused the overflow packing of over issues (actually quite a few times), the first time being before 1970 when I caught the city doing a no-no that, once I papered 12 blocks, several hundred residents showed up and got an in-progress project redesigned on the fly. Actually, being a gadfly is great fun.

Born and raised here, but having traveled extensively on business and pleasure, I couldn’t imagine a better place to raise and educate my five children. I’ve been around so long my youth baseball coaches were (then future) Mayor Wayne Courtney and George Pearson of the Pearson Candy (Nut Goodie) Company. My doctor and neighbor across the street from my parents was Frank Sidell, Sr., M.D. whose medical offices on Sunnyside became, and still are, shared by his youngest son Phillip.

In summer, neighbor Don Houck was a professional baseball scout. His daughter was my long time playmate. Across the street were the Hillstaedt’s, a Swedish couple. In addition to Mrs. Hillstaedt’s fabulous hand made Swedish Rye bread, celebrity sports figures came and went because her husband handled celebrity business investments.

Three homes down was contractor Gary Nowak, who freely let me use his Bobcat, chainsaws and welding equipment. A couple doors the other direction was Andy MacPhail, General Manager of the Twins.

Ad-hoc teams of neighborhood kids played kick-the-can, traipsing through everyone’s backyards for blocks after dark only to be sent home after curfew by Constable Weber, for whom the park is now named. Today two dozen marauding kids would bring out the Edina Tactical Squad. We kids biked to various parks and schools daily, far from home with no cell phones and did so safely. How could a young man not love it?

So, over 65 years I’ve only lived elsewhere a total of eight years. Even during those years, I was closely tied by business, activities and my mother, who was still here until 1996.

I intend to bring some historical perspective to various discussions as I have done in a number of arenas, including on the very active Facebook page, Politics In Edina. (Consider joining.) More recent Edinans, understandably, often lack knowledge of how Edina became what it is. There are a lot of misassumptions. Having had an unusually rich and varied life, I can help with that perspective.

Let’s start. When I was a kid, and churches had few houses near them. In fact, when one drove south on the narrower but decorative Lilac Way Highway 100 Beltline and reached the top of the hill where 66th Street crossed at a stop light, the view to the south was all farms. I clearly remember the black and white Holstein cows—where we later bought one of our homes.

During the heavy growth years of 1970s to the early 1990s, I discovered that Edina was filling up with an interesting variety of residents.

At the time, Realtors specializing in executive transfers explained that Minnesota’s big corporations were bringing a lot of talent, and their families, into the Twin Cities for short stints of two to six years, often before those personnel were to go to branches or divisions elsewhere. Upscale Edina was the top choice of residence for these upward bound, highly skilled people. The Edina Newcomers Club was fascinatingly packed with people from anywhere one could imagine, many of whom were not here long.

Edina also benefited from what the tax code did for those coming from either coast, where real estate prices were far higher. With gains on the sale of a home being tax free if one purchased a home of equal or better value, persons selling a modest bungalow in 1985 for $400,000 in San Francisco found they could move right into an executive quality rambler or colonial, twice the size, in a good Edina neighborhood—one that would have cost twice as much back in San Francisco. A current realtor tells me that “move up” phenomenon still exists and is a big reason for the boom in “McMansions.”

In that era, 40 years ago, a common term was the “brain drain,” meaning the United States attracted the best and brightest from foreign countries to our universities and businesses, enhancing us, but hurting the countries from which they came by attracting away those countries’ future leaders. Edina caused its own kind of brain drain.

While a lot of top business owners and executives chose homes around lakes Minnetonka or Isles, Edina got the doers, the people who really ran the companies. Intelligent, educated, highly engaged, driven people. It is these doers that deeply engaged themselves and their children in the community, the schools and Edina life. As a result, they caused a unique community, not just in the Twin Cities, but in this country.

Sure there are other “cake eater” type communities, but few have a school system that stays on top of America year after year for decades while also having such a high percentage of residents dig into and get involved in daily life right in their home community. I find elsewhere in “cake eater” communities, the residents are more aloof. People who don’t live inside Edina do not understand the deep attachment Edinans develop, or understand why seniors don’t leave. That’s okay, we don’t have enough room for everyone.

Therefore, while some future columns will likely incite some people, anger others and maybe bring up sore subjects, please understand Edina is like few other communities, anywhere. Enjoy it, appreciate it, improve it, update it, but please don’t spoil it for others.