I’ve been trying to get into Dr. Dixon’s head since I realized the folly he was intent on pursuing.
Keith Dixon wasn’t always the “Silver Fox” that his adversaries in Faribault nicknamed him – the Smooth, charismatic, charmer who always knew the right strings to pull to stay out of trouble. A photo from his college year book reminds me of the farm kids I went to school with in southern Minnesota. Everybody’s high school pictures looked dorky back in the sixties. One of my old school photos shows me with my cowlick sticking up and my shirt collar fastened to the wrong button. Dr. Dixon’s plowjock days are far behind him.
Dr. Dixon’s glib confidence keeps showing up in the careless way he has with the truth. Its almost embarrassing for me to call the following example a lie because by itself it hardly rises to the level of a white lie: “Yes, Virgina there is a Santa Clause.”
A venerable group of Central High alumni maintain a one-room museum in Old Central. Its full of memorabilia of our public school past. When Dr. Dixon first went to visit them he was asked how it came to be that the School District acquired the property for New Central up on the hill. No new superintendent should be expected to know that much about a murky subject from the distant past but that didn’t stop Dr. Dixon. Why yes, as a matter of fact, he did know the answer and was happy to tell the group. The Catholic Archdiocese had sold it to the Duluth School Board for a dollar. The crowd was rather dumbfounded by this explanation.
The reason the question came up is because back in the 1960’s, two generations removed from today, the current Museum curators were just kids. They were as innocent about adult politics as the kids in our current high schools are now. Even so they heard bits and pieces of rumors as they grew up about the acquisition that would move the school from cramped Old Central to the rocky but spacious site overlooking the downtown. (How forward thinking the board was fifty years ago to realize room for expansion might come in handy at some later date)
But like all such public land deals the sale heightened people’s suspicions. Who’s going to make all the money from selling the site to the District, they wanted to know. Today the question is, “Who’s going to make all the money when the District sells this lovely condo-land paradise?”
Almost twenty years ago when I began running for the School Board I was no stranger to paranoia. That old history was only thirty years in the past then and there were people with some knowledge of the dusty old mystery. I happened to know a fellow who had dug into it again and passed on a couple of interesting details.
I got the idea of writing a book about some of this murky past and the well oiled but secretive Good-ole-boy network of businessmen who had a financial stake in the high finance decisions of building schools and selling property. I just opened up some of my old rough notes from twenty years ago and can report a rather different story.
New Central’s land was given to UMD by a patent attorney named Rollo Chaffee. The University sold it to Bill Stephenson. (A realtor, I think) Shortly afterwards an old Duluth Trib reporter named Arnold Jirik began sniffing around the transaction suspecting a juicy story. When he got close to reporting it, according to the paranoid who related the story to me, he suddenly got a good job at 3M which ended his sniffing and quashed any expose.
I can’t vouch for any of these notes. There are a bunch of old phone numbers in my notes of people I was supposed to call to confirm this and other information I’d been given. A lumber firm was somehow involved and prominent local luminaries but I never followed up on these notes. Looking at them now does tell me, however, that Dr. Dixon’s story is woefully, if unimportantly, wrong.
I’ve been in Duluth long enough to know that the Catholic Archdiocese sold the struggling Cathedral High School to the folks who turned it into the Marshall School. I recall that the purchase price was one dollar although I can’t swear to that memory being accurate.
Dixon was clearly mixing up the story with a more recent one but it was a harmless mistake. But upon reflection this suggests the sort of slippery truths one might expect from a confidence man who knows how to win people over to sometimes preposterous propositions. It reminds me of the scoundrels in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes who convinced an entire town that anyone who couldn’t see the beautiful new clothes they were weaving for the Emperor was an imbecile.
