This 1949 Saturday Evening Post article about Duluth can be found at the top of Perfect Duluth Day. If you stumble on this post long after today you will have to go to Perfect Duluth Day and search for its author Baum. But you can read it today before it gets shuffled down the website at PerfectDuluthDay.com.
I was probably conceived a month or two before this story was published so I am roughly contemporaneous with it. One commentator fusses that the story about the city rushing to dig the canal has long been debunked but its still a charming fib.
Its interesting to read 70 years later. I had moved to Minnesota in 1963 at the time the Minnesota Taconite Amendment was being argued all over the state. It would make possible what the author of the 1949 story described as the the saving of the WW II depletion of the Iron mines. I moved to Duluth in 1974 a few years before an economic decline that would begin sending young Iron Rangers to Texas to become conservative Republicans.
