By Staff
MINNEAPOLIS - It was a spontaneous gesture of gratitude and welcome home for the uniformed young man who flew with us Oct. 2 from Cincinnati to South Bend, Ind.
He had already been in the air for 17 hours, from well over 100 at his departure, through 47 degrees in Germany.
A rare October Michiana day in the 80s must have felt cool after nine months in Iraq.
The soldier sat across the aisle from me in the last row of Flight 5748 - easy to remember if you're me because being born in '57 makes me 48 - and probably went unnoticed by passengers who got on after.
Hale was the name stenciled on his uniform.
He said he was 19, from Elkhart and might be getting married during the couple weeks of his leave before he returns for another four months in Iraq.
Contrary to the impression news leaves, the war is going well, he said, the ferocity of the insurgents equal to their desperation at the great strides being made in rebuilding Iraq.
His excitement at being so close to home was palpable as he chattered a mile a minute.
He wanted to enlist at 16, right after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The woman in front of me marveled at this artilleryman, comparing his maturity to her son the same age whose biggest worry is ice time in hockey.
As we landed, my seatmate from Warsaw boomed out an announcement.
It would be nice if passengers, who usually start popping their seatbelts and scrambling for carry-on bins even before the plane rolls to a stop, stayed seated and let him stride into the airport proudly, first off the flight.
They not only complied, they go him one better and break into applause at the battle-tested hero in their midst.
Back from the land of booya: It's a stew of chicken, beef, oxtails, vegetables and spices, cooked overnight, usually in vast quantities.
The World Championship Cookoff took place in South St. Paul Oct. 1.
Booya is traditionally the centerpiece of a fundraiser by a church or fire department.
The event itself is often called "a booya."
Recipes are invariably handed down by one's forebears, be they Italian, Belgian, Norwegian, Swiss or French.
Playing hardball with youth sports: Minnesota is having the same discussion Dowagiac had last school year.
Tired of talking about the hazards of overscheduled kids, University of Minnesota professor Bill Doherty and a group of suburban parents are calling for families in Rosemount, Eagan and Apple Valley to demand that Sundays be off-limits for organized sports.
No practices. No games. No tournaments. Organizers will host a community meeting Tuesday in hopes of helping parents band together to slow the frenetic pace of soccer, football, hockey and basketball schedules.
If leagues schedule Sunday activities anyway, she said, parents should make it clear their kids won't be there - and that youngsters shouldn't be penalized for choosing dinner with Grandma over a faceoff at center ice.
Pendulum swings back: The Star Tribune unveils a redesign Oct. 12.
Editor Anders Gyllenhaal writes: "At a time when many in the media are turning up the volume to get noticed in a crowded marketplace, the new look … goes in the opposite direction … Headlines are smaller to allow for more precision … All longer stories come with summaries at the top and small headlines in the text to propel the reader forward. The idea is for the power of the paper to come not from appearance but from the content."
Oct. 2 the paper carried a fascinating feature story on a lesbian couple with three boys who opened their five-bedroom home in Montevideo, Minn. (population 5,400, it survived its own major flood in 1997), for a year to three generations of the black Singleton family of New Orleans, a grandmother, her daughter and six children who lost everything in Hurricane Katrina.
Tanya Thornbury, a 36-year-old artist, on Sept. 5 e-mailed her offer to the Baton Rouge storm shelter. Tanya made the offer without consulting her partner, Tracey, a 38-year-old truck driver.
In Louisiana, Nicole, 33, was breaking the news to her family that they were moving more than 1,000 miles away to snowy western Minnesota, where 23 blacks lived in the entire county in 2000.
The prospect of sharing a home with a same-sex couple didn't faze Dot, 51. "They were offering us their home. I was just glad they were saying we were welcome."
With a Twin Cities couple donating an RV for them to deliver all the kids to school and city officials greeting them Sept. 16 with donations of furniture, clothing and toys, eighth grader Helen Singleton, 14, said she felt like "royalty. It made me so happy. Somewhere out there, the American people do care. You just have to find them."
Accompanying photos are priceless, including Dot trying on pink suede winter boots in anticipation of a Minnesota winter and Ebony Singleton, 6, and her toothless smile curving around the dinner plate she's clutching, happy to sit with her family at a dinner table after waiting for storm shelter meals.
Trees are turning, but this is said to be the greenest Minnesota in early October in memory. Mild September came in 6 degrees above average, the 11th warmest since 1891.
279,000: Number of people unemployed because of Katrina.
85: Percent of college students who own a cell phone. Sixty percent of them access the Internet through it. College students or their parents plan to spend $8.2 billion on electronics this fall - $700 million more than last year. An average college freshman spends $540 on personal electronics.