Two lights guided the lives and actions of former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark: service and community.

Those who knew the couple repeated this theme in remembrances at a funeral mass Saturday morning at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis that was attended by former President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Gov. Tim Walz and his wife, Gwen, and numerous other politicians, along with family, friends, and community members.

The Hortmans were slain on June 14 at their home in Brooklyn Park in an attack believed to be politically motivated.

“Two lights guided their life: service and community,” said Father Daniel Griffith, who presided over the mass. “Melissa manifested a servant’s heart in her work as a legislator.”

The couple lived a life devoted to community, he said. They loved having visitors to their home, which was jokingly called “The Hortman Hotel,” he said because everybody was welcome. They hosted monthly gourmet dinner groups with their law school friends and Mark held monthly card games. The couple also loved sitting on the deck of their home together for happy hour, he said.

“They shared a love for travel,” Griffith said. “Mark was a hobbyist with a curious mind” who loved mountain biking and making furniture.

“His children talked of his big smile, cheesy dad jokes, and having an indomitable spirit.”

Griffith also talked about Gilbert, a dog the couple had taken in to train as a service dog, but it became very attached to Melissa.

When it came time for him to become a service dog and leave the family, “Melissa was wrecked and emotional,” Griffith said. “The family wonders if maybe Gilbert failed the assignment on purpose so he could head back to the Hortman house.”

In speaking of the Hortman’s children, Colin and Sophie, Griffith called them a “beautiful reflection of their humanity, compassion and their sense of justice in every way, in their intelligence.”

He spoke about the statement that the Hortman’s children, Sophie and Colin, released after their parent’s were killed:

“Plant a tree, pet a dog, try a new hobby like Mark would have, stand up for justice and peace. The best way to honor their parents is to do something to make our community just a little better for someone else,” he said. “Mark and Melissa lived this reality.”

Gov. Tim Walz gave an eulogy after the mass, listing some of the ways that the couple made the state of Minnesota better, saying Melissa Hortman was the most consequential speaker in Minnesota history, a close friend, a mentor to him and the most talented lawmaker he had ever met.

Millions of Minnesotans now have better lives because Melissa and Mark chose public service and politics, he said.

“More kids in pre-K. Fewer in poverty. More kids in schools with the tools and teachers they need. Fewer with hungry students. More trees in the ground and clean energy coursing through the grid. Fewer roads and bridges at risk of failure,” Walz said. “More people in safe and secure housing. Fewer worrying about managing how to care for their loved ones. That’s the legacy that Mark and Melissa will leave behind for all Minnesotans.”

Walz painted a picture of the domestic life the couple led, mentioning Mark’s love of shooting pool and Melissa’s love of her garden where she “fussed over her lilies like they were a wayward member of that caucus,” he joked, eliciting laughter from the pews.

Their life outside of politics and public service took place in their kitchen where Mark “fed his sourdough starter, Melissa mixed the margaritas and baked the cakes and Gilbert sat there begging for scraps and the sound of that kitchen filled with laughter.”

Walz said Mark was proud of Melissa and her biggest supporter.

He said that the couple were an example of how people were at the heart of all politics.

“It’s easy sometimes to forget, for all its significance, that politics is just people,” he said. “That’s all it is. Just a bunch of human beings trying to do the best they can. Melissa understood that better than anybody I knew. She saw the humanity in every single person she worked with. And she kept things focused on the people she served. Her mission was to get as much good done for as many people as possible. It was the golden rule instilled in her by her father and the passion to serve she learned from her mother.”

Mark’s focus was people too, Walz said and he was a beloved colleague and friend to so many people.

Griffith said that the Hortman’s children gave him permission to speak about how the guiding principles the Hortmans lived by were “antidotes to our present afflictions” as a state and nation.

“Here in Minnesota we have been the ground zero place, sadly for racial injustice, the killing of George Floyd just miles from our church today,” Griffith said. “And now we are the ground zero place for political violence and extremism. Both of these must be decried in the strongest possible terms as they are a threat to human dignity and indeed, our democracy.

“Sadly racial disparity, some of the most acute in the country,  persists here in Minnesota with modest gains in some areas and widening gaps in others over the last five years. But friends, Minnesotans, this can be ground zero place for restoration and justice and healing, but we must work together and there is much more work to be done. Your presence here is a sign that we can do that work,” he said.

Melissa Hortman is the first woman to lie in state at the Capitol. It was also the first time a couple has lain in state at the Capitol, and the first time for a dog.

Before the Hortmans, 19 people had been accorded the honor. The first was Civil War veteran William Colvill in 1905.

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St. Paul police detective James Crumley made an unsettling discovery in early 1935.

A small dictograph microphone hidden in his office had been recording Crumley’s conversations with colleagues and visitors.

It was one of several bugs hidden throughout police headquarters by 27-year-old Wallace Ness Jamie, a private investigator hired by the St. Paul Daily News to expose corruption within the department.

The editor of the Daily News had convinced the city’s public safety commissioner to let Jamie bug the building and tap its phone lines. The conversations he collected revealed that some of the department’s top cops were accepting bribes to protect illegal gambling and prostitution rings.

Crumley, who played a key role in this web of corruption, was one of more than a dozen officers ousted or suspended when the story broke that summer — including the chief of police.

“It was one of the greatest moments of journalism history in Minnesota,” said Paul Maccabee, whose book “John Dillinger Slept Here” chronicles the city’s Prohibition-era crime wave. “They brought down three-and-a-half decades of police corruption in just a few weeks. It was remarkable.”

In the years that followed, a raft of ethics reforms was imposed on the department by city officials, increasing oversight and depoliticizing the hiring process for the city’s police chief, Maccabee said.

By 1941, the FBI gushed that St. Paul had “one of the best and most efficient police departments in the United States.”

The O’Connor System

The brazen corruption that pervaded St. Paul’s police force in 1935 didn’t spring up overnight.

Criminals had long known that — for a price — its officers were happy to let them lie low in town, as long as they did their robbing and killing outside the city limits. This handshake agreement was born under Police Chief John J. O’Connor, whose tenure at the top of the department began in 1900.

St. Paul Police Chief John O’Connor welcomed criminals to town during his tenure — as long as they behaved within city limits. (Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society)

“If they behaved themselves, I let them alone,” he said, according to a 1951 article in the Pioneer Press. “If they didn’t, I got them.”

Under the system of graft O’Connor devised, out-of-town crooks checked in with an underworld go-between, who would collect their name, address and a cash bribe. Their money, along with similar “taxes” from the owners of St. Paul brothels and casinos, ended up in the pockets of O’Connor and other local officials.

“The people of St. Paul knew that the O’Connor System was in place,” Maccabee said. “That’s the amazing thing about this: It wasn’t a secret. It was openly discussed.”

As long as it kept the city’s streets relatively free of major crime, St. Paulites seemed to accept this arrangement, according to Maccabee. But cracks began to appear when O’Connor retired in 1920, just as Prohibition offered a lucrative new income stream to the city’s criminals.

“The O’Connor System was an important part of why St. Paul became so corrupt, but Prohibition definitely lit the fuse on the worst of the corruption,” Maccabee said.

When Prohibition was finally repealed in 1933, the city’s criminals were forced to find new ways to make a buck. They turned to kidnapping, bank robbery and illegal gambling.

‘Machine guns blaze’

St. Paul tried to shake its reputation as a haven for criminals in early 1934.

After two of its wealthiest businessmen, Edward Bremer and William Hamm Jr., were kidnapped for ransom by gun-toting gangsters, the city’s embarrassed mayor impaneled a grand jury to investigate whether Minnesota’s capital had a crime problem.

The front page of the March 31, 1934, issue of the St. Paul Daily News reported that gangsters had shot their way out of a Lexington Parkway apartment building the same day that a grand jury found that no “excess of crime exists here.”

Three months later, the grand jury published its conclusion that “there is no justification for any charges that an excess of crime exists here.” That same day, famous fugitive John Dillinger shot his way out of a Lexington Parkway apartment complex to escape capture by federal agents.

“MACHINE GUNS BLAZE AS JURY WHITEWASHES POLICE,” screamed a headline across the front page of that afternoon’s edition of the Daily News.

Its editor, Howard Kahn, had been waging a lonely campaign against St. Paul’s lawlessness for months. His scathing editorials targeted not only the city’s criminals, but also powerful public officials who turned a blind eye to them.

“He was ridiculed for it,” Maccabee said of Kahn’s anti-crime crusade. “He had a lot of guts.”

But now it seemed St. Paulites had finally come around to Kahn’s point of view. Later that year, they elected reformer Ned Warren as public safety commissioner on a promise to “clean up” the police department.

Shortly after he took office, Warren agreed to let Kahn embed Jamie in the city’s new Public Safety Building — now the Penfield apartment complex — to collect evidence against its corrupt cops.

Jamie had studied criminology at the University of Chicago and Northwestern before going into business as a private investigator, and he employed the latest electronic surveillance tools in his work for Kahn and Warren.

Cleaning house

In early 1935, Jamie and a handful of assistants set up shop in Room 201 of the Public Safety Building.

They posed as bureaucratic number-crunchers conducting an “administrative survey” of the police department’s crime statistics on Warren’s behalf, the Pioneer Press later reported.

“He drew a bunch of diagrams … and the cops looked at them and laughed behind his back,” Kahn said of Jamie. “They called him a dumb college boy.”

The surveillance team operated in secret for four months before Crumley discovered the bug in his office and warned his corrupt colleagues to watch what they said, according to the Daily News. By then, Jamie and his assistants had already filled 400 aluminum phonograph records with incriminating conversations.

In one typical recording, detective Fred Raasch was caught telephoning the proprietor of the Riverview Commercial Club to warn him of an imminent police raid on its gambling operation.

“Take the two slot machines down,” he said. “There’s a couple of guys coming right over.”

In another, Crumley called a bookie at the St. Paul Recreation Co. to ask why it had been so long since he had received a bribe.

“Say, when are you going to play Santa?” he asked. “We’re all broke up here.”

Warren submitted Jamie’s findings — including 3,000 pages of surveillance transcripts — to St. Paul Mayor Mark Gehan on June 24, 1935, implicating 13 officers in the corruption scheme, according to Maccabee. The department’s chief was suspended and would soon resign.

The front page of the June 24, 1935, issue of the St. Paul Daily News announced that several of the city’s top police officials had been caught up in a wiretap sting.

Kahn splashed the story across the front page of the Daily News that afternoon, proudly detailing his newspaper’s involvement in “the most drastic shake-up in the city’s history.”

As acting police chief, Warren installed a by-the-book cop named Gus Barfuss, who would soon replace him as public safety commissioner and carry on his campaign to inoculate the department against corruption.

A 1941 FBI survey of crime conditions in Minnesota found that Barfuss “has ‘cleaned out’ the St. Paul Police Department.”

The department remains committed to keeping it that way today, spokeswoman Alyssa Arcand said in an email.

“The St. Paul Police Department does not tolerate corruption of any kind,” she wrote, adding that a peer intervention program instituted in 2021 teaches the city’s police how to recognize and address unethical behavior in their fellow officers.

This kind of vigilance is vital at a time when illicit drug markets offer the same opportunities for graft that the illegal alcohol trade did a century ago, Maccabee said.

“There’s no question that the St. Paul Police Department is radically different today than it was then,” he said. “Yes, this is history. But we shouldn’t get complacent.”

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Minnesota judges are offering free weddings at the Dakota County Fair again this summer.

The tradition started as a Valentine’s Day free wedding event, and last year county fairs got involved, according to Kim Pleticha, director of Public Affairs at the Minnesota Judicial Branch. Pleticha said judges “absolutely love” to marry people.

“It’s a time when the community comes together,” Pleticha said. “The more we can do, the merrier.”

Judges will perform weddings this summer at the Dakota, Goodhue and McLeod county fairs along with the Litchfield Watercade festival. Pleticha said the Goodhue County Fair prepared an outdoor garden area for weddings last year.

“It was just a stunning place to get married in this beautiful garden,” she said.

Interested couples can choose which fair they’d like to be married at, then contact the district court in that county to register. People do not have to live in these counties to get married there.

Here are the wedding options throughout the summer:

The Litchfield Watercade festival will be July 11. Couples can email watercade.weddings@courts.state.mn.us.
The Dakota County Fair will be Aug. 4–10. Couples can email 1stDakotaAdmin@courts.state.mn.us.
The Goodhue County Fair will be Aug. 6 and 7. Couples can email Vanessa.Jeske@courts.state.mn.us or call (651) 267-4815.
The McLeod County Fair will be Aug. 15 and 16. Couples can email 1stMcLeodDistrictCourt@courts.state.mn.us or call (320) 864-1285.

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Amy Lindgren

Is the honeymoon over? After nearly tripling during the pandemic, the number of employees working remotely has been leveling off, with more companies now mandating a return to the workplace.

We’ve gone from perhaps 10% of employees working from home pre-pandemic to a high near 30% around 2021 to somewhere between 20 and 27% today.

The numbers themselves are surprisingly difficult to correlate, as some studies count only fully-remote workers, others track the jobs themselves, and others include hybrid positions. Despite the variances, the trend seems consistent: The work-from-home peak occurred during COVID, with a slow decline in the years since.

What’s next is anyone’s guess. Although a number of companies and government entities have begun to limit remote work, it may be awhile before they disallow it altogether — if they ever get that far. Whatever their motivations for requiring a return to work (RTW), employers are running into resistance from the workers themselves.

While some employees may welcome the chance to reunite with co-workers, others want to maintain the flexibility or better productivity gained from remote work. And still others have built their lives around home-based work, giving up cars and day care or moving their families to the far exurbs. For people with disabilities, remote work may have opened doors they (literally) couldn’t go through before, making RTW an unlikely prospect.

Clearly, employees receiving such an RTW mandate need a game plan. Everything from relocation to changing jobs might be on the table, depending on how difficult the new work arrangements would be.

For those willing and able (reluctantly or cheerfully) to come back to the workplace, a few survival tips can help.

• 1. Leverage the RTW advantages. Every working situation has pluses and minuses. For on-site work, the pluses include bonding with colleagues, mixing with co-workers you wouldn’t see in your Zoom meetings, accessing casual mentoring and networking, playing see-and-be-seen with your boss … even the free coffee and company gym can make the list of pluses.

• 2. Control the disadvantages. If the commute is onerous, try to adjust your hours. If co-workers are noisy, ask for sound-cancelling headphones or a seating change. By taking a proactive approach, you may be able to lessen some of the minuses the situation presents.

• 3. Enjoy your commute. Or at least try not to hate it. It may have been awhile, but remember these oldies but goodies: Audio books, carpooling, biking to work, journaling while taking the bus, stopping by a favorite park or the gym on the way home. Yes, commuting to work steals your time. But if you can steal some back and convert it to something pleasurable you might strike a reasonable balance.

• 4. Don’t eat lunch at your desk. But do eat lunch. Skipping breaks is bad for you, especially if you’re used to changing the laundry or walking the dog every couple of hours. Rather than restarting bad habits, take the opportunity to “do it better” this time by taking your breaks, brown bagging it with a coworker or just getting outside for a walk.

• 5. Choose a new outfit. A new outfit, even from a consignment shop, can provide that back-to-school vibe you need for a mental boost. If you want to simplify things, create two or three outfits to keep as your primary “uniform.” Dressing in the morning will be a breeze and hybrid schedules mean that others won’t notice if you wear the same thing twice in a row.

• Bonus tip: Give the new arrangement time. If your first reaction to an RTW mandate is to change jobs, take a deep breath. It’s difficult enough to adjust to returning to the office without adding job search as an extra puzzle to solve. Not to mention, you may find the job market in your industry has tightened, adding extra stress to the search.

Instead of bolting from the company the first chance you get, consider putting job search on the back burner for three to six months. This lets you adjust to the situation while improving what you can.

Staying a few months also provides time for parts of the mandate to relax if they’re going to, and for positions to open internally if other workers decide to leave. If that happens, you could be in line for a new role. And if not, you can always revisit the decision and jump into job search after all.

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Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.