“Ready, Queen?” asked Erin Harrington, the Captain of the Guard.

“Yep,” said Erin Gustafson, the newly crowned Aurora, Queen of the Snows of the 2026 St. Paul Winter Carnival.

Regally, Gustafson’s accepted Harrington’s arm and they walked toward a sparkly ensemble of people dressed in crowns and costumes in the lobby of the St. Paul Winter Carnival early Saturday. The royal family was on their way to a breakfast engagement and then to many other events scheduled during the 10 days of fun and frivolity that is this city’s carnival that dates back 140 years and is produced by the St. Paul Festival and Heritage Foundation (and presented this year by Dungarvin).

(The merriment happened before dawn on Saturday, before the fatal shooting of a man by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis. Later, around noon, the King Boreas Grande Day Parade was canceled less than two hours before it was to begin at 2 p.m., with the organizers not saying whether it was due to the extreme cold or because of the shooting.)

Although this royal group will have a year to get to know each other during their reign, Gustafson is already pretty familiar with one person — her dad, Tim Whitacre, is Notos, Prince of the South Wind (from the Royal House of City & County Credit Union).

The prince had a word with the Pioneer Press after his daughter had completed the queen’s traditional annual interview with the newspaper. He explained how the family got involved in Carnival to get back to his St. Paul roots — and their story could be aspirational for others who want to get to know more people and organizations on this side of the metro.

From Big Lake to Woodbury

Notos, Prince of the South Wind Tim Whitacre, rides to the stage on his Cantina float during the 2026 St. Paul Winter Carnival Royal Coronation at the RiverCentre in St. Paul on Friday, Jan. 23, 2026. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

While the prince grew up in Highland Park and attended Nativity, his daughter the queen grew up out in Big Lake, a community about 50 miles northwest of St. Paul in Sherburne County. Later, the queen came to our side of the metro as an undergraduate at the University of St. Thomas before she and her husband settled down inn Woodbury. Her parents (Prince Tim and her mom, Lady Debbie) are back here now, too.

“We just sold our house in October and moved to Woodbury so we’re very new to Winter Carnival and it was our Realtor (Bernie Swafford) who was involved,” said the prince. “She said, ‘If you want to get to know St. Paul people and your neighbors, get involved in Winter Carnival.’”

They did, they sure did.

“After the interview process to be one of the Wind Princes, specifically the South Wind, after I was accepted, she said, ‘Well, if Dad’s in, I’m in,’” the prince recalls. “She always wanted to run for Aurora, Queen of the Snows.”

The queen, who is sponsored by Bernie Swafford at Edina Realty, concurs and explains how the dream began.

The queen dream

Erin Gustafson is crowned as Aurora, Queen of the Snows during the 2026 Winter Carnival Royal Coronation at the RiverCentre in St. Paul on Friday, Jan. 23, 2026. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“I was an Ambassador up in Big Lake in 2010 and 2011,” Gustafson says of a previous royal role. “I got to ride around on Big Lake’s spud, the giant baked potato float. It’s literally a giant baked potato and we had these little square cushions that we’d sit on and they were our little butter pats and I really hope they let me go sit in my old seat when we see it next.”

While the baked potato float (part of the annual Big Lake Spud Fest) was a big deal, the magic of the Winter Carnival also stands out in her memories of this time.

“Back when I was an Ambassador in Big Lake, I came down to the Winter Carnival for a weekend as part of my duties back then and it was my favorite event all year,” she recalls. “I think just the magic of it was really beautiful and also just being around all of these other women who were really empowering and willing to have a good time even if it’s cold out — even if the weather’s not ideal, it’s a choice to just have fun and that’s what we did.”

Part of that fun is imprinted in her memory, specifically ice skating at the outdoor WinterSkate rink in downtown St. Paul with the lights of Rice Park twinkling in the background and set in the shadow of the gingerbread-like Landmark Center.

“It was just gorgeous,” she says.

There were other moments, too, like seeing how St. Paul showed up big at the King Boreas’ Grande Day Parade.

“And so ever since then, I’ve always thought about running for Queen of the Snows, but my job was really demanding right out of undergrad and the timing never really worked out,” she said.

A royal candidate

Gustafson, 31, studied communications at the University of St. Thomas, earning a bachelor’s degree before going on to get her MBA from the University of Minnesota. Now working independently as a strategy and business consultant, she realized she could finally schedule pursuing that longtime dream of hers.

“Working independently has been a lot more flexible,” she says. “So the timing was just right for me.”

Especially with her dad on board.

“It’s very much a family affair,” says the queen.

The queen’s husband, Brandon, hails from Superior, Wis., so she had to explain why she wanted to make room for pursuing this Winter Carnival role along with the other fun stuff in their life, including supporting the local arts community (especially the St. Paul Art Crawl), hosting game nights with friends, hunting for books at used bookstores (he recently added some built-in bookshelves for their growing home library) and continuing her pandemic-born hobby of knitting (she favors creating baby sweaters for her friends).

Of her quest for queenhood, which officially kicked off last fall as one of 12 candidates, her husband needed a minute:

“He said, ‘You want to do what?’” she says with a laugh.

He’s on board, though, especially after the pomp and circumstance of the Royal Coronation at RiverCentre on Friday night in downtown St. Paul.

“I was in awe,” the queen said of the moment the crown was placed on her head.

A royal year

The 2026 Winter Carnival Royal Family after the coronation at the RiverCentre in St. Paul on Friday, Jan. 23, 2026. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

A queen does not serve alone. As part of the royal family, four other women were crowned on Friday as princesses: North Wind Princess Stacy Johnson from the Royal House of Party Time Liquor; East Wind Princess Natalka MacDonald from the Royal House of Quality Insurance Service; West Wind Princess Katelyn Bergstrom from the Royal House of River Hills Automotive and South Wind Princess Christine Hanley from the Royal House of Northern Prairie Financial.

What stood out about Gustafson?

“Erin had a positive, upbeat attitude from the beginning of candidacy!” said Kara Martin, Queen of the Snows candidate coordinator, in an email to the Pioneer Press. “Throughout the process, she began to stand out with her quiet leadership and ability to ask the right questions to make sure all of the candidates would be successful. We are beyond excited for Erin, Stacy, Natalka, Katelyn and Christine as they embark on this journey!”

Over the next year in their volunteer roles, the royal family’s duties include traveling, riding in parades and making appearances at various events, serving as goodwill ambassadors and boosters for the Winter Carnival and our community.

“‘Respect reigns and kindness rules’ is our motto,” she says. “This year, it’s all about positivity — being kind in the community and meeting people and having those little moments that are special and make their day, finding those meaningful moments.”

She’s already had moments like these, with another memory imprinted on her heart.

“We had a bus day where we went to three schools and two nursing homes,” she said of the candidacy process. “At one of the schools, we were in a classroom and I was asking one of the girls what she wanted to be when she grew up. We were in costume that day, so I asked her if she’d like to be a princess, or maybe an astronaut or a singer … well, she just lit up at ‘singer’ and said she wanted to sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ and the ‘ABCs.’ We sang them together and it just melted my heart.”

As the queen, dressed up in her crown and white attire, and the royal entourage drifted away on Saturday to their next engagement, the royal’s mom — Lady Debbie Whitacre — paused a moment to consider the year ahead.

“It’s going to be a wild, wild, wild year!” Lady Debbie said. “Lots of fun!”

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In 2019, the St. Patrick’s Association approached Peter Kenefick about donning the green jacket of Mr. Pat, the king of the city’s Irish community’s St. Patrick’s Day parade.

Kenefick is a busy guy, organizers worried: Alongside a career as a financial adviser, he also owns Grand Avenue restaurants Emmett’s Public House and Saji-Ya and is an avid wintertime platform tennis player. Would he have time for it?

“I said, if you ask me, I’ll be all in,” Kenefick said. “And I was. I went to every button blitz, every event, every old folks’ home. Everyone goes, ‘Peter, no one else has done that; you’re not required to do that.’ Well, I said I would be all in!”

Kenefick was crowned as the 89th King Boreas at the St. Paul Winter Carnival’s Royal Coronation on Jan. 23.

And he has every intention of going full-throttle as Boreas, too.

Even before his identity was unveiled to incoming members of the Royal Family and the public during the coronation, Kenefick said in a mid-January interview, “the word that’s already spreading to all the candidates is that this Boreas is going to be the ‘all-in king.’”

‘Turn that big ship back around’

Kenefick grew up on Norfolk Avenue in Highland Park, the oldest of five siblings in a third-generation St. Paul Irish Catholic family. He helped put himself through college by taking odd jobs doing roofing and gutters and selling shoes at Powers Department Store, he said.

He started as a financial planner in 1980 with two $1,000 retirement accounts in his portfolio, and today, he leads a team at UBS Financial Services in Wayzata that manages $1.6 billion in assets, he said.

Also early in his career, in the mid-1980s, Kenefick took over the Grand Avenue building that housed Saji-Ya and Esteban’s, the Mexican restaurant where playwright August Wilson once told the Pioneer Press Dispatch he wrote much of the Pulitzer-winning play “Fences.” Esteban’s closed in 1985, and Kenefick brought in friends Steve Goldberg and Mike Andrews, of J.D. Hoyt’s Supper Club in Minneapolis, to open Dixie’s on Grand in its place.

By the time Emmett’s Public House opened, on St. Patrick’s Day 2015, Kenefick said the single-story building was reaching the end of its life. He wanted to replace it with a five-story apartment building with restaurant spaces on the ground floor, but zoning codes capped new structures at three stories tall, so he’d have to petition the City Council to rezone the site. The proposal proved more controversial — and some residents’ reactions more vitriolic — than he expected, he said, and council members only very narrowly agreed to the rezoning by a 4–3 vote.

The new building, Kenton House, opened in 2024 and, though Dixie’s was not included in the redevelopment plans, the building is now home to Saji-Ya, Emmett’s and Razava Bread Co.

Grand Marshall Peter Kenefick, waves to parade goers during the Grand Old Day parade in St. Paul on Sunday, June 2, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

From Kenefick’s perspective, the fact that similar development plans are in the works for the former Billy’s on Grand building a few blocks down at Victoria Avenue, and that he was invited to be grand marshal for the Grand Old Day parade in 2024, are both vindications of his vision for Kenton House and Grand Avenue more broadly.

“Grand Avenue is changing, there’s no question,” he said. “I played a small, small role, but I did stick my neck out with my dear partners, who are gems, and we are helping turn that big ship back around. But (five years ago), Grand was not grand.”

When the Kenton House project was still in early stages, Kenefick loaded all the architects and designers and project managers onto a bus and drove them around town. He had them get out in Frogtown and Lowertown and Cathedral Hill and look carefully at what gives a building a “St. Paul feel.”

“We want to hang onto the past and, what I’ve always said is, also have discussions about thoughtful development,” he said. “Don’t just put up steel and glass. Does it look like it belongs? Look at (Kenton House) now — there are trees taller than the building. It looks like it’s been there forever. And you come downstairs, you meet neighbors on your walk — it just has that small-town feeling we’re trying to achieve on Grand, in my opinion.”

‘Who doesn’t need some kindness?’

Friday night, after Boreas’ identity was unveiled and Kenefick met the Royal Family, he handed each member a signed sheet of paper.

In one corner is his Boreas crest, containing a Celtic cross, lions and the logos of his restaurants. Lining the edges of the page are illustrations reminiscent of medieval manuscript marginalia. The sheet is titled “The Royal Family of Boreas Red LXXXIX Code of Conduct,” adapted from a passage by Virginia historian John Walter Wayland.

“Each member of the Royal Family is the one whose conduct proceeds from good will,” it begins. “Who … speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deeds follow their word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others rather than their own.”

To Kenefick, being an ‘all-in king’ doesn’t mean he feels the need to make every decision — quite the opposite, he said. He characterized his approach as one of horizontal leadership where, rather than top-down hierarchy or strict seniority, the focus is on sharing decision-making power, facilitating more personal relationships and demonstrating a broader culture of mutual respect.

“It’s just knocking people off their stereotypes a little bit, in a fun way,” he said. Within the Royal Family, “I’m going to remind them that I just happen to have this part. But I’m not the boss. We are the bosses, and we’re going to lead as a team.”

As Kenefick tells it, all this goes hand-in-hand with his Boreas motto, “Respect Reigns and Kindness Rules.”

“We can’t control how cold it’s going to be. We can’t control if the float breaks down. We can’t control if we get the flu. The only thing we can control is our attitude,” he said. “So we’re going to bring positive attitudes. Because you tell me, from little kids to retired people or to senior living, who doesn’t need some kindness right now here in Minnesota?”

Fast Facts: Boreas Rex LXXXIX

Who: Peter Kenefick

Hometown: St. Paul; now lives in his wife’s hometown of Edina

Family: wife, Ruth — their 46th anniversary is on Feb. 1, the last day of this year’s Winter Carnival — and their two children and four grandchildren. His son’s family lives in Florida, and he joked: “I have it backward. I have grandkids living in Naples and grandma and grandpa living in Minnesota. We’re reverse snowbirds.”

Occupation: Senior vice president at Kenefick Bolstad Kottke Wealth Management, a UBS financial advisory in Wayzata, and owner of Emmett’s on Grand and Saji-Ya

Favorite hobby: Playing platform tennis, an outdoor wintertime sport also sometimes called paddle tennis that, yes, looks like pickleball but is different

Boreas motto: “Respect Reigns and Kindness Rules”

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As Bob Dylan once said: “The times, they are a-changin’.”

One only need to look to the emergence of artificial intelligence to know the lyrics from this 1964 song continue to ring true today. But for all its strengths — from offering travel tips to investment advice to writing term papers and poetry — AI content is also a double-edged sword, littered with bogus references and conclusions based on biased studies or incomplete information.

And AI comes with a price to pay. For many people, that price will be measured in dollars and cents, as AI takes over jobs that used to belong to human beings. Why pay someone to write a report or plan a budget if AI can do it by pushing a button? Even if someone’s job is not taken over, AI may require them to undergo significant retraining to keep it.

But there is another price to pay, which cannot be measured in dollars and cents: the cost of intellectual stagnation. At its best, AI reflects the current thinking on a particular issue. That may be a good starting point. But what if the current thinking is wrong? What if we need a whole new way of looking at things? Where will new ideas come from?

Unless there are people willing to challenge the current thinking, the price we pay is intellectual stagnation.

Consider the kinds of questions that go beyond the retrieval of information or the completion of technical tasks, the hard questions that many of us face from time to time. Does God exist? Are some actions unforgivable? If someone you love committed a serious crime, would you turn them into the police? Should terminally ill patients be allowed to take their own lives? Here AI is of limited value. There is no way to tackle these questions without deep reflection and a great deal of soul-searching.

In the face of growing conformity, critical thinking skills are needed more than ever. According to a study, released last year, by the Journal of the American Philosophical Association that looked at 600,000 college students, those who majored in philosophy not only ranked higher than all others on verbal and logical reasoning, but also displayed more open-mindedness and intellectual curiosity. There is even evidence that philosophy majors have a higher acceptance rate to medical school than students who major in traditional subjects such as chemistry or biology.

While some may be surprised by these results, I am not. Standardized tests don’t just measure a student’s recall of facts; they also try to determine whether students can analyze arguments and are sensitive to verbal nuances. Because they are trained to question basic assumptions, define key terms and construct logical arguments on their own, philosophy majors often have an advantage over others.

When I taught basic classes in philosophy, for example, I made sure that for every thinker we read arguing for one position, we read an equally important thinker arguing for the opposite: an atheist and a believer, a materialist and an idealist, a defender of morality and a critic of it. Papers and exams were structured so that students had to analyze arguments both for and against a particular position and decide which side is right. In addition to the ability to analyze arguments, I hoped to instill a willingness to consider unconventional approaches to problems.

So while intellectual stagnation may not have an immediate effect on one’s pocketbook, it is a serious problem at a time when people have become so entrenched in their political views that they no longer listen to people who do not share them — in other words, a time when simple slogans and dogmatic pronouncements have become all too common. In this case, the price we pay is a deterioration in public discourse and a corresponding rise in prejudice and misunderstanding.

I am not arguing, of course, that philosophy has a monopoly on critical thinking. It often borrows insights from other subjects. It rarely produces established results in the way the sciences do, and other majors in the liberal arts also encourage creative thinking.

But if the recent study of college students is accurate, philosophy, though not a panacea, does an especially good job of preparing them for the AI age we are entering.

Kenneth Seeskin is professor emeritus of philosophy and the Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick professor of Jewish civilization at Northwestern University. He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

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In the aftermath of the U.S. military strike that seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3, the Trump administration has emphasized its desire for unfettered access to Venezuela’s oil more than conventional foreign policy objectives, such as combating drug trafficking or bolstering democracy and regional stability.

During his first news conference after the operation, President Donald Trump claimed oil companies would play an important role and that the oil revenue would help fund any further intervention in Venezuela.

Soon after, “Fox & Friends” hosts asked Trump about this prediction.

“We have the greatest oil companies in the world,” Trump replied, “ the biggest, the greatest, and we’re gonna be very much involved in it.”

As a historian of U.S.-Latin American relations, I’m not surprised that oil or any other commodity is playing a role in U.S. policy toward the region. What has taken me aback, though, is the Trump administration’s openness about how much oil is driving its policies toward Venezuela.

U.S. military intervention in Latin America has largely been covert. And when the U.S. orchestrated the coup that ousted Guatemala’s democratically elected president in 1954, the U.S. covered up the role that economic considerations played in that operation.

By the early 1950s, Guatemala had become a top source for the bananas Americans consumed, as it remains today.

The United Fruit Company, based in Boston, owned more than 550,000 acres of Guatemalan land, largely thanks to its deals with previous dictatorships. These holdings required the intense labor of impoverished farmworkers who were often forced from their traditional lands. Their pay was rarely stable, and they faced periodic layoffs and wage cuts.

The international corporation networked with dictators and local officials in Central America, many Caribbean islands and parts of South America to acquire immense estates for railroads and banana plantations.

The locals called it the pulpo — “octopus” in Spanish — because the company seemingly had a hand in shaping the region’s politics, economies and everyday life. The Colombian government brutally crushed a 1928 strike by United Fruit workers, killing hundreds of people.

The company’s seemingly unlimited clout in the countries where it operated gave rise to the stereotype of Central American nations as “banana republics.”

In Guatemala, a country historically marked by extreme inequality, a broad coalition formed in 1944 to overthrow its repressive dictatorship in a popular uprising. Inspired by the anti-fascist ideals of World War II, the coalition sought to make the nation more democratic and its economy more fair.

After decades of repression, the nation democratically elected Juan José Arévalo and then Jacobo Árbenz, under whom, in 1952, Guatemala implemented a land reform program that gave landless farmworkers their own undeveloped plots. Guatemala’s government asserted that these policies would build a more equitable society for Guatemala’s impoverished, Indigenous majority.

United Fruit denounced Guatemala’s reforms as the result of a global conspiracy. It alleged that most of Guatemala’s unions were controlled by Mexican and Soviet communists and painted the land reform as a ploy to destroy capitalism.

United Fruit sought to enlist the U.S. government in its fight against the elected government’s policies. While its executives did complain that Guatemala’s reforms hurt its financial investments and labor costs, they also cast any interference in its operations as part of a broader communist plot.

It did this through an advertising campaign in the U.S. and by taking advantage of the anti-communist paranoia that prevailed at the time.

United Fruit executives began to meet with officials in the Truman administration as early as 1945. Despite the support of sympathetic ambassadors, the U.S. government apparently wouldn’t intervene directly in Guatemala’s affairs.

The company turned to Congress.

It hired well connected lobbyists to portray Guatemala’s policies as part of a communist plot to destroy capitalism and the United States. In February 1949, multiple members of Congress denounced Guatemala’s labor reforms as communist.

Sen. Claude Pepper called the labor code “obviously intentionally discriminatory against this American company” and “a machine gun aimed at the head of this American company.”

Two days later, Rep. John McCormack echoed that statement, using the exact same words to denounce the reforms.

Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Sen. Lister Hill and Rep. Mike Mansfield also went on the record, reciting the talking points outlined in United Fruit memos.

No lawmaker said a word about bananas.

Seventy-seven years later, we may see many echoes of past interventions, but now the U.S. government has dropped the veil: In his appearance after the strike that seized Maduro this month, Trump said “oil” 21 times.

Aaron Coy Moulton is an associate professor of Latin American history at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas and the author of “ Caribbean Blood Pacts: Guatemala and the Cold War Struggle for Freedom.” This column for the Los Angeles Times was produced in collaboration with the Conversation.

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