Then & Now . . . and: The Permanent Family Record

After a considerable absence, we welcome back JIM FITZSIMONS of St. Paul: “Subject: Uncle Ralph Then & Now.

“A couple/few years ago, the Pioneer Press ran a special section in their Sunday paper. It was a retrospective featuring several photographs that had appeared in the paper over the decades.

“One photo was taken in June of 1942. It shows a group of very excited second-graders getting out of school to start their summer. My dad showed me the photo and asked if I recognized any of the kids in the picture.

“In the center of the photo, there’s a boy with what looks like a note pinned to his overalls, for his parents. (They did that then.) That boy is my dad’s older brother Ralph. He was about 8 years old.

“Ever since I saw it, I’ve wanted to get a picture of my Uncle Ralph, who is still alive, holding the photo.

“Last month, my younger brother got married, and all sorts of family members gathered to witness the grand event. My Uncle Ralph was among the people who attended the wedding. That meant I had the perfect opportunity to get the picture I wanted.

“And here I have to thank my cousin Jeannie, Uncle Ralph‘s daughter, because she had the brilliant idea of actually going to the school and taking the picture. I didn’t think of it. I wasn’t sure the school still existed.

“So, there he is as an excited 8-year-old set free from school for a whole summer. And then, at the ripe old age of 89, retracing those 81-year-old steps!

“Thank you, Jeannie, for the great idea!

“And thanks, BB, for letting me share!”

Our theater of seasons

WAYNE NELSON of Forest Lake reports: “The ground in Boulder Junction, Wisconsin, was covered in a carpet of beautiful fall colors.”

Dept. of Neat Stuff . . . Grandpa’s Statuary Division (Piggy Bank Subdivision)

GREGORY J. of Dayton’s Bluff: “Here is more of my Grandfather Leonello’s statuary. It is over 70 years old.

“These three particular statues are what is now known as carnival chalkware. It is a form of plaster statue that is hollow, usually brightly painted and was given away as prizes at carnivals and fairs in the olden days.

“Because carnival chalkware was hollow, it was often turned into a bank with the addition of a slot for coins. There was usually no way to get the coins out except to break the bank, so to speak. They were inexpensive, and none of them were exactly works of art, so smashing them to get the money out was no great loss and probably a lot of fun.

“Here are three variations on the piggy-bank theme. The first is a classic piggy bank with a whimsical face, colorful paint job and a coin slot on the top.

“Next up is a pig family, with Dad wearing a bow tie and all the pigs having long eyelashes. The coin slot is in the back.

“Finally we have a clown riding a pig. Maybe that is something clowns used to do. At least he appears to be a friendly clown who doesn’t mind having a coin slot cut into his back.

“I’m just guessing here, but I suspect the classic piggy bank could be my grandfather’s original design, but the other two must have been created from commercial molds — because identical versions of these, but with different paint schemes, can still be found today.”

The Permanent Fatherly/Daughterly Record . . . or: Fellow travelers

THE MIDDLE DAUGHTERLY: “In 1987, I graduated from college, and my father and I decided to take a trip through the American Southwest. It would be a chance for me to practice my driving and a chance for him to see Billy the Kid country. He’d been interested in the Old West since he was a child growing up in the North Country.

“We had a little blue Ford Fiesta and a couple of cassette tapes. We both liked country music, so I brought along the Judds. They were a mother/daughter singing team, so it seemed appropriate.

“We mostly listened to the radio, changing stations as a signal faded out. We were traveling south, and every mile made it easier to find country music on the dial. A song called ‘The House of Blue Lights’ was popular at the time. Whenever it came on the radio, Dad got excited. He would wait for the chorus to come around and then sing: ‘At the house, the house, the house of blue lights!’

“I laughed because I’d seen Bill Cosby do exactly the same thing on ‘The Cosby Show.’ My father used to refer to all sitcoms as ‘Father Gets Ripped Off.’ He felt they made a general practice of ridiculing fathers. I had to occasionally remind him that everything Bill Cosby did to embarrass his kids was something I’d seen him do.

“Our best innovation on the trip was ‘Change of topic.’ At 21, I was a little on the opinionated side. We would start arguing over some small thing, but our rule was that if the other person said ‘Change of topic,’ the first person had to drop the argument — not another word allowed. It worked like a charm. We drove from Minnesota to New Mexico and back without a harsh word.

“As a brand-new driver, I was OK on the wide and lonely roads but nervous in traffic. One terrible morning, we were driving out of a large city. Kansas City, I think. It seemed like there were eight lanes of traffic. I had a concrete barrier on my left and endless pickups and cattle trucks whizzing past on my right. I was terrified, but my father kept saying: ‘You’re doing great. Really great! No problems. Don’t worry.’ He told me it would take four years to get comfortable driving, and that proved to be exactly right.

“I got to balance the scales when we hit Raton Pass on the New Mexico/Colorado border. As we drove down through the Sangre de Cristo mountains, he kept crossing the centerline.

“‘Dad,’ I squealed. ‘Watch out!’

“My father steered back into our lane. ‘It’s the strangest thing,’ he said. ‘I can’t seem to keep it on the road.’

“’That’s because we’re driving down a mountain!’ I said. ‘You have to use your brakes!’

“’Oh, thank you,’ he said, and managed to keep it in the lane from then on.

“I was delighted to have something to twit him about, because he’s a very good driver. He is living the good life at a senior care facility now, but he kept his license all the way to age 92.”

Older Than Dirt

THE DORYMAN of Prescott, Wis.: “Subject: Bittersweet notice.

“You know you’re Older Than Dirt if your colonoscopy results state that because of your age, further procedures are not recommended.”

Accidents of mirth . . . Including: Know thyself!

RUSTY of St. Paul reports: “I had issues with my blouse one day this summer.

“This is one of those lightweight shirts that I use for camping and sun protection. It has a mesh ‘window’ across the back for ventilation, with a flap of material over it.

“One of the sleeves had been fed through the back window, either when I took it off last or from the washing machine. Even though I have a graduate degree in . . . science (!), it took me a minute to figure out why I was feeling like the Hunchback when I tried several times to feed my left arm/shoulder through the sleeve.

“Later I was eating oil-cured Moroccan olives (from Morelli’s; really good). I wanted to spit the pit out into my compost bin and whiffed on my spit, so the pit went down the front of my shirt. These olives are really oily, so as the pit rolled it left an oil stain (four of them) every time it contacted the shirt.

“The trifecta for the day: I was trimming a fairly tall hedge. It was very hot out, so I had the top two buttons open. I kept feeling something scratching my chest and tummy, and my shirt was billowing outward. I’m a big person, but not that big. As I reached up and leaned forward to trim, the trimmed branches were entering my shirt instead of falling to the ground!

“As I type this, I’m wearing a T-shirt: ‘Fool me once . . . .’”

Shirts happen

Red’s Offspring, north of St. Paul: “I want to thank the gentleman in the Roseville Perkins who graciously allowed me to read his shirt:

“’NATIONAL SARCASTIC SOCIETY

“‘As if we need your Support’”

Then & Now . . . Peace & War Division

KATHY S. of St. Paul: “Subject: May Peace Prevail.

“One of the joys of my retirement is the time I can spend watching educational programs, and news programs filmed in other countries. If I live at least 50 more years, I might actually learn enough Japanese to understand the snippets of Japanese I hear on NHK News. Or not.

“Today NHK News had a wonderful story about letters exchanged between Harold J. Bray, the last American survivor of the doomed U.S.S. Indianapolis, and Kunshiro Kiyozumi, the last survivor of the Japanese submarine that sank it. They were both read at a Memorial to the U.S.S. Indianapolis, whose sinking is a horror story suppressed by the U.S. Navy for many years. Its last mission was to carry parts for what became the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it is pure dumb luck that any of the American sailors on board survived to be rescued after four days in a sea full of sharks.

“Neither of these men expressed animosity toward the other. Mr. Bray said, in part: ‘There are no winners in a war. . . . Let us look forward to working together to build a better, safer world.’

“Mr. Kiyozumi answered, in part: ‘I am moved that . . . we can talk to each other as friends. I will continue making efforts to work for a peaceful world.’

“Among members of my generation, which went to war in Vietnam, are a number of veterans who have reached out to those we fought. I honor them, and other former combatants who now work to spread peace.

“Gosh knows we all need it!”

BAND NAME OF THE DAY: Break the Bank

Officially, Kris Kowalski Christiansen is the chief executive officer of the grocery store her parents, Mary Anne and Jim Kowalski, started 40 years ago in St. Paul.

But still. Even after years in the role, something about that title doesn’t feel quite right.

“We never viewed ourselves as chain, or corporate,” she said. “(Mom) and Dad always taught us, we’re a neighborhood grocer. We just stayed small in how we viewed ourselves.”

That neighborhood ethos — spending time in their own stores, not growing too fast, prioritizing a business’s civic role in the community — is partly what’s kept Kowalski’s Markets around for four decades, Kris and Mary Anne said. The business now has 11 stores around the Twin Cities.

The Kowalski family buys their groceries there, too, of course.

“We’re consumers,” Kris said. “We just want to bring an experience to people that we would want to have.”

“A common-sense neighborhood kind of thing”

Growing up in St. Paul, Jim Kowalski and then-Mary Anne Oase were “neighborhood kids,” Mary Anne said.

They married at 19. Jim worked in management at Red Owl, the grocery store chain that was once ubiquitous in the Midwest. The job bounced them from city to city, from Faribault to Chippewa Falls, Wis., where Mary Anne earned a counseling certificate and worked at a clinic.

Finally, Jim was transferred back to the Twin Cities and eventually promoted into a corporate role in the franchising division. When Red Owl began to spin off its corporate-owned stores in the Twin Cities to sell as franchises, in the early 1980s, Jim and Mary Anne knew the business and were ready to take a leap.

Kowalski’s Markets began in 1983 as Kowalski’s Red Owl, a franchise of the then-local chain, shown in this semi-colorized photo from the early 1980s. The store was owned by Jim and Mary Anne Kowalski. (Courtesy Kowalski’s Markets)

They bought the store on Grand Avenue — where both their families had long shopped — and redesigned it. Reorganized it. Rethought the way the store interacted with the community.

They renamed it, too: Kowalski’s Red Owl.

“All we hoped was to make our mortgage payment on the house,” Mary Anne Kowalski said. “We just knew you had to be kind, you had to be good, you had to be nice to people. There just was a common-sense neighborhood kind of thing, and that’s how we ran the store. And that worked.”

At the time, their daughter, Kris, was 16. She was a three-sport high school athlete — and, probably like most teenagers, not exactly enthused about the grocery business, she joked. But hey, her parents’ grocery store meant guaranteed jobs for herself and her friends.

“Then prom came, and they all wanted off,” Mary Anne said. “So we had a bit of trouble then!”

Eventually, the Kowalskis’ store began to turn a profit, and the couple made a deal with Red Owl to acquire two more stores. By the early 1990s, the family had a few locations — now fully their own — and were getting more ambitious with their products. They’d earned some recognition, too, including a “grocer of the year” honor from the Minnesota Grocers Association.

Terri Bennis, now the company’s merchandising director, started as a deli manager in 1993. Jim sent her coast to coast, she said — searching for new specialty foods, trends and brands to bring back to the Twin Cities so Kowalski’s Markets could stand out.

She met with olive growers and cheese producers and figured out how to design the shops’ build-your-own Vietnamese pho bars, she said. Bennis and the Kowalskis would help small producers bring their products to market, from coaching them on insurance and labeling laws to fine-tuning their branding.

She recalled what Jim would tell her: “I just want to be the best deli in the Twin Cities, and I know you can make it happen,” he’d say. “I want people to feel something when they walk in that front door.”

Jim Kowalski died unexpectedly in 2013, and the family recommitted themselves to his legacy.

For Kris Kowalski Christiansen, the stores’ goal is that the level of care everyone shows, from her parents to company leaders to employees, should show through in really delicious food.

“At the end of the day, it’s the common sense, again, of what tastes good and what are the quality ingredients,” Kris said. “It’s about integrity and freshness and homemade — and butter. We use butter. A lot of butter.”

“How do you pass on a culture?”

In the early 2000s, Jim and Mary Anne took stock of their business.

The couple were in their 50s. By that point, Kris had earned an MBA and came back to work for her parents, taking on a variety of administrative roles

Mary Anne (left) and Jim Kowalski (right), founders/owners of Kowalski’s Supermarkets, with their daughter, Kris, the company’s chief operating officer, in the produce section of their newest store in Woodbury. (Pioneer Press file photo: Craig Borck)

Jim and Mary Anne trusted their daughter and knew they’d eventually pass the company to her — but they also knew that keeping a business in the family does not, on its own, guarantee it’ll succeed long-term.

“So many second-generation businesses fail because they’re sort of ‘mom and pop,’ and they weren’t able to leave any structure,” Mary Anne said. “The infrastructure wasn’t built.”

So the Kowalskis implemented a civic organizing program for employees, centered on ideals of active citizenship, shared decision-making and holding one another accountable. These are concepts Mary Anne had already been researching and advocating for a decade or so, she said; Kowalski’s Markets was an early partner of the the Midwest Active Citizenship Initiative.

The company’s Institutional Governing Document draws significantly from principles outlined by the Midwest Active Citizenship Initiative. The document calls on institutions to “sustain the democratic values of our society” and individuals to “govern for the common good and to be a co-producer of justice in the world.”

A companion document, the Civic Business Policy Agenda, is written in similar terms, calling on all business leaders to prioritize shared needs like sustainability over “narrow self-interest.” The company has also outlined decision-making standards, which are designed to ensure everyone who feels affected by a problem has a meaningful stake in solving it, Mary Anne said.

This program is not a cure-all: Employees at Kowalski’s stores are unionized through United Food and Commercial Workers Local 663, and workers at several locations nearly went on strike this summer over claims of unfair labor practices. A few days before it was set to begin, the company and union reached a deal to grant workers pay raises and continued input into health care, and the strike was called off. In a recent conversation, Mary Anne and Kris declined to discuss specifics.

But Mary Anne said she values a productive dialogue with union representatives and believes in the power of the company’s civic organizing principles to guide relationships among employees, management and ownership.

Ultimately, these principles distill what has helped Kowalski’s stay successful for 40 years, she said — and what will lead the business for decades onward.

“How do you pass on a culture? And how do you pass on a culture without a language?” Mary Anne said. “And so this is our language. This is what it still is today — we have standards and practices and a way of making policy that includes every single employee.”

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Halloween rolls around again, and this year is chock-full of events for young and old to enjoy. Whether it’s wholesome family fun or something a little more spine-tingling for adults, these events are sure to invite one into the spirit of the spooky season.

Twin Cities Paranormal Society Cocktail Party: Reminisce and drink over the Twin Cities Paranormal Society’s spooky adventures Oct. 27, 28 and 30 at The Lexington restaurant in St. Paul. On Oct. 30, the party will be joined by paranormal investigator Dave Schrader, host of the podcast The Paranormal 60, who will reveal the findings of his overnight investigation of The Lexington itself. Tickets available at opentable.com/r/the-lexington-saint-paul.

Minnesota Jack-O Lantern Spectacular: Through Nov. 4, the Minnesota Zoo invites families to walk its pumpkin-lined trail. This year’s theme is “Seasons of the Year” with pumpkins carved by artists. Ticket prices range from $18-24 for adults and $14-20 for children and are available at mnzoo.org/jols-2023.

Haunted Basement: A Party To Die For: Minneapolis nonprofit The Haunted Basement transforms Travail Kitchen and Amusements at 4134 Hubbard Ave. N. in Robbinsdale into a spine-tingling dining experience with a 10-course Halloween-themed tasting menu and cocktails. The dinner event starts at 5:45 p.m. and runs Wednesdays to Saturdays until Nov. 4, as well as Tuesday, Oct. 31. Tickets available at exploretock.com/travailkitchen.

Minneapolis Cider Co. Halloween Murder Mystery Party: Work together and role play with other participants Oct. 27 to solve a murder at an office party. Located at the Minneapolis Cider Company’s private event space, The Haralson Room, at 701 S.E. Ninth St. in Minneapolis. Food and drinks for purchase. Tickets available at eventbrite.com.

Barebones Puppet Theatre 30th Annual Extravaganza: The outdoor puppetry theater takes place every year in October, with this one being the event’s 30th that promises drama and songs fit for the family. Showings will be Oct. 27, 28, 29 and 31 on the Midtown Greenway at 2828 11th Ave. S. in Minneapolis. Tickets can be purchased at barebonespuppets.org. Admission can be free, but a $20 donation is encouraged with each ticket.

Hocus Pocus Halloween Drag Brunch: Roxy’s Cabaret in Minneapolis hosts a Halloween-themed drag show at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Oct. 28. The brunch show features performances and costumes. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at roxyscabaret.com.

The Dead End Hayride: Billing itself as “Minnesota’s most terrifying haunted hayride,” the Dead End Hayride rises again for its yearly run from Sep. 22 to Oct. 31, Wednesday to Saturday. The event is at 28186 Kettle River Blvd. N. in Wyoming. Tickets are available at showclix.com/tickets/DEH2023.

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