July 7, 2021 One of the biggest blockbuster movies before the pandemic crept up on us at the end of 2019 was Endgame. Oh-and let’s not forget The Joker. I’m too scared to watch Joker, so I’m just going on Rotten [...]
May 13, 2021 Dorsie Willis draft registration. Ancestry.com. Mr. Willis was a Minneapolis resident for more than 60 years. A few weeks ago, I got a research request for anything regarding a man named Dorsie Willis, someone I knew [...]
April 30, 2021 Southeast Minneapolis Council on Learning had a formula for better education that looked like this: (SEMCOL)NEW+LD+SEREADS=BE or SEMCOL/NEW+LD=BE. Math was not my forte, but one of those statements must be true. The SEMCOL records are currently being processed and organized to be [...]
April 3, 2021 Imagine the spiders that would’ve been in here! This is the men’s restroom from Lake Harriet Park in 1998 before restoration started. The Lake Harriet Restroom Restoration Committee (LHRRC) or Spiff the Biff took on the task of [...]
March 26, 2021 Fire safety pamphlet from the Women's Civil Defense Council collection. This flyer makes me think of those safety films we had to watch in grade school. I remember a long walk through the bowels of the [...]
September 2, 2020 Of all the public high schools in Minneapolis, Central High had the honor of being the first. The roots of Central High School took hold in the 1860s, when Union Elementary School added high school level education to [...]
April 6, 2020 “Minnie” seems like such a diminutive name for a 10,000-ton naval cruiser designed to carry up to four airplanes. But that’s exactly what the crew decided to call the USS Minneapolis (CA-36) when she went into service in [...]
March 30, 2020 "We are still marching on ... Let's keep in touch" Company B Last Man Club was an organization of Spanish-American War Veterans from Company B of the 13th Minnesota Volunteer Infantry. The Thirteenth Minnesota Volunteer Infantry served during the [...]
March 4, 2020 Commedia Theater Company was a professional, improvisational touring theater from 1975 until the early-1990s. It specialized in outdoor park performances and toured across seven states within the Midwest and Canada. Former members of Shakespeare in the Streets Company created Commedia [...]
November 1, 2019 Hennepin History Museum’s archive collection of Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) materials offers a glimpse into the world of highway construction planning. The materials in the collection are mainly impartial data collected for right of way surveys done in the 1950s through the 1970s. This small [...]
