Where the King of Summit Hill meets the Queen of Country
Loretta Lynn was all over the radio driving to and from the Twin Cities airport enroute to Billings and back. The Honky Tonk Girl was gone. She sang “Lay Me Down” with Willie. He could be next. And then you know who.
We were called to Billings for a screening of the documentary “Storm Lake,” along with co-directors Beth Levison and Jerry Risius, sponsored by the Montana Free Press. The film has had an incredible run — the State Department is showing it around the world at embassies as an example of civic democracy, and the News Literacy Project is offering it to civics teachers nationwide with lesson plans. The movie about Trouble with a Capital T saved our newspaper from the pandemic. I’m grateful to Beth and Jerry for their friendship and for the legacy. It still makes me blubbery.
Jerry and I strolled down the bricks at the Billings depot, the house that James J. Hill and his Great Northern Railroad built. He ruled his empire from a mansion on Summit Hill in St. Paul overlooking the river flats once settled by Native people. It is a museum now. The depot platform is quiet but has a historical display of those days. Grain would go north to Duluth and Lake Superior, south on the Mississippi River, and west on the Great Northern. Billings was midway to the coast. It became cattle country.
James J. Hill is long gone, his reign brief and his legacy the stuff of an interpretive display not far from Wild Willie’s Casino and the petroleum refinery.
I thought I might run the rails to the heavens last summer with a little heart scare that scotched my annual reunion with college buddies. It made me feel old. We were able to gather last weekend after I landed. We gave it the old college try and went down to Tiffany’s Lounge, where a purple tide from St. Thomas partied before the football game. Things have changed. We knew there was a football team back in the day, heard about it, but this was something of a different order all in Tommy merchandise. Lentz walks with a cane. Duffy can’t drink as much as he used to. The place isn’t the same but we are, and not that much wiser for wear. We laughed hard. I need some rest.
High school crony Marty Case chauffeured me to the airport and fetched me. We walked along bone-dry Minnehaha Creek and realized that Kim Reynolds could be one heartbeat away from the presidency in 2025. Seriously, folks. Or Kristi Noem. I realize that I don’t understand politics anymore, if I ever did, and I know that many readers would agree. There is a full-blown war going on in Europe after we thought we had all that settled down by Reagan. Trump is threatening to run for president and most Republicans think the election was illegitimate. Don’t say gay, and don’t mind that the Minnehaha Falls are not falling anymore. It gets harder to find the right words the more of it you see.
John Prine came on the radio covering “Clay Pigeons” by Blaze Foley:
“Turn the night into day, and start talking again, when I know what to say.”
Prine was chattering right until the pandemic claimed him.
Mark Twain knew what to say about night and day:
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
No credit card payments or Breitbart News. No yapping lapdogs. No deadlines, I guess. Those things should be for sure. You can hope for good country music where Loretta Lynn lives. The thoughts were inescapable.
So much to be done in such a fragile time and place. Saying the things that deserve to be said, no mean feat. Country radio banned Loretta Lynn from singing about the pill and X-rated women. Kim Reynolds wants to ban divisive concepts in school. Iowa is drifting into hickdom. Willie has to be on the road or he dies. You have to keep talking to draw air, especially when so little makes sense. Samuel Clemens was filled with angst, bankrupted and forlorn late in life. Loretta Lynn sang known heartache. Troubles come into perspective. It goes with the show that must go on. That much is for sure and all you can really know.
Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
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