Congratulations, Del and Phyllis -- after 55 years

I just checked. The sky hasn't fallen yet even though California is issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples.
They sign in as Party A and Party B rather than bride and groom -- just in case you were wondering.
The first couple to tie the knot were, appropriately enough, a San Fransisco couple, Del Martin, and Phyllis Lyon, Del is 87, Phyllis is 84. They've been together 55 years.
Talk about long engagements...
At least they were married in time to have the legal right to make funeral arrangements for each other. The legal right to be there when the other dies.
Fundamentally, that's what this is all about -- legal rights enforced by a contract that they have been allowed to enter into.
A contract -- not a sacrament. Theirs is a union sanctioned by the state, not necessarily a church. It is an act of man, not of God.
Which is how it should be. Civil law is gender blind. The ability to fulfill the civil contractual obligations, rights and responsibilities imposed by the legalities of marriage is no more a matter of genitalia than it is skin color, caste, class or ethnic background -- though those factors too have been upheld as legal impediments to matrimony. This is an issue of equality before the law -- civil law -- not canon law, not sharia, not the laws of Moses nor Levitical injunctions.
And as such, it is good law.
Not God's law -- just good.

What we do and how we do it

There was a long piece in the paper across town this weekend -- plus a column and an editorial -- excoriating the city of Winona for how it has presented information concerning the closure of the Interstate Bridge and subsequent developments.
In short, they complain they've been left out of the loop, nobody's been telling them anything and they don't like it. There seems to be a conspiracy of silence in the depths of City Hall.
Sorry, folks, that isn't quite the case.
At the Daily news, we got first notice of impending problems with the bridge about 7 p.m. Tuesday in a fax from MnDoT (not, as was claimed by Ms. Cynthya Porter, in an email, phone call or secretive phone call from city staff on a cloak and dagger mission). The fax announced an 8 p.m. briefing. Far from a secret conclave, except for the agrieved paper across town, all local media outlets plus some area TV stations were represented, along with members of the city council, county board, state legislature, city staff and a number of citizens who'd gotten wind that something was up. The session went on until no one had any more questions. The meeting set for Wednesday morning was announced, reannounced and announced again.
Just for the record, news of the Tuesday night meeting was posted on winonadailynews.com within minutes of our receiving the fax. A capsule account of the briefing, including an announcement of the Wednesday morning meeting was posted shortly after the session adjourned. That information was available in the newspaper and online.
Hardly a secret session.
All the unhappy folks at the paper across town needed to do is pick up their mail or read the daily newspaper and they'd have known all about what they insist was being kept from them. They might even have made it to that meeting. Our reporters were there -- we had an update on it online just after it wrapped up.
Ms. Porter goes on to claim that "In Thursday morning's edition, the Minneapolis Star Tribune scooped all local media with announcement of a ferry system." Apparently, neither Ms. Porter nor her editors read the banner headline and sub head over Winona Daily News reporter Mark Sommerhauser's Thursday morning story -- "Waiting for answers: City reels from bridge closure, plans shuttle system by Monday." Scooped? Hardly.
Ms. Porter might not have had a clue, but nobody beat the Daily News to the story -- and I'm not about to let the paper across town claim otherwise.
Now I don't care if the paper across town wants to whine and make excuses for itself, but I do mind when Ms. Porter claims the city is "under fire" from news organizations "who have been excluded from the information circle." It has been our experience that during these difficult days Mayor Miller, city staff, council members, area legislators and state officials have been open and fortcoming with information, sharing what they know when they know it and frankly admitting when no information is available.
All a reporter has to do is show up and ask.
Mark, Kevin, Amber, Nolan, Kari, Matt, Fred and Sarah have been out there showing up, asking questions, getting answers. There's no magic information circle to be let in on -- just hard work, tenacity and good, solid reporting.
That's how they got the story, Ms. Porter. Any perhaps, why you didn't.

Parent gripe hits a sour note

It looks like we couldn't make it to summer vacation without another set of parents getting their undies in a bunch. This time folks across the creek in the GET school district are all affronted because there was too much sacred music in a recent high school choral concert.
I want to weigh in here before the Christian Taliban grabs onto this one and replays the typical rant about God-hating liberal secularism taking over our schools and putting us all on the road to Perdition and $5 a gallon gas. This silliness should be held up to proper public ridicule, not because it's an affront to the Almighty, but because whoever's doing the griping has no taste for or understanding of choral music.
Look, unless the kids are going to sing endless variations on a polyphonic Pop Goes the Weasel choral music is fundamentally sacred music -- from plainsong to Bach to Bernstein to George Harrison -- God just keeps creeping into those lyrics. I suppose if the schools wanted to be sure the kids weren't O.D.ing on spirituality, they could require the texts be sung in their original language -- which of course none of the students, much less their parents, would likely understand, but doubtless the tasteless oversensitive would still chafe.
As a former high school chorister, I can assure those concerned parents that the repetition of sacred lyrics by high school juniors eager for lunch is no more prayer than my forceful invocation of the deity upon walloping my thumb with a hammer.
It appears the GET administrators and school board are going about this in the great tradition of public education -- serious deliberation followed by a vaguely worded policy. What is needed is a sternly worded rebuke, tuition for Music Appreciation 101 and a year's membership in Minnesota Public Radio.
Enough of this silliness.

So long Julius C. Wilkie

It appears Winona’s faux-steamboat era is just about over. The council has decreed that by July 25 the rotting hulk at the foot of Main Street will be the stuff of failed dreams and bad memories. Built on the cheap to the specifications of a rich man with more ego than sense of history, Winona has struggled with the Disneyfied riverboat replica for two decades. Too small for a museum, too inauthentic for a historic replica, it had no kitchen to support a restaurant, a dining room tarted up like the parlor of a Victorian bordello with a floor that canted enough to make a sober man unsteady. The only good thing to be said for it was that, at a distance, it looked pretty there at the foot of Main Street, reminding residents and visitors that behind the concrete sea-wall that keeps the city’s feet dry during times of high water flows the Mississippi River – “C’mon down and take a look.”

It was past time for the city to be done with this misbegotten building, but with the flood control dikes between the river and the city, the pre-1965 version of Levee Park is not up for resurrection. We’d be world-class stupid to do anything to jeopardize the city flood control system -- a system that has withstood near record high water twice in recent memory while communities elsewhere along the Mississippi were inundated.

But the Wilkie did look nice perched up there on the levee -- particularly in the winter when snow blanketed the worst of the decay and cold kept folks from coming close enough to see what shape it really was in. It is a wise move for the City Council not to prematurely demolish the hull-shaped foundation and reflecting pool or remove the utility hook-ups that powered the steamboat before it finally ran out of steam.

Let me offer a modest proposal... Send a bright young scholar -- an unemployed historian would be well-suited and likely willing to work on the cheap -- equipped with a notebook and tape measure to record the dimensions of the concrete hull. Then send that scholar off to research the river-packets that plied the Upper Mississippi, calling at the ports of La Crosse, Red Wing, Wabasha and Winona with the goal of identifying a boat whose hull was a close approximation of the concrete foundation there atop the levee. Let’s locate the construction plans for that boat -- or a sister vessel -- and reconstruct her on dry land as a historically accurate recreation. Refit her as she would have appeared to the immigrants, travelers and merchants who trod her decks and relied on her as a vital link to the world beyond the Mississippi valley.

But let’s do it right this time. Let’s not try to turn it into a restaurant -- everybody knows Winona won’t support a nice restaurant anyway, so why would an eatery crammed into building of unsuitable size and shape, in an inconvenient location be any different.

Let’s not try to turn it into a conference center. In this town, Mike Rivers, not the Mississippi River has that niche covered and, considering the 20-year track record of the Wilkie, does a much better job of it.

And let’s not try to do it overnight, on the cheap. The levee isn’t going anywhere -- if it does, we’ll have a lot more serious problems to deal with than what to do with a fake riverboat. For the time being, preserve the Pearson’s paddle wheel with a commemorative plaque detailing the sad story of the poor old boat and its successor. Put a couple umbrella tables up on the patio, let the folks from the Winona Island Cafe set up a snack and soda pop kiosk and make the area as pleasant and attractive as we can while we turn our attention to a lasting solution, worthy of the time, effort, and locale.

Putting up an accurate replica will take time for research and planning. Recreating a structure that is historically authentic in feel and appearance, but also in compliance with contemporary building codes, safety standards and accessibility requirements will require the services and imagination of creative and experienced designers and architects, working in cooperation with historically knowledgeable scholars. It will take time and money to acquire the artifacts and furnishings needed to bring the replica boat to life.

And building and furnishing will only be the first step. While we plan for construction, we also need to plan for what we will do with the thing once it’s up there. How will we coordinate the steamboat center with the William Thompson on exhibit at the Marine Art Museum, with the Winona County Historical Society’s downtown Armory Museum, the Bunnell House, Watkin’s Museum, Polish Cultural Institute, the Luxembourger museum in Rollingstone, the Arches Museum of Pioneer Life and tours of Winona’s historic architectural districts? The riverboat center needs to be viewed and funded as one piece of a much larger historic panorama. To expect it to be financially self-supporting as a stand-alone enterprise or attraction would likely doom it to failure, so establishing either a trust fund sufficient to assure adequate upkeep and maintenance or a cooperative financial relationship with other area tourist and historic attractions needs to be established.

Let’s take the Wilkie for what it was ... a hard lesson in how not to do things. This time, let’s take the time, do the planning, raise the funds and, sometime in the future, create an attraction we can be proud of for generations.

We can do this. Let’s do it right.

Contact Jerome Christenson at (507) 453-3500 or jchristenson@winonadailynews.com. For Jerome’s comments on this, that and something else check out “Up on the wrong side of the bed” at www.rivervalleyblogs.com/jerome/ or go to www.winonadailynews.com.