Eveleth, Minnesota

 

Just as last Saturday my route took me this Saturday through the home town of a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.   Last week it was Sauk Centre and Sinclair Lewis.  This week it was Hibbing and Bob Dylan.  Luckily Joel, a friend who attended Woodstock, alerted me to the Dylan connection, as I wasn’t aware that Hibbing was his home town, and it doesn’t advertise itself as such.  The welcoming sign on the high way just urged motorists to visit its historic downtown.  Other signs mentioned a Greyhound Bus Musuem and a Mining Museum, but nothing about it being the home town of Dylan.

It would have been sheer chance if I had came upon any of the off-the-beaten-path mentions of Dylan’s connection as I passed through the town and a great tragedy if I hadn’t paid him tribute, though that’s probably how he would have wanted it. I wouldn’t have wandered much anyway, as I had initially been drawn to Hibbing, not for its library, but for the only Strengthen the Army of Liberty Statue of Liberty in the state.  It stood in front of the town hall across from the library, which was closed on Saturdays.  

As I was gazing upon it an older guy wandered past.  I asked if he knew of any Dylan mementos in the town.  He said he was from International Falls and knew of nothing in the town relating to Dylan, and didn’t think there were any much to his disappointment. He had actually made a trip to Hibbing a year ago on the date of Dylan’s 80th birthday thinking there might be some celebration.  He had written a poem on Dylan to read at the occasion.  But there was no such event.

I was a let down that there were no murals or a statue of Dylan, as of Lewis in his home town.  I was lucky to find a street named for him as I studied my GPS of the town looking for a way back to the high way, though it was just an honorarium, as the street retained its orignal designation of Seventh Avenue and the Bob Dylan Drive signs were on the opposite side of the quiet residential street.  Following the street it led to his home, which had a plaque on it, and the high school, three blocks away, which had a large acknowledgment of his having won the Nobel Prize in 2016, though it didn’t include an image of him, just that of Nobel. 

When I first arrived, I asked several people if there was anything commemorating Dylan in town.  No one knew of anything, not even that a street had been named  for him. A woman sitting in the sun outside a residence for the elderly said she had been a high school classmate of Dyian’s.  She said he was very quiet, but that he performed at school events.  She had two of his albums, but couldn’t remember which ones.

The crosswalk in front of Dylan’s house on its corner location was decorated with musical notes.  

The small plaque above the door of the house identified it as Dylan’s home from 1948 to 1959 through his high school years.  A sign posted in the grass along the sidewalk gave the phone number of someone who would give tours of the house. 

I arrived at his home just as another out-of-towner happened upon it, a 45-year old financier from the southern part of the state who was drawn to Hibbing to see its huge open pit iron ore mine, the largest in the world.  He pointed out the continuing affluence of the town with the mines in the area still thriving.  As long as he was in town he swung by Dylan’s house as he’d recently heard an hour-long documentary on Minnesota public radio on Dylan that was very thorough, even interviewing an early girl friend when he was a student in Minneapolis, who said he was very sloppy.  

The slender guy had taken up cycling a few years and fifty pounds ago.  He now had two quality bikes and liked riding the hills of Wisconsin near where he lived and was interested in my travels and where I was from, even asking what part of Chicago.  He knew all about Carnegie and had visited his home town in Dummerferline, Scotland last year.  He’d  read his book “The Gospel of Wealth,” and said it was very prescient in its commentary on the perils of inherited wealth. He didn’t realize Carnegie had provided Dummerferline with a library, the first he funded anywhere in 1888.

He knew of the many libraries he had funded in the US, but didn’t know his largess extended to providing libraries all over the world.  I informed him that Carnegie had funded over six hundred libraries in the UK and one hundred in Ontario, where I was headed next for three of them in the far west of the province.  I told him Carnegies could be found in English-speaking countries all over the world, including Australia and New Zealand and South Africa and one in South America in British Guinea. He asked, “Are you a retired professor from Northwestern.”

“No,” I answered, “But I was a student there.”  The he asked what my major was, and I explained that I preferred to live a writer’s life, gathering experiences, rather than writing. Our conversation went on and on to Lance Armstrong and Greg LeMond and the Tour de France,  my longest conversation of the trip by far.  He finally had to cut it off, saying he better get back to his wife, as she would wonder what was keeping him.  

Hibbing was at the midpoint of a four-Carnegie day, which came in pairs forty miles apart.  The first pair came in the sister cities of the large city of Grand Rapids and the small town of Coleraine.  The first in Grand Rapids was another that had been blasphemed by an utterly irresponsible addition akin to that of Fergus Falls.  It left even less of a glimpse of the original building, swallowing it up with brick and glass and relabeling it the Carnegie Business Center.  It was so unrecognizable I had to ask a resident in a nearby apartment building where the old library was.  He didn’t know, other than that the adjoining parking lot to the building was known as the old library parking lot. 

My time in Grand Rapids wasn’t without a positive, as I acquired a sleeping bag rated to thirty degrees on sale for nineteen dollars, reduced from ninety-nine, at an army surplus store. It was on clearance, as no local would dream of buying a winter bag rated to a mere thirty degrees, unless it were negative thirty.  I didn’t want to give up my Marlboro bag, so I’m now carrying two sleeping bags and will be more than  ready for the sub-freezing temperatures predicted for next week. 

The much smaller town of Coleraine nine miles east presented the premier Carnegie of the trip, the first with a corner entrance and the first in a while still functioning as a library, as the last eight had all been repurposed.  Unfortunately it wasn’t open on .Saturdays so I could only peek in at its historic interior.

The next two in similar small towns forty miles away and nine miles apart likewise still served as libraries and were exemplary buildings that would make any community proud, and especially those of just two thousand residents. As the one in Coleraine, both had a full block to themselves, making them all the more majestic surrounded by grassy expanses.  

Iron City’s was graced  by a large statue of one of the founding miners of the town, a figure as legendary as Paul Bunyan in these parts—Leonidas Merritt, known as “Number One of the Seven Iron Men.”

Eveleth’s Carnegie was another that would justify biking hundreds of miles to see.  It was large enough that it hadn’t needed an addition, just like those of Coleraine and Iron Mountain built at the height of these community’s prosperity in their early mining days.  The surrounding homes had a similar modest nobility.  It made for a fine conclusion to another great day on the bike,