MNMinnesota Famous People

A specialist in coming second

Minnesota has never produced a US president. What it has produced, repeatedly, is the person who nearly got there. Walter Mondale was born in Ceylon, a village of a few hundred people in Martin County, in 1928, the son of a Methodist minister. He was state attorney general at 32, a senator, vice president under Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981, and the Democratic nominee in 1984. That November he carried one state, his own, plus the District of Columbia, losing 13 electoral votes to 525. He had already made history in August by naming Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman on a major party ticket.

Hubert Humphrey was born across the border in Wallace, South Dakota, trained as a pharmacist, and became mayor of Minneapolis in 1945. His speech to the 1948 Democratic convention demanding a civil rights plank split the party and drove the southern delegations out of the hall. He was vice president from 1965 to 1969 and lost the presidency to Richard Nixon by about half a percentage point of the popular vote. Eugene McCarthy, born in Watkins in 1916, never came close to winning, but his showing in the 1968 New Hampshire primary convinced Lyndon Johnson not to run again. Harold Stassen, born in West St. Paul in 1907, was governor at 31 and then sought the Republican nomination in nine separate cycles.

What came out of Hibbing

Hibbing sits on the Mesabi Iron Range and has never held more than about 18,000 people. Robert Zimmerman was born in Duluth in 1941 and raised there from the age of six before leaving for the University of Minnesota and then New York in 1961 as Bob Dylan. Roger Maris was born in Hibbing in 1934 before his family moved to Fargo, and in 1961 he hit 61 home runs to pass Babe Ruth's single season record. Kevin McHale was born in Hibbing in 1957, went to the University of Minnesota, and won three championships with the Boston Celtics.

Other small towns did similar work. Judy Garland was born Frances Gumm in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in 1922, and the family ran the local cinema before moving west. Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre in 1885 and used the town as the model for Gopher Prairie in "Main Street," which the town has since embraced on its road signs. Charles Lindbergh was born in Detroit but grew up on the Mississippi at Little Falls, where his father served six terms in Congress.

Two Nobel literature laureates, 86 years apart

Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930. Bob Dylan took the same prize in 2016 and skipped the ceremony. Both were born in Minnesota towns of under 20,000 people.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born at 481 Laurel Avenue in St. Paul in 1896 and named after a distant relative, Francis Scott Key. He came home to Summit Avenue in 1919, broke and rejected, rewrote the manuscript that became "This Side of Paradise," and was famous within a year. Charles Schulz was born in Minneapolis in 1922 and grew up in St. Paul, where his father cut hair and where a real dog named Spike preceded Snoopy. Garrison Keillor, born in Anoka in 1942, spent four decades broadcasting a fictional town that sounded exactly like the ones he grew up near.

Prince, Paisley Park and the screen

Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis in 1958, named after his father's jazz trio, and refused to move to Los Angeles at any point in a forty year career. He built Paisley Park in Chanhassen in 1987 and shot much of "Purple Rain" at the First Avenue club downtown. He died at Paisley Park in 2016.

Jessica Lange was born in Cloquet in 1949. Winona Ryder was born in the river town of Winona in 1971 and took its name as her stage surname. Josh Hartnett was born in St. Paul in 1978, Vince Vaughn in Minneapolis in 1970, and Jesse Ventura, born James Janos in Minneapolis in 1951, went from wrestling to the governor's office in 1999 after a campaign nobody in either party took seriously.

A pacemaker in a garage, a clinic after a tornado

In August 1883 a tornado flattened much of Rochester. William Worrall Mayo, an English-born country doctor, organised the emergency response with the Sisters of St. Francis, and the hospital they opened in 1889 became the practice his sons William James and Charles Horace Mayo turned into the Mayo Clinic.

Earl Bakken was born in Minneapolis in 1924 and started a medical equipment repair business in a garage in northeast Minneapolis in 1949. After a 1957 power cut killed a child on a mains-powered pacemaker, a surgeon asked him for a battery driven one. He produced a wearable transistorised pacemaker in four weeks, and Medtronic grew out of it. Richard Warren Sears was born in Stewartville in 1863 and was a railway station agent at North Redwood in 1886 when a jeweller refused a crate of watches. He sold them himself, ordered more, and the mail order business that followed became Sears, Roebuck and Company.

One suburb, and a hockey team

St. Louis Park, a suburb of about 45,000 people west of Minneapolis, produced Joel and Ethan Coen, who set "Fargo" and "A Serious Man" in the landscape they grew up in, along with the columnist Thomas Friedman and the comedian turned senator Al Franken, all of whom passed through the same high school within a few years of each other.

Herb Brooks was born in St. Paul in 1937, was the last player cut from the 1960 Olympic team that went on to win gold, and coached the 1980 team that beat the Soviet Union at Lake Placid. More than half of that roster came from Minnesota. Ann Bancroft, born in Mendota Heights in 1955, became the first woman to reach both poles over ice.

Minnesota and the states next door