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A college student in the mid 1960's, Jack took a year off from school and became a VISTA volunteer. Assigned to the Turtle Mountan band of Chippewa, Jack lived and worked on the reservation for a year before returning to school as a pre-med student. After he graduated, Jack returned to ND to visit a girl he'd met who was working in Devil's Lake. He stayed, landed a job at the Devil's Lake Journal, and married his girlfriend, Sandy, in 1970. Jack and Sandy lived and raised their family in Devil's Lake before moving to Fargo in 1987. Jack says he stayed in North Dakota because of the environment - he loves the extremes and the ties to the nature - and the people, who he found welcoming when he first immigrated from the east coast and welcoming of the new immigrants that are changing the face of North Dakota. Q: Tell me about how you happened to come to North Dakota? Jack: I was at school at the University of Connecticut in the mid-1960s, and like an awful lot of people during that time which was in turmoil because of the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement and all those other things, I decided almost at the spur of the moment that I wanted to be a VISTA volunteer and take a year off from school, and see what happened. It was more of an adventure than a thought through kind of thing. So I left school and went to a training program in Denver. I left Connecticut and went to Denver and trained in Colorado, the city of Denver, for six or eight weeks or so and then was assigned with three other vista volunteers to the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa in North Dakota, up on the Canadian border, I mean right up on the Canadian border. When I saw where we were going, I thought I'd made a mistake about this vista business and all and arrived in Minot by air in October of 1967, I believe it was, was picked up by our sponsor, and we drove to Belcourt from Minot in a snowstorm which was the introduction I guess you're supposed to get and spent about 14, 15 months as a vista volunteer living in a cabin in the woods, you know, in the Turtle Mountains. That was my first introduction to the state which was certainly limited. I got to Minot once in a while, got to Devils Lake on occasion, but pretty much spent most of my time up there on the reservation and went back to school, finished up school, and was trying to decide what to do. During that year I had met a student from the University of North Dakota who was doing her summer internship from the school of social work on the reservation, and she was a ranch girl from western North Dakota. We got acquainted and started dating and what not and struck up a relationship, and one of the reasons I decided to come back after college was her and decide what the future was going to be. At the time she had taken a job as a counselor for the school for the deaf in Devils Lake. The only reason I stopped in Devils Lake when I did come back out was because she was there and likely landed a job at the Devils Lake Journal with the Graham family that owned the paper at that time, and that was just by you know just by accident, by good chance, because I had studied life sciences and was in a pre-med program at the University of Connecticut and you know had worked for the college paper and that sort of thing, but I wasn't considering a life in newspapers or journalism. Anyway, to make this lengthy story short, we got married in 1970 and stayed there a long time, stayed in Devils Lake and raised a family there for 18 years, moved to Fargo in about 1987 and went to work for The Forum as the editorial page editor, and we've been here now for 15 years. So that's the genesis of the whole thing. Q: What were your first impressions of North Dakota, and why is it that people arrived in a blizzard? You're the second person that I've talked to that that was their first... Jack: I don't know. First impressions flying from Denver and there was an airman on the plane who was going to the Minot air base. I happened to sit next to him, and we struck up a conversation, and he had been on furlough or something and was going back to his posting at Minot, at the air base. We began talking, and I began asking questions about you know what North Dakota's like that sort of thing and he said to me, and I'll never forget it. I told him I was from New England you know, from Connecticut and all that, and he said, "Well you remember what a tree looks like?" And I looked at him sort of funny. I said "Well yeah." He said "Well keep that in mind because you're not going to see very many when you get to North Dakota." Course that's not true, not really true especially in the Turtle Mountains which are covered with trees, but that was sort of the first indication I got that I was going to a place where at least the physical environment was far different from the lush wooded green hills of New England. And it is. There's no question about it. It's two different, starkly different environments, and it takes awhile, it takes awhile, but I just like it. I like the extremes. Maybe as I get older when, you know when you get older and it's difficult to fight the winter, it might seem different, but there's something about the extremes here, about the connection, the necessary connection to the land and to the environment because of the weather. I think that's really something that so much of the country has lost, and we still have it here. I mean we still have it here, and it's important here because it's a matter of survival, especially in the winter. So you know, especially when I live at Devils Lake, lived out in the country (tape cut out) and close to the lake, close to a natural uncluttered you know rural environment, both the agricultural part of it and the wild part of it. And that kind of connection is very valuable I think in a country that's so urbanized. I know when I go back east to visit and I talk to people who think they live in the country, and they live in kind of the suburbs in the trees is what they have out there. If you want real country and wilderness in New England, you have to go to northern New Hampshire or up into Maine, places like that. Otherwise it's full of people, and we have the luxury I guess... I see it as a luxury here of living in the city like Fargo which is an urban center, you know thriving urban center that has all the things most urban centers have, not as many, not as much, but has a lot of those amenities that you would associate with they growing urban center. But then we have, especially to the West of Fargo and in western North Dakota, easy access to this grand changing untrammeled environment, and we take it for granted. And people who come out here... I bring people out here to hunt in the fall sometimes from New Hampshire, they think they've died and gone to heaven. They see these wonderful open spaces out here filled with all sorts of game, you know that's not planted by game and fish. I mean these are wild, you know wild stocks of game and places to hunt and fish with easy access that aren't crowded, and they think that this can't be. And I tell them rather smugly "Oh yeah, this is routine out here" and so that's kind of nice, and that's part of the attraction, you know, that's a strong part of the attraction. I mean it's been 30, what 32 years now, almost 33 years, and you know like anybody we've had the opportunities to go elsewhere. My profession and my wife's profession are such that we could have taken opportunities in other parts of the country, but we chose to stay, and part of the reason is the environment, and the other part of the reason is the people. It's really a welcoming place. Devils Lake was a grand place, a grand place to raise a family. I mean you know good schools, great people, no class system that you would expect. You know there are rich people and poor people, but it wasn't divided in that way and you know a place where you could understand what agriculture is about, a place where you could have access to a cultural life, and this is a small town you know, a town of at the most 10,000 people if you count the surrounding area. This grand Lake, this beautiful Lake where we sailed and fished and ice fished and cross-country skied. But you know my point is that those kinds of places might be rare or at least not as common as they used to be so Devils Lake was a wonderful place. The time came for an opportunity here in Fargo, you know the urban area and the region here presented itself, and Fargo is also, it's just a city that you know to use the old Chicago cliches, a city that works. It has (tape cut out) good planners. It has its problems like any growing area does, but they're manageable and they're managed pretty well by the leadership of the town and the shakers and movers in the city. It certainly doesn't have the small town feel it had maybe 15, 20, maybe 30 years ago, but that's a function of growth, and so overall you know I just, we made a choice a long time ago that North Dakota was a good place to be. So you know for all intensive purposes... you know I think of my age, I've spent far more of my life in North Dakota than anywhere else. Q: In the beginning did you feel like an outsider? Did people treat you differently? Jack: You know that was the thing that was surprising, and maybe it's unique to Devils Lake. I don't think so, but that's the city I knew when we first came to town, and the short answer is no, I didn't feel like an outsider. In fact, there was a circle of people there mostly from Devils Lake, you know who have roots there, that we got to know very quickly, and it was a very welcoming group of people. They also were young families, recently married, starting to raise families, starting to raise kids in the town, and there got to be a social circle and a professional circle in Devils Lake that was very welcoming, and so we never did feel the outsider status. Maybe it's because my wife is a North Dakota ranch girl, but I don't think so because the difference from ranching in the Badlands to you know to farming in the Devils Lake area is really profound. Q: Tell me about your mother arriving for the wedding and the drive to the ranch. Jack: Well it would have been in 1970, and I had rented a cabin on the lake temporarily, and my mother and my best man and his father were coming out from Connecticut for the wedding. My mother was a short woman of Italian descent who looked the part, and as she got older you know you expected her to be stirring a big pot of sauce there and all and talked with her hands. She wasn't born in Italy, but she was first generation American, and so she spoke the language and lived the culture, and she was somewhat surprised, of course, when I decided to settle in North Dakota because in her generation, nobody left, nobody left their home town. You just didn't do that so. Anyway, she comes out for the wedding to Devils Lake, and we're going to go out to Beach in the Sentinel Butte area, and you know that's on the Montana border a few miles away from Devils Lake, and so I said "Well, we'll get started... something along to the effect, we'll get started in the morning, and we'll be driving most of the day." And she looked at me, and she said "Well, where are we going?" I said "Well, we're going out to Sandy's hometown where the wedding is." And she said, "Well, how far away is that?" I said "Oh, I don't know, about six hours by road," and you know she's thinking in terms of a few miles, and I said "No, it's you know it's almost 400 miles." And she said "And we're still going to be in North Da..." The context is so different because in New England, everything's close together. The states are small. You know, Connecticut is the size of a couple of North Dakota counties, and so here we're driving hours and hours and hours and hours, my sister, my mother, and me to Beach. And it was amazing because they couldn't believe that after all that time we still weren't there, and then of course we drove off the highway to drive north into the Badlands where the ranch is, north of the boys ranch out there, and they were concerned to say the least that we were on this ___________ covered roads going out to the ranch house. And so it was a culture shock and certainly an environment shock for them. Q: Wasn't there a story about Sandy's mother and your mother in the car, and she kills a snake? Jack: We go down... Sandy's grandparents were alive at the time, and they lived in the farm about oh four or five miles away from Sandy's place, and so we wanted to bring my mother over to meet the grandparents, and we did. So we drive over the hills and over to the other ranch, have a little tea and coffee and what not and visit. We'd gone over in one of the farm pickups, and Sandy's mother was driving so it was my mother and me sitting in the middle, and Sandy's mom, who's since died also, driving the pickup which is you know routine for a ranch woman. We're driving back, and it's a hot, bright day, and there's a rattlesnake in the middle of the road, and so Sandy's mom stops the car, stops the pickup, reaches out in the back of the box of the pickup and grabs a tire iron from the back of the pickup and just beats the stuffing out of this snake, wham, wham, wham, kills the snake and throws it in the back because the boys, Sandy's brothers, collected the rattles in a cigar box on the dashboard. I new about the snakes having been out there a couple of times, and my mother is sitting there, and I thought she had gone into shock because they were about the same age, and here's this ranch woman rather matter-of-factly just whopping the stuffing out of this you know relatively small rattlesnake and my mother from the urban East shaking her head and saying "Wha, wha." We talked about it afterwards, and she just was still. She said, "I can't believe she did that. I can't believe she did that." Q: Your mother thought that you should go back to medical school as I understand it. Jack: Oh yeah, yeah. That was the plan. You know that was the plan, and she always asked me for all the years that she would come out here to visit or we would go out East to visit if medical school was still a possibility. I said "No mother, that's beyond the pail now. We're past that you know." Twenty years later she's asking me if I'm still interested in going to medical school now. No. Q: She never lost hope? Jack: She never lost hope, but I think she you know, she really enjoyed my family as it grew, and she realized that this was a good place, good place to be, and we stayed in very close touch. We traveled a lot out there, and she came out here a lot, both to Devils Lake and to Fargo, and Sandy and I and the kids went out there a lot so they could get familiar with my roots and you know get to know what's left of my family back there, and that was all very valuable so. Q: Tell me about what's happening in Fargo with this growing ethnic diversity, with this change? Jack: Well, you know, in the last I suppose ten years or so, there's been a migration into the northern plains and specifically to some of the cities of the northern plains, and in North Dakota, Fargo has been that magnet because of the services here of immigrants from all over the world. In fact, you can almost look at the international headlines and determine that within a few months you're going to have some immigrants from that part of the world coming to the United States because of the situations they face and whether it's (tape cut out) or the Sudan or Somalia, Central America. In some cases also... you know the immigration that started from Southeast Asia, for example, after the fall of Vietnam is almost forgotten, but that's 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago, and a lot of those folks, well 25 years ago, and a lot of those folks who came from Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam settled into the United States, and now they're second and third generation Southeast Asians in the country, and so we almost have forgotten about that wave of immigration that happened during that international situation. Now it's changed to Eastern Europe, you know to countries like Serbia and Bosnia and the situation in Kosovo in the last few years and to the awful situations that have developed in Africa, specifically in the Sudan and Somalia. So in Fargo, we've been seeing -- I don't want to make it sound like you know there's these great waves of immigration, but we've been seeing significant numbers of immigrants come to Fargo, and it's been a fascinating experience to not only watch the new Americans get acclimated, not integrated yet, but acclimated to a very new way of life especially for the people who have come from awful situations in wars in Africa but also to see the community which traditionally historically for a hundred years has been pretty much Northern European and white adjust to a new mix in the population. Overall, Fargo is a pretty welcoming place. You always have a handful of nut cases. You always have the handful of people who have strong racial and ethnic biases, and I don't think that's ever going to go away. It's part of who some Americans are. But overall, this community has not only opened up its arms to the new Americans but has also I think opened up its pocketbook in terms of resources, social service resources, school resources, medical resources. Fargo for example, and I give credit to the Mayor of Fargo Bruce Furness for this, was the leader in establishing a human relations commission at a time when the state wouldn't do it so the Mayor and his supporters on this went ahead and established a human relations commission, a civil rights commission, and it's proved to be already, it's very new, it's proved already to be a sounding board for people who have concerns about the way immigrants or others are being treated. And I think when the top leadership of a community, that I think is sometimes perceived as conservative and very white and maybe less welcoming than it is, but when the top leadership of the community, the political leadership, and the business community makes the effort to help people get settled in their new community, people who are far different from the traditional majority population, that's a good sign. That's a real good sign because it sends exactly the right signals to everybody in town. Q: You had an incidence of violence here-- an attack on someone. Jack: Yeah, we had an incident a little while ago of a couple of Sudanese gentlemen attacked in their apartment. Frankly, it hasn't been adjudicated yet. It hasn't gone to a court. We don't know the details. It seemed to be what might be called a hate crime. It seemed to be racially motivated. There are indications that that's what happened so that was kind of a flash point for discussion in the community about all this sort of thing, and of course it became a major story in the newspaper. It became the subject of talk radio around the watercooler and in the coffee shops. You know it became the subject for story. It's quieted down. I think people are waiting to see the details when this thing reaches a courtroom. That hasn't happened. It will. But part of the response to that was a convening of the human relation's commission in an area where immigrants live in an outdoor setting where people had a chance to talk about this openly, and they did. And so that was a good community exercise, and it was reported again in all the local media and I think across the state, and that was a good exercise to air these things that you know a lot of the kinds of bigotry and prejudice is right under the surface. I mean it's there whether it's the joke or whether it's the off-handed remark or the real cultural, I don't want to say ignorance, but ignorance in the sense of not having been exposed to different kinds of people, and I'm talking about racial and ethnic. And that's pretty much been the case in our state you know other than the American Indian population, which is invisible in North Dakota, in most of the cities in North Dakota. So I think this incident with the Sudanese gentlemen and the subsequent community discussion was valuable in kind of getting under that surface and realizing yeah, we have a ways to go before we reach a level of understanding about difference, and that's I think where we are now. That's where the community is now. Q: It's sort of a wake-up call. Jack: Yeah, in some ways it's a wake-up call. Q: Are we generally ambivalent about having new people amongst us? Jack: I think we are until they come here, you know. It's easy to look from afar and say gee, look's what's going on in this city or that city or you know look what's happening in some of the European cities that have changes in their ethnic mix. But when we do have significant numbers of people who are different from the traditional you know historic population here, then you have to confront it. Then you have to... you know when you're standing in line at the Sun Mart, and the person in front of you is dressed in traditional African garb and is having some difficulty communicating with the checkout person, then you realize that there's been a change in the community because, I forget what the level is, but demographers have some level of a percentage where they say that once you reach that percentage -- I think it might be 7% or something like that -- that then an ethnic or racial differences become visible in places like the Sun Mart or the license bureau or wherever it happens to be. I think we're about at that stage in Fargo, and for some people that's a little bit uncomfortable. For a lot of people I think it's uncomfortable. It's how they respond to it I think that makes the difference, but it's hard to condemn people for a discomfort level because it's a learning process, and what's happening here is I think all of us who have lived in a (tape cutout) white community have some learning to do. And in the long term that's a pretty good thing, that's a pretty good thing. Q: So it's okay to be uncomfortable, it's just how you respond to it that's... Jack: I think so. I mean you know it's very hard... the first thing you hear from people who want to make some sort of negative comment about the new Americans is you know, I'm not prejudiced, but... well, the fact of the matter is yes you are, yes you are. The but makes you prejudiced. Q: You have a large Hispanic community, or Latin community, in this area that also tends to make people a little uncomfortable I think, and many of them are in fact not immigrants. They're American citizens from Texas and people would just as soon maybe they go back there. Jack: Yeah, there is a history in the Valley, in the Red River Valley, of course of migrants, of migrant workers coming to work in the sugarbeet fields, and that history is you know, it's a long history, and most of those folks have come from the Southwest, primarily Texas, and not from Mexico and have followed the migrant stream up here. Well what's happened in the last five years or so is that technology and chemicals have pretty much eliminated the need for migrant work, and a very few migrant workers come to the Valley now compared to what it used to be only a few years ago. But in the process of the migrant stream being part of life in the summer in the Valley is that a lot of Hispanic people from the Southwest for good reason, the same reasons we all like it here, decided to settle in the Valley -- good place to raise a family, good schools, all the things we know about Fargo and Moorhead. You know, they're good places to live, and so the Hispanic population, Latino population, depends on what part of the country you're in what word you use I guess, is significant in Fargo and Moorhead. The interesting thing about that is that since a different group of immigrants have started coming to the area from Africa, from Eastern Europe, even from Central America, the emphasis on the Hispanic minority has sort of lessened, and so it's almost as if... well, it is true. You know the Hispanic population in this part of the country is not new. I mean it's established, been here a long time, and so in some ways those folks in the Hispanic community are not newcomers, you know are not newcomers by a long shot. So the attention has shifted, some of the social service attention, the school attention has shifted to the new immigrants from Eastern Europe, you know Bosnia, Kosovo, and Africa and the African immigrants. So there's been a shift in attention that might in some ways prove to be a good think in the long term because I think most thinking people understand that people of Hispanic origin are part of our community and have been for many, many years and have integrated into life here and do just fine. Q: So let's say you're writing that editorial -- what would you say to people to help them to get past that discomfort? Jack: Ah, I think the important thing is for people to really take it upon themselves to educate themselves about the immigrants and to find out a couple of things: what's going on in their homeland. You know, why are they leaving? And that's not hard to find out. I mean it's not too hard to find out what's been going on in parts of Africa, and anyone in their right mind who could get out, will get out. So learn that. Find out. There's a reason people leave their home you know, and it's usually not because they want to leave. It's because they're at risk, and their families are at risk. That was the case in Eastern Europe and Kosovo and Bosnia and those places, and it's the case now in Africa, and it's the case somewhere in the world all the time so learn that first. Understand that. And then begin to find out through your church group, you know through your churches, through people you know who might work with refugees, through the education system, who they are. You know, there's an assumption I think sometime that because a person can't speak English and doesn't understand the cultural norms you know of the Red River Valley of the North, that they're not smart, but that's wrong. When you begin to look into the individual backgrounds of these people, many of them are highly educated; you know, chemistry is chemistry, whether it's in Africa or at North Dakota State University. The problem is the language. Most of the problem is the language barrier. So it's not uncommon to find a person with a Ph.D. in some technical field, physics for example, working at a glass plant in the industrial park in Fargo, not because that person doesn't want to do physics or teach physics or do research; it's because they haven't been able to jump through the hoops yet, mostly because of the language. And so the second thing is learn who they are individually. It's wrong I think to characterize these people as a group only and attribute certain kinds of characteristics to them because of where they come from. The are individuals, and they're different. They're coming here not because they like the weather. My gosh, they're coming from central Africa. You know you haven't seen a lot of snow and ice, I mean I don't think you have unless you climbed Kilimanjaro, but they're coming here because there are opportunities here for their kids to be safe. One of the people from one of the agencies was meeting with our editorial board at The Forum the other day, and he asked a mother from Eastern Europe, from I think it was Kosovo, why she would leave, take her family. Her husband, she couldn't find him; he had been taken by some group fighting over there, why she would up and uproot her family and come over here, and she said very simply, it wasn't for economics you know, it wasn't because of you know the golden promise of the United States or anything like that. It was because where she was, everyday she had to worry that her son might be shot going to school, and she said to him, here in Fargo that's not a concern. So it's things like that I think that you have to know about these people, what motivates them, that I think helps all of us understand that these are folks, these are people not so (tape cut out) from us. You know, certainly there are cultural differences. There are language differences, but the motivations -- family, safety for their family, a way to feed their families, get educated -- that's not no different from my grandmother and grandfather who got aboard a ship you know in the 1890s at a young age and left their homes in Poland to work in factories in New England in order to start a new life. I mean it's not much different. Q: What are the benefits to this area that come with this diversity? Jack: Well, you know, being in the business I'm in, in the newspaper business, we have kind of this access to stuff that maybe a lot of folks don't. We report about it, and we see people. One of the things is really broadening our understanding of what the rest of the world, the rest of the country in some respects is like, and I mean that when we talk about religion. We have a mosque in Fargo. There's an Islamic population here in Fargo that has enough numbers to support a mosque. That's not unprecedented. There was an Islamic population in North Dakota in Fargo in the early years of the state, but it is unprecedented pretty much in the 20th Century, and so we have an opportunity to gain a better understanding of what that religious tradition is. There are cultural practices you know that we have no knowledge of. You know we talk about the going to the lutefisk supper. Everybody knows what that's about in North Dakota, but we might not know what it's like to go to the Bosnian House Restaurant in Fargo. I mean we have a restaurant in Fargo now that's specializes in Eastern European good call. The place is called The Bosnian House, and so you can go there and get traditional dishes made by people who made those kinds of foods just a couple years ago in their homelands in Eastern Europe. So we have the opportunity for that kind of variety in a restaurant for example. So anytime you bring a group of people in who bring some color, you know cultural color, religious color to the neighborhood if you will, that kind of makes the town a more interesting place to say the least you know. Not that going to you know Olivet Lutheran on Sunday isn't interesting. It's fine, but there's more, and it's nice to see more. It's nice to see more so that's a big part of it, and that's happening. That's starting to happen here. As I mentioned, just the fact of seeing someone in traditional African dress in the checkout line in the supermarket is you know pulls you up short. You say, "Who's that" you know, and "Where does she come from?" and it's a good thing. The schools... I talked to te..., a know a few teachers in the schools, and while there are problems with language and cultural differences getting students acclimated to the system, to the public education system, the teachers tell me that students tend to be more open, young people tend to be more open to the changing mix in the student population than we adults sometimes are, and so that's where it begins. You know, that's where it really begins and where the community change becomes, if not routine, certainly not a problem, and that's what's happening I think. |
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