David Obey

Dave Obey is a son of Wisconsin. Most people don't realize he was actually born in Oklahoma; he's so ingrained in Wisconsin soil, so much a part of Wisconsin's story.

Most people also don't realize that Obey was originally a Republican. He's so ingrained in Democratic soil, so much a part of Democratic history.

Central Wisconsin has claimed Dave as its own for over fifty years, a former realtor who decided to run for office to see if he could do some good in the greater community. From 1963 to 1969, he served admirably in the Wisconsin State Assembly.

In 1969, he was elected to Congress to fill the seat vacated when Melvin Laird was tapped to be Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense. Only thirty years old at the time, he was the youngest member of Congress then serving. Since then, he has been re-elected eighteen times, and is the longest serving member of either branch of Congress in Wisconsin's history.

David R. Obey.

David R. Obey is, and has been all these years, the face of Wisconsin's 7th District in the United States House of Representatives, a well respected, hard working, straight talking, passionate member of Congress, and current chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. He is also the author of "Raising Hell for Justice: The Washington Battles of a Wisconsin Progressive."

When not busy doing good in Washington, he's playing the harmonica. With the Capitol Offenses.

He has been a friend to many in our community for many years, and as a member of the Riordan family, I share in support of his efforts on behalf of those he's lifted throughout the years and express appreciation for the same.

King Fahd

I've long said that Rochester is the great leveler.

When people come to Mayo Clinic in the cornfields of Minnesota for treatment, they come from all corners of the world and all walks of life, kings and presidents, priests and paupers. I recall being in town many years ago when then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Rochester to meet with Jordan's late King Hussein, who was undergoing treatment for cancer at Mayo Clinic at the time. There were banners across the main downtown street, Broadway, welcoming both men to town.

Around that same time, several years ago, my husband and I were in town for routine medical care and staying in a hotel which was hosting several members of the Saudi Royal Family on its top floors, including King Fahd. As only Rochester can do, it brought us face to face, in a way that would not have been likely, or even possible, in most of the rest of the world. My husband and I went into the Concierge Lounge that morning for breakfast, prior to our planned checkout later that morning, and there were only two other diners in the room--King Fahd, and a male attendant. The all too young manager of the hotel was standing over the pair fussing to try to discern what it was that was required. Two female employees from the concierge staff also busily stood at the ready. But no one could understand what it was that His Majesty wanted, and there was clear and present frustration.

I stood up, begged pardon and asked if I might be of assistance, then explained to the hotel manager what it was that His Majesty wanted.

"Sweet milk," I explained.

King Fahd nodded at me in appreciation as I explained to the hotel staff what this was. His companion thanked me most graciously.

Anywhere else, that act of assistance, that encounter, might never have taken place, but in Rochester, we were all children of the Almighty at the mercy of our quest for competent and compassionate medical care, in the cornfields of Minnesota.

King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz al Saud.

I felt a special sadness later when I read of his death. Our paths had crossed, if only briefly, in this life in a simple act of compassion for a fellow traveller on the journey.

Martin Capp

I was visiting my sister and brother-in-law in Logan, Utah, several years ago when he was showing us family pictures of his childhood.

"And this was the Capp home we built and lived in," he said, pointing to a picture of his family home.

It was phenomenal to me to actually meet someone who'd lived in a Capp pre-built home. Because Marty Capp was a friend of ours.

Flashback to days just after World War II.

Martin Capp was a young man from Wabasha, Minnesota, who decided to build homes. He needed windows for those homes, and contacted a window company in Wausau, Wisconsin, to see if he could get them. The person he ended up talking to initially at the time was my husband's father, Thomas Riordan, of Chicago.

His first request to get windows was unsuccessful.

Some time later, my husband placed a call to Marty Capp. Montgomery Wards had refused a shipment of a carload of windows--did he want them?

Many years later, at Marty Capp's 80th birthday party, eighty people were flown in for a week of festivities in Las Vegas,and at the black tie gala night I heard Marty Capp tell this story, right after comedian Red Buttons entertained us. It was the finest tribute I'd ever heard anyone give my husband. At Marty's high school graduation, he said, he'd been in charge of getting the entertainment, and hired a palm reader. That palm reader apparently told his fortune, and everything that person told him has subsequently come true. Including, as he told it, that an angel would come into his life and change his life forever. "That angel was Larry Riordan."

That transaction started a business relationship that co-existed as a deep and powerful friendship lasting well over fifty years. Marty was my husband's best customer, and my husband helped Marty when he was first getting his start in the construction business. It is a mutual admiration society that runs silent and deep.

Marty became one of the most successful builders of pre-built homes, Capp Homes, and later Martin Homes, and went on to build a number of office buildings and hotels in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. Several years ago, he bought a winter home in Las Vegas, where he also continues to do business as a builder and developer, well into his nineties.
























He owns two hotels in Minneapolis currently, including The Millennium Hotel on Nicolet, the former Capp Towers Hotel. Their philanthropic efforts in Minnesota and elsewhere are well known and have benefited many.

Marty Capp.

I've had some great times with Marty and his lovely wife Esther. Some of them I can't repeat (something about Jaguars heading for the Mexican border, and professional women in Vegas tapping the wrong man's shoulder comes to mind, but it's a blur). Whether we've seen them in the Twin Cities, or in Vegas, at weddings, bar mitzvahs, or in their kitchen, we've had enormous fun, and their friendship is treasured. They were among those most faithful, most salt of the earth, during our protracted ordeal at Mayo Clinic, and I will forever be indebted to them for that.

So if you pass a building in the Twin Cities that was built by Marty Capp, raise a glass to him for me. And remember, that behind every successful man, there is a woman as incredible as Esther Capp.

Bettye Olson

It seems appropriate to continue a Scandinavian theme, which leads me to Bettye Olson, Swedish-German by heritage, Norwegian by marriage, and very much a Minnesotan.

Bettye and Howard Olson have been friends with my husband for decades, and I was fortunate to inherit them when we married. No truer friends exist anywhere. Howard was best man at our wedding. They were steadfast in support of us during Larry's long and difficult hospitalization at Mayo Clinic, and made the journey down from St. Paul to Rochester on numerous occasions to be present personally.

I am fortunate to know Bettye, one of Minnesota's, and indeed the United States', premier watercolorists.

Bettye Olson is a Minnesota treasure. Her vision is singular and translates with seeming effortlessness to canvas. Part Emily Carr, part Georgia O'Keefe, Bettye sees the world, whether it's running water, a meadow, mountains, flowers, or rocks, and puts her own inimitable flourish of color on it for our enjoyment. In her career spanning over six decades, she has travelled the world, from Santa Fe to Sitka, Norway to New Mexico, bringing that vision to others.









I am blessed to have a number of Bettye Olson's paintings on the walls of my homes, some of which were already there when I married my husband, and others I've acquired since. But Bettye's paintings grace far greater venues, including major corporations in Minnesota and throughout the Midwest, and a number of universities.

Bettye Olson.

Bettye has had numerous shows and exhibitions worldwide and been active as both an artist and an educator, including as Director of the College of the Third Age at Augsburg, a position she held recently for several years. In late 2006 St. Catherine's College hung her show, "Persistence of Vision: Bettye Olson's Work in Retrospect."

Mark Sandberg

I think of Mark Sandberg in soundbites.

What did Theodora's father do for a living?

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd
Tereu

O do not ask "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

When I met him, Mark Sandberg was a mild-mannered prodigy freshman at BYU who'd come in with off-the-charts test scores. We both haunted the fifth floor of the library and shared a common major at the time, Humanities, and had several classes together. He'd come from St. Paul, Minnesota, one of the three children then at BYU of well known educator, scholar and author Karl Sandberg of St. Paul's Macalester College. Together we were part of a motley assemblage of ragtag braniacs and liberals known as the "Fifth Floor Study Group," a core part of which came from the Twin Cities. I frequently had lunch with Mark, his brother Dave, and other Minnesotans at the Cougareat, and listened to them argue which was side of the river was superior, Minneapolis or Saint Paul, and whether or not Hardees truly had the best hamburgers. Together we studied existentialism, and art history, and pondered the great mysteries of the universe.

Like what Theodora's father did for a living.

Those were great times, with a million embedded memories. Kant and Hegel and Sartre and Camus and Art Bassett and James Faulconer and International Cinema and Cougareat.

I think I got pulled over once coming back from seeing Young Frankenstein at a drive-in movie theater in Springville, with Mark and his sister Stephanie in the car. We'd been laughing hard, and the car was weaving and bobbing in the pouring rain. What had I been drinking? the officer asked when he pulled me over to the side of the road and asked me to walk a straight line.

"Milk," I replied.

Mark Bennion Sandberg.

Mark went off to Norway on a mission and wrote back interesting tales of the midnight sun, and townspeople coming out after a long dark winter to chant, "Sola, sola."

Mark is now professor of Scandianavian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and acknowledged expert in Scandinavian film studies. He is the author of Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums and Modernity, published by Princeton Press in 2003.

Judy Collins

Judy Collins saved my life in high school. Of course, she didn't learn that until many years later.

When I finally met Judy Collins face-to-face, she looked a lot like this, with lots of miles both behind her and ahead, and wearing the bloom of a newlywed bride.

In high school, I survived by playing her albums, endlessly. Colors of the Day, Whales and Nightingales, The Best of, Judith. Sure, I listened to Joni Mitchell, too. And Carly Simon. But I was immersed in the life and music and words and wildflowers and mountains and dreams of Judy Collins, whether singing Leonard Cohen's lyrical magic or her own original semi-autobiographical folksongs. I can still sit down to a piano and play "My Father" from memory.

Carol Crockett and I used to sing "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye" as a duet in high school, on long hours sitting in the back of a bus on school trips, or in the band room during choir practice. We always vowed we'd sing it at each other's weddings, wearing long gauzy dresses blowing in the breeze and flowers tucked in long flowing hair. We didn't.

But many years later, I was sitting in a hotel ballroom in central Wisconsin sharing wedding pictures with Judy Collins. And I presented her with my very well worn copy of her Judy Collins Songbook, dogeared and well travelled and practically memorized, still with wildflowers and notes falling out of the pages, for her to sign. She was visibly moved that I'd hung onto it all those years, and that it had meant that much to me. She'd come as the guest of Dave Obey, our local congressman who's a family friend, to speak about political issues. She signed my book.

I told her Carol Crockett had signed the back of her high school picture to me, "Judy Forever."

She understood.

Never did I imagine that when we'd finally meet, it would be like a couple of schoolgirls sharing wedding pictures.

But it was.

Judy Collins.

Joyce McKinney

Joyce McKinney's name is rarely associated with anything tasteful anymore, barely uttered and difficult to find on Internet searches without turning up sordid tales of infamy, but when I first met her in 1973 I was a freshman in college, and she hung out with my roommate at the time.

Both of them were Osmond groupies. My roommate Karen was younger of the two, by four or five years, and would hang around Joyce, a former beauty queen with a southern accent and bleach-blonde hair, like an older sister. Both would hoof several hours to Vegas most weekends just to see the Osmond Brothers perform.

Joyce had a thing for the oldest of the performing Osmond Brothers, Alan, and then subsequently his younger brother, Wayne, which became relatively well known and teetered on stalking. My roommate Karen, from southern California, was self confessed as someone who'd converted to the LDS Church predominantly because of her devotion to the Osmonds (a well documented byproduct of the Osmond mania of the early seventies). She played their albums incessantly in our dorm room and regaled us with details of her trips to Vegas and encounters with the Osmond clan.

There was something more of fanatacism than fan in both of them, but Joyce particularly, and possibly even at least one screw, if not more, somewhat loose. But never would we have dreamt that sometime later, Joyce would become a household name in the tabloid press, when she kidnapped an LDS missionary in England and forced him into sexual bondage.

I remember well when the story surfaced in the late 1970's in Provo, although a continent away. I was administrative assistant to Dr. Marion J. Bentley at the time, and he remembered casting her in performances in the Theater Department. We all shook a collective head and clucked a collective cluck. Cluck.

Joyce McKinney.



Joyce McKinney went from beauty queen to Osmond chaser to missionary chaser to sleaze queen. Rarely is mention found of her anymore without a reference to something entirely distasteful in obscure press, and rarely can a picture be found of her anymore worth reposting.

When I knew her she was slightly more interesting. Never did we dream she'd be infamous.

Just this past week, a news story hit the media about cloned puppies, and their owner, Bernann McKinney.

As it happens, "Bernann" and "Joyce" are one and the same.