Gossips in a little Minnesota town – and the two sides of Dylan’s brick wall

In a little Minnesota town called Hibbing, people are apparently always talking about each other.

Some even say it’s a bit of a twitchy-curtain community.

The disingenuous are known to describe each other as judgemental while others simply say everything is ‘very nice, thank you’.

Personally, I don’t know which is worse – to be described as ‘nice’ or ‘judgemental’.

But there is certainly a middle-class pride in Hibbing, considering it is such a small place standing in the foothills of the Masabi Iron Range …

One of its claims to fame is that it had the first swimming pool in Minnesota. And that makes people feel very nice, thank you.

Oh, and the man who invented pizza rolls lived nearby.

But he wasn’t much of a role model, by all accounts. He came from ‘the other side of town’ and, for some people, that was just too far.

The swimming baths make many good people beam with historic pride though. But the man who invented pizza roll, Jeno Paulucci, who died in 2011 aged 93, got talked about plenty when he was gone.

He was a ‘peddler’ with a foreign name who’d built several food empires, including Chun King, Jeno’s Inc. and Luigino’s.

And successful people are always worth gossiping about.

Oh, and we all know that Bob Dylan was brought up there don’t we … he was a small-town dreamer, just a son of a polio-victim furniture and appliances salesman.

Bob went to Hibbing High School.

It still has a marble staircase, brass handrails and massive stone pillars standing sentinel at the entrance.

And now there is something else.

A brick wall

The school itself was built in 1920 for $4 million and became known as ‘the castle in the woods’ for some reason.

Nobody gossips about that though. I don’t think they even know.

The school has a 1,800 seat auditorium with crystal chandeliers. That’s where Bob fronted a garage band and pounded out 1950s rock‘n’roll at a school assembly.

It was his first step on the highway of his life.

Dylan didn’t have far to walk to high school. His house of blue, with its funny flat- roof, was just two  blocks away at 2425 7th Ave. That’s now called Bob Dylan Drive.

Bob Dylan super-fan Bill Pagel bought the 1,600 square foot home from Greg and Donna French, who had lived there since 1990. It was valued at $84,000. but Pagel is said to have paid more than $300,000 dollars.

Later, he said: “I paid way too much for that house.”

His own small-town dream was to restore it back to the way it was during Dylan’s childhood in the 1950s. He said: “I’m trying to locate another collector who purchased many pieces of the original furniture, including Bob Dylan’s bedroom set, from the Hibbing home in 1988.”

Pagel, a pharmacist now in his late seventies, has run the Bob Links website since 1995.

And now there is that new little brick wall outside the school, just a few yards away from his ‘museum’ where Bob’s infinity goes up on show.

Some say it is very nice brick wall, but it is described jokingly as ‘two-faced’ by the judgmental ones.

“No one likes him here,” one of them, an elderly woman identified only as Irene, is oft quoted. “He wouldn’t acknowledge he’s from Hibbing, so we took his house off the bus tour.”

The house is back on now, and so is the wall.

The wall, described as a monument, is biographical on one side but has lyrics – and a chair – on the other.

Some, like Irene, have tried to paint a rift between Bob and the people of his home-town. But I don’t believe it, not since the far-off Sixties and Seventies anyway.

Certainly, his lyric ‘they’re selling postcards of the hanging’ didn’t endear him to some types during that period … it referred to the fact that on June 15, 1920, the good residents of Duluth, lynched three African-American circus workers, Isaac McGhie, Elias Clayton and Elmer Jackson.

This ‘strange fruit’ horror was photographed for posterity and turned into a postcard.

A hundred years later things have changed and towns folk and some leaders in Hibbing have joined a Police Department task force to sort out any hints of Trumpian racism left in the community.

But because of his flamboyance and many of his biographical lyrics Bob has always ruffled feathers in town.

Now, however, 30 snippets of his lyrics take up one of the faces of this strange, conservative, under-stated red brick monument which cost just $100,000.

On the other is a legend marking the Nobel Prize in Literature Bob was awarded in 2016.

Then there is also that bronze depiction of a school chair. It faces the school. Is it saying that it was his ‘schooling’ that made him what he is today?

A nice conservative thought or a subjugation of genius?

President of the Dylan project, Katie Ferdeen, said that placing the wall in front of the school would inspire students.

“I believe it’s really important to our community to recognize him so that graduates from our schools in the future realize that if they work hard and they chase their dream, they have the potential to achieve the great things that he did throughout his career,” she said.

At the end of the groundbreaking for the wall the celebration moved down the street to Bob Dylan’s bright blue childhood home, where refreshments were served.

And somehow it all seemed very nice but very un-rock’n’roll indeed.