Briefs

Fear and Strolling on the Campaign Trail

Pit bull attacks and deadly gas leaks make for a race that Chris Dahlberg will never forget

Chris Dahlberg stood on the step, ready to ring the doorbell. Suddenly, a pit bull leapt out of nowhere and ripped through his pants leg. Dahlberg stared at the dog. The dog stared back.

This was not what Dahlberg expected from a political campaign.

When he began his run for a spot as St. Louis County commissioner, the biggest challenge he expected to face was trying to beat a 32-year incumbent. Dahlberg, an Iraq War veteran and lawyer in Duluth, had already served as a member of the Duluth City Council from 1992 through 1995 when he decided to run against Bill Kron for St. Louis County commissioner. Running against an incumbent was tough, Dahlberg says, and he knew he needed to get his name out there if he were to have a chance. “What I did was a lot of door knocking,” he says. Going door to door did get him a lot of attention, but not all of the good variety. See exhibit A: the angry pit bull. The owner was able to calm the dog down enough for Dahlberg to escape, but his campaign misfortunes did not end there.

Not long after, while speaking to an 86-year-old woman, he smelled natural gas coming from her home. “She had such a bad cold she couldn’t smell anything,” Dahlberg says. He called the fire department and waited with the woman until they arrived. The firemen discovered gas leaking from the woman’s furnace. She came up to Dahlberg later and said, “I think you saved my life tonight.”

The excitement of the campaign trail and winning the election has slowed now as Dahlberg settles into his job as county commissioner. He is working on projects to cut unneeded cell phone expenses by the county and working with the Duluth Seaway Port Authority to clean up toxic sites in the Morgan Park neighborhood of Duluth. Dahlberg says people he has met with are surprised at his dedication and initiative. “People haven’t heard about someone being this passionate,” he says. But for Dahlberg, it comes naturally. “I just really love politics,” he says.

And for all his trouble on the campaign trail, he knows he got at least one extra vote. The woman he saved from the gas leak later told reporters, “You can bet I’ll vote for him.”

—Sadie Lundquist

 

Best Band Names in Minnesota

First place: Emerson, Lake & Lyndale

Second place: The Hip Replacements

 

Following the Bouncing Ball

Lawyer Bob Fox’s life in table tennis

There’s a difference between Ping-Pong and table tennis. Ping-Pong is something you do in your grandma’s basement. It’s a game, like Candy Land or tag. Nobody trains for Ping-Pong. The rules are simple, the skills required are negligible.

Table tennis is a sport.

“In China, kids know precisely what table tennis is like—how you hold the paddle, what the strokes are. They start in grade school and play in leagues until they’re old,” says Bob Fox, a St. Paul lawyer and professor at Metro State University. “But it’s just not seen in this country. It’s only once you get into the sport that you realize how incredibly difficult it really is.”

Fox has played table tennis across the U.S. and managed multiple Olympic table tennis teams, including the 2008 Beijing team. This December, he’ll be inducted into the U.S. Table Tennis Hall of Fame. He’s been playing nearly 40 years, ever since he went to watch a weekend Ping-Pong tournament at the Minneapolis Armory and left with an obsession. Fox signed up for a league and was soon playing two days a week, taking lessons from visiting Thai pros and heading out to training camps.

He learned how to do battle across the 9-foot-long table; he learned how to react to a 1.5-inch ball that moves at speeds as high as 100 miles per hour. He discovered the difference a good piece of rubber paddle padding can make. And he learned the strategy of the sport. “Just by teaching someone to put a spin on a serve you can improve your score by five points,” he says. “It’s just amazing. A table tennis ball can get this spin that makes a baseball curveball look like peanuts.”

But Fox quickly realized he wasn’t going to be a championship-caliber player. So he decided to give back to the table tennis community by taking top players under his wing. In 1991 he joined the U.S. Olympic table tennis team as “team leader,” a position that basically amounts to making sure players and coaches are free to focus on playing and coaching. Fox has handled travel and uniform issues and coordinated daily details with the Olympic committee.

He has also held hands and soothed savage beasts. “We had a problem with an athlete in the Sydney Olympics who threw a fit when they said her paddle wasn’t legal. She went off the deep end and I had to calm her down and get it settled so she could play the match,” Fox says.

Ultimately, he says, table tennis is rewarding in ways people who only know Ping-Pong can’t understand.

“It’s amazing. When you play it as the sport, it’s an aerobic and strengthening sport. It’s kept me from being 300 pounds. It’s hard work and I work hard at it,” he says. “And, thanks to table tennis, I’ve made friends and played with them all over the world.”

—Maggie Koerth-Baker

 

Letting Freedom Ring

The Freedom Club stands at the forefront of local conservative fundraising

“If you’re a Republican in Minnesota, you’ve had some past failures,” says John Hinderaker with a wry laugh. But one thing that’s never a mistake, he says, is joining forces with other people who share your beliefs. A group of voices can create change much more quickly than a single one.

Hinderaker, partner at Faegre & Benson, is the recent president of one such group, the Freedom Club, which brings together conservatives from across Minnesota and pools their financial resources to help support political campaigns. Founded in the mid-1990s, it’s now an important funder of Minnesota politics, working through two political action committees—one focused on national races, the other on state and local politics—as well as encouraging individual donations from members. In the 2007-08 election cycle, the Club’s national PAC doled out more than $80,000 to Norm Coleman, Michele Bachmann and other “big race” candidates. The state-focused PAC donated about $115,000 to Minnesota House of Representatives races, making it the third-largest PAC spender for that sector. And that’s not even counting what members themselves donated.

Anyone who’s tried to raise money for anything knows this is a big accomplishment, but Hinderaker, who recently handed the reins of the organization to Harold Hamilton, maintains a typically Minnesotan sense of modesty. “We’re just a little group of private citizens trying to make the world a better place,” he says. “If you’re a college-aged kid with a bunch of time on your hands, you can go out door knocking. But if you’re a middle-aged businessman working all the time, you can’t pass out fliers. Instead, hopefully, you have a little money and can make a contribution.”

Along the way, the Freedom Club’s members have managed to influence the direction of Minnesota politics, particularly by identifying up-and-coming conservative politicians and helping them find their financial feet. The group was an early supporter of Bachmann, back when she was just a little-known upstart taking on an established Republican officeholder. Today, Hinderaker says, they’re eyeing some newer new blood and, while he’s not naming names, he says the focus is most definitely on state and local politics.

“The amount of money spent on those big statewide, high-profile races just keeps rising higher and higher. As those get more expensive, our impact diminishes,” he says. “We aren’t a big group and our resources are limited. So we’ve started trying to focus on small-scale races where our modest resources have more of an impact.”

—Maggie Koerth-Baker