Seeing the holiday window dressings for the Dayton’s Project, I wondered: What would Brian Anderson, the not-to-be-beat booster for Minneapolis, have made of them? These sparkling, 3-D ads were a lot more attractive than plywood but served the same purpose: boarding up windows in an empty building. After its nearly 100 years as the Dayton’s department store, a few of its now-ghostly eight floors are to be filled with food experiences. Someday. For months, I’ve caught occasional glimpses of construction lamps turned on inside to indicate people may be working.
But maybe, as Brian died 10 years ago this coming March, this retail-renewal project would look very different to him? Even with this project’s terribly slow progress, I suspect he would have loved its goal of reviving a part of downtown.
Editor Brian was a Maglite on my bumbling path from MPLS.ST.PAUL magazine intern (see Speak Up) to a stint as its managing editor (with detours in Pasadena, state government and the University of Minnesota along the way). And the magazine he edited for 33 years shone its spotlight on TV and radio personalities (Don Shelby, Pat Miles, Garrison Keillor and Gretchen Carlson—hello!), Top Doctors, Best Restaurants and weighty topics—the American Indian Movement, unsolved murders and climate change.
During the monthly cover meetings, Brian focused on developing the punchiest cover lines, refining the images for the newsstand and creating the combination to make people pause and pick up MPLS.ST.PAUL and read these intriguing, entertaining and insider-y stories. (For a taste of my experience, read the running-pace view into the life of an editorial underling with ambitions limned by Maggie O’Farrell in I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, pp.176-177.)
I loved the striving for excellence, the intense atmosphere and my brilliant, often quirky, colleagues. Our boss Brian was impeccable in suits and manners, seemingly unflappable, quick to highlight a trend and too modest to boast about it. He appeared to epitomize a down-to-earth Minnesotan guy. In Brian’s Star Tribune obituary, which had a dual byline of Tim Harlow and former MPLS.ST.PAUL magazine managing editor Claude Peck, his business partner Gary Johnson said that Brian set the tone for the magazine with his decency. “He was one of the steadiest presences I’ve ever been around,” Johnson said. “He was an absolute beam of light.”
Sometimes being in that beam of light was uncomfortable, however. Brian could be blunt—like the time he called a managing editor relatively new to the position on the carpet. Literally.
He called me on the phone to come to his office; once I was there, he did not ask me to sit down. “Let me read you something from this issue of the magazine,” Brian said: “‘former president Walter Mondale.’” Suddenly I experienced the cliché: my heart jumped into my throat. After a deep breath, I said of our former Minnesota senator and U.S. Vice President, who in the 1984 presidential election lost to Ronald Reagan: “Well, he should have been!” Brian laughed. I left his corner office shamed and determined to be a better fact-checker.
I didn’t know then that Brian had served as Senator Walter Mondale’s press secretary and speechwriter before he joined the magazine; I only learned this while reading his obituary. I like to think he told his old boss Fritz Mondale about my dressing-down, as Brian liked to joke. During his struggle with leukemia, he wrote what turned out to be his final, mid-winter CaringBridge post: “I’ve also been doing my part to spur the economy. . . . I bet I’m one of the few people last month to buy lakefront property. Of course, in my case it’s only the length and width of a casket, but it does overlook a lake in Lakewood Cemetery.” (Source: MPR News, March 16, 2010)
Shortly after I had returned to the MSP Communications fold, Brian died. In the office, Gary called us all together to tell us the news. Even though Brian had been quite ill for months, we bowed our heads and shared gasps, tears, murmurs of pain.
Yet now even 10 years on, from his ashes, light still arises. I hope that I, having been mentored as so many were by Brian, may continue to carry forward some of his light of positivity, steadiness and heck, yeah, even boosterism. And, when in doubt, to ask: “What would Brian do?”
Allison Campbell Jensen 