Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Investors Enrich Evil Local Company
OK, so maybe Wall Street isn't condoning the heinous 3M actions rattled off above, but investors are certainly pleased with how little damage the Maplewood-based company sustained from them.
3M stock skyrocketed 23% today, its biggest single-day jump in 40+ years, Bloomberg reports. Remarks from brand-new CEO Bill Brown spurred the trading frenzy, which rose the mega-conglomerate's stock price to its highest level ($127 per share) in more than two years. "I'm amazed at the products we produce and the scale we produce them at," Brown told investors. Visionary stuff!
Analysts are framing this new 3M leadership era as a "fresh start" for the 122-year-old firm, which in recent years has come under fire for poisoning large swathes of the Twin Cities metro with so-called forever chemicals ($12.5 billion settlement) and deafening U.S. troops with its faulty Combat Arms Earplugs ($6 billion settlement). On the other hand activist investors appear bullish on Solventum, the spinoff health-care business whose "parody-ass-sounding" portmanteau name was once mocked by Racket as summoning "a sleepy robot-type Pokémon."
In any event, rather than gawking at the glitzy numbers and MBA-speak, we encourage you to revisit Deena Winter's indispensable reportage on the devastating human and environmental toll 3M has knowingly taken on Minnesota.
Measles! We Got ‘Em!
Three cases of measles were reported in the Twin Cities metro last week, Bring Me the News tells us. That may not seem like much, but it’s three more than most weeks, when zero cases are reported—which is exactly how many cases should be reported, since there is a safe vaccine to prevent measles. All three people infected were children, none were vaccinated, and two had to be hospitalized. This brings the total number of cases in Minnesota this year to 15; all were children and more than half were hospitalized. Because these cases are not directly linked to one another and because those infected did not travel recently, the Minnesota Department of Health is concerned that measles may have spread through the community. This is not the sort of thing we should be concerned about in the U.S. in 2024! Meanwhile, dangerous anti-vax cranks are downplaying the risks of measles while urging parents not to protect their children from the disease. About 1 in 5 measles cases requires hospitalization. About 1 in 20 leads to pneumonia. About 1 in 1,000 will lead to brain swelling, and about as many cases result in death.
A Day at the Strip Mall
Slowly dying mega-malls are eyesores. Strip malls, however, are the persistent kind of thing people drive by a million times without even noticing. The folks at Longfellow Whatever recently took a tour through a strip mall at Minnehaha Park & 46th Street (above Hiawatha Avenue), a destination the author describes as “hidden in plain sight.” The collection of shops and services doesn’t even have a name (when it opened in the late ‘80s it was referred to as Parkway Plaza), but it’s filled with all kinds of stuff that could be useful… if you knew it was there. Once anchored by Blockbuster Video, today it houses tenants ranging from useful (an urgent care clinic, pet groomers for special-needs dogs and cats), to tasty (Crystal Garden recently reopened under new ownership), to banal (Domino's Pizza, “It's a Domino's” LW concludes), to odd (gaming shop Dreamers Vault). It’s a fun piece that’s part history, part photo tour, and part directory, and serves as a reminder that these little commercial districts often offer our communities much more than we realize.
Adios, Weatherman
Just last month Paul Douglas was featured prominently in this Racket feature on retro TV news, which speaks to the profound impact the meteorologist has had on Twin Cities media. And today Douglas announced he's retiring from broadcast duties—radio and TV—concluding a 41-year (mostly local) run. The weatherman, who spent the bulk of his career with KARE 11 and, later, with WCCO, offered a reasonable explanation today to Vineeta Sawkar via 'CCO:
You know, at some point you realize you have enough money, but you don't have enough time. And I think as you get older, time becomes the important metric. I don't want to look back when I'm 85 or 90 say could have, should have, would have, you know? Dog gone it, why didn't I quit a little bit sooner?
Douglas isn't really retiring, however. While he vows to spend more time traveling with family, he also says he'll continue writing his longtime Strib weather column and working at his weather consulting firm Praedictix. A devout Christian and Republican, Douglas became an unlikely crusader for climate-change awareness later in his career. We wish him well!
