I grew up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. If the name didn’t sound like the smallest place on earth, I’d be more apt to tell everyone how great it is. Luckily, The New Yorker just did that for me — and quoted my high school journalism teacher/advisor/mentor, Mim Kagol. Those are tough acts to follow out of SLP…I hope that creosote plant and solar-lunar eclipse had a long-lasting effect.

The Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the political scientist Norm Ornstein, and the moviemakers Joel and Ethan Coen all grew up in St. Louis Park, within a four-block radius of one another. Some years ago, the ex-neighbors were asked by former Vice-President Walter Mondale why St. Louis Park produced so many notable people. [Senator Al] Franken suggested runoff from a nearby creosote plant. The Coen brothers grandly equated the place with a small area of Hungary that had produced several nuclear physicists. Friedman suggested a solar-lunar eclipse. Miriam Kagol, who taught journalism at St. Louis Park Senior High School (Friedman was one of her students), offered another opinion, in a piece about the suburb in the Jewish Daily Forward, where she spoke about the migration of Jews to St. Louis Park in the forties and fifties: “It was at the time that all the political ferment had reached the Midwest and people were just full of ideas and protests, opinions, speaking their minds, finding ways to be free and anti-establishment.”

From Entering Laughing: Senator Franken’s long journey

By John Colapinto, published July 20, 2009 in The New Yorker