Advertising campaigns for Duluth’s KDAL radio in the trade press were intent on revealing the cosmopolitan dimensions of Duluth. These ads both reveal Duluth’s unique industries and reveal that some of Duluth’s retail, especially, can stand shoulder to shoulder with other major urban areas.
This ad campaign, luring businesses to advertise on TV in Duluth/Superior uses a picture of supporters of the Revolutionary government of Cuba manning a machine gun post overlooking one of the main streets, Zapata Avenue, into the heart of Havana, Jan. 4, 1959.
Radio and television audiences in Duluth were surveyed in 1961. While the general demographics could be useful for media historians, it might surprise the readers of Perfect Duluth Day that, in 1961, the category of “first generation Scandinavian immigrants” was statistically significant in a survey like this. We are not so far away from the days when Duluth was a rich community built from immigrants, with all the magic and tension that follows from immigration.
Information from Media History Digital Library.
Briefly, Duluth-Superior radio stations KDAL and WEBC advertised together. I found these joint ads while scouring a database of media trade publications.
I’ve been excavating media magazines for references to Duluth. Some of them are adverts for WEBC 560 AM, which is presently branded at “Northland Fan” and broadcasts Duluth-area sports interspersed with statewide sports talk from KFAN in Minneapolis and national sports talk from FOX Sports Radio.
Archive.org has the 1920 Duluth Central High School yearbook, Zenith, available for perusal online.
The Internet Archive hosts the 1941 edition of the Denfeld Oracle. My friends’ grandparents — those are the folks I am looking for in here, I think. And a nod to “then and now.”
Movie trade publications loved the NorShor Theatre and its milk bar. These features on the NorShor were taken from the Media History Digital Library.
A colleague sent me a link to the novel False Negative by David B. Rusterholz, which is set in a fictional university in Superior/Duluth. The author lives in River Falls, a semi-rural, semi-suburb-of-the-Twin Cities community.
Has anyone read it?
The Internet Archive hosts advertisements from transportation-themed magazines. This one features Duluth as the endpoint on a steamer trip to the Northwest, before joining the train to Seattle and points nearby in Canada and Oregon.
This advert from Life magazine promotes trips from Buffalo through Chicago and Milwaukee to Duluth. I found it on the Internet Archive.
Ryan Fleming of Rogue Robot Comics and Games was on KSTP-TV’s Minnesota Live with a nearly statewide audience, showing off hot holiday gift items and/or “a little bit of everything in geekdom.”
I found reference to Duluth in Anarchy: A Journal of Anarchist Ideas, issue #84, from February 1968, with a feature about something I have never heard of, the Kropotkin House.
