As part of Minnesota Public Radio’s Voice of Minnesota series, MPR’s Gary Eichten interviews George Latimer, former St. Paul mayor. Latimer talks about his life and work, beginning in the early 1940's in Schenectady, New York, where Latimer grew up as a shopkeeper's son. He would become, and still remains, one of Minnesota's most popular politicians.
Back in 1963, Democrat George Latimer left New York to practice labor law in St. Paul. The city, and the state for that matter, would never be quite the same. Latimer would oversee a major downtown building boom as St. Paul's longest serving mayor. He would also serve on the University of Minnesota Board of Regents and the St. Paul School Board, run for governor, and head to Washington as a top official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
This is part one of a two part interview.
Transcripts
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SPEAKER 1: They were storekeepers. My father was a jack of all trades. My father was really the child of farmer, Yankee, Protestants from upstate New York who had been here forever.
And my mother was Catholic Lebanese growing up in a merchant family. And those two cultures collided sometime in the '20s, and three neurotic boys grew out of that, my two big brothers and I.
And my father was a jack of all trades. Growing up on a farm, he could fix anything. None of it rubbed off on me or my brothers, but he could fix anything. So he'd done anything. He'd worked as a construction guy, he'd run a few jobs.
During the war, he was what they called an expediter, which is really a quality control guy for aircraft parts at the General Electric company. We used to call it GE. But then through it all, my mother and father owned and ran a store their whole lives from 1942 until they retired both in their 70s.
SPEAKER 2: Why didn't you do that? I mean, you'd be a good merchant--
SPEAKER 1: Well, maybe I did. Maybe I never left the store. I know it's corny, but I swear I worked for my mother and father when I was 9, 10, 11 years old in that store. And the store was in an old Irish and German Catholic parish in Schenectady, a real old factory town.
And from the '40s through the '70s, it became pretty blighted old central city neighborhood. But in the '40s and '50s, it was a pretty strong neighborhood. In any event, just met every type of person, and I took them on one at a time. And you learn a lot about people in the store.
And I honestly believe that so much of what I instinctively feel about people and what they're feeling like and how they are, I drew from that experience. That and my mother's milk, I guess. So maybe I never stopped being a storekeeper. I've never regretted those years.
SPEAKER 2: You said that you in part became a labor lawyer because you'd worked in Union jobs and come to have some sympathy for working people. Did you see the-- and back in those days, did you see the business owners as kind of evil ogres trying to exploit the working man or?
SPEAKER 1: Well, I'd like to clean up my act and say that, no, I thought differently than that. I never was an extreme populist, thinking that having money or corporate was bad. But I must tell you that in the '40s and '50s when I grew up, the company was not in my mind a benevolent presence, the big companies.
So the candid statement is that I cannot honestly say I was a brick thrower. I wasn't. But I saw the power of large and wealthy corporations over the lives of people.
And I became convinced that although you couldn't be a storekeeper as a kid and not believe in capitalism, at the same time, I very early developed a belief that you needed-- capitalism was good, but you needed to have fetters there. That companies were not just going to do the right thing because they're benevolent. You're going to have to keep an eye on corporate power.
And then I saw early examples of discrimination right in the construction work. I saw Black laborers who could outwork any of us be sent down the road. We used to say, if there was a layoff, there was no question the Blacks were first to go.
So when I was very young, although there weren't a lot of Blacks and not a lot of what we now designate as minorities, not a lot of Hispanics or Asians, but I saw enough even then in upstate New York.
And then I did a lot of reading as a kid to become convinced that America was a big, open, wonderful place in many ways, but it could also be very cruel to people who are not on the inside, whether there was the poor or the people of color, or the people who were disadvantaged. So I developed without any real prodding from my parents a certain kind of passion for justice around some of those issues.
SPEAKER 2: Why were you interested in running for mayor when you decide-- 1976 you jumped into the race, despite the good advice of your wife and family. What were you hoping to accomplish?
SPEAKER 1: I'd been so active as a regent and school board member and all the rest, my kids growing up there, that I just kind of liked the city. And I loved where we grew up around the St. Luke's neighborhood, and I felt the city had great possibilities.
And I felt that a lot of it was frittered away by minor league arguing and foolishness. And that there were great opportunities for St. Paul to make it a more livable city. And St. Paul has always had a kind of persistent paranoia. And so they tended to look over their shoulder at what the big city was doing across the river.
And there was a particular stalemate in downtown-- it's very humbling, but also instructive that when the current mayor ran, that they talked about bringing the city back to life and all that. And here I thought it was alive all those years. I thought it was alive. I didn't know it was dead.
But it was a strong feeling that a good mediator, a good negotiator, a good leader, someone who brought everybody together around a table, could get the city moving in directions that it had not moved. And that's what kind of moved me.