MPR’s Greta Cunningham interviews Wendell Anderson, former governor of Minnesota; and Chuck Ruhr, a Minneapolis advertising executive, as they look back at the 1973 Time magazine issue that highlighted the state of Minnesota. Anderson and Ruhr discuss the Minnesota reflected in those pages and how things have changed.
It was a simpler time -- there were no sane lanes, no cell phones, no Timberwolves. The IDS was shiny new, the Mall of America was not even a glint in the Ghermezian brothers' eyes. And Minnesota was a different place. On August 13, 1973, Time magazine devoted its cover and a six-page spread to Minnesota. The cover gushed "The good life in Minnesota," and the article boasted it was "a state that works."