Big Foundation Is a Special Blessing for Small Minnesota Town

It’s a pretty little town of 8,000 where the freight train pokes through twice a day, where the Mississippi is no longer navigable and where people would never think of trying to beat someone out of a parking space.

The drugstore has a cardboard box filled with pennies near the cash register. The signs says: “If you need a penny take, if you’ve got an extra, toss one in.”

It’s Grand Rapids, Minn., not to be confused with the much larger Grand Rapids, Mich., and it is going through hard times now, with lumbering down and the iron range in recession. Unemployment runs about 17% in the county. But this small town has a special blessing.

More Than $100 Million

It’s the only small town in America with a foundation worth more than $100 million right in town. More important, the foundation was not established to solve world problems, nor to fight a specific social ill or disease. It’s there just to benefit the people of this area, to enhance their quality of life.

The Blandin Foundation, established 44 years ago, is required by law to give away $6 million each year, which is twice the city budget.

Not all the money goes into the city, but the foundation’s imprint is obvious: a first-class YMCA, Blandin beach, the restored old school and train station, the high school swimming pool, a 600-seat performing arts theater far finer than most off-Broadway theaters of comparable size and the most handsome high school band uniforms in the country. Not to mention the little things like fancy two-way radios for the police, ball fields, hockey rinks, all built with a little help from Blandin.

Roughly half of the foundation’s spending each year is now in the primary area, Grand Rapids and 40 miles around it. The rest goes into the secondary areas, or for statewide projects.

Nonetheless, it’s enough money to carry a sense of responsibility.

Caution Exercised

“If we’re not careful, we’ll intrude into everyone’s life,” said Paul Olson, the executive director.

“If we spent $6 million in a town where the city budget is about $3 million, we would just run this town right down the rat hole. We would stifle their sense of initiative. Maybe not in the first generation, but if you look at wealthy families, the second, third and fourth generations get pretty weak-kneed.”

They even speak here of “Blandinitis.” That refers to the tendency of people with a cause to ask Blandin for the money first and figure out a way to raise it some other way only if rejected.

Or, as Keith Tok, who runs the Ace Hardware store, says: “It’s always been go to poppa and see what you can get.”

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer place. There are 25 churches in town, one taxicab, 37 restaurants, 266 organizations and 545 businesses, some just mom and pop operations.

30,000 Population

The population stands at 8,000, but that’s a little misleading. It’s closer to 30,000 if you count the people who live 15 minutes away on one of the beautiful lakes.

Despite the comforting presence of its opulent benefactor, “we’re definitely not wallowing in money,” said George A. Rossman, publisher of the twice-weekly newspaper. His file cabinets and memory are awash with official statistics. He finds them all beneath a stuffed immature bald eagle, killed 75 years ago, when it was still legal. He even has the papers to prove this.

Rossman knows, for instance, that the median income per family is $20,894 in the county, that 84% of the residents are homeowners, that the median value of a home is $36,000 and only eight houses are listed as being worth more than $200,000. He knows that of the 43,000 souls in the county, there are 1,083 Native Americans, 4 Eskimos, 29 blacks, 11 Japanese, 1 Korean, 1 Indian and 19 Chinese.

The foundation started out modestly, giving away $200,000 to $300,000 a year until a 1969 IRS ruling forced it to sell the paper company it owned because it was a profit-making operation.

Those who knew Charles K. Blandin say that must have set him to whirling in his grave, which, incidentally, is in the park he built for mill employees.

Sale Netted $80 Million

The 1977 sale netted more than $80 million. Coupled with other foundation monies, interest and loan repayments, that total is now $134 million, putting the Blandin Foundation among the top 250 foundations in the United States.

Because of that, a professional foundation man was hired, a staff came into town, a building was put up to house it and some local folk looked on with a wary eye.

“I think we’ve got a monster by the tail and I don’t think we can spend this money within Blandin’s intentions,” said Clarence (Tex) Akre, a retired mill worker who was personally appointed to the board of trustees by Blandin.

The money cannot be given to individuals or used for anything that tax dollars should support. No capital expenditures are made outside of Itasca County, of which Grand Rapids is the county seat.

There is a bit of stretching of the tax dollar rule. The school swimming pool, for instance, kept getting rejected in referendums, so the foundation finally decided to build it.

Olympic-Size Pool

It didn’t go cheap, but then, the foundation never does. This pool is Olympic size and has a diving tank and portholes so that the coaches can evaluate the underwater follow-through on the butterfly.

“My kids complain when they come back from meets with other schools. They say the pools are crummy,” said Anne Huntley, one of the five city council members and United Way appeal chairman.

“We could deluge the area if we wanted to,” said Margaret Matalamaki, one of the seven Grand Rapids members of the board of trustees. “It is necessary to go out of the area.”

That is within the prerogatives of the foundation. It gave, for instance, $300,000 to the Minneapolis-St. Paul zoo on the assumption that people here benefit from it and Grand Rapids could never support a zoo.

Surrounding communities are considered part of the environs, and they too receive funds for special projects--centers for senior citizens, ball fields and, inevitably, fire trucks.

‘Funded Almost Everything’

“It used to be that we funded almost everything anybody asked for because we had the money. We funded Little League uniforms, swings for the parks and playgrounds, diving boards, skating rinks, development of baseball fields,” said Vivian Trboyevich, who has been with the foundation for 25 years and remembers when it was run out of a little office in the paper mill.

“That was in our brick-and-mortar period,” she says. “Now, we do more programs.”

“A sure way to get a laugh at a board meeting is a fire truck project or a blueberry project,” said Eugene Rothstein, a trustee who runs a real estate business. He has 11 children and estimates that he has attended 1,200 hockey games, lived through 110 years of piano lessons and 50 years of college tuition. He’s 64 “and holding.”

“I don’t know how many fire trucks we’ve bought over the years,” said Rothstein, “maybe 12 or 15. And then, once they’ve got the fire truck, they need somewhere to house it. And we usually end up giving them that, too.

“Blueberries. Someone always has a project to make the wild blueberries an economic crop,” he says. “It’s never worked. Maybe someday it will.”

Money Loaned to Airline

The foundation has been virtually everywhere, supporting everything from camp scholarships for needy children to putting up towers so loggers to the north could watch television, to loaning money to a feeder airline so that it could continue to operate twice daily flights to and from the cities, to loaning more than $250,000 to produce a documentary about life on the Iron Range.

Samples from the 1984 annual report:

--$337,200 to the Range Community Fund to help Range communities with high unemployment.

--$15,000 to help buy rescue equipment for the Warba-Feely-Sago Fire Department.

--$80,000 to make Grand Rapids a site to test a values-based sex education program.

--$40,000 over two years to the Itasca Orchestral Society in Grand Rapids.

--$150,000 to help start up the new Ordway Music Theatre in St. Paul.

Funds to Firewood Business

--$50,000 to an Indian firewood business.

--$1,025,000 to the Itasca Development Corp. to help foster expansion of small businesses in Grand Rapids.

--$124,500 over five years to help develop a fungus in roots that stimulates tree growth.

The grants go from more than $1 million down to $600 for the city of Northome to help out the senior citizens’ center.

Home-grown and home-oriented, the foundation, while professionally staffed, is not bureaucratic.

“We’re not like the federal government,” said Kathryn Jensen, a staff member. “If you are missing a figure, we don’t mail it back, we just call up and ask for it.”

Still, there are stricter standards now of how and why money is spent. In the old days, it was an attitude of, “you’ve known me 20 years, you can trust me, it’s a good project.”

Today there are challenge grants. Grand Rapids people were asked to raise $300,000 to get $3 million from the foundation. The community raised $600,000 before the deadline.