Gorbymania: A Sign of Dissent in Minnesota

Not everybody was going gaga over Gorby.

True, the fires of Gorbymania are being stoked by entrepreneurs with souvenirs to sell and by a high-powered corps of business leaders and politicians eager to capitalize on the Gorbachev visit.

But at least one Minneapolis resident was not impressed. Injecting a note of dissent, the owner of a trendy restaurant covered his windows with a five-foot-long banner that reads, “Gorby Meets Goofy. Visits Iron Range Toilet Paper Recycling Plant.”

Besides satirizing the media hoopla surrounding Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s seven-hour visit to the Twin Cities on Sunday, the sign in the window of the Loon Cafe takes a political swipe at Gov. Rudy Perpich, whose sometimes far-fetched ideas to stimulate economic rebirth in Minnesota’s depressed Iron Range region have helped to earn him the nickname of “Gov. Goofy.”

A small collection of “Dear Gorbachev” letters from Minnesota readers made its way into Sunday’s edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

“I had every reason to hate you and all Soviets,” wrote Ilona Dukes of Waseca. “My family and I escaped from Hungary after Soviet troops crushed the uprising in 1956. But you have won my respect and admiration.”

“If you’d like to feel one of the true pleasures of freedom, come over and I’ll let you take a ride on my Harley Davidson Superglide, a real steel American machine,” wrote Peter Holseth of Minneapolis.

A warning came from David A. Jones of St. Paul: “Our elected officials are turning our democratic system into a socialist state, and I don’t have to tell you what happens to socialist states.”

George A. Erikson of Robinsdale came up with a different kind of warning: “I worry that your people will too eagerly embrace everything Western. . . . Tell them that our capitalist system, though a great engine of economic development, can also be an engine of greed. . . .”

It sometimes seems as if Gorbymania is the over-40 corporate equivalent of that peculiar 1960s craze, Beatlemania.

Even though the coveted invitations to a two-hour business meeting with Gorbachev went out by fax machine at the last moment, business leaders dropped what they were doing and scrambled to get to Minneapolis.

The normally half-empty Sunday morning Northwest Airlines flight from Washington to Minneapolis was jammed, carrying, among others, much of the Minnesota congressional delegation heading for a lunchtime date with the Soviet leader.

But with the guests limited to 145 people, executives left off the list were more than a little miffed at the governor’s office.

There is a “frenzy of desire” to get close to Gorbachev, Minnesota Trade Commissioner David Speer said. For those who did not make the list, he said, “it’s like lifelong season ticket holders getting shut out of a World Series game.”

One name that did make the list was that of H. R. Haldeman, the former aide to Richard M. Nixon who served 18 months in prison for his part in the Watergate scandal.

Haldeman now works for Americom International Corp., an Irvine firm that is helping to set up the first U.S.-run hotel in the Soviet Union. Perpich’s office was quick to emphasize that the invitation was the idea of Soviet officials, and not of the governor.

There probably has never been a press center quite like the one set up by the state of Minnesota for the Gorbachev visit. The baseball playing field of the Metrodome, home of the Minnesota Twins, was parceled out to the hundreds of visiting journalists and television crews.

Correspondents for the Los Angeles Times, for example, worked at a table in right field, where John Moses and Shane Mack usually platoon for the Twins.

The scoreboard did not flash any scores for the press but instead issued a stern warning: “No Eating on the Astroturf.”

Times staff writers Stanley Meisler and David Lauter contributed to this story.