A writer I've long considered the Ring Lardner or
Damon Runyon of North Dakota, my home state, is retiring from the Grand Forks
Herald newspaper after 40 years of writing on deadline for both the Herald as
well as the Minneapolis Star Tribune. His name is Chuck Haga, and you've likely
never heard of him if you've never read either newspaper.
That's too bad. You've missed out on some fine
writing.
Chuck Haga might have written for a relatively small,
regional newspaper when he wrote for the Herald, but his columns, features and reporting on that
"large, rectangular blank spot in the nation's mind," as Eric
Sevareid, another North Dakota newsman, once dubbed mine and Chuck's
motherland, transcended their roots every bit as much as, say, Alice Munro's short
stories transcend her rural Canada.
I'm not saying Chuck deserves the Nobel Prize, which Ms.
Munro just won, but if it were up to me--yeah, I'd give it to him.
I started reading the Grand Forks Herald religiously
back in the 70's and 80's because of Chuck's funny, humane columns that were
written with Steinbeckian heart and bucolic simplicity. They related even to me
at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. How extraordinary for this hayseed
wannabe scribe to find a “real” writer from my hometown writing about this
dreary backwater and making it much more than a blank spot on my own
consciousness!
Chuck made North Dakota in general and the Red River
Valley in particular, seem like a real place--like Huck Finn's Mississippi and
Ahab's big, chilly North Atlantic. My provincial home country with its long,
cold, bland winters and its ice fisherman's and hockey player's one-dimensional
reality was given the same sort of significance as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha
County.
The dimension of Ray Bradbury's Mars...
Having early on found Chuck Haga's newspaper work
meaningful as well as entertaining and artful, I've over the ensuing years
sought out other newspaper writers to my great enjoyment and enrichment. I can
honestly say that I've learned as much about the world and the craft of straight-forward
writing from Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Liebling, Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, and Mike
Royko, just to name a few other newspaper writers whom I admire, as I've
learned from the novels of, say, Ernest Hemingway.
And I have Chuck Haga to thank for that.
Funny how just because a guy or gal writes on deadline
on pulp newsprint, he's less esteemed. Well, it ain't right. If you ever get a
chance to read Chuck Haga's flowing columns about real people in a real place,
you'll see that it is so.
I hope Chuck isn't really retiring but that he's merely
leaving the Herald to start a brand new writing career. Or maybe to collect his
columns into one, big, fat, entertaining book.
For a sample of Chuck's writing, click here to read his
farewell column in the Grand Forks Herald.
