Transcript of Nice Little House

Lemonada. Previously on Ghost of a Chance.

A group of Black families lived in and around my neighborhood. And then by 1940, almost all of those families are gone. And one of these families lived in my house. Their names were Harry and Clementine Robinson.

For more than four years, Eric has been searching every detail he can find about the Robinsons.

You're not property anymore. That's a very different disposition on life. He was exhaling in every way, and that very much impresses me.

Because if they stayed in Mecca, there's nothing there for them. The elation turned to disappointment must have been palpable.

I mean, I can't imagine.

She's living in this boarding house at 1107 Harrison Street. Who else is living in this boarding house? A man named Harry Robinson.

If you're a Black in Kansas City at that moment before the Great Migration, it's a really tenuous place to be and moment to be there.

They came to Minnesota to find something a bit better than where they were. The hope that the father the north you go, the better off you're going to be as a Black person in America.

You don't understand a lot of things now, but later on you will.

You're listening to Ghost of a Chance from the Minnesota Star Tribune. This is the story of my search to find out what happened to Harry and Clementine Robinson. I'm Eric Roper.

I'm Melissa Townsend.

This is episode 2.

When Eric started his search to find out what happened to Harry and Clementine Robinson once they arrived in Minneapolis, he realized the local mainstream news newspapers didn't cover the Black community here very much. But lucky for him, the Black newspapers from the 1900s had recently been digitized. They were online, and they were a gold mine. In 1908, there was a Black newspaper published in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It was called The Appeal. It was one of the premier Black newspapers in the Midwest.

The Appeal and the other Black newspapers like it were like my time machine into this period to hear what people saying we can see both national news and also opinionated editorials.

The editor of The Appeal at the time was a man named JQ Adams, and JQ Adams had a daughter. Her name was Adina Gibbs. This is an old recording of her, part of a set of oral histories at the Minnesota Historical Society, and she's talking about why her father published the appeal.

My father wanted so much to educate colored people to be decent, to be upright.

He always wanted them to appear in a right light. I have recollections of his telling them when they were in groups if they didn't behave themselves. He just tell them, Don't act like this. Don't let these people see you acting like this.

Newspapers defined respectability.

Bill Green is an historian based in the Twin Cities.

That's one source of knowing what we need to do in order to be respectable. And that's one reason why they were so important to the Black community.

You see a lot of images of people's houses on occasion. Today, we would find that very odd to just put a bunch of people's houses in the paper, but it's a celebration of, Here's who we are. Here's where we live. Here's what we have accomplished.

Then there are the social pages.

When you read it, it's like social media today, with people tagging where they are, who they're with, what they're doing.

We asked a man named John Coleman to read the headlines from the Black Newspapers. He's a voice actor based in Minneapolis.

The May party given by Madame Nelly Hale-McCuller at Holcom Hall Wednesday night was a most delightful affair which was well-attended. Ms. Bertha Clay was crowned Queen of May.

If you were hoping to aspire to the middle class like we think Harry and Clementine were, the paper told you how you needed to present yourself. It's a good sign that after Clementine finished her course at the Moller School of Dermatology and joined Harry in Saint Paul, it was posted in the appeal newspaper.

It's dated May second, 1908. This is a cosmic date that we see throughout the story because that was Harry and Clementine's shared birthday.

Ms. Clementine Brown, a graduate of Mola College of Dermatology, Chicago, is in the city, the guest of Mrs. Willis Green. She contemplates following her profession if the field looks good.

So then I found a marriage certificate that showed that just a month after Clementine arrived in Minnesota, she and Harry got married.

And for a long time, that's where their trail ended. Eric knew they would end up in his house in 1917, but he didn't know how they got there.

I'm searching online for quite some time, and finally, I found some clips in the Twin City Star newspaper saying, Mr. And Mrs. Robinson of Duluth are visiting some friends. Then I think, Well, that's interesting. I start to poke around Duluth more, and I find a Harry Robinson in the city's directory, and he's working as a Harry a chef, and he's also listed as working as a cook. He's living right next to the primary Black Church of Duluth.

So he found Harry Robinson, but Eric still couldn't find Clementine.

I had tried Clementine Robinson, Harry Robinson, looking at keyword searches. I'm getting really nothing. I'm getting some other Harry Robinsons. Then I start seeing, though, C. H. Robinson, and I'm like, Oh, that's interesting, because Clementine went by C. H. Once in a while later on. Then I look at these classified ads, and it's like, Mrs. C. H. Robinson is a dermatologist. Okay.

Mrs. C. H. Robinson, graduate of Dermatology, to do your hairdressing, manicuring, hand massage, facial massage, shampooing, singing, dying and bleaching. Scalp treatment of specialty, special attention to residents and hotel calls.

Eric actually dug up a textbook from the Molar School of Dermatology to figure out if there was a match between what Clementine learned in school and the services offered in these classified ads. He really wanted to be sure this was Clementine. She's doing everything.

It's almost like chapter by chapter. It's the hair singing, the hair, the bleaching. I mean, everything one I won, it's matching up with that textbook. I'm like, Okay, got it. I knew for sure that they were living in Duluth.

Now, for those of you not in Minnesota, Duluth is a small city in Northern Minnesota, right on the shores of Lake Superior. It's about 90 miles to the Canadian border as the crow flies. When Eric told me Harry and Clementine were in Duluth, I was like, why? What's in Duluth that would draw a young Black couple in 1908.

Duluth is a boom town in this period, basically. In addition to saw milling, which is a huge industry, and lumber, you have one of the largest reserves of iron ore in the countries on the iron range of Northern Minnesota. And there's a lot of foreign-born people living there. For example, you have a lot of Finnish immigrants who are arriving there, and sometimes it's known as the Helsinki of America. This stuff gets shipped out to the rest of the country through the Port of Duluth. And so what you have are iron mining magnates, steel magnates. There's a saying around Duluth that it had the most millionaires per capita in the United States.

Eric knew a lot about Duluth, but what he didn't know was what it was like to live there as a Black person in the early 1900s. This is when Eric began to see a side of Minnesota that he never knew.

I found this old recording of a woman named Ethel Nance. She was a Black woman who grew up in Duluth. When I checked the city directories, I realized that Harry and Clementine moved into the neighborhood where she grew up. She said her father worked on the boats at the Port and in the hotels in town. In this old recording, she talked about the time that he bought their first house in Duluth.

He came down and was walking around the back of the house, and the neighbor woman came to her door and stood there with her arms, Kimbo, and he said he purposely walked slowly to give her a chance to really get riled up. And when he can't close enough, she said, I hope you don't think you're going to live there. He said, Well, I was thinking about it, but he didn't tell if he already owned the place.

Ethel said once her family moved in, the neighbors didn't become any more friendly. Neighbors on one side of the house built a fence that she called a spite fence. The only thing you could see out the windows of the house was the fence. So her father built another story onto the house to see above the fence. But then the neighbors on the other side of the house sabotaged their drain pipe.

But it was raining, and I came in and said, Mrs. Rickard, move the water pipe. At that time, we had a family living in the basement, and it meant by turning that water pipe, the water would go into a window.

I've heard a lot about the history of Duluth. I hadn't heard about the attitudes that Black people were putting up with. I'm sure that has a powerful impact on people's psyche over times in neighborhoods like this.

In that recording, Ethel Nantes said it did have an impact on her father.

Well, he always said that these people were antagonistic and didn't want us there. He didn't want us to run errands or do anything at all for them, and really didn't want us to talk to them.

There's a book that came out in 2022 that includes some of this history. It's written by a man named Chad Montry. Eric reached out to him and he asked, What should I know about the experience of Black residents who were living in Duluth in the early 1900s? Chad said, At the time, Duluth was very racially segregated, and where you could live, where you could socialize, where you could work.

A lot of them work as waiters, or they work as elevator operators or custodians. Whites do not let them have access to most other jobs.

Now, obviously, this is common place in the Jim Crow South, but Harry and Clementine, they moved north to get away from that, and Minnesota was supposed to be different.

Eric knew that in Southern states from Maryland, Texas, They were Jim Crow laws that required racially segregated schools, railroad cars, parks, even jails. Many states made interracial marriage illegal. But he also knew that that wasn't the case in Minnesota. In fact, at the time, there was a law on the books that made it illegal to discriminate against Black people in public places. Eric asked historian Bill Green about it, and Bill said it was a paradox, not just in Duluth, but across West Minnesota.

There are two Minnesotans, one that is high-minded and liberal. Coexisting at that time, there's another group of Whites who are anything, and they tend to be in the majority. They seemed to elect progressive leaders, but it didn't really relate to them being progressive towards Blacks. Discrimination was widespread. Black Blacks couldn't go into hotels, couldn't go into restaurants, despite the fact that Minnesota had a law banning that behavior.

Chad Montry said, Yeah, just look at what happened between white settlers and the Indigenous people from the region. There was a war in 1862 between US forces and the Dakota in Minnesota. Chad said that sharpened the racism that then would be aimed at newly arrived Black residents.

I think the Dakota War is in my book because that's the context for Whites in Minnesota then thinking about what's going to happen now that Blacks are emancipated if they move north.

It didn't matter that the Black community in Duluth was only one-half of 1% of the population. Bill Green told us it never mattered how many Black people were in any town. They were always seen as a threat.

There was a lot of talk among White property owners that the smaller numbers of Blacks moving into Minnesota was an indication of a horde about to move in.

In the end, Harry and Clementine didn't stay in Duluth for very long.

In 1913, and this is four years after they moved to Duluth, they leave, and they head south to this bigger city with a bigger Black community, Minneapolis.

Eric wanted to know, what were Harry and Clementine walking into? Was Is Minneapolis any more welcoming than Duluth? To find out, he went to talk with a woman named Kirstin Delagard. She's an historian who specializes in race and housing policies, especially in Minnesota. She runs the Mapping Prejudice Organization.

So just to be clear, in 1910, Minneapolis is not particularly segregated, nor is Saint Paul. And the cities are not unique in this regard. This is true of almost every American city in this time. At the beginning of the 20th century, they are not particularly segregated.

But she said right around the time that Harry and Clementine moved to Minneapolis in 1913, all that was changing.

I mean, there's this whole so-called science of the real estate industry that's emerging at this time, where you have real estate economists developing these models that are saying, Oh, yeah, if there's one Black person in the neighborhood, it brings down the property values this amount. I just want to be clear, this was not based on fact in any way. You read a lot of the press and the interviews with white people in this period, and that's what they'll say. They're like, You have to understand everything I own is in this house, and how dare these black people come in and try to attack the value of my house, which is all I have in the world.

On top of that, real estate developers specifically had their eye on the southwest corner of Minneapolis. It's a lovely part of town. There are a couple of lakes, there are a lot of parks, there's a nice band shell for outdoor concerts, and those developers thought it was ripe for upscale development exclusively marketed to white residents. But there were already Black people living there. Eric asked Kirsten, what did the white residents in that part of town do to their Black neighbors? Kirsten told him about this one family who was living in Southwest Minneapolis around that time.

The Myrick family, Mary Myrick, owned a house which was a home for her extended family. She was a domestic worker, and neighbors pledge to come together and say, We will not give her any work, and we will make sure that she doesn't get any work, so she will be forced to leave because she will not be able to afford to stay in her house.

Kirsten said Mary Myrick held on for eight years before she was forced to sell her house in Southwest Minneapolis. So in 1913, when Harry and Clementine were moving down to Minneapolis, they needed to pick a place to live.

The first time that we see where they're living is in 1915, and they had found a little apartment, a duplex, on the south side of the city, south of downtown.

Kirsten said it was several blocks away from the southwest neighborhoods where there was growing racial tension.

It's considered the very desirable stable integrated neighborhood with good access to parks that people use a lot.

I presume that Clementine was still doing beauty work at this point, and I know that Harry was a waiter. One of the things that surprised me is how many jobs were off limits to Black men in that period. There's studies to show that. You see waiters, porters, barbers, janitors, elevator operators. These are mostly jobs in service. Occasionally, you'll see someone works for the post office, but it's very limiting of what you could do.

We don't know what Harry's experience was like, but in this old recording, a man named A. B. Cassius talked about his experience being a waiter in the 1920s.

When I went to the Curtis Hotel to work as a waiter, I was very discouraged because they only paid $17 a month wages. And if you caught you with any cream in your coffee, they charged you a nickel, and if they caught you with a pat of butter, you had to bear a nickel. If you broke a glass, which in waiting, you're bound to break something, that was all deductible. So there was no way for you to get $17 a month. Each payday for two weeks, you drew about $6 or $7. If you didn't make any tips, you didn't have anything.

Today, that would be about $100 every two weeks.

I discovered that the white waiter downtown at the Radisson and the Nicolet and the The Apples Club, the athletic club, they were all paid $75 a month. And I said, This can't be right.

Today, that would be about $500 every two weeks. The pay discrepancy was remarkable remarkable between white and Black waiters. Harry and Clementine were probably struggling financially, but Eric found an announcement in the newspaper that signaled everything was about to change for them.

It was in the appeal newspaper, and it's dated November fourth, 1916.

Madame C. H. Robinson has been appointed body masseurist at the St. Barnabas Hospital under Dr. Farr.

She's working for Dr. Farr. Dr. Farr is not just some doctor. Dr. Farr is a pioneering, very high tech, eccentric guy. He's playing music in the surgery room, which was very innovative at the time. He's actually innovating in anesthesia at the time, and he was also taking motion pictures of some of these surgeries. You can imagine he's also thinking like, okay, and the other thing I'm going to do is when the patients are done, we're going to very carefully massage their wounds and so that they heal appropriately. But again, the guy is on the cutting edge.

When Eric told historian Bill Green, he was impressed.

Black woman with that have rolled at a hospital, a white hospital. That strikes me as noteworthy. This is important.

Clearly, it allowed Clementine and Harry to have enough financial stability to say, Okay, we're going to stop We're renting. We're actually going to buy a house.

This is a big deal. This is when Clementine and Harry bought the house that now belongs to Eric. In order to get all the details, Eric reached out to a woman named Penny Peterson. She's an historian who also works with the group Mapping Prejudice. She specializes in analyzing historical property records.

She found the original ad in the newspaper from 1916.

Stop paying rent. Nice little six-room house with three bedrooms near Nicolet. Second, Carlynes, can be bought of owner for $3,000 cash and $35 a month.

Today, that $3,000 would be more than $70 $10,000 for the house, with a monthly payment of roughly $900.

Since Eric also bought this house, he can imagine all the features Clementine and Harry probably loved about it.

It's not a big house. It's very cottage style. There's a beautiful small stained glass window in the living room. There's arched passageways between the rooms downstairs. There's big bay windows up in the bedroom upstairs. There's a big claw-foot tub, which I sit in today and think about We all sat in the same tub, but nobody wants to hear that.

In 1917, Harry and Clementine bought the house. Maybe it was the claw-foot tub that really cinched the deal.

Even though they have this steady income, they don't have a nest egg to put into a house. So they buy the house on a contract for deed.

And that made Penny Peterson say, Uh-oh.

So contracts for deeds are bad.

You don't get the deed until you've paid off the entire house.

If you miss one payment, you'd lose everything.

Back in those days, as is now, you could have a big balloon payment that you somehow have to put together. And that's where people often lose it. It's clear that Harry and Clementine were taking a big risk when they bought this house, partly because of what Penny Peterson said about the contract for deed, but also because of something Kirsten Delagard pointed out about the location of the house.

The Robinson's house is in this contested zone in the years after they move in.

In other words, they were now going to be living in Southwest Minneapolis. That's where the Myrick family lived. That's where Eric's house is.

By the way, I didn't know any of this history, but the census data shows us that there's more than 6,000 families who are living there, and only nine of them are Black. It was one of those areas of the city where White residents are starting to target their Black neighbors.

Why buy this house? Why take this risk? Eric asked historian Bill Green.

It's an investment. The challenge that the African-American faces is acquiring property, getting wealth in that way. We don't necessarily want to integrate, but we want better property.

That's one reason. But Bill Green said there's also another reason. This house was a signal that they were part of that aspiring middle class, with their lives splashed across the pages of the appeal newspaper paper.

Yeah, that's it in a nutshell, actually. The leadership of the Black community at the end of the 19th century took efforts to embrace the trappings of middle class status, which was how respectability was defined in the larger world as well as in the Black community.

For Harry and Clementine Robinson, buying this house was a signal that they were worthy of respect. Worked, but now they had to keep it. We'll be right back.

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The Robinsons bought their house in a predominantly white neighborhood in Southwest Minneapolis in 1917. That same year, the United States entered World War What?

Industrial jobs are suddenly opening up a little bit. These jobs that we were talking about that were closed off, they're starting to loosen up. And so, Harry landed a job as a furnace man at an ammunition factory that was run by the Minneapolis Steel and Machinery Company. For a little bit there, I thought, was he just adjusting the temperature of the machinery company? No, he's actually running these fiery hot furnaces that are helping with the heat treatment of shelves.

We don't have any information about how Harry felt about working in the plant, but we did find this recording of another Black man who had the same type of job at the same company years later during World War II. His name is Albert Dylan. In this recording, he described his first day on the job.

I can't ever laugh. Thank you. I didn't know what I was going to as a shell plant. And I walked in. All I was dirty, filthy thing. I think the day about pollution. Oh, my gosh, what that plant was doing to individuals. But that time, there's no one concern. I just get those shells out. As I was walking down, I had all my nice little blue suits that I took that award. I'd been going to school, and just as keen as I could be, I was walking down with the form, and I could see all these fellows sitting up on the shelves and all this dirt around.

So I walked-Eventually, Alan began work on the furnace, just like That finish is cockeyed hot.

When you'd walk down this aisle, the average individual would come in the plant. He'd have to walk at least 50 feet from it because they couldn't stand the heat. I ended up with a challenge by working right there at the door. It shows you how a body can make an adjustment.

I've seen pictures of these guys, and their clothes are torn and dirty, and they're dipping these ammunition cells in hot oil, essentially. This is not pleasant work, but it's still an opportunity.

Harry Robinson was 37 years old, and this was the first job he had where he wasn't serving people. But historian Bill Green said, Harry was probably still working as a waiter. This work on the furnace in the munitions plant was probably his second job.

Most Blacks who were of the middle class, basically, the husbands had one or two jobs because the jobs that they were normally able to get a hold of paid menial wages. They were sometimes porters and janitors and waiters at the same time.

Bill said if Harry could bring in two incomes, it would free up Clementine to participate in social clubs.

The men, their status was their inability to allow their wives or to afford their wives to participate in club activity.

That's exactly what I saw in the newspapers. It was like, whoa, there's a lot of social activity happening in the house, and it really starts right around this time, 1917, into the early 1920s. You can see them all over the appeal newspaper, but other Black newspapers that are publishing at that period.

Mrs. Lagrinia Williams of Winnipeg is visiting Mrs. Ed Hall of Saint Paul. Mrs. Harry Robinson entertained her last week. Mrs. Ida Sellers, recently organized the Phyllis Wheatley Literary Art Club with Mrs. Clementine Robinson, Vice President. Mrs. C. H. Robinson, West 39th Street, entertained at dinner 16 guests on Christmas Day.

Clementine was also being celebrated for her work.

Mrs. G. H. Cranier of Moose Lake, Saskatchewan, who has taken her treatment, says, They are wonderful. Madam Robinson is the only one west of Chicago using the thermoelectric medium.

I want to give you a little space here to savor this moment. They made it. I mean, they still had to do some really tough jobs for a living, and there was probably no extra money lying around. But their life spread across the pages of the appeal newspaper was the picture of middle class Black excellence.

This is when I started to realize that something significant had happened in the house. They've been scraping by for years, working in jobs, the only jobs that are available to them, which are very limited, and yet they've been able to get this far, which is extraordinary.

But we know that the next year, things would begin to change. The summer of 1919 is also known as Red Summer. Red, as in the color of blood. It would go down in the history books as one of the most racially violent seasons in the 20th century. Historian Bill Green gave us the details.

I believe there are as many as 40 cities that saw race riots throughout the nation, mostly in the north and in the east, and occasionally in the far west, in California.

These cities included Chicago, Omaha, New York, Washington, DC, among many others. Bill told us this rioting included something not often seen before. Black people were arming themselves and fighting back. This was just after World War I had ended and Black vets had returned to the United States with a new sense of entitlement. Edward Nichols was one of them. He was a Black man who grew up in Northern Minnesota. In this old recording, he talked about his time in France as part of the US Army, and then what happened when he came back to the States.

Well, when we arrived in France, I was a young man, 17 years old. Now, here, we were pleasant people, and we wanted to be friendly. And these people, they wanted to be friendly, too. And we had money, and we'd buy their wine and frattenize with them, and they liked us very well. Things were pretty good. You could go in any theater or anything. But when I come back to France, I took my girl to the theater, and the girl in the ticket booth says, Well, you can go in, but you have to sit down front, the front three rows, or go up in the balcony in what they call nature heaven. And I resented very strongly, but these were things that happened while I was gone. We had quite a bit of trouble there.

Bill Green told us there was a widespread sense that people were fed up with this discrimination, and they were fed up with having to be compliant and polite.

And It all contributed to a sense of Blacks drawing the line, and that caused a reaction. Blacks standing up created a sense among the white power elite. This is a real threat here.

The riots of 1919 did not spread to Minneapolis, but people in the city definitely knew about them. I found an article in the appeal newspaper, and it was reprinted from a Chicago newspaper called the Chicago Hérald and Examiner.

It was dated September 27, 1919. That would be the fall after Red Summer.

Because our time of rioting is over, some people think the sky is clear again. No idea could be more foolish. So long as we have discrimination, unfair treatment, a feeling of brooding injustice between the white men and colored men, we shall have a burning fuse on its way to high explosive.

In Minnesota, that high explosive came the next year in 1920. That's when a mob of white residents in Duluth lynched three black men.

This was front page national news across the country, including the front page of the New York Times, because it was a triple lynching in a northern city at a time when a lot of people were wagging their fingers at the south, saying, Okay, you guys got to cut out this lynching. In a prominent black newspaper in New York, The New York Age, James Weldon Johnson, who was a leader of the NAACP, he said, The truth about this incident is, Minnesota has turned out to be as bad as any Southern state could be, which is a very damning accusation about Minnesota at the time.

Edward Nichols, that soldier who had come back from France, was in Duluth the night after the lynching. He talked about it in that old recording.

The next night after the mob, the white people said they were going to run all the niggers out of town. And we decided that we'd just barcade ourselves in our house. And I was the only one that had a gun. I had a '45 coal automatic that I brought back from the war. In the night, the Sheriff, and there were quite a few concerned white people about our welfare, wanted to make a relationship with us, but we decided to go it on our own.

And then there was a knock at the door.

So I put on my raincoat and they had these pockets that go through the army raincoat. And I put the '45 coal automatic down in there I caught the trigger back, and I went to the door, and it was a white lad out there and said, What you want? He said he had a telegram from Western Union. But if he just stamped his foot out and murdered him. We're that tense.

When it came to Harry and Clementine, we already knew that many of the white residents in Southwest Minneapolis didn't want their Black neighbors. But Red Summer had emboldened these neighbors to escalate the situation.

I found this article in the Minneapolis Tribune from November 16th, 1920. This really is like the bombshell story that puts a fine point on how intense the neighborhood tensions are at that time.

The headline, Negro Question Causes Protest. Residents of 13th Ward Object to Members of Race as Neighbors.

I should say that Southwest Minneapolis includes the 13th Ward.

It goes on, Protesting against the presence of Negroes Four persons of Negro blood as residents of the 13th Ward, 200 men and women held a meeting at 43rd in Pillsbury Avenue last night in the South Central Community Club rooms.

Eric says this meeting in November of 1920 had a clear objective.

So these folks are saying, We want to get rid of this handful of Black families who live in Southwest Minneapolis.

After Eric read this, he realized the meeting was just five blocks from the Robinson's house. What's now his House.

And this isn't just some random assortment of people. This group was very influential at the time. There were two leaders of the club. One was a man named James McMullen, and the other one was a man named Ewen Cameron. Ewen Cameron around this period would get elected to the State House. And James McMullen, who is the chairman of the meeting, he is a real estate agent. And this is just along the lines of what Kirsten said, that real estate agents play a really important role here of driving this segregation.

I can only imagine what it felt like to be singled out like that and targeted by 200 of your neighbors. It's chilling. So what can Harry and Clementine do? That's next time.

The notion of walking on ice This is very real here. You have to be careful where you step. You have to be very careful with sudden moves that you might make that could result in cracked ice underfoot.

This is Ghost of a Chance. Our website is startribune. Com/ghostofachance. There you can see pictures and documents from the podcast, and you can also sign up to receive news about discussion guides and events. Our email is ghostofachance@star-tribune. Com. Get in touch if you have a question or feedback or a tip related to the Robinson story. We'd also love to know if this story motivated you to do something in your community, so let us know. You can help pay for this incredible story and others like it with a subscription to the Minnesota Star Tribune. Go to our website, startribune. Com. Ghost of a Chance is reported by Eric Roper and written and produced by me, Melissa Townsend. Our executive producer is Jenny Nake Pinkley. Our editor is Mary Joe Webster. Fact-checking by Eric Roper and Mary Joe Webster. Sound design by Marcel Malakabu. Our contributing editors are Star Tribune Managing Editor Maria Reeve and Star Tribune Editor and Senior Vice President Sook Yee Dardarian. Legal review from Randy Lebedoff. The art for our show comes from Anna Boon and Brock Kaplin. Special thanks to Kendall Harkness, Zoe Jackson, Laura McCollum, James Schiffer, Nancy Casey Darnell, Laura Yuin, Taine Danger, and members of the local community who served as our advisors.