Star Tribune from Minneapolis, Minnesota • Page 15

Star Tribune Tuesday ik August 131991 Read then recycle lb Panel waives desegregation for school Indian program can be 83 minority rife "It sets a bad precedent," said Will Antell, director of Indian education for the Minnesota Department of Education. "If this board and this commissioner are charged with some constitutional responsibility, and that is to maintain desegregated schools, I think this gives out the wrong signal." Students continued on page 6B By Rob Hotakainen Staff Writer In a major desegregation ruling, a committee of the State Board of Education voted unanimously Monday to allow the Minneapolis School District to operate one of its new schools with a minority enrollment of more than 83 percent. The 6-0 vote by the board's Educa school to have a higher proportion of minority students than allowed under Minnesota desegregation guidelines. Critics called the vote a mistake and predicted that it could spur a lawsuit. The school is in part of the old Mount Sinai Hospital.

The school will open Sept. 4. Yesterday's vote is significant because it marks the first time that the state has given permission for any tion Standards Committee goes to the full school board today. It already has enough votes to assure passage. The vote means that roughly 500 of the 600 students scheduled to attend the district's new American Indian and French Program at Mount Sinai can be students of color.

i. investigators checked debris left Noel Holston TV, radio sue a different career challenge and other goals." Townsend was not available for further comment, and Brook did not i if tr Staff Photo by David Brewster Explosion in St. Paul St. Paul and Northern States Power Monday by an apparent natural-gas explosion that severely burned a homeowner. Story on Page 3B.

ARE-TV's general manager Linda Brook resigns Jim Klobuchar On the road again, going nowhere I made a modest bow to the glass minarets of downtown Minneapolis on my drive in to work Monday. All right, they weren't the glaciers of the Tetons or the ruby towers of the Kremlin, but they were home and they were available without the penance of jet lag or thieving bears in camp. Still, I have to make a confession. If you have been wandering the Russian steppes and skulking around Robber's Roost in Jackson Hole for nearly a month, it isn't the sight of the city skyline that gets you moist and sudsy about coming back to the Twin Cities. The power shovel did it.

Let me tell me tell you how. I rounded the frontage road on my way to the Golden Valley House and I felt a hulking presence a few feet over my car roof. Something big and toothy. Nearby I could hear the grunt of monster machines. I felt like singing "Home Sweet Home." Something rose in my throat, besides the dust.

There was no doubt about it. I was back. God was in his heaven, the traffic was detouring from four highways and the power shovels were halfway to China. I was about to switch from "Home Sweet Home" to "The Minnesota Rouser" when I looked. I looked up.

The teeth on that scoop had to be a foot long. The diggers were tearing up Ottawa Av. and here was a power shovel's bucket, coming over the hedge of the motel driveway and hanging there fearsomely in the sun, just above my windshield, before diving into the ground to swallow 5 more yards of asphalt. Don't talk to me about flowing seas of grain and the call of the loon. They are nice but obsolete if you want to get seriously mushy about being back home.

Until I saw the jaws of that great steel bucket hanging over my car, I didn't realize how much I had missed. It didn't take me long to begin savoring it again. For the last four or five days I had been roaming the Cascade Canyons and the Beartooth Passes and the velvet meadows of the Big Horn Mountains and feeling the sprays of the Yellowstone, the mystic loneliness of Death Canyon in the Tetons at midnight. "Pleasant," I told my companions. "These are places I have visited for years.

But we all need roots, right? There is something at the center of our daily lives that needs replenishment, something that becomes part of our glands and psyches, something that tells us we are back breathing the air we understand." And for you in Minnesota it's what? one of them asked. "Road tear-up in the summer. It tells me that nothing has changed. The world spins at the same rotation. The cursing motorists are just as vehement and just as helpless.

The same dusty mushrooms hover over the freeway." It started early Monday. I made the mistake of trying to allow 45 minutes to keep an appointment in Hopkins, 7 miles away. By the time I got to St. Louis Park, 4 miles away, I had killed 50 minutes on the engineering marvel that is Interstate 394, now in its eighth exciting year of producing creative neurosis. At that, it was an improvement on the couple in front of me, who had nearly killed each other.

It was what the cops call a domestic. It was aggravated by dust and immovable traffic. People were getting out of cars and playing touch football. With pads. Nothing moved.

1 bowed my head again. I gave thanks. God, it's good to be home. Road tear-up is nothing less than winter's revenge on the snowbirds who desert the ice fields for Hawaii in February and return to enjoy Minnesota in summer. Enjoy the power shovels, pals.

They are part of the mystique. I told myself this is a place I can understand, a place where I can take root. I did. I took root someplace around the Pcnn Av. ramp.

return the Star Tribune's calls. Her managerial performance at KARE is difficult to judge. She generated embarrassing publicity when she replaced the station's nightly "Cheers" reruns with "Cosby Show" reruns, a move she had to retract under heavy viewer protest. She started a chatty afternoon talk show, "Between Friends," that went nowhere in competition with KSTP-TV Ch. 5's "Good Company." She alienated and demoralized some members of the station's news staff with her personnel decisions, particularly the firing of John Lansing, the respected assistant news director, over "philosophical differences" just six months after he had been named Gannett's news executive of the year.

Gannett Broadcasting announced the resignation Monday of Linda Rios Brook, president and general manager of KARE-TV (Ch. 1 1) since May 1989, and her immediate replacement by Hank Price, president and general manager of Gannett's station in Greensboro, N.C. Ron Townsend, Gannett president, said that Brook had resigned "to pur- Hepatitis scare slows Chi-Chi's business No room at the Inn for Normandy staff (T On the other hand, KARE made its strongest showing in years in the July ratings sweeps, regaining the lead in the 10 p.m. news competition. A newsroom victory party was postponed because of the Gannett officials' visit yesterday.

The wild card in Brook's departure is KARE-TV continued on page SB Doug Grow decision. It's been a tough decision, but it's one we felt we had to make." Sorry, Ruth. Sorry, more than 100 other former Normandy employees. It's not personal that the Normandy, which closed in December for Grow continued on page 5B i It's not personal, Tom Noble Jr. keeps saying.

Just business and image. It's not personal that he won't rehire people who, in some cases, worked for the Noble family at the Normandy Inn for more than two decades. Why, he said, when he thinks about some of those old employees, people such as 61 -year-old Ruth Brennan St. Germain, he thinks warm thoughts. Kind thoughts.

About the only thoughts he doesn't have are thoughts of giving the old employees their jobs back. "I know Ruth," said Noble. "She waited on me (in the Normandy's Village Restaurant). I want nothing but the best for her. But my responsibility as an employer is to provide the best jobs possible, which means running the best business possible.

We have made a business overpowers By Richard Meryhew Staff Writer Nicollet County deputy Richard (Buzz) Witty figured it would be a routine assignment: drive to St. Cloud, pick up a prisoner, drive to St. Peter for a court appearance, take the prisoner back to St. Cloud and call it a day. Witty, a 22-year veteran of the Nicollet County Sheriffs Department, has made similar trips dozens of times.

He didn't anticipate the knife, the scuffle and a brush with death. pulls a knife, By Norman Draper Staff Writer Fiegen sat down at Chi-Chi's Restaurant in Richfield during the lunch hour Monday, joking about how his friend wasn't so sure that their lunch hangout was the place to go. Both had heard about the restaurant Closing Thursday night after a cook was diagnosed with hepatitis A. But tests by the Minnesota Department Of Health of the restaurant's other H9 employees found no evidence of the virus-caused liver ailment, and the Mexican restaurant reopened for business yesterday. That was enough for Ty, who figured that he runs a greater risk to his health driving back and forth to work than he does from eating in restaurants.

But he had to persuade his friend, Mike Betz, who insisted that he call the restaurant for an explanation. "When I called him, I had to do a sell job to get him here," Fiegen said of Betz. Surrounded by empty tables, Fiegen and Betz were joined by some others, including the mayors of Bloomington and Richfield. But you wouldn't call it a luncheon "crowd." Bill Etter, president and chief executive officer of the Bloomington-based Consul Restaurant which owns the restaurant, said noon-hour business I was down by half. That might have I been optimistic.

1 Restaurant continued on page 3B officer, flees By the end of the day he had a couple of nasty cuts and no prisoner. "It was a frightening experience," Witty said Monday night after returning to St. Peter. "I guess the trouble with these old cops is we get complacent." Authorities continued to search the Elk River area last night for David Ernest Schaer, 20, who has been serving time in St. Cloud for receiving stolen property.

Escape continued on page 6B Staff Photo by Charles Bjorgen Dances hard Robert Reinfeld frowned at himself in a mirror after trying to form the letter with his body. The New Dance Ensemble is offering a summer workshop for boys called The Dancer as Athlete at the Hennepin Center for the Arts in Minneapolis..