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of the Lost and Found Working title of a new book by William E Burleson
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About the author
I grew up, mostly, in south Minneapolis. Mostly because for five years, 1968 to 1973 we all lived on a farm, well, fifteen acres, about fifty miles south of the Twin Cities. Near Lonsdale. Hated it. Nothing against Lonsdale. But I was a city kid through and through. Some of my earliest memories are of going to the Great Northern Market, the last grocery store to grace Downtown Minneapolis. I remember that the floors creaked and the place smelled of fish. We went there often, as well as Shinders and the Academy and World Theaters. When my mother and I moved back into Minneapolis in ’73, we lived on 18th and LaSalle, about as close as you can get to being downtown without being downtown. That first summer back in town, Mom would give me a dollar every day so I could go to a matinee. That’s a lot of matinees. When I graduated from high school, I got a job as an usher at the World Theater on 7th Street, just off Hennepin Avenue. I loved it, loved it, loved it. This crummy minimum wage job at a crummy old theater was like a dream come true, because it meant I could see all the movies I wanted at any General Cinema theater. My friends got jobs there too. We’ll just say we partied a little bit. The stories I could tell, and I mean non-fiction ones. That was 1977 and ’78. Now I’m fifty and I still have a warm fuzzy for downtown and that particular block. Always will. It was never pretty, nor particularly kind, but it was always real, alive, and electric. At present I continue to live in South Minneapolis, albeit south of Lake Street (I feel like I’m in the suburbs). My wife Mariann and I share our little house by the Mississippi River with our Springer, Wrigley, and cat, Chai. I work in communications for the Minnesota Department of Health. For my writing life, visit my main Web site, www.williamburleson.org. There you’ll find lots of interesting stuff, including my 2005 Routledge Press, non-fiction book, Bi America: Myths, Truths and Struggles of an Invisible Community, and my award winning one-act play, Manfinders.com, both of which couldn’t have less to do with this project. --bill |
Visit www.williamburleson.org for more by and about the author
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