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Show 'Lorraine Nelson A Biography " 115 colors and devoted the entirety of its effort to keeping suppliers fully stocked with canary yellow Post-It® Notes. Minneapolis St. Paul (where 3M headquarters are based) is an oddity of the mid west. Too far north to be aligned with middle America, and historically too far left to register in Washington D.C., it sits outside the cultural and political milieu, an outpost for the radical and insane. At the heart of its fugitive history sit the battlements of Fort Snelling, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers. Colonel Josiah Snelling, for whom the fort is named, directed its construction between 1819-24, but he was such a brutal and belligerent drunk that he lost the confidence of his men and was forced to leave the post a few years after its completion. St. Paul, too, may well have never existed were it not for the efforts of one overtly pious missionary, Father Lucien Galtier. Galtier led the campaign to change the name of his diocese to that of his favorite patron saint in the 1840s. Before this, the area on the northeast landing of the Mississippi was named for an inveterate moonshiner who began the area's first profitable business on the spot. Pierre Parrant, one of a long line of French-Canadian fur trappers, was the first European to settle the St. Paul area. Like many frontiersman of that era, he was a crude fellow, given to bouts of drunken violence, coarse in appearance and not much recommended to the habits of good-hygiene. His look was made all the more grotesque by the dead eye, white-rimmed and cloudy, he carried in one socket. It was this feature that earned him the vulgar nickname-the name by which St. Paul might now be known were it not for Father Galtier- "Pig's Eye." The success rate of DDS's direct mail campaigns would make most reasonable men balk. The return on a "profitable" project hovers around 1%, but most register half that number. The infinitesimally small success rate of the business would seem to work against its popularity. That it continues to exist-no, not merely exist, but flourish-is a credit to the tenacity of the bedlamites who practice it. |
