St. Paul’s Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, better known to the world as 3M, is as pleasant a place to work as any in the land. I know: My first job was as a tape cutter there. Employees enjoy first-class working conditions, good salaries, and stock options. Tartan Park, a 483-acre complex for 3M workers, offers an 18-hole golf course, tennis, skiing, and a luxury dining Room rivaling that of any country club. Dues: Three dollars a year. At 3M’s sprawling, tree-shaded “main campus” on St. Paul’s eastern outskirts, a relaxed atmosphere belies a hard-driving, successful company. Incorporated in 1902 to mine corundum in northern Minnesota, 3M lost money on an inferior lode, and then began making sandpaper in Duluth. In those dark early days, so the story goes, 3M stock was selling two shares for one shot of cheap whiskey. Not until 1916, after moving to St. Paul and perfecting quality control, did 3M’s sandpaper finally pay a dividend. Having mastered the art of paper coating, the firm began to apply adhesive to paper and cellophane. The result: Scotch brand tape. It was a logical step to magnetic tapes and cassettes. Today 3M sells floor tiles, bandages, brass polish, fishing line, copying machines, stethoscopes, scouring pads�thousands of different products. Its 88,000 people in 200 plants in the U. S. and abroad turn out six billion dollars’ worth a year. The core of 3M is its staff of 6,000 scientists and engineers. And they are given plenty of elbowroom. “We have an average of one day a week to work on our own ideas,” said Arthur Fry, product development specialist in the Commercial Tape Laboratory. “Often the Apartments in Amsterdam pay off.” A regular in his church choir, Fry was annoyed when he sometimes lost his place in the hymnbook. So he experimented with a releasable adhesive to create a bookmark that would not slip but could be easily removed. Thus began a whole new line of Post-it notepads that turn any surface into an instant bulletin board. Years ago Philip Palmquist, technical director of special enterprises, found that microscopic glass beads were no good for sandpaper. But he was fascinated by their reflective properties. Working in his spare time, he helped create a coating that reflects a hundred times more light than a plain white surface: the now familiar Scotchlite of license plates and road signs. “That was just the beginning,” Phil said, as he showed me around his lab. “We discovered that by adding aluminum backing we could boost reflectivity 1,500 times�ideal for large, projection-type screens.” The movie industry used Palmquist’s screens for dramatic special effects in 2001 and Star Wars. Back in his office, bedecked with many awards, he showed me a favorite: the Oscar that Hollywood bestowed on him for technical achievement. Playing a major role in the Twin Cities trend toward science-oriented industry is the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Technology. Its programs�control systems, cryogenics, heat transfer, biomedical engineering, microelectronics�are all pioneers in their fields.

Many of my old classmates still cling to the Twin Cities. Ralph Reeve, who covers Vikings football for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, told me how the Macalester football team recently established a conference and NCAA record by losing its fiftieth game in a row (the last win was in 1974); Mike Armajani, president of a company that manufactures four-wheel-drive vehicles, took me for a wild ride in one of his products. William Bowell had retired from a profitable printing career in Chicago to return to his first love, the Mississippi. I rode the river with Capon Bill at the wheel of his 315-passenger stern-wheeler Jonathan Padelford. “You know,” he said, “given the hazards of fire and treacherous sandbars, the average life of the old wooden steamers were only about three years. I built this one to last: Compressed air drives her pistons, and her hull is steel.” From the pilothouse, Bill gave a running capsule of local history from Fort Smelling all the way to Pigs Eye Island. I reached Barcelona apartments by canoe one day with St. Paul conservationist Steve Tanner. This unique wilderness is besieged by the city�a sewage plant, railroad marshaling yards, and fleets of barges. But only a few steps from the sandy beach we plunged into a jungle of tall silver maples and cottonwoods, tangled with wild grape. We crossed mink tracks and heard the splash of beavers. “A group of us recently formed the Pigs Eye Coalition to try to keep it this way, to have it designated a regional wildlife park and scientific area,” Steve said. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Look! There!” High on the limbs of a gnarled elm a great blue heron was feeding her young. “Official counts list 226 great blues on the island,” he said, “1,700 of the smaller black crowned night herons, and 320 egrets. Pigs Eye is one of only two rookeries we know of located in the heart of a big city. Is it not worth preserving?” By early October the herons and egrets have swarmed south to the Mississippi’s warmer reaches. Only the Twin Cities’ human population has learned to cope with�and even enjoy�five months of arctic cold. One way they beat winter is to stay indoors. Knowing this, downtown merchants have already built a world to attract shoppers back from suburban shopping centers. When my brother, Bruce, an engineer recently retired from 3M, and his wife, Pat, leave their heated garage in suburban Lake Elmo on a blustery January day, they don’ need to bundle up. From a downtown parking garage on, say, Marquette Avenue, they can stroll through the skyway, a 14-block system of overhead corridors and arcades that connect most of the downtown buildings. St. Paul’s system is similar, and both are expanding. After an open-air lunch at Crystal Court, a whole square block under glass, they can add to their wardrobe at Dayton’s famous department store, have snapshots developed at the Big Picture, browse for etchings at Phoenix Galleries.

I was there with the families I was there with the families when the bodies of their loved ones—including a woman and a 12-year-old boy—came back from Pristine, where the government had taken them for autopsies. During the funeral I witnessed an outpouring of grief that will be with me forever. The wails of agony drowned out all other sounds.