(woman) Welcome to... a patchwork of stories about the arts, culture, and history in our region.

Hi, I'm Matt Olien.

and I'm Barb Gravel.

On this edition of Prairie Mosaic, we'll learn about a famous line of Minnesota boats, restore artwork for future generations, and listen to a musician from Rochester, Minnesota.

♪ They always want it ♪ in 1909 the Northern Pacific Railway recruited workers and families from Italian communities in Minneapolis and Wisconsin to Dilworth, Minnesota.

The cultural impact on Northwest Minnesota not only included their food, religion, and music, but also their sense of perseverance and family pride.

[mandolin plays Italian folk music] We only needed to come from one family.

One family, and you belonged to all of them that's the way it was in Little Italy.

My mother's side were the Altobelli's and the Dibrita's, came from Ellis Island, now my dad's side, the Olivieri's, the Perzichilli's, I understand came in Boston Harbor.

Some ended up in Cumberland Wisconsin then they went to the levee in St. Paul.

(Larry Costello) All of my grandparents came through Ellis Island.

My mother's side of the family settled in Chicago.

My dad's side of the family settled in Wisconsin.

Both families separately not knowing each other came to Dilworth.

Then some stayed in Dilworth in Little Italy, and others just kept going all the way out to California.

They followed the railroad.

Well Dilworth was settled due to the railroad.

(Mark Peihl) The railroad set up sidings about every 6 miles or so along the railroad line.

In 1882 they established one about 4 miles east of the red river.

They named it Richardson for a local landowner.

The next year they changed the name to Dilworth for Joseph Dilworth a member of the Northern Pacific Railway board of directors.

Starting in 1907 the railroad actively recruited Italian laborers to come up from Minneapolis/St.

Paul and Western Wisconsin.

From my grandparents and my dad talking there was a little bit of discrimination at that time against Italians.

They were only allowed to work on the section as laborers.

(Mark Peihl) They were given the dirtiest, hardest jobs, had to work for many years in the coal dock or the icehouse.

They weren't allowed to be engineers or trainmen.

(Larry Costello That changed-- after my dad graduated high school he went to Moorhead State College.

And while at college he applied for a trainman's job in Dilworth, and they hired him.

And that opened the door.

Through the years I would bet 75% of the kids and relatives my age, we all worked on the railroads at one time.

(Marcia Olivieri-Hough) My grandfather on my dad's side, the Olivieri side, he was a foreman for 60 years on the railroad in Dilworth.

And grandpa Tony, he also worked on the railroad, they all did, all the Italians-- they were hard workers.

(Mark Peihl) The town of Dilworth grew very, very quickly.

In 1910, a fella named Carl Bean sold some lots to Rosina Boit, an Italian woman that lived in the immediate area.

She turned around and sold a lot of those lots to her Italian neighbors.

Pretty soon there was a sizable Italian community.

That became Little Italy.

(Larry Costello) Little Italy was on the south side of the railroad tracks.

And the main part of Dilworth was on the north side of the railroad tracks.

Actually the name Little Italy was given to Dilworth by the people that lived on the north side.

(Marcia Olivieri-Hough) The name Little Italy, I never heard of anybody resenting that.

We were very proud of it.

"Where are you from?"

"Little Italy."

"Little Italy in Dilworth."

(Larry Costello) it was just a neighborhood of basically all Italians, and they were all related.

(Marcia Olivieri-Hough) And if you walked down the street and you saw a light on, you could walk into that house and they'd give you a plate of food.

Family was basically the most important thing growing up.

We didn't have a lot of money growing up, we had family-- that was our legacy.

My relatives were divided by a driveway.

I had my mom's relatives on one side and my dad's relatives on the other side of the driveway, All of my cousins were raised like brothers and sisters.

(Larry Costello) we all hung together, we all played together.

We were attached to the church.

Every morning before I went to school I went to church.

(Larry) And we'd do the evening masses during Lent and those type of things.

It was just a place where everybody congregated.

(Marcia) It's something you don't see anymore.

I didn't realize I was growing up at such a great time.

(Larry) One of my fondest memories is Christmas Eve mass that would start at midnight.

On Christmas Day the Italian families would open their homes to whoever was at church, and they would eat, they would eat all night long.

It would start like one, 1:30 in the morning.

They would house hop and eat until the sun came up.

St. Elizabeth was started by a bunch of Italian families.

One of the big things they brought was their cooking culture.

A priest which I remember, Father Danz was from Germany, he taught the women to start having 2 Italian dinners a year.

We all worked, my mom, she was one of the original gals.

I washed dishes, my dad worked, and it's still going today.

My dad's name is Fonzie, his name was Frank Olivier Junior, but they called him Fonzie.

He was your original Fonz with the pompadour hairdo.

He went to a Moler Barber College in Minneapolis and set up shop on the main street of Dilworth, and it was there for 60 years, and everybody came to dad.

That was the meeting place in town.

The night after a football game, all the coaches were downstairs going over every play they had.

A lot of good memories in that barbershop.

I could go on for hours and hours.

(Larry Costello) It seemed like every household made bread once a week.

My grandpa, if he needed bread he'd walk down to one of the neighbors who was making it that day and he'd trade her something out of the garden for a couple loaves of bread.

Everybody had a big garden.

All the tomato sauce was made by hand.

I mean, hundreds of quarts of tomato sauce each family would make.

If you went to 10 different aunts or cousins homes and had spaghetti, everybody's sauce would taste just a little bit different.

Everybody kind of put their own spin on, the way their family liked it.

I've cooked for thousands of people for dinners over the last 30 years, and I don't measure anything-- it's a handful of this and a handful of that like my mother taught me.

They made wine once a year over in Little Italy.

A boxcar from a train would come in to Dilworth, and they'd set it aside, then all the Italian families who ordered grapes would have a couple days to go and unload the grapes.

They came in 36 pound boxes.

Everybody would go from home to home to home to home for about a 2, 2-1/2 week period making wine.

Everybody had their own barrels, their own presses, their own grinders.

Every home had a wine cellar in it (Marcia Olivieri-Hough) 2023 we had a family reunion, a lot of people helped pull that together.

That was a testament to what the Italian Little Italy was.

800 people came back for that.

I think there were 30 states that came It was something that I never felt I'd see in my lifetime.

(Marcia) There were cousins there I'd never seen before.

There were cousins that we hadn't seen a lot of.

(Larry) Either they grew up in Little Italy or their grampa did or their dad or ma.

Wherever the occasion was it was mind blowing that many people got together and we had that much fun.

I think the culture, cooking, holidays-- all those things just seem to have brought people here from Italy, from around the country, then came to Dilworth because of the railroad.

Former students and friends of Cyrus M. Running came together to restore his final large mural in collaboration with the Rourke Museum in Moorhead Minnesota.

The restoration efforts highlight the reach Running had through his work at Concordia College and preserves his legacy for future art enthusiasts.

(Mark Larson) Cyrus was really a force to be acknowledged and revered in the Fargo-Moorhead area.

Students who took art at Concordia during the Running period went there because of him and his design ability.

(Mark Strand) His Wikipedia article says he was a regionalist painter, and that's a little too confining for Running.

He grew up in this big part of the United States we used to call the great American desert.

Born in Veblen South Dakota where his father was a Lutheran pastor.

They moved to two parishes in Montana, Big Sandy and Havre.

And then to Idaho before they circled back to Minnesota to Zumbrota where he graduated from high school and went to Northfield to Saint Olaf College, came to Concordia in 1940 to really start the art department.

(Mark Larson) Cy Running was my teacher at Concordia College from '65 to '69, and I took design from him, I took painting from him.

He was a mentor to me and fellow students.

He was a wonderful guy.

He was known for his design work, his ability to break up space and organize space.

And everything was very figurative.

He has a fine hand and a very firm hand when it comes to making things-- good at drawings, good at makings.

He was inspired by his experience of living in San Miguel de Allende Mexico in 1955 in 1956.

I always thought when Cy painted he always painted a little bit of Mexico with his heart.

The last huge mural that he did was this one for the Ylvisaker Library at Concordia.

It's 54 feet long and 8-1/2 feet high.

He designed it and completed the painting in I think under 4 months, which is pretty amazing.

It was painted from the spring of 1966, then finished up in the fall.

That summer of '66 he was really busy painting this thing.

It was commissioned by the family of Gordon Manternach.

Gordon was his neighbor who died at a young age, in his 40s, I believe.

They had planned for this mural but it took 10 years before the funding came fluid.

I'm a graduate of Concordia, and while there I enjoyed this mural very much sitting in the reading room of the library.

I remember when it first appeared with that lighted exit sign and the fire alarm with the kid pulling it, I was just really delighted.

It's dreamlike, and it's merging all kinds of periods of time, slightly illustrational.

It's there to make the students comfortable with the idea of being in a library.

It exhibits lifelong learning (Mark Larson) Running put little jokes in like graffiti on a wall that says "Toads make warts."

He had little things like that that are hidden inside.

(Mark Strand) You see a kid walking along nonchalant with a baseball bat and a couple of guys fixing a broken church window, and you just get the feeling that kid with the bat was probably Running or one of his friends, and in the final panel you notice a very nice tribute from Cy to his friend and neighbor Gordon, "Blithe Spirit" he calls him.

(Mark Larson) My friend Mark Strand and I used to go look at it, and we saw probably around 20, 25 years ago that it was starting to deteriorate from water, humidity, temperature changes.

So we kept saying that at some point something needed to be done about it, wouldn't it be fitting if one of his ex students actually restore it and fix it.

That didn't happen until a couple years ago where we actually got it going through the Rourke Art Gallery museum under Jonathan Rutter, It took about a year and a half to fully restore all of the 13 panels.

It was a full-time job.

The damage was really extensive on the left side of the mural the first 3 panels.

A lot of the canvas was just wasted away, rotted away, just deteriorated and fell apart.

It was like putting together potato chips.

After getting those pressed down in place I had to put filler in between the potato chip pieces, then that was sanded down, then it was retouching with paint.

I like his color palette.

When you drive out here in the country you see this yellow green everywhere in the landscape.

You contrast that with the yellow orange, and there's the Running palette.

There's a lot of greens and yellows in his palette.

You won't find any blue.

Just trying to figure out what he did so I could match it, it was an interesting process in itself.

For those who remember it being in the library at Concordia, if they saw how it had deteriorated, then it was removed, and people would ask what happened to it.

One of the aides to one of the Concordia presidents said to me that mural was not beloved.

Well, we loved it, and we decided to fix it.

(Mark Larson) For me personally it was a matter of respecting Cy and his work and his legacy, and I've sort of been pushing for this for 20-some years; it's a great story.

and if you look at murals from the past, that's what they are about-- murals are about telling stories and history.

I'm now part of this mural.

It's great that one of his students was able to work on it and restore it.

And just seeing what a legacy has developed around this man and realizing what a big deal he was and how talented he was-- and he was a great teacher.

(Mark Strand) His biggest legacy is a lot of talented, strong artists.

They believe in what they're doing, and living well-- that's the greatest legacy.

Larson Boat Works is recognized far and wide for many different kinds of boats, but primarily for the world-famous Falls Flyers.

In this Artifact Spotlight Kaci Johnson tells us the story of these unique boats.

Hi I'm Kaci Johnson, the Associate Director here at the Legacy of the Lakes Museum in Alexandria, Minnesota, and this is our Artifact Spotlight.

I'm standing here with our Falls Flyer collection that we have here at the museum.

Falls Flyers were created by Larson boat works.

Larson Boat Works is one of those Minnesota brands that is instantly recognizable all over the world.

They have built many many boats for many many years.

It all started with Paul Larson way back in the 19 teens.

He built this first boat at age 11, but he sold his first boat at age 19.

By 1925 he had opened his very first factory on the Mississippi River in Little Falls, Minnesota.

Primarily they built wood boats, eventually in the 1940s they broke into aluminum boats which eventually became Crestliner, then in the 1950s they experimented with fiberglass.

The Falls Flyers are a very unique boat that is extremely special and highly sought after today.

Falls Flyers were built by Larson to celebrate and honor his friend Charles Lindbergh who was a fellow Little Falls, Minnesota native.

Larson based his line of Falls Flyers off of Lindbergh's JN-4 Jenny biplane, and he even based the color scheme off that which is the cream, red, and black.

This one here is a 17 foot from 1939.

This one is extremely rare; it's the only 17 foot that was ever built, but they did have a 21-foot model available.

It wasn't actually really popular because it's an inboard, and it was kind of tippy if you look at the design and hull shape of this boat.

So they weren't very popular, but that didn't stop them, and many more Falls Flyers came after that.

In addition to building inboards Larson also built Falls Flyers outboards.

The difference between those is that inboards have the engine inside and outboards are a separate motor that's attached to the back.

Falls Flyers were constructed a little differently than many mainstream wooden boats at the time period in that they were using cedar strip construction.

Cedar strip actually takes thin pieces of Cedar and glues them together rather than using the wide planks.

So it glues the cedar strips over an oak frame, then after that you take airline canvas or airplane canvas and glue it over that frame; so that's where you get this.

It does look like fiberglass but it is actually canvas.

Another fun detail that's a nod to this Minnesota heritage is a lot of Falls Flyers have little loon decals on the nose of the hull.

Falls Flyers were produced by Larson through the 1930s, '40s, and '50s.

But by the 1960s demand for them had lessened and at that time they hardly looked like this anymore.

We have another Falls Flyer here at the museum, it's a 1958, which is one of the last years that Larson produced Falls Flyers.

You can see that the design of them is still technically inspired by flight but in a different way.

So in the 1950s there was the space race and people's fascination with getting to the moon, getting to space, so a lot of automotive design took its nod from rocket ship design, so you see a lot of tailfins on cars, Well, boats at the time also incorporated the tail fin design.

So our 1958 Larson has that tail fin design on it.

Another unique piece of Falls Flyer history that we have here at the museum is the Falls Flyer automobile.

This is not an amphibicar, you can't just drive it into the lake.

It is made out of a boat that was put on a Volkswagen chassis in the 1960s, and they custom-built all these fenders and pieces on that car.

It's just a really cool thing, it draws a lot of people's attention to the museum and gets them in so we can share the rest of the Falls Flyer story with them.

What I love about Falls Flyers is that they really are something that shows Minnesota Lake life but also the industry that Minnesota Lake life inspired.

So many unique designs and boat shapes and looks came out of Minnesota through Larson, Lund, Crestliner, Alumacaft-- all these different brands and these Falls Flyers are just one of the many, many different styles that you can see out on Minnesota lakes today and even beyond.

Hannah Lou Woods is a singer and songwriter from Rochester, Minnesota who constructs heartfelt lyrics and melodies to reflect her own personal journey.

She's received numerous awards for her folksy, bluesy pop songs and has graced the Prairie Musicians stage with her talent.

[playing in rock rhythm] ♪ ♪ I've been afraid to ♪ ♪ Speak my truth ♪ ♪ That I've been tongue-tied up all night ♪ ♪ Waiting for a love like you ♪ ♪ And though I've tried ♪ ♪ To let love grow oh ♪ ♪ It's hard to show oh-oh you ♪ ♪ How I feel yeah ♪ ♪ It's what I want to be loved by you ♪ ♪ I want to be held right through ♪ ♪ Oh darling all the things that we could do ♪ ♪ I want to be ♪ ♪ Would you want to be loved by me too ♪ ♪ ♪ Yea yea yea ♪ ♪ Well I've been trying ♪ ♪ Trying to speak thy truth ♪ ♪ That I've been hoping waiting praying for a love like you ♪ ♪ And though I've tried it ♪ ♪ So many times before ♪ ♪ They always wanted more ♪ ♪ Than I could give ♪ ♪ That's why I want to be loved by you ♪ ♪ I want to be held right through ♪ ♪ Oh darling all the things that we could do yeah ♪ ♪ I want to be would you want to be ♪ ♪ Loved by me too ♪ ♪ ♪ Oh oh-oh oh-oh yeah ♪ ♪ Ah-ah oh-oh yeah ♪ ♪ Oh-oh yeah oh-oh yeah ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Wouldn't it be great to be loved ♪ ♪ We could rise above like a white dove ♪ ♪ All we're dreaming of I want to love you till the break of dawn ♪ ♪ Till the light turns on and the silence turns into a song ♪ ♪ Wouldn't it be great to be loved ♪ ♪ We could rise above like a white dove ♪ ♪ All we're dreaming of I want to love you till the break of dawn ♪ ♪ Till the light turns on and the silence ♪ ♪ Turns into a song ♪ ♪ I want to let go let go let go ♪ ♪ Let go let go ♪ ♪ Let go let go yeah ♪ ♪ Let go let go let it go ♪ ♪ I want to be loved by you ♪ ♪ Held right through ♪ ♪ Oh darling all we could do ♪ ♪ I want to be would you want to be loved by me too ♪ ♪ Oo-oo-oo ah-ah ah-ah ♪ ♪ Would you want to be loved I want to let go ♪ ♪ Let it go yea let it go let go ♪ ♪ Let it go oh ooo ♪ [finger-picking in moderate tempo] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Because I believe in a love like that ♪ ♪ I believe in a love that lasts ♪ ♪ Beyond the confines of time and space ♪ ♪ I believe I have known your face ♪ ♪ Oh how can a heart forget her past ♪ ♪ I believe in a love that lasts ♪ ♪ Beyond the confines of time and space ♪ ♪ I believe in a resting place ♪ ♪ Whoa-oh-oh ♪ ♪ Breathe in love ♪ ♪ Let your heartbeat ♪ ♪ Be enough ♪ ♪ ♪ Breathe in love ♪ ♪ Oh let your heartbeat ♪ ♪ Be enough ♪ ♪ ♪ Ooo ♪ ♪ Oh-oh oh-oh ♪ ♪ ♪ Ah-oo ah-ah-ah oo ♪ ♪ Oh oh-oh-oh oh-oh ♪ ♪ ♪ Oh-oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh-oh oh-oh-oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh breathe in ♪ ♪ Love ♪ ♪ Let your heart be free ♪ ♪ Tonight ooo ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Ooo ♪ ♪ Ooo-oo oo-oo ♪ ♪ Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo ♪ ♪ Oo oo-oo-oo ♪ ♪ ♪ Breathe it all breathe it all ♪ ♪ ♪ Breathe in love breathe in joy breathe in peace ♪ ♪ Breathe it all whatever it is you need ♪ ♪ Just breathe ♪ ♪ Breathe in ♪ ♪ Love ♪ ♪ Know that your heartbeat ♪ ♪ Beats enough ♪ If you know of an artist, a topic, or an organization in our region that you think might make for an interesting segment, please contact us at... (Matt) You can watch this and other episodes of "Prairie Mosaic" on Prairie Public's YouTube channel, and follow Prairie Public on social media as well.

I'm Matt Olien, I'm Barb Gravel.

Thank you for joining us for this edition of "Prairie Mosaic."

[guitar, bass, and drums play in bright country-rock rhythm] (Barb) "Prairie Mosaic" is funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, the North Dakota Council on the Arts and by the members of Prairie Public.