Best invisible downtown cemetery

Place where I got so lost I had to call my wife on the cell phone and have her get a map and talk me home t’s sort of a driving roulette for confusion when you motor around in the neighborhoods north of Assisi Heights. In Rochester’s grid system, avenues normally run north and south and streets run east and west. Corners should be an intersection of a street and an avenue. Except around Elton Hills Drive, where streets sometimes bisect streets, avenues bisect avenues. You’ll see corners like 22nd Street and 23rd Street Northwest and 14th Avenue and 15th Avenue Northwest.

Best business motto

Most appropriate phrase spelled out by a local phone number

Other, much less appropriate phrases spelled out by local telephone numbers

Best park that you would never

find on your own, even if you sort of knew where it was

f you stumble upon the secret entrance—between the hedgerows of two neighboring houses and down a grassy way—you just might discover a perfectly manicured park with a bright new plastic slide, two swings, three rocking animals and two picnic tables set in the middle of a circle of houses in northwest Rochester. It turns out this city-owned park not only has a name—Crescent Park—but has been in existence since the Elton Hills neighborhood was developed. “That’s the park we tried to give away once,” former Parks and Recreation Superintendent Roy Sutherland told us previously. Neighbors at the time didn’t like all the late-night, youthful visitors to the park that exists just off their backyard property lines. But they also didn’t want to be responsible for maintaining the land, so the city kept it and added new playground equipment in the late ‘90s. Now, the quiet, secluded park is used by young families on the block and the few who glimpse it between houses and are curious enough to risk walking right into what seems to be other people’s yards. The park is located just north of Cascade Street Northwest and south of 29th Street, east off of 15th Avenue, and can be accessed from 15th Avenue at the west end, or from the north off of 29th Street.

Best place to hitch your horse downtown

Where does a rider park his horse when he visits downtown? It’s perhaps the only hitching post on a Rochester street, and it’s in front of Heritage House, formerly the Whiting House, an 1875 Victorian that serves as a museum depicting life in the mid1800s. When the house was moved in 1972 from its North Broadway site to Central Park, preservationists carted along one of the home’s two horse hitching posts. Today, it’s planted curbside in front of the home at the northeast corner of the 200 block of First Avenue Northwest. A small stretch of the curb in front of the black, metal post is painted yellow, marking the spot to angle your horse.

Best silo

A limestone relic of Rochester’s old State Hospital, which closed shortly after its centennial celebration in 1979, our most prominent town silo stands, alone and mystery-cloaked, on the fringes of 40 acres of former farming land now owned by RCTC. The lower rungs of its two opposing ladders have been removed. Vines and leaves snake up around its circumference, shading but not smothering bricks installed by hand in the 1930s. The silo stored feed for the hospital’s Holstein livestock, which served as a food resource for the selfcontained hospital, alongside grains grown on the surrounding land. Before RCTC turned the land into an unending array of soccer fields, the DNR installed its own crop rotation and grew food for visiting geese.

Some of Rochester’s most infamous inmates

Favorite mayoral edict

During his first stint as Rochester mayor (from 1947-’51), Claude “Boney” McQuillan, the former pro boxer and Green Bay Packer, began a sometimes quiet, sometimes overt campaign to remove racist signs (some as blatant as “No Niggers Allowed”) that adorned various Rochester businesses. Most business owners complied, but, so the story goes, one Rochester bar keeper told the mayor that the sign would stay. Boney gave him a choice: “You can take it down right now, or I will break your nose right now.” The barkeep complied.

Turn of the screwed

The Talking Heads sing about the “Road to Nowhere.” We’ve found the left turn to nowhere. Southbound traffic on Broadway at Sixth Street Southwest can pull into a lane that traditionally serves as a left turn lane. However, the only place to go if you turn left is through Hazama Park and into the Zumbro River. Not a good option. It’s a puzzler, but the city traffic engineer says it’s likely a U-turn lane (though it’s not for the Broadway fire station) or a leftover from the pre-flood control days. At least once a week, we see some poor Clinic visitor with out-of-state plates, left turn signal blinking, just sitting in that turn lane.

Best intercity basketball game ever played

In the 1968 District Three boys basketball game, Mayo beat John Marshall 61-59. Here’s what made it so amazing: Number of overtimes: 5. Number of fans (at $1.25 per ticket) in attendance at the Mayo Civic Center Auditorium: 4,100.

Number of points scored in the second, threeminute overtime: 0 (JM stalled until the final 13 seconds of the overtime.) Where longtime Post-Bulletin sportswriter Bob Brown ranked this game in the top five local sporting events of his P-B tenure (1966-2004): Third. (Second? John Marshall’s 96-66 win over Spring Valley in the Region One boys basketball semis in 1969. And number one? Pat O’Connor’s boxing win over Duane Horsman in 1969.)

Rochester’s greatest heavyweight boxer (with the most mediocre nickname)

Rochester’s worst parade float, by far

t was, judging from the grainy black-and-white photo, a relatively standard float. Three people in costumes driving and standing on a flat-bed pickup truck draped with a banner of stars. But the costumes were KKK. The Ku Klux Klan sponsored a float in Rochester’s Fourth of July parade (back when they had a Fourth of July parade) in 1926. The truck was driven by two men in the traditional white robes and headresses, while a third Klansman stood in back waving the American flag.

Rumors of Klan activity in Rochester first appeared in 1922. On September 28, 1923, the city awoke to find copies of the KKK’s Minnesota publication, Call of the Wild, on the doorstep of every home and business in town. The next day, Rochester’s two newspapers received threatening letters in the mail, written in ink on pieces of white bed sheets.

On March 3, 1924, a series of explosions sounded on a bluff to the north of town, and people living nearby reported seeing a burning cross. In 1925, a Klan rally in Kasson attracted a crowd of 500. The main speaker had given an address the week before at Rochester’s Flag Day celebration.

But the Klan never acquired a serious following in Rochester, perhaps because minorities were not a major economic concern here. Although for a time it was able to seize political power in Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon, the Klan’s strong-arm tactics were not well-received in most American communities. By the end of the 1920s, it had begun to run out of steam, and while it experienced a brief resurgence during the mid-1960s, it never regained widespread popular approval. And they haven’t, as far as we could find, had a float in any Rochester parade since.

e was glamorized by Hollywood in a movie set in Iowa. And buried in Rochester.

After a long and solid minor league career, Archibald “Moonlight” Graham was finally called up by Major League Baseball’s New York Giants on June 29, 1905. With a ten-run lead over the Brooklyn Dodgers after eight innings, according to Major League Baseball, Giants manager John McGraw made a defensive change, replacing George Brown with Archie “Moonlight” Graham in right field. Three quick infield outs by the Dodgers ended the game, and Graham never got to bat. It was the only big league appearance the 28-year-old Graham would ever make.

The Giants went on to defeat the Philadelphia Athletics four games to one in the 1905 World Series, but Graham, faced with a trip back to the minors, left baseball for a medical career. After graduating from Johns Hopkins, Graham took a job in Chisholm, Minnesota, arriving soon after the Great Chisholm Fire of 1908. “Doc” Graham spent his first six years practicing medicine at Chisholm’s Rood Hospital and the next 44 years as physician for the Chisholm schools, where he gained national recognition for his study of children’s blood pressure.

“A pioneer in the field of vaccinations, his concern and dedication provided Chisholmites with a town that was never quarantined because of communicable diseases,” according to the Chisholm Chamber of Commerce. “Doc Graham became a legend, a champion to the oppressed. The grand marshal of every football, basketball and baseball game, he encouraged youth to train and play. He believed in the community and the parents and children believed in him.”

It wasn’t until 1989—25 years after his death—that Graham finally got his big league at-bat. In the Kevin Costner-starring Field of Dreams, the young Archie Graham (played by Frank Whaley) hits a run- scoring sacrifice fly to right.

Earlier in the movie, character Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) laments that the stunted baseball career of “Moonlight” Graham (the older version, played by Burt Lancaster) could be considered a tragedy. Doc Graham, in that classic Lancaster voice, says: “Son, if I’d only got to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy.”

Though he died in Chisholm in 1965, he was buried here to be next to his wife Alecia, who was born in Rochester.

Archibald “Moonlight” Graham’s grave site, often part of the annual Cemetery Walk, is located at Section 9, Lot 4, 1E of Calvary Cemetery. Above info from Baseball America.

Best interspecies kiss by a Rochester actress (or at least an actress who was born in Rochester)

Our favorite big-hair band video with a Rochester tie