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Minnesotans sometimes point to themselves as the reason for the state's success. "You just don't have people barking at you when you're walking down the street or sitting in a restaurant," says Jim Johnson, a former Princeton instructor and Muskie campaign worker who recently moved back home. At the Minneapolis Club, where corporation executives and political leaders gather, the waitresses are so friendly and informal that a guest almost expects one to sit down and share the meal she has just served.
Wayne E. Thompson, a transplanted Californian, is now a senior vice president of Dayton Hudson Corp., one of the Midwest's largest retailers. Says his wife Ann: "People are so nice here that for a while I thought they were putting me on. I would call the plumber or the electrician, and my problem became his problem. I found that hard to believe." Sometimes the slower Minnesota pace irritates Thompson: "When I get frustrated because a project isn't moving fast enough, I am tempted to bring in someone from the outside, a heavy." But he's never done so because "you just can't get mad at anybody here."
The Land. Informality permeates business dealings as well as private life. Says Stephen Keating, president of Honeywell: "The nature of this community—its size, its cohesiveness, its informality—means that you can accomplish things at lunch, in the street, or your friends come by on the way home." A young lawyer raised in New York City observes, "In New York, when you wanted a deposition from the other side in a lawsuit, you had to go through a heavy exchange of letters. Here I just pick up the phone and say, 'George, I need your client's deposition. Can we get together Wednesday?' So we do it then. No correspondence. No hassle." As Keating says, "There is a hell of a lot of mutual trust."
Much of the mood in Minnesota has to do with the comparatively unspoiled land. Southern Minnesota is an expanse of rolling countryside, a patchwork of rectangular fields, the loam that has made Minnesota the country's third largest corn producer (after Iowa and Nebraska), the soil that yields 100 bushels of corn and 40 bushels of soybeans to the acre. To the north and west, the land flattens into prairies that merge going eastward, with hills of nearly primeval forest. The northwestern lands are more sandy, but rich enough to produce ample crops of wheat.
Northeastern Minnesota, sometimes called the Arrowhead Country because of its shape, begins at the rugged Misquah Hills and Giants Range, a sharp granite ridge as high as 500 ft. To the southeast rises the Mesabi Range, a rocky belt that used to produce 82% of the nation's iron ore and still yields 63% in iron and taconite, the iron pellets sifted magnetically from huge loads of earth. Below the Canadian border stretch vast expanses of forests and lakes, a region of shaggy and pristine beauty. Timber wolves roam there. Moose can be seen feeding in the clearings. Sometimes a bald eagle is spotted atop an enormous pine.
Such an abundance and