George Grim, a wide-ranging, globe-trotting journalist best known for the "I Like It Here" and Santa Anonymous columns for the Minneapolis Tribune, died Sunday night at his home in Key Biscayne, Fla. He was 99.
In addition to writing columns and human interest stories for the Minneapolis Star and then its sister newspaper the Tribune, from the 1940s to the 1980s, Grim also was a prolific foreign correspondent and a Twin Cities radio and TV personality. Even after moving to Florida in the 1970s, he continued to write for the Minneapolis papers.
"George was a man about town, into everything socially, the town crier," said retired Star Tribune columnist Jim Klobuchar, who in many ways was Grim's successor. "He was an unusual combo for the times -- not only a popular community columnist with expansive tastes on what interested readers, but also an accomplished World War II correspondent."
According to retired columnist Barbara Flanagan, Grim was the only child of a New Jersey dentist and his wife. He moved to Minnesota in his 20s, his parents in tow, to do promotions for the Star, producing a radio ad in which he famously said in his East Coast accent, "Don't say 'pah-puh,' say 'Minneapolis Stah'!"
By 1947, when Flanagan joined the morning Tribune, "he was a famous foreign correspondent, covering our Minnesota boys in action overseas."
"He also was all over WCCO Radio and Channel 2 [KTCA TV], talking about everything under the sun," she said. "He was a real character, and everyone knew who he was."
After the war, Grim continued for many years to write dispatches from all over the nation and the world, including Canada, Britain, Egypt, Israel, Poland, East Germany, Peru, China and the Philippines.
In 1945, he launched the Santa Anonymous column and its extensive volunteer operation to help what he called "up-against-it families." Klobuchar, who took it over from him in the 1980s, said they both liked the idea of "the public anonymously making gifts to poor folks that would be presented to children directly by parents," a concept they felt lent dignity to all involved.