Possible hockey museum move: Another example of small towns getting the short end of the stick

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Quite frankly, I couldn’t care less about hockey.

I know it’s played on ice with a puck, a stick and a lot of fisticuffs, but beyond that, it’s just a bunch of big guys on skates.

Small towns and rural communities — those I care about.

Eveleth, Minn., population 3,493, surely qualifies as a small town. Located out there among the mines and forests of the Mesabi Range, it’s also unquestionably rural.

Now when I think of Eveleth I think of two things: the Whistling Bird (best Jamaican jerk chicken on the Range, just a hop and a skip over in Gilbert) and the world’s largest hockey stick.

Hockey is a really big deal in Eveleth. Then again, hockey is a really big deal up and down the Iron Range. In fact, hockey is such a big deal on Minnesota’s Iron Range they built the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame up there — in Eveleth.

Now, halls of fame don’t just get plunked down here or there at random. The Pro Football Hall of Fame is in Canton, Ohio, because that’s where the NFL was founded. Every Little Leaguer dreams of making it to Cooperstown, the place in New York where, legend has it, the first game of baseball was played. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland, Ohio, home of Alan Freed, the disc jockey who first called rock ’n’ roll “rock and roll.” The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame is in Springfield, Mass., the town where Dr. James Naismith nailed a peach basket to the wall at either end of a local gym, tossed in a soccer ball and, in 1891, a new sport was born.

It only follows that the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame was built in Eveleth. Eveleth and the other little towns on the Range have cranked out more great hockey players for U.S. college, Olympic and pro teams than anywhere else in the country. When Iron Range winters gave locals a lot of ice time but not a whole lot to do, hockey was a natural. Like having the halls in Canton, Cooperstown, Cleveland and Springfield, having hockey’s Hall in Eveleth, on the Range, was also a natural.

Unfortunately for Eveleth, natural is far from the NHL’s dominant characteristic. For a sport played on a sheet of ice, there’s nothing natural about hosting teams in places like Florida, Texas, Vegas and L.A. — places where the coldest day wouldn’t freeze a Popsicle — or playing championship games in June. I can’t help but think that lack of respect for what is and ought to be contributes to the fact that the board of directors of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame Museum are giving serious consideration to moving the museum from America’s hockey heartland to downtown St. Paul simply because — tradition be damned — there’d be more folks passing through the gift shop.

Once again, the powers-that-be are poised to take away something important and meaningful to folks living out in small-town America. For the folks in the metro, adding the Hall of Fame to the lobby of the Xcel Energy Center would be just one more thing to tie up traffic, nothing more than a merchandising ploy for pro sports — which characteristically exhibit a community loyalty worthy of Benedict Arnold.

On the other hand, for the folks living up on the Range, the hall is a place of real local significance — not to mention economic importance.

How many hockey fans does it take to keep the Whistling Bird whistling?

For more than a half century our small towns and rural communities have been bled white as the local economy shrank, local employers and retailers closed, and too many of the best and the brightest debarked for big-city opportunities that just weren’t there in their hometowns. Rural folks looked around and saw themselves as used-to-haves rapidly becoming have-nots. Feeling ignored, devalued and disenfranchised, these folks know exactly why they vote to make America great — again.

It’s time to put a stop to it.

Jerome Christenson, of Winona, is a retired editor and columnist who worked at the Winona Daily News.