Simon Bourgin writes:

ELY - Margaret Sweet of the Ely-Winton Historical Society sent us some info on a recently published book by Simon Bourgin of Ely. She was so thrilled that the Ely native, who has lived such an interesting life, finally wrote a book about it.

Margaret said, “I am enclosing the following which explains Simon Bourgin and the life he has lead. It is by two men who know Simon well. Thank you so much for doing this.”

This book, “Simon Bourgin: The Odyssey That Began In Ely” - with all its twists and turns - may be purchased through the Ely- Winton Historical Society.

From the Foreward, by David Kess

This well could have begun “Once upon a time in a far away land ...” because the story and the writings of Simon Bourgin do have that exotic nature. His life story begins in a small, very remote town on the edge of the northern wilderness just nine miles south of the border with Canada.

Ely, Minnesota, was emerging from an era as a rough frontier town. The Bourgin family, who came from Russia, was one of only five Jewish families in Ely. The nearest synagogue was fifty miles away, and kosher food came one hundred miles by train. This small band struggled to keep their Jewish identity in this isolated place.

Simon grew up in the Slovenian part of town and was befriended by a number of those families. This was the beginning of his keen interest in Yugoslavia and the Balkan countries. He also forged strong and lasting connections with several well-known Finnish immigrant families on the other side of town.

The upper echelon of the mining companies, who were the backbone of the local economy for eighty years, had insisted that their children have access to a quality education. A campus was built comparable to an eastern prep school complete with a swimming pool, greenhouse, large auditorium, first–rate library, and teachers who presented Simon with big ideas and new challenges.

It was this mix of remoteness, ethnic diversity, mentoring teachers, and a scholarship that eventually led Simon to the University of Chicago, where he was launched into the greater world.

Beyond Chicago came Washington, D.C., New York, London and Paris. Next came Budapest,

Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Kabul, and Los Angeles. Simon traveled much of the world as a journalist. Reporting the news from these far away places, Simon always managed to capture a unique sense of place and people there. Today, at age ninety–six, it is evident that places and people still excite him. Not the least of these is his birthplace, where he has returned each summer for many years.

He—like his former teacher and mentor, the noted author Sigurd Olson—still finds a sense of renewal and excitement in this remote wilderness town.

By friend & Colleague Jim Klobuchar:

I first learned of Simon Bourgin when he was recruited as the central figure in a gentle but wily scheme crafted by my mother to influence my career path when I was twelve years old, growing up in the mining town of Ely on Minnesota’s Iron Range. My mother noticed my interest in the Duluth Herald when it arrived daily at our front door, sometimes accompanied by a half-foot of snow.

“Son,” she said, “you know what I’d like? I’d like to see you writing in the newspapers and magazines like Simon Bourgin. Did you know that he’s a very famous man who grew up here in Ely?”

Nearly fifty years later I shared my mother’s charming little exercise in brainwashing with Simon Bourgin at a time when we’d become friends.

Simon drilled me with a look of mock gravity, pretending to be a prosecutor. “Did you know then or did you ever know that I’d become a famous man? And, if so, I deny ever being a famous man."

“I know now,” I said, “that I would have loved covering a story with you.”

When he was visiting from Washington in his later years we’d meet once or twice a year in the restaurant of the Luxford Hotel near Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. We’d talk music, the latest political or military disasters in the Middle East, the fresh air of democracy in the Balkan countries, American politics, or maybe the tenor’s third act aria in Tosca. In winters he arrived in shaggy fur coat down to his toes that made him look like some commissar just off the docks of Murmansk.

Sometimes we talked for hours in his apartment in Washington, D.C., surrounded by his private library of thousands of books plus personal notes from kings, prime ministers and probably a few revolutionaries.

Here or anywhere it was the same Simon—a kind of universal man, interested in, well everything, politics, art, the condition of the Boundary Waters, memories of Sigurd Olson, the great poet-advocate of wild nature. This is a man, I told myself, who has experienced both the follies and the possibilities of nations, who knows the worst of it, but still a man of exquisite good will.

I asked myself often, “Why hasn’t this man put it between the covers of a book? Not all of it. He might even spare the reader the worst of the international turmoil and posturing, the brutality of the wars and their aftermath. Come back to your home, and tell us how it was seventy years ago, and more."

We got well-acquainted. He was flattering. He liked my stuff in the newspaper and in books, and later when we met we would confide. I wrote to him and said the most bothersome part of our friendship to me was that I’d let all of the years pass without really knowing him and understanding the springs of his career and life.

“We could have done a dozen things together in the last ten or fifteen years,” I said, “and now the sunset is coming closer—and there is still time.”

I meant there was still time to publish his book. I nagged. So did others of his friends. We said we wanted to know about Simon’s Ely going back to the times when the junior college was housed in ancient building that had the general contours of a stockade that survived the French and Indian War. We wanted to know about the times when Si Bourgin ranged from New York City, to the Vienna of The Third Man days of double and triple agents roaming the streets, the Sofia and Bucharest of the Cold War, and then Si Bourgin roaming Hollywood, talking to the stars, writing great and intimate dispatches from the land of Judy Garland, Katherine Hepburn and Clark Gable.

So we bonded in our fashion, and Simon enjoyed dabbling into the improbability of it, talking about our parallel professional lives.

“Think about it,” he’d say, “from one mining town, out of the Depression, two guys who roamed the world, writing to different audiences but emerging with the same ideas of social justice, and the same feelings of gratitude for the place where they were born.”

Good writing often comes down to how we look at the world and the people who fill our lives. Simon Bourgin looked at his world with a well-grounded value of what’s right and wrong, with the sophistication of a man who has seen most of what’s good and bad about it, and with a generous strain of thanksgiving and forgiveness.

Nobody did it much better.

To order the book send a check or money order ($20) to: Ely-Winton Historical Society, 1900 East Camp Street, Ely, MN 55731. Sorry, no credit cards. Their campus is next to Olcott Park in Virginia.