A Bulletin from Downtown St. Paul

The stue that was stolen - msn.com

Scott Fitzgerald would be quite disappointed that the theft of a statue of him in St. Paul was not a better story, was in fact about as dumb as a crime story can be. A 37-year-old dimwit with a drug problem swiped the figure and drove it in his Jeep to a metal recycling company and tried to sell it for scrap. He gave them his actual name. They concluded (duh) it was stolen and reported his license plate number to police who went to the dimwit’s house and found pieces of the statue. A blowtorch was in the jeep.

A statue of Fitzgerald is worth more than scrap metal. If you wanted to get a good price, you’d cut the head off and hold it for ransom. And you’d have a better motive than gaining a couple hundred bucks to feed your fentanyl habit, you’d do it to gain the attention of a woman who has slighted you in favor of a wealthy guy who can afford to take her to Greece for a honeymoon and buy her a lavish mansion on Summit Avenue overlooking the Mississippi.

And you’d go for the big statue of Fitzgerald in Rice Park downtown. The dimwit snatched a little statue standing in front of an office building that used to be Fitzgerald’s prep school, and to the weary office managers and executive vice presidents who pass it every day, who were forced to read The Great Gatsby in tenth grade and didn’t get it, the statue is no more significant than a fire hydrant. The big statue downtown is worth at least a quarter million and, best of all, the rich guy’s father donated half the cost of it. The insult of decapitation is going to hit the McMonaham family as a personal insult. The McMonahams own 3M, the company that put St. Paul on the map; their name is where 3M’s name comes from.

The Fitzgerald they financed stands in Rice Park, Scott holding his hat, coat over his arm, looking toward the George Latimer Library, his back to the old federal courthouse where some great Thirties gangsters were put on trial, including Ma Barker’s gang who kidnapped William Hamm of the brewing family. They were no pikers, they thought big.

Few persons noticed the disappearance of the little Fitz statue but the downtown crime would be front page in the Pioneer Press and there’d be a photo of the headless author and also the ransom note taped to the base:

The McMonahams and 3M destroyed this city, putting its smart young people to work making Scotch Tape and Post-it Notes instead of creating great art. We took Scott’s head and we’ll return it only when the McMonahams put up a quarter million to publish my novel Hotel St. Paul. Show some class. It’s a classic.

Never before had an author shown such bravado as to commit a felony as a way of getting published. Authors had worked lousy jobs dishwashing and parking cars, attended writing courses taught by bipolar celibates, sucked up to editors, but here at last was an author who believed in himself enough to commit crime.

The heroine of Hotel St. Paul is a brave young woman, Jenn Ayre, who declines the offer of marriage from a pretentious professor in favor of a stand-up comedian. The professor taught poetry so that none of his students cared to read any for the rest of their natural lives, but the comic amuses the plain folk by pissing on pretense and goosing grandiosity, does more for civility than the jerk with the mortarboard. The comic adores her. The professor hopes she’d advance his career.

The McMonahams order a temporary head to be molded of hard rubber. They hire detectives to track down the culprit, without success. They suspect their daughter: the description of Jenn Ayre fits her rather well. And then the missing head turns up — in the McMonaham laundry. Their cleaning lady Lola confesses: she wrote the novel. They read it. It’s brilliant. It’s published to rave reviews. Lola reveals that she’s not Mexican but a member of the Ukrainian royal family in exile. The daughter marries her boyfriend, the wedding is held at the Hotel St. Paul across the street from the statue, and the guests dance on the plaza around the fountain, Scott watching them, coat in hand.

This is a better story. If it’s worth stealing, it’s worth stealing nobly.

Garrison Keillor © 08.18.25