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Your Harley Sorensen stories, please

By David Brauer | 02/24/11

Reading Gail Rosenblum's lovely obit for former Star Tribune reporter, convict and literary cabdriver Harley Sorensen this morning, I couldn't help thinking I'd bumped across the name somewhere.

Turns out it was in a 2009 Braublog post about a new daily newspaper in Detroit with Minneapolis connections. The Detroit publishers started a newspaper here during a 1980 Star and Tribune strike. As ex-Stribber Mike Zerby recalled, "Under the watchful eye of Editor Harley Sorensen, my wife Judy and I both worked for them, made page one several times and got PAID!"

After a commenter mentioned another short-lived paper, the more conservative Daily American, Strib alum Richard Parker wrote this:

I remember the 1980 strike and some shoestring operation edited by my buddy Harley Sorensen, although I was a Guild hard-liner. The Daily Herald, or then the Daily American, was still around in the late 1960s. I remember the Tribune's rotating police beat having a credibility problem as characterized by Peg Meier in the early 1970s, even after Molly Ivins had left for Texas: A woman (Peg), two black guys, one openly gay (Terry Farrell and Carl Griffin), and an ex-con (Harley). The cops would sit around making a point of reading the Daily American when our reporter-du-jour would be visiting the cop shop.

Man, don't those times sound delicious? I can't help thinking there are more good Harley Sorensen stories out there. If you have some good ones from his Minneapolis days, please plunk 'em in the comments.

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Comments (5)

Submitted by Larry Pearson on February 24, 2011 - 2:17pm.

Harley was a friend during my Tribune days. Dick Reid hired Harley while Harley was still in Stillwater Prison. I wish I could recall just what Dick said when he returned from conducting that job interview. I do remember that Dick was mightily impressed by his insights about the paper.

Harley was a great police reporter, too good at times. He got into trouble with the police and with the managing editor by getting too close to fleeing kidnappers after a St. Paul bank robbery. He was using his police radio to track them and he did it so well that he got between the police and the kidnappers. That incident got him a mention in Time magazine.

I kept in touch with him for a while after he moved west. He wrote a novel soon after arriving in San Francisco, but reported back to me that it had turned out to be unsalable, characters were too wooden.

But that description didn't apply to Harley himself. He, like Molly Ivins who's no longer with us either, and others who still are, is one of the people who made the Tribune newsroom (and the social life centered around it) a great place to be in the 1970s.

Submitted by Chuck Lennon on February 24, 2011 - 3:03pm.

Only with this post did i realize harley had passed. As a St. Thomas journalism student in mid-70s I was a copy aide at the Tribune. Harley
was a fun presence at the city desk, always hilarious, and never looked down at a copy aide, was always ready with an explanation, a tip or a kind word. In fact, i enjoyed many long conversations with him. And i never realized he was an ex-con, just thought he was a Child of the 60s like us all. He deserves to rest in peace.

Submitted by brent andrews on February 25, 2011 - 4:28pm.

It's fun to read the Harley stories, please keep them coming. Thanks.

Submitted by betty Wyren on March 7, 2011 - 2:02pm.

Harley never really knew what effect he had on so many lives. He was an exceptional writer with a "Ma and Pa Kettle" charm. He loved to instruct everyone in the correct way to do anything and everything. I am forever grateful there were no pop quizzes after football and baseball games.
I was always "Miss Betty or Peahead (because my head is the size of a pea)". We went together the last 17 years of his life. I used to critque the columns for SFGate.com that he wrote for in the 1990s. He always had a way of presenting a new perspective on whatever he wrote about. He never got a big head because he never understood how great he was.
I learned a lot from him and for that I am forever grateful.

Following Harley

Submitted by brent andrews on March 10, 2012 - 2:37pm.

Mr. Brauer,

I will be in the Twin Cities area next week following Harley Sorensen's remarkable trail from Frogtown to St. Cloud, Stillwater and the Tribune. Ms. Rosenblum of the Tribune has offered a cup of newsroom coffee, which I am looking forward to; and I am working through the proper authorities to get a tour of the prison at Stillwater, where Harley edited the Mirror in the 1960's.

I am gathering a Harley Sorensen archive with the help of Miss Betty Wyren, Harley's long-time girlfriend, and on behalf of his son Dominic, with the goal of publishing several Harley books for profit and posterity. He left a mountain of material behind.

Harley was a friend of the common man and an advocate for prisoners, the disenfranchised, and the disaffected. One of his first acts, when he became editor of the very good Reformatory Pillar at the M.S.R., St. Cloud, in 1955 or early '56, was put out a "suggestion box" and publish a column about it which resulted in immediate changes favoring the men. The Suggestion Box column became a clear channel of communication between the prisoners - Harley never called them "inmates" - and the administration that was beneficial to all concerned.

His story reveals the potential of a criminal to change his life and contribute in a positive way to society. It is my hope to have it in every prison library.

Please share my contact information with your readers, and my request for their memories of Harley for an upcoming book.

Warm Regards,

Thomas Brent Andrews
Franklin, Tennessee
615-516-9861
The Harley Sorensen Project
http://www.harleysorensen.com