Forty years ago next spring, the Twin Ports of Duluth, Minnesota, and Superior, Wisconsin, opened their arms to the world when they welcomed the British ship Ramon de Larrinaga on May 3, 1959.

The Larrinaga was the first ocean-going ship to transit the length of the St. Lawrence Seaway from Montreal to the head of Lake Superior. A deep-draft seaway from the Great Lakes to salt water had been a dream of Duluth visionaries from before the turn of the century, and Larrinaga was proof that the Twin Ports were about to enter a bright new era of international trade. Eighteen-year-old Davis Helberg was there that rainy May morning in 1959 to watch history made. 

Sometimes Davis Helberg swims with the big fishes, like Sen. Ted Kennedy (left), or catches the little ones (top).

Unfortunately, like Sammy Sosa’s home run race this baseball season, Dave’s own link to seaway fame came in second place. The young Helberg served as “ship’s runner” through a local shipping agent for the Liberian-flagged Herald. Five minutes after Larrinaga cleared the Duluth ship canal, Herald arrived to become essentially the subject of a local maritime trivia quiz.

But four decades later, Davis Helberg is still there, working and welcoming ships to the Twin Ports. Executive director of the Seaway Port Authority of Duluth for nearly half that 40-year span, Dave is perhaps the best-known maritime figure in the Great Lakes.

Dave, in fact, is among the oldest - in terms of length of service - port directors in the United States. He’s certainly the “oldest” in terms of service in the Great Lakes (on both sides of the border) and probably one of the five or six longest-serving port directors in the Western Hemisphere. Dave’s date of service stretches back to 1979, in a politically charged business in which the average tenure for a port director fluctuates somewhere between four and five years. 

“I guess I’ve just perfected the art of running scared,” Dave says.

Growing up, Davis Helberg never entertained thoughts of becoming a port director. Born and raised in the Finnish community of Esko west of Duluth, he was raised on the family farm and dreamed of playing football, basketball and baseball while doing daily chores. Dave’s dad was a self-described “lunch-pail farmer” who worked at the Northwest Paper Company mill in Cloquet and timed summer vacations each year for making hay.

“He had the outdoors in his soul,” Dave says of his father. “He loved the woods. He’d cut pulp all winter and had a huge saw near the barn for cutting firewood.”

For himself, Dave admits to being “always a sports nut. I fell in love with baseball in 1950 and have been smitten with baseball ever since. Ask my wife.”

Dave played sandlot baseball and high-school basketball and football. It was while playing high school sports that he discovered what he professes as his true calling in life. In ninth grade, he rode the pine during Esko’s cinderella journey to the state high-school basketball tournament at Williams Arena in Minneapolis. Since the ninth-grader wasn’t getting a lot of playing time, the seniors on the team asked Dave if he’d write and file sports stories for the school newspaper.

It was love at first write. Dave won an internship at the Duluth Herald the summer between his junior and senior year. The legendary Orville “Bud” Lomoe was city editor of the paper then, and he worked all that summer with his enterprising cub reporter. The next year, the morning version of the newspaper, the Duluth News-Tribune, proposed to sponsor young Davis for a scholarship at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Like so much else in life … life intervened. Dave had started dating his future wife, Karen, as a senior in high school. By the time the two graduated in 1958, they were already thinking about getting married. Dave turned down the scholarship, got a job at a laundry for something to do and began looking for a job that would allow him to start saving money.

He went to the Minnesota State Employment Service and got sent out on two interviews. One was to a bank. The second was to Alastair Guthrie.

Then in his 60s, Guthrie was the dean of Duluth vessel agents. He sized up young Helberg and saw a potential apprentice. “He offered me an appealing opportunity,” Dave explains. “He told me he’d put me on the boats the rest of the year. He’d put me through business school in the winter. And he’d put me on the payroll as of April 1, 1959.” It was one of those offers that was too good to refuse. 

“Forty years ago this past summer,” Dave chuckles at the memory, “I started what you might laughingly call a career. I was never real big on strategic planning.”

Dave took the offer, packed his bags and flew to Toledo, where he shipped aboard the LaBelle, a 50-year-old steamboat owned by Kinsman Line Cleveland. That day in the high summer of 1958, Dave got a quick education in the way of the lakes. He also lost a nickname.

As he clambered up the ladder of the LaBelle, the first person to greet him was Frank Kasperski, a grizzled, one-handed watchman who had proven too tough to die when  the Henry Steinbrenner had gone down in a gale five years before. Dave’s folks christened him Davis when he was born, and up until that very moment, everybody in Esko had known him for years by the nickname, “DeeDee.” He took one look at the weathered Kasperski and stuck out his hand. “It didn’t seem prudent,” he recalls, “to say, ‘My name is Davis, but you may call me Dee Dee.’ So I said, ‘Hi, I’m Dave.’”

The LaBelle carried ore, coal and grain between the lower lakes and Duluth-Superior, and Dave learned all he ever wanted to know about life on the lakes that long-ago summer. When the gales of November came early in 1958, the LaBelle was on Lake Superior and rode out the blow that claimed the Carl Bradley 150 miles south and east on the upper end of Lake Michigan.

Davis Helberg enjoyed newspaper work in a big way. 

“That was a wild, wild storm,” Dave says. “We were in ballast on Lake Superior. All hell broke loose about 2 a.m. It’s like my dad used to say: ‘Strange tales the big boys tell.’” 

Dave Helberg returned to Duluth that winter, enrolled at Carey-Gaspard School of Business, learned speedwriting and a little bit of bookkeeping and went to work for Alastair Guthrie Inc., a month before the seaway opened.

If you think Dave Helberg’s maritime career progressed in an unbroken line for 40 years, think again. Life, and the lure of the news and sports desk, kept intruding, at least for the first half of his career.

In 1961, still nurturing newspaper dreams, he quit the maritime industry to go to the University of Minnesota-Duluth. But midway through his first year, Karen was pregnant and there were bills to pay. Bud Lomoe was now News-Tribune executive editor and, when Dave applied in January 1962, Lomoe hired him as a cub reporter. A few months later, he landed a spot on the sports desk.

Not that he cut all ties to the maritime business. Sports was a nightside assignment from roughly 3 p.m. until 1 a.m. In 1964, Dave worked days as a ship runner for Duluth vessel agent Bob Baker. A ship runner is essentially a “go-for” for a ship while it’s in port, Dave explains. “When you bring the mail aboard, you’re kind of a popular guy - until you tell ‘em there’s been a change in orders.”

He wouldn’t be the first or last Twin Ports reporter to be bitten by the boats; one long-time Duluth-Superior reporter took his month of vacation every November to work the grain rush on the docks as a longshoreman. 

Alastair Guthrie wasn’t about to let a promising disciple defect to the Fourth Estate that easily. In the process of merging his business with Baker’s, Guthrie and his new partner, Sven Hubner, prevailed upon Dave to come back to the waterfront full time. He left the newspaper for the first time, but Bud Lomoe and the late Bruce Bennett were equally unwilling to let a good young reporter be wiled away to the docks. Like in a free-agent bidding war, the newspaper called again a year later. 

“At the end of the 1965 shipping season,” Dave recalls, “Bud and Bruce made me a heck of an offer. And I still had ink in my blood. It was really running thick. In February 1966, I decided for the second time to leave the maritime business forever.” 

Dave might have stayed at the newspaper were it not for the persistence of then St. Louis County Land Commissioner Len Theobald. When the News-Tribune asked him to go dayside to cover county government in 1967, Dave approached another of those career crossroads. Married by this time, with two children, he faced the choice all reporters eventually face: Stick with the first love of your life or find something more lucrative. All during 1968, when Dave Helberg was covering the tumultuous political battle between Minnesota Sens. Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, Dave Oberlin had started calling. Oberlin at the time was executive director of the Seaway Port Authority of Duluth and would shortly become U.S. Administrator of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

“He was looking for a public relations director,” Dave recalls. “But at the time, I had no use for the Port Authority. To me, it was just another public agency. I kept telling him I wasn’t interested.” But Len Theobald, who was then a port commissioner, kept pressuring Dave to at least go and talk with Oberlin. Dave relented, sat down with Oberlin and found that he liked him. And the more Oberlin described the P.R. job, the better it sounded. Plus, it paid more.

In September 1968, Dave left the newspaper business for the second, and (perhaps) final, time. “There ought to be a 12-step program for recovering newspaper reporters,” he laments.

He spent three years at the port but left shortly after Oberlin departed for Washington, D.C., and Massena, New York. This time, however, Dave stayed on the waterfront. His new boss was the late Tony Rico, himself a legend on the lakes. Rico hired him as assistant director of Upper Great Lakes Pilots Inc., and later named him president of North Central Terminal Operators, the stevedore at the port.

In the meantime, the Port Authority had gone through two executive directors., C. Thomas Burke and Paul D. Pella. When Pella left in mid-1978, three of the seven Port Authority commissioners approached the manager of their terminal operations about his interest in the job. That fall, he said yes, and on January 21, 1979, Davis Helberg took the reins at the Seaway Port Authority of Duluth. The rest, as they say, is history.

“My job is to smile and talk to the press a lot,” he says. In a more serious vein, he notes that in his nearly 20 years with the port, “I’ve been blessed with great staffs. And I’ve had good boards. We work really hard at continuing to stay as close as possible to the local maritime community.”

Whatever he’s done, it’s worked. When Dave started as executive director, the Port Authority had three waterfront tenants. Today, it’s 18. AirPark, the port’s industrial park near the Duluth Airport, had three businesses. Today, 35 companies call AirPark home. About 750 people work in businesses that are located on Port Authority property.

In the past 20 years, Davis Helberg has become a passionate, if sometimes puckish, spokesman for Duluth-Superior and Great Lakes maritime interests. Visitors to his Duluth office will notice photos of Dave Helberg’s family: wife Karen, sons Bill and Adam and daughter, Heidi. They’ll also notice a sepia-tone photo of a young gentleman in a high collar. If asked to guess, most would suggest it is a photograph of a Finnish great-grandfather. 

“Nah,” says Dave. “It’s Jesse James. He was one of the few Americans who knew how to deal effectively with the railroads.” 

Dave’s sense of rootedness has kept him in the Lake Superior country for going on six decades. He talks easily of his sense of cultural identity and in recent years has been delving into his Finnish heritage.

Several years ago, Dave spoke at a trade mission in Helsinki, aboard a Silja Line cruise ship. The next stop on the trade mission was Stockholm, and Dave stood atop the top deck as the liner made its overnight run for the Swedish Coast. 

“I was standing there watching the lights disappear from the Finnish islands as we slipped out into the Baltic,” Dave recalls, thinking about the young Finnish ancestors who left family farms 100 years ago, “going off into the great unknown, leaving behind their families, booking steerage on who knows what craft, heading for England to catch another ship for America. I was just overwhelmed by the experience.” 

A century later, Davis Helberg’s ancestors would be proud to know that their descendant is still going down to the sea in ships, heading off into the great unknown.

Bill Beck operates Lakeside Writers’ Group Inc. in Indianapolis. He used to write for the Duluth (Minnesota) Herald and News Tribune and for Minnesota Power in Duluth.

In 1955, the Minnesota Legislature established an independent public agency to foster maritime and trade development for the Duluth, Minnesota, port and to advocate for the port’s interests.

The Seaway Port Authority of Duluth, led since 1979 by Davis Helberg, preceded by three years the arrival of the first ocean-going vessel in the Twin Ports of Duluth and Superior, Wisconsin. The combined Duluth-Superior activity, averaging 40 million metric tons of cargo in a March through mid-January navigation season, constitutes the largest port on the Great Lakes and one of the premier bulk cargo ports in North America. The legislature has amended the Authority’s powers and duties over the years but its main mission remains much the same: “Build and improve the Port of Duluth and create environmentally sound economic development opportunities while protecting and generating international and domestic commerce.”

The agency owns some waterfront properties and an industrial park near Duluth International Airport and manages two tax increment financing districts.

Funding for the port authority comes through land leases, operating fees, economic development investments and related financing activities, as well as financial assistance from the state of Minnesota, county of St. Louis and city of Duluth. Those entities appoint a seven-member Board of Commissioners which sets policy and approves contracts. The agency’s total budget for fiscal year April 1998 through March 1999 is $2.7 million.