text:
Posted inArts & Culture, History, Story
Percy Ross Wants to Give You Money!
He was was a self-made, blue-collar millionaire in Reagan's America. But when Percy Ross decided to give away his fortune, he made things simple: all you had to do was ask for it.
by Jacqui Shine July 20, 2017 October 12, 2022
Illustration by Matt Lubchansky
Jacqui Shine | Longreads | July 2017 | 23 minutes (5,700 words)
Percy Ross was a trash-bag tycoon, a serial entrepreneur who had made millions in plastics in the 1960s and relished spending it. But in 1977 he staged an astonishing reinvention. Ross would become a philanthropist — and not just any philanthropist, but one for people like him: a "blue-collar millionaire," as he put it. He'd give money away the way he'd gotten it, in bills small and large, and always when it was needed the most. He'd portion out his millions in cash, in checks, accompanied by the satisfying clink of a silver dollar. Percy Ross would become, as the newspapers called him, "America's Rich Uncle."
Ross always said — boasted, really — that he'd made and lost two fortunes. It was his third business that stuck, the one in plastics. Ross had been a fur auctioneer in the 1930s — he met the woman who eventually became his wife at a craps table in Las Vegas while in the company of Clark Gable — and an organizer of farm-equipment auctions. In 1958, the story went, Ross borrowed $30,000 to invest in a failing plastics company. He knew nothing about the industry, and within five years he'd filed for bankruptcy — but with hard work, the help of his family, and a little innovation, he eventually turned the company around. Poly-Tech, as he renamed it, made plastic garbage bags. He liked to tell people he sold Poly-Tech for $8 million on the same day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon: July 20, 1969.
The story of the trash-bag turnaround was part of Percy Ross's pitch-perfect rags-to-riches tale. Born in 1916 in Laurium, Michigan, a small town on the state's copper-rich Upper Peninsula, Ross was the son of immigrants, desperately poor Jews from Russia and present-day Latvia. His father was a junk dealer who worked constantly, and so did his three sons. By the age of 6, Percy had begun making weekly rounds through the neighborhood with a wagon of farm eggs his father had bought for 12 cents a dozen, which he then sold to neighbors at a 3-cent markup. He sold magazines. He started his own business rebuilding car batteries. He would have shined shoes at the country club if they hadn't rejected him for being too poor and too Jewish.
After the Poly-Tech sale, Ross began calling himself an "investment entrepreneur" and threw money at anything that interested him: Broadway shows, oil wells, a Hollywood production company. He'd even considered buying a professional boxing franchise and a failing Minneapolis soccer team. He dabbled in politics and was a fervent supporter of Hubert Humphrey. When the Minnesota senator lost his bid for the Democratic nomination in 1972, to George McGovern, Ross became the chair of Minnesota Democrats for Nixon and attended White House events and private parties with the president.
Ross surrounded himself with luxury and spared no expense. He matched his suits to his watches and his cars, of which there were at least eight — including a chauffeur-driven chocolate-brown Lincoln Continental limousine previously owned by Howard Hughes. He had apartments in London; Los Angeles; Rancho Mirage, California; and the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, where he also had a 3,000-square-foot office that had a color television and a telephone in the bathroom suite. He hired a staff of young, beautiful women with "IQs of at least 130," he said. One later modeled for Playboy.
He spread his wealth via a series of legendary parties that were, according to one Minneapolis paper, "stacked with celebrities" and "plain folk" alike. Another wrote that his social sphere put him "in the same league as Truman Capote." In May 1972, he spent $25,000 to throw a bash for the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport skycaps because, he said, they'd been so kind to him when he was a traveling salesman down on his luck. The party included dinner for 80 — on the menu were bone-in tenderloin steak, bananas Foster (listed as "Going Bananas for Percy!"), and champagne — and gifts for everyone, including a dozen roses for each woman in attendance. For entertainment, he hired a famous ventriloquist and chartered a Learjet to fly in boxer Joe Louis from Las Vegas.
[pullquote align="center"]Ross surrounded himself with luxury and spared no expense. He matched his suits to his watches and his cars, of which there were at least eight — including a chauffeur-driven chocolate-brown Lincoln Continental limousine previously owned by Howard Hughes.[/pullquote]
Sometime in the mid-1970s, Ross hired Timothy Kehr, the director of a Minneapolis ad agency, to help him with a new project: "He just wants to give away money and be known for it," Kehr told Backstage magazine in 1981. Charity might have been the impulse driving his generosity, but Ross wanted to position his narrative differently. He wasn't just some cruise director for the famed and fabulous. He would give away money—and be known for it.
Percy Ross made his first foray into the world of philanthropy with a Christmas party. The event on December 24, 1977 was his one-man cotillion, less a party than a choreographed event. An advance press release had been sent to national media outlets. He had invited more than a thousand disadvantaged children — culled carefully from lists supplied by social-service agencies — to the Minneapolis Auditorium. There were piles of gifts for each child and an appearance by MLB Hall of Famer Rod Carew. A cameraman was on hand to record the evening's finale. Just as the children were preparing to leave, Ross pulled up a stage curtain to reveal a crowd of brand-new bicycles. The kids went berserk.
It's sweet to see this moment on film. The camera captures a little girl's face exploding with joy as the curtain rises. It pans over to a group of kids who are scrambling onto the bikes, pedaling shakily in circles, trying out the horns. Ross pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and dabs at his eyes, smiling through his tears. It's hard to be cynical about the engineering that went into producing this moment. Afterward, Ross said it was a journalist who first called him "the Jewish Santa Claus," though this language seems to have come from Ross himself.
The Christmas party was picked up by the local media, and wire stories about the event turned up in papers as far as Colorado and California. Over the next few years Ross also pulled more publicity stunts — for instance, offering the Ayatollah Khomeini $50 million in 1980 to release the Americans held during the Iran hostage crisis. Two years earlier, he'd thrown $16,500 in silver dollars from the back of a moving convertible into the crowd at the 1978 Minneapolis Aquatennial Torchlight Parade. (No serious injuries were reported.)
Strangers began writing to Ross asking for his financial help. He tried to reply to every letter, sometimes with checks, others with advice. He set to work developing his responses into a newspaper column, which he first pitched to a local paper in 1980. In March 1983, Thanks a Million launched in seven papers; by July, it was in 80; within a year, the New York Daily News had picked it up. "The Philanthropist," as Ross was sometimes billed, started receiving 4,000 letters a week. Percy Ross, aka "Ann Landers with a bank account," went national.
Between 1983 and 1999, Percy Ross — the Jewish Santa Claus, the Blue-Collar Millionaire, America's Rich Uncle — gave away between $20 and $30 million of his personal fortune, usually in amounts totaling less than $2,000, through Thanks a Million. In the process, he introduced the world to a new kind of celebrity: a philanthropist with an outsize talent for giving the people what they wanted.
It's tempting to frame Thanks A Million as a product of the Reagan era, a trickle-down entertainment that attempted to cover gaps in readers' budgets created by the government's rollbacks of social welfare. Or maybe Thanks A Million was simply one conservative's effort to encourage a private alternative to welfare. Perhaps Percy Ross, like Ronald Reagan, was assertively defining who deserved what.
For his part, Ronald Reagan didn't like to talk about poverty unless he was maligning welfare programs for keeping Americans in the "poverty trap." Instead, he talked about the "truly needy," a group he began describing in his first term as California's governor more than a decade before he entered the White House. Reagan's truly needy were "the blind, the elderly, the disabled, and those children from families with little or no outside income and no employed breadwinner." These were the people who deserved the support of government anti-poverty programs, and they stood in opposition to another Reagan villain: the greedy welfare queen.
He invoked her just 16 days into his presidency, when he announced a proposed federal budget that included an aggressive $35 billion in spending cuts and imperiled social-welfare programs serving low-income Americans. "Our spending cuts," he said in an address to the nation, "will not be at the expense of the truly needy." Days later, he told a joint session of Congress that "only the programs for the truly deserving needy" would remain untouched. This was, of course, just one variation on a much longer debate over who constituted the deserving poor in America, a cruel accounting that has always been at the edge of public discourse about charity. Nearly all philanthropic efforts are defined as much by a donor's definition of the needy as they are by his or her generosity. Percy Ross was no exception, and it was in Thanks A Million that he got to lay out his own philosophy.
[pullquote align="center"]Perhaps 'Thanks A Million' was simply one conservative's effort to encourage a private alternative to welfare. Perhaps Percy Ross, like Ronald Reagan, was assertively defining who deserved what.[/pullquote]
Ross received thousands of letters a week, and his staff read them all. A trusted employee, aided by other paid readers, would winnow the week's mail down to around 200 letters; then Ross and his assistant would handpick 30 or 40. Ross read and replied to each of these, often privately fulfilling requests for money. (Only three or four would appear in print.) Frequently he sent cash; sometimes he arranged for donations to be made by others or paid merchants in a writer's hometown directly. Off-the-wall stuff was his favorite, which is probably less reflective of Ross's beliefs and opinions than of society's. Cat ladies, for example, took a hit when Ross wrote to Ms. V.W. of Oklahoma, who wanted money to build a dwelling for her twelve felines, "If I paid for your 'cat house,'" Ross replied, "my wife would put me in the doghouse."
At first glance, Thanks a Million seems to be a manifestation of the late-20th-century conservative zeitgeist of "personal responsibility." When Ross's column launched, promotional copy declared: "He doesn't give money for mortgages, health, hospital, or utilities, and he's not afraid to say no." The latter was certainly true. Ross regularly declined to assist readers he thought undeserving, and most of his columns included one or two rejections, usually made with a pun or some snappy wordplay. Rejections were judgments — of the request itself, of the person making it, or of the values Ross saw embodied in it.
He energetically made examples of people and requests he found greedy, through both tongue-lashing and juxtaposition. "Sorry, but I don't intend to help you," he wrote to D. C., a medical student from a family of surgeons who wanted $70,000 for his education. "So…suture self." This letter appeared below one from Mr. H.H., who asked Ross for a far more modest $250 so he could buy a window-cleaning safety belt and start his own business. He needed the help because he wanted to begin supporting his wife and two children, but no company would bond him because of a prior felony conviction. Ross granted the request with an encouragement to someday "remember that someone gave you a 'chance'" and return the favor.
This was classic Percy Ross. He was a friend to those who demonstrated their honest efforts, and he gave no quarter to those who didn't, regardless of their means; he had even less sympathy for people whose wealth and privilege made them feel entitled to his attention. For someone who understood his life as a series of lucky breaks, to take this stance makes perfect sense: He gave himself thousands of chances to reenact moments in his own life in which someone with power and wealth gave him a boost.
It is unsurprising that Ross found hardworking people to be the most deserving, but he didn't always adhere to a Reaganomics vision. Without shaming or scolding, Ross regularly sent money to correspondents who wrote that they were on welfare. On Christmas Day, 1988, he printed a letter from a woman who wrote to "tell you what it means" to be on welfare, and how hard things were a year after going off it. "I'm not asking for anything, Mr. Ross. I'm just very disappointed in life, including the fact that nobody ever wants to give us a hand and help us out. Face it," she wrote, "sometimes being able to help yourself is dependent on the roll of the dice." With compassion, Ross wrote that he was sending a thousand dollars as a "shot in the arm of Percy Ross' eternal optimism" — she did, after all, need a boost, even if she didn't ask for it. But he also didn't contradict her. "You've lived in the despair of the welfare trap," he wrote, "only to say the grass isn't any greener on the other side. That's the most frightening aspect, and one which keeps some people from ever trying to get out."
Despite his claims to the contrary, Ross gave people money for utilities and even for debts — though never for mortgage payments. In 1989, he sent a family living in a cold basement money for a space heater, and "some extra to soak up the added costs in your electric bill." A few years later, he paid a $336 light bill for Ms. B. W., who worked to support her disabled brother and infirm mother, and a $400 bill for a woman whose medical bills had bankrupted her family. In 1999, the column's last year, he paid a reader's overdue property taxes — and paid the next year's too. What made people deserving in Ross's eyes was that they tried hard to solve their own problems; his money could in turn ease some pressure and, though it sounds corny, offer some hope.
Ross didn't seem to care much about the possibility of getting scammed. He only investigated writers' claims if they requested more than a thousand dollars. "When readers trust me with their confidential and innermost thoughts," he wrote during the column's first year, "I rarely question their sincerity." And even when it turned out that Ross had been, as one letter writer told him, "taken," he seemed unfazed. In that case, his correspondent tattled that Ross had given money to someone who claimed he needed it to fix a nonexistent grandmother's roof. "It's not the first time I've been taken, and it won't be the last," Ross replied. "Thanks for the info, but sometimes that's how the cookie crumbles."
A certain degree of moralizing was also part of the equation, but Ross hesitated to impose his values on the people he helped. Over the life of the column, he paid for abortions, HIV testing, vasectomies, and tubal ligations — though he said he wouldn't fund artificial insemination because "my money is committed to individuals who already exist." None of this was particularly consistent: Sometimes he funded abortions and sometimes he didn't; sometimes he sent money to trans women who needed new clothing and sometimes he declined. But none of it was off-limits either.
He also refused to allow his readers to impose their values on others. He sent $350 to a woman who said she wanted to make a donation to a pro-life agency — but he directed her to use it to support "a child in your community who is underprivileged," someone who had "already been given a chance at life." In the same column, Ross printed a letter from a reader offended that Ross had advised someone with AIDS to practice safe sex, who wrote: "Abstinence is the only safe sex there is." Ross replied that comprehensive sex education for teenagers is "mandatory," because the consequences are "more than severe — they're deadly."
What's most moving about Ross's brand of philanthropy is not that he wanted to provide hope, but that he wanted to provide dignity and pleasure. He sent warm coats for husbands, long underwear and warm socks for entire families, a set of satin sheets and pillows to a bedridden 71-year-old, and a supply of incontinence pads to enable a woman to fly across the country for her daughter's wedding. He agreed to fund a nurse in a psychiatric hospital who wanted to buy cigarettes for her patients and sent another writer a case of snuff. He sent money to an older woman to live out her modest dream of playing the slots and eating a pastrami sandwich in Atlantic City, and he helped a woman keep her 92-year-old grandfather in girlie magazines for the rest of his life.
Almost immediately, Thanks A Million brought Ross the praise and attention he hungered for. He was profiled in dozens of newspapers and made regular television appearances. In July 1983, he was even honored from the floor of the United States Senate. David Durenberger, a Republican senator from Minnesota, described Ross as "a man with a heart of gold who gives pieces of it away in the form of silver dollars, checks, and cash" — a man ready to give "whatever someone in need needed."
But not everyone was impressed with Percy Ross. In 1983, a Minneapolis reporter told People, "If you're going to be a real philanthropist, you do it quietly and get your reward in heaven. Percy does it with brass bands and gets his rewards on the spot."
But there is no such thing as a "real philanthropist." Other than the literal translation of the ancient Greek ("love of humankind"), there is no clear definition of philanthropy. Instead, we have only a series of deeply institutionalized traditions. When Andrew Carnegie published The Gospel of Wealth in 1889, as industrialization was rapidly concentrating money in the hands of a new upper class, he outlined a capitalist humanitarianism that has come to define modern philanthropy. Carnegie was writing against the idea of charity, which he felt mitigated the consequences of poverty without addressing their root causes. The stratification of wealth was not the problem — this was "not to be deplored," he wrote, "but welcomed as highly beneficial" and merely temporary. The solution was that the wealthy person should, indeed was obligated to, use his money for the "common good" and become the "mere agent and trustee" of his "poorer brethren." In the last two decades of his life, Carnegie donated 90 percent of his wealth to philanthropic causes. Perhaps most famously, he endowed more than 2,500 libraries in the United States and across the globe. This was no mere exercise of noblesse oblige: Carnegie thought that successful industrialists were better stewards of wealth because they could apply their business skills to such projects.
[pullquote align="center"]Ross wanted his brand of philanthropy to provide dignity and pleasure to those who asked for it. He sent warm coats for husbands, and long underwear for entire families. He sent money to an older woman to live out her modest dream of playing the slots and eating a pastrami sandwich in Atlantic City.[/pullquote]
Carnegie's model has dominated American philanthropy in the 20th and 21st centuries. According to historian Olivier Zunz, author of Philanthropy in America: A History, charitable foundations are very much a modern American invention. Between 1915 and 1930, their number grew from 27 to more than 200. By 1955, there were 1,488 foundations in the United States, and today there are over 1 million 501(c)(3) public charities, all exempt from taxation as long and their profits are reinvested in the "common good." The management of a charitable endowment is conducted according to market principles, he explains. It's just that the profits generated are for beneficiaries, not stockholders — and the direct beneficiaries are causes and institutions rather than people.
By the 1980s, philanthropic institutions, as part of what we now think of as the nonprofit sector, were deeply intertwined with federal social-service provision, a relationship that, despite conservative arguments to the contrary, only deepened as the Reagan administration slashed government funding and enacted middle-class tax breaks. When Percy Ross began Thanks A Million he entered into a philanthropic world that had a very specific framework for what did and did not constitute charity.
In 1986, when Thanks A Million was syndicated in 150 U.S. newspapers, Town & Country included Percy Ross on an "honor roll" of the 186 "most generous living Americans," made up of individuals who had each given away at least $5 million to charity. The list included boldface names we still hear about today: Estée Lauder; NYU patrons Laurence and Preston Tisch; two sisters of newspaper magnate Walter Annenberg; Leslie Wexner, who went on to fund the Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University; Mark Taper, of L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum; and two Lincoln Center building namesakes, Alice Tully and Avery Fisher. Ross was in distinguished company — the writer, Dan Rottenberg, called him "America's most flamboyant philanthropist" — but he also had little in common with the others. They had endowed hospitals, universities, and arts organizations and made massive donations. Ross sent small checks to as many people as he could, a form of the pass-the-hat charity Andrew Carnegie so thoroughly disdained. But that didn't seem to bother Ross in the least. "I don't particularly want my name on a hospital wing or a statue," he told a Toronto newspaper in 1988. "It doesn't do me one bit of good. I'd rather have that money spent on somebody who needs their teeth fixed so they can go out and get a job and not be embarrassed."
Perhaps more significant than Ross's placement on the Town & Country honor roll was his exclusion from a feature on Minneapolis philanthropy the magazine published the following December. The same writer who had called Ross the nation's most flamboyant philanthropist, didn't even mention his name here. In fact, he didn't even leave rhetorical room for Ross. "That's how it is in Minneapolis," Rottenberg wrote, "where extraordinary people avoid calling attention to their extraordinariness."
Percy Ross was too ostentatious, too blue-collar, and in Minnesota probably too Jewish. (When Ross backed Nixon in 1972, the Star Tribune ran a story headlined "Two Jewish Minnesota millionaires seek out fellow Democrats for Nixon" that included a long analysis of the state's Jewish voters.) Even his own employees thought his new-money antics were tacky. In 1987, his longtime assistant, Connie Hanson, told a Los Angeles Times reporter that she "takes credit for her boss's new constraint…'Mr. Ross got rich very quickly and you know how that is. Throwing coins. Ugh! Certainly, we don't do that anymore.'"
While there is no single definition of philanthropy, many people think of it like obscenity: They know it when they see it. And a lot of people didn't like what they saw.
Part of the problem with Percy Ross is that it's not difficult to poke holes in his story. Over the years, the Minneapolis media certainly tried. A particularly bad year for Ross in this regard was 1981. The trouble began in late March, when the police raided his office on a Sunday afternoon. They arrested Ross and seized what was initially described by newspapers as "an unspecified amount of suspected cocaine, hashish and marijuana" — though there was only a "misdemeanor amount" of pot, and the white stuff turned out to be baking powder. But Ross received a felony charge for possession of hashish was excuse enough for KSTP-TV to run a previously taped interview in which Ross had admitted to past drug use. The Minneapolis Star Tribune published a front-page profile of Ross headlined "Drug link blurs Ross' image" fewer than 48 hours after the arrest. The writer suggested the arrest could threaten Ross's ability to secure a deal for a syndicated column "tentatively called 'Ask a Millionaire.'"
He was acquitted of the felony possession charge in late July, but the damage had been done. Reporters digging for dirt found a deposition from a former employee stating that Ross had committed perjury in an unrelated civil suit brought by a contractor. The matter had been settled to Ross's benefit. This, too, received front-page treatment and resulted in an investigation by the county attorney. Though the office declined to press charges, the Minneapolis Tribune reported this news in a piece that explained in great detail an allegation that Ross had enlisted his staff in forging letters that he submitted as evidence in his favor.
All this coverage was cruel — or so the papers' readers said. In the wake of the drug arrest, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published at least five letters from readers; one called the coverage "an ostensible ploy to breed sensationalism," and the rest echoed this sentiment. The letter writers agreed that Ross was generous and kind, that the police department and the papers had, as one man wrote, "darkened the name of an honest and charitable person" whose good deeds were far more important than whether he used drugs. The paper received a similar response in 1987 when it ran an exposé titled "Percy Ross: Is He As Generous As He Says?" A reporter had combed tax returns made public in Ross's civil suit to prove that his charitable deductions were far lower than he said they were. For one thing, Ross occasionally promised to pay for things local and state government agencies already funded. The paper also found that Ross often facilitated donations for readers, rather than necessarily forking over his own cash. This point seemed to especially rankle: all the bicycles he gave away at the 1977 Christmas Party had been donated by the manufacturer. After all, arranging in-kind donations is something philanthropic organizations do all the time. But this seemed like sour grapes to some readers, who wrote in to complain.
Eventually, the Star Tribune had nothing to say about him at all. No Minnesota newspaper ever ran Thanks a Million, but Ross always said it didn't bother him. After the Star Tribune called him a fraud, he told a South Dakota newspaper he wasn't surprised: "They say a prophet is never recognized in his own hometown."
But the newspapers might not have been entirely off base. It was hard to measure Ross's generosity. He refused to confirm his net worth for reporters; he seemed to give away most of his money without funneling it through his charity, the Sharing is Caring Association; and he handled his affairs through multiple accountants and lawyers. When his column ended in 1999, all Ross would say was that he had given away "between $20 million and $30 million," claiming there was no way of knowing for sure. Ross had no trouble making bold pledges — $50,000 to support Vietnamese refugees, $50 million to release American hostages in Iran, money to repair Robert F. Kennedy's vandalized headstone — but they often weren't accepted. At the same time, he was so committed to documenting what he did contribute that many of his gestures were easily confirmed, either by his own records or by newspaper coverage; local papers often reported on the donations Ross made to people in their communities.
The more serious offense is perhaps that Ross appears to have lied by condensing his life into a Horatio Alger story. He liked to say that he "went broke twice," always implying that his businesses collapsed. But that's not true. Ross wasn't broke when he bought the plastic bag company in 1958. He continued to work under the name Ross and Ross Auctioneers even after he purchased Poly-Tech. (Ross and Ross Auctioneers was still operating out of Ross's offices at the time of the drug raid in 1981.) As late as 1965, according to court documents, he and his wife had a profitable sideline publishing a national advertising tabloid for heavy-equipment sales. In fact, between 1958 and 1962, the Equipment Advertiser generated an annual income of $13,000. When adjusted for inflation, this amounts to more than $100,000 in today's currency, and that income was protected when the Poly-Tech Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (Over the years, Ross and Ross Auctioneers was itself embroiled in civil suits filed in courts across the country. Ross was accused of withholding profits from auction clients; passing bad checks after another creditor had garnished his account; and firing an employee just before an auction, then refusing to pay him his share of the proceeds.) The story of Poly-Tech's turnaround wasn't quite as it seemed, either. Ross always said that he split the $8 million he made from its sale with his sons and wife — but it wasn't to thank them for their generosity in helping to build the company. It was because his sons had sued him.
Maybe Ross didn't mind being taken by a good storyteller because he was one too. And maybe he thought these were his just deserts. His career in philanthropy was an effort to make amends for … something, anyway. He was "spreading the gospel … spreading the word," he told the Globe and Mail in 1988. "I'm on a mission … The good things I've done outweigh the bad ones. And people believe in me."
Whatever else anyone said about Ross or his column, his 30 million readers were unfailingly supportive. But they didn't just read Ross's column. They were philanthropists too. Struggling Americans, particularly recent immigrants, have long relied on the generosity of their neighbors and friends for financial assistance, especially through mutual-aid societies. Today, when we donate money to total strangers — sometimes in exchange for a reward, sometimes not — we call it crowdfunding. But in the pre-internet age, when money flowed in through self-addressed stamped envelopes, the recipients were true strangers, unbound by any form of community, willing to help out a name without a face, and not receive any form of acknowledgement.
In the last eight years of his column's run, Ross mobilized his dedicated readership to raise huge amounts of money for a handful of causes — his fans sent 15,000 children's books to a California schoolteacher who'd already shelled out $1,000 for supplies for her class of low-income second-graders. They sent money to a family who lost two children in a devastating house fire, and to the family of an LAPD officer killed in the line of duty. At one point, 22,000 readers raised a little over $200,000 to fund a heart and lung transplant for a 28-year-old woman. And when Ross printed a letter from a woman raising money to build a YMCA in Marquette County, Michigan, the organization received more than $50,000, most of it in dollar bills.
What Ross's readers accomplished was astonishing. The impressive thing here wasn't necessarily that Percy Ross gave individuals an opportunity to contribute to good causes. Small gifts from individuals have made up the bulk of charitable giving in the United States for decades. In 1981, Olivier Zunz writes, individuals with incomes below $50,000 were responsible for 85 percent of charitable giving. (That year, an estimated 638,000 Americans were millionaires; in 2016 there were 10.8 million) Instead, Ross was creating a kind of communal safety net, like the old mutual-aid societies and community chests to which struggling Americans once turned for help.
If Percy Ross wasn't all he appeared to be, it didn't seem to matter to his readers, who found his column inspiring — corny puns, showy gestures, and all. They were devoted to him. Newspapers that dropped Thanks a Million often received reams of mail from readers. When the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette discontinued the column, a reader wrote, "Why in the world you threw him away I can't imagine. I want to join all the others who have written to you to say, 'Please bring back Mr. Ross.'"
Thanks a Million ended quietly, without stunts or drama. "When I started this column, I made a solemn vow to continue helping people until I had given away all my money … As of today," he wrote on September 19, 1999, "I've achieved my goal."
There aren't any buildings named after Percy Ross, and that's how he wanted it. One of his favorite slogans was "He who gives while he lives knows where it goes." ("Money is the root of all happiness" was another.) He wanted to share, he wanted to inspire, and he wanted to be thanked. Did he want to be remembered? It depends on whom you ask.
When I tracked down Nancy Webber, who'd worked for Ross from the inception of Thanks a Million to its end in 1999, she told me that the once-voluble philanthropist didn't want his legacy to extend beyond his own life. "His family," she wrote in an email, "was not entirely supportive of his methods for distributing his wealth." This, of course, was no secret. Ross never concealed the fact that his family, like other wealthy Minneapolitans and many journalists, disapproved of his philanthropy. "My two sons don't believe in my system. They will not carry on this calling when I die," he told a reporter in 1996. "They believe that people should not get the kind of help I give them. I don't think they realize, I'm not giving them money, I'm giving them hope along with a few dollars." But Miss Webber (as Ross called her, in print and in person) told me one more story. Several months before his "sudden and unexpected" death in 2001 at the age of 84, she and Ross "held a conversation about his legacy," she said. "He asked that after his own death, if I could safeguard the family's privacy and let the story of Thanks a Million simply fade into obscurity. I told him then, as I'm telling you now, that I would honor that request for privacy."
It's a nice coda to the story of America's Rich Uncle, but it's hard to believe. Even if he didn't want a building, and even if he was concerned for his family's safety — it doesn't necessarily mean Ross wanted to be forgotten. What he wanted was to be a part of people's stories, as many stories as possible. His silver-dollar souvenirs and $500 checks probably didn't change many lives permanently, but he hoped his recipients would remember him. It's what he told a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1987: "If you help people, they remember you. They tell their children and their children's children." It's a sweet, frail ambition — perhaps the most expensive kind.
Jacqui Shine is a writer and historian whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Awl, Atlas Obscura, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Editor: Michelle Legro
Illustrations: Matt Lubchansky
Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel
Copy-editor: Ryann Liebenthal
Special thanks to Karolina Waclawiak and Andi Winnette
Tagged: economics, economy, money, philanthropy, ronald reagan


Light and bright 2006 built 3/2 with split bedroom open floor plan and vaulted ceilings. Kitchen has a breakfast bar open to the living room and a pantry. Living room is spacious with built-in cabinets next to the breakfast bar. Master bedroom has a walk in closet and the Master bathroom has a large soaking tub as well as a shower. Home feels larger than it is! Owner is a Lic. Real Estate Broker Associate.


We believe that all business is personal.
Core to our values are our relationships with our clients, our business partners, our own team, and the global community. Spaulding Ridge is dedicated to helping our clients transform their business, from strategy, through implementation and business transformation to AIM, ELEVATE, and EVOLVE.


text:
Page One of Two
Go to Page 2 of Suranme J.
History of Hennepin County and The City of Minneapolis, 1881. North Star Publishing
JACKSON, Henry is a native of England, born in Chatham, in 1821. He came to New York while young, and engaged in the manufacture of cutlery and surgical instruments, until he reached the age of twenty-one. He then removed to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and was engaged in the boot and shoe trade until 1856, when poor health forced him to retire. He then came west and located near Lake Minnetonka. He was one of the voters to elect the first Town Board of Minnetonka, and put on the first shingle roof in town, using shingles of his own make. In 1862, he purchased his present home in Independence, where he has since resided. In 1862, he married Mrs. Stimson. They have one child, Edwin W., aged seventeen. Mr. Jackson enlisted in the 6th Minnesota Infantry, August, 1862; was discharged June, 1868. He was drafted in 1864, and served about four months.
JACKSON, J.R. born in Ulster county, New York, March 1846, and came with his father to St. Paul. Mr. Jackson was one of the first businessmen in the place. He made one of the first claims where Minneapolis now stands. John R. enlisted in 1863, in Company F, First Minnesota Cavalry, served fourteen months, was mustered out at Fort Snelling in 1865. Married Lucretia H. Miller of Hennepin county; they have five children living.
JACOBS, John, one of the early settlers of this county, is a native of Wales, born in 1835. He emigrated to the United States, with his parents, in 1843, and located in Oneida county, New York, where his father died. He removed to Wisconsin in 1851, and engaged in lumbering until 1858, when he removed to Minneapolis, Minnesota. He enlisted in Comp. B, 6th Regt. Inf., and served against the Indians until 1864, when he went South, where he was taken sick, and mustered out. He was married in 1864, to Miss Matilda McKinley of Wright county. They have had four children, three of whom are living: William, Nettie and Belle. Lizzie R. died. Mr. Jacobs has held the office of town supervisor, two years.
JACOBSON, C. a native of Norway, was born August 9th, 1835. He emigrated to the United States in November, 1868, and first settled at Red Wing, Minnesota. In 1869 he removed to this city, and worked at various lines of business until July, 1878, when he embarked in the grocery trade; he owns the property where he is now located, at 1314 Fourth street south, and is doing a prosperous business. In January, 1862, he married Sigrid Engebretsen. They have five living children: John, Laura, Wolborg, Charlotte and Jacob.
JACOBY, George G. was born in 1838, in Germany. He moved to New York in 1859, remained two years, and in 1861 enlisted in the Fourteenth New York volunteer militia, the first regiment that enlisted to serve through the war served one year, and was discharged for disability. He located in West Virginia, and transacted a general merchandise business until 1865, when he returned to New York; after a three years residence there, he went to Philadelphia, where for nine years he was in the wholesale liquor trade. In 1877 he came to Minneapolis, and after about two years experience in the clothing and merchant tailoring business, returned to the wholesale liquor trade. He was married April 18th, 1868, to Fannie Mikols.
JACOBY, W. H. photograph artist, was born at Massillon, Ohio, May 24th, 1841. Since the early age of fourteen he has studied the art, and now stands in the front rank of photographers. In 1861 he opened a gallery at Dayton, Ohio, from there he went to Springfield, thence to Xenia and in 1866 removed to this city. He commenced, business here at the corner of Bridge square and Second street, and about five years after, built his present studio at 252 Nicollet Avenue. In September, 1860, he married Louisa Stafford. They have one child, Charles L.
JAMES, Freeman D. was born in Chautauqua county, New York, in 1822, where he lived twenty-seven years, much of the time engaged in lumbering. He went to California in 1853, met with considerable success, and returned to New York. In 1855 he came to Minnesota and settled in the town of Hassan, where he now lives. He has served the town as supervisor and constable. In September, 1864, he enlisted in Second Battery, Minnesota volunteers, was mustered out in July, 1865, at St. Paul, and returned o his farm. He married, in 1843, Mary B. Strong, who died February, 1876, leaving three children. Mr. James has done much for the cause of education.
From "Our Independence 1854 - 1981" Submitted by Claudine Pearson. ClaudeP@aol.com
JAMES, Roy Sr. and his wife came from Germany in the late 1880's. Roy served as foreman on the railroad from North Dakota to Montana prior to coming to Independence. In 1905 he and his wife purchased a farm on County Road 92 (where the Douglas McCulley family now live). Mr. James was overseer of County Road 92 to County Road 26 for many years. He and his wife reared a family of eight children. Peter and Frank moved to Maple Plain. Frank is well know to this area. He was employed by the State Bank of Maple Plain all of his mature years. He is retired but continued on as vice-president of the bank.
JAMME, Joseph one of the early settlers of Hennepin county, was born east of Quebec, Canada, May 16th, 1814. He lived with his parents on the farm until he reached the age of twenty-four, and in 1838, removed to the United States, residing in Maine, engaged in lumber business near Bangor. In 1853 he came to Minnesota, and spent two years lumbering at St. Anthony and on the river. In 1855 he made a claim of 160 acres, in what is now Plymouth, where he now lives. After residing on his claim one year, he returned to Minneapolis and engaged in lumbering until 1866, since which time he has resided in this town where he has a pleasant home twelve miles west of the city. He was married in Oldtown, Maine, to Miss Celeste Barber, of that place. They have had nine children, of whom six are living. Those living are: Addie F., Clara, Phoebe, Joseph R., Henry C., and Bernard G.
JARDINE, Alexander a native of Scotland, was born in Ayreshire, on the 8th of October, 1847. At the age of fifteen he commenced to learn the blacksmith's trade, also worked for a time with Randolph, Elder & Co., ship builders of Govan, Scotland. In 1869, he went to Canada; stayed one year, and then removed to Massachusetts, but afterward returned to Canada, and in 1879, he came to Plymouth, Minnesota, and established a blacksmith shop, where he is doing a thriving business. October 19th, 1880, he . married, in Minneapolis, Miss Sarah, daughter of William and Ellen Allen, of Scotland.
JARRETT, William J. was born September 14th, 1823, in Lehigh county, Pennsylvania; attended the Moravian school until fifteen years of age. In 1838, removed to Allentown, and engaged in farming until 1840 ; went to Philadelphia as currier, for a short time; thence to Mauch Chunk, following the same trade until the spring of 1867, when be, came to St. Anthony, and engaged his brother in the Jarrett House, for a short time; thence to Eden Prairie. While in Pennsylvania, married Miss Susan Detwiler, of Mauch Chunk; has had six children, five of whom are living. Has been a been a member of the town board several times.
JARVIE, Matthew a native of Scotland, was born December 18th, 1827. He came to the United States in 1855, and settled in Berkshire county, Massachusetts, where he worked at the woolen manufacturing business; he moved from that county in 1857, and continued the same pursuit at various places. In 1871 he came here and was at once engaged as superintendent of the weaving department of the North Star Woolen Mills. This position he resigned in 1873, and entered the grocery trade in which he is meeting with success; he owns the property where he is now located, No. 1329, Fourth street south. His wife was Miss M. Jarvie, whom he married in 1855.
JEFFERY, Thomas a native England, was born September 16th, 1845, in Derbyshire. In October, 1865, he came to the United States and lived in New York city until 1875, when he removed to Minneapolis and started in the carpet business; first alone, then as Kenyon and Jeffery, and now the firm name is T. Jeffery and Company. Their place of business is No. 225 Nicollet Avenue. He was married in 1869, to Miss M. B. Hague of England; the fruits of this union were four children, only one of whom survives: John Arthur, aged seven years.
JELLISON, Jesse L. born in Ellsworth, Maine, 1845., Moved to Springfield, Illinois; moved to Minneapolis when thirteen years old, which has been his home since. Enlisted in company E, Eighth Minnesota, in 1862. Served a few months, when he enlisted again in Hatch's Battallion, in 1863, and served against the Indians. Was honorably discharged at Fort Snelling in 1866. Married in 1871 to Elldora Fuller. They have four children.
JENKINS, N. H. was born in Caledonia county, Vermont, in 1820. He lived there twenty-three years; lived in Washington county, Maine, eight years; engaged in teaching part of the time. In 1851 he came to St. Anthony, Minnesota, and lived about two years, when he took a claim on Jenkins Prairie; he lived there fourteen years, then sold it, and moved to Minneapolis, where he lived two years. In 1869 he moved to Brooklyn. He was married in 1850, to Emily R. Hanson. They have five children living.
JENKINS, Sylvanus was born in Vermont, March 6th, 1818,and lived there twenty years. He then moved to Washington county, Maine, and lived thirteen years. He was married in 1840, to Eunice R. Noyes. Came to Hennepin county in 1851, and his family followed in 1852, He took a claim on Jenkins Prairie; sold it in 1865, and moved to Dakota county, and bought 1,000 acres; sold this also, and now lives near Farmington, Minnesota. They have seven children
JENKS, G. A. born at Watertown, Jefferson county, New York, in 1826. He removed to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1846, and was employed in the manufacture of machinery, with L. and A. G. Coes; after about two years he was given the general management of the financial department; he was with this firm ten years. In 1856 he went to St. Louis, Missouri, and accepted a similar position in the wholesale dry goods establishment of Pittman Brothers. In 1860 he came to Minnesota, and in 1862 was appointed republican commissioner to go into the army and take the vote of soldiers; and in 1865 was at Prairie du Chien, in the quartermasters department. He engaged in the manufacture of barrels, for A time, at Excelsior, and in 1872, came to Minneapolis; he worked for different firms until September 1st, 1878, since which time he has been employed by Fraser and Shepherd as general book-keeper. In 1846 he married Pamelia Lockwood. They have one child: Arthur, who is now assistant train dispatcher for the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway.
JENSON, C. was born in Denmark, in 1847. He emigrated to America, and in 1867 went to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. In the fall of 1868 he removed to Minneapolis, and was engaged as laborer until 1872, when he embarked in the dairy business. The firm of Smith and Jenson started with forty cows, but at the expiration of four months they sold out, and in the fall of 1873, commenced with only twenty cows, which they sold again in the spring. The following autumn, the firm of Jenson Brothers located on the east side, engaged in the dairy business with twenty-four cows, and in 1875, bought their place of fifteen acres, on section 29. In the spring of 1878 this partnership was dissolved and C. Jenson is now sole proprietor of the "Western Avenue Dairy."
JEWETT, A. W. a native of Maine was born in June, 1840, at Aurora. His father was a black-smith and so he commenced learning that trade as soon as he was large enough to hold a hammer, and has continued in the business since. In April, 1869, he came to this city and is now a member of the firm of Myers and Jewett. December 11th, 1872, Mr. Jewett married Anna McCausland. They have two sons: Ira and Leon.
JOHANSON, Hans , a native of Denmark, was born in 1844. He came to Minneapolis in 1872, and in, 1876 commenced the dairy business. He now has fifteen cows. Mr. Johanson was married in 1875, to Miss Anna Madsen. They are the parents of one child.
JOHNSON, A. M. a native of Ohio, was born May 29th, 1849, in Logan county. He accompanied his parents to Minneapolis in 1866, and attended school here three years. Until 1872 he worked with his father at building, and then started in the milling business at the ''Old City Mill," where he remained three years; he then went to the Pettit mill where he is still employed. Mr. Johnson's marriage with Miss Clarinda Scott occurred October 11th, 1874. Two children have been born to them Nellie and Gertrude.
JOHNSON, ASA E. M.D. was born at Bridgewater, Oneida county, New York, March 16th, 1825. He first studied medicine in 1849 with Dr. Kellog, a homeopathic physician; then studied three years, in Otsego county, with Dr. Erastus King, afterward, he became dissatisfied with his homeopathic experience and, attended two courses of lectures at the State University of New York, where he graduated March 16th, 1851. The following May he went to Beloit, Wisconsin, and practiced there until May 1853, then removed to St. Anthony. Dr. Johnson is the oldest practitioner in the city. He was married March 16th, 1853 to Hannah Russel, of Wisconsin. They are the parents of one child, Roesina.
The Dr. was county physician for one year, and on the board of health two years. It was he who suggested the organization of the Minnesota Academy of natural sciences, now located in this city; he was the first president of that institution and held the office four years. He has served on committees of various natural sciences, entomology, comparative anatomy, geology and cryptogamic botany; he classified and identified eight hundred species in mycological botany. Among the classifications, the Dr. is the discoverer of seventeen new species peculiar to this state; some of them have been confirmed by such high authority as Professor Peck, state botanist of New York; he also discovered at Palmer Lake mound, Brooklyn, Minnesota, the skeleton of a mound builder; this curiosity is now in the Minnesota Academy of Natural Sciences.
JOHNSON, C. was born in Sweden, September 12th, 1847. He emigrated to America in 1868, and after a short stay in Kansas, he removed to Goodhue county, Minnesota, where he remained until 1872. He then came to Minneapolis and engaged in the grocery business in which he continued until becoming a member of the firm of Ryberg and Company in the Stockholm meat market. He was married in 1880 to Anna Peterson, of Sweden.
JOHNSON, Charles was born in Maine, 1816. He moved to St. Anthony in 1852, remained there until 1855, when he went to Nebraska; was gone four years; returned and spent two years in Carver county; moved to Minneapolis, for one year, and then came to Long Lake, where he has since resided. When he first came here there were only two houses, and nothing but forest where now is the centre of the village. He married Miss E.F. Barnes, in l870. They have one child.
Additional notes provided by descendant, Gene Barnes. Eugene Barnes
He married Eleanor Frances Barnes in 1870. She was the daughter of Shepard Blanchard Barnes (1819 - 1898) and Olive Hill Small (1818 - 1897) and born June 30, 1843, in Springfield, Penobscot County, Maine. Their son, Charles Menos Johnson, was born in Hennepin Co. on June 24, 1880. The family migrated to Beaverton, Washington County, Oregon, in 1883. Charles Johnson died there in 1901, and is buried in the Cedar Mill Cemetery, Washington County, Oregon. Eleanor Frances Johnson/Griffin died in Raymond, Pacific County, Washington, on June 14, 1943, and was buried in the Cedar Mill Cemetery.
Note: (Charles is said to have died in Beaverton in 1901, but Eleanor and her son appear alone in 1900. Death certificates for Oregon at that time are unavailable. A lot of counties did not report from turn of century on although required to do so by law. My gr. gr. father Barnes died in 1906 - not even a funeral record - checked four counties. As far as I can tell Charles had a parcel within my gr. gr. parcels, held with his wife, Eleanor Frances Barnes Johnson. He may have been a Cooper (West. Henn. Co. Pion. Assoc. notes). Oregon records were supposed to be sent, circa 1900 to a central source, but as late as 1930, some counties did not participate, and there is no death certificate yet to be found on Charles, and as I indicated, records show he died in 1901, but 1900 census has my great aunt Eleanor with her son. Charles is not listed. I think sent his sup. through, but just a note of explanation.
JOHNSON, Charles W. was born in Belleville, St. Clair county, Illinois, March 17th, 1843. He received an high school education at his native place, and learned the printer's trade at intervals between the terms of school. He came to Minnesota in 1860 and worked on a farm and taught school two years; enlisted in the Sixth Minnesota and served over three years. At the close of the war he returned to Minneapolis, taught school and finally resumed his business of setting type, drifting naturally into newspaper work in the capacity of correspondent, reporter and editor on various city papers. He was elected and served one year as city clerk. In 1873 he was elected assistant secretary of the state senate and the following year was elected secretary of that body and for six years afterwards performed the duties of that office. In 1880 he was appointed supervisor of the census in the second census district of Minnesota. During the winter of 1881 he was engaged as the Washington correspondent of the Pioneer Press, and received the republican nomination for chief clerk of the United States senate. He has been engaged actively in politics of Minnesota as a republican for many years, and has been secretary of the state central committee and of the republican central committee for the Third congressional district. His family consists of his wife, the daughter of J. D. Rich, Esq., and two promising children.
JOHNSON, David. B. a native of Winchester, Gurnsey county, Ohio, was born August 7th, 1852. When seventeen years of age, he went to Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, and remained there about two years; he then attended the Geneva institute for the same length of time. At the age of twenty-one, he began the study of law with Milton Barnes at Cambridge, Ohio, and later with Amos Coggswell, of Owatonna, Minnesota. He was admitted to the bar in February, 1876, and practiced law at Owatonna three years, then came to this city and has since resided here. He married Miss Carrie M. Johnson at Owatonna, June 27th, 1877. They have one child, Antoinette.
JOHNSON, F. A. was born in Sweden in 1849. He emigrated to the United States in 1871, and located in Minneapolis. For five years he was with the American Express Company, and since that time has been in the hotel business. He has been proprietor of the Swea House since September 1879. It is located at 723 Washington Avenue south. His marriage with Lena Cornell occurred in June, 1880.
JOHNSON, George H. was born in Norway. He came with his parents to America in 1850, and settled in Cook county, Illinois. In 1862 he enlisted in the First Illinois Artillery. He served most of the time with the army of the Cumberland, and was in the battles of Chickamauga, Stone River, Lookout Mountain, Mission Ridge, and others. He also accompanied Sherman as far as Atlanta on his march to the sea. . He was mustered out in July, 1865, and came to this city in the autumn following. He worked in the lumber mills for a time, and then went on the police force. Mr. Johnson was elected sheriff in 1870-1872-1874, and went to the legislature in 1876. In May, 1877, he was appointed deputy sheriff, and has since continued to fill that office. His wife was Annie Sheridan, of Anoka. She has borne him five children. Those living are: George and Nellie.
JOHNSON, Gustavus, V. born in Clayton county, New York, March 2nd, 1845; learned the trade of ship building. In 1868 enlisted in Company M, 14th New York heavy artillery, and was mustered out September 1865, at Rochester. The same fall came to Chicago, worked at ship building, then to Fox Lake, Wisconsin, and did carriage making a number of years. Sold out and went to Winona, then to La Crosse, where he was engaged in boat building four years, thence to White Bear Lake, following same business three years, then to Lake Minnetonka and established a large boat building business. Married Elizabeth Buffett, Sept. 23, 1869. Have two children living.
JOHNSON, J. W. was born May 2d, 1825, in Franklin county, New York. He learned the contracting and building business, and worked in that line until 1857, when he engaged in mercantile business. In August, 1864, he moved to Red Wing, Minnesota, and in 1868 came to Minneapolis. He was in the dry goods trade here until September, 1869, when he took charge of the North Star Iron Works, then located in St. Anthony, but removed to the west side, and greatly enlarged in 1870. In 1872 he bought one-fourth interest in the works, and in 1874 bought the other three-fourths, and conducted the business until 1880, when he retired from active business. January, 1881, he was elected president of the City Bank. Mr. Johnson has been married twice; his first wife was Martha Walker. The second wife, Mrs. Malinda Roman, has borne him three children, Annie, Frederick, and Walter.
JOHNSON, K. a native of Norway, was born in 1844. He emigrated to the United States in 1868, and ten years later came to Minneapolis. He is engaged as millwright at the lumber mill of P. G. Lamoreaux, and resides at 203 Third street north.
JOHNSON, Luther Gage was born at Concord, N.H., November 13, 1813. His parents removed during his infancy to Boscawin, Merrimac County, with whom he remained until twenty-three years of age, at which time he opened a general country store at Fisherville, now Penacook, J. S. Kimball as partner. Ten years late opened a tavern at Fisherville for the accommodation of stages and teams passing over turnpike road from Canada through Vermont Boston and Portsmouth. The country tavern in those days was headquarters for the neighbor to meet for the daily mail and exchange greetings.
In 1853, accompanied by his brother John C., he visited St. Anthony and decided to locate here. Returning to Fisherville he closed out his business and with his family reached St. Anthony in the spring of 1854, accompanied by his brother and Mr. Hubbard. They establish furniture factory just below the bridge crossing to Hennepin Island, which was furnished with power from the falls. Here for three years they carried on quite an extensive business for that time until 1857, when they sold out their business to the Barnard Brothers. Johnson Brothers then built a three-story stone store on Main street, just below the present Pillsbury A Mill, where they opened a general grocery and supply store, with Wm. M. Kimball and Mr. Hubbard partners. Two years later their partners retired from the firm, and the Johnson brothers continued the business under the style of L. G. & J. C. Johnson until 1880. The Johnson Brothers also laid out some additions to St. Anthony.
Mr. Johnson was alderman of the city in 1856, but did not seek or enjoy public positions. He was deacon of the First Congregational Church for more than twenty years. He was married Miss Cornelia E. Morrill, January 21, 1847. He died in August, 1897, in the same house he purchased and moved his family into on his arrival in St. Anthony in 1854, after an honorable, active and long business career, loved by those knew him intimately and highly respected by all of his acquaintances. (SEE ALSO BELOW)
JOHNSON, Cornelia E. , widow of Luther G. Johnson, was born at Canterbury, N. H., December 6, 1826. Her father was Hon. Ezekiel Morrill of Canterbury, N.H. She was married to Mr. Johnson January 21, 1847, who died at Minneapolis, August, 1897, leaving four children, the eldest son, Edward M., late judge of the district court of Hennepin County, being born in New Hampshire; Mary, wife of Lieut. John A. Lundeen of the U. S. Army; William C., secretary of the Northwestern. Casket Co.; and Luther A. Johnson, who died in January, 1897. Mrs. Johnson resides in the same house she occupied with her family on their arrival at St. Anthony, in April, 1854.
JOHNSON, Peter a native of Sweden, was born July 12th, 1845. He attended school until 1861, then followed farming until 1866, when he came to America; he first located in Wright county, Minnesota, and in May, 1867, came to this city; he worked as an apprentice at the mason's trade until 1870, then worked five years as journey-man, and since 1875 has been contracting. Mr. Johnson still retains his old homestead in Wright county. He was married August 3d. 1873, to Miss Christina Swedeburg; they reside at 507 Fourth street north. Two children have been born to them: Carrolton and John Edward.
JOHNSON, W. H. was born October 5th, 1825, at Ogdensburg, Now York. At the age of nineteen years commenced lumbering; in 1849 he went to Wisconsin, bought 160 acres of land, and after the heavy work of clearing was done, he run, in connection with his farm, a sawmill and lumbering business. Mr. Johnson hauled a portion of the rolling stock for the Chicago and North-western railway from Sheboygan to Fond du Lac, a distance of forty-one miles, on a plank-road, using eight teams; he drew an engine entire. In June, 1864, he came to Minneapolis, and had charge of Morrison's saw-mill until 1879, when he was elected superintendent of the water-works. He was councilman four consecutive years, and went to the legislature in 1877-1878. He married Miss Sarah Lyman, of Jefferron county, New York, March 11th, 1847. Their children are Jasper and Sumner. Mr. Johnson and family resident 1229 Eighth street south.
JONAS, Joseph a native of Prussia, was born June 16th, 1848. He came to the United States in 1872, and lived in St. Louis, Missouri, until the following year, when he came to Minneapolis, and has since been engaged in the sale stable business. In 1880 he started a grocery and general merchandise store at his present location, No. 420 Plymouth Avenue. Mr. Jonas married, in 1879, Caroline Sternberg, of Prussia.
JONES, J. G. was born in Washington county, Maine. He came to Minneapolis in 1857, and went into the clothing business in company with his father. In 1861 he enlisted in the Third Minnesota Volunteers, and served four years. He participated in the battle of Murfreesboro, the seige of Vicksburg and the capture of Little Rock; he then came to Minnesota and took part in the war against the Sioux Indians; he was at the battle of Wood Lake where three hundred Indians were captured, thirty-eight of whom met the death penalty on the scaffold at Mankato in 1862. On being mustered out of service he returned to Minneapolis, and was elected county treasurer while absent on his wedding tour. This office he held four years. Since 1870 he has been engaged in the logging business. He now has lumber yards at the corner of Washington Avenue and Tenth street north. In 1866 he married Anna Harrison. They have two children, Carrie and Harrison.
JONES, R. F. born in St. Lawrence county, New York, September 25th, 1852. He came to Minneapolis in 1875, and since then has been a wholesale and retail dealer in oysters, fish, game, etc., at his place of business, No. 806' Hennepin Avenue. The wholesale trade is very extensive; shipments being made throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the northwestern territories. He is the originator of the brand of oysters known as the Gold Seal; they are packed and shipped to him by his branch house in Baltimore, Maryland. Mr. Jones family consists of a wife and one child.
JONES, W.B. born in Madison county, New York, 1828. Moved and located in Saint Anthony in 1855, then to Excelsior in 1856. Took a claim, and in 1860 started a store. Was Postmaster for eighteen years, Has been twice married, the first time in 1850; the second in 1876 to Mary H. Moore.
File contributed for Minnesota Biographies Project by:
Carol Mitchell gooddog@wi.rr.com June 27, 2004, 4:42 pm
JONES, WILLIAM H. was born in the South. The family believes it was Georgia. He joined the Confederate Army in Georgia on 15 October 1863 as a Private. He was with K Co 66th Inf Reg, GA. This Company had formed on the 13th of Oct 1863. William was about 18 at the time. By Dec of 1863 William is absent without leave. At this time it is assumed he changed his name to JONES. It was said to be his mothers' maiden name. It was said that he was captured and given the choice of staying in the prison camp or joining the Union Army to help fight the Indians out West. He choose fighting the Indians out West. He appears next on the 1870 census of Dodge County, Fremont, Nebraska. He trained to become a paper-hanger. He is married to MARGARET (MAGGIE) O'GORMAN born at Dane County, Madison, Wi 1849-1912. She was the daughter of EDWARD O'GORMAN and MARGARET WALSH, DUNN, O'GORMAN. B 1815-unknown. WILLIAM was an avid fiddle player. It was said he learned to play on a "gourd fiddle". He would play his fiddle for extra money and was in at least one contest that was published in the Minneapolis Tribune on Feb 26, 1926. He played in other contests throughout the Midwest. The Minneapolis contest was broadcast on the radio WCCO. The other contestants were: FRANK SWANSON, 63 yrs old, "OLD DAD JONES (WILLIAM), 79, played Marching Through Georgia, "OLD KING TUT' SCHWANENBERG , 58 he said his fiddle cured him of chronic arthritis, AUGUST SIEGEL, 62 who can play his fiddle with his mittens on, WEBB KOONS, 68, played Silver Threads Among The Gold, AA LUND, the gum chewer, O.A. HENDRICKS,76, a farmer, and J.S. LeBRUN, 72. and HARVEY MUSSEY, 78. This event was The Minneapolis Tribune- Finkelstein & Ruben Old Time Fiddling Contest. It was reported that between 25,000-30,000 people were in the audience. The winners of the contest were:
1. KING TUT 2. D.M. MORRIS, 3. FRANK SWANSON 4. J.S. LeBRUN 5. HARVEY MUSSEY 6. "FIDDLING SAM" BLACKETER. WILLIAM JONES died in 1931 and had a wonderful article published about him, most probably untrue, but he seems to have had a wonderful spirit and zest for life that is a wonderful gift to pass on. He was an amazing man without the embellishments.
The children were:
LUCY A. JONES b.1867 Nebraska –1949 She married ROBERT E LEE 1856-1913 Son of
JOHN LEE. She re-married sometime after 1931 to a Mr. KERBER.
SARAH JONES B Mar 1868 in Wyoming and died unknown
She married ( abt 1887) CHARLES MONTAGUE, b. 1863 in Wisconsin d. unknown. Son of JOHN MONTAGUE and BRIDGET MCGUCKEN. Children were: JENNY MONTAGUE, B Dec 1888. INEZ MONTAGUE b. Sept 1890. LEONARD MONTAGUE b 1902. PATRICK MONTAGUE b. 1911 and adopted son ( we are assuming from a brother) CHARLES MONTAGUE b 1921.
KATHERINE JONES b. 1870 d. 11 Mar 1949. She married NOAH LABELLE.
WILLIAM H JONES, JR b. 1874- d. 7 Aug 1913
MARGARET JONES b. 1876 d. unknown. Married GEORGE WILSON. One son named GEORGE WILSON.
JENNIFER JONES 1879-1951. She married CHARLES BENNETT. 1883-Unknown Children were: HAROLD BENNETT, MARGARITE BENNETT, RICHARD BENNETT, VERA BENNETT 1901-1986 and ROBERT BENNETT b. 1924
CAROLINE JONES 1882-1967. She married WILLIAM R CONWAY. B 1884 in Minnesota. Their Children were: WILLIAM R CONWAY 1902-1985 JOHN (JACK) H CONWAY b 1904 . Married ALICE unknown . THOMAS E CONWAY b 1906.
ROBERT JONES 1883- Unknown
MYRTLE JONES b 28 Oct 1886 d. 27 Oct 1976. She married MATTHEW NICHOLAS ALTENHOFEN 1887-1958
FLORENCE JONES 1889-1949. She married (abt. 1906) HERMAN PETERSON 1884-1930. Son of PETER PETERSON and ANNA unknown. One child RUTH PETERSON 1907-1982. She married HARRY GILBERT. Son of ADOLPH GILBERT and JENNIE HILL. Marriage #2 IRA R MITCHELL 1882-1953 Son of JAMES F MITCHELL and NELLIE ROBINSON. Children : DONALD S MITCHELL 1909-1988 and MILDRED MITCHELL 1915-1961
EDWARD D JONES 1891-1891
FRANK JONES 1893-Unknown. He married JOSEPHINE UNKNOWN 1894-Unknown. Children were: MARIE JONES 1917-Unknown, DAVID JONES 1918-unknown, ROBERT JONES 1919- Unknown and JANE JONES 1922- unknown.
JONES, W. H., born in Wales, May 1st, 1845. In the spring of 1857, he accompanied his parents to America, and lived with then on a farm in Columbia county, Wisconsin, until 1866, when he went to Green Lake county, and for two seasons was in the agricultural implement business; then he was employed one year as general agent for a Milwaukee firm, and afterward with E. H. Gammon. In January, 1878, he established himself in the agricultural implement business in this city. He is now president of the Plano Manufacturing Company of Plano, Illinois. He married Elizabeth Owens, September 18th, 1876. They have three children, Hugh, William and Arthur.
JONES, Edwin Smith president of the Hennepin County Savings Bank, was, born June 3d, 1828, at Chaplin, Windham county, Connecticut. He received such education as the schools of his native town afforded, and attended two terms at the Monson Academy, Massachusetts. After completing his academical studies he began the study of law in the office of Hon. J. H. Carpenter, at Willimantic, Connecticut. Having finished his professional course he wished to explore the rich and fertile lands of the west, which were only waiting to reward the toil of those industrious ones who were willing to work. He accordingly carried out his plans in 1854, coming to seek a home and fortune in Minnesota. Finding Minneapolis a desirable place in which to locate, he entered the law office of Hon. Isaac Atwater to complete his reading. He was admitted to the bar in l855 and continued with Mr. Atwater until 1857, and afterwards alone. The next year, 1858, he was elected to the office of probate judge, in which he continued until 1861. In 1863 he entered the Union army and was commissioned captain and commissary of subsistence in the department of the gulf, an office which he retained to 1866, when he returned to Minneapolis and resumed the practice of his profession. During the years of 1866-1867 he was chairman of the county board of supervisors. Continuing to practice until 1870. Judge Jones accepted the position he now occupies, president of the bank. In 1873-1874 he was a member of the city council. Since 1860 he has been connected with the Masonic fraternity. He and his wife are members of Plymouth Church in this city. He was married in September, 1853, to Miss Harriet M., daughter of Whitman and Harriet James of his native town., and lost his wife twelve years later. He was married again in September, 1866, at Minneapolis, to Miss Abigal J. James, sister of his first wife. She died in April, 1872. In May, 1877, at Goffetown, New Hampshire, Mr. Jones was wedded, to Miss Susan C., daughter of Charles and Susan C. Stinson. His children living are: Edwin S., Jr., Ellen, David P. and William O. (SEE ALSO BELOW)
Edwin Smith Jones was born June 3, 1828, at Chaplin, Windham County, Connecticut. His father, David Jones, was of Welsh descent, and his mother, Percy Russ Jones, was of English stock. His father was a sturdy farmer, who tilled one of the hill farms of Connecticut. His father died when he was ten years old, and his mother when he was seven. All the education which he obtained was in the common district schools of the neighborhood and several terms at Munson Academy. At sixteen he began teaching school, and, with his older brother, carried on the home farm, until his removal and departure to Minnesota in the spring of 1854, settling in Minneapolis, which was then only a straggling village. As was customary in those days, he came up the river to St. Paul by boat, and then on to Minneapolis to join the pioneer village, residing first in what was called St. Anthony.
Just before coming to Minnesota he had begun the study of law in the office of Ron. J. H. Carpenter, of Willimantic, Connecticut, and continued his study of law upon coming to Minneapolis in the office of the Hon. Isaac Atwater, being admitted to the bar in 1855. He continued the practice of law until the breaking out of the Civil War. Just prior to his departure for the seat at war, he, with other citizens, were called upon in quelling the Indian outbreak on the frontier, and was one of a group of volunteers who went to the front to protect and assist the terror-stricken farmers upon the frontier.
Early in 1862 he received an appointment from the government to an important service in the South as commissary of subsistence, mainly in the Department of the Gulf. His most important service was perhaps in connection with the ill- fated Red River expedition. He was the chief commissary of that expedition, both up and back During his service his headquarters were, at various times, at New Orleans, Mobile, Baton Rouge, Port Hudson and Shreveport. At the close of the war he retired and was brevetted as major for faithful and meritorious service.
On returning from the army, in 1865, he took up again the practice of law until 1870. During this period he was for three years judge of probate of Hennepin County. Prior to the incorporation of the town of Minneapolis into the present city, me was chairman of the board of supervisors, and, with Dorillus Morrison, was one of the candidates for the office of mayor at the first city election of the new city. He subsequently served two years in the common council as alderman of his ward, all of which positions he filled with ability and with a high sense of his responsibility and obligation in the various positions of trust or duty to which he was called.
He was the founder of the first savings bank in the city of Minneapolis - the Hennepin County Savings Bank, and served as its president from the date of its organization, in 1870, until his death.
During the later years of his life he carried out many plans of beneficence and charity, among them a long-cherished plan in the founding of an old ladies' home, through the agency of the Woman's Christian Association of Minneapolis, now known as the Jones-Harrison Home. He was a director or trustee of a number of educational institutions, both in the State and beyond its borders, and was also a corporate member of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. In the mountains of North Carolina he also established and maintained a large school for girls, which is still a flourishing institution for the education of Southern white girls of the mountain districts, and continues to do a fine work under the name of Jones Seminary.
Judge Jones was a man of very large benevolence, and during his lifetime gave very largely of his wealth to aid educational and charitable institutions. He was one of the broad-minded, liberal citizens among the older settlers of Minneapolis who helped to lay the broad and deep foundations of that beautiful city, and whose, most earnest desire was always for its higher life.
He died at Minneapolis in January, 1890.
From "Minneapolis Portrait of the Past", collected and compiled by Edward A. Bromley. Voyaguer Press. 1890
(Click to enlarge image)
JONES, Judge E. S. (same as Edwin Smith Jones above) Well up on the roll of prominent pioneers belongs the name of E. S. Jones. It was in 1854 that Mr. Jones, then twenty-six years of age, left his native State, Connecticut, came to Minnesota, and chose Minneapolis as his home for life. After completing his study of law in the office of Isaac Atwater, he was admitted to practive in 1855. He received his title, Judge, by serving as a judge of probate, from 1858 to 1861. He was in the service during the war,and aat its close resumed his law practice. He needed a wider field for his stirring energies, and during the twenty years prior to his death, in 1890, he was a business man with large interests. He was one of the organizers, and continued year after year, president of the Hennepin County Savings Bank. He was very successful in business and exceedingly liberal with his accumulating wealth. He gave freely to scores of worthy objects, and in church adn charitable enterprises his name was a household word in Minneapolis and in many remote places.
JORDAN, Amos. C. managing editor of the Tribune, was born in Eaton, Canada East, April 22d, 1842. He removed to Minnesota with his parents in May, 1854, locating at Purgatory, four miles from Excelsior in Hennepin county. In 1867, he entered as an apprentice in the office of the St. Anthony Express, then owned by Isaac Atwater. In 1861, with four other compositors of the Atlas, owned by W. S. King, he enlisted in the First Minnesota Infantry, and in the absence of Mr. King at Washington, they closed the office. Remaining in the service continuously until August, 1865, he returned to Minneapolis and soon afterward secured the position of telegraph editor of the Daily Tribune. In 1872, he resigned, and with Col. Lounsberry, founded the Bismarck Tribune, of which he had entire editorial charge during the first year. In 1874, he joined as night editor of the St. Paul Pioneer, owned by David Blakeley. After the consolidation of the Pioneer and the Press, he continued as night editor of the consolidated concern until the purchase of the Minneapolis Tribune by Mr. Blakeley, when he once more returned to Minneapolis to assume the duties of managing editor, which position he has since held. Mr. Jordon has done more of editorial service in Minneapolis than perhaps any other person. His continuous service in responsible positions on leading journals in the state, amply testify to his capacity and ability.
JORDAN, John H. a native of Prussia, was born January 16th, 1845. When seven years of age, he came with his parents to America. They landed in New York in the fall of 1852, and went to Newark, New Jersey, for a short time, and in 1853, moved to Illinois. In the spring of 1855, they came to Minnesota, and made a claim on section 18 of what is now Plymouth township, where they experienced, of course, their share of the hardships of pioneer life. In July, 1864, John R. enlisted in the 8th Minn. Regt. Vol., served nine months, and was mustered out at Fort Snelling, May 16th, 1865. He returned to the homestead and lived, until his marriage with Anna M. Weidenbach, which occurred in November, 1868. In l871, he bought the farm where he now lives, Mr. Jordan has been active in all the public affairs of the town, also in promoting the causes of Christianity and education. He has been assessor for six years, also justice of the peace, and school officer for a number of years. At present he fills the office of town clerk. They have had six children, only three of whom are living: Anna, John and Alexander.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
SportTrump says will award Tiger Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom
21:15 15 april 2019 Source: reuters.com
© Reuters/LUCY NICHOLSON FILE PHOTO: Tiger woods celebrates after winning the 2019 Masters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said he would award Tiger Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom after the golfer won the Masters for the fifth time on Sunday.
"Spoke to @TigerWoods to congratulate him on the great victory he had in yesterday's @TheMasters, & to inform him that because of his incredible Success & Comeback in Sports (Golf) and, more importantly, LIFE, I will be presenting him with the PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM," Trump tweeted.
(Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
Tiger Woods waking up ridiculously early for final round of the Masters
The Masters moved up its schedule for Sunday's final round due to the possibility of severe weather later in the day, and Tiger Woods has given us an idea of just how much of an impact that will have on the golfers. Tee times will begin at 7:30 a.m. ET off the Nos. 1 and 10 tees, with the leaders teeing off at 9:20 a.m. Since the tee times are beginning so early, Tiger said Saturday that he will be waking up around 3:45 a.m. to get his routine started. How will Tiger prepare for his early tee time Sunday? "I'll wake up around 4 a.m., maybe 3:45 a.m… Start the process of getting this body ready and get after it." Anyone else going to wake up at 3:45 with Tiger tomorrow? — GOLF.
Related video: Highlights of Sunday's final round (Provided by CBS Sports)
Your browser does not support this video
NASCAR America MotorMouths: Is Kyle Busch the Tiger Woods of NASCAR?.
A caller presented an interesting question and our analysts had equally interesting responses.
Michael Jordan Receives The Presidential Medal of Freedom
Michael Jordan, one of the greatest athletes of all time, receives the nation's highest civilian honor in the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jordan played 15 ...
George H.W. Bush On Medal Of Freedom Award
George H.W. Bush talks about the medal of freedom honor he received from President Obama.
Tiger turns back clock to win Masters for first major since...
Empire State Building to glow green honoring Tiger Woods' Masters...
Watch: Stephen Curry pays tribute to Tiger Woods in pregame...
NASCAR America MotorMouths: Is Kyle Busch the Tiger Woods of...
For goodness sake, Federer is 37 and too old to be doing...
For Roger Federer to best an opponent - and an 18-time Grand Slam winner - on such a fast, exacting, demanding surface at his age, is […]


Have you planned to go out with your loved ones or families on outing this season? If yes, then better get yourself prepared employing all the gateways that can be done downloading the imperative and lucrative iPhone apps/ Either you need some personalized forecasting details or instant hotel reservation or any other cheapest gas options, we have dig-out the amazing mobile apps that can make your travelling plans a cinch.
There are some more amazing words besides "road trip" that can make the motor in running condition are the "roadside oddities". This is a Roadside American App that will alert that will aid in giving the alerts of the popular road side attractions such as shopping outlets and farmer markets. There are also a few roadside oddities that true road runners can only enjoy. The app will also nequeath the opening hours of the stores, entry rates as well as the directions of the road side sites of the US. You will also never miss the ball of twine using this app.
Those who love sending postcards, this app can be really worth-full for them. Just pick any photo, input the picture, message along with the address information. Then proceed with a high-quality and glossy postcard that will be mailed directly to the recipient. All the postcards sent to the US addresses will cost 1 credit that will sum up to near around $0.80 which is really an affordable alternative to dig out the own postcard.
This iPhone Mobile Application Development will allow you to easily locate and save the details of local hotels. The negotiation part is lacking a bit, but the user will definitely find the desired deal. Instead of a back and forth naming game, the app will let the user in negotiating based on all the previous deals that have been found in the area. There are amazing two features namely; Browse and Radar. The Browse feature will list all the hotels in the local area and Radar will find the hotels in the similar direction of your moving.
It is a very true fact that weather can take a huge change within a small snap, so better get prepared with appropriate resources before you move for any destination. However, iPhone usually have its own weather app, but using this app you can easily get the weather conditions for the exact location along with the long-term forecasts and radar maps.
No matter, how much strong you are as the road warrior, safety is the major priority. Whether you are driving alone or roaming around with your family, your safety lies at first. Most of us are magnetically drawn to the smartphones, but when it comes to driving, we just ignore them. Behind the wheel is really an amazing way embedded by an iPhone App Programmer in order to resist the urge of answering the calls. A soon as your cell-phone will receive an incoming message, Behind the Wheel will auto-respond via message that you will respond later or you are driving.
Rick Brown is a technical content writer who is working for a highly reputable iPhone Mobile Application Development Company. You can avail his assistance to hire iPhone App Programmer with the good skills.
As the world has become more digitalized with every passing day, the technological advancements are shaping up the future in a completely new way. Over the recent years, LCD technology has brought a colossal revolution in our lives.
Once it comes to DJ club lighting some things change while others stay the same. In choosing DJ club lighting with style, you may choose from regular can lights, spot lights, and so on or much more up to date LED light walls, ceilings or dance floors.
Most of the people might be living with the extra weight and want to shed it. Many times, this may not be possible especially when the lifestyle if not appropriate. One needs to have a balanced diet as well as an exercise program in order to lose weight and making changes in the life style.


text:
Q: Moderator Suspension Guidelines: Is the increasing suspension time policy doing more harm than good? Before I start with my question, let it be said that I am not against suspensions as a moderator on Programmers.  They are a valuable tool in our belt in dealing with less than acceptable behavior with users.
The current guidelines on moderator suspension are essentially that with each user infraction, the level of suspension increases many orders of magnitude from the last infraction.

*

*Written warning

*7 days

*30 days

*365 days

To throw an example out, lets say I call a specific user "a f****** idiot" and I get a written warning.  The next two times I say something to the effect of "why don't you actually use your brain for a second and think about it" and I get suspended twice more.  The third time I get suspended I get in an edit war.  The fourth time I maybe use foul language in a post that can be easily edited out and I refuse to edit the content of my post personally.  This last action results in a 1 year ban.
This is all a fictitious example of course.  My issue with the above example is that ever increasing punishments occur by the common guidelines compared to ever decreasing severity of infractions.  The user learned their lesson that personal attacks are not to be tolerated.  They subsided in this and committed some lesser offenses in my opinion but paid more of a price.
What kind of lesson does this send the user, someone who possibly has been a valuable contributor for years?  The prior history and mod annotations follow that user for the rest of their time on the site and 500 valuable answers later they may find that one small slip up results in being kicked out for a long period of time.  Why would that person be motivated to come back or help anymore?
It seems very similar and relevant to debates about The Three Strikes Law and how it doesn't work.
My proposal is that the infraction should always fit the response, and that prior infractions should be no determination in the appropriate moderator action for a specific infraction.
Essentially each new type of breach of the rules should give the moderator the discretion to issue ONE and only one warning.  The repeat offense should get the appropriate punishment.  If say somebody goes rage and starts defacing content with adult content, that should be an immediate harsh suspension.  If after serving that time the user never repeats that particular offense but then proceeds to contribute valuable content for a while, then has a minor "skirmish" with another user, then that should be a lesser but appropriate action.
This would result in more fair outcomes and would be a better moderator guideline for all sites.

A: I was a part of a mailing list community for years some time ago. We had lots of great participants, but we had one awesome person in particular who was aggressively abrasive.  He was on moderation (ie, every message vetted by a moderator) for awhile, and a number of other things were tried to help him change his behavior.  He was of the opinion that the best way to correct another person was to berate them and rub their noses in their misconceptions and mistakes - but he always led them the right way and had a great deal of skill, experience and knowledge.
When, over a decade later, a compatible community on Stack Exchange came into being I was curious as I saw people from this mailing list become involved in the community.
He eventually came here as well, (and incidentally joined several other communities here) and guess what?  He learned the rules and followed them.  I don't know if he ever suffered moderator bans, nor whether his opinion on how best to teach others has changed.
But he's significantly changed his presentation and is fitting in well enough with the communities he's chosen to participate in.
Conversely, I've seen great people join the community, hit the ban wall, and ultimately leave because they are unwilling to change.
The point here is that the system as-is works.  Those people who want to stay, can and do.  Those people who are unwilling to change are not.  People who have to be banned 7 times before they're no longer welcome are not interested in changing and integrating.
This proposal seeks to allow repeat offenders to stay forever with minor bans when they fail to follow the rules. For instance, a user might choose to use foul language in their posts once a week, and get a day ban each time.  They get to break the rules frequently, use the sites more than 75% of the time, and they have little to no incentive to change.
These are not the users we should include in our community.
Further, it would increase the subjectivity the moderators already have to use.  With the current system there's a little subjectivity, and essentially a single punishment.  With your proposed system there's a lot of subjectivity and a multitude of punishments, and they'd have to be codified, tracked, and when disputed it would be a lot more work.
I don't see the benefit to this proposal. It hurts the community more than it helps it.

A: In society punishments remove your human rights due to your behavior.
Stack Overflow, Inc, in no way affects your rights.  Participating in Stack Exchange communities is a privilege, not a right.
As such, geometric increases in suspension times here is utterly uncomparable to studies of "3 strikes laws."
Without the studies, your argument has no foundation.  Please update your feature request with data that shows this system hurts these communities, otherwise I fully expect you to find it rejected by the community.
At the moment the system:

*

*Appears to work fine

*Significantly reduces moderator workload by quickly weeding out bad actors

Any change should address both those points, and you've addressed neither.

A:
Justice is Truth tempered by Love

Old, Ultima players may recognize this statement, taken from that game virtue system.
I think that the reply here is to be found in the word: Guidance. Those are guidances, some ideas that should help you in deciding what is the "right" action to do. Not all second infractions should incur in a 7 days ban, and not all first ones should just end up in a warning. I am no mod, but I do think that you should have some form of autonomy in applying the main guidelines - that obviously doesn't means going completely against them just because, but you should still be able to do some minor adjustments as the situation calls for.
That said, while you DO have a point there - sometime two minors infractions are better than a single mayor one - it is also worth noticing that as the number of infractions goes up, then probably you would want to give history a weight greater than the single infractions taken one at time. The actual type of the infractions should matter too.
Consider this counterexample: an user that was suspended two times for voting fraud gets caught a third time. I am not sure "30 days" is the correct answer here - there is a repeated problem, and probably just giving out another suspension won't resolve much - the user need to understand that either he changes or he will have to be banned forever.
My whole point here is that I don't really know what the moderation requirements are right now and as such I don't know how committed to use those numbers you all have to be - but I wouldn't focus any change proposal you may feel you need to have around the sheer number of infractions.
The nature of the user, his history, the type of the errors he made... all of those should be taken into account when deciding.

A: I would look at suspensions not so much as a punishment for the person who is breaking rules, but as a way to protect the rest of the community from that person's behaviour.
The first suspension a user gets is not just for doing one thing wrong - they already have a history before mods suspend.
Once we get to someone who has had a 30 day suspension for being rude or offensive, when they come back if they do it again, do I think another 30 day suspension is likely to "cure" them?
No.
Do I think a 365 day suspension will cure them?
Possibly. Possibly not. But it will stop them being offensive to the rest of the community for the next year, so that is an overall benefit.
And that sequence does ignore the usual comments, messages and guidance that moderators (and the rest of the community, usually) provide to try and help sort out behavioural problems, so the progression from 7 to 30 to 365 is not a dramatic jump.
It is only a single order of magnitude progression each time.

A: Suspensions are for serious offenses, not for just anything a user does wrong. There is always the choice of warning users. Suspension isn't the first choice, it usually is the last one.
The suspension durations are a guideline, and we can diverge at any time if they don't fit the situation. I think the increasing durations are a good idea for most cases, but certainly not for all of them. Moderators should feel free to suspend for more or less than the recommended time if they think it is appropriate.
The easiest way to deal with users that do something problematic on the site is to just tell them to stop doing that. Reasonable users might just follow that advice and the problem is solved. Suspensions in most cases involve users that aren't being reasonable at that particular time, users that don't just stop problematic behaviour when asked nicely. Doing short suspensions over and over again would not solve the issue in such cases, it just adds more overhead and drama to the whole process.
The history of a user is a pretty good way to judge if they'll be reasonable and change their behaviour. If a user just does the same stuff over and over again, odds are they won't stop this time either.
If you're at the point where a 365 day suspension is on the table, you'll have to ask yourself if the user can be convinced to stop the problematic behaviour, or if you just want that user gone from the site. Giving out a year-long suspension pretty much means you want that user gone and see no reasonable chance that they'll change their ways. If you think there is a good chance that the user won't continue the problematic behaviour, or if you don't think the offense warrants such a long suspension, then don't suspend them for that long, but think of something else.

A: To a certain degree I agree with you. The suspension time given is not always an appropriate punishment for the offense.
However I disagree with this one:

one small slip up results in being kicked out for a long period of time

If you are being suspended for a year or more, there is something very serious you have done. It doesn't really matter that half a year, or two years would have been more appropriate. You have repeatedly broken the rules, now you have to live with it.
The suspension times set are not hard rules as far as I know. Moderators can vary the suspension if they think it is appropriate. In extreme cases, users can be suspended for a very long time, almost forever. Also, if a user posts spam in the degree you describe, his account can even be deleted, and his IP blocked.

A:
My proposal is that the infraction should always fit the response

I agree with that. However...

and that prior infractions should be no determination in the appropriate moderator action for a specific infraction.

...I strongly disagree with that.

There are a two cases to consider.
First, the case where a user keeps breaking the same rule many times. A user who repeatedly is targeting votes, is being rude or abusive to others, is self-promoting their own work without disclosure and/or in inappropriate contexts. The course of action for all of these may be different - the escalation procedure for using signatures is very different than the escalation policy for being rude or abusive. Once a user is informed of a particular rule or policy, he or she shouldn't need constant reminders or warnings. Eventually, those warnings should turn into suspensions and those suspensions should turn into longer suspensions. Eventually, you may need to even escalate higher than a moderator to a CM.
Second, the case where users break different rules. SE sites are complex communities. We are different than other online communities with respect to our standards and expectations. Although I hope that people read the Help Center and the policies, they don't always. If a person is warned once for including signatures, then another warning may be in order if they self-promote their own content. Just because you have notified them of one behavior, they may honestly be unaware that the other is a problem.
There are other things to consider, as well:
For one, interactions on other sites. Moderators have tools to communicate with each other across sites. If a user has been talked to, warned, or suspended for one action on one site, you need to take that into consideration. Some policies, like being nice or not including signatures/taglines are the same everywhere in the network.
Something else is the time since the last warning. If it's been a long time or is infrequent, then you may need to escalate a lot slower. However, if the behavior is frequent, then you need to consider it. Suspension is a way to protect the rest of the community. If someone is spamming or being rude, they are hurting everyone else on the site and if they do it often, they need a longer time-out from their contributions.
I also do think that you need to somehow weigh in the contributions of the user. You want to balance saying "hey, this isn't the kind of behavior that we want here, please go and learn from your mistakes" with their useful contributions. By no means should you look the other way to infractions, but you also want to give them every reasonable chance to change their ways.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange