Around the little restaurant on Moose Lake's main drag, a lively Friday morning crowd filled most of the booths and tables, sharing stories and opinions. Some were enjoying 45-cent cups of coffee, quickly refilled by attentive servers. A man used a fork to methodically work his way through one of Art's Cafe's massive cinnamon rolls.
The woman in the booth still lives six months a year in Moose Lake, but she doesn't visit the cafe often these days. It's not that Romelle Jones doesn't like the food, the service or the ambience. She just doesn't want to appear to be looking over the shoulders of her successor, she said.
Jones, 75, owned Art's Cafe for 26 years, selling it on Jan. 1, 2007. Along the way, she was a key factor in setting off a movement that culminated that year in Minnesota.
Today is the 10th anniversary of the implementation of the state's Freedom to Breathe Act, which banned smoking in bars, restaurants and other indoor public places.
But before it became state law, a handful of communities paved the way, showing they could go smoke-free without calamitous effects on their hospitality industry.
It had to start somewhere, and it didn't start in Minneapolis or St. Paul or Duluth or Rochester or a college town such as Northfield.
It started in this working-class northern Minnesota town, in this unpretentious Northwoods cafe, with Jones, a woman with such a soft voice it was difficult to hear her during an interview, above the conversation from adjoining tables.
But that soft voice masks a steely determination.
"She was passionate, courageous, a soft-spoken giant," said Pat McKone, a longtime crusader for smoke-free policies with the American Lung Association in Duluth. "And she was always prepared."
Layers of smoke
Not so long ago, some of the patrons of Art's Cafe considered smoking a cigarette along with that cup of coffee to be almost a birthright.
"I'd spend so much time in the kitchen, (and) I would just look out here, and I could see the smoke (in) layers," Jones recalled. "And I could tell who came in by the smell of their smoke."
Jones had purchased the cafe with her husband in 1980. (He died in 1985.) The smoking habits of customers were, back then, a routine part of the business. Jones herself had smoked for 10 years, saying she started only to fit in, continued even though she never enjoyed it, and then when she quit discovered it was "one of the hardest things I've ever done."
But she had developed an implacable hatred of smoking, for personal reasons. She grew up in Duluth with parents who were heavy smokers. Each died of lung cancer.
Shortly after her mother's death, a catalog came listing the things she could buy with the coupons that had come with her cigarettes.
"And I took the envelope and I wrote on it, 'Do not ever send this garbage to this address again,'" Jones related. "'We just buried my mother. She died of lung cancer.' And I felt like somebody put a steel rod down my back. I thought: How can they do this to people?"
Smoke-free advocate
About four years after her mother died, in 1999, Jones got a call from Jan Salo Korby of the American Lung Association asking what she thought about Art's Cafe going smoke-free.
"It just took me a second, and I remember saying, 'I would love it. How can I help?'" Jones related. "And she said she almost dropped the telephone."
Moose Lake was seen as a promising place to start the smoke-free campaign, McKone said. Led by a city councilor who was a powerful advocate for the cause, the city already had taken some anti-smoking initiatives. It also didn't have any bars outside of a municipally owned liquor store and bar, so debate about the need to smoke while drinking was moot.
With a smoke-free ordinance proposed, Jones said she didn't want to go smoke-free independently because that might lead to the argument that one establishment already had banned smoking so the ordinance wasn't needed. But she was a vocal proponent of the ordinance.
It wasn't a slam-dunk. Another restaurant owner vigorously opposed the ordinance, minimizing the health detriments. The hospital took a neutral position, McKone said. But the councilor who ultimately cast the deciding vote in favor of the ordinance was a hospital employee.
The ordinance, the first like it in Minnesota, passed in April 2000 and took effect on Aug. 1, 2000. But with the debate over, Jones decided not to wait any longer. Art's Cafe went smoke-free on May 1.
She knew that smoking in her restaurant wasn't as prevalent as it seemed. One night, she had her servers make notes about how many patrons at each table smoked and how many didn't. When she compiled the results, Jones found that eight out of 10 customers were not smokers.
The ordinance received heated mixed reviews, for which Jones became the lightning rod. Although she said the vast majority of her correspondence was positive, she also received hate mail, "a lot of name-calling, very icky things." Once, a patron, learning who she was, loudly berated her for her advocacy of the ordinance, she said. The people at the next table stood and applauded her.
Over the first month or so, business took a hit, Jones said. Then it started to rebuild. Some of the people who had vowed never to return to Art's Cafe came back, "very quietly. And I never said anything, of course."
Business kept improving. Her last year, 2006, was her best at Art's Cafe. She sold it to an employee so she could help at her son's resort, Arcadia Lodge in Itasca County. She spends summers there and winters in Moose Lake.
Expanding the battle
As smoke-free ordinances moved up Interstate 35 to Cloquet and Duluth, Jones continued to speak out on their behalf. She kept hearing the same objections: that it was an infringement on individual liberties and it would be catastrophic for business.
The owner of the Duluth Grill was so certain about a ban's negative effect that when Duluth's ordinance passed, she closed her business.
Tom Hanson bought it.
"When we looked at it ... my wife and I looked at each other and said, 'I think we could do better with a nonsmoking breakfast restaurant,'" Hanson said last week. "We came into it thinking it was a plus."
The Duluth Grill thrived.
When the effort went statewide, Jones testified on behalf of the legislation. McKone recalled driving down from Duluth and picking up Jones along the way on frequent occasions. The bill went through 17 committees and 107 attempts to amend it, McKone said.
"That woman gave powerful testimony," McKone said of Jones. "She really debunked the 'Hey, don't tell me what to do.' She'd bring along the code (governing restaurants) and say, 'I'm told what to do all the time. You tell me what temperature to keep my butter.'"
Testifying in legislative hearings was outside of her comfort zone, and it would make her feel "almost sick to my stomach," Jones said. But "every time I did, I made up a little bit for what happened to my parents. A little part of me was saying, 'This is for you, Mom and Dad.'"
The measure was signed into law on May 16, 2007, and took effect on Oct. 1.
As controversial as it was then, it seems to be taken for granted now, Hanson said.
"Now it's hard to believe that you would see (smoking) in the interior of any public building," he said. "I think there's a whole generation that's over that."
from Don T Breathe - Google News http://ift.tt/2fCXrlK
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