BurtonHanson.Com About Burton Hanson

Burton Hanson.Com

Political Opinion Journal

Sometimes Left, But Always Right

About Burton Hanson

I was born in Benson, Minnesota on Memorial Day in 1943 and baptized in the Norwegian Lutheran Church on the Fourth of July in 1943. My father was a small-town independent banker and investor who was active for many years in the Independent Bankers of America; my mother was an extraordinary public school teacher and, among other things, was active in Citizens for Eisenhower in 1952 and as Chairwoman of the GOP in the old Seventh District for a number of years. My brother, the late Rev. Dr. R. Galen Hanson, Ph.D., was an ordained minister, teacher of the sociology of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School, award-winning public speaker, and author, with Dr. Don Martindale, of Small Town and the Nation. The only "political" offices to which I have ever been elected are student council member in junior high school, city council member in connection with Benson's famous Kid Day in 1954 (click here, then scroll down), and president of my junior class in high school during the 1959-1960 school year. I graduated from Benson High School as co-valedictorian with Margaret Leddin in 1961. Three years later, in 1964, I received a bachelor of arts

degree from the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. I subsequently received a Juris Doctor degree from the law school, i.e., Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was thereafter admitted to the District of Columbia bar and the Minnesota bar. I am an attorney at law. Past public service includes a) delivering the daily Minneapolis Star and the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune for several years; b) working as a part-time janitor at the local Montgomery-Ward catalog store for a time; c) working as a rock'n'roll dee-jay, "Rockin' Rand," on the local radio station in the late 1950s and

early 1960s; and d) working one year as Hennepin County District Court Special Term (Civil) Law Clerk, two years as law clerk for Justice C. Donald Peterson of the Minnesota Supreme Court, and 26+ years as Deputy Commissioner of the Minnesota Supreme Court. In addition, I was a nonpartisan candidate for Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court in the general election in November 2000 and a liberal anti-war candidate for Congress in the Republican primary in the Minnesota Third District in September 2004 (more). Of the above, I believe I performed the greatest public service when I was spinning immortal songs such as "Teen Angel," "Pretty Blue

Eyes," "Let It Be Me," "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," and "Tell Laura I Love Her." However, trumping everything I have done in the realm of public service are the following acts of public benevolence: a) being an Edina resident, homeowner, and taxpayer since 1973; b) being the father of two children, a daughter who is an attorney with a leading Minneapolis law firm and a son who is studying, among other things, the mysteries of biochemistry; and c) being a friend of dogs, including the immortal Lord Butterscotch ("the Poet") Hanson, a golden-hearted Golden Retriever who died in 1995, Lady Mathilda Ragnhilda DooLittle Hanson, a jovial, athletic and brilliant nine-year-old tri-color Australian Shepherd, and Lady Jane Hanson, an open-hearted and foxy little soccer-playing one-year-old black-and-white Border Collie. The nicest thing anyone ever said about me was what my mother said shortly before she died in 1990, "He's a very good lawyer, but in his heart he's a poet."

E-mail: BurtonHanson@BurtonHanson.com.

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