JUNE 5, 1959 — Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman) graduated from Hibbing, Minnesota high school. Due to his lengthy sideburns and leather jacket, Zimmerman was known to classmates in the distant rural society as a greaser. During the talent show of the school in 1956, the headmaster had once drawn the curtain on his Little Richard cover.
He attended his class reunion ten years later in 1969. As the ‘ 59 class recalls, he, accompanied by his then wife Sara, flew to Hibbing Airport and was then driven to the city where the other 1959 graduates were gathered at Moose Lodge, 1510 Howard Street.
one attendee told the paper, “It was very different. My memory of that is of Bob standing in one corner and of people going up and shaking his hand. I didn’t like that. I would have been happier if he had just been able to sit down and be one of our classmates.”
As Bob Dylan supporters are conscious, his connection with Hibbing has not always been hot: The Telegraph quotes a 1965 interview in which he disdain, “When I left there, man, I knew one thing: I had to get out of there and not come back.” That remark suits the general tone of how Dylan shaped the myth surrounding his boyhood, presenting himself as an outcast and misunderstood loner in a dying Midwe.
And although the legend contains elements of truth–as one former girlfriend told the Chicago Tribune in 1988, “he was strange and different. No one really understood what he was attempting to do”–for years Dylan’s obvious disdain for Hibbing ruffled feathers among the town folk. “If Bob Dylan came here tonight to sing, I wouldn’t go,” said a resident in 2004 to the New York Times.
“People in this town, they weren’t real receptive to him,” a former classmate reflected in the Telegraph piece. “I think they were jealous of him, or didn’t think he was talented enough. That’s why he didn’t come back, because he was not well received.” Added another graduate, “He was a little weird. He still is.”