When American singer and actor Dean Reed was found dead in a lake in communist East Berlin in 1986, it was surprising that the Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune devoted so little attention to the story. After all, Reed had come to Minneapolis several times in the 1970s and 1980s to visit his friend Marv Davidov. Then, in 1978, Reed had been arrested in Buffalo, Minnesota and spent more than a week in the Wright County Jail for protesting, with farmers and others, against a high-voltage power line. In a wonderfully inventive tactic, Reed managed to call his friends the Everly Brothers, the Smothers Brothers, actress Jean Seberg in Paris and others in Chile, East Germany, and the Soviet Union, and turn the episode into an international affair. MORE »
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