Article: Remembering Gordon Parks: Minnesota relatives of Gordon Parks are planning a memorial service for the renowned photographer, who died in March.

Byline: Tim Nelson

Nov. 29--Nearly 80 years after Gordon Parks came to St. Paul, his descendents are planning a memorial to one of the city's most accomplished adopted sons.

Parks, born in Fort Scott, Kan., moved to Minnesota as a teenager and started his career as a musician and photographer in St. Paul in the 1930s, days better remembered as St. Paul's glamorous "gangster" era.

Parks, though, was a homeless teenager at the time. His first "break" came at the Lowry Hotel in 1932, when bandleader Larry Duncan heard a bus boy playing the piano and offered to orchestrate and feature the original work. A single fashion picture for the Frank Murphy ...

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