A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
Sorted by date Results 101 - 125 of 151
My husband, Rod Walli, often and confidently says in Finnish: "Voin Korjata mitaan." It means "I can fix anything." He's not bragging. Just expressing confidence. I'm drafting at home. Morning light bounces off walls and a cathedral ceiling he built 17 years ago, enlarging the bungalow that Barb Walli designed and where they raised their boys, Gene and Mark. One time, a nosy drive-by neighbor asked "Why are your building an addition?" "For the baby," the 64-year old Rod answered, amused at the...
Like most of us, I generally make a limited number of New Year’s resolutions. Mostly they are personal: getting more sleep, exercising, and spending time with family and friends. This year, 2020, is special though, an election year. I’m planning to spend more time learning about candidates for office at all levels: what they stand for and their track records. I also hope to talk to more people of all ages and walks of life to hear what their priorities are and how they rate the various hop...
A kinder, gentler community life. That's how I'd describe Kyoto, Japan. I'm here for probably the sixth or seventh visit, including the fall I taught at Ritsumeikan University. Probably community life in Tokyo and Osaka is denser, faster and more impersonal than in Kyoto, but not as fast and furious as New York City or Los Angeles. For the past five days, Rod and I have walked many of the narrow streets around our guesthouse. Traffic is gentle, for many reasons, even on four-lane arterials....
I admit to being a lifelong winter lover. When voluptuous snow blew down from the north this past weekend, I watched whorls of powder surf off the garage peak. Coming home from the morning walk, I did outdoor chores with gusto. Hauling in a sled of peeled and split poplar from our shed. Shoveling our walkway. Filling three seed feeders, beefing up our suet offerings, and filling the nut butter tower that friend Arnold Collman made for us one Christmas. Stocked the wood stove and set it afire,...
Listening to portions of Congressional testimony this past week, I realized how little most of us know about Ukraine. It’s important because of its strategic economic and geopolitical position in Europe, its exit from the Soviet Union, and its struggle to emerge from corruption and build democracy. With a group of North American regional scientists, I spent most of a week in Ukraine in 1991, when it still belonged to the Soviet Union. We traveled by bus to Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine, where f...
It's a good season for church bazaars. You can find one-of-a-kind handmade items and artworks, edible lovelies and lightly used items. I'm used to silent auctions. But I've never lived in a community where a congregation hosts its auction live. Every November, the women of Cromwell's Bethany Lutheran Church hustle to solicit contributions, sort and arrange them for best viewing, and price items not for auctioneering. Two Bethany members, brothers Billy and Rob Switzer, were emcees at last...
Lately, I’ve been searching for compassion in our public discourse. Actually, I’ve been longing for more discourse, period. The kind where people listen carefully to each other and honor the rights of each to hold differing points of view, even when they strongly disagree on values or courses of action. Instead, our ability to engage with each other across class, race, gender, political and philosophical divides seems to be deteriorating. I find it elating when conversing with someone who fee...
Photography was one way Cloquet area resident Mark Cline dealt with an enormous personal setback. As a 55-year-old married father, he received his first serious DSLR camera in 2007, shortly before his wife was killed in a gas explosion at their cabin. After three years of nursing his kids back to health, his corporate head hunting business never recovered. Two years ago, he moved here to be close to Lake Superior. When Cline found he could leave his boys for a while, he began walking his rural...
Fond du Lac Band member Vern Northrup began photographing during his work as a Bureau of Indian Affairs wildland fire operations specialist working on Native lands across the U.S. “When I was a firefighter,” he reflected during a conversation with me last week, “we carried everything on our backs. Real cameras were heavy, so we would buy disposable cameras to document our work and its challenges. I fought fire for 26-27 years. I managed fires, managed aircraft, engines and crews, inclu...
The Pine Knot celebrates one year of publication this week. It's been a heady journey for the founders and those who work to assemble your newspaper every week. We re-opened the downtown Cloquet office that the Pine Journal's corporate owner closed in early 2018. The Pine Journal was the result of a merger of the Cloquet Journal and the Pine Knot in 2002. We obtained the rights to the historic name in a nod to the past and future. It took us two months to launch the new Pine Knot. Five of us for...
We are learning a lot about industrial arts training and jobs these days, well-deserved and long overdue. But what about artists? Musicians, performing artists, writers, filmmakers, painters, photographers, designers and architects? An economist, I’ve been studying artists for almost 20 years: their aspirations, training, post-schooling work, and ways of relating to their patrons, audiences and publics. I started exploring data, mounting surveys, and interviewing many artists, hoping to learn a...
For most of us, our direct experience with American politics starts and ends with the voting booth, supplemented with what we learn, selectively, from the media. We rarely see our elected representatives in action, proposing and bargaining over bills and budgets. In general, politicians rank low on our lists of most admired professions. Nor do we know much about what happens inside those big state and federal agencies. Recently, the son of a third cousin asked me to advise him on post-college jo...
It’s puzzling how President Trump’s erratic trade initiatives aren’t prioritizing good relationships with democratic countries and nudging autocratic countries, like China and Saudi Arabia, to give citizens the right to debate and elect their political leaders. U.S. trade policies have always had multiple rationales. One, perhaps the oldest, is to protect jobs in industries that are “infant” or strategically important. For example, in the latter half of the 19th century, the American governmen...
It used to be called just "shop" or, in the '90s, at least in my son's school, "tech." But now, K-12 educators are according industrial arts its prominence as an academic subject, preparing teens for good-paying, skilled industrial jobs. This past Friday, Cromwell-Wright High School christened its new industrial arts building with a ribbon cutting by school board members and a tour by superintendent and principal Nathan Libbon. It's been quite a journey. Some years back, voters in our area...
The natural world and how we interact with it are Fond du Lac artist Karen Savage-Blue's inspiration for her paintings. "Nature is always my base. My goal is to make it more accessible to folks. As human beings, we have a lot in common with our flora and landscapes." "We should treat the earth as if it is a member of our own family," she said. In her paintings, Savage-Blue often places the human form among plant forms, or juxtaposes them with animal or astrospherical forms, the latter suggesting...
Three is definitely not a crowd when it comes to art shows. On Thursday, Sept. 5, the Pine Knot News is partnering with the County Seat Theater and Magnolia Café for a gallery hop. Start at the Pine Knot News for Karen SavageBlue’s art exhibition opening 5-7 p.m. at our office in Cloquet’s historic West End at 122 Avenue C. Enjoy refreshments provided courtesy of Cold One Liquor, and join a conversation with the artist. There will be things for kids to do too. The same evening, the Magn...
I’m not a TV watcher. Movies are often too long for that last hour before falling asleep. In recent years, we’ve watched two whodunit series, available on Netflix, that stand out for their excellence in conception and stylish, culturally embedded filming: “Death in Paradise” and “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries.” A whodunit generally dispenses with the act of murder, culprit unseen, in the first five to seven minutes. They spare sensitive people like me the dread, even terror, of many police and...
You can still find birds in August. They're not as noisy and easy to spot as in April or May and during fall's migration. They've found their mates - the goal of the glorious singing they treat us to in spring. In this season, they're training their young ones, demonstrating finding food and venturing farther from nests. They're emerging from a silent stretch during June and July, when crooning can attract predators. Last weekend, my cousin Martha and I went "car birding." Early mornings, when...
I've long admired the way some area families are so locally present. Hosting a reunion requires little more than picking a date, sending out the word and preparing food. Since the last Stillwater reunion in 2006, my generation of an extraordinarily dispersed family has taken the initiative, organizing a reunion in Cambria, California (2014) and this July back in Minnesota. Our Markusen/Lee/Wilson family settled in Stillwater in the late 1880s, our forefathers and foremothers generating lots of p...
The day after my 73rd birthday, my husband, Rod, and I headed up the North Shore. We fled exhaustion and duties, immersing ourselves in glorious summer. Lake Superior operates like a cooling chamber, cold water mating with sunshine to put zip in the air, disperse biting bugs, and lay a light tan on your shoulders. Daily swims are possible both inland and, if you are brave enough, in Superior. First stop, Tettegouche State Park. If you hike the trail and wooden stairs down to where the Baptism...
Another CSA hits county Tilling up hayfields, enriching soil, building a greenhouse and capturing rainwater off its roof, erecting a tiny house to live in, planting, weeding, harvesting and selling dozens of varieties of vegetables, and engaging community members in farm work. That's how Heather-Marie Bloom, and now her partner, University of Minnesota Duluth journalism professor John Hatcher, farm on the west side of Prairie Lake. Bloom's parents cultivated flowers and some vegetables in their...
On a warm Saturday afternoon at Lakeside Cemetery, southwest of Wright, more than 90 offspring and partners of Isaak and Maria Haukkala Walli gathered to celebrate their Finnish ancestors who gave them life. A handsome, new engraved metal plaque bearing both the American and Finnish flags celebrates the cemetery's establishment in 1906 and acknowledges Isaak and Maria's donation of the cemetery land. Isaak (1854-1918) and Maria (1845-1919) married and had seven children in Wassan Lanni,...
For the next two months, the Pine Knot Gallery is showing Adam Swanson's paintings. When I first saw his work, I was struck by his blends of color, as in his "You Are the Water," depicting two working men on an outdoor industrial job site, full of blacks and blue-grays punctuated by red jackets and yellow pants. And his "Nowhere Else to Go," a painting of a Boundary Waters-like channel, as if you are in a canoe and approaching a narrowing between orange and red cliffs topped by towering pines....
On June 28 the Cromwell Area Community Club hosted its fourth annual midsummer steak fry, silent auction and variety show. It was a lovely evening. Some people remained well past the events, enjoying the Kaleb Anderson Memorial playground. Our silent auction solicits one-of-a-kind donations from community members who have designed and made things themselves: paintings, photographs, sculpture, quilts, weavings, table runners, placemats, homemade jellies, pickles, breads and soaps, handmade...
I like films that stretch me. Bring me to new places and cultures, present surprising solutions to daunting problems. Films that make me think, films that avoid violence, films that explore love and meaningful work. This year's Free Range Film Festival offers up 19 films that range from a few minutes in length to more than an hour. They cover most genres: animation, documentary, fiction, experimental. My favorite is a film about sausage. Brilliantly conceived, acted and filmed, it follows a...
