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
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While the parking lot outside Cloquet City Hall filled with union members rallying in support of project labor agreements Tuesday, councilors inside the building steeled themselves for a contentious discussion on the subject. Ultimately the Cloquet City Council voted 5-2 - with Lyz Jaakola and Sheila Lamb the two "no" votes - to remove the PLA mandate for private businesses from city code. At issue was a request by the city's Economic Development Authority that the council remove the private man...
The case of a fight between drunk friends that ended with one of them dead 18 months ago concluded Monday in Sixth District Court in Carlton County. In a departure from state guidelines, Judge Rebekka Stumme placed Joel Jay Ammesmaki, 59, on probation, but with a longer-than-usual sentence for second-degree manslaughter if Ammesmaki violates that probation. “The ball is in your court,” Stumme told Ammesmaki Monday, also dictating that Ammesmaki complete 150 hours of community service by speaking to groups about his experience. “You have a lot o...
After 38 years, Beth Ninneman worked her last shift at the Cloquet Pizza Hut on Monday. As usual, she was doing a little bit of everything: waiting on customers, taking orders, cleaning, hiring, cooking, doing dishes, joking with staff and generally making sure all was well at the 46-year-old restaurant. "The customers and my crew kept me here this long," said Ninneman, a Yooper (from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan) who moved to Cloquet to manage the Pizza Hut here. "There are people here I've...
Neither wind nor snow could stop the 17th annual Mojakka Cookoff, held Sunday at the Northeastern Hotel and Saloon in Cloquet, where it's always been. What is mojakka, someone new to the area might ask. It's soup. Specifically, mojakka is the Finnish (or Finnish American) word for soup. On Sunday, a steady flow of people in search of delicious soups and good company kept coming through the door, paying their $10 and doing their best to sample all 14 different soups. There is no one mojakka...
The Duluth Miller Hill Mall isn't the only place in the Northland with a missing roof thanks to the snow. When Cloquet's Nick Brown went to bed the night of March 6, his detached garage was intact. By the next morning, the roof had collapsed and the top window had shattered from the force, blowing glass shards at least 20 feet out onto the driveway. Brown hadn't heard a thing. "My room is in the corner, so about 8 feet away, and my boy's room is in the back, and the neighbors didn't hear it eith...
When the Little Opera of the North came to Churchill Elementary School Friday, it wasn't only the professional cast members who performed "The Pirates of Penzance." More than 50 students became part of the production, and the gymnasium became a seashore where pirates and members of the upper class threatened and flirted and finally made peace, in honor of the Queen. Music teacher Regina Roemhildt said there was a larger-than-usual number of kids in the cast and the chorus, and the show kept the...
With a potential project labor agreement vote on the Cloquet city council agenda, union members from Duluth, Superior and beyond packed City Hall Tuesday. Well over 100 people, mostly men, filled the council chambers and the atrium, the hum of their voices outside the meeting room making it difficult to hear Mayor Roger Maki as he opened the meeting. In the end, councilors voted 5-2 to table the issue, with Maki and Ward 4 Councilor Kerry Kolodge dissenting. That vote to delay a decision came...
From the right vantage point, the ski jumps at Pine Valley rise over tall pine trees and - along with the water tower and pulp mill - serve as an anchor in Cloquet's irregular skyline. On Sunday those jumps were crowded with kids wearing ski suits and helmets, swooshing down the inruns on extra-long skis only to fling themselves into the air and fly off the end. The best ones seemed to hang there, soundlessly suspended for seconds at a time before thumping back to the snow-covered ground at a...
It was easy to tell which group hadn't been to the Beargrease Derby before, as two sets of scouts made their way down the trail on three-person skis. It was the group that kept falling over that was obviously new to the exercise in teamwork. All six scouts were part of Troop 221 out of Superior, but at opposite ends of the age spectrum. Finn, Grady and Jonah were the youngsters. Teenagers Oliver, Daniel and Keith had been there before, and had mostly mastered the art of walking in unison on...
A quick and aggressive response by firefighters saved the storefronts at the Bergquist complex last week, but the large warehouses in the back are likely a complete loss. Cloquet Area Fire District Chief Jesse Buhs said the stores were connected to the warehouses by two breezeways. Both Bergquist Imports and Erbert & Gerbert's sandwich shop sustained smoke damage, but the fire didn't spread to the front. Erbert & Gerbert's owner Al Kurtz used Facebook to thank fire suppression efforts, saying...
For the second time in less than a year, Esko schools were again the victim of a “swatting” incident, essentially a fake 911 call made to bring about the dispatch of a large number of law enforcement officials to a particular address. According to a news release from the Carlton County Sheriff’s Office, a 911 call came in at 10:39 a.m. Thursday, March 2, indicating there were injuries due to violence at Esko High School. Sheriff’s office staff made contact with the school and both entitie...
Cloquet resident and WKLK sports guy Dwight Cadwell has a new lease on life, and a new liver. He and his wife, Diane, got the call that a donated liver was available just before midnight on Feb. 18. The doctor told them they needed to get to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester within 5 to 5 ½ hours. Diane made it there by a little after 4 a.m. She may have exceeded the speed limit, despite her hatred of nighttime driving. "When you know you have to get there for a liver, you get there fast,"...
Editor's note: Cloquet School District officials canceled the special meeting mentioned in this story and will finalize athletic facilities plans and funding at the board meeting on Monday, March 20 instead. Cloquet superintendent Michael Cary told school board members he’s been working “fast and furiously” with contractor Kraus-Anderson and Members Cooperative Credit Union officials on plans for the $4.5 million outdoor athletic facilities project, but not fast enough to bring it to the board...
No one was hurt Saturday when the pilot of an experimental light sport aircraft made an emergency landing on the ice-covered Big Lake Saturday afternoon. The Carlton County Sheriff's Office described the aircraft as a "home-built fixed-wing aircraft" in a news release, explaining that the landing was planned after pilot Rich Mattson realized one of the landing gear wheels had broken off when he departed from Fish Lake in Fredenberg Township in St. Louis County. After originally planning to land...
Science fair offers time to shine, after months of hard work The rewards of scientific pursuit are many. There's the satisfaction of learning and contributing to a greater body of knowledge, the excitement of experiments, recognition for a job well done. And, in the case of the Northeastern Minnesota Regional Science Fair, sometimes there's swag, travel or cold hard cash. Students from five schools came together Saturday at the University of Minnesota Duluth to tell a small army of judges about...
Iris Keller, the newly appointed Ward 3 Cloquet city councilor, peppered city officials with questions Tuesday as she played catchup on the complicated issue of project labor agreements in the city of Cloquet. "You've been busy with the ins and outs of this for six years," Keller said to the other councilors. Largely informational and fairly short, there was no vote at the meeting Tuesday. Instead, there was a first reading of a proposal to eliminate the requirement for private businesses to...
Cloquet school board members got happy news Monday, when superintendent Michael Cary informed them the district has an almost certain major sponsor - Members Cooperative Credit Union - for the proposed $4.5 million outdoor athletic facilities project. The regional credit union, which began as Cloquet Co-op Credit Union in the 1930s, is in talks with the district to cover the entire "community" portion of the project costs. As the exclusive sponsor, MCCU would pay $1.25 million (roughly the cost...
More background details - and concerns - are emerging regarding the proposed transfer of the Cloquet Forestry Center to the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, but it appears likely that answers could take months or even longer. News that the University of Minnesota intends to give the 3,400-acre research center and experimental forest to the Band became public two weeks ago, when it appeared as an information-only item on a University of Minnesota Board of Regents meeting docket....
With dance tunes booming through the gymnasium Friday, students at Washington Elementary jumped their way to raising $35,000 during the school's Kids Heart Challenge event. It was loosely controlled mayhem, with children everywhere bouncing between different styles: there were lopers, backward jumpers and solo high jumpers in addition to the more usual techniques of jumping rope. Physical education teacher Patty Rothamel said students in grades K-4 took over the gym grade by grade all day long,...
A note of urgency dominated the Cloquet City Council work session Feb. 7, when members of the city’s Economic Development Agency asked, for the third time in five years, that the council remove the requirement for private businesses to sign a project labor agreement. While the private business requirement for a PLA is union-friendly, it’s not business-friendly, they said. According to EDA director Holly Hansen, that’s impacting the EDA’s core mission of attracting, retaining, assisting expansion and enabling redevelopment for business, housing...
Cloquet Middle School principal Tom Brenner said it's his job to improve the quality of education in his building by working with the teachers in the classroom. It's a numbers game that inspires the former math teacher. "If you think about it hard, if we can improve instructional practices and what our teachers are doing, that affects the 125 kids they teach every day. Then if we get them a little better every year, the number of kids that [improvement] reaches and touches is enormous," he said....
Mother Nature was not kind to Minnesota state ski meet participants this week. Although state alpine skiers started the day with beautiful weather Tuesday morning, the rains came in the afternoon. Then it rained for hours before turning to snow, just in time for the start of the two-day state Nordic ski meet. A total of six Cloquet-Esko-Carlton skiers headed to Giants Ridge in Biwabik for the state meets: two for alpine and four for the Nordic relay races. They all skied their hearts out,...
Cloquet's Pine Valley was a winter sports oasis Saturday, with hundreds of athletes and parents here for the junior varsity Nordic ski championships, joined by ski jumpers and a handful of hockey players on the outdoor ice. With sunshine and temperatures in the 30s, the snow wasn't fast, but it was a glorious day with skiers and spectators gathered in clumps or lined up along the start and finish of the 2.5K and 5.5K course. Skiers in grades 5-12 from nine teams in the region joined host...
Talk about learning from experience. After making their first trip to the state One Act Play Festival last year, the Esko High School cast, crew and directors placed first in the Section 7A competition again this year and were one of only a handful of schools to receive the coveted "starred performance" award. Esko was one of four Class A schools to get a star. The 19-student cast and crew performed "The Inexplicable Chaos Factor of Mia Gregory" by Emily Hageman. The play about mental health tel...
A small one-person aircraft made an emergency landing on the ice-covered Big Lake Saturday afternoon after losing part of its landing gear. Fortunately, no one was hurt. The Carlton County Sheriff's Office described the aircraft as a "home built fixed wing aircraft" in a news release, explaining that the landing was planned after the pilot realized one of the plane's two front wheels had been lost when he departed from Fish Lake in Fredenberg Township (St. Louis County). After originally...
