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 businesses sweat out a pending Supreme Court decision on Covid-19 vaccine mandates, the Wrenshall school board found and took advantage of a loophole Monday night. At its first regular meeting of the year, board members voted to not include themselves as employees of the district, putting it below the 100-employee threshold for the mandate called for by President Joe Biden. Before Monday, Wrenshall’s employee count was 101. The Minnesota School Boards Association has been prepping districts across the state to put policies in place...
Reader Kim Matteen spotted a reference to Cloquet in the latest issue of Smithsonian Magazine. In its Prologue section, under the heading of "Origins," Max Ufberg writes about the rise of snowboarding from a "goofy" pastime to an Olympics sport. Vern Wicklund, as the story goes, was messing around with modified sleds when he was a teenager in Cloquet, as early as 1917. In 1939, he and relatives Harvey and Gunnar Burgeson, all now living in the Chicago area, patented what is generally considered...
It was as much for themselves as it was for him. Last week, just before Christmas, Steve Jarve got a clamorous escort out of Community Memorial Hospital after an emotional 40-day odyssey dealing with Covid-19 and its complications. He almost died, but the staff at Cloquet's hospital wouldn't let him. After a while, he would motivate himself and the staff in a recovery few expected to see as another grim pandemic year comes to a close. "He just refused," said social worker Jennifer Potocnik. "He...
It was difficult to hear the pleas from students, parents and other district residents begging the school board to keep Carlton High School open. They were talking through masks and the speakers hanging from the ancient walls weren't optimal in the dimly lit and cavernous "small gym" that also serves as a cafeteria. Custodial machines could be heard in adjacent hallways. There was a varsity boys basketball game going on in the nearby main gym and buzzers and fans could be heard intermittently. A...
Sigfred Johnson considered himself the "black sheep" of his family. It was likely because he liked to drink beer while most of his relatives were teetotalers. And there were a lot of them. Born in 1909 to Severin and Anna Johnson, Sigfred was in the middle of a pack of 12 children growing up on 22nd Avenue in Cloquet, where the city rubs against Scanlon's west side. Sig, as he was known, worked for the city of Cloquet's sewer and water works department and had an outsized personality. He drank h...
The number is big, but not a real surprise for residents of the Wrenshall school district. Taxes for residents and business owners will go up 26 percent next year. The school board approved the increase Monday at its regular meeting after a truth in taxation meeting and audit report Dec. 8. There was no public comment about the increase at either meeting. It is fueled by the continuing building improvement projects in the district the past year. The levy is increasing by $311,202, at $1.5 million for payable taxes in 2022 after $1.2 million...
Jim Meikle wasn't going to let it go. "The whole thing bothered me," he said from his home in Baudette this week. He was talking about the plaque he saw hanging at a salvage yard this past summer and the nagging suspicion that a veteran was buried somewhere without a marker honoring his service. "My dad was a World War II vet, so I take it seriously," he said. Meilke has a trucking firm and had been in the area doing work related to the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. He needed a wheel and went to...
After two emotional meetings filled with public testimony in the past week, the Carlton school board failed to pass a resolution Monday night that would have led to an agreement with the Cloquet school district to take Carlton high schoolers. The tuition agreement, which would have eliminated the high school in Carlton, failed on a 3-3 vote. The board spent the past year going over its options after another consolidation effort with neighboring Wrenshall fizzled. The board now faces the...
After a series of impassioned pleas from parents this fall to end the current mask requirement at Cloquet schools - which applies to all grades during the school day -the school board will have a police officer at meetings and will do more to inform the public how the comment period works at meetings. After police were called during the Nov. 22 meeting, superintendent Michael Cary suggested that the board move its public comments portion of meetings into what is called the "working session"...
The sepia-toned photographs, slightly larger than a business card, tumble out of a browning, mottled envelope. For what is known of the six photos, and also what is enticingly unknown, the sight of them is breathtaking. Keiko Satomi punctuates the moment. "It's just," she pauses. "It has a weight." From what can be pieced together across nearly eight decades, the photographs were found on the bodies of dead Japanese soldiers during a Pacific Theater battle in World War II. There are pictures of...
Monday’s Wrenshall school board meeting began with a palpable moment of silence. Superintendent Kim Belcastro said the family of board member Alice Kloepke reported she had taken a turn for the worse in a battle with Covid-19 and was in an intensive care unit in the Twin Cities area. Hours earlier, Wrenshall resident Shelly Kilby posted a dire report on her husband Steve. “They needed to intubate Steve. It was a tough decision for him. They have called the six surrounding states to try and find a critical care unit for him. He received a tra...
The clock showed 19.7 seconds left in the fourth quarter. Esko had battled, back and forth, with New London-Spicer in the Class AAA state quarterfinal in Brainerd Saturday afternoon. The score was tied, and now the Eskomos had the advantage, the ball on the 11-yard line. It was third down, and Esko coach Scott Arntson was ready to call another run to center the ball for reliable field kicker Wyatt Stankiewicz. "You want to take a shot?" That's what Arntson recalls hearing from Stankiewicz...
The coffee is on at the Carlton County Historical Society. What may seem like a small gesture means a lot to the society's new director, Carol Klitzke. It's been 19 months since the museum on Cloquet Avenue has been able to freely entertain visitors and ask them to come by to just chat. That's how Klitzke would like to mark her tenure. "Come in and say hi," she said this week, her first officially as the director. She was happy to talk with a visitor Monday who eventually said she knew Klitzke...
There are storms and then there are storms. The ones we remember are often tied to other significant events. Think of the Super Bowl blizzards in the 1970s, or the Armistice Day blizzard in 1940. The Halloween blizzard in Minnesota has properly taken its place in Minnesota weather lore. It's hard to forget trick-or-treating through heavy snow and even by snowmobile. It's hard to forget that in Carlton County we got a break of about just 20 inches of snow, really, compared to more than 3 feet in...
The lost chickens of Carlton County have been found. And they've been adopted. This week, for the second time in a month, people exploring the woods off Carlton County Road 4 between Interstate 35 and Hay Lake - along the border of Blackhoof and Twin Lakes townships - discovered hundreds of chickens roaming wild. And for the second time since Sept. 12, a call to action on social media has raised outrage and compassion as people have taken the birds in. It isn't difficult to ascertain where the...
Take a late afternoon tour of the grounds at the Haunted Shack with Pat Stojevich and you get the feeling that the name is a misnomer. It should be Love Shack, or Family Shack, Survivor Shack or even "Hey, I Got a Kidney" Shack. An energized Stojevich obviously still loves the monthlong dive into scaring people to raise money for charities. He's been at it for 28 years, making his operation the oldest of its type in the state and one of the oldest in the country. The Haunted Shack is a...
The lost chickens of Carlton County have been found. And they’ve been adopted. This week, for the second time in a month, people exploring the woods off Carlton County Road 4 between Interstate 35 and Hay Lake — along the border of Blackhoof and Twin Lakes townships — discovered more than 100 chickens roaming wild. And for the second time since Sept. 12, a call to action on social media has raised outrage and compassion as people have taken the birds in. It isn’t difficult to ascertain where t...
A short emergency meeting of the Wrenshall school board Wednesday night resulted in a vote to begin an investigation into the actions of one of its own members. The investigation will focus on the special board meeting held the night before as board members and a public audience discussed Covid-19 protocols before the district opens school for in-person classes next week. The issue of whether or not to require mask wearing by students and staff dominated the discussion. The board, after two...
A petition is now circulating in the Wrenshall school district to block an appointment to the school board made Aug. 16. The hasty vote-in of Bill Dian to replace new school principal Michelle Blanchard — made with no discussion among board members — rankled enough people with its lack of transparency to get the petition going. The petition states that the board “selected a candidate who was interviewed privately by the board chair and a few school board members rather than holding a public interview process or even discussion of candi...
Wildflowers were on grand display last week at the home of Sandy and Betsy Dugan south of Wrenshall. The Dugan place has the barn that has been the center of the Free Range Film Festival for nearly 20 years. After canceling last year during the pandemic, the festival, usually run in June, returned last weekend. If you think the gardens around the house are something, Sandy Dugan said, just wait until the strip of land across Carlton County Road 4 gets going. It also has been planted in...
The heat is finally breaking this late Friday afternoon on another 90-something degree day in Carlton County. The dry, hot summer has the poplars yielding, yet it still seems far too early for downed yellow leaves to be dancing along the roadsides on a drive to a barn in rural Wrenshall. A persistent wind has kept the day from being totally oppressive, and it is quite pleasant on the grounds of the Free Range Film Festival a few hours before the first of two 7 p.m. showings of short films last...
It happened so quickly, Nicole Krisak didn’t even have a chance to react. While the official record will show that the Wrenshall school board voted unanimously to appoint a new person to its board Monday, Krisak could legitimately be considered a nonvote. She didn’t have a chance to say “yea” or “nay” as she swivelled her head in what looked to be astonishment. Superintendent Kim Belcastro had barely finished offering her suggestions to the board on how to proceed with the appointment before Alice Kloepfer blurted out a motion to appoint Bil...
Public-record filings are indicating that there may be another shakeup in the direction of Cloquet’s only new car dealership, and its one-time owners have filed for bankruptcy. June filings with the Minnesota Secretary of State office shows that Cloquet Auto Center has renewed the various assumed names attached to Cloquet’s Ford and Chrysler dealership. What’s new is that the Cloquet Auto Center name was renewed in May with an address associated with Duluth-based car dealership group Evergreen, which owns dealerships in the Twin Ports and a...
Superintendent John Engstrom read his prepared statement. After a pause that encapsulated the import of his words, Carlton school board member Sue Karp said “well stated.” Three other board members agreed. “Our hearts are in a K-12,” Karp later said. The lament in the school library during one of those typical short July meetings was palpable. Engstrom had just laid out a future for the district that didn’t include educating students in grades 9-12. He announced that talks with Cloquet to release Carlton students to its high school had reach...
A property in Scanlon with political flags on a pole disparaging President Joe Biden and voters with expletives, and supporting former President Donald Trump, is being sold, and the flags are gone. According to real estate listings, the home at 22nd Street and Doddridge Avenue on the border with Cloquet was listed in earaly June for $250,000. The home hadn't sold as of early this week and the price had been reduced to $224,000. In March, the Pine Knot News had a story about the flags and...
