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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Cloquet golf phenom Sam Baker struck again with a convincing win in the Cloquet Country Club Championship last weekend, July 23-24. In his final match, Baker defeated Aaron Young, his Cloquet High School golf coach. In his semifinal match, Baker defeated another coach from the 2021 CHS state championship team, Jimmy "Mr. Steady" Stafford. "That was a little unusual," Baker said. Sixteen Cloquet members played in the championship flight. The format was match play, so a player had to win four...
As Cloquet's most heralded young golfer, it wasn't a total surprise to local golf pundits when Sam Baker won the Cloquet Invitational amateur tournament last weekend. After all, the 2021 Cloquet High graduate was the medalist and individual and team champion at the 2021 Minnesota State High School Class AA golf tournament. He also holds - from the regular white tees - the Cloquet Country Club course scoring record of 62. With a college scholarship, Baker will be leaving in August to attend Flori...
Often, I’ve dreamed of playing golf on new courses or maybe even on the turf of foreign countries. My Korby grandparents were born in Finland. Could I ever play close to where they grew up, farmed and trekked? This June, my spouse’s family, also Finns, planned a vacation to southwestern Finland/Suomi on the Baltic Sea. They took me along. Their Finnish cousins we visited are both avid golfers. When they golfed — which was nearly every other day — they took me along. Outi and Timo Paukkio, the co...
The Cloquet High School boys golf team, the defending Class AA Minnesota state champions, are heading to the state tournament once again. In windy and chilly conditions last week, the boys unequivocally won the Section 7AA crown at the Quarry golf course at Giants Ridge in Biwabik June 1-2. The top three individuals in the two-round meet were all Cloquet players, with junior Karson Patten medaling as individual champion as well. "On Day 1 it was windy and there was a lot of pollen in the air,"...
The Cloquet High School boys golf team, the defending Minnesota State Champions, are heading to the state tournament once again. On June 1 and 2, with windy and chilly conditions, the boys won the Section 7A crown unequivocally at the Quarry golf course at Giants Ridge in Biwabik. The top three individuals in the two-round meet were all Cloquet players. With difficult playing conditions, Cloquet was led by junior Karson Patten with a score of 153 (76-77), sophomore Anders Gunelson 157 (77-80),...
The Cloquet Country Club’s paved parking lot on Monday was packed with regular-sized buses, short buses, vans and cars delivering kids from all over northeastern Minnesota to a tournament hosted by Cloquet High School. Per Cloquet boys head coach Aaron Young, there were 12 boys teams and four girls teams, with just more than 100 golfers. “The weather was cool, but partially sunny and dry, so it cooperated,” Young said. “It was a very successful event.” The Cloquet boys varsity golf team — the de...
Unlike high school basketball and hockey - which have competitive seasons for four months - high school golf in northeastern Minnesota can have seasons lasting closer to one month. "April was some tough weather, with both windy and wet conditions," said Cloquet golf boys head coach Aaron Young, noting that the Cloquet Country Club did not open this year until May 5. "Now, we're trying to play catchup with golf meets and practice." As the 2021 Minnesota Class AA boys state champions, Cloquet is...
Ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic - including shortened and canceled sports seasons - contributed to the end of Jerry Erickson's 50-plus years of coaching youth sports. The Cloquet legend successfully coached both boys and girls basketball and high school baseball well into his 70s. In the 1970s, Erickson coached two Cloquet baseball teams that made it to the Minnesota state high school tournament at Midway Stadium in St. Paul. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Cloquet...
Nobody in the last three years has shot more hoops in the Cloquet and Fond du Lac area than Cloquet senior Conner Barney. Barney's high school career ended with Cloquet losing to Hibbing in the sectional tournament in March, but his mark on the region could be felt for many years to come. He wants to improve himself but also share his love of basketball and positive actions with youth and others. His basketball legacy is as follows: two years at Fond du Lac Ojibwe High School with 1200 points sc...
It was a love affair. It's the only way to describe how people from Cloquet and the surrounding communities embraced the 1963 Cloquet High School boys basketball team. Basketball was king in Minnesota and especially the region then. It was before the hockey barn was built, Pine Valley was a relatively new ski facility, there wasn't girls' sports, there were no cellphones or ESPN, so it meant there were a lot of people going to local gyms on Friday and Tuesday evenings to get a sports rush. Cloqu...
It's been rousing fun tracking some of the feedback I've been receiving from my column March 4 on local high school basketball scoring records. Carlton County sports fanatics have much to be proud of with its basketball heritage. Records continue to fall and the dialogue of which specific generation of teams and individuals is the "best" is a top local coffee shop conversation igniter. Thanks to Dwight Cadwell, WKLK radio personality and local sports expert, I was corrected on who holds the...
At Cloquet coach Rol Bromberg's recent visitation at Nelson Funeral Care, I was astounded by the preeminent collection of athletic and family photos on display. Undefeated football teams, track regional relay champs, Brom and his wife at Twins games, hugs with grandkids, birthdays, his own high school and college awards, the dedication of Bromberg Field. One particular picture brought a twinkle to my eye: a photo of Bromberg and Dickie Eklund out on the Athletic Park football field, dated 1979....
In January, I celebrated the 50-year anniversary of my scoring 12 points in a Cloquet high school boys basketball game versus the stunned Morgan Park Wildcats. It was my all-time CHS high. There was no three-point line back then, or I might have had 13 total points. I made four of five shots from the field and the same on free throws. With being mostly a bench player, it was a big deal for me. That anniversary got me thinking about how much hard work is involved for local athletes to put up...
Have you ever been lost? No, really lost. Lost where your heart and pulse start elevating, you’re perspiring, it’s getting dark, personal fear and anxiety are on the rise. You try to be calm. Most of the time when I went partridge (ruffed grouse) hunting in Minnesota’s fall season, I either personally knew the planned hunting terrain or had someone accompanying me who was familiar with the landscape. There are many perfect partridge ecosystems in Carlton and St. Louis counties with thick brush...
Last June, I lost a close friend, Gary Ross. It wasn't officially recorded as a direct Covid-19 death, but the damn pandemic was surely a contributing factor. Sorry about the curse, but it is deserved. He was a couple years older than me and had cancer scares, diabetes, tremors and, finally, heart issues which were ultimately his undoing. Gary's wife died about a year earlier. Since her illness was at the height of the pandemic, he couldn't even visit her at the hospital until she went into...
As I recently watched young, smiling kids riding down the snow-covered hill at Cloquet's Pinehurst Park, I thought back to the great times the "Scanlon Rottensnots" had sliding in "the pines" in the 1960s. Back then, 12 months out of the year, neighborhood kids played outdoors. "The pines" was land owned by Northwest Paper, and later Potlatch on 22nd Street. It had several different hills, and snow seven months out of the year. It is now the site of the Cloquet Middle School and the Rol...
Kerry Rodd’s column about the late Rol Bromberg last week was right on, but I wanted to add a few of my favorite memories. I first met Bromberg when he was my physical education teacher at Cloquet Junior High. I remember a certain quarter that was dedicated to wrestling. Now, Bromberg was a college wrestler himself at Bemidji State and spent a few hours teaching us amateur wrestling rules and tactics. With some preliminary practice and demonstrations, he divided the classroom of all boys into w...
This saga sounds like the backdrop to a TV reality show: snowmobiles in the wilderness on the Minnesota/Canada isolated border with subzero record-breaking temperatures, whiteout blizzard conditions and little food, water, or shelter. Due to the weather stress, those snowmobiles eventually became unmovable, but all three riders survived the overnight ordeal. For Cloquet’s Tim Carle and Johnny and Sis Leon, it was an outdoor challenge they lived to tell about. It could have easily turned the othe...
Santa Claus came a few weeks early, bringing presents for Minnesota Twins fans. First was the news that Byron Buxton had signed a long-term million-dollar contract. The talented but oft injured Buxton will continue to gallantly track down fly balls for the next seven years at Target Field as the Twins center fielder. Second, and this has been on Minnesota baseball fans' holiday wish list for decades, Twins immortals Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat were chosen to be part of the July 2022 Baseball Hall...
I was saddened to hear that my high school driver education teacher, Gerald “Jiggs” La Breche, recently passed away. Jiggs was a legend at the Cloquet and Big Lake golf clubs. He was a longtime Cromwell social studies teacher and a fixture of the West Carlton Avenue neighborhood in Cloquet. I wrote about Jiggs for the Cloquet Country Club membership newsletter in April 2018. The following are some excerpts from that piece. Jiggs was born in 1932. He grew up on West Carlton Avenue and spent mos...
At the ripe old age of 21, former Cloquet standout Riley Leslie has been an award-winning high school athlete and scholar, then a hard-working college student, and now you can call him “Captain.” Leslie recently acquired his own boat as part of the Happy Hooker Charters fleet in Duluth on Lake Superior. Sports were always a big part of Leslie’s life. As a junior, he played on the undefeated Lumberjacks football team, which lost for the first time in the state championship game. Although the t...
Do you remember where you were the evening of Oct. 26, 1991 - 30 years ago? If I tell you it was the night that Twins baseball player Kirby Puckett hit a home run in the bottom of the 11th inning to win Game 6 of the World Series, would that refresh your memory? Serious baseball fans or not, a vast majority of Minnesota's populace was tuned in to that game. If you are now over age 35, you probably remember it was a big deal. The Twins won their first World Series in 1987, a magical run of all...
The dog days of August were always the time for the annual Blackhoof Valley men's fastpitch softball tournament. Blackhoof Valley is to the east of Mahtowa and south of Carlton. It's rural, mostly farmland at the junction of County Roads 4 and 5. It had two, almost adjacent softball fields. One was the infamous "schoolhouse" field (literally attached to the long-vacated, old Blackhoof school) and the other was down the road at Tiny's farm. Blackhoof has had a long tradition of exceptional...
With the turning of the leaves and calendar to September, many golf aficionados start planning where to store their clubs for the winter season. But a group of seniors maximize the remaining daylight and try to prolong the golf schedule with a condensed tournament that features six local course sites played over four days. The annual event, founded by the late Lee Samuelson of Lee’s Pro Shop in Pine City, has a maximum — and it is always full — of 18 foursomes playing in a four-...
I think most folks in Carlton County probably have a Jessica Lange story. She’s our most famous hometown native and the only movie and television star who can still be seen waltzing through the Super One aisles picking up shampoo or plants at a local greenhouse when she’s escaping to her cabin here. In the late 1980s, me and two of my buddies — Tom “Maynard” Marciniak and Gary “Moose” Pastika — coached my spouse’s slow pitch softball team. The team played in the very competitive Carlt...
