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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A special meeting of the Wrenshall school board took a surprising turn Tuesday evening when board members voted to postpone discussion of an extension to principal Michelle Blanchard’s one-year contract. While school boards typically perform annual evaluations of principal and superintendent performance in closed session, Blanchard had requested that Tuesday’s evaluation meeting be open to the public. No public comment was taken. Superintendent Kim Belcastro began by recommending that the boa...
The Carlton school board met Monday, in large part to discuss again the possible cuts to meet a budgetary shortfall of about $500,000. The board is looking to cut that deficit in half for next school year with changes in curricular and extracurricular offerings, staffing levels and superintendent benefits. The committee of the whole meeting was for discussion purposes only, with ideas, questions and information exchanged freely among all six board members, superintendent and participating staff. Any decisions on budgetary cuts will still need...
Saturday dawned cold and clear with just a light wind puffing some fresh snow out of the trees at Pine Valley in Cloquet. Mid-January turned out to be a perfect time for ski jumping. By the time the youngest ski jumpers slid down the inrun on the 5-meter hill just after noon, the sun was relatively blazing, it was a balmy 12 degrees and the annual Cloquet Ski Jumping and Nordic Combined Invitational was on. With more than 40 young competitors putting on their bibs to jump - and another 60 or so...
The Wrenshall school board completed its do-over on the appointment of a new school board member last week. Eight candidates applied for the spot, including Ben Johnson, Karola Dalen, Cindy Bourn, Tony Sheda, Brandon Burt, Caroline Johnson, Janaki Fisher-Merritt and Ethan Harvey. The second appointment came after more than 200 community members submitted a petition to recall Bill Dian, the person the board appointed in August without holding any public interviews or extended board discussion. This time the board held public interviews in a...
A recently written book by Esko area resident Elaine Osborne confronts the reader with questions about what we believe and why. “If I Felt Alone” is the story of Osborne’s struggle against the personal devastation of environmental illness and the challenges of being heard, understood and believed by a world that does not always listen well. While living in her rural Esko home back in the early 1980s, Osborne was persistently exposed to toxic industrial and residential waste. A large sewag...
Music can have some surprising ways of bringing people together. And now - after several years apart - the Carlton choir is back by popular demand. They're set to livestream their spring choir concert on Sunday. Carlton's previous youth choir had to disband in the spring of 2013 after nearly five years of making choral music. Last year, high school students who had sung in that choir as elementary schoolers remembered how much they had enjoyed singing together. They got together and asked that...
After a yearlong delay due to the pandemic, the "West End Flourish" is once again back on track to celebrate arts and community. The project aims to revitalize Cloquet's West End business district and will feature the works of more than two dozen local and regional creative artists over the next 20 months as they imagine the West End of Cloquet as their canvas. Artists of all types - ranging from painters, sculptors, actors and dancers to musicians, writers, photographers and filmmakers - are...
Carlton County sled dog racers Will Bomier and Ted Wallace have spent countless hours over the past several decades tending to, training and racing their dogs. For them, time spent with their dogs is what they love to do. It turns out that is quite a lot of time, as Bomier and Wallace have over 80 years of mushing experience between them. Bomier lives near Mahtowa. He’s 38 years old but can already count 35 seasons on the dog sled trail. “My dad used to take me out, wrap me up and put me in the...
Jessie Waldorf faced the class. "We're here just to have fun and make something creative." It was a chilly Saturday afternoon and sunlight streamed unobstructed through big, south-facing storefront windows at 213 Chestnut Street in Carlton. A hardwood floor and white walls combined to bring early-February light all the way to the back of the shop. Waldorf is the owner of CreativEdge Designs. She was talking to a group of about a dozen women of all ages as part of new art classes at the shop....
Woodsmoke curled through the trees on a quiet winter afternoon at Camp Miigizi, just off Magney Drive on the Fond du Lac Reservation. An event called "Frybread Friday'' was scheduled here for Jan. 22, but it appeared no one was around the encampment of lightweight tents scattered randomly around a low-burning fire. A single, larger canvas tent stood out as a possible hub of activity, but all was silent inside. Farther on, a half-dozen women and men were found quietly assembling a wooden hut....
Over the past several years, customers walking into the Cloquet or Carlton post offices have been greeted by a familiar face backed up with a helpful, can-do attitude. The guy who seems to be at the front window of every local post office is Philip Birkhofer, who now runs a one-man operation in Carlton. Birkhofer started his career in Cloquet seven years ago, then shifted to Carlton before going back to Cloquet for about five years. He was the head clerk there, "kind of running the front...
While the Carlton and Jay Cooke State Park area is known for its recreational trails, many people who would like to experience the beauty of these trails by bicycle may not be aware of a great resource for getting out and enjoying them. Carlton Bike Rental and Repair has been around for 10 years this summer, catering to the needs of those who would like to plan a group bicycle ride on the Willard Munger, Alex Laveau, or St. Louis River trails. The shop features a fleet of rentals: hybrid bikes i...
When Gail Van Guilder made her first face mask, she was thinking of the potential danger the coronavirus posed to her family and herself. Now, more than a thousand masks later, her effort to supply masks to anyone in need has become a story of service, sacrifice and friendship. When pandemic restrictions hit in mid-March, Van Guilder got out her sewing machine and cleaned the dust off. She figures she hadn't used it in five years. "I was just gonna make some for the grandkids and (husband...
With people looking for opportunities to get out of the house and find something new, interesting and safe to do, a local shop with some decidedly dated inventory may prove to be a fun and worthwhile destination. Billing itself as an "antiques and collectibles shop," Nantiques at 402 Arch Street in Cloquet has now reopened, with limited weekend hours. "We're testing the waters," Nantiques manager Sheila Peterson said of the new hours, which are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. May 24...
Wouldn't you know, I had just put down my glasses somewhere and for the life of me I could not find them. Of course, when I finally discovered them sitting above the brim of my ball cap - on my head - I knew that the great powers of my advancing age and disrepair were upon me, and I must certainly have gained wisdom yet unknown in exchange for my loss of mental acuity. Having located the errant spectacles, I was ready to resume my search for my misplaced cup of coffee and a good breakfast muffin...
With teams of experts reminding us daily of the defensive measures we must all take to fight off the coronavirus, we tend to think that's all we need to do. But now comes our moment to go on the offensive, to win the bigger war - a war not only for our physical health, but for our mental, emotional and even spiritual health - the war to maintain the bonds of our community, maybe even our humanity. When Desiree Pederson, owner of Necessities Salon in Cloquet, thought about the challenge to her...
When I was kid, one of the fun things that might happen when the family was stuck in the house on a snowy day was a "theatrical production." These were usually a one-act play dreamed up by the kids who planned it all out, gathered the props and put on a show for Mom and Dad. The snow had brought life's big show to a grind-ing halt, so it fell to the kids to put on a little show. It may have been Plato, some 2,400 years ago, who first articulated that big, show-stopper problems often demanded...
Coronavirus represents an elevated threat to elderly people and those with compromised immune systems. Understandably, those who have a family member or a loved one in an assisted living or long-term care facility might have elevated concerns, as well. Making sure that both the physical health and social needs of their residents are being met has taken on new meaning to area residential healthcare providers. Sunnyside Health Care Center in Cloquet and Inter-Faith Care Center in Carlton have...
Just minutes after I finished interviewing one of the two directors for the article that starts on the previous page, I got a call from Linda, an activities assistant at the residential memory care unit where my mother lives in Phoenix. Linda wanted to set up a Zoom video meeting with my mom, my wife and me. This technology was new to the memory care facility, and Linda herself had never used Zoom before. We would be their test case for this new way of connecting residents with loved ones....
We all know that a key to our health and well-being in this pandemic is "social distancing." While I can feel totally helpless against an enemy that is invisible, powerful, global and doesn't care a whit about what a nice guy I am, I like the idea of social distancing (SD). The practice of SD puts a great deal of power over my personal health back into my own hands, and even enables me to care responsibly for those around me. In this war, distance is power. The trouble is, most of us are social...
The Cloquet-based Community Access Television channel, CAT7, has taken some big hits in recent months. Its broadcast services were off the air for most of 2019 before being restored late in the year. And now, the station has “gone dark” once more. This comes at a time when our community needs every public resource available to provide critical local information about the current COVID-19 pandemic. If it is to become a real asset to our community in crisis, CAT7 must get back on the air. Now...
When Dustin Anderson wanted to improve his small vineyard in Carlton, he called the company that had sold him his grapevines. What happened next is why he is known as "The Apple Tree Guy" and not "The Wine Guy." Anderson had purchased a couple of apple trees from this same vendor and they were doing well, but the grapevines were not. The company suggested he plant more apple trees, but had a 100-tree minimum purchase policy. "Oh yeah, I can put in 100 trees," the hardworking Anderson told them,...
Leah Hammond stood on the showroom floor of her family's woodworking business in Cloquet. Beside her was her latest hand-crafted wall hanging, an elegant testimony to her creativity and craftsmanship. But this was no ordinary wall hanging. Six feet tall and made of precisely cut pieces of wood intricately assembled into geometric patterns, this was solid craftsmanship becoming art. The work clearly evoked the patterns of a meticulously-made quilt. Hammond began to tell the story of how her...
Cloquet’s downtown revitalization efforts received a nice boost last week when, along with three other Minnesota municipalities, the city was selected for the 2020 Artists on Main Street cohort. Over the next two years, Cloquet will receive $30,000 for project funding and program implementation. It took the collaborative efforts of public employees, nonprofit organizations, businesses and individuals to bring the Artists on Main Street initiative to Cloquet as they all shared a similar vision f...
When Neil and Theresa Erickson bought Carlton's Woodland Grocery back in 2013, it was already like an old familiar friend. Theresa had found her first job at the store, which was then owned by her uncle, Richard Meger. She had worked there, off and on, since 1995. Neil grew up on a family farm in the Wrenshall area and knew the store at 500 Third Street in Carlton, including its excellent meat department. He met Theresa in 2000. They got married and started a family. Theresa had the store in...
