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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Those enticing ads depicting people immigrating to a better life in the USA sponsored by Ancestry.com have succeeded in convincing millions of people to submit DNA samples as a means of finding their roots. We search for stories of the past, details about where we came from, health histories and more. In all of this, we hope to learn how our ancestors survived to pass their genes on to us, but we need hard facts to establish the basis of our stories. The New York Library website says,...
Carlton High School thespians will perform "Epic Fail" by Bradley Hayward at 2 and 6 p.m. Saturday, April 15 at the Encore Performing Arts Center in Cloquet. As the play is described: "Teenagers are faced with failure every day. Some mornings it feels like they have the letter 'F' stamped on their foreheads in bright red ink. In a series of hilarious vignettes, students take on a multitude of challenges, each from a different perspective. From learning to driving a car (seemingly with a mind of...
In the 1963 crowd photo of area residents welcoming home Cloquet's state runner-up basketball team, we heard from 1963 graduate Helen (Waldorf) Witte, who noticed herself and others in the lower left corner of our March 24 crowd photo and said, "That's me. I couldn't believe it. I went down for the state basketball tournament." Helen is the person anchoring the foreground here, wearing the headscarf. Directly behind her is her late aunt, Marcella Johnson. Standing with them is Paulette...
Attending its first statewide one-act play festival since 2019, the County Seat Theater Company took home top honors this past weekend for its performance of "Tracks," by Peter Tarsi. The Cloquet-based community theater group won Best of Festival at the biannual Minnesota Association of Community Theatres one-act play festival in Glenwood, Minnesota. The acting troupe also won the following awards: Outstanding Achievement by an acting Ensemble, Outstanding Achievement in Directing to husband and...
The Cloquet Community Band is seeking new members. If you have played an instrument, please check out the band. Practice is 7-8:30 p.m. Mondays at the Cloquet Presbyterian Church, 47 Fourth St., Cloquet. The band provides sheet music, and you bring your instrument. The band performs at a variety of community events (spring and winter concert, parades, nursing homes and other events as requested). Questions? Contact Becky at 218-206-4441....
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...
The County Seat Theater Company is taking audience members along for the ride, as actors present the community theater's Minnesota festival competition piece starting Friday. "Tracks" is a one-act play written by Peter Tarsi. The dramatic play is set on a well-traveled subway station where a group of strangers meet. Each person has arrived with limited personal belongings and they all claim to be in different cities and have no sense of time. Soon they learn there is no way out of the station,...
Tim Winker loves living here, and he's always looking for ways to engage his neighbors in his passions. Whether it's car racing, saunas, accordions, or the delicious soup/stew called mojakka, Tim wants to share his enthusiasm as far and wide as possible. Tim started the local mojakka cookoff 20 years ago, and it's still going strong. He also put together the website mojakka.com, where you can find recipes, memories and stories contributed by Finnish folks from the U.S. and Canada. The word...
Jim Boyd had a repost on Facebook recently that we wanted to share. Boyd’s page, called “Cloquet, MN-1884 to Present,” is chock-full of historical Cloquet area photos and memories. He shared a memory from Kurt Hunter, a 1975 graduate of Cloquet High School, “of the day I played softball with the vice president of the United States.” It was May 23, 1969, so Hubert Humphrey was then a former vice president, having lost the presidential election to Richard Nixon in the fall of 1968. Humphrey...
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...
The late Jack Finberg (center) is pictured, at right, training to make "slabs" for the Carlton County Vidette newspaper with two unidentified men. Finberg worked at the Vidette, then took a printing job at the Pine Knot newspaper in the mid-1960s. His son, David Finberg, shared some photos with the Pine Knot News. David's grandmother, Ruth Finberg, below, had a radio talk show in the 1970s called "Memory Lane," about the history of Carlton. David said the old Finberg house on Slate Avenue in...
After 21 years without a section win, the Esko High School One Act play is now returning to the State One Act Play Festival Friday, Feb. 10, for the second year in a row. After placing second at subsections on Jan. 28, Esko took first place at the Section 7A competition on Feb. 4. The 19-student cast and crew performed "The Inexplicable Chaos Factor of Mia Gregory" by Emily Hageman. The play tells the story of Liv, a brilliant teenage mathematician, who struggles to understand the one person...
The County Seat Theater will open its new season next weekend with "Charlotte's Web," a story about friendship that ought to enchant audiences of all ages. The Children's Literature Association had high praise for the well-known book by E.B. White, calling it "The best American children's book of the past two hundred years." "This show is only about an hour long, which is great for our younger audience members, but I guarantee all ages will want it to go on longer," said co-director Joel...
Talking from his northeast Minneapolis residence, Tony Petersen described the home studio he named Double Pug after his dogs Patti and Doug. There are powerful microphones and compressors, good sound baffling, and windows facing his backyard to the west. "It's a really powerful one-man studio," Petersen said. "Generally, the music happens between 7 p.m. and 3 a.m., so I get to catch the sunset." Petersen, 33, is a Cloquet native and founder of numerous projects, including Social Animals, the...
Cloquet native's 2020 book with wolves is chosen There was an ease about Thomas Peacock as he made a presentation and later sat down to talk about his work as an author of revered books about the Native experience. He was at the Jan. 6 Dream Catcher Winter Gathering for educators from the region, talking about the use of "story" in teaching and learning about Native ways. It was the first such live gathering at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in Cloquet since the pandemic hit. Peacock...
This was a fun photo we found while researching information on a story this past week. This photo is from the Carlton County News Graphic, dated Feb. 16, 1951. You'll find out that when digging for historic nuggets that information on women is always the most difficult to find, because names change from birth names. And to add insult, most women in newspaper archives are listed only as a Mrs. to their husband's first and last name. So your task this week is to tell us what became of the girls...
There were three generations on the stage and at least three generations on the dance floor Saturday afternoon for the annual New Year's Eve dance at the Cloquet VFW. Duane and Sandy Olson of Two Harbors were a lively couple to watch on the floor. There was also a potluck for all the attendees. Jo Zack of Holyoke, 89, and Will Riendeau of Hibbing, 92, were enjoying a turn on the floor. Will said he has been dancing for 80 years. Dancers traveled from as far south as Sandstone and as far north...
Kermit Nielsen of Cloquet had some interesting recollections spurred by the Dec. 16 History Mystery item about a pulpwood fire at Northwest Paper in April of 1963. News reports at the time said a lightning strike may have been the genesis of the fire, though there was no definitive cause of the fire that ate up at least 11,000 cords of wood. The loss was recorded as $250,000, or $2.4 million in today's dollars. Kermit said the lightning explanation may have been a ruse to recoup losses through i...
John Luomala, a reader in Thomson Township, recently brought in some physical black-and-white snapshots of a fire at a Cloquet lumberyard. Luomala figured he had taken the pictures in the late 1950s or early 1960s and was sure some readers would remember the huge pulpwood fire. Luomala was a forester for Northwest Paper Co. at the time. His photos show the efforts to douse the fire, including this one with the fedora-wearing president of the company, Harry T. Kendall Jr., looking back at...
Not so much a mystery this week. It was called the “Comeback of Cloquet,” and people here celebrated in style 100 years ago this month. While it may seem odd that a whole community came out to celebrate a street construction project, that’s just what people did on Nov. 4, 1922, after a mile of paving was completed on business arteries in the city. As the Minneapolis Journal reported, “The great forest fire of 1918 descended upon this city and left much of it in ruins. Now, the city has ‘come back’ and today finds this town with many prospe...
The County Seat Theater Company will bring "A Christmas Carol" to the stage again, but a more spirited and fanciful version, featuring a swirling, dancing chorus of ghosts who weave through this uplifting holiday story of redemption, magic and hope. "The show starts with Scrooge in bed, surrounded by the ghosts and spirits, having a fitful, nightmare-filled sleep atop the bed covers," said County Seat general manager Joel Soukkala. "Throughout the whole show, the apparitions are constantly...
When Thomlin Swan moved to a home on the Fond du Lac Reservation in early 2021, the theater artist was astounded by the lack of visible Ojibwe culture within the city of Cloquet, "despite having a reservation as part of its borders." Swan wanted to change that. In 2021, they received a West End Flourish grant to produce a piece of youth puppet theater that would help bring Ojibwe stories to downtown. After a slow start, things started coming together last summer when Swan connected with two...
There will be no place like Cloquet High School to see the production of the popular "The Wizard of Oz" this weekend. A cast and crew of nearly 80 students will bring Oz to life with the familiar and not so familiar. Inspired by the children's novel written by Frank Baum in 1900, "The Wizard of Oz" film was released in 1939 and became a classic for the ages. "Its theme of love and hope is timeless. Who doesn't love that?" said Lily Rosen, who plays a Munchkin in the Lullaby League trio. Those...
The Esko theater department turned back the clock to the turn of the century on Thursday night for their debut of the Pulitzer Prize winning drama "Our Town." Set between 1901 and 1913 in the fictional small town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, the show explores the universal struggle of the human race to understand the big picture of life and death from the perspective of a rural community living during that time. "You get to follow the same characters at different snapshots in their life,...
Carlton resident Galyna Tuttle is headed to Ukraine next week for the second time this year. Born and raised in the now war-torn country, Tuttle is bringing more medical supplies, warm clothing and sleeping bags, and will purchase food to bring to rural villages once she's there. However, this time she has plans for her return trip to Minnesota as well. She's bringing two young women and a toddler back with her. They will join another refugee, Gloriiya, who arrived three weeks ago from Ukraine....
