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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It’s been a chilly, damp, dark stretch, from early March through April. The beautiful winter ice for skating melted months ago. Snow for skiing disappeared in bits and drabs. Purple finch and white-throated sparrows have returned, ravenous for sunflower seeds and peanut butter, along with the resident chickadees, woodpeckers and nuthatches. The trilling red-winged blackbirds are turning up too. How have we made it through those dismal weeks? Besides trying out lots of new recipes and l...
I was appalled to read that Jeff Dotseth is campaigning on his support for “Stand Your Ground” laws. After this past winter’s local experience of a citizen being severely injured in a road rage incident, it should be clear to all that vigilantism isn’t a good idea for our community. We have a professional, qualified, and trained police force whose job it is to protect us, and a legal system whose job it is to protect the innocent and punish the offenders. Citizens taking the law into their own hands whenever another person seems “scary...
Having just watched a Supreme Court nominee supported by a comfortable majority of Americans draw just three Republican votes in the Senate, you could be forgiven for thinking bipartisanship in Congress is a thing of the past. And in the case of Supreme Court nominees, you’d be right: The last time a nominee got over half the votes of the opposition party was in 2005, and you have to go back nearly three decades — to Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993 — to find one who drew votes from almost all senat...
Congratulations to Cloquet city officials for getting Tree City status. I believe the last time we received the designation was during mayor Arlene Wolner's tenure. She was a dedicated tree person as I am, and we worked together to get the designation for Cloquet. At that time, requirements included having a tree board and a tree ordinance. We organized both and received the Tree City designation for several years. As part of the effort, one of my graduate students conducted a survey of the...
Just a few notes about last week’s story about the 1963 Cloquet boys basketball team. A few years ago the Carlton County Historical Society had a program about this team and season. They had on display the actual state runner-up trophy. It was quite an impressive trophy, and as the runner-up, it far exceeds the trophies given out at today’s tournaments. Today, what I see on TV is that it seems all of the places, champions, runner-up, third, etc., get the same size and design trophy; only what is engraved on them is different. That seems lik...
As our country will soon be heating up with election campaigns, I would like to bring attention to Minnesota House Representative 11A candidate Jeff Dotseth who supports a bill that gained traction in the Minnesota legislature in 2017 but did not pass. If passed, the Stand Your Ground bill would give citizens better measures to protect themselves, especially as crime accelerates in the Twin Cities area and is heading up north exponentially. There is limited protection for victims of violent crime in Minnesota at this time. The state only...
Are you kidding me? The Cloquet Pine Journal is the Cloquet area’s small business of the year? It is based and published in Duluth by Forum Communications, a Fargo, North Dakota company. The Cloquet Chamber of Commerce clearly doesn’t understand where the city boundaries lie. Besides, we have an excellent newspaper in our town called the Pine Knot News which is actually a locally owned and operated business. Chamber board members, get your heads out of the sand. Chris Jenkins, Cloquet...
Thumbs up Bravo to Nathan Barta. He’s the Esko High School senior who took the time to come up with a plan for more equal county commissioner districts and then presented it to commissioners earlier this month. Wow. How many teenagers even bother to grasp the fact that county commissioners have districts, let alone come up with a plan to equalize them? We heard Barta also spoke up at a redistricting hearing in Duluth regarding state legislative districts. Well done. Thumbs up Kudos to Cloquet grad Luke Heine for bringing a free hackathon to t...
I probably did not adequately express to Jana the trauma I felt when we discovered a boxelder bug in the front window of the Pine Knot News office this week. I had just spent most of the morning talking to people about ash borers, and their official arrival in Cloquet. The emerald ash borer is a real problem. Its infestation kills ash trees, threatening a large chunk of the hardwood tree canopy across southern and eastern Minnesota as of this week. Boxelder bugs? Well, they say they are harmless. They munch on boxelder tree leaves all summer...
Spring may be the season of snow and mud in Minnesota, but earlier this month city administrator Tim Peterson pointed out a third substance that emerges in spring: dog poop. "We've had a lot of complaints about dog poop in Veterans Park," he told city councilors on April 4. "It was also brought to my attention today that our two parks staff each spent four hours cleaning up dog poop around the train park," he said, referring to Fauley Park, a relatively small park that lies between the West End...
There’s been a truly serviceable public service announcement on area radio stations since the pandemic started. I say that because Kevin Love, the former Minnesota Timberwolves player, is speaking about anxieties in troubled times and turning to mindfulness. Then he guides a small exercise, asking that we take a “big, deep breath,” “in, and out,” “just breathing.” The PSA is on the radio a lot, and each time I hear it, I take those breaths. It’s a great prompt to “be kind to ourselves.” The pandemic has hit everyone in different ways, but...
Thanks to Jana Peterson for the nice article she wrote for the Pine Knot about the status of the Cloquet Forestry Center. The transparency she provided which has been sorely lacking was welcome. The Cloquet Forestry Center has a rich and productive history. Our local community has always supported it and hopefully their use of the many roads for hiking, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing will continue for many years. Al Alm, Cloquet...
Every now and then it crowds into one’s consciousness: Why am I rich, poor or middling? How’d I get here? How does Relativity matter? What if I was in Ukraine? Now what? What after I’m dead? At the risk of revealing the obvious: while this is largely an Old Person Conundrum, the fact is, people go through this self-audit on a constant basis from a very early age. It’s the intensity of the boil-from-simmer that differentiates the younger consideration from the more seasoned. Water boils at 212...
Last Friday, a local firefighter could have been hit by a passing driver. Fortunately, he had retrieved the equipment he was taking from the rescue truck before the driver demolished the traffic cone near the truck, without even slowing down. When you see emergency responders — police, firefighters, ambulance, tow truck drivers — responding to roadway incidents, move over and slow down. It’s common sense and it’s also the law. Minnesota’s Ted Foss Move Over Law, named in honor of the State Pat...
While all the attention in the Pine Knot News about being stranded in Miami was fun for our young travelers, I just want to clarify that the trip to Costa Rica was part of a class for educational credit. The itinerary of the trip is very robust and educational. The students are with local Spanish teachers, other chaperones, and a local Costa Rican guide (expert in the history, culture and flora and fauna of Costa Rica) all the time. Because the students are in class all day with teachers (we make the world our classroom), the students on this t...
Sometimes I feel like I’m 12 years old. Other times I feel all of the many decades of my nose to the journalism grindstone. It’s a constant battle of finding the youthful energy to be indignant versus what the spent energy will yield in the end for one who’s seen this all before. This too, shall pass. Ignore all the noise. Save your energy. The current state of public discourse on a national and local level has reached an unnerving point, especially in a state known for its civic sense of duty and interest in getting a fair shake for everyone....
Maybe it’s the perspective a long life brings, but I find myself eyeing with some skepticism the glut of “personal brands” that assault us every day on television, in print, and through social media. Entertainers, celebrities, politicians striving for acclaim, artists and writers who’ve mastered the public relations game, journalists and media stars who are building their national profiles—all are “important” in terms of the attention they garner. But are they actually important? In some ways, of course, the question is impossible to...
I remain struck by the tagline for WDIO-TV in Duluth: “With You For Life.” Seems ominous, doesn’t it? It’s a double entendre, maybe. First meaning, perhaps, “with you through this journey of life.” But if it is a double entendre, I’m not sure if they really want you to think that you are tied to them for your entire being. As a typical Minnesotan, that aggressive connotation is just that, a bit aggressive. I think of “With You From the Cradle to the Grave” or a life sentence in prison. So does that tagline hit its mark? I reviewed these thought...
It was the Snapchat heard around the world, or at least the part of the globe where most of our readers live and work. A tossed off conversation between teenage boys on social media, packed with racist comments that they apparently thought were somehow cool, or funny. They were neither. They were appalling. But anyone who sent messages threatening to harm the boys should also be ashamed. Threatening the writers isn’t going to make them better people … and that’s the goal, isn’t it? In some cases — i.e., a Facebook conversation between a...
Don't blame the flag designer from 1893. It was a rush job, with one significant requirement that is vexing vexillologists today. That's the word used for flag experts, people who study and comment on flag design. This month, the state legislature is mulling the idea of a new state flag. For years, vexillologists have urged a new flag based on some pretty solid design principles. Our flag is unremarkable, a state seal on a blue background like so many other state flags. It is printed on one...
Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine, a peaceful independent nation, can only be explained by revisiting late 20th-century history. I am rusty on much of this, so I’ve spent some time reviewing the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The totalitarian Soviet Union began to change course in the mid-1980s when Mikhail Gorbachev, as general secretary of the Communist Party, initiated glasnost, supporting more open discussion of political and social issues and ushering in democratization of the...
I would like to respond to the article “One-man battle on petition continues” regarding the Wrenshall schools. First, Tony Sheda isn’t the only one who’s upset with how things were handled with the petition costs. The next statement that upsets me was the comment that when people went door-to-door, community members were upset about how the board appointment was handled. Not one person came to our door. I was also told (it was implied) that I had no business discussing the petition as I have no children in the school the day I stopped at Hugh L...
I greatly appreciated Steve Korby's article on Dickie Eklund and Ray Poirier. I didn't know Dickie well, but I remember him riding his bike with Ray. My band was not a polka band, but we did do "Just Because" and the "Tick Tock Polka" for Ray to sing. His timing was impeccable. Len was a saint. He sometimes would hire Frankie Yankovic to play at the Elmwood as a special treat for his customers. Frankie was a saint also. Ray gave me one of the cards Frankie had printed just for him. Ray was very...
Editor’s note: This column was written for Sunshine Week — an initiative by newspapers across the country to shine a light on the need for open government and access to public information — two years ago. This year, Sunshine Week was scheduled for March 13-19, but we agree with the writer that a person’s right to know should not be limited, and that includes promoting that right through editorials in your local newspaper. Enjoy. The media are most definitely not your enemy. Far from being the enemy of the people, day in and day out we take ou...
If you use the Cloquet clock, it was supposed to be spring this week. Gordy’s is open. Alas, that rite of spring and harbinger of summer rarely means we get matching weather, even as the conventional calendar says we’ve reached “meteorological” spring. But here we are, in that waiting room between real warm and lingering winter. It has been an especially difficult end of winter here at the Pine Knot. Jana has been stuck at home with a bum leg for two months, meaning we can’t count on her ramblings about the community for pictures and all the t...
