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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Driving around town, you’ll find remnants of long-forgotten commercial activity in many neighborhoods, corner groceries and old gas stations that have evolved into residential space, as most commercial activity moved downtown or to the Highway 33 corridor over the years. The West End of Cloquet is one of those sites. Once the thriving center of Cloquet, it held City Hall, the police station, and many of the most important businesses in town. The original town square was in the West End. So was the train station, and the town’s movie the...
I recently read your article in the paper that discussed the upcoming bike race and the worry this has created for the ski club. As a mother of a member of our local cycling team, I was bothered by some of the comments and lack of acceptance or excitement about this upcoming race. We as a city tend to pride ourselves on supporting local sporting events, so to have cycling looked at as hindrance is rather disappointing. If we pride ourselves on accepting and encouraging our youth to be active and engaged in sports or other activities then we...
As a mid-70s-year-old male I’ve never witnessed a more divided America than today. While the insurrection was caused by a conspiracy crowd off misguided instructions by the former, twice-impeached president, Fox News anchors are claiming the IRS is coming with loaded AR-15s to take down small businesses. There is a cancer eating up our democracy and I believe Fox News, as well as most religious leaders, have steered their flocks to vote for the party for life no matter if the leader told 30-plus thousand lies, had three wives, tried to o...
There are two especially striking aspects to the "Inflation Reduction Act," the sprawling climate-change/tax-reform/health-care legislation that just passed Congress and was signed into law by President Biden. The first is that it passed on strict party-line votes. And the second is that in an unexpectedly productive Congress, this makes it unusual. The measure was the product of a year's worth of patient negotiation and compromise in the Senate. And while there are portions of the law that...
Travel near and far in the Pine Knot Gallery’s “urban landscapes” exhibit, opening Friday. Our fall exhibit includes unique urban perspectives from a number of area artists, including Rhonda Peters, Kris Nelson, Ken Hanson, Mark Cline, Carole Hill, Ivy Vainio and Deborah Manisto. Ken and Kris Hanson helped us hang the exhibit, and Ken contributed three acrylic paintings of urbanscapes the two encountered during their trip to Europe this past April. They visited Madrid, Toledo, Barcelona, Rome,...
Kudos to USG for being a great corporate citizen by designing, fabricating and erecting a sign designating and promoting the West End business district. It is prominently displayed on Broadway Avenue, across from the locomotive. Thank you, USG, for your combined efforts and generosity in transforming this vital and upcoming neighborhood. A grateful resident, W.G. Fleisch...
In the mid-1920s, my grandmother Ruth Lee Markusen began teaching at Cromwell High School. Although she had earned a degree from the University of Minnesota in English and social science (1910) and had taught grammar school in rural Minnesota for several years, she had most recently been a homemaker with two small boys at home. But her husband, Marinus "Renus" Markusen, had contracted tuberculosis and had to close down his planing mill and stop his carpentry work. So, she went to work teaching...
The Carlton County Labor Day celebration enjoyed its 105th gathering in Cloquet on Monday. The parade and surrounding events were widely and well-received, bringing our communities close in the name of being stronger together than apart - a core tenet of the labor movement. But if we want community celebrations like it to continue, we're going to need to listen to Chad Tuura. "I don't want it to go away," Tuura said. "I don't want to lose it. I don't want Labor Day not to happen." Tuura was the...
I attended the Labor Day festivities in Cloquet on Sept. 5. Great weather. Great crowd. Great fun. One thing that was not great, and quite frankly an embarrassment for our community, was the lack of adequate toilet facilities. I estimated that over 1,000 people were at Veterans Park at various times that day. There were only two porta-potties, yes two, at the park and they were in extremely poor condition at the very beginning of the event. There were long lines to use them and most people walked away with a repulsed look. The lady with one...
THUMBS UP to the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa for making the hard, but seemingly necessary decision to prohibit wild rice harvesting on reservation lakes this season. The Band described growing conditions as “highly unfavorable” in deciding to “rest” the on-reservation wild rice lakes for the season. The plan, as one Band member told the Pine Knot, is to let the rice fall to seed and hope that the harvest bounces back in 2023. Ricing has deep cultural and historical significance, and it’s a wonderful fall treat for all of us. Ev...
This morning, we had a visitor. Aaron Aho, the son of the recently deceased Wright resident Marvin Aho, came by to speak with husband Rod Walli about the burial site and interment for Marvin’s father in the Lakeside Cemetery south of Wright. Rod, along with several others from Finnish immigrant families who settled and stayed in Wright, Minnesota, continues to serve on a committee overseeing the cemetery’s care and maintenance and observing rules for purchasing plots, and also locating and int...
I’m so fed up with all the changes in this area. First, the middle school wasn’t fit for students, but yet fixed up for apartments. Second, putting in turn lanes and sidewalks for Washington Avenue, cutting into our properties. Because of the sidewalks, we’ll have to risk standing in the street to get mail, almost getting hit. Cars going too fast. No parking for sales or family events. Dumb! Third, a new jail costing millions. It’s a jail, not the Hilton hotel. Ridiculous! Fourth, the stupid [roundabout] on 14th and Washington Avenue. Makes n...
More than 150 golfers, from the very young to what most would consider quite old but young at heart, converged on the Cloquet Country Club to play in the weekend adult-child golf tournament. Golf, a sport for life, affords that opportunity. “We never advertise or publicize the event,” said Cloquet course pro/manager Bill Manahan. “Yet, we’re able to get numbers that rival our invitational tournament. We’ve had kids play in the tournament with their dad or mom, and now they’re playing wit...
While adults never quite lose it, the intuitive, psycho-emotional trigger that gets pulled in kids around mid-to-late August is as keen as the intuitive trigger that gets pulled in geese two months later. For geese, it’s: Fly South. For kids, it’s: Have Fun. Squeeze every last pinch of summer out of Summer before the reality of September and Back-to-School accountability and order takes over. Accountability and Order. …as mentioned, even adults never quite lose the aversion to either. Earli...
Back in June, when the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, attention understandably focused on the majority’s view of what the Constitution allows. In their decision, the six justices contended that if the right to an abortion could not be found in the Constitution — or in early American legal precedent — then it doesn’t actually exist. This was new ground for the Court, and it raised the specter of a rollback of other personal freedoms Americans have come to take for granted, including the rights to use contrac...
Sidewalks won this week. So did public health and our sense of community. We congratulate the Cloquet City Council on its unanimous vote in favor of sidewalks — and for following the city’s own rules requiring sidewalks in new subdivisions. Unfortunately, the council hasn’t always voted for sidewalks, something the Cloquet Planning Commission pointed out when its members suggested the council had set a precedent by not requiring sidewalks for some recent projects. It was a reasonable suggestion, but we are thrilled the council threw that argum...
Before You Die you should read “Moby Dick.” A lot of us from varying generations will have had this title as Required Reading in high school or as an undergrad student. I remember trying to plow through it in ninth grade, as the assignment of Ms. Swanson after sprinting through “Huck Finn” and finding it infinitely less interesting than what 5-years-older Jeff Kapinski was buying my eventual wife and Ever-Ever Girlfriend for a birthday present. “I guess it’d be okay if you bought me skis and a...
Patriotism, a viewpoint: The vast majority of this country’s “Greatest Generation” were patriots first and politicos second. They put country before politics. There were both conservatives and progressives who espoused their particular political viewpoints on what should happen via the politicians as far as providing for the general populace. But, they worked together in the U.S. Congress to move this country forward. Yes, many compromises were made on both “sides” of the aisle. And we made progress. No matter our individual conservat...
THUMBS UP to everyone who worked at or voted in Tuesday’s primary election. Voting is the cornerstone of democracy and works best when people actually vote (and of course, when voters are educated on the issues or candidates). Kudos to all of you for showing up. We look forward to seeing many more voters at the polls in November. THUMBS UP to the various groups that used to do backpack and school supplies programs separately for joining together to serve students across the county in a collaborative effort. The first Carlton County Back to S...
Whether Munter, Schultz, Welty, or Stauber wins the 8th District Congressional race, the winner should focus on housing. The home mortgage tax exemption has been the great engine of Middle Class prosperity for the past 70 years. I suggest these initiatives for increasing the housing stock: 1. Push for HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development to grant no-money-down first-time-buyer mortgages like the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides in rural cities and towns for those with good credit scores. This will balance the scourge of...
I am proud to serve on the Wrenshall School Board, and I would like to share a little about what is going on within the Wrenshall School. The views expressed in this letter are my own. Our district is finishing the final stage of construction on our buildings. The school is something our community, students and staff can be proud of. Classrooms have been updated, and with a new HVAC system, they are comfortable and safe. Our gymnasium and new multi-use space give more opportunities for all of our students to engage in physical activities; even...
Watching the hearings held by the Jan. 6 committee as it delves into last year’s events at the U.S. Capitol and what lay behind them, I’ve been struck by what you might think of as the “meta-coverage.” It’s been fascinating to see. Most news stories, of course, have focused on the alarming revelations uncovered by the committee — in essence, the lengths to which a sitting president and his allies went in trying to short-circuit the clearly expressed will of the American people. But some covera...
The best thing to do when you lose confidence in yourself is find it. Unless you’re not breathing, it’s in there, somewhere. Even in the meekest, most humble and fragile of us, the thing that makes us human — that certain self-consciousness, that self-awareness, that option we keep in the back pocket of our ego, that self-abasing, soul-roasting, self-loathing, catch-all, Ace Card: I suck, is proof positive that we’ve got the power to make decisions about how we manage our view of ourselv...
Minnesota is home to 14,000 lakes, 12,000 loons, 135,000 seasonal lake cabins and 3.9 million newspaper readers. Really? Really. Every month, 86 percent of Minnesota adults read newspapers’ print and online issues, according to a new Minnesota Market Study conducted by Coda Ventures. The study measures media usage and purchase behavior of Minnesota adults across urban and rural zip codes (see full-page ad in this issue). The 3.9 million Minnesota newspaper readers number might not come as a surprise to you. After all, you are reading a newspape...
The Fond du Lac Tribal College Board of Directors (FDLTCBOD) finds the comments made by a sitting Wrenshall school board member regarding our American Indian ancestors disrespectful and degrading. The comments made by the school board member were in reaction to redoing a school parking lot and a question: “What if they dig up bones?” The board member responded that “I have a plan for that. Fence it off and bring in all the dogs from the dog pound. There won’t be any bones left.” The reference to finding bones was made in connection to the Fo...
