All good things end

This will be my last column in the Mesabi Tribune.

No sense in burying the lede. But to end something, you really should start from the beginning. 

My first professional byline was in the erstwhile Hibbing Daily Tribune shortly after I graduated high school. I met my wife Christina in the newsroom. In June 2001, I was named editor of the paper after several more qualified candidates literally fled the state to avoid selection. Only recently hired as the city reporter, I was 21 years old, a fact that the publisher at the time, Terese Almquist, did not know and was shocked to learn the next day. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was a lot for the newsroom to absorb. They ranged in age from older than me to much older than me. I thought that having a lot of ideas would help. It didn’t. But we all figured out how to get along, a process aided by the departure of several of us for other work. 

Being a daily newspaper editor on the Iron Range was like washing dishes with a firehose. It was thrilling, terrifying and often counterproductive; but I learned a Ph.D’s worth of knowledge in two and a half years of split shifts, angry phone calls and Rotary Club meetings. We stopped the presses for 9/11. Along the way, I learned how to write about almost anything, all the time. 

When I was a kid, I didn’t want to work in the mines. But I learned more than I ever thought possible about mining. I loved politics, but learned how to hate it. There are ways to tell good public officials from bad ones, and their party affiliation has little to do with it.

I met so many people, all of them older than me. They gave me a century of historical perspective and the curiosity to search for more. I knew I was from the Range, but I never knew what that meant until I saw how generations formed one long, gnarled rope of human experience tethered to this beautiful but ravaged land.

Technology shifted dramatically. I helped develop the newspaper’s first website. Later, I was the first person to live blog Hibbing election results through the overnight hours of Election 2002. I may also have been the only person to read what I was writing. Before I left, I saw an entire team of experienced compositors laid off or reassigned as computers replaced their jobs. Working knowledge of godforsaken Quark Express kept me employed. The world isn’t always fair.

When I decided to go back to grad school so I could teach at Hibbing Community College, Terese asked me to stay on as a columnist. I don’t think either of us would have expected it to last as long as it did. 

I suppose I wrote about 1,300 columns or so. A dozen editors, publishers and owners came and went over the next two decades. I figured at least one of them would fire me, but no one ever did. In 2020, the Hibbing Daily Tribune merged with our one-time rival and corporate sibling Mesabi Daily News. Here we are, in the Mesabi Tribune.

It’s humbling that my tenure as a columnist rivaled that of all time Hibbing greats like Rufus Hitchcock, Claude Atkinson and Al Zdon. Now my work joins theirs in dusty boxes of microfilm down at the library. So it goes.

I’ve taken a new full time job in the media business. I am not leaving the area and hope to do some good with my new assignment right here on the Iron Range.

It is amusing that for the last nine years the line at the end of my columns said I was working on a book that still hasn’t come out. It will! Probably next year. To follow my thrilling tale of Victor Power and the early 20th century fight for the soul of the Iron Range, subscribe for free updates at my website, MinnesotaBrown.com. I’ll also announce my next adventure there soon. 

I’ll never know how my columns were received over these 24 years. You might have wrapped fish in them or relished their immolation in the wood stove. But you’ll never know what it meant to me to write them. Twenty-four years is a long time. In fact, it’s an entire generation of human experience. Whole families were birthed and grown during this time, including mine.

Oh, the changes we’ve seen. Change won’t stop. It might get better or it might not. We don’t control all that, but we have a say. We’re certainly not obligated to make things worse. 

Get off your phone, support fair-minded journalism and fight like hell for the people. Honest people can disagree. But we’ve got to stay honest and we’ve got to care about others.

Aaron J. Brown is an author and college instructor from northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. He writes the blog MinnesotaBrown.com. This piece first appeared in the Saturday, March 1, 2025 edition of the Mesabi Tribune.

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