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Highway 53: Herbie Rides the Range
This is my Sunday column for the April 1, 2012 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. SCENE: Jesse, a dejected-looking boy of 12, looks out over the Mine Overlook south of Virginia, Minnesota, in the heart of northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range. He speaks with his mentor Mort, the kindly retired miner who staffs the…
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The cold touch of metal, the language of machines
I grew up a mechanic’s son of a mechanic’s son on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota. My family has long lived around the Range’s tamarack swamps, seldom within its cities and often many miles out. Always more focused on the machines, the woods and the work than the machinations of the region’s booming, busting…
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The dawn of Winter’s Empire
Each year around this time elements of Winter take hold in the social fabric — cooling the temperatures, stripping the leaves. Winter-inspired political thinkers and writers organize within our institutions. They prepare the people for the idea of winter, tout winter virtues, indoctrinate our youth. Winter won the elections. Winter runs the trains. Winter forms the plans.…
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Silent Cal at the Hull Rust Mine
On this date in 1923, Warren Harding, an amiable, if corruptible president who sometimes questioned his own abilities to govern, died of a heart attack in San Francisco. Vice President Calvin Coolidge was sworn in during the night by his own father, a notary public. On this same date in 1928, President Coolidge became the…
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The day Rocky came to breakfast
This is my weekly column for the Sunday, March 20, 2011 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. The day Rocky came to breakfast By Aaron J. Brown Many different woodland creatures live in northern Minnesota but these creatures are knowable, just as the people of a city can be known to the advantage of the…
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The night I stole an hour from time
From 1996 to 1998, the years I was in senior high school, I worked weekend overnight shifts as an easy listening DJ at 97.9 WEVE in the iron mining town of Eveleth, Minnesota. Specifically, I’d come home from school on Friday afternoon, prepare a bowl of Campbell’s soup and cheese sandwich, take a sleeping pill…
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Whitepine down
When we first considered building our current house in the country, what struck me about the site was this tall white pine along the property line. The woods around northern Minnesota’s Iron Range once teemed with some of the largest white pine in North America, a fact that literally put the place on the map…
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Keep Looking Up
When you live in a place like the Iron Range, you learn to cope with a lot of stuff that needs “saving.” Local businesses need saving. Mines need saving. The arts need saving. Schools need saving. Everybody’s got problems and no institution is really safe. The population is aging and the economy is stuck wearing…
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A ‘vital’ life in the ‘Zone of Plenty’
One of the best things about writing a book like “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range” is all the stories, clippings and first hand accounts that people give you afterward that weren’t in my book. This little number arrived in the mail last week from a Mr. Earl Currie. It’s a 1943 advertisement for…