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No more Tuffy Burgers
Tuffy’s Bar and Grill on First Avenue in Hibbing closed last night, according to reports I’ve heard around town. I called to confirm and there is no answer today during normal hours. I’ve heard the same talk from many different sources, so I’m going to lean toward believing that this subtly iconic Range luke warm-spot…
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Bob Dylan’s boyhood synagogue for sale on Iron Range
The synagogue where Bob Dylan and his family attended services when Bob was growing up on Minnesota’s Iron Range is for sale again. The former Agudath Achim Synagogue in Hibbing has been remodeled into a residential home but key attributes remain from its time as the site of young Robert Zimmerman’s bar mitzvah, including the…
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COLUMN: On the other side of the forbidden ridge
This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Oct. 10, 2010 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. This piece may or may not be based on my experiences strolling around the vicinity of a certain local mine last week. On the other side of the forbidden ridgeBy Aaron J. Brown For two generations, young people…
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GUEST POST: Hard times, good times
Guest posts last week from Jeff Manual and Frank Haataja inspired Noah Hanson, another longtime member of this blog community, to opine about his time on the Iron Range. I’m enjoying these posts. It reminds those who live here that our homeland is not always as boring as we sometimes think, and that the things…
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Paper: known consultant working inside Range agency
The Mesabi Daily News is shocked, shocked (!) to learn that the commissioner of the Iron Range Resources agency might be making arrangements to become a private consultant after her term is up this winter. The article is full of the sort of dramatic attempts to solicit comments usually reserved for those convicted of unseemly…
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Jump the fence, peek over the tall ridge
Over the weekend I gave a lecture at the Minnesota Discovery Center in Chisholm. A small but kind crowd was there for my talk about Iron Range political history and I thank these folks for coming out on a a beautiful fall day. I took the “back way” home and what a day for a…
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COLUMN: Keep it interesting, Minnesota
This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Oct. 3, 2010 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. Keep it interesting, MinnesotaBy Aaron J. Brown I’ve been trying to quit, but it’s so hard. Temptation is all around and it’s only going to get worse. I wish I never started. I’m talking about politics, not pills.…
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Broadband projects suggest great potential in northern Minnesota
Google Twin Ports, the group of interests trying to attract the internet giant’s experimental fiber project to Duluth, Minnesota, and Superior, Wisconsin, touts recent broadband developments as signs that the region might place high on Google’s list. Check out the message sent to the Google Twin Port’s e-mail list. One of the interesting thing about…
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Iron ore + innovation = corvettes (also jobs?)
An Iron Range mining project has been featured in The Street, a Wall Street business publication. Here’s the lede: Keith Busse, the CEO and one of the founders of Steel Dynamics, owns the world’s second largest collection of corvettes. In fact, Busse set up his corvette garage, which contains 60 of the classic Chevrolet sports…
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Frankly speaking about food, faces and other F words on the Range
After I announced that Jeff Manuel would be writing some thoughtful, historically-minded guest posts for MinnesotaBrown, a UW-Superior classmate and fellow former Promethean editor wrote me. Frank Haataja is from the Cloquet area south of the Range, southwest of Duluth, and offers this, an entertaining and considerably less academic outside view of the Iron Range.…
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GUEST POST: Taconite Roads: what’s old is new
The following is part of an occasional series of guest posts from historian Jeff Manuel. Thanks, Jeff! File this one under everything old is new again. Aaron’s recent post about a company hoping to use overburden and tailings as road construction material reminded me of several old efforts to use mining byproducts in road construction.…
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Ten million Benjamins lined up for Essar’s new Range mine?
If it’s Friday afternoon on the Iron Range, some distant corporation must be quietly releasing an extremely important piece of news in a highly controlled manner. Folks ’round here just call this Miller Time. The Hibbing Daily Tribune reports today that “foreign media outlets” are reporting that Essar Steel Minnesota has secured $1 billion in…
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(Fe)eeling good about this upcoming (Fe)st
The Minnesota Discovery Center in Chisholm is doing a big fall shindig to celebrate some of the popular local bands from the summer “Art in the Park” series. Anyone looking for some Sunday evening fun on the Iron Range should check out IronFest. See what they did there. Iron, with “fest.” My suggestion would have…
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Click on this airport post to increase your enreadments
Headline: “Enplanements keep rising.” This is from a Hibbing Daily Tribune story about how one (!) additional passenger flew out of Hibbing’s Range Regional Airport in August compared to July. Now, the news itself is unremarkable, maybe even good in these economic times. But feel free to let your mind work over the wordplay for…
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Open house aims to win support for Range planetarium
The Paulucci Space Theatre in Hibbing, a (literally!) star-spangled beacon of astronomical knowledge on the Iron Range, faces its own existential threat this year. The destructive gravitational forces in this case are provided by the state budget crisis. The planetarium’s operator, Hibbing Community College, cannot afford to operate the facility at a loss, which it…