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Range native holds high hopes for ‘Cold November’
This week, hunters across Northern Minnesota will check sights, erect stands and procure truckloads of cheese curds and jerky before opening the rifle deer season next Saturday. Most hope for that perfect shot, the big trophy and a freezer full of venison, but that’s often not the most important detail. For some, it’s the first…
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Book serves Range food favorites to new generation
Every member of the Cherry High School band knew from Day 1 there would come a time where we would spend the entire night in the school cafeteria making pasties for the big annual fundraiser. It was as sure as the sunset or a freshman missing the high notes. When pasty night came, every kid…
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Range War: Essar, Cliffs clash shows Mesabi at crossroads
~ ~ ~ Speculation can be ignored, but one must reckon with concrete. Here along Northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range one finds many messy versions of the truth surrounding Essar Minnesota’s new taconite mine under construction near Nashwauk. While controversial, actual activity at Essar shows that new mining will happen on the grounds of the…
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Veda Ponikvar: America’s Iron Lady
Veda Ponikvar, founder and publisher of two Chisholm newspapers, esteemed American civilian military leader, and arguably the most powerful person in Iron Range politics of the latter 20th Century, died Tuesday in Chisholm at the age of 96. One could remark that Ponikvar was the most consequential women in the male-dominated industrial history of the Iron Range.…
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Thinkers, tinkers and 3-D printers
Growing up, my dad was a leather whip of a man who chain-smoked Winston cigarettes and spent nearly all his free time tinkering with an invention in his garage. When they first taught us how to use this new thing called “the internet” at my high school, my inaugural search was about patent law, seeking…
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Broadband issue fills rural halls, demands action in 2016
My neighbor John Kannas set up extra folding chairs in the Balsam Township Hall but even those wouldn’t be enough. Last month, John told me that Paul Bunyan Communication was preparing to apply for a grant to expand fiber optic internet lines in parts of Balsam, Lawrence and Wabana, a block of rural townships in…
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Twilight for the unlovable chair
NOTE: Today’s column is a condensed version of a monologue I did in the Sept. 19, 2015 Great Northern Radio Show which re-airs today at 11 a.m. on Northern Community Radio and will be made available as a podcast in coming days. *** My wife and I have a term for the decorating style of our…
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The missing empathy in our politics
Something remarkable happened the night Vice President Joe Biden appeared on Stephen Colbert’s new Late Show during its first week on the air. A national political figure, one often mentioned as a presidential candidate, spoke like someone you knew. He opened his heart and let us see inside. Biden did so not as part of…
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Mining for Dinosaurs
For decades, Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range has labored under the belief that most of our fossils were walking around above ground, not buried below. Now scientists exploring a state park on the western Mesabi seek to turn this notion on its head. Most Iron Rangers know the Hill Annex Mine State Park in Calumet as…
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Blazing trails to sustainable Iron Range economy
To quote a line from William Blake, “Expect poison from the standing water.” True of water. True of spirit. True of Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range. The kind of poison I’m talking about comes from hopelessness. Our Iron Range economy has suffered in recent months, years and decades. We have watched young people leave, and worse…
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Paying raptors attention
We have a bonafide naturalist in our house in the form of our oldest son Henry. At 10, he knows more about the birds that live in the woods of Northern Minnesota than I ever have. Of course, he’s kind enough to bring the rest of us up to speed. Part of Henry’s fascination with…
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History’s human forge
Throngs of civilians gather inside the ramparts of Fort Snelling in St. Paul. The heat, nearly 100 degrees, oppresses all movement. Ladies fan themselves while the men soak stiff collars with sweat. Cooks fry and boil a feast over open flames; the smell hangs heavy in the air. At once a light breeze blows in…
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Somebody in the crowd
People get a certain look on their faces as they shuffle about events like this weekend’s St. Louis County Fair. They abruptly look up from their phones or fried snack with sudden optimism, a hopeful gaze that pierces even dark sunglasses. They’re looking for something or someone: a change agent to liven their world. Most…
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A more fashionable future for the Iron Range
Fashion has never been my forte. I often dress in the dark by feeling for the most comfortable fabrics in the closet. Last semester, an art major sitting in the front row of my class informed me that my old grey shirt was, in fact, green. Time finally taught me why my father wears one…
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The human story in every place
Most every Iron Ranger knows an old timer’s story about living off the land, harvesting timber to build the home where the children would be raised, the names of traditional foods and songs. Sure, some of us are Italian, some Slovenian, others Norwegian, Finn, Swede or Ojibwa, but the cold fact is that these stories…