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Eight years on the road
In W.P. Kinsella’s novel, “Shoeless Joe,” later made into the movie “Field of Dreams,” the farmer Ray Kinsella builds a baseball field in the middle of his corn. People think he’s crazy. I suppose he is. But the experience heals him. Even though this story is fiction you can still visit the actual baseball field…
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Northland safe from Halloween horrors … or is it?
“I can’t even imagine.” I never cared for that phrase. Because it’s almost never true. What makes something horrible is not that you can’t imagine it happening, but that you can. Horror is based less on fear of the totally unknown but on fear of the imagined unknown. When you get lost in the woods…
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Enter to win ride in giant pink mining truck
Here’s a fun item while I continue work on my book. The Hibbing Tourist Senior Center, operators of the famous and newly re-established North Hibbing Mine View, are running a contest with a very unique prize. You can enter a drawing to ride in a Hibbing Taconite production truck as it leaves the mine and…
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Unlocking young minds to reach true potential
This time of year the men of my family gather around the big wood table up at the hunting shack to talk engines and tell stories. I do well with the stories, though I struggle with the engines. My father knows motors well enough to diagnose and repair any type of machine. He once explained…
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Silent films rich with sound
The history of movies, like the history of the world, begins with light and shadows. At first, people recreated reality with shadows on the wall. Film made it possible to capture real images. You saw yourself, or your friend, or a famous celebrity, captured during a moment in time. The past reflected into the present…
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‘Strong Towns’ fans flames of revolutionary pragmatism
Those who read “Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity” by Charles L. Marohn, Jr., a new book published by Wiley, might at first be overwhelmed by Marohn’s bad news. America’s cities are insolvent. And though he doesn’t mention them by name, his metrics would certainly implicate our own Hibbing, Chisholm, and all…
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Stay loose, Twins; Lord knows Minnesotans can’t
Work on the book continues. Thus, most of you have gotten used to not hearing much from me here at the blog. Don’t worry, I’m still brewing ideas at my outpost in the woods. You’ll hear more soon enough. It’s hard to let one item go unmentioned, though. That would be today’s start of the…
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A little bit country
The misguided passions of youth run strong. It took time for me to mature into an emotionally stable adult. How old am I? About that long. Maybe longer. One of the teenage fervencies I now regret was my disdain for country music. I grew up in Cherry, which isn’t a town so much as a…
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Autumn: the perfect season for our imperfect species
The stages of a year are a lot like the stages of life. Each one has something to teach you. By the end of it, you’re not the same person you were at the beginning. And that’s good. Because otherwise you would get sick of yourself. So it goes as we send the kids to…
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Adding value where it counts
We hear it all the time. The abundant rocks and dirt found on the edges of our Mesabi Range towns became the steel that powered modern American manufacturing and infrastructure. And they still do! We also hear that all of the modern technology and conveniences we’ve come to enjoy also come from mined minerals. We…
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Season finale? Great Northern Radio Show broadcasts Nov. 9 at Hibbing
Hi all — some rather big news buried in the press release for my Nov. 9 Great Northern Radio Show at the Hibbing High School auditorium. If you haven’t seen the Great Northern yet, this may be your last chance for a long while. Anywhere from two years to forever. More to come on the…
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Late but great, hear the most recent Great Northern Radio Show
I don’t know what it is about summer, but it always seems to delay the release of our Great Northern Radio Show online audio. At long last you can hear Sarah Morris, Thomas X, Katie and the Occasionals, the Great Northern Radio Players and yours truly in the show we broadcast June 22 at the…
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Michigan’s U.P. offers glimpse at past & future of Mesabi Range
A couple weeks ago I traveled to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for research on my book about Victor Power. Power was born in Calumet, Michigan, and raised in Escanaba before moving to Hibbing, Minnesota, as a young man. He became a consequential figure here on the Mesabi Iron Range. More on that to come. But the…
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Labor faces unresolved peril in new mine deals
It’s Labor Day weekend on the Mesabi Iron Range. So let’s talk about labor. You might have noticed a burst of media attention for a project labor agreement between the proposed Twin Metals mine in Ely and local construction trade unions. It was a front page story in this and most regional newspapers and a…
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Nothing but open road on route to MN-8 DFL nod
Last year I made a lot of hay out of the race for Congress in Minnesota’s Eighth District. The end result ended up less climactic and influential than we all thought. U.S. Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN8) ended up winning by just over five points, becoming one of few Republicans to win open seats in an…