Bob Collins
You knew that Savage, Minnesota was a shipbuilding port during World War II, right? Me, neither. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Regional history
You have to have thick skin and some real guts to be a newspaper editor in a smaller community. Jaci Smith, the managing editor of the Faribault Daily News, has both. Read more →
It’s very nearly drive-in movie season again, another opportunity to reflect on what we’ve lost.
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Next week, as the anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches on April 30, the country will be flooded with stories, TV shows, and memories of the war, which — at least for a time — made us reluctant to get into another one. Read more →
This week’s clue:
When you enter this town, a huge Hereford steer greets you.
For the literary crowd, it’s better known as the city where author Jon Hassler was raised.
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From the ‘Department of We Can’t Have Nice Things’ comes word that the longest trestle bridge still standing in Minnesota has burned, thanks to the work of an arsonist.
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Today’s clue: Its name in Ojibwe is ‘Ne-zhingwaakokaag’.
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Alan Page, the former Minnesota Viking and current justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, will turn 70 in August, and by the end of that month, he has to retire. It’s the law in Minnesota.
Why? Read more →
What’s wrong with this statue? Read more →
Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard traveled from Sweden to Canada recently to trace the Viking trail from L’Anse aux Meadows, the first European settlement in North America, into the United States. Destination: Alexandria, Minn., the site of the Viking runestone, which may or may not be fake. Read more →
There’s a good chance a few people are thinking of getting into the small-town general store business today. That seems to be how one gets into the business, at least in Marine on St. Croix, where the ‘heart and soul’ of the town is for sale. Read more →
Courtesy of Vox, we learned that 123 years ago today, the Los Angeles Herald revealed scandal in the frozen tundra of Minnesota, from which a Minnesota state senator had fled.
The climate of Minnesota had made him feel like a ‘young buck’ and he wanted to ‘taste some of the joys from which he had been debarred by the restrictions of respectability.’
So he went to an orgy. Read more →
When Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson and pilot Roger Peterson died in the February 1959 plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa while enroute to Fargo, the Civil Aeronautics Board ruled the cause was pilot error and weather. Another pilot, L.J. Coon is getting some attention in the news today, telling the Read more →
Today is the 70th anniversary of the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima.
Chances are this isn’t the picture that will accompany the stories on the anniversary today. Read more →
Sometime between the first of the year and Valentine’s Day, part of the huge concrete icons in Lake Superior in Duluth disappeared. Read more →