Bob Collins
If you’ve never wandered up to the top of the bluff overlooking Saint Paul’s Holman Field, you probably don’t know why that white beacon keeps turning and how it got there in the first place. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Regional history
What do we call us? ‘The thermally-challenged hell hole north of Iowa’ won’t fit on a license plate.
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Lost in the holiday diversions this week was the death of Paul Sprenger, who died on Monday while vacationing in Curacao.
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Myron J. Schober, 78, has died. Schober was an old-school newspaperman and says the most important words ‘I ever did’ were these. Read more →
John Doar was “one of us” in the classic way we proudly claim ownership of legends. But his contributions to the world were often overlooked, especially here, for some odd reason. Read more →
To remember the 39th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the National Weather Service in Marquette is tweeting the weather in “real time” today.
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Myron Peterson, 95, an icon in the skyways of St. Paul, has died. At his funeral last weekend, his remains were placed in a popcorn tin. Read more →
Early in the summer, I was driving the back way from Hibbing when I stumbled across Kalavela, MN., and, in particular, this church, which was built in 1915.
It was a delight to explore and I wrote about it here, imagining this place as the center of town and retracing the steps of Finnish pioneers.
Or maybe not.
We heard this week from Owen Gaard, who calls Soldotna, Alaska home now. Read more →
There’s a line that schools seem to blur between history and propaganda. If they didn’t, more of us would’ve grown up knowing that Abraham Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution in the nation’s history, for example. Or we’d know that Lake Calhoun is named after an ardent supporter of slavery, state’s rights, and the architect of the forced removal of Native Americans from their land. It’s not the sort of thing we can be proud of.
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The twin ball in Darwin weighs 17,400 pounds, extends 40 feet around, is 11 feet high and has been hailed as the world’s largest ball of twine.
Is it? Read more →
It’s been a little more than 70 years Major Don Beerbower, an ace pilot, was shot down and died in Saint-Thierry. But today, the town will dedicate a monument to the 22-year-old from Hill City, MN., who might’ve had a big career in buttermaking (he was studying it in Iowa State) had the war not broken out when it did. Read more →
It doesn’t look like the Mount McKay is going to be a fixture tooling around the Duluth waterfront again, not unless someone buys it and treats the tugboat the way Don Bergholm and the boat’s engineer, Bruce Lindberg, did. The two restored the 1908 boat and worked the waterfront until cancer claimed Lindberg last year. Read more →
A St. Louis County commissioner, a supporter of a controversial copper mine, is at the center of a controversy for a history lesson he gave during a public hearing in Ely, the Duluth News Tribune reports today. Read more →
Changing a racist name can take a long time, but it might be about to pay off for opponents of the Washington Redskins name. The U.S. Patent Office today canceled the trademark on the Redskins name. That only took about 20 years. Opponents figured out long ago that if the profit from the sale of Read more →
Kalevala, Minnesota? Never heard of it until Friday when I was driving the back road from Hibbing, had time to spare, no one to nag me, and a faded “historical marker” sign to follow.
The township in Carlton County only takes a few seconds to miss if you’re in a hurry to get to Moose Lake, especially with the road construction going on on Minnesota Highway 73. Read more →