History, Science, The Baboon Congress

All the News That’s Fit to Print in Blowers

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Today’s guest post comes from Clyde of Mankato

“Mr and Mrs. Harold White were the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Einar Rasmussen on Friday night. Mrs. Rasmussen served Swiss steak with pineapple upside-down cake for dessert. After dinner the couples drove into Wadena for dancing at the American Legion club.”

Hot news that story, is it not? Such items were once the staple of small town newspapers. As I recall, they were called “social notices.” Anything to fill space around the ads and the legal notices. (More on the legal notices later.) Who does not want to see their name in print?

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My parents spent much of their childhoods and early married life in the central Minnesota town of Sebeka, home of the Sebeka Review, to which my parents subscribed after they moved away. Each Thursday they would read the paper and tell us stories, fully augmented by imagination, about the people mentioned, the kind of tales a newspaper would never tell. The Review published social notices by regions, one of which stood out in our childhood—Blowers Township. My sister got a kick out of the name, “The Blowers News,” which as a joke we always pronounced as you are pronouncing it now, unless you are up on your Otter Tail County geography. It is not bloo-wers, as in people who blow, but blau-wers, as if you were expressing pain with the ow, “oooww.”

Every week my sister read the Blowers social notices aloud. Over time we became acquainted with most of the few residents of this small very rural township. My sister plotted out friendships and feuds. She drew scandalous unfounded conclusions about what the notices really meant.

As for the social notices on our town, my parents’ comings and goings were hot news almost every week. The wife in the couple with whom my parents were socially active was the reporter of such tidbits. A common item would read “Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Birkholz were the guests of My and Mrs. ______________. After a dinner of chicken and dumplings several games of smear were played.” Mrs. ______________ was a devoted fan of passive verbs. In social notices women were always Mrs. His-First-Name Something, as if they had no first name.

If you do not know what smear is and how to pronounce it (Schmear), then you don’t know Northern Minnesota.

Another long gone item was a legal notice, the property tax reports. Each household was listed, by the man’s name of course, unless the woman was in some form single. After each person’s name was the amount of property taxes assessed and if paid or not. My father relished the anger he could express at how much more property tax the few farmers paid than the high-paid citizens in town. The newspapers made good money from printing those long reports.

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Doing a bit of research, I learned something new about Sebeka. It is the birthplace of one-time Twins pitcher Dick Stigman, which I knew, but is also birthplace of Kenneth Arnold, the pilot who made the first widely reported sighting of a UFO, or a flying saucer as he called it.

Have you ever been newsworthy?

117 thoughts on “All the News That’s Fit to Print in Blowers”

  1. nice one clyde. reminds me of crabapple cove on mash where hawkeye would get the news from his hometown in maine. i grew up in bloomington which was a population of 13000 when we moved in and then blew up to 100,000 people in the erma bombeck expansion where the corn fields became little boxes on the hillside. the bloomington sun still exists but it has gone from announcements of interest to an effort to be a jr version of a real news paper. i think they have 3 or 4 reporters who write all the stories and cover the bar b ques and high school dances, the chamber of commerce events and the 50th anniversary of the folks who have lived on the corner of 110th and france ave for all 50 of those years.
    i still like reading the community paper. i am now in eden prairie and the land of snooty suburbanites but the paper is still fun to read with sports teams and political letters to the editor.
    i have never made the paper in a way i would like to pass on here. blips on taxes water bills and trees fallen on mailboxes are about all i am in there for. i used to have kids listed for baseball and the like but i have pretty much finished up with that. i drove past the girls fastpitch softball tournament not far from my house this past weekend and had mixed emotions as to if i wished i was ther or glad i wasn’t . at this point in my life no news is good news is a reality for the most part.
    i hope to be making headlines with the new companies i am launching this year but i had better get to work if i want that to happen.
    thanks clyde.another good blog post to start the day. keep up the good work

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  2. that post feels exactly like the article of the eden prairie paper i cant skim fast enough. i will get back to it today with something of a little more substance.
    the poet i am trying to help get to the big time just published a collection of poems called beast by mara adamitz scrupe
    http://www.pw.org/content/mara_adamitz_scrupe

    one of my artist people whio i am try to help launch in china has a gig coming up in yellowstone where the chinese are coming over and having a big do this summer
    http://parksreece.com/

    a project i am trying to get started with outdoor sculpture with my old buddy turned big time art guy is sputtering along. joe is an artist in houston where he is a big dog and he is helping me decide if this vision is a good one to pursue

    https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=joseph%20havel%20art

    i am plugging away and if i never get front page billing i wont be surprised but i do diddle with this and that that pop up every now and agin.

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  3. My brother was the one who made the paper several times in his youth: classic shot of a kid in a yellow rain slicker and hat eating a foot long hot dog in the rain at the state fair (it was a staged shot – the photographer thought he had the right “look”…only time I think my brother has ever bit into a dog with pickle relish), french horn player at the end of the row of the youth symphony (article on the symphony), high school kid in cut of shorts carrying a ten-speed bike with a front tire bent at an angle that made it impossible to ride (right place, right time – photographer was out looking for filler). Me, I made it in once in an article about a youth theater I was involved with that was on its way to England. And once the props I had made for a show were mentioned in a review, though I was not – which was probably fine because the props were one of the few things that got a good review (the show was pretty awful). Never made the “who was visiting who” column the summer I lived in Grand Marais, alas.

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  4. Rise a d Quickly Check In Baboons!

    We are nearly moved in to our house! Yesterday our son helped us move some things, then we returned to the hotel for the last night. By this afternoon our water in the house should be on again and we can go home. We can live upstairs while the contractor completes the projects in the lower level.

    When I met Lou and dated for quite some time, he then took me to his parents’ home to meet the fam. The Ossian Bee (Iowa) featured the visit as the first item in the social column. It was hot news. The year–1988. Not much go in’ on in Ossian when a visit from me is the feature.

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  6. Thanks for this memory, Clyde. I’m not sure I personally made the Norwood Times, but without fail when we spent a week at my grandmother’s there was one day a week (can’t remember when) that the phone would ring and it was the woman from the paper calling, “do you have any news this week?” So if we were visiting, that was my grandmother’s contribution.

    Back in the days when the Morning Show was a crucial part of my workday, our workroom supervisor would always bring in her hometown paper from North Dakota to read to us during Thursday lunch.

    We got really familiar with flea beetles and leafy spurge.

    And it never ceased to draw comment when it was reported that someone had hit a deer, and there were no injuries. We were pretty sure the deer community (which in population probably out-numbered the humans) would beg to differ.

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    1. Flea beetles are important in the fight against leafy spurge. Leafy spurge is a real problem out here. It makes the cattle ill and takes over from native grasses. It is yellow in color.

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      1. That was essentially the message we got from that paper.

        The joy of it was that the guy who wrote this (editor maybe?) was moved to poetry when it came to the flea beetle.

        Most of us in that work group had grown up in rural communities, so we enjoyed it all from an insider perspective.

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  7. The St. Paul paper used to print real estate transactions once a week. I think it was on the weekend – can’t remember for sure. 535 Bates, 73,000; 1838 Jefferson, 124,500; 720 Winslow, 95,700; and so on. Before the Worldwide Web, of course, it was the only way to find out what the neighborhood home prices were like without making a trip to the county property records department. Now we have Zillow.

    My house was listed there in 1988.

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  8. I’ll bet this will be a fun day. First time was when I had written my first grade teacher, who was getting married after school let out, a “best wishes” letter (on that lined writing paper for beginning writers) that said “I hope you have a nice wetting.” She knew some columnist and it made it into the Des Moines Register. Then there were things like our Brownies’ field trip to the local paper… My mom had put all these things in a scrap book at one time.

    Later on I was featured in a story about Kindergarten in the Half Moon Bay, CA, rag. Still have that one – I look SO YOUNG! Then Husband and I were part of a kissing contest in campus celebrations at Ball State – while holding 2-year-old Joel – in the campus newspaper. That’s the last one I can remember. Hmmm… time to do something noteworthy\!

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  9. Good morning. The Ellendale Eagle was still carrying stories about family social activities, when we first moved to Clarks Grove, that resembled those you described, Clyde. Our family wasn’t covered in those stories by the reporter from Clarks Grove. That report mostly covered her own family and close friends of her family.

    I got my name in the paper when I was a student after being interviewed by a reporter about my efforts to help students resist the draft. I was told by my professors that I should stop talking to the press about my political activities. The Dean of the School of Agriculture told my professors to silence me.

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  10. During my teen years we lived in a home on a hill overlooking the town’s biggest park, Brookside Park. The park was my playground. My dad built me a plywood boat (the “Shark”) that I used to explore the local creek (whose name in those politically incorrect days was Squaw Creek). A photo of my paddling around in the creek made the paper.

    At about the same time the paper printed a photo of our family dog, Danny, sporting in shallow water in the creek. Danny enjoyed the park so much he almost lived down there, begging for hot dogs and retrieving balls thrown for him. I once mentioned to a kid I didn’t know that Danny was my dog. He got angry and was close to hitting me. “You’re a liar! You don’t own Danny! Everybody knows Danny is the park dog!

    I showed up in the paper a few times because I acted in summer program theatrical productions. One of them, “The Three Rs of Safety,” was televised a few times.

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    1. That is a tale of a relaxed, happier, and freer era that was more about community than egos, the era I am referring to in my post. My son has stories about how a child alone or with others cannot be in a public park without adult supervisors, the definition of child keeps creeping up. CA defines abuse to include a child on its own in any manner at any age up into junior high. .

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      1. A couple of months ago, a couple from Maryland – dubbed the free-range parents – allowed their two children, ten and six years old – to walk home alone from a neighborhood park. Police, alerted by some busybody, picked the children up and detained them for several hours before contacting the parents, and then reported them to CPS who began an investigation. The parents were charged with child neglect. The case was ultimately dismissed, but for a while there they lived in fear their children would be removed from their home and put into foster care. A far cry from the childhoods most of us experienced.

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        1. That story drove me wild with frustration. I roamed freely all over town when I was a kid, and so did the girls. My mother didn’t have a clue about where I was, and she was abnormally protective. What people now usually say about that is that we grew up in a safer time. No, no, no! We grew up in a time before parents got freaked out by media reports of assaults on kids. I was shocked when my erstwife told me it wasn’t safe to let our daughter walk three blocks to school. I didn’t mind driving her back and forth, but I hated having her grow up with the idea that she wouldn’t be safe walking there on her own.

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        2. As a parent of a kid still under the age of 12, I was more than irked. And it made me wonder if some busybody was going to report me for sending Daughter to the store to butter unaccompanied or – worse yet no doubt – allowing her to go to the library on her own (horrors!).

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      2. I don’t know that those times were entirely happy or always marked by a higher degree of freedom. Back in the early fifties along with the a climate that might be more relaxed came a lack of awareness of many of the problems that have increasingly come to our attention more recently and that have created significant unhappiness both now and then.

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        2. Well, to mention a few things, the early fifties preceded the civil rights movement and gay rights movement. Also, there was very little anti-war activity.

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        3. I don’t that any of us were suggesting that the fifties were perfect, Jim, but it certainly was a safer time to be a kid. We had more freedom to roam and explore; our parents weren’t petrified that we would be hurt or abducted by strangers.

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  11. I had not thought to answer my own question, but the question has evoked wonderful old memories, from 1963. I was interviewed for the Today Show (one quick answer), had my picture in many newspapers across the country and in Time Magazine, had my name in the two Chicago newspapers many times, and was interviewed twice for stories in the Daily News, couple questions and my answers along with other folks. That stories relates in a backdoor manner to Jim’s Viet Nam War era protests.

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  12. I subscribe to the Rock County Star Herald. The police report is a hoot. Last week one of the entries involved a burglar alarm going off, and the person who owned the building wasn’t in the building at the time and was contacted by the police to ask about it. The owner told the police it was either a burglar or the cows. The police went to check and found 50 head of loose cows.

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    1. The Cloquet paper used to have similar police reports. My favorite (or, the only one I remember) was about chasing a chicken around a store parking lot.

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  13. When I was a boy, and into my young adulthood, my parents had a lake cabin in Waverly, Minnesota and we had been there long enough to know quite a few people in town and, to some extent, their reputations and idiosyncracies. During the winter we subscribed to The Waverly Star, just to keep our hand in so to speak, and the contents were just as you describe. Even though the Twin Cities are only 35 miles or so from Waverly, a “trip to the cities” was invariably newsworthy and if the intrepid traveler stayed overnight, stop the presses!

    Reporting in the passive tense seems to be de rigueur for small town papers. My favorite was the summary for open events:
    “Everyone was invited and a good time was had by all.”

    A special treat in the Waverly Star was when the self-appointed poet laureate of Waverly favored us with a verse. Her name was Florence Hanscomb and I picture her in her youth dancing with scarves a la Isadora Duncan. I remember one of her poems began with the lines,
    “A roving gypsy I must be,
    Because that life appeals to me.”

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    1. I was going to suggest in the blog, before it got long, that the expression “a good time was had by all” may begin with the socials.
      A local man wrote exceptionally bad poetry in little pamphlets that you could buy in the hardware store where his wife worked. They sold because he filled his stuff, I refuse to say poems, with names of locals. He and his friends would petition the high school English teachers at all levels–us, principal, school board–to teach his poetry.
      One man used to routinely demand that I teach the poetry of Edgar Guest in AP English.

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    2. Y’all remember the poet laureate of Lake Woebegon? Margaret H-something? Garrison wrote the most dreadful poems in her name. Did she write the poem about the Finn who wouldn’t take a sauna?

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  14. The Rock County Star Herald is a weekly paper that doesn’t have those social notes anymore, but is really good about having lots of photos of sports teams and speech teams and musicians and other events. I was in the paper several times for speech tourneys and music competitions. Remember when wedding announcements had detailed descriptions of the wedding dress?

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    1. We purchased the Mpls. Paper on Sunday’s. My teenage sister, not ever a real girly girl, used to read the wedding stories and laugh about the descriptions. She and my mother used to ad lib funny descriptions.

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    2. The Rock County Star Herald had at least one great writer in the past. The Ken Burns documentary on WW II featured many quotes from Al “something” in the Rock County Star Herald. He wrote with great warmth and elegance.

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        1. He was a life long Republican from ND who moved to Luvern and did a wonderful job on the paper. Somehow, my mother ended up with his three footed cane after he died. He lived down the street from us.

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  15. OT: thank you cb for the nice weekend blog. I was elsewhere drawn, and will be for much of the next two weeks.

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    1. At every festival in New Ulm, most of which have died out, they would have umpah bands like this, who were usually made up of many generations. The rule was that no matter what your age, when you played, you had to look very bored.

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  17. Morning all! Young Adult and I are back on terra firma. Couple of OTs.

    OT #1. Lisa, et. al…. no need to worry about missing the LGMS reunion. Mike is still working on it – the good news is that he’s gotten the go-ahead to record it, so it can be re-played. I will make lots of noise when it’s ready to go!

    OT #2. For those of you who knew him, we lost Thorin, our big fluffy, last week. He had a great day, playing with the puppy and then passed away in his sleep Sunday night. Vet says it was most likely his heart.

    Now I have to catch up on all the comments I missed on vacation!

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    1. So sorry to hear about Thorin! He was a sweet dog. I guess if you have to go, as we all do eventually, his way was about as gentle as one could hope for.

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  18. Since we are OT . . . I have an excellent compact digital camera that I don’t use. I could sell it, but I’d rather give it to someone I like. If anyone on these pages could use a good digital camera with a zoom lens and a nice leather case, contact me.

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    1. Steve, Young Adult took a photography class this past year and she borrowed a nice camera from a friend of mine. Just this past week when we were in Colorado, she said “boy, I wish I had Laurie’s camera on this trip.” If you’re serious about passing it along, I know she’d love it.

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  19. Oh, I was ‘newsworthy’ once. I was working as crowd control at the DECC in Duluth. It was the height of the UMD Brett Hull years and we’d get loads of UMD students, some of them intoxicated, some of them bringing those plastic zuzuvela horns. They were the self-proclaimed “UMD Horn Club.” And if you’ve ever sat around someone with one of those things, you know that it can seriously diminish your enjoyment of anything, unless you’re a fan of loud, off-key trumpeting.

    Naturally, we started getting complaints and my supervisor (who was a serious jerk) came over and yelled at me that I had to find out who had those horns and kick them out. The thing is, when you’re standing in the little alcove to your section, you can’t see above or around you unless you’re going to block people’s views by standing along the guardrail. So, I asked if an usher in a section across from mine could spot who it was and radio me. My boss yelled at me that it was my responsibility and I had to do it myself.

    So, I stood out in along the guardrail, staring with obvious frustration and anger at the UMD’ers, trying to spot who the culprit was and getting yelled “down in front!” the whole time. People would come down to complain alternatively about my being in the way and the noise from the horns bothering them.

    After the game, one particular UMD student lingered as she was passing by. My jerk of a boss insisted that we have name tags with our full names on them. The next week, there was an editorial written up about me, by name, citing “glares that would melt the ice” and how rude I was.

    (Actually, I took that description as somewhat of a compliment. I used to be able to stop people dead in their tracks, especially if they were doing something they knew they weren’t supposed to, by just looking at them.)

    I wrote up a counter-editorial, stating that a person’s enjoyment of an event does not give them the right to step on someone else’s enjoyment. You know, the old ‘don’t talk in a movie theater’ thing. She wrote a feeble reply about that since she paid her ticket, she had the right to do anything she wanted and it died out after that.

    As I recall, it finally ended when a non-student right in front of one of the Horn Club, stood up, grabbed the horn away, and stomped on it.

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    1. People are always saying this about major levels fans: they bought the ticket, they have the right to be foul, to be obnoxious, to insult players and others fans etc etc

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  20. Have I ever been newsworthy? Not really, but I have been in the news several times nonetheless.

    The first time I made the news was in an Armed Forces paper in Greenland. I was prominently featured, along with a photo of me together with a black Staff Sgt. in front of a microphone. Getting to Know You was the headline, and the name of the weekly broadcast. As I recall, the run of the show was a month before I ran out of things to talk about.

    The second time was in the Cheyenne newspaper. Our landlords, Anne and Kate Garvin, had reported that wasband and his Danish bride had moved into their basement apartment on Talbot Court. They had also alerted the local Welcome Wagon who visited me with a basket of small gifts and information about Cheyenne. I remember being impressed that there were 23 churches in Cheyenne – although I never visited any of them.

    But I really hit the BIG TIME when a Danish journalist visited the US and contacted Hans for an interview. He had found him the phone book under Danish Woodworks. The guy showed up at our house at the appointed time, complete with a huge camera around his neck. He shot staged photos of us together and one of Hans chopping wood! He did a free-ranging interview, but I had my misgivings about the whole enterprise, couldn’t see how anything of substance would come of this.

    We had no idea where, when or even if this would be published – the journalist was free-lance – and we didn’t see the article before it was published. Imagine our surprise when we started getting calls from relatives and friends in Denmark. Our photo had made it onto the front page of one of the weekly tabloids. The article described our very nice, but modest, house in Inver Grove Heights as HUGE, and it went downhill from there. We were the laughing stock of everyone who knew us. I think we still have a copy of the tabloid around here somewhere.

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  21. Back in the eighties I was interviewed for an article that appeared in Photo District News, a trade magazine aimed at professional photographers. Robin and I had developed a cottage industry producing photo-realistic props— especially small soft fruits like strawberries, cherries, raspberries and blueberries for use in commercial photography. This was before the advent of Photoshop and if a product photograph called for a smattering of fresh fruit to suggest a flavor, the photographer’s stylist often had to have them shipped from the antipodes, if they were available at all. Surprisingly, some were completely unavailable most of the year. At the time, we were rush shipping our product all over the country.
    Somehow we came to the attention of Photo District News and I am featured at the head of the article peering into the camera with one of my artificial strawberries clasped between thumb and forefinger.

    More recently, I was interviewed by our neighborhood newspaper about an exhibit of vintage photos I had hung at our local Dunn Brother’s coffee shop. I’ve mentioned them before. They are a set of images by an unknown photographer taken in Europe in 1904. For that interview, I am pictured in front of this photo:
    1904 Four Boys From Volendam

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  22. I made front page Cloquet Pine Knot photo included when my sisters, stepmother and I took over my late father’s store from the “boys'” who had bought it on a contract for deed and promptly ran it into the ground. Then when it was liquidated I made it into the Duluth News Tribune with photo. (The dry goods store was and had been a beloved community fixture for 40+ years) Not a happy time, people still talk about the store and how they miss it.

    Cloquet being the small town it is, I also was included in photos as a kid. One I remember I was wearing a Brownie uniform along with other girls, but I don’t remember the occasion. Then as a teen a group of us girls were featured as “attendants” for the Charity Ball, dressed in our strapless “ball” gowns. Happier times.

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    1. You lived in Cloquet? My best buddy lived there two years working in a mentoring program under a local physician. The first time I visited, Bill cautioned me: “There’s one thing you don’t say in this town. You NEVER say the air stinks. It does, but a lot of people work in the pulp mills that create that smell.”

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      1. I grew up in Cloquet, left to go to college and work elsewhere, but moved back to the area in 1974. The town only smelled when the wind was from the east (the paper mill is on the east end of town), mostly the smell went towards Duluth. They used to say, “It’s the smell of money.” I don’t know when they shut the pulp mill down, but it hasn’t smelled for years. Which physician, do you know?
        cjohnson55802@yahoo.com

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        1. Bill worked in the offices of a doctor named Rick. I used to know his last name, but now cannot recall it. His last name was Czech or Finnish or something. He had a beard and was an active outdoor sportsman.

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        2. Rick Puumala? Both his parents were doctors and when I was growing up, they were known as the doctors only Finns went to but when I moved back it was their clinic I chose to go to because they were the best docs in town. Rick is known for his “medical school” sense of humor.

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  23. I almost forgot. In my operatic salad days, I would show up sometimes in the arts section (never by name, because it was all about the frock I was “working” on).

    Standard operating procedure when the press came to the shop was to put something pretty and very nearly done into everyone’s hands and some rather lovely on a dress form, then post someone with a scissors or needle and thread hovering over it.

    I don’t like beong photographed so I learned how to get busy elsewhere. This backfired spectacularly when I went into the side room to work at a machine. We had some rather Rubenesque women in that particular production and prudence taught us that it was best if they never actually saw their own dressforms, so those were stashed in that room too.

    You know how this ends. On the back cover, there I sit, bent over my work, sewing away and surrounded by zaftig dress forms in a photo captioned “Dressforms at the Washington Opera”.

    If we had any illusions about the Importance of the humans who worked in that shop, they were gone.

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  24. Plus a 30 second soundbite on tv news on the occasion of JFK’s assassination asking me where I was when I heard the news.

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  25. I remember being envious when my best friend, her mom, and sister got their picture in the weekly recipe slot – can still see that photo in the Storm Lake Pilot Tribune, showing the three of them around the table with something like Date Oatmeal Bars. I was quite sure it meant my mom’s recipe for something would be next.

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    1. My very first job was working in the office of one of those small, local newspapers in Copenhagen, a really fun job. The editor/publisher and his wife both worked in the office. She was from the island of Bornholm and spoke in heavy dialect – more like Swedish than Danish, really. She was one the homeliest women I have ever met, but was a really sweet woman. She was in charge of recipes, and was forever bringing us treats she had made as a test before publishing a recipe.

      My desk was face to face with the other clerical worker in the office. I drove her nuts with my constant, and totally oblivious, humming. With some regularity she would bark “hold kæft, frøken Pedersen,” and I would quiet down for a while, but inevitably I’d start up again. She must have been delighted when I left that job to go to Basel.

      Thanks, Clyde, for another wonderful trip down memory lane.

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      1. What was it like to work in Basel? I spent a few months in a village near by…Munster something? the name is lost in the depths of my brain. Spent several other months in Adliswil near Zurich…that name I can remember.

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        1. Munster-Geschinen, I think. At the age of eighteen, away from home for the first time, Basel was a great place to be; anyplace would have been, actually, but I really did enjoy my year in Basel. It’s a beautiful old city with a terrific art museum. I was working at a children’s hospital with lots of other young women from various places in Europe; a great year.

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        3. that’s it! I was staying with a family because the woman wanted to practice her English (so I didn’t get to practice much German). Mostly I remember the beautiful Oriental carpets she was often buying or looking at and my first taste of escargot.

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  26. I have lurked on the edges of the Trail for a couple of years and with this blog, finally decided it was time to chime in. I grew up in a town of 500 folks. Every Monday the news lady from the paper would call asking for any news. Anybody who ever came to our house for any reason (relatives for dinner, friends for a visit, returning home from college for a weekend) made the news. My friends in particular got a charge out of seeing their names in print. And yes, Clyde, the married women were always referred to as Mrs. (Husband’s first name) last name.
    In addition to the town news, the surrounding townships had their own columns, so we could catch up on all the farm news.
    When the news lady finally retired, no one took her place and the column died.

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    4. K-two, I have an entire church cookbook where every contribution was made by Mrs. His-first-name Last name.

      There for awhile, I thought it was rather a shame none of these women got to use their own first names.

      Well, we have moved on and times change yet again, and now I consider it rather sad that not a single unmarried woman or any man whatsoever was asked for a contribution. The latest cookbook from my church is quite different and doesn’t even have a “foreign food” section (read: chow mein and chop suey, maybe pizza- note: pfferneuse is NOT a “foreign food”).

      Regardless, I treasure that old relic and will make no other banana bread.

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      1. I have a church cookbook and a women’s club cookbook with contributions listed that same way…….some of the recipes I still use.

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      2. I have more than one of those cookbooks, though I think the last one printed by the Carlton County Fair board did use first names…I must go check. I was honored to have drawn the picture for the meat section — beef, chicken, pork…no rabbits or lamb. I ran out of room, but how likely is it there were recipes for rabbit or lamb? I must check.

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      3. I own quite a few of those spiral bound cookbooks, and I love them. In 1998, the West Side Safe Neighborhood Council and the Riverview Garden Club published such as cookbook as a fundraiser. What I love about it is that I know a lot of the people who contributed recipes. There are lots of fun recipes in the book, but two stand out.

        One is a recipe for for green beans that runs five pages. I kid you not, five full pages. It’s a hoot. I know the contributor of this recipe, and I chuckle every time I run into him.

        The other is a recipe for elephant stew; unfortunately I don’t know the woman who contributed that one. Here’s the ingredient list: 1 elephant, 2 rabbits (optional), brown gravy, and salt and pepper to taste.

        The recipe serves 3,800 people. If more are expected, two rabbits may be added, but do this only if necessary, it warns. Most people don’t like to find hare in their stew.

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        3. Did this make it to Mike’s list? I love it. Used it in a community theater production…with the perfect woman to sing it.

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      4. on the church cookbook subject, the newer one I have that I love was done by St. George’s Greek Orthodox here in St Paul. We like Greek food very much and this book is loaded with it, and since it is a church cookbook, it is more on the line of “home cooking” made with things that are pretty easy to get one’s hands on and none to complicated either.

        I like my “pretty” cookbooks, but sometimes the ingredient list gets long and the technique more tedious than I have time for.

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        1. I have that one as well, mig. 3rd edition favorite Syrian recipes. Received it as a 40th birthday present in 1983.

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  27. Greetings! I am totally boring and not newsworthy at all. I grew up in Green Bay, WI — not small enough to get noticed when doing Scouting activities with my parents. Last time I was in the newspaper was when our house was listed in the paper for foreclosures. Just embarrassing … 🙂

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    1. I consider myself lucky that I didn’t make it into the paper, complete with a mugshot, after the mink caper. Now that would have been embarrassing.

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        2. Just read it. Oh, dear..what a story. Glad you survived the mishap with a certain amount of grace….

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        3. Not sure that grace is the right word, Cynthia, but yes, I’m grateful to have come through that escapade relative unscathed.

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  28. When I was eight (and my sister was six) my folks dressed us up as Swiss kids. They put an ersatz whiskey keg on the collar of our Saint Bernard and the three of us entered a town costume parade. We were pretty cute. A photo went in the paper. I could send a scan of that photo to anyone with an inquiring mind.

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  29. On a very slow news day in February of 2001, my husband and I appeared in a photo above the fold on page one of the Pioneer Press. We were posed in our still unfurnished condo on the day we were moving in to the first new owner-occupied condo building in downtown St. Paul in some number of years (maybe 20 years since Galtier Plaza opened?). We, and several of our neighbors had been interviewed and we were quoted as well as pictured. As I said, an extremely slow news day, and man have we aged since that photo was taken!

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    1. Oh yeah. At age 5 I was seriously ill with a combo of croup and pneumonia….it made the front page of the paper. And I think that’s how my Grandma found out just how sick I was.

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        2. A few years back MPR switched the paired stations in southern man so that now the news station got the greater signal. Classical is now unobtainable in much of the area. My grandkds over by Sleepy Eye had classical on all the tine in their rooms as small children and always heard it in the car. Even in Mankato the signal would fade. My letter of compliant and my daughter’s was replied to with the statement that we could stream it on computer and that nothing had been or would be promised. The new director spoke in Rochester and made similar comments. No promises about signals.
          I did not threaten to not drop my membership, but the letter said they would miss me as a member. I have never received another mailing. I know you worked there and are loyal, good for you, but they upset more than me in this larger area. I used to drive over to Sioux Falls and pick it up all the way. After that transition I could only hear it a small per dent age of the way.

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        1. I started as promotions and membership manager and ended up after various others as prospect research assistant.

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  32. My dad ended up in the paper lots of times, with repeated stories about him retiring from sports officiating, only to go back to officiating several more years each time, thus necessitating another story.

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