"Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm."
~Abraham Lincoln

"The richest village in the world."
~Hibbing's reputation during the tenure of 10-time village president Victor Power

"The Iron Range will never, never, never be the same."
~Gov. Rudy Perpich, after the iron mining collapse of 1982.

"Don't call it a comeback. I been here for years. Rockin' my peers and puttin' suckas in fear."
~LL Cool J

I'll be giving a new lecture about Iron Range politics at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 2 at the Minnesota Discovery Center (formerly Ironworld) in Chisholm. The talk is part of an ongoing traveling exhibit at the MDC celebrating the life and political courage of Abraham Lincoln. A local expansion to the exhibit honors Iron Range political figures Victor Power and Rudy Perpich. I'll be connecting the fascinating stories of Power and Perpich to the larger significance of Range political history and using my "Overburden" thematic mojo to relate all of this to the present. Also, jokes and potential controversy. Who knows? I've been rather erratic lately. And it is an election year.

See you Saturday! The Minnesota Discovery Center is off Highway 169 in Chisholm. Admission is $5, but you get full access for that. Except the trolley. That's an extra $2. WORTH IT! I'll have books there to sign and sell, if you're in to that sort of thing. Come on down and join the discussion.

(Photo and more: Minnesota Historical Society)

We've got a 2006 Chrysler Town and Country minivan. What's funny about the Town and Country is that you tell people you bought the Town and Country and they go, "Ohhh, niiiiice," as though this signifies some kind of class distinction. But really it's a Dodge Caravan with a slightly different interior. We like ours fine. Anyway, they've got these new Town and Country vans and they are for sale, which brings me to today's topic.

Perhaps you've seen the ad for the new 2011 Town and Country in which a skinny boy is being chased by larger boys across town, ostensibly as part of a race to see who can get home first?



What bugs me about this ad is that it was clearly touched up after what I presume was some bad audience tests and run nationwide anyway. The voiceover at the beginning is supposed to make it seem as though the ginger mob chasing this odd-looking child across town are just playing a fun game of "let's race," but that's not what the storyboards show. The boys are shadowy and imposing. This pursued child is scared at first and then relieved to find his mom's minivan parked down the street. This ad was designed to make it seem as though bullies were chasing this kid and that he was saved from a merciless pummeling by this mother's wise decision to purchase a 2011 Town and Country van with its unique automatic rear hatch opening function and back-up sensors. Because that's what it's all about. Protecting our increasingly strange and fragile children from the surrounding world.

And, you know what, I'm fine with that concept. But you've got to commit. None of this "oh, we're going to dub in some nonsense about how it's just a 'race' among 'friends' in the editing room so we don't get angry letters or Facebook comments." Tell us, Chrysler. Tell us your vans will protect our vulnerable children from a dangerous world. Promise us, Chrysler! PROMISE US! (weeping, weeping). No, instead you go half-ass. You've got to run through first base, Chrysler! Run it out!

A Toyota Sienna ad, on the other hand, promises mothers they can expect less stress and informs fathers that they will have more sex (and soon!) upon purchase of the vehicle. I'd say the American car industry has a ways to go. A ways indeed.

An Iron Range mining project has been featured in The Street, a Wall Street business publication. Here's the lede:

Keith Busse, the CEO and one of the founders of Steel Dynamics, owns the world's second largest collection of corvettes. In fact, Busse set up his corvette garage, which contains 60 of the classic Chevrolet sports cars, as a museum, and situated it directly across the street from Steel Dynamics HQ -- the better, perhaps, to jump into a Stingray and put it through its paces should the desire ever overtake him while sitting behind his desk.

Yes, that's the lede. Buried a couple graphs down is the fact that this dude may be buying even more corvettes after Steel Dynamic's Mesabi Nugget plant in Hoyt Lakes, Minn., ramps up even more, giving Busse's company the vertical integration it needs to thrive. Pig iron on the Range, and such, which is not as hot to write about as corvettes. The rest of it is worth a read if you're interested.

I feel ... I feel good right now. Real good about our local prospects. No misgivings whatsoever about the tone of this article, especially all the corvettes. We are in total control (breathing, breathing). Everything is OK. Right?

I enjoyed this quote from the recent Rolling Stone interview with President Obama regarding the president's one very brief interaction with Duluth native and Iron Range-raised American icon Bob Dylan:

"Here's what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you'd expect he would be. He wouldn't come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practicing before the set in the evening. He didn't want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn't show up to that. He came in and played 'The Times They Are A-Changin'.' A beautiful rendition. The guy is so steeped in this stuff that he can just come up with some new arrangement, and the song sounds completely different. Finishes the song, steps off the stage — I'm sitting right in the front row — comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves. And that was it — then he left. That was our only interaction with him. And I thought: That's how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don't want him to be all cheesin' and grinnin' with you. You want him to be a little skeptical about the whole enterprise."

(Major hat tip to The Awl, which you should read)

After I announced that Jeff Manuel would be writing some thoughtful, historically-minded guest posts for MinnesotaBrown, a UW-Superior classmate and fellow former Promethean editor wrote me. Frank Haataja is from the Cloquet area south of the Range, southwest of Duluth, and offers this, an entertaining and considerably less academic outside view of the Iron Range.

When I saw Aaron Brown posting guest blogs I was all “HELL YEAH! I lived on the Iron Range for like two years! I’ll write a guest blog about all the cool stuff I learned!”

In my plash of jubilation I overlooked one minor detail: What cool stuff did I learn, exactly?

My elation was sobered some when I failed to recall more than two “lessons”: The amazing food, and an incident at the Sawmill in which a slushy fat woman flipped out and bit a man’s face.

So let’s talk food. It’s much prettier.

In 18 months of covering sports for the Mesabi Daily News, I was on hand for nearly everything that happened at the Hippodrome (Eveleth-Gilbert’s hockey arena)— even the peewee tournaments if I was able to. Why? Because their chili dogs are so good you almost need to wear a condom when you eat them.

I would bring four into the press booth to start games. Half of the rickety press counter would be the WEVE broadcast heap and the other half would be a fortress of slop-ridden snack boats. Meanwhile, I’d be writing game notes on my knee.

Countless times a goal was scored, and I’d look around all wide-eyed with my head tilted sideways and half a dog length jammed down my throat. I’d push my King Kong bite down and gasp, “Who scored that?”

At a Virginia hockey game, I once farted so loud in the booth that WEVE’s color guy almost fell out of his chair. Five minutes passed before he could speak again.

I sometimes wonder if those guys miss me.

In Ely, I would sit in the booth at Veterans Memorial Stadium gorging myself on burgers and hot dogs while BEST baseball coach Tom Coombe and Ely coach and tastefully named Frank Ivancich discussed new concession food ideas with me. As a result, most of my game stories amounted to little more than “Ely won because they scored more times.”

On a serious note, I speak with Iron Rangers constantly who have never set foot in Ely’s beautiful ballpark. So many people will spend their entire lives in that region without ever experiencing it. I don’t care where you live; go there at least once before you die.

The food, baby, it was everywhere! Just writing about it makes me want to drive up there. The burgers at Dahlin Field, and I never passed through Aurora without hitting the A & W; the bake sales at Cook games and E-G swim meets – I mean the swimming, I totally went for the swimming; and the tailgating before MI-B home games. Sure, I had to dodge certain fans (some may still be cursing my name), but the grilled wares were worth the danger.

And that’s just the sporting events. I never even touched on Rudi’s Rangers or Goodfella’s cordon bleu sandwiches or the greatest pizza on Earth at the Vermillion Club.

Outsiders give the Range a lot of yuck-yuck about the median weight of the area’s population, but that’s merely a token of their ignorance. If you’re skinny up there, chances are you’re missing out on something fantastic.

Just, try to avoid eating faces.

Frank Haataja writes at Kinked Slinky.

The following is part of an occasional series of guest posts from historian Jeff Manuel. Thanks, Jeff!

File this one under everything old is new again. Aaron’s recent post about a company hoping to use overburden and tailings as road construction material reminded me of several old efforts to use mining byproducts in road construction. While digging in the archive--the historian’s version of mining--I once found a 1963 story in the Two Harbors Chronicle about an engineer trying to use taconite tailings for road construction. I never learned what happened to this project. Maybe this was one of the four hundred paving projects cited in the Business North article?

My favorite example of using Iron Range mining materials for road building, however, was a 1930s project that used taconite to make cast iron roads. In the 1920s and 1930s, E.W. Davis and staff at the University of Minnesota’s Mines Experiment Station were, well, experimenting with taconite because they were stuck between the lab and the market. The process for concentrating taconite worked in the laboratory, but there was no market for the final product. So Davis and his staff tried turning taconite powder into cast iron paving blocks. They were hoping this might catch on and lead to a boom in cast iron roads (and taconite). As you can probably guess from today’s non-iron roadways, this didn’t really work out. Several sections of Minneapolis and Eveleth roads were paved with the iron blocks but the iron roads proved “too noisy for high-speed auto traffic, and they were not as skidproof as modern transportation required.”* I always imagine cars sliding down an icy iron road like eggs in a well-seasoned cast iron skillet.

A quick tour through business history illustrates that there’s very little new under the sun. Most good business ideas have already been thought of and the difference between success or failure is usually implementation, not the idea itself.

*For the full story, check out Edward W. Davis’s memoir, Pioneering With Taconite (pp.82-83).

Jeff Manuel is a history professor at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville who lives in St. Louis. He is working on a book based on his dissertation on the Iron Range's recent history.

This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Sept. 26, 2010 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune.

Turning leaves, reading the signs
By Aaron J. Brown

The grass grows slowly now. Cool and dry, the lawn cuts smoother than at any time in 2010. But you’d never know it the way the leaves are falling. Red and yellow helicopters, the oak and maple leaves spin to the ground landing softly with the sound of a yellowed newspaper clipping on a hardwood floor, an old sound not to be heard again for a long time. In just an hour leaves cover the clean mowed rows and you forget you mowed; you forget the whole afternoon, in anticipation of the winter ahead and what must yet be done.

If you’ve succeeded in avoiding cable news and the internet so far today, and I hope you have, the lawn signs nevertheless remind us that there is an election coming up. The TV people tell us this is an angry election, like a hornet’s nest. To me it seems a sleepy affair. Some new people will get in, some old ones will stay. Good steaks and old whiskey await the winners, but also the losers. What I really want to know is where are the clannish battles that I remember from covering Hibbing politics? I’m sure old grudges remain under the radar, but the view from afar is of an election marked mostly by lawn signs, and the occasional letter to the editor decrying lawn sign theft.

There are conflicting theories about yard signs in politics. For 100 years, yard signs have been used in Range politics. In the old days highway construction crews erected countless signs for their candidate patrons along the virgin highways of the budding region. Now signs are put up by volunteers, or the candidates themselves, ducking in and out of their mid-sized, late model sedans, firm in their knowledge that signs equal victory. That may be false comfort, however. Many of my friends in the political business have full faith in one-on-one contact and digital indexing of voters, now. Signs are just war paint, wins and losses are charted on doorsteps and telephones. That’s the theory. But the yard signs remain. On election day, both sides will declare victory as they have for the last decade.

One area where victory is not assured is this region’s transition from fulcrum of the industrial revolution to bullwhip of the global economy. I’ve said here that we’re dealing in new currency, the price of information running even with a ton of rolled steel. And like the old days, when the Merritt brothers’ infant empire died for lack of a railroad off the Mesabi, the issue becomes transportation.

We have valuable commodities in northern Minnesota: affordable housing, good schools, and a beautiful place to create and do business. What’s lacking is high speed internet penetration into the communities and rural areas where more and more people choose to live. Northern Minnesota has among the state’s worst access to high speed internet and most expensive. A common argument is that this is just the nature of the market, but that’s no more convincing an argument than a lawn sign. Public and private leaders have the power, and obligation, to change this.

Case in point from last week, in Cook, Lake and portions of northeastern St. Louis counties a federal grant will now expand extremely high speed internet to every home. The ramifications of this can’t be understated at this point in the development of our 21st century infrastructure. This is a potential model that could revolutionize the way people work and the way the outside world sees northern Minnesota. All manner of creative and production-based jobs can be done from homes and offices with high speed internet. The skyscrapers of New York and Chicago can be made obsolete from an old Finnish farmstead or former company house on the Iron Range.

Can. But will we act? Where are we on this issue on the Central Range? In Itasca County? The season reminds us that change is inevitable. The falling leaves will bury tired old arguments like a yard sign, perhaps soon. Winds blow faster, and colder. The time for finishing big projects will run out before you know it.

Aaron J. Brown is an Iron Range writer and community college instructor. Read more at his blog MinnesotaBrown.com or in his book “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range.”

If it's Friday afternoon on the Iron Range, some distant corporation must be quietly releasing an extremely important piece of news in a highly controlled manner. Folks 'round here just call this Miller Time.

The Hibbing Daily Tribune reports today that "foreign media outlets" are reporting that Essar Steel Minnesota has secured $1 billion in financing for its proposed mine near Nashwauk on Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range. My corresponding Google search reports that those foreign media outlets include the Hindu Business Line and the Press Trust of India. Amusingly, these exotic stories from the across the globe still seem to be written from an Essar corporate press statement, a practice that transcends religious and cultural differences. It is indeed a mighty press release that can be blindly converted into a news story on multiple continents. I will honor their success by doing the same here on my internet "weblog."

Local Essar officials aren't talking yet, but I'd say we'd be wise to trust the Hindu Business Line on these and other related matters until further notice. Get your Google Alerts on, people. The news gets dumped on Kolkata time these days.

Anyway, media snark aside, this would indicate that the troubling delay in Essar's financing appears to be over and that the company will soon have the money it needs to start principle construction on its Nashwauk concentrating plant. The goal, as stated, includes building the Iron Range's first direct reduced steel plant in coming years. That part remains a mystery. Stay tuned.

CORRECTION: An initial version of this post described "a billion Benjamins" for Essar's financing package. Oops. A "Benjamin" equals $100. $1 billion would be ten million Benjamins.

This week's edition of "Between You and Me" on 91.7 KAXE explores the topic of anger. Excuse me, ANGER!! $%&$&#&%@!!!! My weekly contribution tackles the anger trend in American culture and the anger trend among our preschool children. The differences between the two are slight. I also discuss how anger is a source of Midwestern shame and must be buried deep down inside ourselves like a cancer. Often it is literally a cancer! All of this is very funny, I promise.

"Between You and Me" airs from 10 a.m. to noon on 91.7 FM in northern Minnesota or streaming live all over the world at www.kaxe.org. The show explores a new topic every week but is really just an elaborate excuse to invite the people of the region and their sympathizers onto the radio for a couple hours. Host Heidi Holtan leads a team of regular contributors, including Michael Goldberg, Steve Downing and me. The show and my essays are archived and syndicated through PRX.org.

I enjoyed this story from the vault of the Duluth News Tribune, shared in the paper's online "News Attic" feature. In 1972, students at Floodwood High School staged a rather dramatic walkout and protest surrounding the dismissal of a popular young English teacher. Floodwood is one of the hayfield swamp towns south of the Iron Range but still reasonably far from Duluth. The story is fun to read partly because of the extraordinary detail, but also because this level of passion is seldom reported in area high schools today. I don't know if that's because stories like this are happening less, or just aren't being relayed.

I mean, this thing has everything: Vietnam-era military principal, long haired freaky kids, hipster teacher, walk-outs and misspelled protest signs. My dad was at Floodwood High School around this time (though maybe just before). I'll have to ask him. He'll recognize the hairstyles, I'm sure.

The Minnesota Discovery Center in Chisholm is doing a big fall shindig to celebrate some of the popular local bands from the summer "Art in the Park" series. Anyone looking for some Sunday evening fun on the Iron Range should check out IronFest.

See what they did there. Iron, with "fest." My suggestion would have been to call it FeFest, "Fe" being the periodic table abbreviation for iron. But this is also good, I guess.

Minnesota Discovery Center announces fall concert, “IronFest”
CHISHOLM, Minn. -- Minnesota Discovery Center in Chisholm announces a fall concert featuring three of the area bands who performed during the facility’s popular summer music series “Art in the Park.”

The concert, proposed as an annual event, has been dubbed IronFest, and will be held Sunday, September 26, from 5-9 p.m. Featured bands are Slapshot, Colmekill and Fifth Floor. Concert admission is $5.

“We’re very excited and honored to be able to work again with these great performers,” said Tammy Jensen, Minnesota Discovery Center Engagements and Events Manager. “They’ve been great partners with us through the summer and we’re happy to welcome them back for this special event.”

Slapshot includes band members Ben Quirk on lead guitar, drummer Marty Gensler, Nathan Rutchasky, vocals and guitar and Tim Sheppard on bass, playing your favorite rock, metal and blues songs. Slapshot’s members hail from the Chisholm-Hibbing area. Colmekill was formed a few years ago when most of the band members were still in high school. Some of their songs have been termed “radio friendly,” while others have progressive and metal sounds. Colmekill members hail from the Eveleth area and include Nate Willman on vocals, Gary McKeever, shredder, Tony Farley, rhythm, Mick Maraccini, bass and Kyle Johnson on drums. Fifth Floor band members are from Hibbing and play progressive/metal and rock music. Their members are lead vocalist T.J. Renskers, Pete Martin on lead guitar, Matt Duffney, rhythm guitar/vocals, Lee Ralidak on bass guitar and Fred Kiesel on drums.

“Everyone who attends IronFest will get to hear great rock music that showcases the amazing talent of our local musicians.” Jensen said. “This event is part of the Community Arts programming we’re building here at Minnesota Discovery Center, and we’re hoping to see a good turn-out in support of these bands. “

Food and beverage service will be available during the event. Event admission is available at the gate the night of the event only. Call 218-254-1223 or visit mndiscoverycenter.com for more information.

Headline: "Enplanements keep rising." This is from a Hibbing Daily Tribune story about how one (!) additional passenger flew out of Hibbing's Range Regional Airport in August compared to July. Now, the news itself is unremarkable, maybe even good in these economic times. But feel free to let your mind work over the wordplay for a while.

I wrote 39 posts here in August, as compared to 32 in July. Therefore I would like to point out that my enblogments are outpacing the airport's enplanements by seven-fold. If the airport commission would like to hire me as a consultant to explain how I did this, I am available.

Personally, after having spent 10 hours at O'Hare International trying to get back to HIB I am leaning toward upping my endrivements. But that's a personal enchoicement.

The Duluth News Tribune has been doing some investigative journalism lately. I'm just going to let that linger on the screen for a second. Nice.

OK, so the DNT ran some good stuff Monday about the St. Louis County Board and its travel reimbursements for its seven county commissioners. The smoking gun scandal is not readily apparent, but what is obvious is that a whole lot of money is paid out by SLC taxpayers to move their commissioners around a Rhode Island-sized land mass for meetings. John Myers has the story.

Representatives of the St. Louis County watchdog group "We are Watching" tell me they plan to raise some heck over some of the itemized trips from the travel expense reports. We'll see where that goes.

For Minnesota metro types who breathlessly follow the shenanigans of counties like Hennepin and Ramsay, you should give a passing thought to St. Louis County. This county is often tagged as the "Iron Range/Duluth/DFL/slow election returns" county. Indeed, it is all of those things, but it does boast a couple hundred thousand people and is the state's largest geographic county. The marked cultural contrast between the city of Duluth and the county's northern fringes is almost comical.

I'd further argue that St. Louis County politics remains woefully unknown and misunderstood even by the people who live here. Incumbent commissioners cast long political shadows, indeed they can sometimes be described as Palpatine-like imperial figures, vulnerable to attack but seldom defeat. The DNT shows how these commissioners command a salary and travel reimbursements that rival if not exceed those of state representatives or even senators in some cases. Vast amounts of money and policy are cleared through the county board, none of it facing the scrutiny that the actions of the state legislature or city councils face. This is probably true in most Minnesota counties, but especially so in St. Louis County.

I guess I wasn't looking for trouble with the county board when I woke up this morning, but what the hell. I've got a blog and I've been grumpy lately. Controversy cleans the blood.

The Paulucci Space Theatre in Hibbing, a (literally!) star-spangled beacon of astronomical knowledge on the Iron Range, faces its own existential threat this year. The destructive gravitational forces in this case are provided by the state budget crisis. The planetarium's operator, Hibbing Community College, cannot afford to operate the facility at a loss, which it has done as a community service for some time. The college is looking for a public/private partnership or nonprofit effort to keep the unique facility open, where it fills a particular science education need for area school children. The planetarium has also been open as a low-cost entertainment option for the community, showing large format films and sky shows.

The planetarium is hosting an open house this week until Sunday, Sept. 26. If you're in Hibbing, stop by the distinctive building along Highway 169 at 23rd St. and show your support. Even just a signature helps a little. Buy some astronaut ice cream and take in a show if you can. If you are a wealthy plutocrat, know that I am winking at you now. Just you. Special.

I wrote a longer post about the planetarium, space and saving things last month.

Unfortunately, this is the first of a couple "save this Iron Range arts and/or culture institution" posts I'll be dropping this week. The Lyric Center for the Arts is the group restoring the old Lyric Opera House in downtown Virginia, Minnesota. They've opened the First Stage performing hall, where music, literary and visual arts events have been held for a couple years. The Lyric Center is one of a small number of groups working year-round to show that the Range isn't just mining and outdoor recreation, but has boasted an active arts community for more than a century.

Over the weekend, the e-mail below was sent. Check them out. If you're able, help them fill their relatively modest funding gap for the rest of this year.

Hello Friends of the Lyric Center,

With the recent downturn in the economy we find that we are falling $4,000 short of funds needed for 2010 operating expenses at the Lyric Center. This is a 'first' for LACA. We're asking for your help today to pay utilities, insurance, staff and other expenses through the end of the year. Please consider making a tax deductible donation today. If you would like more information about the Lyric Center before making a donation decision, click HERE and watch our video. We know you will see what an asset the Lyric Center is to the Quad Cities community and want to contribute your support at whatever level you can.

Razoo is an quick and secure way to donate via the web. To donate on-line go to http://www.razoo.com/story/Lyric-Center-For-The-Arts-2010-Operating-Expenses

If you prefer, you can mail a check to us at PO Box 416, Virginia, MN 55792.
Thank you for your donation!

Mary McReynolds
President, Board of Director

Lisa Vesel, former communications official for the Hibbing hospital, was named the permanent CEO of the Minnesota Discovery Center in Chisholm last Friday. She replaces Paul Dwyer who had been the interim CEO after the facility re-opened this year from its embarrassing shutdown last year. It's been good to see the place open, fulfilling its purpose in showcasing Iron Range culture and history, both of which remain among the nation's richest.

Congratulations to Lisa, who gave me some valuable insight for my book about her experience moving to the Iron Range several years ago. I'll go on the record hoping she can continue the progress made under Dwyer, who deserves a lot of credit for refocusing the facility on a grassroots, locally-oriented mission. Good luck to Paul in his future endeavors as well.

This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Sept. 19, 2010 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune.

The wheels on the bus go away
By Aaron J. Brown

The frost glittered off the cold gray highway, yellow lines the warmest part of a crisp winter morning. Bright, flat sunlight beamed off the snow, deadening in the dull, dark tamaracks in the swamps of Zim. Out past these trees, we looked to the distant curve of Highway 7, now named the Bobby Aro highway, the loneliest drive between Duluth and the Iron Range. This was a road named for a polka bandleader running parallel to the train tracks that moved iron ore from the mines to the harbor, out east to the steel mills. This was a very serious road.

My sisters and I huddled at the end of our driveway, shared by our home and our family’s ill-fated junkyard. Our arms stuck out to the side from our thick coats. The faint smell of wood smoke from the neighbor’s stove mixed with the industrial decline from the wreck heaps out back. A monster groaned from the over the southern treeline, out of sight but entirely on our minds.

The highway ran slick, even the driveway tailings had frozen into a dicey surface. The rare passing car moved tentatively. The groaning sound grew louder and from around the corner our school bus emerged luminescent in the sunrise, then fishtailing like a dog in the back of a moving van.

We were young, but not so young as to accept this observation as normal. We knew that the weather was bad and had crowded around the radio listening hopefully for school to be cancelled just minutes earlier. We looked back to the trailer house, knowing that mom was brewing another pot of coffee, readying for her day. If we went back and told her the bus had skidded up at the corner she would have let us stay home. But the bus pulled up and we got on anyway. Because that’s what you do when the bus comes.

That year our bus driver was Bob, a craggy Jack Palance figure whose libertarian discipline methods left a loud teenage girl and a hulking thuggish boy in constant struggle for authority over the remaining children. We would be assigned a new driver in years to come, but no driver drove faster than Bob. Later he would drive the extracurricular bus. As an awkward teenager I once professed my desire for a nickname, even suggesting to my friends that I be called “chief.” A low cackle came from up front, as Bob’s eyes peered from the rearview mirror. “OK, then, chief.” I would not be called chief ever again.

I grew up around buses, my family entering the transportation business after the last vestiges of the junkyard had been put to mercifully rest by the Iron Range economy of the 1980s. One of my first paid jobs, which I completed rather poorly, was to wash several buses one afternoon. Always living in the country, busy in school, busy at home, buses were everywhere. Yellow cousins, metal kinfolk.

But a yellow bus rolls down our country dirt road these days, and it is strange. Structurally similar to all the big diesels I’ve come to ride and know, this bus indeed has four wheels, seats that smell of chemicals and a big engine that groans louder with each lost degree on the thermometer. The difference is that this bus appears like a flytrap at the end of our driveway to snatch and then later deposit our kindergartener. And what happens on this bus? Which forgotten, frozen highways will it explore this winter? Where does it go? It may as well fly up over the trees on its way to a school, my kids’ school, where I am a visitor and must report to the office.

Aaron J. Brown is an Iron Range writer and community college instructor. Read more at MinnesotaBrown.com or in his book "Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range."

This week's edition of "Between You and Me" on 91.7 KAXE explores inventions: things you've invented, inventions you've loved, inventions you wish were invented. The topic will be dissected in traditional call-in and music-playing fashion, blending the unique voices of northern Minnesota and the expert moderation of host/producer Heidi Holtan.

My regular contribution explores an invention from my past, because dammit if I can't stop talking about my childhood as a source of material these days. I'm surrounded by children, I can't help it. Must stop. Send help. But seriously, my story is funny and ideally self-deprecating enough so that you don't hate me. If not, sorry.

Tune in to "Between You and Me" from 10 a.m. to noon on 91.7 FM in northern Minnesota or streaming live all over the world at www.kaxe.org. My essays and episodes of the show are available for listening and syndication at PRX.

Scene: a northern Minnesota McDonald's Play Place. My son George, 3, approaches a similarly aged girl outside the tube slide.

GEORGE: "We're going to Wal-Mart next."

GIRL: (stares blankly)

GEORGE: (points to coat) "This is my coat."

GIRL: (stares blankly)

GEORGE: "Do you like my coat?"

GIRL: (pauses) "We're at the McDonald's."

GEORGE: Yeah. (long pause, walks back to me) Dad, I talked to a girl!

That's my boy! The sad truth is that if I wasn't happily married this is EXACTLY how I would pick up women. Or try, anyway.

With another political season upon us, the Minnesota Discovery Center in Chisholm has opened a new exhibit reminding us of times when politics was even more important (and somehow even dirtier). "Abraham Lincoln, a Man of His Time, a Man for All Times" debuted this week, with a localized exhibit highlighting two important Iron Range political leaders, former Gov. Rudy Perpich and pioneering Hibbing mayor Vic Power.

You can see the exhibit during normal museum hours until Oct. 14. I'm going to go check it out this week because I'll be giving a lecture on Iron Range politics there on Saturday, Oct. 2 at 2 p.m. You should go to that! I've been a bit of a maverick lately. I might say anything. I'll definitely be talking about the contributions of Power and Perpich to very turbulent times on the Iron Range. Naturally, I'll have copies of "Overburden" to sign and sell. More on this later.

Minnesota Discovery Center hosts national exhibit on Abraham Lincoln

CHISHOLM, Minn. – Minnesota Discovery Center in Chisholm announces the opening of a new, traveling exhibit, “Abraham Lincoln, A Man of His Time, a Man for All Times.” Companion displays with this exhibit feature Hibbing resident and former governor Rudy Perpich and 10-time Hibbing mayor, Victor Power.

“We’re pleased to receive this exhibit from the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History and the National Endowment for the Humanities,” said Kelly Florence, education coordinator at Minnesota Discovery Center. “The addition of displays about Rudy Perpich and Vic Power compliment the story of Lincoln and add a local flavor to the exhibit.”

More books have been written about Lincoln than any other American, yet public knowledge about our most famous president is dominated by a series of iconic images: the son of an illiterate frontier farmer who taught himself to read; the savior of the Union; the Great Emancipator; the martyred leader. Abraham Lincoln: A Man of His Time, A Man for All Times invites visitors to look beyond the myth. We hope that presenting Lincoln’s own words in speeches, letters and proclamations, will encourage a deeper understanding of the nation’s 16th president’s life, accomplishments and legacy.

This exhibit is included with admission and will be featured at the museum through October 14, 2010.

Other upcoming events at Minnesota Discovery Center include “IronFest,” an evening of rock music by three regional bands on Sunday, September 26, from 5-9 p.m.; and “The Ultimate Fire Ring” display, the result of a regional competition among metal artists to create the most memorable fire ring as voted by MDC visitors (showing October 5-November 5). Visit mndiscoverycenter.com for information about other events and activities.

Abraham Lincoln: A Man of His Time, A Man for All Times is a national traveling exhibition organized by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The traveling exhibition has been made possible in part through a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, dedicated to expanding American understanding of human experience and cultural heritage.

The Grand Rapids Herald Review reports on a discussion held during a recent Itasca County Regional Rail Authority meeting that pokes at a persistent rumor around northern Minnesota's Iron Range. Namely, it's been suggested that Essar Minnesota, the local affiliate of India-based Essar, a major global corporation moving up the ranks of the steel, ore and oil business, might bolt on the project labor agreements used over the past two years. Essar is due to start construction next year on a taconite plant near Nashwauk and has plans in place to build a steel mill attached to the mine after a few years, though that latter piece of information is itself structurally similar to a rumor. (Enhanced by 3D graphics, of course).

Well, the county mine planning chief refutes the notion that Essar will do anything but follow its labor current labor practices, though it should be noted that the company itself has not commented. Local officials are preparing letters of concern. How do you like it, Essar? Stern or vitriolic? 'Cause, you know, we do letters hardcore, y'all.

Fun Fact: A project labor agreement is an established pact between the entity wishing to build something and the contractors and workers involved who do the building. Provisions for who is in the labor pool, where the contractors are located and how workers are compensated and protected are often part of the deal, along with fixed costs and agreements to avoid labor disputes down the line.

Fun Fact: The Itasca County Regional Rail Authority has a major influence over developments in this region because it controls the railway right-of-ways from 100 years of mining activity.

Nothing big happens on the western Mesabi without a project labor agreement and the tacit approval of the rail authority. This is adorable.

"Overburden" is more than just the title of my award-winning book (though principally that's what it is). Overburden is also a real word that means something "miney." Miney is my new word for things related to the mining industry. You start saying things like this after a few years of covering the mining industry. Anyway, overburden is anything covering an ore body that needs to be removed.

Taconite production creates a lot of overburden waste and one company is attempting to market the aggregate for building materials and landscaping. This means that in addition to feeding the steel mills that make the rebar and guard rails of American highways, the contents of our Iron Range earth could become the actual road materials as well. There are challenges in this business, namely making a profit transporting heavy-ass rocks all over the place. But that's a fairly standard operational challenge when you live around here. Beth Bily of Business North has the story.

Lake and Cook counties in Northeastern Minnesota will receive millions in funding to create a publicly-owned network of broadband internet access for all their households. (Note: Link is to a private company's press release). News items like this will continue to circulate as federal grants surrounding rural broadband start circulating outward from Washington, but I thought this was particularly notable. First, these are very rural counties along the North Shore/Arrowhead of Minnesota. Each has a centralized county seat that holds much of the population, but the growth of these counties are in the desirable, low-population areas outside the towns. High speed internet is a HUGE selling point for new entrepreneurs, business owners and creative professionals.

I must again remind you, this story is about Lake and Cook counties. I remember a story from a few years ago where a dude got tired of waiting for the government up in this neighborhood and MADE HIS OWN ROAD. If my memory serves people still drive on this road. (Another note: if you also remember this and can refresh my memory, please do). My point is that if Lake and Cook can handle this, so can Aitkin, Itasca, Koochiching and St. Louis. Northeastern Minnesota can sell itself as an economic destination, for freaking once, if it gets this right. We better hurry before the sod people start getting the same idea. (No disrespect, sod people).

More Huey, less hooey.

UPDATE: Business North carries MPR's story on this.

I wrote last week on Pam Brunfelt's lecture about the significance of the Iron Range in U.S. history. KAXE just shared a 12 minute interview of Pam which is a pretty good distillation of her talk. You should give it a listen.

Duluth continues to expand its homage to its native son Bob Dylan with new manhole covers on Dylan Way. The heavy metal discs celebrate Dylan by way of his song "Subterranean Homesick Blues," featuring some kind of fancy image of sandals and candles. The vandals and handles will be forthcoming, I'm sure.

You might know that I work with Dylan Days in Hibbing, the Iron Range town where Dylan grew up after his family left Duluth. Hibbing has renamed a major street "Dylan Drive," but we do not have specialty manhole covers.

That's probably for the best. The minute this old town's public utilities commission got the inkling, the bulbous busts of any number of local officials might appear across the streetscape. It would end in scandal, but the tainted manhole covers would outlive the scandal. Decades would pass, then centuries. Future residents of Sky Slim Jim Hibbing would descend with their jetpacks to the pockmarked land below, see the manhole covers, and assume that the names and visages depicted were really important, like the Dylan manhole covers over in Sky Google Duluth were important, and what then? What then? Think of the children's children.

I'm still getting hot-off-the-press media dispatches from the pro-lock and dam, anti-carp, pro-common sense, anti-bureaucracy lobby, which opposes Asian carp to the degree which it affects shipping on the Great Lakes. CONFUSION IS PEACE! Seriously, Asian carp may soon invade the Great Lakes, which is hella bad considering how just one Asian carp can fly and eat more freshwater fish in one day than a person can legally catch in a long weekend. Also bad, disruption of commerce!

The Obama administration has apparently appointed a carp director, who is a human and not a carp, which prompted this cartoon shared generously by lock-and-dam interests:


I am more alarmed that the Asian carp are aware of the concept of taxation. That can't be good. Can we all agree that giant fish capable of engaging in dialogue are a universal threat?

This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Sept. 12, 2010 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. Once again, this is inspired by a blog post earlier in the week.

The empire of Iron Range past
By Aaron J. Brown

Last week the family and I headed out to Palo, another of the wonderful scrub-brush townships that surround the core iron formation of Range towns in northern Minnesota. We were visiting relatives because everyone on the Range has relatives in Palo if they look hard enough. If not, get to work on that. It’ll be worth your time.

It had been more than a decade since I’d been out in that neighborhood. I grew up in the swamps south of Eveleth and have since moved west, through Hibbing and now to the rural townships of the western Mesabi. Even though the Iron Range is a deeply interconnected region of around 100,000 people, it stretches along a 120-mile line east to west, a long haul for those on the fringes.

Our ride to Palo took us along the full length of Highway 16, or Townline Road, where I lived back in high school. We sped past the waste water treatment plant, over the bumpy roads of Cherry and past the old Forbes school on the crossroads of Highway 7, which is now a bar.

“Look, Henry,” I said to my oldest son, who went to his first day of kindergarten a few days later. “That’s where daddy went to school when he was a boy.”

“Hmm,” said Henry. The sign was stripped, the stucco faded and cracked. Half a dozen well used cars rested in the parking lot, waiting. Out back, the Saturday night crowds would later shuffle over the floor where I lined up to do jumping jacks. Maybe someone would do a jumping jack on the old floor. Maybe.

Past the Eveleth taconite plant of many new names, across Highway 53, a new road sprawled ahead, smooth, sleek and strange. The highway now curves away from the Makinen Store, rendering the former landmark invisible unless you’re looking for it, something you wouldn’t do without fairly intimate knowledge of Makinen. I used to bike out to the Makinen Store. There was a post office in that store, which was neat, or is if it’s still there. I thought about stopping to see but the new road kept turning, so I followed.

At this point I trusted my memory to lead us to our destination. I could picture the house and the road that leads there. I was certain that I would see the first road that led to that second road, but I didn’t. I saw a landscape of faded green, red-tinted highway, bright tan dirt, blue sky over unfamiliar waters. It’s OK. I knew there was a gas station a few miles farther. Indeed there was, ten years ago. The gas station burned down. I now remembered a friend telling me about this a couple years ago, but the story seemed arbitrary, something that would never affect my life directly.

A map might have saved us some time on this trip, but I’m not sure how much comfort it would have brought. In an Aug. 30, 2010 column at 3quarksdaily.com, David Schneider writes about the maps we really use. We don’t chart our lives over landscapes anymore, we pass our days completing many new tasks in the same small places, flipping around the very definition of change. To move is so often to stay still, trapped in our minds.

Centuries ago, explorers hand-drew maps of their exploits along unseen shores. They drew seas bigger than reality, and jagged coasts like monster teeth. This idea came to mind reading Schneider as he writes of today, “We redraw the past to fit our maps.”

Here my family’s journey of just 75 miles was made longer not because of a new destination, but because the route rested in memory, faulted. My crude cartography charts something other than the land: A Northwest Passage, a city of gold, the fountain of youth. My favorite line from Schneider’s piece, “The past of the mind is an empire. It is a great weight to bear.”

That’s our challenge here on the Iron Range. We move forward on a land that does not, will not, match the empire of our past. This is new country.

Aaron J. Brown is an Iron Range writer and community college instructor. Read more at MinnesotaBrown.com or in his book “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range.”

Here are some intermittent updates from today's Minnesota Blog Conference in downtown St. Paul:

3:03 pm
I'm ODing on blog talk. Need steak and open flames, anything three dimensional will do. More later.

11:35 am
Egg salad, because I live dangerously.

11:14 am
Me to "blog-to-book" presenter: "How do I break out of regional base to national audience?" Her: "Be quirky. Everyone is looking for the next Garrison Keillor."

Mofo! That is my whole bit! I need a phone number! Er, I mean ... Life in a small town sure is quaint and quietly significant.

10:18 am
My elevator pitch: "The Iron Range's fastest growing, most influential daily blog." Back home that is either confusing or pretentious. Here it's a reliable laugh line. I have no home.

10:02 am
Line to "share" at blog writing session is loooong. Even I, Aaron J. Brown, a noted writer, am too sheepish to make it longer.

9:25 am
Met Star Tribune columnist and blogger James Lileks. I read him all the time as a teenager when I was deciding to become a writer. He was wearing a Red Owl grocery store t-shirt. I mentioned how the former employees of the defunct Hibbing Red Owl still have a reunion. He lamented how today's grocery stores don't have anthropomorphic animals on their signs. He went on to offer his concern about bacon advertising, specifically the trend for animal mascots to endorse the consumption of different animals in self defense. We shared thoughts on how some animals are willing to sell out their own kind in self-preservation. Good talk, good talk.

9:04 am
Good quotes from a.m. Keynote:

"If you're proud of what you're putting up there the numbers really don't matter." -Patrick Rhone

"You're never alone on the internet. Well, you're actually alone most of the time, but there is the illusion of never being alone." -James Lileks

8:32 am
Having WiFi difficulties. Flashbacks to 2010 DFL convention in Duluth. Bad trip, man. Bad trip. Lots of excitement here, though, and the absence of "balloting" should prevent any further comparisons.

8:01 am
Here's the scene. It's the opening moments of the first-ever Minnesota Blog Conference. A growing group of people in their late 20s and 30s (and cool old people!) who spent their teen and college years awkwardly attempting to interact with others are now interacting with others. It's a proud moment. There is coffee. And AV equipment to mess with. These things help.

Tune in to "Between You and Me" Saturday morning on 91.7 KAXE for music, commentary and listener contributions about this week's rotating topic: JOKES! Guest hosts Michael Goldberg and Gail Otteson will be taking calls and celebrating 9/11 humor! Ha ha!

Too soon? Yes. Too soon. They'll be taking jokes from the audience and not talking about 9/11.

I'll be chiming in as usual. My commentary will talk about jokes without actually telling any jokes. That's what the people want! I can promise one thing: one of my paragraphs includes the words "rectal exam" three times. Rectal. You know. Rectal. It just gets funnier as you think about it.

Tune in from 10 a.m. to noon on 91.7 FM in northern Minnesota or streaming live all over the world at www.kaxe.org. As this airs we'll be at the Minnesota Blog Conference in St. Paul, so stay tuned for further updates.

I ALSO have a master's degree in communication. Unfortunately this guy is doing a good job if showing what that's actually worth.

This viral video has been dubbed the "worst stump speech" in the history if the republic. I don't know. I kind of like it. It's good enough to get him on the Itasca County board, if he's looking for options.

Today Christina and I will be heading south for the Minnesota Blog Conference in St. Paul. She'll be presenting in one of the sessions on Saturday and I will be a dutiful participant in all the proceedings. I look forward to meeting some of our colleagues in the Minnesota blogosphere and learning more about our "craft," if we can call it that, which we must, to preserve our honor.

Bloggers unite! I'll post updates if I can. Meantime, know that we've left our preschool children at the house with powerful rifles and orders to protect the compound with lethal force if necessary. (Just kidding! OR AM I!)

Today I attended Pam Brunfelt's Minnesota Humanities Center lecture on the significance of the Iron Range in American history at Valentini's in Chisholm. Pam detailed the modern history of Minnesota's three iron ranges starting back in the 1880s until today, showing how this one small place in northern Minnesota changed the course of history. Without this place and the relatively small number of people who immigrated and worked the iron ore mines -- which provided a vast amount of the base material for WWI and WWII steel -- America would have been at best a notable regional power, not unlike today's Brazil. Instead we are the United States of America. The big USA. Superpower. Pam asked me to push the slide button on the Power Point. I felt pretty good about that.

I'm looking forward to celebrating the 120 year anniversary of the discovery of "red dirt" Mesabi Iron Range hematite on Nov. 16. Stay tuned.

UPDATE:
Northland's News Center covered the event.

Here's something interesting. Commissioners in Winona County in southeastern Minnesota have voted 4-0 to ban county employees from staying in hotels that OFFER pay-per-view porn movies. (One commissioner "abstained" -- HA HA). Bear in mind that purchasing such movies has always been against the rules, but now everyone who works for the county has to call the Marriott to ask if they have porn. "No, no, I don't WANT porn. I just want to know if it's there. No, no. It's not like that, really. No, it's not for me, but, my boss ... uh, do you have porn? I need to know."

It's almost enough to drive a conscientious county worker to the hotel bar after work hours to get drunk, fornicate with a consenting stranger and smoke a pack of Lucky's in the parking lot. Fortunately, this is still allowed. But it better not show up on the expense report, understand?

Sometimes I have to post a local link just for the headline: "Chaos is the focus of Women's Mini Retreat" (Hibbing Daily Tribune).

So much material here. A lot might focus on "chaos" as the funniest thing about this headline, but I choose to highlight "mini." Indeed, if chaos can be handled at a mini retreat, what could women accomplish at a regular retreat? It boggles the mind.

David Schneider writes at 3quarksdaily about how maps don't mean what they used to. That's a very simplistic way of describing a strong, creative piece exploring a changing world. He writes about Brooklyn. I'm working on the Iron Range version of this, which is weighed down by a lot of haul truck references and, thus, remains incomplete. There are some great lines in here:

The realtors are kind and quick: the economy has ground to a halt, and people don't move as much. We shuffle through angles of space, blank canvases. This is uncharted territory. Neither of us wants the realtor to know that we don't know that we don’t know what we want.

and

We redraw the past to fit our maps.

and my favorite

The past of the mind is an empire. It is a great weight to bear.

Read Schneider's piece. Fate and free will, time and space. That's what colors my perspective these days. I should probably take up stock car racing instead. Politics is not working for me.

From the Iron Range, one of the ancestral lands of the American labor movement, Happy Labor Day! The workers of the world may not yet have united, but we do spend a lot of time on Facebook. It's only a matter of time.

It's Farmers Day in Bovey, with other Labor Day events all over the region.

This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Sept. 5, 2010 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. You'll notice that it is based, in part, on a post I wrote here last week.

The white pine falls
By Aaron J. Brown

Sometime in March the ice usually lifted off the untouched rivers and lakes north of the big man hills. The water tasted of iron, flowing north to the Hudson under the big shoulders of a white pine forest so old nothing living beneath the canopy could remember anything other than the pines, the big man hills and the water that tasted of iron. Different kinds of men discovered the place this way. Each wave of people arrived hungrier than the last. The trees were fat. The water tasted of iron for a reason the men knew and the animals feared. What happened was neither good nor bad so much as it was always going to happen, just like the ice receding every March.

A story in Jack Lynch’s history column a couple years ago re-entered my mind just last week. A speaker at a historical society dinner some 70 years ago or so described an image he saw as the 19th century faded into the 20th. He had no camera. What he saw no longer exists and will never be recreated. This man ascended to the top of the Laurentian Divide, the rigid spine of the Mesabi Iron Range, and looked over a forest of hulking, ancient white pine. These trees were so tall that the ground below rested in permanent night. The dark green sea of needles ebbed and flowed like an ocean just before a storm. Within a quarter century this forest would be gone, and while much of this area remains forested, these white pines will never return in their previous size or number.

When we first considered building our current house in the woods of Itasca County, due north of Calumet, what struck me about the site was a tall white pine standing along the property line. The forests around northern Minnesota's Iron Range region once teemed with some of the largest white pine in North America, a fact that literally put the place on the map as loggers, then miners, then tourists poured in from places with smaller trees. The biggest white pines were harvested away, building up many late 19th, early 20th century homes in Chicago and other Great Lakes cities. A combination of disease and habitat now limits the growth of most white pines from ever reaching the species' historic heights. But here on our land, a really big, pretty white pine towered above the collection of balsam, basswood, poplar, maple and other common local foliage. For me this was one of the signs that this was the right place for us.

Well, we cleared the scrubby growth up to the edge of this white pine, built our house and went about the business of raising our three boys in its shadows. We started to notice the top of the tree die off a couple years ago and then the birds starting picking it apart from top to bottom this summer. As more branches began drying up and falling off we knew that the tree was dead and would be a risk to fall on our house.

Last week a tree service came and cut down the tree. I counted the rings later and it appears as though the tree was about 70 years old, a child of the big white pines. I loved this tree. I didn't want it to go, but it had to go. I had them cut four rounds out of the only marginally usable wood left on the tree. I'm going to make them into clocks, because lately I've been contemplating the steady passage of time. You can’t stop the ice from coming or going here in northern Minnesota, nor can you change human nature or the life cycle of a tree. You must simply live the best life possible under the shadows of mighty forces.

Aaron J. Brown is an Iron Range writer, radio commentator and community college instructor. Read more at MinnesotaBrown.com or in his book “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range.”

My weekly contribution to 91.7 KAXE's Saturday morning program "Between You and Me" joins the rotating topic of "worst job you've ever had." This is, loosely speaking, a tribute to Labor Day, but admittedly a bit of a sacrilegious one. Never mind; if there's one thing that members of the proletariat have in common it's our shared desire to complain about our duties even after we've acquired the hard-earned capital of our honourable employers. Rabble! Rabble, we are.

I haven't really had a "bad" job, so much as certain parts of all the jobs I've had have been bad. I've cobbled some stories together into something cohesive and wildly entertaining. Trust me! It's my job!

Tune in to "Between You and Me" from 10 a.m. to noon on 91.7 FM in northern Minnesota or streaming live anywhere in the world at www.kaxe.org. The show blends talk, listener calls and music in a truly unique exploration of the region and its people. The show and my individual essays are archived at PRX.

In rural Texas a 24-year-old entrepreneur has figured out a way to expand broadband internet access to residents who aren't along the cable routes of big providers while making money in the process. J.W. Breeden, who wrote his business plan in high school, works out of his parents basement and has a plausible vision of creating a broadband empire from right there. I was interested to learn that he uses a series of microwave radio towers, not unlike the old kits we used to broadcast nearby sporting events on the radio. This specific technology might be difficult to use in some areas, but it's intriguing none the less.

Laylan Copelin, writer of the business profile piece where I read all this, opines:

Broadband is to this generation of rural Texans as the railroads, farm-to-market roads and interstate highways were to their forebears: They get bypassed at their peril.

So if a smart kid from Texas can create an affordable, privately delivered broadband network (at this point including about 300 clients, including some businesses and public entities), where are the developers here in northern Minnesota? Between Iron Range Resources, which can provide a truly unique public financing source, and the millions in grant funds accessible by cities and nonprofits, it stands to reason that rural broadband is logistically possible -- if not by microwave, than through some other means. The townships north and south of the core Iron Range towns enjoy more population density than rural Texas. The availability of fast internet outside the towns would be attractive to entrepreneurs and e-commuters in a vast array of industries and professions, if marketed correctly.

Fact is, this region is wrapped up by Qwest and other private providers who do a great job in the towns, but aren't interested in expanding outward because of the cost of expanding down a huge network of roads with expensive cable. I still believe they'd make money, but not in the short term. Stockholders wouldn't approve. Meantime, rural residents are held over the barrel by satellite providers, who can (often) deliver solid download speeds, but are technically limited in upload speeds. One of the challenges I face right here at the blog in introducing a revenue-producing podcast is the challenge of uploading media from my home. Furthermore, satellite provider prices make them affordable only to the middle class, which is not the growth sector on the Iron Range where median income is well below the state average. (Six figures is a fortune here, an absolute fortune).

The Range keeps funding power plants that won't be built and slick new railroads for mining companies capable of paying their own way. Thirty years from now these ideas will seem like a cataclysmic joke. Private small business development is the central ingredient in economic diversification and growth on the Iron Range. Much of the economic growth will be in fields dependent on fast, reliable internet connections. Iron Range Resources has only scraped the tip of the iceberg on this and the towns and state leaders aren't moving fast enough.

This is a great opportunity for public leadership, but absent that it's still a great opportunity for private entrepreneurs. I lack the technical knowledge, but if you're even remotely interested in finding a way to light up northern Minnesota's internet grid, contact me and I'll try to help.

Tonight the Minnesota Discovery Center in Chisholm closes its "Art in the Park" concert series at the amphitheater. Admission is free with live local music, food, beverage and fun for all. "Slapshot" will be the headliner at this show, which runs from 5-9 p.m. I'm sure there will be plenty of surprises.

As I said last week, the series has been a big hit and a great opportunity for the local music scene. We can hope that Art in the Park and ideas like it can build the MDC's audience base and make it the self-sufficient Iron Range cultural venue it needs to become.

Hello, traveler. You've located a blog about the Iron Range in northern Minnesota. Stay! Stay!

Peek inside the machinery. See the wonderful gears turn like fingers of the gods. It is magic, magic I say!

In olden days Iron Rangers lived and died never seeing the powerful pen flicks and filed papers that controlled their very livelihood. Now Google news alerts have pried up the rotten board, exposing the teeming masses of insects and grubs. This information was intended for others! What will happen next?