The tenth issue of the Nemadji Review, the University of Wisconsin-Superior’s literary journal, was released in May and a new website was launched. The publication was previously available only in print, but the 2021 issue can be viewed and downloaded online as a PDF file.
What’s inside the PDD picnic basket? Treats for you, that’s what. Join us on the deck at Boreal House tonight at 5 p.m. for Perfect Duluth Day’s 18th birthday party.
The St. Louis County Board was asked by Sheriff Greg Sertich to extensively remodel the county jail 50 years ago. The June 29, 1971 Duluth Herald reported the proposed project included jail office and roof work; providing remote control televisions, air conditioning and security lighting; installing a metal detector in the lobby and other items such as plumbing and electrical upgrades.
Duluth photographer Kip Praslowicz tells the bizarre story of a long lost song.
YouTube user “MNduro USA” explores the east side of Lake Ore-be-gone, the flooded mine pit in Gilbert, about 60 miles north of Duluth.
Fifty years ago Duluth’s Leo Spooner won his third Reidar Lund Skyline Memorial Golf Tournament at Enger Park. The victory came on June 27, 1971, and was reported in the June 28 issue of the Duluth Herald.
A piece of Cloquet history popped up on CBS Sunday Morning today, but it’s in Cloquet no more. Mäntylä House, designed by visionary architect Frank Lloyd Wright, has been rebuilt at Polymath Park in southwest Pennsylvania. In the video, CBS Correspondent Lee Cowan talks with the park’s proprietors, and with the Minnesota couple whose home was moved, piece by piece.
See how many of this month’s headlines you remember with this week’s current events quiz!
The next PDD quiz will test your ability to match historical buildings to their modern occupants; it will be published on July 18. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by July 15.
[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. Twenty years ago he filed a report from R.T. Quinlan’s Saloon in Downtown Duluth. The article appeared in the June 13, 2001 issue of the Ripsaw newspaper. The last paragraph refers to a poster that disappeared from Quinlan’s men’s room wall a few years later. The word on the street back then was: “someone stole it, and he is a fucker.”]
Holy Christ, the rear entrance of this basement hooch joint is lurid. It’s like a nasty Minneapolis strip club, with about four cheap multicolored bulbs attempting to light up beautiful Michigan Street. The Superior Street entrance is … well … it sort of blends into Mr. Nick’s charburger joint, so no one sees it or uses it. When you go to Quinlan’s, you gotta take that long walk down Michigan with all of its homeless teenagers and homicidal paint-huffers, just to get yourself in the mood.
Quinlan’s is the gathering place of 40-year-old men who don’t want to deal with any bullshit. They’re not looking to enjoy live music, score with chicks, get into a bar fight or be entertained in any way other than a regular conversation or a little TV. They want a direct, nonstop, one-way ticket to oblivion, and tonight as usual I’m right there with them.
In June of 1971, 50 years ago this month, WDIO reporter Stu Stronach did a series of special reports on the then-ongoing process of desegregating the Duluth public school system. This video is a compilation of those reports.
The final four-way segment on Highway 53 between Duluth and Virginia was nearing the end of construction 50 years ago. The June 25, 1971 Duluth Herald reported that “full expressway travel” between the two cities was “10 years in the making. The 12-mile segment between Pike Lake and Independence was expected to open in September. Reconstruction and resurfacing of the 73-mile highway began in 1961.
The University of Minnesota Duluth is seeking a new leader to provide strategic leadership in the professional administration and management of Glensheen. The director of Glensheen shall develop and implement long range and annual work plans; provide fiscal, business and facility operations management; direct the hiring, training, supervision, and motivation of staff, and student workers; demonstrate entrepreneurial initiatives in programming and business management; support fundraising efforts; oversee the site’s public relations, marketing, and outreach community development efforts.
The Half-Moon Pack of wolves at Voyageurs National Park had the largest litter of any pack observed at the park this year with eight pups. The largest litter ever documented by the Voyageurs Wolf Project was nine pups. The project is focused on understanding the summer ecology of wolves in the park, located about 120 miles north of Duluth.
Off-sale liquor stores in Duluth were closed on Memorial Day and on election days 50 years ago, but things were about to change. The June 23, 1971 Duluth Herald reported that the city’s alcoholic beverage board voted in favor of letting the stores open, leaving it up to the city council to follow the recommendation. The action was authorized by a March 15 action of the state legislature.
Stoney Point, March 6, 2021
Ron Benson, a Duluth glass and ceramic artist, began posting daily photos of sunrises over Lake Superior to Facebook during the first winter of the pandemic. I hadn’t known him as a photographer, so I was surprised. He posted these images almost every day, and they were amazing. I knew, and eventually thousands of people knew, that he’d be out perched on rocks as ice water slammed or sloshed, aiming a camera at the sunrise, every day. It was impressive.
