A & Dubs owners Syl and Sandy Hantz posted on the restaurant’s Facebook page that they will not reopen their drive-in Lincoln Park burger joint this summer. It was founded as an A & W in 1948 and parted with the chain to become A & Dubs in 1973.
Växjö, Sweden. Photo based on an interpretation of aerial imagery by Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Växjö – pronounced Vequa according to the YouTube videos I watched — has been Duluth’s sister city since 1987. With a population of 80,000, it’s approximately the size of Duluth. Also like Duluth, it has a significant student population, with Linnaeus University just outside the city center. In 1991, Växjö became the first city in the world to set a goal of becoming fossil fuel-free. In 2007, it won the Sustainable Energy Europe Award for being the greenest community in the EU.
[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 the Sultan of Sot paid a visit to C.W. Chips Bar & Grill and composed this article for the April 2004 issue of the Ripsaw magazine. At the time, there was a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of Duluth City Hall, which was moved to Canal Park later that year. C.W. Chips closed in early 2005 when the building was purchased by the Whole Foods Co-op.]
Because I’ve spent the past several years trolling the suckholes and boozehalls of this wreck of a city, because I’m cheaper than a Mexican proctology exam and because I like to control my own drunken experience, I like to drink at home. Preferably alone.
Tonight, however, my sometimes pal Ricky Flours is in town and we’ve pissed away enough time together in my cramped, dingy apartment to know that we need to remove ourselves from the sticky, bottle-filled dungeon I call Chez Goodbuzz. I’ve become a hermit, and Ricky is little more than a purring cat lying around on my floor. We don’t have to go to C.W. Chips, but we can’t stay here.
As a two-time former Duluth city councilor, one of my goals is to make city government more accessible, or at least help citizens become more informed. I figure there are many Duluthians who would like some simple answers to some simple questions. I learned in school that if there is something you don’t understand it’s likely there are many others who feel the same way. Hence the idea of the Duluth Mailbag column.
I won’t divulge who is asking the questions, but I’ll answer them in this format about once a month. Feel free to put a question in the comments for next month’s “Duluth Mailbag” or tweet me via @Hobbs_Duluth or email me at hobbsforduluth @ gmail.com.
Also, if you want to have a longer conversation, you can sign up for a 45-minute cup of coffee through my 100 Cups of Coffee project.
OK, here we go!
“Someone dropped a dozen scrapbooks with Duluth newspaper clippings on my front porch,” began the email from Tony Dierckins. “Would you like them?”
“No,” I said out loud to myself before replying to Tony with questions about what the scrapbooks might contain.
Nolen Sellwood‘s 2024 NPR Tiny Desk Contest submission is a video for the song “Lavender,” a track from his upcoming album Cadence to the Flame, scheduled for release June 7. The video was shot by Tanner Miller.
Last year, Duluthians gathered behind Leif Erickson Park to scream at Lake Superior. The April Fools’ Day screaming session was initiated by Ryan Glenn. “I originally posted the event […] to be sort of a joke, so in case it flopped it was on April 1,” they said.
Close out the month of March and see how many newsworthy events you remember with this week’s current events quiz!
The next PDD quiz will preview the 2024 Homegrown Music Festival; it will be published on April 14. Submit question ideas to Alison Moffat [email protected] by April 10.
It recently snowed about thirteen inches here on the hill in the very middle of Duluth. Right here, in the urban middle.
That thirteen inches took three days to fall. It stopped snowing three days ago. The roads in my neighborhood have been entirely passable the whole time. Slick, perhaps, at times, but entirely passable.
Neighbors have been coming and going. School buses. Fed X, UPS.
But no Postal Service. No mail. Not a single truck since last Saturday.
Are they OK? Should we check on them?
“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
― William Gibson, Count Zero
Attention billionaires: get bent. As the recent “Cheerios” kerfuffle illustrates, Minnesota billionaire Karen Kathy Cargill is acting like a terrible neighbor in Duluth. Google her name to see the universally bad press she has unleashed upon herself. Basically, Mayor Roger Reinert had the temerity to point out that Cargill was not actually being helpful, and she ran crying to the Wall Street Journal, like ya do. It was there Cargill laid bare her toxic billionaire’s view of the world: “The good plans that I have down there […] forget it […] I think an expression that we all know — don’t pee in your Cheerios — well, [Reinert] kind of peed in his Cheerios right there, and definitely I’m not going to do anything to benefit that community.” Imperious much? Get bent.
The Fleet Farm property in Hermantown has been sold to a North Dakota investment firm for $30 million. (Photo by Mark Nicklawske)
The Fleet Farm big-box retail store property in Hermantown has been sold to a real estate investment firm based in Fargo, North Dakota for $30 million.
Tim “Edwards” Verthein and his daughter Stacia Rom operate what is believed to be the smallest record store in the world. KEBS Radio and Records is located at 311 Second St. in Bovey, about 80 miles northwest of Duluth. It opened in 2017.
In its series The Slice, PBS North presents short “slices of life” that capture the events and experiences that bring people together and speak to what it means to live up north.
To mark the start of the 2024 baseball season we take a look back at the Big League Manager Baseball Game, which was made in Duluth beginning, as near as can be determined, 70 years ago in 1954.
The Duluth Art Institute has announced the location of its new gallery space. After 50 years at the St. Louis County Depot, the region’s foremost public art venue will move its galleries to the fourth floor of the U.S. Bank Building at 130 W. Superior St.
The Looney Tunes animated short Design for Leaving was released on March 27, 1954 — 70 years ago today. One-minute into it, door-to-door salesman Daffy Duck shoves Elmer Fudd onto a nonstop bus headed to Duluth. Fudd returns moments later on a Duluth Van and Storage Company truck after Daffy has updated his home with futuristic appliances.
