Steve Fernlund and The Long Way Home

If I had a quarter for all the times I heard this when I was struggling to become an adult, I’d be Musk-like rich. “Don’t get too big for your britches, young man.” Whenever the sin of pride reared its ugly head, Mom, Dad, or one of the other parent figures in my life would knock me down a peg or two. They’d tell me that the seams eventually rip, and the fall from grace isn't graceful when a person gets too big for their britches.  I have vivid memories of pitching in an East Richfield Little League baseball game in the 60s. Our fields were fenced all round with real dugouts for coaches and gear. Home plate and the bases were real, not soaked paper plates held down with large stones. Our uniforms were made of real wool, with stirrup socks and fitted caps. And I was king of the mound. At some critical moment, I was pitching to the opposing team's best hitter. My nerves were running high, and after what seemed then to be a historic duel, I threw a third strike for the third out. ...

With all that’s going on in our world today, one crisis that gets too little attention is the demise of cursive handwriting. More on that later, but the dying of cursive was preceded by the end of shorthand. Perhaps for sexist reasons, it was the late 60s after all, I did not take a shorthand class in high school. In my liberal self-defense, however, I did take typing, at which I became proficient. Typing turned out to be a skill I needed in my work life. My first shirt-and-tie job, barely past 20, I was the Traffic Coordinator for a manufacturing firm in the Halloween Capital of the world, Anoka, MN. My boss was the Traffic Manager, barely into what we call middle management these days. He was high enough in management to have a secretary, Judy.  These were the days when Secretary Day was just getting underway, and no one held the title "Administrative Assistant". Despite my vaunted title, Judy and I were basically at the same level of the corporate hierarchy. We worked in a...

Over a lifetime, many of us have the urge to collect objects that connect to a happy memory of an event or special person. We don’t recognize a financial value, but the sentimental value is high. Sometimes we have a shoebox or two of sentimental trinkets, or we become hoarders, filling storage units, garages, and basements with accumulated memories.  Some collectors treat objects with the cold calculation of a high-tech day trader. To them, a rare coin, a vintage comic book, or a piece of fine art is a financial investment that has consistently beaten inflation, even outperforming a 401 (k).  Before using fax machines to send shipping information to the railroads, we actually talked to the billing clerks. At the Burlington Northern, our assigned clerk was old Red, a cantankerous but lovable and thorough professional. We became friends, and he was a valued source of competitive intelligence for me. He was also a coin collector. He told me that one closet in his St. Paul apartme...

Frequent readers of this column could easily infer that my favorite stories to cover are those involving bungling bureaucrats and struggling elected officials. And they’d be right about my Long Way Home efforts.  But for community news stories, I truly love talking with small business owners along the shore and telling their stories with my keyboard. Despite my self-deprecating comments about being a corporate stooge, every company I’ve been employed in is considered a small business by bungling bureaucrats in the US Chamber of Commerce and the Small Business Administration. For purposes such as the “equitable” distribution of government contracts, the federal government considers a contractor with 500 or fewer workers to be a small business. My definition considers a small business as one where the owner(s) are employed in the business, know their employees by name, and contribute in one way or another to a local service organization or two. They have local and regional competitor...