Steve Fernlund and The Long Way Home

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...

A Father Is Biology. A Dad Is Something More Sitting down to write this column, I waded through some potential topics that readers might appreciate. I considered a dive into how so-called Private Equity was tearing apart businesses built by real entrepreneurs. Or maybe a look at how all the glowing praise for private/public partnerships covers up the fact that the private benefits far more than the public. I’ve previously written about the warning signs of rising personal credit card debt, so not yet ripe to revisit that. Maybe I could do some self-reflection about how my Minnesota Lutheran guilt has me in turmoil every time I hear Smokey the Bear say, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” Despite my best efforts for decades, there are still forest fires. It’s depressing. Thumbing through my scrapbook of columns I’d written in 1996, my first year as a newspaper publisher/editor, I came across one with the headline “Checking in with dad.” Of course, Father’s Day is this weekend. So let...

"Whadda Ya mean 'cut the adverbs?'' For an old chronicler like me, deadline days sneak up. I try hard to get ahead of the game, but end up working under pressure to produce something readable. Sitting in silence, staring at a blank screen, considering a subject that commands more of my own heart than it might yours, I aim to examine the erosion of the English language in modern media. It has been many years since I first found that my doctors and dentists were all younger than me. Then the television newsreaders went the same way. Today, I look at the television journalists on local Duluth television and think, “Why are they hiring teenagers now?”  I recall barely scraping by in the high school English classes. I knew a tile layer in Las Vegas who swore his high school geometry classes were a total waste of time—even though he used angles and geometry every single day on the job. I felt the same way about English classes, not knowing that words would play a significant...