Steve Fernlund and The Long Way Home

After 53 years, a wedding anniversary requires just a modest acknowledgment for me and the Bohunk. We dropped the stress of gift-giving years ago, and once the price of a greeting card cleared five bucks, we dropped those, too. Now, we exchange a 'Happy Anniversary' before the coffee is even brewed and call it a day.  For most of those special days now, we say morning greetings like “Happy Anniversary” before the coffee is brewed and go out for an afternoon meal. It’s our comfortable routine, making each occasion feel like just another day, in the best way. This comfortable routine set the tone, as on the second-to-last Tuesday of March this year, we headed to Canal Park in Duluth for a special lunch at Cloud Nine, a new-to-me restaurant. It is a modern Asian-fusion restaurant and is rumored to be one of the best Sushi restaurants in our new hometown. The Bohunk doesn’t do Sushi, but I do, and to show her love and appreciation on our anniversary, she offered to buy and agreed t...

CBS Radio Brings the News My longtime friend Kay (Uncle Kay) Carsten, when faced with changing circumstances, would consistently say, “Nothing stays the same, except rocks.”  As a budding business tycoon, I loved it when he told me that. Now that I’m just a self-appointed observer, I find myself overly nostalgic about all the changes society has undergone since the 1950s.  Recently, CBS News announced it is shutting down its radio news service next month after nearly a century of operation. The network was born in 1927 as United Independent Broadcasters. A young cigar entrepreneur, William S. Paley, took over in 1928 and renamed it the Columbia Broadcasting System. In the early years, radio didn't "do" news. They just read bulletins from the newspapers. CBS broke the mold in 1932 by ignoring a news embargo to report live on the Lindbergh kidnapping.  Radio news was the social media of the middle part of the 20th Century. From the Roaring Twenties through a worldwide depre...

In our highly mobile society, where "home" is often just where the Wi-Fi connects, we sometimes get taken over by a desire to know where our “people” came from, at least before the grandparents, whose story we learn growing up. And, like most things today, an industry has sprouted up to make money off what I like to call the Heritage Hype. There is something deeply humbling about paying a tech giant in Utah forty bucks a month to confirm that my ancestors were exactly who they said they were: a long line of stoic Scandinavians who would be absolutely horrified that I just spent forty bucks to talk to a computer about them. This renewed curiosity about origins became especially relevant for me back in 2018, when I struggled with a painful medical condition that was beyond the treatment ability of my specialist in Duluth. He referred me, with little optimism, to a specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.  After a day of invasive tests, a surgeon young enough to be my son tol...

Here we are to talk about the SAVE Act, which is simmering wildly in the halls of Congress. It is purportedly designed to prevent election fraud. It appeals to the same crowd of citizens who believe we never landed on the moon, W was behind 9/11, Haitian immigrants were dining on the house pets of white neighbors in Ohio, and Aurora, CO, was "invaded" and "taken over" by Venezuelan gangs. For those of us who saw through those charades, the SAVE Act is a solution looking for a problem, a problem that doesn’t exist. When I was coming of age, the mechanics of our democracy felt as reliable and unnoticed as the plumbing in a house—you only notice the pipes if there’s a problem, like a leak. Nowadays, if you listen to the national rhetoric, you’d think our democracy was in crisis. But voter fraud is less like a flood and more like an occasional, isolated drop of water in an otherwise dry basement. American elections are difficult to manipulate because we don’t hold a sin...