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...