A withdrawal from a checking account with a balance of $363,142.39. !!!!

So many questions. I don’t know any millionaires whom I could ask, but is it normal for wealthy people to keep several hundred thousand dollars in a plain old checking account? Maybe they need to be prepared if they decide to buy a house that day?

And, who could it have been? What very wealthy individual would have been in Duluth, shopping at Cub Foods and using that ATM at 4:22 p.m. today? I almost don’t want to know; the truth is almost certainly not as much fun as the stories that can be conjured up.

I’m looking at the receipt sitting on my desk as I type this. It’s just numbers on a slip of paper, but it feels so out of place in my humble little house.

At this time of year, 20 or 30+ years ago, the hot topic in Duluth and Superior would have been the status of the smelt run.

Duluth’s mostly-vanished smelting tradition has been discussed on Perfect Duluth Day at least once before. It’s been a frequently requested item for the News Tribune Attic to cover.

So, by popular demand, the latest post in the News Tribune Attic includes a bunch of photos and a couple contemporary accounts of smelting in Duluth in the early 1980s. Enjoy!

With the grand opening of Amsoil Arena tonight, the News Tribune Attic this week has been featuring a look back at its predecessor, the Duluth / DECC Arena, with photos and a timeline of notable events:

Photo gallery, early 1960s – grand opening in 1966

Photo gallery, grand opening program / brochure

Photo gallery, 1966 – 1975

Photo gallery, 1975 – present and timeline

Time and space prevented the inclusion of every notable concert and event held at the Arena in the timeline, but we’d still like to hear your stories and memories. If you think something else should be included, please post your Arena recollections in comments here or at the Attic site. Keep in mind, the focus is on the Arena, not the Auditorium.

Tugs try to free the freighter Socrates from the sandy shallows of Park Point on Nov. 22, 1985. The ship had run aground several days earlier during a strong storm. Crowds of onlookers flocked to Park Point to watch in the days after the ship got stuck. (Photo by Charles Curtis / News-Tribune)

Many more photos and stories about the Socrates are posted in the News Tribune Attic.

It took a few days to pull together, and the link was kind of buried in the Upset Duluth thread, but in response to demand a gallery of portraits has been started over at the News Tribune Attic. It includes the 1995 photo above, by the News Tribune’s Bob King, of a Superior resident concerned about the condition of the sidewalk near his home. There are photos of people without concerns, too.

I’ll keep adding to it if there’s reader interest in seeing more.

Wow. God’s Wilderness. Alas, the small sign on the post at left…

I guess God’s Wilderness is not for me. I do have to say that I’ve seen much better wilderness than that particular spot.

Back to the berries, after a few more hours of (literally) fruitless searching, I did hit a mini-jackpot – an untouched patch of ripe blueberries. It was late and I didn’t have much time left, but I got maybe three or four pints’ worth:

Where was that patch? I’m not telling – and having “my own” blueberry patch feels like a momentous milestone in my northern Minnesota / Wisconsin existence.

I was out on a walk with the dog yesterday evening on a country road north of Duluth, the same road I’ve walked literally hundreds of times the past few years.

Sometimes I wing rocks into the woods. When they hit ground it sounds like a small animal moving – and the dog rushes into the brush to see what’s there (should I feel guilty about misleading my dog?). I threw some rocks last night, and from the road I watched the path the dog took into the woods.

About 10 feet in, I saw what looked like a glass ring, and immediately thought it looked like the top of an old milk bottle. “It couldn’t be,” I thought – it was at the edge of a swamp, well away from any house, past or present. But I walked in, dug into the dirt and – sure enough – a mostly intact pint milk bottle emerged. Broken in half, but salvageable and with all the embossing intact (and no, my rocks didn’t break it – the split was well underground).

It reads “D.M.D.A. DULUTH, MINN.  - TO BE FILLED ONLY BY MEMBERS OF D.M.D.A.”

From Google searches, I found reference to a “Duluth Minnesota Dairy Association.” Does anyone know if that’s the correct translation of DMDA? Can anyone provide some more history about that business – dates of operation, in particular?

The bottle will be re-assembled and displayed above my kitchen sink.

Video from an Iowa sheriff’s deputy’s dashboard camera, about 10 p.m. Wednesday.

The meteor / fireball was also captured on a webcam at UW-Madison.

And it was picked up on radar out of La Crosse. Cool.

All of those views are from a few hundred miles to the south, so I’m not sure if it was even possible to see it up here. Did anyone?

I need to get some Canadian money here in Duluth. The last time I tried at a local bank – a branch of a national chain – they told me they’d have to order it; they didn’t have any on hand. I didn’t search any further at that time.

I’m betting some bank in town has Canadian currency readily available. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

When you drive up to the exit gate, a man’s voice automatically emits from the ticket-taking machine, asking you to “please insert your ticket, magnetic stripe up and to the right.”

It’s an odd voice – hard to describe, but my best (and OK, probably slightly exaggerated) description would be that the guy sounds like Droopy Dog slurring his words. After a few days in a row hearing this, I wondered who decided, “that’s just the voice we need for our parking ramp computer!” And I sort of wondered how that poor guy was doing – he must have been having a rough day when he recorded that clip.

But that’s not the end of it. After you insert your ticket, a different, more energetic man’s voice emits from the speaker as the gate goes up, telling you thanks (and have a good day, too, if I recall correctly). That guy is a bundle of vim and vigor compared to the previous voice.

I started imagining some being living inside the machine who subsists on validated tickets. He’s been starving, waiting for someone to come along, woozy and almost unable to get out those magnetic stripe instructions… and then someone inserts a ticket, reviving his spirits and voice just in time for the peppy farewell.

Anyhow, I also started thinking how it would be kind of cool to have a local celebrity be the voice of the parking ramp. As for who that could be – let the discussion begin….