Other hoopla this week:
Thursday through Sunday: Stomper’s Retreat: the 4onthefloor’s Music Gathering
Thursday through Sunday: One River
Saturday: International Guest Artist Concert: Morten Gunnar Larsen
Monday: My Mind’s Eye: Portraits Inspired by Shakespeare’s First Folio
It’s difficult to read the names on this postcard dated July 13, 1907, so the transcript will represent them with blanks.
____ and I are having a glorious time. Took a beautiful drive this a.m. and saw this very spot. Be good till we get home.
_____
The opening date of a new eating or drinking establishment is often a moving target. A majority of enterprises planning to launch in the coming months required significant gutting and reconstruction of old buildings, a common recipe for delays. Here’s the scoop on four soon-to-launch food and beverage joints.
7 West Taphouse
Owner Rick Lampton has pushed back the anticipated opening date for Superior’s 7 West Taphouse to Oct. 3. The burger bar at 1319 N. Tower Ave. is modeled after the original Duluth location. It will feature burgers, tacos and 40 rotating taps of craft beer. Click here to read the full-length story from July.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeQrR4jjgJM
Former Duluthian Mark Lindquist has been busy in his basement in Baxter. A five-track EP by his one-man band the Little Black Books titled The Don’ts has been showing up in the mailboxes of some of Lindquist’s Duluth friends. It bears the famous Shaky Ray Records label, founded in 1995 on Duluth’s East Hillside. “Buffalo Pit” is the second track on the new EP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmdmO4mdam8
Spike is an orphaned, hand-reared porcupine who, due to his close relationship to humans, was deemed unreleasable. Lake Superior Zoo gave him a forever home. Jessica Shold, Spike’s keeper at the zoo, says he has exhibited this “dancing” behavior his entire life — the result of being raised by humans instead of porcupines.
“We have a daily enrichment and natural feeding program in place as well as positive reinforcement training to ensure he has the best possible welfare and is content for his entire life,” Shold says.
Music: ZZ Top vs. Pink.
At some point in the 1990s, I started hearing about the Superior Hiking Trail, a new footpath designed for hikers to see the sexiest peaks and rivers in the wilderness along the North Shore of Lake Superior. It didn’t come up very often in conversation until the year 2000, which is when it began to annoy me that I had never hiked a speck of it — other than maybe wandering away from the waterfalls at Gooseberry and noticing markings that told me I was on the not-yet famous trail I’d been hearing about.
It was April 2000 when an upstart Duluth newspaper called the Ripsaw began publishing weekly and I stepped up to be its managing editor. The paper had a weekly “Adventure” article and I suddenly found myself around people who had taken on parts of the SHT and heard stories about a handful of souls who had through-hiked the whole thing, which at the time meant trekking from Two Harbors to the Canadian border.
There was a rumor going around that Dusty Olson ran the whole trail in two days, which I found almost but not quite believable. The notion that such a feat could be close to true at least led me to believe I could do it in fewer than two weeks. Then I heard the first documented person to conquer the trail had a fused spine and partially paralyzed legs, and hiked with forearm crutches. That made it hard for me to think I wasn’t physically up to the task.
This week, a little bit of fashion in Selective Focus. We hear from Candace Lacosse who operates Hemlocks Leatherworks.
C.L.: I am primarily a shoemaker (which is a cordwainer, not a cobbler), but I love designing and making just about anything out of leather and waxed canvas: bags, purses, wallets, leather-bound journals, really just about anything.
Chlorophyll production in tree leaves is slowing down and the fall colors are almost upon us. Here is the Department of Natural Resources’ fall color activity map, showing the progression across Minnesota.
As a teenager in Duluth, Robert Rowe Gilruth built model airplanes. Three decades later he would be a key player in NASA’s plans to put a man on the moon.
An article in the February issue of Air & Space magazine details how “without Bob Gilruth, there would not have been a Mercury, a Gemini, or an Apollo program.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POj01Z_o6AI
Duluth has a stretch of Lakewalk with condos plopped down on it. I am used to diving farther up the shore a ways, but took the day to dive in front of the condos to see what was down there. This was early September, a weekend morning, the last truly great dive day of the summer: warm air, warm water, excellent visibility, and blue skies. I spent several hours in the water in a state of bliss. For a while there was the gentlest of currents and I just let it sweep me up the shore. As soon as I got out the weather turned — I had caught the last of these perfect conditions. This is my favorite form of recreation in this northernmost beach town. Here is what I saw. I wasn’t setting any depth records, average depth 10 feet or so but so fulfilling. Thanks for watching.
Are you ready to make slightly above minimum wage with no benefits while working in your pajamas at home? Then Perfect Duluth Day needs you. Running the PDD Calendar is sucking the life out of the editor and his previous assistant has too much collegiate stuff to deal with at the moment. So here’s a rare opportunity to get inside the PDD media empire. Read the full job description on the PDD employment page.
The Wolvin Building was constructed as the general offices of the Pittsburgh Steamship Company in 1902. It is shown here as a six-story building, but in 1909 an additional three stories were added. It still stands today as a nine-story building at 227 W. First St., known since the 1970s as the Missabe Building.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlxFgxPalqg
Jay Freborg’s YouTube description:
In the mid-1970s the drinking age was 18 and friends built elaborate houseboats from whatever material they could find. Going out to “The Island” is what the typical high schooler tried to to do every weekend in the summer. It wasn’t uncommon to have 300-500 people under the age of 21 along the shores of Nesbitt. Over the years, Nesbitt Island’s sandbars and beaches have eroded but the memories have not. Thanks to Bernie Orhn for his forsight to shoot this 8MM film that I edited and put to music.
This undated postcard depicts “Alice in Wonderland,” one of more than 30 scenes from favorite fairytales at Fairyland, a roadside attraction that operated from 1948 to 1972 just west of the village of Marble, about 80 miles northwest of Duluth. Pretty much anything one might want to know about Fairyland can be found on a PDF compiled by Tim Wick, son of Melvin and Faith Wick, who bought the park in 1960.
It’s that time of year again when T-shirts become long sleeves, cups of coffee become pumpkin spice lattes, and the emerald and sage colored leaves become sandstone orange and rosewood red.
Breathe in the crisp morning air, take pictures of the vibrant Midwestern colors, and maybe toss a puppy or a child into that pile of dead leaves. After you have finished having your fall fun, those leaves will not rake themselves.
An Ames 26-inch Poly Leaf Rake could be the tool that helps you through the dreaded yearly task. The handle has a cushion grip to deter blisters and all the tines touch the ground simultaneously.
Whether you are a first-rake, first-home buyer or a second mortgage home remodeler, this product could liven up your yard again.
Here lies the tenth feature for the Price Check series where we compare prices of products and services in Duluth. The prices below reflect the rate the establishment charges with tax included. The combined tax in Duluth is 8.375 percent. This is the summation of Minnesota sales tax (6.875 percent), St. Louis County transit sales/use tax (0.5 percent) and Duluth general sales tax (1.0 percent). Hermantown’s general sales tax is the same as Duluth, and the same state and county taxes apply.
