As we tend to do, I talked to someone last Friday about resolutions. When she asked about mine, I said, “I gave up on resolutions before I quit staying up until midnight on New Year’s Eve, which was a long time ago.”
Studies show that a relatively small percentage of people stick to their New Year’s resolutions. Like Daylight Saving Time, we make a big deal for a day or two, and then life goes on.
When we moved back to Cook County in 2016, the Bohunk and I resolved, with no thought to it being a New Year res, to go through all the bins of stuff we’d moved, but never unpacked over our last half-dozen relocations. We thought it would be a good winter project but always managed to procrastinate. We got off the line this year, and I’m happy to say we’re making progress.
Since we moved from Grand Marais for the first time in the oughts, both of our mothers have died. We were diligent about getting rid of the routine household things they had, a considerable task, but we packed away the paperwork and photos to review at our leisure. That would be this winter.
You wouldn’t believe the photographs those two collected, not to mention decades of pictures from raising four kids, a significant number of dogs, and now five grandkids. Over the years, we did our part to keep Kodak, Polaroid, album manufacturers, and picture framers in business.
In one of my mom’s totes was a good size scrapbook that she had started when the Bohunk and I acquired and began publishing the Cook County News Herald. I was over 40, and when Mom starts a scrapbook for a kid over 40, I don’t know if it says more about her or me.
Mostly, she pasted my weekly column, “Shorelines,” in the first year we were there. After filling all the pages, she seems to have stopped. I guess she was bored with me by then.
In Lake Superior Magazine’s 1996 Travel Guide, they wrote glowingly about the Cook County News Herald as their favorite source for news about action on the North Shore. I highlighted that quote in my first piece as publisher and promised to live up to the glowing praise.
Many years and keyboard touches have passed since then. So, I took some time from scanning photos and paged through the scrapbook.
Back then, I wrote that we would strive for continuous improvement in the newspaper, not just in journalism and photographs but also in ensuring that the dreaded typos were struck at the composing table.
My subjects included the changing seasons and reports on my short amateur curling career. The headline for curling was “Throwing Stones,” something I did in editorials.
One column went on about our son Dan and me going on a fishing outing with Capt. Clint Helmerson on his boat “Far Superior.” Clint was a fixture around town when it wasn’t winter, and his stories of life in Cook County kept us hooked when we weren’t catching our limit of Lake Trout.
There were also more newsworthy columns about Cook County government activity. Not surprisingly, those got me some riveting attention from the local poobahs.
In 1996, the city mothers of Grand Marais managed to enact a ban on skateboards and inline skates on downtown streets. They banned bikes from the north side of Highway 61 and the sidewalks in town. They even prohibited chairs and benches on the sidewalks. The street signs posted with those rules were less than friendly in tone to the essential tourists who were foundational to the economy.
Over several columns, I also teed off about taxpayer funding for projects to update the care center, improve the school building, add the Arrowhead Center for the Arts, and build a spanking new cop shop.
Northshore Health was hurrying to improve the Care Center and planned to use an existing special sales tax to fund the bonds. Because time was short, the board didn’t want to bring the issue to voters. The members thought it would be approved anyway, so why bother with elections?
The county and school board tried to avoid referendums for the opposite reason. They didn’t think voters would approve funding for the cop shop and arts center in referendums. Again, why bother with elections when we know we might lose?
I still have a lot of pictures to go through.
Now, what do we do with a dozen empty totes?
