Recently I was able to connect with other city administrators both near Marshall and across the State of Minnesota. One consistent message was the challenge of finding enough revenue to provide services — whether it be providing public safety, maintaining infrastructure like streets or ...

My Magical Mystery Nostalgia Tour has come to an end. It’s time to return to the present time. Which isn’t that great. But it’s all we got. Pam accuses me of being a serial nostalgic. She’s right. The longer-ago memories are, the more enjoyable they are to retrieve. One definition ...

Editor’s note: Jerry is taking some time off. Here is one of his past columns from his Oldies But Goodies file. Mesabi is the Ojibwa word for giant. Mesabi is also the name given to a range of iron-rich hills in northern Minnesota, knolls that the Ojibwa believed held a sleeping giant. ...

Last December, I noticed a deposit of $3,089.80 in our checking account. What a nice Christmas gift. It was a payment from the Farm Service Agency. I dug in my memory to recall that months ago I filled out an application for a PARP payment based on some combination of farm income, yields, ...

For the first time in 40 years, Minnesota has a central role in a presidential campaign as Gov. Tim Walz runs for vice-president with the Kamala Harris campaign. It’s bringing our state national attention, just like the Hubert Humphrey years of the 1960s and the Walter Mondale years of the ...

A guy can learn a lot when he’s undergoing tonsil cancer treatments. For instance, I recently had an appointment with a woman named Tina, a speech therapist. I learned that it’s important to keep your mouth parts fit and healthy via exercises that help preserve the ability to swallow. ...