Leon Mortland was born in 1946 in Tyler, to Hazel and John Mortland. Leon grew up on the family farm northeast of Tyler and attended Tyler Public Schools. After graduating from Tyler High School in 1964, Leon continued his education at Mankato State College. He met Augustana College student ...

Do you see your connections as a way to hold on to something, someone, or as opportunities? At some point along our way, most of us come to the realization that as big as our planet is, the world is a small place. That revelation comes to us from many sources, but there’s always a ...

Labor Day weekend has come and gone, and the unofficial end of summer (or if you’re a hunter, and a glass-half-full type, the unofficial start to fall) has come with it. The transition is never a clean break though, with plenty of summerlike fishing opportunities and warm days yet ahead with ...

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 ...