Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/author/saint-paul-almanac/page/6/)
Midway Shopping center at University and Snelling, Murphy Department Store, St. Paul. (Photo: Russell Schweizer, ca. 1960/Minnesota Historical Society)
The department’s floor personnel — Bobbi, Tess, Shaun, Alice, and the stock boy, Luis — received word in that week’s pay envelope, but rumors had been circulating for some time that the store was closing.
Lobby, Saint Paul Hotel, circa 1910. (Photo: Minnesota Historical Society)
It’s 5:15 p.m. in the entryway of the old Saint Paul Hotel. It’s early winter, cold, and snowing. The lights across the street in Rice Park twinkle with the frost and people are rushing in to get warm and have the early evening cocktail at the famous bar where F. Continue Reading
The Como Park hill and ski lift! (Photo: Sharyn Morrow)
The sign mysteriously appears when the snow starts, at the foot of the golf club driveway, announcing the start of the ski season at Como Park: “Welcome to Mount Como.” When my husband tells a friend visiting from Switzerland, a snowboard instructor, that his kids took downhill ski lessons there, the Swiss fellow looks puzzled. Continue Reading
Crowds of Saint Paulites walking along Grand Avenue on Grand Old Day 2010. (Photo: Drew Geraets)
Hla/Paw family by their house in the Thai Refugee Camp. Daniel is missing. November is on the left.
Illustration: Kirk Anderson
Dr. Sobkoviak of Frogtown, our dentist, stood looking out the window of his office at Western and University and saw Russia. As he changed the point of the drill, looking straight through Old Home Dairy across the street into the Kremlin, he warned me about Nikita Krushchev.
For well over a year I drove around Ottertail County, poking around in its little towns, stopping whenever something caught my eye, asking “why?” a lot, and “who should I talk to?”
It would be easy to make light of what I did under the title “area reporter,” just because the towns are small, relatively few people are affected by their decisions, and most of the world barely knows where Continue Reading
