The Official Newspaper for Foster County
The Official Newspaper for Foster County
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I have a North Dakota map from the 1950s and I was looking at it to see if any highways have changed. Then I got a little curious about several small towns in Cavalier County that either no longer exist or are hanging on by a thread. Alsen, Calio, Clyde, Hannah, Wales, Loma, Nekoma, Easby, Calvin and Maida are all listed on the map. The sad thing is, every one of those communities has lost nearly its entire population in the past 70 years. Many of them moved to Langdon, many moved to Devils Lake...
We’re all complaining about the price of gas these days and we have every right to do that. The price has never been this high and it’s killing any pay raise we might have gotten this year. Gas prices will go up and down as most of us know and right now we’re in a quagmire. When are we going to get some relief? This is, however, not unprecedented. My first memory of gas going out of control was in 1973. That’s when Saudi Arabia declared an oil embargo and it hit the United States, Canada,...
Most of us, if not all of us in North Dakota have recycled something. The first thing that comes to mind is aluminum cans, but there are numerous other items that can be and are recycled. North Dakota and the United States are a long way from the motivation to recycle in Europe, but that attitude is gaining some ground, slowly but surely. The city of Fargo has had a robust recycling program for more than 32 years that I’m aware of. And since 1990, numerous other programs have popped up across t...
Two weeks ago I was out in the field planting, or rather mudding in, transplants As I was doing that a helicopter from Minot Air Force Base circled overhead numerous times before darting off to the east toward Minot AFB. It got me to thinking about the numerous people stationed at Minot AFB who have helped make our little vegetable farm that we call North Star Farms successful. It’s time they be recognized. And honestly, as I look back to the first year that we had assistance from the base (...
When I was working at the Minot Daily News, I interviewed Sen. Kent Conrad one day about the rise of wind energy in North Dakota. On that day, there was a groundbreaking ceremony for a wind energy project near Velva. At one point during our interview Conrad told me that wind energy has no limit in North Dakota because “we are the Saudi Arabia of wind.” Most of us know that Saudi Arabia has an unlimited oil supply and Conrad’s comment, of course, was that North Dakota has an unlimited wind suppl...
It was recently announced that the North Dakota Department of Transportation has OK’d a major road construction project that will turn U.S. Highway 52, from the Canadian border at Portal, all the way to Carrington, into a “super 2,” which means strategic passing lanes will be added. Since April of 2008, there’s been a push to have U.S. 52 four-laned from the border to the four-lane U.S. Highway 2, about 15 miles northwest of Minot. Public meetings were held along the route and not much ever ha...
In the past month, there have been a lot of vehicles with Saskatchewan and Manitoba license plates milling around Minot and on U.S. Highway 52. Covid restrictions were lifted April 1 in Canada which made it much easier for Canadians to travel across the border. It’s been a long time coming and Dakota Square Mall in Minot recognized it too with large banners that say “Welcome Back Canadians.” For at least 32 years that I’m aware of, Minot, Grand Forks and Fargo have all been recipients of the...
There was a photograph in last week’s Kenmare News showing local man Jim Hillestad with his son Kelly and daughter Terri at his birthday party. That’s not so unusual, but what is unusual is that Jim turned 102 in late April. Kelly lives with his dad in Kenmare while Terri flew in from Australia to attend this special event at the Kenmare Senior Citizen Center. According to the North Dakota Department of Commerce, there are 310 North Dakota residents who are 100 or older, that’s up about 100 p...
For the longest time, I would sit and look at my Kenwood KT 6040 AM-FM receiver and wonder what was wrong with it. When I bought it in 2018, it provided radio reception two step above anything else I’d ever known. But in the past year, there’s been some kind of issue. Last week my wife went to visit the grandkids in Rapid City, so I dedicated one of those days to find the problem and fix it. I gave myself an entire day so I wouldn’t have to get into a hurry. That meant taking the system compl...
There’s a small town in the gooseneck of Ward County called Donnybrook. It’s common knowledge locally that the town was named for the Donnybrook Fair in Ireland. Today Donnybrook is a district in Dublin. A few days ago, I discovered there is another Donnybrook and it’s in Western Australia. This Donnybrook is a town of 3,000 people situated 130 miles south of Perth. It’s home to Western Australia’s apple industry. Although there is no commercial apple production at Donnybrook, N.D., and the p...
If you haven’t heard about this yet, there is something unique going on at Linton High School and my friend Jay Schmaltz is largely responsible for it. Jay and I go back a lot of years when I was deep into newspapers and he was deep into radio. And Jay being from Nekoma, I’d see him in Langdon occasionally when I was operating the newspaper there. At one point I convinced him to come on board at the Cavalier County Republican where he became a sports writer. I think, however, Jay got his claim t...
When I signed on to write a weekly column for this newspaper, part of the agreement was that I write about current events, history, sports figures, etc., all with a North Dakota tie, sometimes deviating to states or provinces bordering us. This week, I’m compelled to change that theme because of something I saw on TV that was absolutely mind boggling. It was so stupid that it was shocking. Stew Peters is a conspiracy theorist who has a TV show and there was endless fiction coming out of this g...
Last week’s article showed the diversity of North Dakota and that we fall into the No. 1 category in a number of areas, mostly with grain and row crops. But, there are some areas in which we could do far better with our diversity. Let me give you some examples. • One of them is horseradish. This plant grows very well anywhere in North Dakota, including the wild and thrives in just about any kind of soil type. Yet there is no commercial horseradish production in the state. Two counties; Mad...
Lately I’ve been seeing indicators of how powerful North Dakota is as an agricultural producer. Statistics are generated by the USDA, Department of Agriculture and others but numerous people have been regurgitating said statistics on social media. We’re No. 1! Following is a list of the crops in North Dakota that are considered No. 1 in the nation in production; beans, canola, flax, honey, oats, sunflower seeds, spring wheat and durum wheat. North Dakota is No.2 in the following crops: Len...
I’m sure many of us watched Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy live via video on American television Wednesday as he addressed the U.S. Congress about the need for more aid to stop the Russian aggression. It came one day after he spoke via video to Canadian Parliament requesting more aid. Whether you know it or not, there are much deeper ties than political or diplomatic ones between the United States and Ukraine and Canada and Ukraine. As of the 2020 Census, there were 1.08 million p...
Those of us who live in North Dakota like to think we are up-to-date with the rest of the nation, savvy about technology and on top the world because we are “North Dakota friendly.” Sorry to burst your bubble, but we’re not even close. We are so far behind in certain aspects of daily routine living that we may never catch up. It starts with customer service, or the lack of it. There are a lot of businesses in this state that seem to think their revenue is automatic whether they treat their...
Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to visit the Dakota College campus in Bottineau. The reason for my visit was to meet a student and a staff member. What I found out, however, is having a lasting impression. It’s obvious that the big guys; University of North Dakota, University of Mary, North Dakota State University and Minot State University get most of the attention when it comes to higher education in North Dakota. Some of that attention ought to be shifted because after touring the D...
Have you been to a shopping mall lately? I haven’t until recently and it’s quite surprising at the lack of activity going on. Some of it could be attributed to COVID, but somehow I doubt it because we’ve seen a shift in buying habits before the pandemic and that’s undoubtedly due to the Internet. It doesn’t matter where you live in North Dakota, you probably have a mall within a reasonable distance. Take a look, go walk about, then think about that very same mall 10, or even five years ago...
I’m sure you all remember Craig Cobb? He was a self-proclaimed white nationalist who came to the Grant County community of Leith and tried to take over the town by buying up properties and bringing like-minded individuals to Leith. Cobb caused quite a stir that lasted a long time. His actions manufactured a lot of stress for the Leith City Council, the Grant County Commission and Sheriff’s Department and even the state of North Dakota. Sometime after the “siege of Leith” ended, Cobb, in 2015, a...
The world of communications is constantly changing and most of it runs parallel to the changes in technology. And for those of us who work in communications, it’s sometimes been a difficult transformation. As an example in each of the past three years, North Dakota has lost three weekly newspapers in the Dunn County Herald in Killdeer (2019), the Walhalla Mountaineer (2020) and the Cavalier County Republican in Langdon (2021). In addition, nearly every daily newspaper in North Dakota has made c...
It wasn't quite the Iditarod, but we had our own version of long-distance winter recreation that was fun for a lot of people. How many of you remember a snowmobile race that started in Regina and ended in Minot? It was call the Regina Minot International 250 that took place in the 1970s and early '80s and usually happened in the month of February. There is currently some Internet buzz to resurrect this race and return that excitement to the prairie. And if you look at some of the Internet...
There is no doubt technology has changed the way we live. Even in the past 20 years, there have been phenomenal changes that make living on the prairie more bearable, and in some cases enjoyable. Think about medicine for example. it used to be that you had to go to Minneapolis or Denver to have heart surgery. Now, most of the major hospitals in North Dakota will do heart surgery. If you had cancer, it was too late. Today, there are numerous treatments available in most hospitals and some...
Last weekend I was cleaning out a drawer and ran across a North Dakota map from 1956. It was in some of my dad’s belongings that I received after he passed away. On the surface, you wouldn’t think there is a lot of information, but when you unfold this map, there is a lot to unpack and it’s all very interesting. The most obvious piece of information I found was with the population of West Fargo. It had a population of 159 that was based on the 1950 Census. In 2020, West Fargo’s populat...
Do you remember a news story that started in 1985 about a Red River Valley potato sale to Honduras? Anyone who grows potatoes in the state should recall this newsmaker. It caused all kinds of ramifications for numerous people, including the state of North Dakota. The entire scenario started out innocent enough when the Ag Department’s marketing director Laurence McMerty made his best attempt to set up a major seed potato deal with Honduras. But McMerty later got into legal trouble and was c...
As we move into the new year, a subject came up frequently during holiday gatherings and that was that our parents didn’t teach us a second language when we were children. Granted, some people who were parents in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s only knew English, but there were countless others who did speak a second, or even a third language, and for the most part, kept it to themselves. Perhaps the most obvious foreign language, at least in North Dakota, is German. A lot of our parents were the sec...
