Thanks for the memories

Enjoyed [Ken Johnson’s] two articles on the “island” in Cloquet. Quite a history. I do believe that The Foundry bar was Donnelly’s before The Foundry. Vince Donnelly owned it and was an aspiring heavyweight professional boxer before he bought the bar. He quit drinking and joined AA and his ex-wife Eunice got the bar.

In 1973 I walked into Stella’s bar and took a picture (slide) of two middle-aged ladies working behind the bar. One, maybe, could’ve been Stella. The Northeastern bar had a large stuffed moose head on the wall, I remember.

Some research is remarkable.

Gerald Norrgard
Dululth, Minnesota

Religious demise

The world is full of what I’ve coined as “45-minute Christians.” There are good folks who dress nicely, attend weekly services, repeat a lifetime of memorized prayers as instructed, hopefully tithe 10 percent and leave feeling purified.

Then as good folks, feel free to tell off-color jokes, use slang, read or watch violent shows and carry on as normal people.

Growing up as a Pentecostal minister’s son I believed being a Christian was a 24/7 full-time life of being a faithful servant and a testimony to the world of Christianity.

Now this being said, as I was realized I’m known to my former church as a backslider, someone who knows the way however does not practice its teachings.

The churches have failed us miserably by being in the political realm, by supporting one party, supporting a president regardless of multiple marriages, committing adultery, lying, cheating and overlooking all other shortcomings as religious leaders should!

If these priests, preachers, pastors and clergy people all claim to be called by god, then the god I know dialed far too many wrong numbers to end up with our modern-day church leaders.

To the few clergymen and women left, I apologize as far too many have forgotten “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.”

Tim Kaspari
Wrenshall, Minnesota

Repeating History

Because it happened in Germany in the mid to late 1930s, many people (other than historians,) might not know that Hitler and his crew had three specific roles for women. They were “kinder, kirche and kuche;” children, church and kitchen. These roles led to to the desired outcome of keeping women in their place, barefoot and pregnant. That’s how much the Nazi leaders feared the vulnerability that comes from caring about others, women in particular. In patriarchal male religious systems, these role expectations continue to this day. 

It’s been written there are two enemies to freedom: those who want to control everyone and everything around them, and those who don’t believe they need to control themselves at all. It’s no coincidence that both traits or tendencies are found in the same fear-based groups of people.

Hitler and his fellow Nazis were fear-based, patriarchal male control freaks, and you know how that ended. And here we are, 90 years later, repeating the past once again.

Practitioners of the patriarchal male system have one goal – control of others. If they win the abortion battle, what’s next? Separation of church and state? It won’t happen overnight, but they won’t stop until they control everyone else – except themselves, of course. Patriarchal personalities assume the fear and vulnerability will stop when control of others happens.  As long as they’re trying to control others, the fear and vulnerability will never stop.

Gary Burt
Marble, Minnesota