Early in August, we drove to Denver to see our son Ezra. Between here and there is Nebraska, a big state with a lot of open space and sky.

There are two ways to get through Nebraska. The interstate is straight, predictable and a little dull. Or you can take roads that go west and south and west and south, etc. We took the latter on our way to Denver. Somewhere in the middle of Nebraska, wide roads through corn fields with regular towns turn into narrow roads through rangeland with few towns.

That’s all well and good, unless you need gas. With the Low Fuel light on, we came to a gas station on the edge of Bartlett. The price was fifty cents higher there on what seemed the edge of civilization. I was glad to pay it as I stepped inside the small station.

A young woman, 16 or 17, was working the counter. She was friendly, and I’m a fan of small talk. I asked her about Bartlett. I couldn’t really see the town. It was behind trees, west of the road. I learned there were only about one hundred people over there.

Did she go to school there? Yes, there were four in her class. I asked whether she thought she would stay in Bartlett when she was older. She seemed surprised by that, and answered with an uncertain, “Well, I guess so. Probably.”

Of course, I have no idea her situation or background. Is there a ranch or family business that might be in her future? A boyfriend? Even in the middle of Nebraska, there are a hundred variables that impact where a young person might end up as an adult.

A few more pleasantries, and we were back on the road. I told Pam about Bartlett Girl, and wondered if she would end up there. How do any of us end up where we do? Who we marry, the work we do, children we raise, all affect the life we live. But the place where we do those things has a profound impact.

Compared to Bartlett, Sleepy Eye is big, thirty times the population. Everything is perspective, and someone from Chicago would certainly not think Sleepy Eye is a big anything. When I was Bartlett Girl’s age, no way did I think I would come back to the farm west of Sleepy Eye as an adult. I’m not sure why. I enjoyed my childhood there, but it just seemed inevitable that I’d leave. Funny how life is that way.

Farming is unique in that traditionally the workplace is the homeplace. The only separation is the yard. It is one career where a son, sometimes daughter, is likely as not to end up in the house they grew up in. It’s common in farming areas like ours. That’s changing, though. As farms grow in size, the number of farmers is less.  It’s a hundred-year trend.

After college, I came back to the most familiar place on Earth to me. For wife Pam, it’s a much different story. Sleepy Eye wasn’t on any list of possible places she’d spend her adulthood when she was young. But in those ways that life throws you a curveball when you’re looking for a fastball, here she is. She met a guy in college who ended up going home to farm. Pam has made a life here with friends and her own interesting work. But the decision of where we would live was one-sided.

A job is the number one dictator for most of us where we will put down roots. If you’re married, one or the other’s work will take priority and decide where the couple will live. Some people are in careers where they have to move to a new place, sometimes multiple times. Moving was always hard to imagine for me. When you’re tethered to dirt, you don’t move.

While career is the number one reason most of us live where we do, other factors can have a part. Sometimes being close to family decides where we are. A school can weigh heavy for a young couple with kids. A church can be a draw. There are families who’ve come to Sleepy Eye because of St. Mary’s, not only the church, but also the school. Plus a nursing home and a chapel on the lake. It’s a Catholic destination.

Access to natural and cultural resources can be an influencer. People like living near water, on hills, and around trees. A home on the beach is the ultimate place for many. Corn and soybean fields aren’t high on lists of naturally beautiful places. But it’s better than concrete.

I’m at an age where people are making decisions about where to live now that they aren’t tied to a place by a job. Perhaps it’s where to live for the “rest of their lives.” After forty years of working for the man, it can be liberating to go where the wind blows you. It’s an interesting phenomenon, and of course it’s only an issue for those with a certain amount of wealth.

I know folks who are moving to be close to their kids and grandkids. Others have places where winter is not something you need to survive. I admit that after scooping out the driveway for the third time on a wind-swept, ten-below day, that has it’s attraction.

Speaking of moving, I have thought about our ancestors who settled here. It really wasn’t that long ago that most of them came, but it’s buried in history now.

Can I imagine bringing a young family on a long ride across an ocean to a place I’d never been, with maybe one or two trunks of our things? Leaving a home and relatives that I almost certainly would never see again? And then taking a train to the middle of the continent where there were barely any towns? In a language that was foreign? No, I can’t.

Back to current time. In Denver, I saw people without homes as you do in any large city. Sometimes it was an individual on the side of the road. Sometimes it was a group in an encampment of tents and sleeping bags. It was a reminder to not take any of this for granted. A home is shelter, a warm place on a cold day or a cool place on a hot day. If we can share that with someone, even better. It is a gift not granted to everyone.

Laura Ingalls Wilder said, “Home is the nicest word there is.” No matter where that is.

Last week, there was a picture of the Essig Junior Bi-County baseball team in the paper, champions of the league. It made me sad.

I don’t have anything against that group of boys. It’s just that it reminded me how I felt this time of year when I was young and summer baseball ended.

But for kids, the season is done. The end of ball triggers all sorts of connected feelings in me. Some of those go back a lot of years and to situations in a distant past. For example, the foreboding sense that school is going to start and take away all my glorious freedom. My last September that was scarred by a return to a classroom was 44 years ago. But I still feel a bit of that dread. It remains in our bones long after the reality is gone.

The days begin to shorten. I played my own Junior Bi-County baseball at Prairieville. That was a field of dreams that is a cornfield now west of Sleepy Eye. We never had lights there. In the blissfully long days of middle-summer, sunlight easily bathed our field for seven innings after a 6:30 start. When you’re a kid, sunlight even overlaps bedtime, which is problematic when you move to the parent side of the equation.

Temperatures cool. Leaves begin their slow turn from green to autumn hues. Crops mature. Apples redden on branches. Birds gather in anticipation of getting out of Dodge. We all know how this story ends. It starts with w and rhymes with splinter.

Baseball and softball end early to make way for fall sports. Adolescent bodies need to prep for volleyball and cross country. And football. Football is still the elephant of sports. It takes the most kids the most time and the most effort. I don’t dislike football. Watching the Vikings is as fine a way to blow a Sunday afternoon as any other.

I have to admit, playing it was kind of dreadful. That may be partly due to the seasonal comparison. When I think of baseball, I think of shagging balls during batting practice: easily floating around the outfield, chatting with friends, chasing balls, and flinging them into the mound. Just writing that makes me want to go, take some flyballs.

Practice for football was sweating profusely in heavy gear while I tried to hit my friends. I wasn’t very good at either sport, but I much preferred chatting with them. Baseball was joyful; football was grueling.

This melancholy that I feel with the passing of baseball season is connected to the passing of things in general. We see ahead of us the end of summer, the end of the growing season, the end of vacation.

Everything ends. I don’t especially like that, but it is one of the Great Truths. Everything ends, except for God and eternity. Understanding God and eternity is impossible. So, on this side of the grave, we are left with things that end.

Days end. Weekends end. Television series’ end. Books end. Songs end. This column will end in about 300 words.

One can’t go down this path without coming to lives ending. We do things to postpone our own end. Eating well, exercising, getting good sleep are useful but finally futile. Knowing the Great Truth can compel us to get stuff done. Putting things off will only work so long. Perhaps that is reconciling with a family member or organizing our finances. Remember: everything ends. Us, too.

One particular end came back to me recently. In the (New Ulm) Journal’s Fifty-Years-Ago page was a story about Lobo performing at the Brown County Fair in 1973. You can be excused for not knowing who Lobo is. He wasn’t exactly a one-hit wonder, more of a few-hits wonder. In the early Seventies, he was something of a star when he came to play in the grandstand in New Ulm.

I went to that show with my younger brother Dean. We listened to Lobo’s records together at home. We had pretty good seats to see and hear Lobo at the Fair. Only Dean couldn’t see him.

Dean was blind from the age of two, but otherwise healthy. From first grade to tenth, Dean attended Braille School in Faribault. He boarded there during the week. My mom drove him to Faribault on Mondays and brought him home on Fridays. During summer, Dean was home on the farm and a fulltime playmate. It was another reason I didn’t care for the end of summer; I would lose my best friend to school.

Anyway, fifty years ago, I can picture Dean’s foot tapping to Lobo and his band. Months before that night, headaches led to discovery of a brain tumor in Dean. When we were at the Lobo concert, we were hopeful radiation and chemotherapy could defeat it. This was before my senior year. Dean was a junior. He would not make it to his senior year. He died the next spring, days before my graduation.

I don’t know if anyone handles such situations well. I didn’t, and fifty years on, I feel like some processing still needs to be done. I might come back to that in the next year if you don’t mind me using this space as therapy.

We all have songs that sit on a shelf in our brain that we take down regularly. A Lobo song that I can’t defend as great songwriting is there for me. I can sing this in my head right now, and go back to the Brown County Fair, 1973:

“Me and you and a dog named Boo,

Travelling and living off the land,

Me and you and a dog named Boo,

How I love being a free man.”

There are big anniversaries we all share, like the first man on the moon and 9/11. There are little ones I share with Pam: first kiss, birth of kids. Anniversaries, good and bad, are a chance to put ourselves back in that moment. “Oh, yeah. That’s how that felt.”

This month was the 75^th anniversary of Hubert Humphrey’s speech to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. It doesn’t get the attention it deserves, but it was one of the most important speeches in American history.

Humphrey was a small-town kid from Wallace, South Dakota, born above his father’s drugstore. Hubert Sr. sold medicines for people and animals. It was a hard scrabble life during the Dust Bowl. Hubert Jr. spent one year at the University of Minnesota, but money ran out and he came home to work with his dad.

Hubert traveled the dirt roads of South Dakota selling “Humphrey’s Chest Oil” for humans and “Bone Tone Veterinary” for hogs. His heart wasn’t in it, though, and when he was 27, Humphrey returned to the U of M to study political science.

He was drawn into the hot bed of politics that Minnesota was at the time. This was when the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party was formed. In 1945, Humphrey was elected mayor of Minneapolis. Only 34 years old, he succeeded in reducing crime and growing business in the post-war booming city. He won a second term handily and began to garner national attention.

To say the political landscape was different from today would be a gross understatement. Growing from the ashes of the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the party of not-Lincoln. They were in power across the South, the former Confederacy. Republicans held sway in the North for most of a century.

By 1948, the Democratic Party was also the party of the New Deal and four-time elected Franklin Roosevelt. An uneasy truce existed over civil rights where Roosevelt accepted segregation through the South in return for support for his programs.

After World War II that became untenable. More than a million Black men and women fought for our country. Those who came back, many didn’t, returned to a country where they were second class citizens in the North and less than that in the Jim Crow South.

The movement for civil rights began to percolate, later to boil over. In 1948. the Democratic Party was split between those who thought the federal government should actively protect civil rights and Southerners who believed that states should be able to enforce traditional segregation. ”States’ rights” was the buzzword.

A battle went on behind the scenes about whether the party’s platform would include language from a Commission on Civil Rights. Including it would anger Southern Whites, who threatened to walk out. It was this cauldron into which Humphrey stepped. He was chosen to speak for the minority plank on civil rights. It was a speech he was warned not to give. But he did. From that:

“To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: the time has arrived in America to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!”

It was an early example of Humphrey’s oratorical flare, and the minority plank passed 651 to 582. The delegations from Mississippi and Alabama walked out. Southern Democrats were enraged enough to form the Dixiecrat Party to run Strom Thurmond for President. The realignment of the political parties was on.

The Solid South now means Republican. I have been a Republican and have many friends who are. We agree that their party plays with fire when it gives succor to racists. For our nation’s sake, they mustn’t become a dark hiding place for rats.

Back to 1948, Humphrey’s speech was like a starting shot. In the twenty years that followed, noteworthy progress was made on civil and voting rights. It is progress that is not guaranteed to be last. Two steps forward, one step back. Two steps back, one step forward. We are flawed and sinful people with the capacity for greatness. It’s complicated.

Here in southern Minnesota, we have had the “luxury” of blissful ignorance to race issues that have bedeviled much of our country. It’s been a century and a half since the native people were routed and put on to reservations of not their choice. Their primary offense was being in the way of white peoples’ plans for this continent. That story is buried in early chapters of Minnesota history books and mostly disregarded now.

In my lifetime, our overwhelming whiteness has been altered by a flow of Hispanic families. At first, they were migrant workers who came seasonally to work in fields. That shifted to all types of jobs in a couple generations. Now, the economy of southern Minnesota is absolutely dependent on these relatively new arrivals.

I still hear Hispanic people referred to as “those Mexicans.” in unfriendly tones. The good news is you can go to playgrounds around here and see kids with German and Guatemalan heritage playing together. It’s a reminder that kids don’t see skin color; they only learn that from us adults.

For large parts of our nation, there has been no “luxury” of ignorance in race matters. Half a million Africans were brought to the United States as slaves. This, despite that nettlesome Declaration of Independence that states, “All men are created equal.” Black men were understood to be something, but not the “men” that Thomas Jefferson wrote about in 1776. That seems as if it would take serious mental strain to conclude that. But tremendous wealth created with free labor eased that.

Progress would have been made without Humphrey’s speech on a hot summer day in Philadelphia 75 years ago, but likely slower. I never met Humphrey. My young adult years just missed him. There are pictures of him at the Orchid Inn in Sleepy Eye, so it was close.

My parents seldom talked politics. When you have cows, crops, and kids to raise, there’s not time to dawdle on that. I do remember them joking about how long-winded Humphrey was. In a lengthy career as a Senator and Vice President, he certainly had opportunities to be such.

I was with them at a café in Switzerland in January 1978. They had come to visit after I ended a college semester abroad. It was a great leap for two farm people who had not often been out of Brown County.

We were having breakfast, when someone who recognized us as Americans came over and asked if we had heard Hubert Humphrey died. We hadn’t. I was surprised that my parents became quite reverential. In that moment, the end of a significant life in our nation’s history, there was quiet respect.

There are lots of talented people around here when it comes to operating big machines. Among them are several generations of Heiderscheidts in multiple enterprises. Since I was a kid, if you wanted earth moved or a building knocked down, you called one of them and let them figure out which Heiderscheidts you needed.

The Heiderscheidts are not only talented, but entertaining. To watch Larry on the backhoe or Linus on the skid loader is like watching a type of performance art. I have always thought a reality show based on the Heiderscheidts would put the Kardashians to shame.

Later this summer, some combination of them will knock down and haul away our old chicken house. Terry told us it will be a day’s job for men and machines. Pam’s been wanting it gone for a while. It doesn’t have much use anymore, so I guess it’ll be good to have that done.

When the parts of it are being trucked to the demolition landfill, I can’t expect the Heiderscheidts to know this, but they’ll be hauling away memories. When you live on the place where you grew up, there are memories around. In a way, you live with ghosts. The ghosts are family who are gone now, but also others who worked and visited here.

They are friendly ghosts. I can go days without thinking of the past, and then a certain angle of the sun on one of the sheds will trigger a memory. It’s a sensation I enjoy.

I spent my childhood here. The further I get in time from that, it becomes precious in a way I didn’t expect. Moments with my parents who raised me, a brother I grew up with, another brother I worked with are things I carry around. They are gone now, but I keep them in my heart.

I’ve noticed in conversations with friends, I often probe around about their childhoods. I like to get background on the adult I am engaging with. It’s one thing to know your current thoughts and opinions. But if I can peak into your past, I will know you better.

In my investigating others, it’s not uncommon for people to have no connection to the place where they grew up, the complete opposite of me. I ask if they go by their old house, or even stop there. It probably feels a little nosy. In some cases, the home of their youth doesn’t exist anymore. That always seems sad to me, part of a person severed.

Not everyone is as nostalgic as I am. There is a novel by Thomas Wolfe titled “You Can’t Go Home Again.” That’s become a phrase implying we can’t relive our youth. But what if you never left home?

I was thinking about childhoods. I have been involved in four of them intimately, my own and our three kids. All four were centered in this place. The farm of my youth and my kids’ youth is different. The dairy cows, stacks of hay, and piles of ear corn are gone. But the grove, the rock pile, the creek at the edge of the field remain. It’s the same house, with some nipping and tucking done in the generation between.

So much of what we become as grownups spins from the years we are children. We don’t completely understand that process. I remember as a father of a baby not really getting the reason for all the goofy face-making and baby banter back and forth. Instinct compelled me to do those things. Psychologists might be able to explain why it mattered, but we know babies need engagement with those around them to develop healthily.

Our earliest years we don’t remember at all. Then come years when we have flashes of memories, snap shots. Till we’re older and can remember situations and conversations. It’s clear that even in those early years, babies and toddlers benefit tremendously from being in a loving environment. To be in the care of kind and unselfish adults who sacrifice their time and needs is a great gift.

It’s interesting that I can remember vividly a few times when someone was mean to me. Sadly, there are kids that have lots of those. Growing up in a hurtful or neglectful environment is something people never grow out of. They might find ways to succeed despite that, but the scars never heal over. The worst childhoods can leave one with symptoms not unlike PTS.

We know that children are resilient, and some stress helps us grow. It’s like the tree that is made stronger by having to buffet winds. But life will find ways to stress us enough without coming from an unloving home. I was blessed with a childhood that was safe and warm.

Many hours were spent in the chicken barn that is soon to be a memory. My parents built it in 1960. With an addition in 1965, it held 10,000 laying hens. It was a unique style barn that was only built for a few years. It had ten large pens, five to a side with feed and water and egg gathering chains running the length of the building.

There was a center “dusting” area where the hens could go each afternoon to scratch around in wood shavings. It seemed a way that they could express their “chickenness.” Soon after, cage operations were developed. Within years, farms had hundreds of thousands of chickens. I think our barn would be considered humane now.

A lot of memories of my father came from time spent milking cows in the dairy barn and of my mother gathering eggs in the chicken house. Two chains with plastic cups brought the eggs to a gathering room where we would set the egg in flats of thirty which would go in cases of twelve flats. Both milking chores and gathering eggs leant themselves to meandering conversation where some of the best if unintentional parenting was done.

The dairy barn burned down on a winter night in 1984. My father was living then. I remember walking around the burnt edifice with him a couple days later. Briefly he came to tears, one of the few times I ever saw that.

The chicken house will go down soon. I wish there were pictures of the activities that went on there. Pictures of any sort were rarer when I was young. The only pictures are in my head. There, they are vivid.

Back on May 11^th through 13^th, parts of southern Minnesota got a lot of rain. Eight to twelve-plus inches fell Thursday to Saturday. It was an abrupt halt to planting and caused problems with basements and sewer systems not designed for such a deluge. I spent hours sucking water in our basement.

If you took a moment from whatever wet task you were doing to look around, you were met with an amazing view. For a couple days the landscape was covered at least a third by water.

It was like looking back in time. Before Europeans came, this was the prairie pothole region. All that water we were looking at was approximately where nature had water in 1800. The uplands then would have been prairie grasses; now it’s tilled fields and roads.

We planted corn before the rain. As soon as I could I began walking fields to see what was going on with our seeds. One day I noticed two Canada geese in one of the temporary sloughs. The pair was still there the next day, looking quite at home on the glistening water reflecting the sky’s blue.

The third day that I went out, the water had drained. The tile under the surface had done its job, pushing the field back toward a state where tractors could roam. The goose couple was still there, standing on damp soil. At the risk of anthropomorphizing, it looked as if they were thinking, “What the hell just happened here?”

In looking up Canada geese, I read that they “exhibit a high degree of philopatry.”  Philopatry is the tendency of an animal to stay in or return to its place of origin. I wondered, was it possible my geese had returned to the wetland home of some distant ancestor? Of course, that home is my cornfield now.

It’s easy to never think about what this place looked like before. We live in the moment. There are plenty of concerns without wondering about some long-ago time.

But for thousands of years, this was prairie and potholes, aka sloughs. It’s barely been one hundred years that it’s been crops and pavement. The transition from what was here to what is here is remarkable. Looking out on acres of corn and soybeans interspersed with farm sites might not be as dramatic as seeing a big city where a forest used to be, but it’s every bit as profound.

A small number of plants, birds, insects, and animals that lived here remain. There might be a few on the line fences. Scattered refuges like Swan Lake give shelter to others. It is said that one could have canoed from Sleepy Eye to New Ulm when the railroad came through in 1872. A few wetlands remain along Highway 14, but they are disjointed and separate.

Two hundred years ago, Secretary of War John Calhoun ordered an expedition to the source of the “St. Peter River,” the name given to the Minnesota River then. That preceded the flow of Europeans here, a trickle that became a flood. In 1851, the Traverse des Sioux treaty deeded 21 million acres to the United States from the Upper Dakota bands. It was a “treaty” like the rest: unfair, imbalanced, and ultimately tragic to the Natives who signed that.

In decades, this region transformed from one of Earth’s great natural eco-systems to one of the most productive agricultural regions on the planet. There is no way to understate how dramatic and complete that was. Draining millions of acres of sloughs is an amazing engineering feat.

Has there been a cost? Like most human interactions with nature, it’s complicated. Millions of people have been fed from the bounty of the Corn Belt. The planet could not support eight billion inhabitants without this place and others where exportable commodities are produced.

Gone or suppressed are not only the Native peoples who were here, but most of the incredible variety of flora and fauna that was. Was there value to the prairie grasses and birds? Obviously not in the way one values 200 bushel an acre of corn.

Twenty years ago, Star Tribune columnist Dennis Anderson wrote eloquently about “empty skies.” He was talking about the vast number of waterfowl that used to fly these skies when all the water was here. Early settlers reported skies darkening in the fall when ducks were migrating. Was that worth something? Again, not in the way that 60-bushel soybeans have a dollar value.

Getting water off the land as quickly as possible so we can grow things has been critical. A great web of drainage ditches fed by underground tile accomplishes this. The fact that after eight inches of rain, we could be back in the field in a week indicates how successful that system is.

We live in the Minnesota River watershed. What was historically a meandering prairie river with gradual rises and falls in water level, has been charged with being the lead ditch. When it is forced to take all that water off our fields like it did this May, it becomes unrecognizable as a great torrent cuts at its widening banks.

The washing of fertilizer and farm chemicals away from their targeted place has been a problem. But the sheer volume of water displaced so rapidly has degraded all our waterways from the Sleepy Eye Creek near me to the Mississippi that ultimately takes the Corn Belt’s water south. A dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is a result of that.

In reading this, you can sense criticism of modern agriculture, the very thing I practice and profit from. Like I said, it’s complicated. Human beings are one of nature’s species. Finding how to be on Earth, respecting and caring for it, mindful of future generations, has been and always will be the great challenge for our species. The Bible says we are to have dominion over the Earth, not trash it.

Groups like the Minnesota River Congress are leading efforts to find creative ways to store water on the uplands, reducing that massive flow to the ditches and rivers. It won’t restore the prairie potholes, but it’s a good effort to imitate them and some of their benefits. Scott Sparlin keeps me involved in that. Scott’s a longtime friend who’s been working on Minnesota River issues for forty years.

We can’t go back two hundred years in time, but for a few days in May, it was useful to think about what was here. If nature is to be a partner and not the enemy, it’s good to know her original design for this place.

When Pam doesn’t shoo me away, I set the laptop on the kitchen table to write these. I’ve spent a lot of time in this room having lived here most of my life. A lot has changed: cupboards, appliances, floor. One thing hasn’t. The latest copies of The Journal and Sleepy Eye Herald Dispatch are nearby, on the table or the cupboard.

For as long as I have had consciousness, I’ve spent time with newspapers. It’s a habit, newspaper and coffee in the morning. “Habit” might not be as accurate as “addiction.” Taking my newspaper and coffee away in the morning would be kind of a torture.

The Herald Dispatch was a bi-weekly when I was young, published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In the early ’80s, it went weekly, in line with other small-town papers. The Herald Dispatch was created by a merger of the Sleepy Eye Dispatch and the Sleepy Eye Herald in 1908. I don’t remember that. But I can imagine someone saying, “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

At times, we subscribed to one of the Twin City papers and the Mankato Free Press. I often buy an Advance Press in Springfield, a Comfrey Times, or a Hanska Herald when I’m in those towns. Whenever we travel, I buy a local paper, a slice of time and place in wherever we happen to be.

Did I say I love newspapers?

Now I get the Star Tribune online. I read that on my phone which is OK. But it lacks the tactile sensation of the paper laid out on the table in front of me with a smear of coffee on it. A newspaper in physical form is a two-page collage that invites you to find other stories, pictures, and even ads that you weren’t intending to.

The Journal and Herald Dispatch still come in our mailbox. Both those parts of my life are undergoing transitions. Clay Schuldt is taking over as news editor of The Journal and David Forster as editor of the Herald Dispatch. They’re both young and talented, and this subscriber is excited to see their work. At least Clay and David are young to me, as are most people now.

Kevin Sweeney is going to try to retire at the Journal again. He came back in that position last fall when his first replacement didn’t pan out. Kevin came to New Ulm in 1985 after a stint with a big eastern newspaper. Well, it was the Albert Lea Tribune, so not too far east.

I always enjoyed Kevin’s writing. His reports on St. Patrick’s Day in New Ulm are classic. A problem with being editor is you don’t have time to write a lot. Being editor is like being an umpire. You only get noticed when you screw up.

Clay is a good writer, but I imagine he will do less of that. Clay still has my Sleepy Eye buddy Fritz Busch as a reporter and new hire Daniel Olson. Daniel’s just out of college so probably filled with piss and vinegar. I look forward to his writing. (I’m not sure I can say that; we’ll see if Clay leaves it in.)

Over here in the middle of the county, Deb Moldaschel is stepping down as editor at the Herald Dispatch, Deb served admirably in that position for nine years. She had done other things before coming to journalism late in her career. She brought a lot of life experiences to the role, especially Sleepy Eye experiences being a lifer.

It can’t be said enough how difficult a time this is for newspapers. Over 2,000 have closed in the United in the last twenty years. As such, Kevin and Deb deserve extra credit. Then there was that little matter called COVID they had to maneuver. 360 papers closed in the first year of the pandemic.

The Herald Dispatch had fallen under the holdings of Gannet a few years ago. Gannet is the largest newspaper chain in the country. Despite their legacy, they were known for “vaporizing” newspapers: gutting the staff, selling off assets, and shutting down those they couldn’t profit from. Two winters ago, CherryRoad Technologies bought a group of weeklies from Gannet including our Herald Dispatch. Indications are they actually mean for them to survive and even thrive.

David Forster is beginning as editor of the Herald Dispatch. I got to know David from the Pix Coffee Shop and Brewery and the Babe Ruth Centennial committee. David graduated from St. Mary’s in 1998 and is among a group around his age who have found their way back to Sleepy Eye. Partly because it’s a good place to raise kids and partly because it’s not a bad little town.

After high school, David went to St. Thomas. He fell into the journalism program there. St. Thomas has cranked out a number of prominent journalists. Kevin Sweeney graduated from there in 1973. A year later, this Sleepy Eye kid began as a journalism major there before ultimately being drawn back to the farm where I sit at the kitchen table.

David spent time at the Fargo Forum before working at the Virginian Pilot and Southside Daily, also in Virginia. He might be the most experienced journalist ever to work at the Herald Dispatch.

When I was young, I did part time work for the Herald Dispatch. Weeds started there and migrated to the Journal after some years off to raise kids. I admit, I still get a little excited when I see something I wrote appear on a page of print.

I may not have a lot of powers of persuasion, but I would encourage everyone I know to subscribe to their local newspaper. I am convinced that newspapers still have value and do things that social media can’t. There are 2,000 places that have lost theirs. If that happened here, I would have to drink coffee and stare at an empty kitchen table each morning.