Marilyn Hagerty
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Lights were out during a winter storm when triplets were born Jan. 31, 1935, in the old Bethesda Hospital in Crookston. On Saturday, the trio will mark their 80th birthdays. One of them is Jerome Birkeland, longtime resident of Grand Forks. The other two are his sisters, Joan Jacobson of Glyndon, Minn., and Jean Tweten of Appleton, Minn. This week's parties will be low key. But there will be a family party at the end of February, according to Jerome Birkeland's wife, Gayle. They are residents of Grand Forks and were married here in United Lutheran Church on Sept.
My idea of a very nice dinner is a petite filet done about medium with rosemary red potatoes. You mix in the company of friends and a glass of wine on a cold winter evening. And it is memorable. I enjoyed this dinner recently at the Grand Forks Country Club. You reach the place by finding radio station KNOX, south of the city, and taking County Road 6 east toward the Red River. In the dark of the night, you need to watch out for deer crossing the road. The country club is not hard to find. It has been out there for at least 50 years.
One of America's greatest sculptors was working on the new court house building in Grand Forks 100 years ago. But Andrew Genout's fame was unknown to many people who daily watched him completing the carving on the marble, the Herald reported. Genout, 45, started to learn his work as a boy of 16. Though his home was in Minneapolis in 1915, he was born in Cracow, Poland, which was then in a war zone. He had degrees from the University of Munich and Vienna. When he traveled to the United States, he was engaged in work on the New York state Capitol in Albany and the public library in Chicago.
His life is on hold. She is still his wife. He still loves her. But Michael Gallo finds that his wife is no longer his sounding board. She no longer responds to him. She has slipped into Alzheimer's disease. Most people can't or won't talk about it. Gallo, who is an assistant professor of teaching and learning at UND, was willing to talk about Alzheimer's over coffee the other day. He believes the disease now is hush-hush like cancer used to be — 20 or 30 years ago. Some people just can't talk about it.
Some Grand Forks children will move on to greater stages from the theatre workshops at Fire Hall Theatre. Others will tuck the memories away in their piles of learning. There is always a string of young people who go out from here to varying success on the national scene. One of them is Leonora Gershman Pitts, a dancer, singer and actress who grew up in Grand Forks. She spent most of her childhood here in local community theatre. She went on to New York University where she taught for three years after graduation.
Dear Shirley, Some people collect rocks. Some gather silver dollars. This time of year, we all collect pieces of paper. The annual collection of papers needed to file the income tax is under way. Businesses need to mail this stuff out before the end of January, and I have a pile on my desk already. I just coordinate it, Shirley. Then I take it out to an accountant for help. Although I have a helper, I know that tax assistance is sometimes hard to find around here.
If you read the Wall Street Journal or USA Today, you might be worried about the future of McDonald's. If you zip around greater Grand Forks on a cold January day, the McDonald's restaurants seem alive and well. In the past couple weeks, I have visited all four McDonald's restaurants in Greater Grand Forks. My first visit was to McDonald's on S. Washington Street, where I ordered a senior coffee for 47 cents one morning. And with it I had a sausage egg McMuffin. That was $2.99 and a whopping 370 calories. You know you have eaten, and I like the combination.
"Borders Without Bayonets" was the title of a story in the Saturday Evening Post 75 years ago. The article, written by Jack Alexander, focused on a neighborly relationship between Grand Forks and Winnipeg. It was carried in the Herald in January 1940. In it, the Post writer said he rented his car in Duluth. And before heading for the Canadian border, he headed westward to Grand Forks. "Its relations with Winnipeg are close, cordial and often hilarious," he wrote. "For an evening's fun, high-spirited Canadians may be satisfied with cinema and a saloon of a border village.
He's trim and erect. He has a passion for what he does. And that is teaching history at UND. He has, in fact, been teaching longer than anyone else at UND. Today Professor Gordon Iseminger, Ph.D., is branching out to lead a discussion at 2 p.m. in the Myra Museum. He will present an Entertaining History lecture entitled, "The Quartzite Border: Surveying and Making the North Dakota-South Dakota Boundary 1891-1892.'' There has to be a way of marking boundaries, Iseminger said. The Red River marks the eastern boundary of North Dakota.
Seems like only yesterday they graduated from Central High School. There were more than 500 of them in the class of 1965. And just recently, some of them started planning for a reunion here in Grand Forks. It will be held July 17, 18 and 19. Central High School classes were big back then, before the opening of Red River High School. And St. James High School was still running nearby. There were many students from Grand Forks Air Force Base and children of Boeing employees. So the 50th reunion will be for former St.