Feature Stories

14 Main Street

The heart and soul of every small town is its Main Street, captured here in images from 14 Minnesota communities.

22 Memorial Day

The war dead are remembered in a time-honored, patriotic program at a rural Minnesota cemetery.

On the cover

Photographer Ryan Ware spied this old pickup truck and its driver roll into Sleepy Eye. The driver parked, got out, and went into the barbershop for a trim..

departments
& columns

3 Calendar

4 Glory days - Photography is a snap

I REMEMBER WHEN I was first learning how to take photographs. I was in college and learned the craft by taking pictures with a 35mm camera. I knew what I was doing, sort of. I say sort of because I wasn’t an artist. You certainly would never have found my pictures for sale in a store or on the walls of a museum. But I was good enough to get paid for taking pictures for newspapers. One of my photos even won an honorable mention award in a photography contest. If I remember correctly, it was a picture taken at a youth wrestling tournament. I was pretty proud of that award at the time. It gave me validation that I knew what I was doing...

5 Moments in time: When girls finally existed

SOMEWHERE IT HAPPENED. An accumulation of soft smells, the “I like you” signaled across the classroom and the domestic, sensitive nature they presented called to the “man of the wild” within us. We never meant for girls to enter our lives...

8 Moments in time: Welcoming the joys of spring

SPRING HAS FINALLY arrived and a new season unfolds. For me, spring is a time of awakening, transformation, stimulation and hope. Winter has lost its grip. Daylight hours are longer. The sun, higher in the sky, heats up the land. The vernal equinox marks the astronomical or official beginning of spring on March 20 with equal daylight and nighttime hours.

10 Moments in time: A boy and a dare: Memories of ’63

WHILE GROWING UP on the east side of St. Cloud under the giant elms of Kilian Boulevard just two blocks from the high banks of the Mississippi River, life in the early ‘60s was a stable, happy-go-lucky time before the outbreak of turbulence from Civil Rights, Vietnam and Watergate upended the national applecart later in that decade of my adolescence.

24 Book reviews

Still Standing: The Story of SSG John Kriesel
By John Kriesel as told to Jim Kosmo
Beaver’s Pond Press, Inc., 2010

Carnegie Libraries of Minnesota
By Kevin Clemens
Demontreville Press, Inc. 2011

Conversations with the Land
By Jim VanDerPol
No Bull Press, 2012

26 Travel: Leader, Minnesota
Finding hog heaven in Leader

Have you ever seen that “deer in the headlights” look on someone’s face when you tell them something and they have no idea what you’re talking about? That’s how Jane and I looked at Judy when she suggested the third “One Nighter” destination. What? The pig races? Where? Leader? Where is that?

30 What’s in your boathouse?
Beautifully restored 1966 Cir Craft

THIS IS PROBABLY the most unusual boat I’ll ever feature. It’s a 1966 seven-foot Cir Craft, powered by a 1955 Mercury Mark 55 40-horsepower outboard. The boat (if you can call it that) is owned by Del Van Emmerick of Maple Grove, a talented vintage boat restorer who specializes in unique, early fiberglass marques, often the finned variety. He named the boat, “Getting Around.”

31 Crossword puzzle

32 Picture This
Submitted by Laura Hansen

Laura Hansen is a bookseller and poet who lives in her childhood home on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Little Falls where sunsets and pontoons abound. Laura grew up swimming, diving and waterskiing on the river and writes often about her home, her love of willow trees and of the water. Photos of the river’s many moments and moods often serve as inspiration for her writing.

Laura snapped this picture of some visitors to her diving dock. After an hour of belly flops, backflips and laughter, Mr. Mac and the kids climb back aboard the boat and the inflatable and enjoyed the sunset before heading home.

FYI If you’ve got a special photograph you’d like to share with the readers of Minnesota Moments, send it to us at E-mail: info@minnesotamoments.com or mail to: Picture This; Minnesota Moments, PO Box 436, Cold Spring, MN 56320. Photos will not be returned, unless accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope.