SCHMID: LOOKING BACK FROM THE LEFT COAST - AUGUST 31, 2013
Tempest in a teapot? A wild-eyed man wants to take over the ND town of Leith (pop 19), become mayor and rename the town Cobbsville. It’s said that white supremacist Craig Paul Cobb (61) has acquired 13 lots in Leith and wants to turn it into an all-white enclave. But wait, aren’t Leith and Grant County (2,400) already an all-white enclave? Terrified Leith residents claim to have been unaware they were being taken over until aroused by a reporter from the Southern Poverty Law Center. In case you want to intervene, you will find Leith about 35 miles south of New Salem, which is on I-94 (turn when you see Salem Sue, the big fiberglass cow).
The dangers lurking in Leith juiced political activists. Inveterate letter write Vicki Voldal Rosenau of Valley City solicited donations for the Southern Poverty Law Center crediting them with making Nodaks “aware of the evil festering in Leith.”
AFBs in the region are going through a rough patch. Minot AFB had a series of missteps in recent years; in June, a commander was relieved after an exceptionally poor review of his missile wing. A commander at Malmstrom AFB in Great Falls was removed in August for similar reasons. As mentioned last week, Ellsworth AFB in Rapid City lost a $300 million bomber at a practice area in southeastern Montana.
We are seeing some reversal of business that flowed to China. Wages have risen in China and the delay and expense of shipping from there is causing second thoughts. Ultra Green is a company that makes food containers and other products from sugar cane in China. Later this year, the company will be making those products from wheat straw in a former pasta plant in Devils Lake and expects to hire 100 employees.
Northern Plains Nitrogen is a proposed $1.5 billion fertilizer plant near Grand Forks. The chairman of N. Plains says the project is on track. They have purchased a site, secured a supply of natural gas and arranged distribution for the product. Natural gas represents 80 percent of the production cost of nitrogen. The next step is financing -- those plans will proceed full speed after September 23, a date when the SEC loosens rules for promoting start-ups.
A former Minot law officer is imprisoned for life in the “Alcatraz of the Rockies,” a high security prison in Colorado, with such famous criminals as serial bomber Ted Kaczynski and shoe bomber Richard Reid. In 1987, Richard Lee McNair was surprised while burglarizing a Farmers Union elevator in Minot. He killed one man and badly wounded another. McNair was arrested and began a series of dramatic escapes from the Minot jail, the ND penitentiary and a federal prison in Louisiana. After being on the loose for 18 months he was caught and sent to the Colorado facility. McNair’s escapades are described in a new digital book, “The Man Who Mailed Himself Out of Jail” by Canadian crime reporter Byron Christopher.
Horton, Heskin and Harding (and old age) were features of a 3-car crash on Hwy 52 north of Jamestown. It was a nice Sunday afternoon when Kent Horton (92) of Jamestown changed lanes and struck the vehicle of Alisa Heskin (20) of New Rockford. Horton’s car spun out of control and hit a vehicle driven by Delon Harding (63) of Carrington injuring and hospitalizing Harding and his passenger, June Larson (83) of Carrington.
The Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) are administered statewide to measure student ability. The tests have become tougher in conformity with new national Common Core standards. Only 60% of Minnesota students have reading and math proficiency. Minnesota’s gap between white students and minority students is one of the largest in the nation. In St. Paul, black students were 47 percentage points behind their peers in reading.
The president of the St. Paul teachers union has a solution -- stop the MCAs. Additionally, she doesn’t want to look at recent test scores: "The test results cannot feel more irrelevant at this point. We're starting a school year wanting to look forward, not backward to scores from last April." As you can imagine, reaction from the business community, which hires graduates, is a little different. A spokesperson for the Minnesota Business Partnership said, “proficiency tests are the only objective accountability measure parents have to judge schools. The fact that someone wants to take that away from the public is shocking.”
Regulators from a number of states are shutting down Western Sky Financial located in Timber Lake, S.D., the southern edge of the Standing Rock Reservation. The company makes short-term, high-rate loans online and attempts to avoid state usury laws by hiding behind tribal sovereignty. In ND, the Turtle Mt. Chippewa in Belcourt do something similar in a company called BlueChip Financial, making loans with an average annual interest rate of 300 percent. The tribes operate under their own banking laws.
Uggh! The water is not fit to drink -- it tastes and smells awful. At least that was the reaction of some Spirit Lake tribal members to their new water system. The Red Cross was so sympathetic it sent 4,300 bottles of water to the reservation. It turns out the new water is actually cleaner and safer than the old drinking water which had unacceptable levels of arsenic -- many tribal members prefer the old taste. The Red Cross will not pull their donation and will help educate residents on the safety of the new water.
Orton Birchfield (91) ditched his real name because he was a salesman and customers couldn’t pronounce his last name. When he was 35 he petitioned a court to change his name from Bjerkager to Birchfield. Orton was a member of the “Greatest Generation” and a submariner in the Pacific during WWII. Born in Colfax, ND, he lived and worked all over the country, but brushed his ND roots in 1979 when he and his wife moved to Lawrence Welk Village in Escondido, CA. Orton lived there for over a quarter of a century before returning home to ND where he spent the last year of his life at the Veteran’s Home in Lisbon.
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