There’s something special about landmark anniversaries and the media coverage that they attract. We’ll have one such event on Monday. It’s the 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald. It sank to the bottom of Lake Superior in a fierce storm that ...

Editor’s Note: Because of the federal holiday and no mail delivery on Tuesday the Independent will not be publishing a printed paper on Tuesday. U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s column is running in the weekend edition ahead of the Veterans Day holiday. On this and every Veterans Day, our nation ...

Just about everyone | know has told me that love was the reason they married their spouse. Whether you are married or divorced, love was in there somewhere. Since love is the most often stated reason for marriage, it would be good to know what that is. What follows is what psychologists ...

My wife and I recently took a business trip to St. Cloud. She suggested that we leave early so that we could go antiquing. I learned long ago that “antiquing” is a code word for “shopping.” I used to think that “antiquing” meant making something new appear to be old. This is the ...

I noticed this week that Marshall’s Adult Community Center sponsored a presentation about the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It involved a tense two weeks when the world came close to nuclear war. The missile crisis was a major event in a much longer situation known as the Cold War, which ...

I spend an ungodly amount of time in a tractor cab during the fall. Outside of sleeping, eating at odd intervals, and doing maintenance, my life is lived in a cab. The tractor radio is my steady companion. Every spring and fall, I spend a lot more time listening to the radio than Pam. The ...