Bob Collins
James Robertson, 56, works at a factory in Rochester Hills, Michigan. He takes a bus part of the way from Detroit and then commutes daily by foot.
Twenty-one miles.
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MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
People doing good
For a week, the Rochester Post Bulletin reports, Jadalynn Haugen debated whether to spent her $20 of birthday money on candy, or donate it to the Plainview Fire Department to help buy equipment that can resuscitate pets caught in a fire? Read more →
Sometime in June or July, if things work out as she hopes, Maxine Renning of Los Angeles will ride her bike into Minneapolis. She admits she’s not much of a cyclist but by then she will be. She’ll be riding from Baltimore and will stop here on her way to Seattle as part of a 4,000-mile ride to support people fighting cancer. That seems to be her specialty.
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Richard Rhodes, 73, died alone in his Winona apartment last month. He had no family. He left no will. If not for a funeral home director, no one would have noticed his passing. Read more →
George Ewing, 84, has died, but a lot of people in poor countries are eating because he lived. Read more →
A good person has to feel for Linda Bowar of Rochester, who did something about the fact that there are too many kids without appropriate winter gear for Minnesota’s dark months. Or, at least, she tried to do something.
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Jill and Brian Dejewski have given up life in a two-story home and moved to a trailer park because more than half the people in their community live below the poverty line. Read more →
Lauren Hill, the Cincinnati woman who is dying from a brain tumor, has reached another goal. The basketball player wanted to raise a million dollars for cancer research by the end of the year. In the last minutes of a telethon, someone threw $100,000 in. Read more →
There’s plenty of depravity in the world, but the Duluth News Tribune today offers a timely reminder that there are still the Wayne Hoffmans among us. Read more →
You may recall the story in this space a week or so ago about the widow who dropped her wedding and engagement rings in a Salvation Army red kettle in Massachusetts, and the woman who bought them for $21,000 with the goal of returning them to the original owner.
The only thing that needed to happen is locating the woman.
That has now been done and the rings have been returned. Read more →
Your daily dose of sweetness today comes from the NewsCut ancestral homeland. Read more →
We already knew that Marine on St. Croix might be Minnesota’s most wonderfully quirky Minnesota town, but Jana Shortal’s KARE 11 report last night on how it’s responded to a woman with cancer provides additional proof. Read more →
We wrote about a woman who dropped her wedding and engagement rings in a Salvation Army red kettle. Today’s update on the story comes from the “one good turn” file. Read more →
Sophie Fellows, 9, was playing in a holiday concert in Vermont last week when she suddenly was overcome by a headache. She couldn’t finish the performance.
Sophie is in love with music and, in particular, the violin.
And her friends and music teacher are in love with her. Read more →
Cindi Grady’s 2002 Hyundai was in bad shape, what with the shattered passenger side window, the driver’s side window that wouldn’t go up, the damaged hood that was fastened down with somebody’s belt, and the bent frame that made it drive like a crab. Read more →