Big Lemon at the Grimm County Fair

Neighborhood lemonade stands are nothing unusual.

And you’ve seen lemonade concessions in portable huts, shaped like lemons.

What you probably haven't seen is anything quite like the I Love Fruit! (ILF) lemonade stand at this year's Grimm County Fair. It’s shaped like a lemon - nothing new there - with a big porthole instead of the usual rectangular opening. And, the giant lemon is still attached to a section of stem.

It's portable: although with a main section that's 12 feet long by nine and a quarter feet wide, it needs a 'wide load' permit to go on Minnesota roads. This colossal ersatz citrus has built-in refrigeration for its stock of lemons, and air conditioning for the staff.



Loonfoot Falls native Cherrie Baum has been involved with ILF's development for over a year now. 'I'd love it if people use these at county fairs,' she explained. 'The ILF concession is probably best suited for amusement parks like Valleyfair, though, and other areas where the stand can stay in place year-round.'

The ILF stand at this year’s fair is a test-run, to see how people like it.

Each year around 30,000 people come to the Grimm County Fair to look over farm equipment, eat fried candy, enjoy the midway, and check out livestock: so the ILF stand should get a good looking-over.

Provided that Saturday and Sunday aren't like today.

About three inches of rain thoroughly washed the streets this afternoon: and kept people at the fair in the exhibit buildings.

Frustrations of a Small-Town Journalist

Daniel Nelson graduated from Loonfoot Falls High School back in 1999, got a degree in Journalism from Foggton University four years later, and started work here a couple weeks later. He did a good job: although Nelson clearly wanted to get past merely assisting the editors.

On his own time, he'd study Loonfoot Falls, looking for the story that would put his name on the journalistic map. He became convinced that there was an expose just waiting to be written about Rasmussen's department store, downtown.

There'd been a Rasmussen's in Loonfoot Falls for about a hundred years. The current owner's grandfather started the store as a clothing shop, and some of the fourth generation is working there, learning the ropes. And, as often as not, there are "SALE" signs in the windows.

Dan Nelson found the store's frequent sales quite suspicious.

After three years Nelson gave up, dropped his notes and a letter of resignation on Mr. Johnson's desk, and left town. His notes, weighing about two pounds, made their way to my desk this year. My hat's off to Dan Nelson: he'd done a particularly thorough job, not just collecting information about Rasmussen's, but analyzing the store's records.

Those sales? He'd discovered that Rasmussen's was getting the season's stock off the racks to make room for new merchandise. Not every store has sales that often, but there wasn't anything illegal, or unethical, about them.

Don't worry about Dan Nelson. He's now the editor of Morlock's Voice, down in Minneapolis.

"I am a Feather for Each Wind that Blows" and Other Cheerful Thoughts

A chill wind drives leaden clouds across the sky. Trees wave their branches: beckoning, perhaps, for sunlight and warmth to return; or gesturing supplications against the boreal force.

It's been downright chilly in central Minnesota this week. Winds like this and highs in the sixties are fairly normal during autumn: but this is mid-July.

I should have said, "average during autumn". "Normal" in Minnesota covers a lot of ground. As they say: Minnesota doesn't have a climate: it has weather.

I think a writer overstated it a bit when, discussing "the future" (as imagined in 1964), he described living in Antarctica this way:

"...you too can take up residence in a barren desert of ice and snow where it's dark six months of the year and blizzards howl as they blast flesh-cutting shards of ice through the subzero air.

"A bit like living in Minnesota, actually." (Tales of Future Past, Futurama '64 (4), David S. Zondy)

There are, after all, many calm days during a Minnesota winter, and the sun is above the horizon for several hours. Of course, you can see the sun best on those days when it seems too cold for clouds to form.

My reason tells me that summer will return, along with blue skies and sunshine are not merely dim memories from another life; legends of an age when joy and laughter had not forsaken humanity, when wind and rain didn't have the ducks walking; tales recalling that epoch when I didn't have a cold.