West End News: November 5

The North Shore Commercial Fishing Museum is holding its fifth annual story telling dinner at Lutsen Resort Friday, Nov. 21 starting at 6 p.m.
 
This year, Art Fenstad will share his recollections about how telephone service first came to the North Shore.  His talk is titled, “Broadband, Then and Now,” referencing the similarity between the availability of telephone 100 years ago and the broadband internet that is being installed now.
 
It’s hard to imagine what a profound effect the telephone had on daily life in the West End back in the early days of the 20th century.  At that time a simple exchange of letters with someone in Duluth would take a couple of weeks at best. Suddenly, you could crank up your phone and ask the operator to connect you instantly.
 
When I first came to Tofte in 1957 the old crank phones and local operators were still a recent memory. For quite a few years after that, when you wanted to make a local call you only had to dial the last four digits. 
 
Here at Sawbill, we had a private telephone line that Sawbill Lodge had taken over from the CCC. It consisted of two bare, #10 steel wires on 12-foot cedar poles and was originally built to provide communication with the Kelso Mountain fire lookout tower.  The simple system could only handle one call at a time, so we had to have a party line with our neighbor.  One ring meant it was for them and two rings meant it was for us.
 
Every time there was a stiff wind, a tree would fall across the line causing the phones to go dead.  Someone would have to drive down the Sawbill Trail, locate the break and splice the heavy wires back together.  This crude system lasted until the late 1960s when a big windstorm finally knocked several miles of poles down and we started thinking about new fangled radiophones.
 
Now, we are just a few weeks away from abandoning those radiophones in favor of a high capacity wireless internet link and cell phones.  I foresee a time in the relatively near future when all communication will be done via portable devices talking directly to low orbit satellites.
 
Instant, universal and cheap access to limitless information and communication will doubtless have as profound an effect on our lives as the coming of the telephone did 100 years ago.
 
If you want to hear Art Fenstad tell his stories, call Lutsen Resort at 663-7212 and make your reservations by Nov. 12.  The event is a major fundraiser for the museum, so there is a charge, but it’s a small price to pay for hearing wonderful stories in a beautiful historic lodge while eating delicious food.  
 
In the time-honored tradition of “too many fun things to do in the West End on a given night,” the Birch Grove Community School is holding their annual fundraiser dinner, dance and silent auction Friday, Nov. 21 at Papa Charlie’s in Lutsen. 
 
This is a really fun event and important to the school, so the challenge will be how to support both events. My strategy is to get to the Birch Grove event early, because is starts at 4 p.m, have a beverage, pay the small fee for dinner but not eat it, visit, get my silent auction bids down and then head down to Lutsen Resort in time to hear Art’s stories and eat a delicious dinner.  As soon as that event starts to wind down, I’ll hotfoot it back up to Papa Charlies’s to dance to one of my favorite bands, “Cook County’s Most Wanted,” and pick up my fabulous auction purchases.
 
And when I get home, happy but tired, I’ll make a phone call and do some high speed browsing on the internet - just for fun.

(Photo courtesy of Forest History Society)