Northern Valley Beacon

  At one time Moline, IL, had two dime stores, Kresge's and Woolworth's, in the same block.  As the downtown retail area began to falter, many merchants moved to malls or just closed down altogether.  The newspaper I worked for was a prodigious consumer of coffee, so its employees were frequenters of places that sold coffee.  Woolworth's was a survivor of the business abandonment of the downtown area and it had a snack bar that sold coffee, so many a cup of coffee made it from the store into the editorial offices of the newspaper.  But there was a reason.   The cranky lady who ran the snack bar had a devotion to making special coffee, which was to make coffee that tasted as good as it smelled while brewing.   She said if they can make fine coffee in a church basement, they can make it in a five-and-dime store.  So she did.  And her recipe called for breaking eggs into the grounds, among other things she did to th...

"Can you believe that South Dakota once had two  Democrats, Tom Daschle and Tim Johnson, in the U.S. Senate.  And a Democrat, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin in the House of Representatives.  Now just saying the word Democrat  in the state could get you lynched."    The speaker of those words was a former college faculty member who once taught in South Dakota, but has moved on.  He was at a faculty convention chatting with former colleagues from South Dakota.  The politics of the state are a bit of a puzzle in that the state is totally red, so staunchly Republican that it seems like the Democratic Party has gone extinct as far as the state is concerned.   There is much conjecture about why the state became such a bastion of what now passes for conservatism.  My own observation comes from my role as the keeper of a donors list for the county Democratic Party and as a professor at a state university.  In those roles, I noted a that the stat...