I recently had the fun of attending the local Rotary Club meeting. Rotary, for those of you who don’t know, is a service club of local professionals and businesspeople, whose mission seems to be networking coupled with public service. They meet for lunch weekly, and get involved in community projects from providing books to young readers to maintaining Fauley Park in Cloquet.

When I first got to town in 1999, then superintendent Russ Smith sponsored me in my membership, mostly as a favor to one of my bosses, Tom Skare. Russ interviewed me first, and one comment from that meeting stuck out...