It was by no means your typical Fourth of July in Cloquet this year. And, really, why should it have been, after all we’ve gone through in the past three years? We went from no events in 2020 due to the threat of the pandemic to a limited event in 2021. This year, the weather was the menace, but it created a rarity: two days of events.

This was the first year of Fourth organizing by us here at the Pine Knot News, under contract with the city. Call us biased, and certainly exhausted, but we are proud of how things went despite a wet chilly Monday and the cancellation of the parade and late...