Home Care In Belle Plaine, MN

BELLE PLAINE, Minnesota — Each Monday in Communities that KARE, we showcase unsung heroes that make a difference. This week we travel to Belle Plaine, where the local paper has been preserving the city's history for nearly 140 years.

"We are standing in the original building of the Belle Plaine Herald where my great-grandfather, Joseph Edward Townsend, started the newspaper," said current publisher Edward Daniel Townsend.

That happened back in 1882. The paper was an offshoot of a printing company founded around 1875.

The current Townsend gave our KARE 11 photographer a tour of the paper's archive where that first edition sits. It looks and feels like a time capsule.

Among stacks of past editions of the Belle Plaine Herald, we found old photography equipment and cameras from the 1920s and earlier. There were also stacks of old photos of the town and Life Magazines, highlighting some of the most critical moments in American history.

It's a collector's dream!

This fourth-generation family-owned paper is nearing its 140th anniversary and continues to reconnect its readers to a bygone era.

Even as the Herald covers current events, the paper also republishes photos and snippets from 30, 60, 90, even 120 years ago, bringing a voice back to eyewitnesses of history. "We've got people in Belle Plaine that have fought in almost every war," Townsend said.

In the weekly paper, you can find out everything from what the weather was like for the crops in 1901 to what the infamous outlaws, the Younger Brothers, did the day they left the Stillwater Prison.

It's not just significant headlines that are worth looking back on.

"Belle Plaine stopped baseball during the pandemic, and our sports page didn't have any sports. So, we then decided we would start from the first archived stories of baseball in Belle Plaine," Townsend said.

So the paper started republishing articles from 1892 and ran them every week until they got to the 1900s.

"You can tell [the reporter] was writing as a spectator and as a journalist because he would get passionate in his writing, and that was always entertaining to read as well," Townsend recalled.

While the Belle Plaine Herald sparks fascination for the past, the Townsend Family is also looking towards the future.

"I'm excited, nervous, and I have high expectations," Townsend said.

"I think the history of the newspaper is something a community can't afford to lose. What happens today you can read about a hundred years from now. If we're gone, it's over."

No matter what direction the paper goes, Townsend is adamant that it will stick to its founding principles.

"I think the Belle Plaine Herald has stayed true to what my great-grandfather said we would do; this paper is going to have integrity. It's going to be respectful, and we're going to work with the community. I'm also interested in preserving the history of the community as well," Townsend said.

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The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of appeals recently upheld attorney sanctions that were imposed by the federal district court. In Matthew A. Kezhaya v. City of Belle Plaine, Minnesota, decided August 25, the court concluded that the lower court had not abused its discretion when it concluded that plaintiffs filed a second frivolous lawsuit.

In 2017, a monument was installed at Veterans Memorial Park in Belle Plaine. It depicted a soldier kneeling by a cross-shaped grave marker. After complaints, the monument was removed, but then the city created a free-speech area and reinstalled in it.

The Satanic Temple — a non-theistic organization that uses satanic imagery to promote skepticism of social norms — wanted to erect a monument at the park as well. It was to be a black cube with a pentagram and helmet on top.

The monument — which the Satanic Temple asserted was the first monument from its group placed on public grounds — caught national attention and sparked local debate. After a battle over religion and free speech, the city canceled the free speech zone. The monument was removed once again.

In 2019, the Satanic Temple sued the city, arguing that it had opened a limited public forum for a Christian monument but then closed the forum for the purpose of excluding the satanic monument. It alleged that the city violated the federal and state constitutions and breached their contract.

The parties each moved for judgment on the pleadings. The district court dismissed nine of the Satanic Temple’s 10 counts for failure to state a claim. After the district court’s deadline to amend pleadings, the Satanic Temple moved for leave to amend and reassert and add claims. However, a magistrate judge denied the motion for leave, finding that the Satanic Temple did not show “good cause” to amend after the deadline and determining that it would be inappropriate for the Temple to assert new constitutional claims so late into the litigation.

But before the Satanic Temple objected to this order, it filed another lawsuit in district court. This action reasserted the constitutional claims that were dismissed and added state constitutional claims. The city moved to dismiss, which the court granted, claiming that the suit was barred by res judicata. The court characterized the second lawsuit as “frivolous” and expressed its displeasure that it wasted resources.

The city moved for Rule 11 sanctions against Matthew Kezhaya is an attorney at Crown Law who represented the Satanic Temple. The city sought $33,886.60 in attorney’s fees. The court sanctioned Kezhaya. It concluded that the Temple’s “repeated disregard of court orders, suggests that a mere reprimand from the Court would be insufficient to deter similar misconduct in the future.”

Kezhaya argued that the district court abused its discretion when it imposed sanctions. “We brought all of our claims in the first complaint,” Kezhaya claimed. “Judge said that they were factually deficient and we needed to plead more facts. We asked for leave to plead more facts. We were told ‘no.’ So what do we do? We don’t abandon the issue. As a lawyer, I am not supposed to abandon issues for my client. That’s my job.

“And for that, I got sanctioned,” Kezhaya asserted. “This was wrong. It was an abuse of discretion.”

Monte Mills, an attorney at Greene Espel who represented the city, stated “By filing the second complaint, the appellant disregarded binding 8th Circuit precedent and attempted to thwart the district court’s preclusive judgment that the motion to amend the complaint was denied.”

“The test for duplicative litigation is satisfied here,” the court concluded. “The Temple attempted to maintain two actions against the City based on the same facts.”

“Insofar as Kezhaya and Temple disagreed with the magistrate judge’s ruling on leave to amend, their recourse was to appeal to the district court (and potentially to the court of appeals), not the start a new lawsuit,” the court added. “The district court properly criticized the Temple’s effort to use duplicative complaints to evade the magistrate judge’s ruling or to expand its procedural rights.”

Nor was the court persuaded that the district court awarded sanctions without detailing support for the amount. “The court examined the work performed and did not authorize a blank check,” the court affirmed.

Although the city claimed that those fees were incurred when responding to the complaint in the second lawsuit, the district court found that some of the work duplicated work done for the first lawsuit. Therefore, it reduced the amount by 50% and ordered Kezhaya to pay $16,943.40 to the city. That amount has now been affirmed.

FAIRMONT — The No. 2-seeded Fairmont Cardinals play the unseeded Belle Plaine Tigers in a 10 a.m. Class AA state quarterfinal baseball game on Tuesday at Dick Putz Field in St. Cloud.

“These kids are a fun group to coach,” Fairmont head coach Don Waletich said. “Belle Plaine has been to the state tournament before (1994) and is a well-coached team. They have good pitchers and good defense, so it will be a challenge to score runs.

“We have players with state tournament experience from last year, which is a benefit in these games. They won’t be nervous. I think it helps playing early since the game is fresh in their minds and the kids don’t have to sit around all day thinking about the game. It should also be a little cooler at that time of day and won’t be as hot. We played at this time last year.”

Fairmont is making its 12th trip to the state tournament. The other season the Cardinals made it: 1963, ’64, ’68, ’71, ’75, ’93, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2022 when they beat Roseau 7-0 in the state championship game.

This is Waletich’s second time making the state tournament as a head coach.

The other three Class AA quarterfinal games Tuesday are unseeded Perham (20-4) vs. No. 3 seed Foley (23-5) at 12:30 p.m.; unseeded St. Agnes (23-4) vs. No. 1-seed Esko (23-1) at 3 p.m.; and No. 5 seed Cannon Falls (21-5) vs. No. 4-seed Holy Family Catholic (18-5) at 5:30 p.m. The quarterfinals are all played at Dick Putz Field.

“All of the teams that made it to the state tournament are good,” Waletich said. “You need some breaks along the way to win it all. We don’t think about winning back-to-back state titles. We take it one practice at a time and one game at a time.”

The semifinal games are 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Wednesday at Dick Putz Field, and the state championship game is scheduled at 1 p.m. Friday at CHS Field in St. Paul, home of the St. Paul Saints and Hamline University’s baseball team.

The Cardinals bring a 22-2 record to the state tournament and will be going for a second straight state title.

Belle Plaine is 18-6 and finished second to Norwood Young America in the Minnesota River Conference.

Belle Plaine’s top hitter is Jake Brandenburg at .367, followed by Ted Hohn at .333. The Tigers’ top two pitchers are Ted Hohn and Hunter Hoen, who have a 0.33 and 0.34 ERA in 42 2/3 innings pitched and 62 1/3 innings pitched, respectively. Hoen is 6-2 with one save on the season, while Ted Hohn is 7-0.

Offensively, the Cardinals put a lot of runs on the board as their lineup is potent from top to bottom.

Among the starting nine, the top four in the lineup lead the way. Leadoff hitter Landen Meyerdirk has a .381 batting average (32-for-84) with nine doubles and two triples. He’s scored 32 runs in the Cardinals’ 24 games.

No. 2 batter Lincoln Becker’s batting average is .391 (36-for-92), which leads the team among starters. He has scored 24 runs, hit four doubles and two triples. Becker also leads the team with 32 RBIs.

No. 3 batter Nate Soelter carries a .375 batting average (30-for-80) with five doubles, five triples and two home runs. He’s scored 25 runs and driven in 17.

Clean-up hitter Jack Kosbab has a .295 batting average (23-for-78), collecting four doubles. He has driven in 21 runs and scored 19.

Those four hitters are followed by Cooper Steuber (.250 batting average), Brendan Schmidtke (.213 batting average), Levi Pooley (.243 batting average), Josh Soelter (.317 battting average) and Joseph Hackett (.237 batting average).

The Cardinals have scored 204 runs — 8.5 runs per game, and has a .298 team batting average. Their potent lineup puts a lot of pressure on opposing pitchers. They have scored in double figures in eight of their 24 games with a high of 21 against Blue Earth Area on April 13.

In the six sectional games, the Cardinals have outscored their opponents 35-13.

The Cardinals use their very good team speed as they have hit an amazing 34 doubles and 12 triples, compared to only three home runs. The Cardinals have 56 stolen bases on the season.

In sectional elimination play, Fairmont trailed Paynesville Area 3-1, but scored five runs in the fifth inning in a 6-3 win. Against Luverne in the finals, Fairmont scored a combined seven runs from the fifth inning and later to beat Luverne twice, 6-4 in 10 innings and 3-2 in eight innings.

Defensively, the Cardinals have committed only 28 errors and during the section championship games against Luverne did not make an error.

Hackett is a wall behind the plate, throwing out seven of 11 runners attempting to steal a base, which is 64 percent.

On the mound, players who have a decision on the playoff roster are Jensen Livesay (1-0), Becker (2-0), Meyerdirk (2-0 with one save), Nate Soelter (6-1), Schmidtke (5-0 with one save) and Ben Moeller (6-0). The team ERA is 1.46. They have struck out 130 batters in 158 2/3 innings this season.

A few months ago, I began to feel a fatigue that would linger and tumble into the rest of my day. There is a baseline level of exhaustion that comes with kids and work and friends and life. And anything after age 40 seems more arduous, honestly.

But this fatigue had spilled into my other obligations and my lengthy task lists had seemed impossible to complete by the end of the day. While I always rise early enough to do what's necessary to start my day, those pre-sunrise awakenings were never my preference.

I am a bona fide night owl.

Some days, I'd get up at 5:30 a.m. or earlier. Other days, I'd beat the kids' alarm by a few minutes. On weekends, I just tried to recoup any rest that I'd lost during the week, an often unsuccessful task with work and family responsibilities.

Because of my work in the sports world, however, I'm an expert at getting to the airport by 4:30 a.m. and catching a 5:45 a.m. flight. But again, I have to do that. I would never get up early simply because I believed it offered a real benefit.

Plus, I resented the morning people. You know the type. Their early mornings are a whole persona. By the time the rest of us hit snooze, they've already gone to the gym, read their favorite books and finished a few paintings.

There are conflicting studies on the value of rising early and I also don't adhere to any concept that says one philosophy works for everyone. But a book from the early 1900s made me consider the possibility that a better morning might lead to a more fruitful day for me.

"The obvious thing to do is to circumvent your ardor for your ordinary day's work by a ruse," said Arnold Bennett in "How to Live on 24 Hours a Day," published in 1910.

"Briefly, get up earlier in the morning. You say you cannot. You say it is impossible for you to go earlier to bed [at night] — to do so would upset the entire household. I do not think it is quite impossible to go to bed earlier at night. I think that if you persist in rising earlier, and the consequence is insufficiency of sleep, you will soon find a way of going to bed earlier. But my impression is that the consequence of rising earlier will not be an insufficiency of sleep. My impression, growing stronger every year, is that sleep is partly a matter of habit — and slackness."

That did it for me.

I decided that I would wake up at 5 a.m. and work out.

The first few days felt silly. I sat in bed wondering what I'd done to my life. I felt like a trend-chasing fraud or some self-help-guru acolyte. It did not feel like me. "Who am I doing this for?" I thought one morning as I sat in bed.

My body craved the night.

It's all I knew.

Even in high school, I would stay up on Saturday nights to watch "Saturday Night Live" and "Showtime at the Apollo." And I have old-school playlists filled with Hall & Oates and the Doobie Brothers only because of those late-night infomercials where they promised you 10 CDs for five easy payments of $9.99.

But the mornings began to grow on me.

When I got up and worked out, I had a burst of energy and peace throughout the day. By the time I'd dropped off the kids at school, I felt like I'd already completed a major task.

At 9 a.m., I'd suddenly felt victorious and the workday had not yet commenced.

Sometimes, instead of exercising, I'd just carve out time to read or finish a project. Those mornings, I've found, are great opportunities to fold laundry while I watch "Martin" reruns. And then there were times when I would just relax and think about the day ahead. It was a calming experience.

After a few weeks, I began to feel as if I'd somehow hacked the day and had a jump-start on the world.

All those smiling, energetic morning people? Well, I could understand their mojo. I had momentum by sunrise and my tasks seemed easier to complete. I had more focus. But the fatigue had also switched to another portion of the day.

By 7 p.m. or so, my body wanted to prepare for bed. I'm still working on that adjustment. I have witnessed the benefits, however, of an earlier and, more importantly, consistent start to my day.

I'm not batting 1.000 here.

I still have those snooze-filled mornings but now, when I miss a 5 a.m. alarm, I always feel like tomorrow offers an opportunity to try again and regain the momentum I'd missed the previous day.

I don't know if a 5 a.m. start works for everyone. But I have noticed a difference.

I've always searched for a slice of stillness amid the chaos each morning.

I guess I just had to get up earlier to capture it.

Myron Medcalf is a local columnist for Star Tribune and recipient of the 2022 Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for general column writing.

The Satanic Temple has lost its court battle with the city of Belle Plaine four years after the religious group attempted to put a monument in the local Veterans Memorial Park.

The temple asserted in two separate lawsuits that the southwest metro city had violated its rights to free speech and free expression of religion, among other objections. But a federal judge dismissed most of those allegations in 2020 and decided in September that the city didn't breach a contract when it revoked the temple's permit to install the monument.

Belle Plaine is pleased with the court's decision, said Dawn Meyer, city administrator.

"Don't pick a fight you can't win — and that's what happened here," City Council Member Paul Chard said. "It's too bad it had to get this far."

The court's ruling came by summary judgment, not a trial.

Matthew Kezhaya, the Satanic Temple's attorney, said that the Massachusetts-based religious group has filed notices to appeal both the first case and a second, similar case that it filed.

"Our case was never heard," he said. "If the public silently watches this miscarriage of justice happen to the Satanic Temple, then it disempowers itself to credibly object when it happens to other religious minorities."

© OpenStreetMap contributors

The battle began about four years ago after a monument was installed at Veterans Memorial Park depicting a soldier's silhouette kneeling by a fallen comrade's cross-shaped grave marker. The monument garnered complaints for its religious overtones.

The city then took the memorial down, but new protests prompted Belle Plaine to create a free-speech area in the park and put it back up. The Satanic Temple commissioned a monument of a black cube with pentagram inscriptions and an upturned helmet on the top to be displayed as a counterpoint.

It was to be the first Satanic Temple monument on public property in the country, but Belle Plaine leaders canceled the free-speech zone — a "limited public forum" — after repeated protests by religious groups and free speech advocates and revoked the temple's permit. The statue of the soldier, who some called "Joe," came down.

The Satanic Temple sued the city in 2019, asserting that its rights were violated by the city revocation of the permit. Temple officials said they had paid to have the monument built and that its value was about $35,000.

The temple, which has chapters around the world and one in Minnesota, says its members don't actually worship Satan but advocate for a distinct separation of church and state.

In August 2020, a federal court dismissed nine of the 10 counts in the Satanic Temple's suit, including several alleging free speech and free exercise of religion violations. The lawsuit's remaining count alleged that the city broke a promise when it revoked the permit.

The "promissory estoppel" claim required the temple to prove that the city made a "clear and definite promise" to the Satanic Temple, that the city intended the temple to rely on the promise, that the temple did so with negative results and that the promise must be kept to "prevent an injustice."

The judge found that Belle Plaine made a promise but said the temple didn't rely on it because the group had contacted an artist to make the monument before receiving a permit.

Belle Plaine fulfilled its promise, the judge said, since the city never promised to reimburse the temple and the temple received ample donations to fund the monument. The temple didn't make a "compelling case" that its reputation was hurt or that the monument isn't fulfilling its purpose because it's not displayed in Belle Plaine, the judgment said.

Since the temple wasn't financially hurt and there was no loss of reputation, enforcing the promise isn't necessary, according to the order.

The judge also agreed with the city's request to penalize the temple for filing a second lawsuit that echoed claims that already had been dismissed in the first case.

The judge ruled that the temple should pay the city's legal fees for the second suit, which was dismissed, as a penalty. The legal fees still are being determined.

Erin Adler • 612-673-1781