Tuesday, March 8, 2005

Uffda Dubya!



John R. Bolton, candidate for US Ambassador to the United Nations. A Senate confirmation fight is guaranteed.



Bravo Judy!
The Lake Agassiz Kiwanis Club of Fargo has named Judy Siegle its sportsperson of the year. Siegle will receive the award Saturday at the Red River Valley Sportsman Show at the Fargodome.



Siegle, a native of Pelican Rapids, Minn., was a talented high school basketball player with aspirations to play in college. But she was seriously injured in a car accident – sustaining a broken neck and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Today, Siegle is one of the elite wheelchair racers in the world. She represented the United States in the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta and in the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney, Australia. She won two gold medals in the 1999 Mexico City Pan Am Games and holds national records in the 400-, 800-, 1,500- and 5,000-meter events for quadriplegic women. She was named the 2000 female athlete of the year by USA Wheelchair Track and Field. (The Forum)


Today’s ticket
Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton plays Pelican Rapids for the Minnesota Class 2A, Section 8 south boys basketball title. Coverage begins at 7 p.m.
WDAY (Channel 6)


The Vikings, behind DGF the entire game, by ten points in the fourth quarter, came from behind in the last ten seconds and beat the Rebels to the tape by a nose in a photofinish, 32-31. The secret to the Vikings success is that they have more than one horse and more than one pony. Now, if they just had a tad more confidence.......Congratulations boys.


The pelican's story
By Sonja Hegman, Fergus Falls Daily Journal
When driving into Pelican Rapids it's hard to miss all of the pelican replicas. The welcome sign to the city has a pelican on it and so does the sign at city hall. Almost everywhere you turn there's a sign of a pelican, especially in the downtown area. "The World's Largest Pelican," standing 15 1/2 feet tall, looks over the falls on the Pelican River next to the Mill Pond Dam. Called the most photographed object in Pelican Rapids in a 1981 Pelican Rapids Vacationland article, the metal and plaster bird is a sight to behold. Though the pelican is lonely these days as winter is here, once the snow melts and fishing starts, people will be seen fishing near the pelican in Mill Pond. Brothers Ted and Anton Resset constructed and welded the giant steel bird in 1957. The metal framework was then plastered by Alvin Anderson. According to "A Century at Pelican Rapids, 1883-1983," the concrete base of the pelican took 120 bags of cement to construct. Gilman Resset and a large crew of volunteers mixed the cement that was wheeled down Broadway to the river bank. The skeleton was moved from the Ressets' blacksmith shop with a boom truck from Lake Region Electric. In a 1983 Pelican Rapids Vacationland article, Truman Strand, the chairman of the committee that promoted the construction of the pelican, is quoted as saying, "The pelican is a part of all of us, no matter how long we've lived here." He and other members of the committee had discussed the project for several years.The Ressets also constructed the steel suspension bridge that spans the Pelican River. Pelican Rapids received its name from the large number of pelicans that nested at the upper rapids of the Pelican River.

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