“I only missed 2 times in the 25 years that I delivered the mail,” was how Dorothy M. Jamnick of Aurora, MN explained to me her dedication to her job. “Both times the mail never made it to town. If it got here we got it out.”
Dorothy and I met on the plane ride to Duluth yesterday, where I was going to give a talk to the Northwest Wisconsin Economic Development Professionals Conference in Cable, WI. She is spry for her age at 80, although she needs a cane or wheel chair to get around. She enthralled me with her tales of the weather in Aurora, like “we thought nothing of being 40 below zero or snowstorms of several feet of snow.” Aurora is only 14 miles from Embarrass, one of those funny named towns that I wrote about last week, and often the coldest spot in the continental USA.
Her father and mother both immigrated to the USA from Slovenia, her dad, Ludovik Drobnick, in 1922. He set up his own blacksmith shop in 1928 in Aurora, evolving into engine repair. Dorothy lived away from Aurora for only 10 years when her husband did construction work around the country.
She was on her way back from visiting her only daughter, a retired teacher, in Flint, MI, who always sponsors the annual pie eating contest in Aurora for the kids. Aurora celebrated their 100th anniversary in 2003 and Dorothy is going to send me their Centennial book.
We had a wonderful conversation during our too short plane ride as she told me about Aurora and her love for the town. She wouldn’t tell me her name at first, so I asked her, “Are you in the witness protection plan?” She softened up a bit then and gave me her name and let me take her picture, after a bit of pleading with her. It’s people like Dorothy that make this such a wonderful journey, in my search of Boomtown.
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