I see I was tag teamed by Bob Tammen and Reid Carron in the March 14 Timberjay. Please let me respond.

I’ll only say this to Mr. Tammen. Bob, for a guy who made a nice living and got a nice pension from the mines, your babbling is both mind boggling and embarrassing.

Now, on to Mr. Carron. It’s so nice that our Twin Cities savior has “set forth some facts” in order to convince us poor Rangers that we never really were a mining community. Reid says we’ve just been “on life support” for 132 years.

Life support, wow! The Range built America. Our ore won two world wars. Ely sent more men per capita to fight in world war two than any other town in America—and we were just “on life support”. For six generations, people from Ely to Grand Rapids have been mining for a living. We fought the Steel Trust and won good wages and benefits for ourselves. We fought for a decent education for our children. Our schools have educated generations of Rangers who have gone on to fame and fortune all across the USA and abroad. Every day on the Range, our people go to work to dig our ore, teach our kids, plow our roads, build our homes, heal our sick. Then they go home to raise the next generation of hard-working Rangers, and all the while, we were just “on life support”! I think the Honorable Mr. Carron owes us an apology.

Now that I got that off my chest, I must confess that Reid’s facts continue to confuse me. He says “90 people have volunteered to work at Sustainable Ely to meet and educate the public”. So what? Here’s my fact. Everyday,  90 Elyites drive to Babbitt, Virginia, Mt. Iron and Eveleth to work in the mines. That’s what keeps Ely going. Reid educates us by pointing out that Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness has 2,400 supporters, “some of those people live and work elsewhere but they come to Ely...(and) spend their money at local businesses”. So what? Would Reid like to compare how much they spend in Ely’s economy compared to the thousands of retired and active miners who have lived in and around Ely all their lives?

Folks, for anyone to even suggest that we can exist up here without mining is absurd. Anyone who tries to deny the fact that we’ve been a mining community for 132 years is just plain nuts. Mr. Carron, me, Mayor Peterson, Gerald Tyler, and the 90 percent of the population up here that supports mining don’t “pine for a mythical mining industry of the past”. We see evidence of our mining industry everyday as we drive by Northshore, Minorca, Minntac and UTAC’s mines. It’s you and your allies who pine for a mythical “Sustainable Ely” that never was.

Finally,  I really don’t care how Albert Einstein defined insanity. My definition of insanity is a lawyer who continually tries to convince us not to believe what we see with our own eyes, but to, instead, believe his twisted “facts”.

Tom Rukavina

Pike Twp., Minn.