Quinn Minute

A Minute About Groundhogs

I’m proud to welcome a “guest columnist” this week. Her name is Lola, and her paper receives the Quinn Minute regularly. I think you’ll enjoy her thoughts on a famous winter festival.

A Groundhog Minute is more like “seconds” for Punxsutawney Phil or Jimmy, as we lovingly refer to the two featured groundhogs here in Wisconsin.

Groundhog Day is just out there for those who live where the weather gets beastly cold, changes rapidly, and stays too long or not long enough. Does it mean six weeks more winter or instant spring? It is a groundhog thing.

Our newspaper has been broadcasting the results of this event for as long as I can remember. As of 2021, I can still remember many, many years.

I look for what Phil has seen, and I look for what Jimmy has announced, and then leave it up to readers to pick which they feel most happy about. Some folks here actually like winter.

Me? I stopped liking it at age ten. I think mainly because on the farm, our water froze. Hauling it was, well, let’s just say a flushing toilet can be a selling point…but barely..

A special note about the origin of Groundhog Day: It was in 1887 the first official one took place, and came to be named so by Clymer Freas, the editor of the newspaper in – yep, you guessed it – Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

Freas enlisted area businessmen and groundhog hunters, who were members of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, to help with this celebratory day. The first event, however, came to be the first “shadow” sighting…and six more weeks of winter.

The rest of the story has been Groundhog Day fun ever since!

Lessons from the School Years

At lunch a few weeks ago an old friend asked, “What lessons did you learn from your school years?”

Well, here are five that stuck to me like glue. I’ll share more with you in a future column.

1. Bells rule our life. The last high school bell, for instance, alerts us that we need to prepare for a career. Every year when the birthday bell rings, we’re reminded that time moves faster than a cheetah on a treadmill.

2. Don’t eat off your friend’s plate until he tells you it’s OK. In elementary school, I supplemented many lunches with somebody else’s dinner rolls.

3. Getting picked first on another student’s team means that the person recognizes your skill. Getting picked last means you should explore some of your other gifts.

4. Everyone can contribute. The tallest guy may be your basketball star. The smartest girl might be the school’s spelling champion. (My special gift: Teachers could point to me as a bad example.)

5. Never throw food. That’s true in the elementary lunchroom, or at the senior prom.

I learned in middle school that it’s hard to sling mashed potatoes much further than a couple of feet. Also, teachers do not appreciate gravy on their shirts.