Hosted by the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County, Roger Quam presented his newest novel The Teacher at a public reading at the Hjemkomst Center on April 13 at 2pm. About thirty-five people attended to hear him read a passage from the book and discuss how he came to develop this story of local trauma into a work of fiction. As did a number of Hawley-area people, Quam grew up hearing about the scandalous shooting of a rural school teacher in front of her class in March of 1913.

A disturbed spurned lover shot the young woman while her terrified students watched in horror. Those sixteen students grew up telling the story to their children and their grandchildren. Quam heard the story and, having a penchant for historical research, tracked down the facts as far as they were known. HCS archivist Mark Peihl sent him newspaper articles that covered the event. Frustrated by the lack of detail, Quam developed a fictional account with a different ending. He does not pretend it is a history; there were too many gaps that he has never been able to fill.

The real teacher lived, carrying one of the bullets inside for the rest of her life. In his fictional account, Quam has the teacher paralyzed and later romantically involved with the doctor who treats her. In real life, she never married. For Quam, his experience with the story carries a valuable lesson: get those important stories recorded. Whether written out or audio or video-recorded, the stories of our past must be preserved in some form. HCS Executive Director Maureen Kelly Jonason states, “It is a prime example of how we fail to realize we are making history every day.”

Quam would love to have a class photo or any stories that anyone may have tucked away in memory. He lives in Sioux Falls and can be reached at rgmq7@msn.com

His books are for sale in the Heritage Shop at the Hjemkomst Center: 218-299-5511, Ext. 6731.

The reception for the 2013 Fargo Moorhead Visual artists Big Show kicked off with a bang on April 16 as regional artists and art connoisseurs came to view the multimedia exhibit. The mission of the FMVA is to promote and support quality Visual Arts in the Fargo-Moorhead area by educating and encouraging visual artists and their communities.

Over 50 artists of all ages and backgrounds have their work displayed at the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County at the Hjemkomst Center and many more came to the reception to show their support. Local artists gathered in the reception area for food and refreshments and talked to guests about their works—everything from traditional paintings like Winona and Jason by Laura Youngbird, and Rude II, a screen print by Kent Kapplinger, to multimedia sculpture like Trashy Bridal Gown by Suzanne Williams, and OVO by Terry Mallick. The exhibit is open to the public until June 3. For more information on FMVA events visit FMVA.org.

Poster advertising the 1940 US Census. National Archives.

By Archivist Mark Peihl
The National Archives will release the 1940 US Census Population Schedules this spring. Census records hold a wealth of information about families and individuals and are among the most valuable tools available to genealogists. This new treasure trove may help family historians surmount some of the “brick walls” they may have run into.

The US Constitution mandates that the federal government count each of us citizens every ten years. A lot rides on census information: representation in Congress, distribution of tax money, etc. The first census was done in 1790, the most recent in 2010. Information recorded varies from one census to the next, but much of it is very private. Federal law requires that the information about individuals and families be kept secret for 72 years. The most recent census currently available, 1930, was released in 2002. The official “census date” for the 1940 census was April 1. April Fools Day falls on a Sunday this year, so the schedules won’t be available until 9 am Eastern Time (8 am Central) Monday, April 2, 2012.

Past census schedules were released on microfilm, but the new release will be available online. The National Archives has scanned all 3.8 million pages of the census records as digital image files. These files will be available for free download from the National Archives website (www.archives.gov/research/census/1940/) at 8 a.m. April 2.

There will be no name index at first. Organizations like the popular subscription-based genealogy site ancestry.com and non-profits like the Mormon Church’s familysearch.org will be getting access to the digital files the same time as the rest of us. Both of the above have announced plans to begin indexing right away April 2.

In the meanwhile, the census records will be arranged by enumeration district (ED), then by family in order of visitation. In order to locate an individual or family, you will have to know in which ED they lived, and then page through that ED’s records until you locate them.

Large cities can be divided into many hundreds of EDs. Things are a bit simpler in rural areas. Clay County’s forty-six 1940 census enumeration districts (numbered 14-1 through 14-46) largely follow township and village boundaries. The city of Moorhead is divided into eight EDs. Genealogy guru Steve Morse has developed a handy ED finder/tutorial, stevemorse.org/ed/ed.php. The site allows researchers to search for a location and find its ED number. Eventually (after the census release) your search results on Morse’s page will link directly to the first page of the appropriate ED records.

Most of the questions asked in 1940 are familiar to genealogists: name of each person, their relationship to the head of household, race, gender, age and place of birth. But several new questions reflect the nation’s difficult economic situation at the time. Taken at the tail end of the Great Depression, the country’s unemployment rate still stood at 15% in April 1940. Enumerators (the census counters) asked folks 14 and older if they had been unemployed during the week of March 24-30, or employed by a government relief agency like the Works Progress Administration or the Civilian Conservation Corps and other employment questions.

They asked about income, amount of wages and salaries earned in 1939 and whether the individual had received more than $50 from income other than wages and salaries. These questions proved controversial. According to National Archives research specialist Diane Petro, “Republican Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire mounted a campaign to force the administration to delete the questions. It was unsuccessful, but a compromise allowed individuals who did not want to give the information to the enumerator to send in a confidential card listing their income.   A ‘C’ (for confidential report) will appear in the upper right hand margin opposite the name on the census record.  In the end, only 2% of the population did not answer the question.”

The government was also curious about Americans’ mobility, asking “In what place did this person live on April 1, 1935?” This question may prove very helpful to genealogists trying to track their ancestors’ movements.

Some census responses are so off the wall that researchers are often left to ask, “Where did they get this stuff?” Beginning in 1880 the enumerators were instructed that if they found no one home, “then it shall be lawful for the enumerator to obtain the required information, as nearly as may be practicable, from the family or families, or person or persons, living nearest to such place of abode.” (I can only imagine what some of my neighbors might have reported about me!) The 1940 enumerators’ instructions made provision for at least identifying the person providing the information: “Write an X with a circle around it in col. 7 after the name of the person who furnishes you with the information concerning the members of the household…If you find it necessary to obtain the information from a person who is not a member of the household, write the name of this person in the left-hand margin, opposite the entries for the household, thus: ‘Information from John Brown, neighbor.’”

Each two-sided census form included lines for enumerating 80 individuals, one per line. The folks who wound up on lines 14 and 29 (about 5% of the total) were asked 15 additional questions including birth place of the parents; whether a veteran or widow or child of a vet; if the person had received a Social Security number or had paid into the program; and if the responder was a married woman or a woman who had once been married, whether she had been married more than once, age at first marriage and number of children born to her.

I’m guessing that the National Archives’ internet lines will be pretty busy at first. As soon as is practical, we will be downloading all of the Clay County images for use here in the archives. We will also be ordering old fashioned microfilm copies of the schedules. I can hardly wait for April 2!

The Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County (HCSCC) received a $2,640 Legacy Grant from the Lake Region Arts Council. The HCSCC will partner with Hawley Elementary and Concordia College, to provide a high quality arts experience to residents of the greater Moorhead area in a range of ages in November 2012. The HCSCC will host the performance group, Dance Revels Moving History, in a two-part art and culture project.

First the HCSCC plans to engage 150 Hawley 5th and 6th graders in arts education to learn about the music, dance, and stories of the French/Ojibwe (Metis) culture, remnants of which still survive today in pockets of northern Minnesota and North Dakota. Concordia College French and education majors will participate as helpers in order to learn how to integrate the arts into classroom teaching. The children will learn songs, dance steps, and stories of Red River heritage while practicing French and Ojibwe languages.

The second part of the project involves a public performance at Pangea—Cultivate our Cultures, a one-day family-friendly celebration of cultural diversity in our region focusing on performing arts and cultural education, at the Hjemkomst Center in Moorhead, Minnesota on the morning of November 10.

This activity is funded by the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

The Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County (HCSCC) received a $15,000 grant for a new video project titled, “Thirty Years after the Dream: The Hjemkomst Legacy”. This project has been financed in part with funds provided by the state of Minnesota from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the Minnesota Historical Society.

The purpose of the project is to record the stories of the crew and Asp family members and how the building and sailing of the ship has impacted their lives 30 years later. Prairie Public Television will coordinate the project, providing personnel and equipment, to record interviews and document the reunion and 30^th anniversary celebration of the famous voyage of the Hjemkomst, which will take place on July 21 at the Hjemkomst Center with a free open house from noon to 5 p.m. Visitors will also be invited to record their Hjemkomst stories via a camera set up at the open house. A panel discussion with the crew and family will take place from 1 to 3 p.m. Interviews will be transcribed and deposited in the Clay County Archives for preservation and future research.

For more information, please call 218-299-5511, or visit us online at www.hcscconline.org or www.facebook.com/hcscc. The Hjemkomst Center is located at 202 First Avenue North in Moorhead, Minn.

Moonlite Drive-In

By Mark Peihl, HCSCC Archivist
A teenager, his car hanging low in the back, pulls up to the gate and pays his admission. He finds a parking space and nervously steps around to the back, fumbles with keys in the dark and pops the trunk. Three more giggling youths pile out the back and dash to their places in the car and settle in for a double feature. This scenario played out hundreds of times in the FM area’s two drive-in movie theaters. Kids snuck into Fargo’s Star-Lite and Moorhead’s Moon-Lite drive-ins over more than three decades of operation.

The 1950s and early 1960s were the golden age for drive-ins, but their beginning dates back to the 1930s. Motion pictures and autos had taken the country by storm in the 1920s, and 1932, New Jersey inventor Richard Hollingshead began exploring ways to combine the two. He nailed a sheet to trees in his yard, set up a movie projector in his driveway and moved his car around to figure a way for occupants of multiple vehicles to view the screen simultaneously. Hollingshead worked out an ingenious system of ramped and angled spaces so viewers could see over the tops of cars in front row. Radio speakers on either side of the screen provided sound and a funnel-shaped wind tunnel in front of the projector lens blew bugs out of the projection light path. He received a patent for the system in May 1933 and the first drive-in theater opened in Camden, NJ the next month. Except for the addition of window-hung speakers for each car, most drive-ins changed little from Hollingshead’s design.

Few theaters went up in the depression years of the 1930s or during building material shortages during World War II but after the war, entertainment hungry Americans flocked to the outdoor venues. Most were established on the outskirts of towns where darkness was plenty rare and land was dirt cheap. In 1946, there were about 300 drive-ins in the country. By 1958, however, a whopping 5,000 were in existence.

In 1949 on the corner of what’s now Fargo’s University Drive and 19^th Avenue North Joe Floyd, owner of Welworth Theater Company, leased a wheat field from the Hector family. It became the site of one of five regional drive-ins built by Floyd between 1948 and 1952, all named “Star-Lite.” In a 1979 interview Floyd noted that, though the Fargo venue was the best of the five, the 665 car capacity theater was “built sort of backwards.” Because it was so close to Hector Airport, the six-story screen had to stand in the lot’s southeast corner, meaning it faced the setting sun forcing movies to always start approximately 20 minutes later than the other theaters.

This particular site was also notorious for mud holes. Though the lot was fully graveled, the Grand Opening had to be postponed when two inches of rain fell during the day and the first car in the lot sank up to its hubcaps. The show finally got underway June 8, with a twin bill of Pennies from Heaven starring crooner Bing Crosby and Down to Earth with the knock-out Rita Hayworth. Newspaper ads for the opening boasted “Movies under the stars! So practical you’ll wonder why they hadn’t thought of it before! You can smoke! No restrictions!” Adult admission was 50 cents, kids were free.

At the season’s end in late October Manager Robert Sheppard told the Fargo Forum “the outdoor theater has been well received. Audiences included persons who came from distances as far as 100 miles.” Free admission for kids proved brilliant. One area small town couple piled 15 kids in the back of a truck. Though seventeen people watched a double feature with cartoons and “selected shorts” for a buck, the concession stand did gang busters. Up front bleachers provided extra seats and playground equipment kept kids happy before the show. Sheppard said family comedies and Technicolor western proved the best draws, a pattern that would hold through the early 1960s.

The theater was not only kid friendly, but dog friendly as well. One local couple and their Boxer never missed a show’s opening. The pooch entertained ushers by standing attentively in the back seat watching the film. Another family reported their Collie missing. The staff knew where he was. He’d been lying in the front row quietly staring up at the screen for hours.

Sheppard reported one problem which constantly plagued drive-in managers around the country: disappearing speakers. “Apparently some patrons begin driving out of the grounds without putting the speakers back on the hooks, then become concerned that they might be forced to pay for the damage to the cord and drive out with them… We plan to educate them on that point. They will not be asked to pay for the damages. The speakers are expensive and we would like to keep them.”

The outdoor movies proved so successful that Joe Floyd built a second theater on the Moorhead side in 1953. The Moon-Lite was located on the northwest corner of what’s now 40^th Ave S and US Highway 75, just a mile and a half from the edge of the city. This new Moon-Lite venue, though smaller than the Star-Lite, had a screen facing a more practical northeasterly direction allowing for features to follow the time table of other movie theaters. The Grand Opening, July 31, featured the Kirk Douglas lumberjack saga The Big Trees, fireworks, pony rides for the kids and “free to the first 100 ladies, a beautiful rose courtesy of Town and Country Flowers.” An added attraction was the White Spot Drive-in restaurant just north of the theater. Leland “Bud” Bredemuhl’s teenage employees served up hamburgers, hot dogs, malts and the first pizzas served in the Fargo-Moorhead area.

Though popular, the Moon-Lite got off to a rocky start. The Grand Opening went well, but technical difficulties closed the theater for much of August. Then after several months of operations, a wind storm tore down the big screen. The theater did not reopen for three years.

In 1956, Joe Floyd’s Welworth Theater Company announced a major rebuild of the Moon-Lite featuring a new, much wider screen capable of handling the new Cinemascope movies. Improvements cost a whopping $85,000. The new screen debuted in May.

Meanwhile in Fargo, the Star-Lite’s small screen could not accommodate the new format films. The venue closed for the 1958 and 1959 seasons.

Welworth Theater Company completed another rebuild in 1960. The Star-Lite’s new 50 by 90 foot screen, renovated concession area and projection booth cost $25,000. They set a June 2, 1960 Grand Reopening. There plans were smashed by yet another storm on May 31.  With their new screen in a pile of rubbish, Manager Burnell Bengtssen announced a “crash construction program” to rebuild. A new steel frame screen was in place by July, 1960. They celebrated by holding the first of many “Dusk ‘til Dawn” features. Film fans started with Gordon Scott in Tarzan’s Great Adventure, followed by the Gregory Peck western The Big Country. Bleary eyed patrons sat through Hey Boy, Hey Girl with Louis Prima and finished the 7-hours of fun the 1958 Japanese film called The H Man. 

The early drive-ins brought in assortment of movie goers. Lots of families with pajama-clad kids falling asleep in the back seat, noisy teens glad to be away from their folks and young lovers who paid little attention to the screen. In the late 1960s films became racier and more violent. Drunken patrons became more common. Families stayed away and crowds grew younger. By the 1970s Moorhead suburbs had grown out around the Moon-Lite. Neighbors complained about R-rated films. Police had to increase patrols as crowds became rowdier.

Cinema Entertainment Corporation (CEC) took acquired the drive-ins from Welworth Company in 1975. They installed a new sound system using low-power radio broadcast directly to patrons’ car radios. That did away with the missing speakers but problems continued.

The final curtain for the drive-ins was the increasing land values. The lots became too valuable for businesses which ran only a few months out of the year. In 1981, CEC lost its lease to the Star-Lite property. A Kmart and Buttrey-Osco grocery pharmacy went up on the site. Today it’s home to the Skills and Technology Training Center and a branch bank.

CEC announced they’d be building a new, duplex drive-in in the future with a paved lot and other improvements but it never came to pass. The Moon-Lite quietly shut down at the end of the 1987 season and never reopened. Today its home to a housing development called Moonlite Addition.

By Matt Calvert, HCSCC Fall Intern

Viewing the world today, one can see many monuments and structures that are extravagantly made as testaments of religious belief.  The towering statue of Jesus Christ overlooking the beautiful city of Buenos Aires or the great cathedral of Notre Dame in France are just a couple examples that may come to mind.  However, there is one such monument that doesn’t require an expensive plane ticket or thousands of miles of travel to see.  Tucked away in Moorhead, Minnesota and located just outside of the Hjemkomst Center is a wooden church called the Hopperstad Stave Church replica.

This incredible building, which gets its name from the large, upright tree trunks that act as the church’s main foundation, is a replica of the Hopperstad Stave Church located in Vik, Norway.   This original building worked as a normal functioning church and likewise, stave churches acted as places of worship for many people in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden throughout much of the Middle Ages.  While Sweden and Denmark no longer have stave churches, Norway has preserved twenty-eight.  Although the Moorhead replica built by Guy Paulson, a native to the area, was completed in the summer of 1998, the original Hopperstad Stave church is thought to have been created around 1100 C.E.[1]  Like many of the great cathedrals of the time, stave churches displayed captivating artwork to inspire and teach visitors about the Christian faith.  However, stave churches were also different in this artistic respect in one major way.  Instead of using stain glass or stone to display religious images, stave churches used wood carvings to decorate and glorify the Christian God.  In particular, the greatest examples of these wood carvings could be found around the portals, or in other words, the entrances of the stave churches.  The positioning of these carvings was no mistake.  Placing them right at the entrance of the church had a shock-and-awe effect on people who were entering the church to worship, and much like the great stained glass windows of the cathedrals in main land Europe, they demonstrated that the building was the house of the Christian God.

There are several different categories under which portal carvings can be classified.  The carvings of Hopperstad replica comes from the Sogn-Valdres classification of portals, a classification in which plants and animals are used abundantly to convey a deeper religious meaning to observers[2].  The meaning that lies behind these carving may be interpreted in at least two ways.  The first interpretation can be understood as the visualization of battle between good and evil or the Last Judgment, and the second is demonstration of Christian dominance over the older pagan religions.  It is important to note at this point that religion in Scandinavia was at a turning point at the time of the creation of the stave churches.  The Norse pagan tradition of old was being pushed away for the new religion of Christianity. However, it is hard to change tradition in an instant, and because of this, old pagan tales were used to illustrate new Christian concepts.  Examples of this can be seen in the Hopperstad Replica’s portal depiction of the Last Judgment, where the mixtures of Norse and Christian themes are very prevalent.

Looking at the portal, the first thing one may notice is a mêlée of animals and plants attacking each other. This creates what Peter Anker in his book The Art of Scandinavia calls a Combat Motif[3]. In the Combat Motif it seems like every type of being depicted is at war.  Snakes bite dragons, vines choke snakes, and dragons reach to tear apart anything they can get their hands on.  From a Norse perspective this suggests the idea of Ragnarok, the final battle between the gods which ends up causing total destruction to the world[4].  The idea of Ragnarok has many similarities with the Last Judgment as described in the Christian scriptures.  Found in the book of Romans, chapter 12, verse 7, this battle also seems to be filled with many beings fighting and with great destruction happening that ends with the good forces triumphing over the evil ones[5].  Seeing the similarities between the two stories, it can perhaps be understood that the carving of the Hopperstad Replica’s portal depicts a time and culture in transition from the old pagan ways to the new ways of the Christian faith.  With this transition came beautifully styled carvings that depicted both Christian and pagan traditions that were used to demonstrate the similar concepts of the end of the world.  However, a demonstration of transition to new understanding may not be the only meaning behind these carvings.

The symbolism of Christian dominance is possibly the second message demonstrated in the portal carvings of the Hopperstad Replica Stave church.  Looking at the bottom of the portal on each side of the door, one can see a lion head with vines coming out of its mouth.  These vines go on to engulf the rest of the monsters carved into the portal displaying that the lion has total control and dominance over everything that is happening in the carving[6].  According to Christian tradition, this lion represents the Lion of Judah which is a symbol of Christ.  The Lion of Judah controls everything in this Combat Motif with his powerful vines preventing the destruction that could be caused by any evil forces entering the church or the souls of its believers[7].  Displaying this dominance to visitors as they entered through the portal made a clear statement: The old pagan faith was dead, and salvation could only be found with the acceptance of Christianity.

Seeing the Hopperstad Stave Church replica’s stave portal is a transcending experience.  Automatically one thinks of the history and legend that lie behind the carvings that surround the entrance of the church.  This reference to mystical ideas causes something to happen to a person that is beyond words.   Looking over the curving vines and ferocious dragons, one can’t help but be brought to a new understanding of faith and time that only inspiration from the soul can deliver.

Bibliography

Anker, Leif & Havran, Jiri.  The Norwegian Stave Churches.  Translated by Tim Challman.  Tangen: Arfo, 2005.

Anker, Peter.  The Art of Scandinavia. Volume 1.  Paul Hamlyn: The Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited, 1970.

New Revised Standard Version.  The Harper Collins Study Bible: including Apocryphal Deuterocanonical books with Concordance.  New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006.

The Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County (HCSCC) is seeking community input for a new exhibit featuring Hjemkomst voyage artifacts. The exhibit, which is currently under development, opens during the Hjemkomst Voyage 30^th Anniversary Celebration on July 21, 2012 from 1 – 5 p.m. The exhibit will be on display through Dec. 31, 2012.

The HCSCC has hired Claudia M. Pratt of CMP Consulting for the research and design phase of the exhibit development. The exhibit will bring a fresh perspective about the Hjemkomst expedition. Pratt hopes the public can look at this exhibit with new eyes and be amazed again at what an accomplishment the expedition was— for the Asp family, the voyage crew, as well as the businesses and communities that supported it.

“The goal of this exhibit is to uncover information that adds to the story we’ve enjoyed for 30 years. I think what fascinates me is that it really took an enormous amount of community support in order to make this happen—a lot of personal sacrifice and perseverance. It’s time to revisit that and get back to Bob Asp’s core ‘Dare to Dream’ message and what the expedition accomplished,” Pratt says.

The HCSCC encourages the public to share their thoughts on what they would like to see in the new Hjemkomst exhibit by leaving their ideas in a comment book, which is located nearby the ship in the Hjemkomst Center. The HCSCC will also post stories, questions and information about the Hjemkomst ship and voyage on their new blog at TheVikingShipHjemkomst.areavoices.com. You may also contact Claudia M. Pratt at CMPconsulting@mac.com or 701-371-7277 if you would like to share your story about the Hjemkomst and voyage or have recommendations for the new exhibit.

The research and design phase of the exhibit development has been made possible in part by a grant from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the vote of the Minnesotans on November 4, 2008, and administered by the Minnesota Historical Society.

I’m a sucker for sunsets…. I’m never up for sunrises! This one that we came across while driving on a winding, gravel road through the forests in Southern Sweden was amazing. The lake was still and the sunset was reflected in the water. Sometimes it’s interesting to look at things from the mirror image… It can give you a clearer view.

Two exhibits, “EXPLORING NOW: 365 Days to 50” and “The sheARTS Project: Art Hats for Breast Cancer Awareness”, showcase how art heals the soul in times of life’s challenges. Both projects were created by local artist and designer, Claudia M. Pratt, who has faced breast cancer head on over the last five years. The exhibits are hosted by the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County at the Hjemkomst Center February 4 through March 26.

In addition, a celebration of Claudia’s work and a fundraiser to establish her endowment, the “Art Heals Fund”, will be featured during Claudia’s 50^th Birthday Bash scheduled Saturday, February 25 at the Hjemkomst Center. The event is open to the public and tickets are available through FargoStuff.com and at the door.

Claudia’s artwork reflects her life experiences. After surviving Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 1981, Breast Cancer in 2006 and 2009, and now living with a Stage IV cancer diagnosis Claudia has chosen to take a positive approach to her “healing journey”.

Early on in Claudia’s cancer journey, she decided to take an artistic approach to losing her hair. During sleepless mornings she’d think about how to embellish her bare head and “The sheARTS Project: Art Hats for Breast Cancer Awareness” was born.

The idea was to collaborate with artists of all ages who would create art hats, photograph Claudia in the hats and turn the project into an exhibit. Initially the idea was to work with female artists, but the project has inspired many. Hence the name: she-arts, (s)he-arts, and (s)hearts.

Since the sheARTS Project was started in 2006, Claudia has received over 50 handmade hats for the project. “It seemed like every time I was down I received a special hat,” noted Claudia. Artists from all over have responded to the request for art hats and shared their own journey stories. While the exhibit has been shown in a few venues since the project was inaugurated, this will be the first time all the art hats with photographs by Meg Luther Lindholm, a local documentary photographer and freelance radio producer for Prairie Public Broadcasting, will be shown.

In the wake of her most recent cancer diagnosis and to celebrate her 50^th year, Claudia decided to challenge herself to a project of documenting a year of living in the moment – from her 49^th to her 50^th birthday – her 50^th year of living. “EXPLORING NOW: 365 Days to 50” was created and features three components: an art exhibit; a daily blog and photo inspiration postings on line at www.cmp365daysto50.wordpress.com through February 28, 2012; and raising $25,000+ for the Art Heals Fund, an endowment fund at the Fargo-Moorhead Area Foundation which will support art therapy projects or projects that use art therapeutically in the counties of Cass ND and Clay ND (www.areafoundation.org/giveonline.html).

EXPLORING NOW was started with the support of the Green Market Kitchen in Downtown Fargo. Claudia was allowed to use the space as a working studio from January through April 2011. She created two phases of the 365 Days project at the restaurant. Phase one included 12 panels representing 12 months starting on her 49^th birthday on February 28. She questioned how we document time and asked patrons to share their thoughts about living in the moment. “The interest was overwhelming,” said Claudia. “People shared so many great ideas and I’ve been able to experience many of them this year!” The second phase of the project features 4”x4” photographs that Claudia has been taking since March 1, 2011. Individual panels of the photographs have been shown at the Green Market Kitchen but the whole exhibit of completed panels of 365 photos will be showcased at the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County. Additional large prints of significant photographs will also be featured.

In the process of sharing about the sheARTS and EXPLORING NOW projects, a community of support surrounded Claudia, gave her strength and offered a deeper meaning to her journey. So Claudia has began sharing her therapeutic art experiences with others. Her sheARTS exhibit was featured at the Ellendale Opera House in southern North Dakota and at Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota. She has given hat style shows and art hat workshops for organizations as well. Claudia was a guest artist at Kamp KACE (Kids Against Cancer Everywhere) in 2010. She worked with campers to create two murals that now hang at Essencia Health and Sanford Health centers in Fargo. At the annual Sanford Cancer Survivors Picnic in June, Claudia has shared a community art project with attendees. In 2010 “Healing Hands” was created for Sandford’s Roger Maris Cancer Center in Fargo.

For more information on the sheARTS and EXPLORING NOW exhibits contact the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County at 218-299-5511 or check them out online at www.hcscconline.org or www.facebook.com/hcscc.

The Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County (HCSCC) is offering half-price admission to the Hjemkomst Center museum for reserved school groups in January and February. Contact Markus at 218-299-5511 Ext. 6738 or Markus.Krueger@ci.moorhead.mn.us to reserve your tour today or for more information.

In addition to getting a guided tour the Hopperstad Stave Church, watching the 30-minute Hjemkomst documentary film, and seeing a variety of traveling exhibits, groups will get a personal guided tour of a new exhibit opening on January 27, The Boom: 1945 – 1960 in Clay County. From the GI Bill to the Baby Boom, changes on the farm and TV to the Korean War, this exhibit looks at the exciting years that created modern America. The exhibit includes Clay County artifacts and is on display through 2012.

For more information, please call 218-299-5511, or visit us online at www.hcscconline.org or www.facebook.com/hcscc. The Hjemkomst Center is located at 202 First Avenue North in Moorhead, Minn.