COUNTRY
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2017
Serving Marine on St. Croix, Scandia, May Township
VOL. 34 NO. 21 www.countrymessenger.com $.75
RIVER GROVE ELEMENTARY: Board plans purchase of playground. PAGE 9
Marine family asks who will be held accountable for stray bullets BY SUZANNE LINDGREN EDITOR@COUNTRYMESSENGER.COM
NEALY CORCORAN | COUNTRY MESSENGER
‘The Wagon’ films in Marine On the set of “The Wagon,” directed by Marine filmmaker Gayle Knutson. The crew shot scenes inside and outside the Marine General Store last Tuesday, and at Nita Mae's Scoop the day before.
‘I Do?’ kicks off documentary series BY SUZANNE LINDGREN EDITOR@COUNTRYMESSENGER.COM
Filmmaker Joe Brandmeier and his wife Joan Steffend, a former KARE 11 anchor and celebrated Twin Cities personality, are celebrating 29 years of marriage this month. Even so, Brandmeier finds the longstanding custom of taking vows is a bit baffling. “I always thought it was a silly concept,” he says. “… Over the years the conversation about marriage grew louder and louder. … Why do we do it? Can you really love someone till death do us part? How do some people make it work for 70 years and other people only last a year?” He did so much wondering aloud, he recalls half kiddingly, that eventually Steffend got tired of hearing him talk about it. “Joan said, ‘Why don’t you just start the documentary?’” Brandmeier says. “So I threw a couple cameras in the car and started talking to couples to see if I was the only one thinking like this.” The result is “I Do?” which Brandmeier describes as “a light-hearted documentary about the ‘crazy’ concept of marriage.” The film won Best Documentary at last year’s Twin Cities Film Fest and will kick off the Marine Film Society’s 2017-’18 documentary series (see sidebar for details). While shooting the interviews that make up the film, Brandmeier sought people he didn’t know, reaching out through social
A Marine on St. Croix homeowner asked county investigators last week to hold someone responsible for the high-powered rifle bullets that flew into his house, narrowly missing his wife and daughter. “Our house was hit by two bullets on August 20, fired from about a mile away, southwest of our property,” Andy Powell told the Marine council and a roomful of residents at the council’s Sept. 15 meeting. “They came through a single hole in the window and lodged in two separate holes in the wall, approximately (my wife’s) head height,
in the hall.” He reported that his wife and daughter were home, “literally feet away,” when the bullets hit. “We dodged not one but two bullets that day,” he said. “I never thought I would say that in a literal sense in my life. But we did. … We want to know who is going to be held responsible for this. At this point, they know the property and who was at the property, but no one is being held responsible and no one has owned up to causing the damage.” According to Andrew Ellickson, an investigations commander in the Washington SEE COUNCIL, PAGE 2
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Filmmaker Joe Brandmeier hit the road to get to the bottom of a crazy concept: marriage. His documentary, “I Do?” will screen in Marine Oct. 5.
media — his own channels and Steffend’s — in an effort to get strangers to contact him. He appeared as a guest on his brother’s Chicago-based radio show and on Twin Cities Live with Elizabeth Ries. “I didn’t want to interview anyone we knew,” he explained. “And I didn’t want to make it a celebrity thing. Just real people going through every day.” His efforts were rewarded. “We started getting calls and emails from all over the country,” he says. “It was amazing.” Still, he found plenty of material without traveling too far. “I thought I was going to go coast to coast but never made it past the Midwest,” he says. The film’s subjects run the
gamut from the highly traditional Ralph and Ruth, married for 73 years, to a gay couple wondering whether they should get married following the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing samesex marriage across the U.S. “People really opened up,” Brandmeier says. “What I kept finding is the environment really affected (people’s choices). … Some people’s parents were divorced. One woman said she’d grown up seeing her parents arguing. She didn’t want her own marriage to be that way and she believed in the end it made her marriage stronger.” In presenting these stories Brandemeier worked to balance serious material with humor. SEE DOCUMENTARY, PAGE 2
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Living Cemetery Marlin McCurdy spoke as "Wood John" Johnson, given name Nils Johan Johannasson, at Elim Lutheran Church's Living Cemetery Tour on Sunday. The tour highlighted the lives of 10 Scandia saints.
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