I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.
Oct. 28, 1999
By Devlyn Brooks
Actor Peter Weller will visit Red Lake today to view first hand what his philanthropy has helped build.
Weller, who starred as the character RoboCop in the 1987 movie of the same name, and the 1990 sequel RoboCop 2, has donated more than $12,000 to help build a Writing to Read computer lab at Red Lake's St. Mary's Mission School.
Sister Marina Schlangen, St. Mary's religious education director and director of development, wrote the grant for the reading lab more than two years ago, which asked the Riordan Foundation to consider funding the lab.
She said the foundation wrote back several weeks later and told her that Weller had agreed to pay half of the original funding and half of any continuing costs needed to upgrade the system.
Schlangen said the grant total has reached $30,000 in two-plus years, and Weller is expected to donate more money today.
St. Mary's Principal Dan Hannig said Weller has never had the opportunity to visit the computer lab he helped fund, and no one at the school has talked with him. The actor was able to schedule this stop on a cross-country trip.
He will be in Red Lake all morning, and he flies out of Bemidji this afternoon.
St. Mary's Write to Read lab contains five learning stations and is geared toward helping students learn to read.
Schlangen said the software helps the children attending St. Mary's because it is geared to their right-brained thinking.
The RoboCop movies were about a cop who dies in the line of duty and is transformed into a sophisticated cyborg by the corporation that operates the Detroit Police Department. Weller did not act in the 1993 movie RoboCop 3.
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