CHISHOLM, Minn. (AP) - Longtime newspaper publisher and Minnesota Iron Range political force Veda Ponikvar has died. She was 96.
Ponikvar died Tuesday of natural causes at Heritage Manor Nursing Home in Chisholm, where she had lived for the past year and a half, her nephew John Nobens of Hibbing told The Associated Press.
“If she believed in a cause, it was 100 percent. If she didn’t believe in it, it was 100 percent ’no,’” Nobens said of his aunt. “There wasn’t a lot of gray in her life.”
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The daughter of Slovenian immigrants, Ponikvar was a staunch advocate for the Iron Range, the blue-collar, ethnically diverse iron mining region of northern Minnesota, and her hometown of Chisholm.
“Some people called her the Iron Woman, and she was exactly that,” state Sen. Dave Tomassoni, a Democrat from Chisholm, told the Hibbing Daily Tribune (https://bit.ly/1X4ylL1 ).
U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., recalled meeting Ponikvar when she first decided to run for the Senate.
“Everyone said to me, ’you want to understand Range politics,’ you talk to Veda,’” Klobuchar said in a statement Wednesday.
After enlisting in an all-women’s branch of the U.S. Navy and being assigned to naval intelligence in Washington, D.C., during World War II, Ponikvar returned to Chisholm and founded the Free Press in 1947 as a counter-voice to a mining company’s newspaper. She eventually bought the competitor and went on to own and operate the twice-weekly Free Press-Tribune Press for nearly a half-century. The paper is now known as the Chisholm Tribune Press.
“One of the things I was taught was, you tell it like it is,” Ponikvar told the Duluth News Tribune in 1996 after she sold the newspapers. “You tell the facts and you also take each situation you cover and take a positive approach, not a negative. That’s what I tried to do.”
Ponikvar continued to write for more than a decade as the newspaper’s publisher emeritus. During her career, she wrote more than 4,300 editorials.
Among the community projects Ponikvar pushed for was the giant Iron Man Statue of a miner outside the Minnesota Discovery Center in Chisholm. A road to the statue along U.S. Highway 169 is named Veda Ponikvar Boulevard.
Ponikvar also promoted the story of Chisholm doctor Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, who walked away from his rookie year with the New York Giants in 1905. Graham’s story was featured in the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams,” and actress Anne Seymour played a Chisholm newspaper publisher based on Ponikvar in the movie.
A funeral Mass is scheduled Monday in Chisholm.
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Information from: The Daily Tribune, https://www.hibbingmn.com/placed/
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