Aarre Suomela used to work at Tyomies on Superior's Tower Avenue back when it was still a newspaper.
As a typesetter in the '50s, he entered text into a Linotype machine on the same wooden floor where bar patrons now play pool and drink beer, the pulleys from the presses still hanging over their heads.
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On the second floor, where bar owner Paul Orloski rents out apartments, were located offices for the paper's editors who oversaw a controversial Finnish-language newspaper with a national readership.
The paper was called Tyomies -- later Tyomies-Eteenpain after a merger with another paper -- and was published out of Superior from 1913 until 1998.
Throughout its years of publication, the paper had a decidedly leftist perspective -- sympathizing with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, publishing stories about labor movements, and openly opposing U.S. involvement in World War I. It catered to a community of Finnish immigrants who settled largely in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
"It was a good, progressive paper and no individual owned it. It was a society. It was people like myself that owned shares there," said Suomela, who lives in Proctor now.
Over his lifetime, Suomela, 88, witnessed the paper's long decline firsthand. His parents, both Finnish immigrants, read it closely every morning when it was a daily with a peak circulation of more than 20,000. In his 13 years working there from 1951 to 1964, the paper went from a daily to being published only three days a week.
By the early '80s, the Tyomies building had been sold and the whole operation had been moved to a house in Superior. There, a handful of people put out a weekly paper with a circulation of just over 1,000.
In 1998, due to a declining readership of Finnish speakers and an aging editorial staff, Tyomies-Eteenpain published its final issue.
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After that issue, the paper was given to Finlandia University in Hancock, Mich.
The university still publishes it as the Finnish American Reporter, but it's not the paper it once was.
"It's basically a cultural journal. A way for people to stay connected," Editor Jim Kurtti said of the monthly newspaper, which publishes articles about modern Finland and Finnish cultural events such as FinnFest in English to a mostly elderly readership. "The obituaries are quite popular."
That's in stark contrast to the paper's heyday in the early 20th century, when its readership was relatively youthful. At that time there were more than 26,000 Finnish immigrants in St. Louis County, many of whom had been influenced by the revolutionary thought circulating around czarist Russia, of which Finland was a part.
Providing fertile ground for those radical theories was the harsh work and low pay of the iron mines and logging camps of the Upper Midwest where most Finnish immigrants ended up. On top of that, they were marginalized by existing labor unions who viewed them as competitors driving down the price of labor, according to Richard Hudelson, co-author of "By the Ore Docks: A Working People's History of Duluth."
"They were excluded. They were downtrodden. They got the worst jobs at the worst pay," he said.
Lapakko grew up with a lot of employees of the paper and members of the Communist Party coming over to his family's house in St. Louis Park, Minn. He was struck by all the unfulfilled stereotypes surrounding them.
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"At school I heard all these bad things about communists, and here they were all sitting in my house playing cribbage," Lapakko said. "They weren't anti-American. They believed in equal rights for all."
