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Revised: Museum Staff. "Jerry Knapp & Elite Enterprises." In The Midst Of. Cokato Historical Society. (July, 2022) vol. 42, no. 2.  Laser 917 designed by Jerry Knapp. Did you know that Cokato was home to a race car driver and kit car designer? Did you know that one of his designs ended up in the Disney movie "Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo"?
Museum Staff. "Lost Cokato: Movie Rental Stores." In The Midst Of Blog. Cokato Historical Society. (March 25, 2023) www.cokatomuseum.org.  Dana Buttenhoff at "Dana's Movies Unlimited, 1984. Photograph is property of the Dassel-Cokato Enterprise Dispatch, used with permission. In the late 1970s, movies were transferred from theatres to homes in Cokato with the invention of a device called the Video Home System (VHS). A black plastic rectangle encasing two white reels wound with magnetic tape, the VHS was projected onto people's televisions using device called a Videocassette Recorder (VCR). The VCR was an innovative system, which allowed a VHS tape to be physically played, rewound, or fast forwarded. There was no jumping from scene to scene like streaming devises allow today. VHS tapes were affected by dust and humidity, and when watched would produce thin lines that would dart across the screen. VHS tapes also had poor audio and fuzzy resolution (at least compared to today's standards). Content on VHS tapes could even be recorded over. In fact, to prevent the risk of someone recording over something important, like your wedding video, there was a special tab on the VHS that had to be removed. As the popularity of VHS tapes and VCRs began to grow in the early 1980s, businesses like Blockbuster emerged in the U.S., providing the public with a variety of movie selections through rental. In Cokato, one of the first movie rental stores was "Dana's Movies Unlimited."1
Oliver Johnson. "Timber Harvesting," In The Midst Of, Cokato Historical Society (Winter, 1992) vol. 12 no. 1.  The Cokato area was almost in the heart of the region in Minnesota which was known as the Big Woods. It was a triangular area which started a bit northwest of St. Cloud, extended south to the Minnesota River, east to the Mississippi River, and then went diagonally back to a point which was a little northeast of St. Cloud. The timber in this area consisted of hardwoods such as oak, ash, elm, maple, butternut, hickory, basswood, etc. The Big Woods area was surrounded by prairie on the south and west, and mainly coniferous trees to the north and east.
My father often talked about the many sawmills in the area. The native lumber was used extensively for buildings at first. Later the railroad provided a market for railroad ties and maple cordwood to fire the steam locomotive. My father told of hauling cordwood with oxen to Smith Lake where the trains would take on the cordwood for fuel and the farmers would earn a few dollars. I believe he said they earned one dollar for a cord of hard maple. |
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