Member, Minnesota Newspaper Association (in spirit)
Vol. CXXIX — No. 33  •  Misquah, Minnesota  •  The Chain of Lakes
Tuesday, August 18, 2026  •  Archive Edition
The Misquah Pilot-Independent loon seal
The Voice of the Chain of Lakes

The Misquah Pilot-Independent

“Where the coffee’s hot, the lakes are cold, and all the children are above average.” — Serving the Chain since 1897.



Issue No. 33ArchiveThe Klatch & Living

The Klatch & Living

The Klatch Considers a Second Location, Then Reconsiders, Then Splits the Difference

For two days after the opening, the town’s oldest institution flirted with relocating four blocks. It has settled instead on an arrangement it insists is not a schism.

By Marvella Tollefson • August 18, 2026

The Klatch has met at the Daybreak Café every morning since before anybody at the table can reliably date, which means since at least the middle nineteen-seventies and probably before. On Sunday morning, for the first time in living memory, part of it met somewhere else.

The defection was small, temporary, and immediately regretted by everyone involved. Four regulars, having spent Saturday afternoon at the brewery, arrived Sunday at the Daybreak, drank one cup, and then walked down to Second Avenue at eleven to continue a conversation begun the day before. Pat Reinholt, who has fed this table for twenty-two years, was asked about it Monday and gave an answer that will be quoted at the Daybreak for a decade: “They came back at one. They’ll always come back at one. I sell breakfast.”

The arrangement now settled on, and described by three separate participants as “not a schism,” is this: the Klatch remains at the Daybreak, mornings, as it has always been and will always be. What happens at Mud Lake Brewing Co. on a Saturday afternoon is a separate thing that has not been named and does not need to be. “It’s not the Klatch,” one member said firmly. “The Klatch is coffee. That is a different activity with the same people.”

Vern Knutson, asked whether the town could sustain both, said that a town that has three roof funds in year fourteen can sustain anything, and asked whether that was on the record. It is.

---

Accuracy matters here. If you see something that needs correcting, send it to the newsroom. Material corrections are noted online and in the next print edition.
More from this edition
I Was Standing in the Street When It Came Down, and I Am Going to Tell You About the Sound