Doris Eleanor Knutson, 93, of Misquah, died peacefully on Wednesday, June 11, 2026, at the Lakeview care home in Pinedale, with her family near.

Born September 12, 1932, on a farm in Birch Lake Township to Alfred and Esther (Lindgren) Moe, Doris attended a one-room school she would later, in a turn she found very funny, return to teach in. She taught third and fourth grade in the Misquah schools for thirty-eight years, and there is hardly a soul in this county under the age of seventy who did not, at some point, learn from her where the apostrophe goes.

She married Raymond Knutson in 1954. Ray preceded her in death in 2009. For fifty-one years she was the organist at First Lutheran, where she played every hymn slightly faster than the congregation wished to sing it, on the stated theory that “we’d all like to get to lunch.”

Doris was the unofficial and undisputed authority on the spelling of local family names, a role she took seriously and exercised freely, including, on more than one occasion, in the pages of this newspaper, whose editor she once corrected by postcard and was, it must be said, right.

She is survived by two daughters, Susan (Mark) Hagen of Misquah and Janet Moe of Duluth; five grandchildren; eight great-grandchildren; and several generations of former students who still, to this day, double-check their apostrophes.

Services will be held Saturday, June 20, at 11 a.m. at First Lutheran Church, with burial in the church cemetery and a lunch to follow in the basement. Memorials are preferred to the Misquah school library and to the First Lutheran organ fund, which she would want spent on tuning.