Neighbors: Fargo Woman Shares Love of City on Internet
By BOB LIND
03/09/2004

"Fargo," Trish Lewis says, "is a place of extremes: extreme weather conditions, extreme flatness where you can see for miles and your imagination runs free, extremely open skies where you can see every star so clearly it’s as if you can reach out and touch it. It is a town with extremely friendly people where you know if you need a helping hand, it will be there...To some, Fargo may be boring. But to those of us who know it, it is anything but. It’s all in the perspective, you know…"

 

This tribute is a website Trish established to tell the world about Fargo and, to some extent, Moorhead. She loves the F-M metro area, and so she has become an unpaid Internet Chamber of Commerce for it.

 

She gets other people to write about the cities, too, and she runs pictures of F-M sites taken by local photographers.  Trish is especially thrilled with downtown Fargo, where she moved last year.

 

"The vibrancy of the downtown -- the character, the individuals who live and work there -- all give it something very unique and special," she says on the Web page.  "You actually get to know people. It reminds me a lot of the small town I came from."

 

That town is St. Vincent, in the northwest corner of Minnesota. It was a key point along the Great Northern Railroad when it was built by James J. Hill.  Trish, in a brief autobiography on her page, says her great-uncle Richard Fitzpatrick helped build the Great Northern line, and her father eventually worked for the GN, too, before it became part of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

 

Trish knows about the computer ’Net. She is a network systems administrator for the Office of Hearings and Appeals, a component of the Social Security Administration, located in the Quentin Burdick Federal Courthouse in, happily for Trish, downtown Fargo.

 

She has a variety of interests: photography, music (both listening and playing), reading and "great conversation."

 

And she certainly has a deep interest in her adopted towns of Fargo-Moorhead.

 

Her Web page tells of them being founded on the back of agriculture and that they have now become centers of education and an overall quality of life. She hails the influx of immigrants from around the world; in fact, her daughter met and married a "wonderful" Kurdish man, she says, whose family came to Fargo through a refugee program.

 

Maybe the Web page will have changed by the time this column gets into print. But as of its writing, it had pictures of Broadway in the 1950s, memories of music lessons at Daveau’s Music Conservatory, praise for the Renaissance project which is revitalizing Fargo's downtown, and, maybe best of all, a picture of Trish when she was a sweetie of a little girl in St. Vincent.

 

Copyright FARGO FORUM ©2004