It was Christmas Eve, 1985. I’d been working at KSTP-AM for a week.

The bad news: it was a part-time job that started at $3.35 an hour.

The good news: I’d managed to find a mid-day board-operator shift that the Executive Producer, Rob Pendelton, was working. “Why should a highly-skilled executive like yourself be working the board?” I asked; Rob agreed, which gave me two more hours a day.

My budget was looking like it was working out like this:

• Half of my money was going to my rent.
• A further quarter was going to my commute – from south Minneapolis to Maplewood, northeast of Saint Paul. As the weather got colder, my car’s mileage got worse; during one cold snap that first winter, I figured that I was getting about 8mpg.
• The rest of the budget – $100 a month – was for me.

I was so stoked!

I worked through the day – Vogel had a fill-in, as I recall. The snow started around mid-day; it was cold, and it began snowing heavily.

At the end of the day, the guest host took off like a shot. It was 6PM, and dark, and the only people left in the studio were producer Dave Elvin, newscaster Cathy Wurzer (yes, that Cathy Wurzer) and me.

I went out to start my car. Nothing. Zip. Not even a click.

I went back into the studio and started calling garages from the Yellow Pages (handicapped by my ignorance of the geography of the area; I had no idea what ‘burbs to look in, or for that matter that I was probably a mile from Saint Paul, or for that matter any idea of what part of Saint Paul was where). Nobody was available – or the ones that were cost a lost more than I could afford on Christmas Eve.

Dave offered to drive me home, and Rob Pendelton could give me a ride to work the next day, Christmas.

I took him up on it. Dave dropped me off at my apartment in a slushy, white-coated South Minneapolis, and I went inside.

My roommate was visiting family in Wisconsin for Christmas, so I had the place to myself. For that matter, I had South Minneapolis to myself; there was no traffic on Minnehaha Avenue to speak of.

I pulled out and baked a Tombstone pizza – at $3, a bit of a splurge – and a couple of beers (Stroh’s, as I recall), opened a couple of presents I’d gotten from my parents, and turned on the TV. I had two beers left, and ran through one of ’em as I called my family (my brother and sister were still living with my parents, whose divorce was still five years in the future).

By 9-ish, that was pretty much it. I kicked back on the couch, ate the pizza, drank the last beer, watched the Pope’s mass on TV, read the book Dad gave me…

By 11ish I was bored. The TV ran an ad for “Gab Line”, a phone chat line back in the era before Chat Lines got their seedy reputation (or at least when I was just off the turnip truck and didnt’ know about their seedy reputation). “Only 10 cents a minute”. I dialled in.

There were two people on the line; a very drunk-sounding black woman who’d just moved up from Chicago, and a guy who sounded like he’d lost all his teeth and could neither pronounce nor enunciate. I don’t remember what the conversation was about – and with a drunk and a guy who in retrospect was probably a meth addict, does it matter? – but it killed half an hour and $3, yet another big splurge on this red-letter Chrismas Eve.

I hung up and sat down on the couch, playing guitar for a bit, thinking about things.

Downside: I was nearly-broke, I was alone as I could be on Christmas Eve, and my car was an inert lump of rotting metal in a parking lot in Maplewood.

Upside: Things were moving, finally. I had a job – I knew that I could get a job, that I wasn’t completely unemployable and worthless – and I knew that I could get by for a while. I enjoyed the job, as crappy as the pay was. And after the holiday, I could approach the whole music thing with a clear mind and, now that I was employed (more or less), some mental energy.

All in all, not bad.

It was Wednesday, December 18, 1985.

I’d spent the long weekend in Jamestown, hanging out with friends and my family, catching up with the few friends I still had in Jamestown, just relaxing – satisfied at least to know that finally had a job to come back to – of which more later).

I went to a dance at the college on Friday night, caught up with a few people (including this person, who took over the college paper from me, if memory serves). It was a kick to tell people I had a job, even if I hadn’t started yet.

Sunday, I headed back to the Cities. I drove to Fargo, had dinner with a friend of mine who was still at North Dakota State, and set back out on ’94 to the East. Over dinnertime, a snowstorm caught up with me; visibility dropped to 1/4 mile. Which wasn’t bad, until a semi would pass on the left; the slipstream whipped up enough snow to make it feel like driving inside a ping pong ball. Time after time – two or three dozen times on the trip – I gripped the steering wheel and kept the car pointed as straight as I could, hoping the road would still be under me when I gout out the other side. Luckily, it always was – but compared to Thursday’s three hour jaunt, it took the better part of five and a half hours go to from Fargo to Minneapolis.

I spent Monday and Tuesday the 16th and 17th knocking around town, enjoying that most glorious of feelings; having a job, but not needing to be there yet.

Finally, it was the 18th; I showed up at the station at 12:30 in the afternoon. I met Dave Elvin, Don Vogel’s producer. He took half an hour to explain the arcane art of talk show phone screening while we waited for the cab to bring Don to the station.

“By the way”, said Dave, “I should explain; Don is blind”. This brought some twists to the job; beyond answering the phone and screening out boring, repetitive and dull callers, I was supposed to pass the next caller to Don through the “talkback” into his headphones, preferably right around the time he needed them.

Don showed up around 1 to begin the daily ritual. Tapping his cane in front of him, jovially bitching about the cold, he made his way back through the “hall” between the backup transmitter and the studio equipment stack, back to the talk studio. I’d grown up working at stations with spartan appointments; KSTP-AM, in its old studio on Highway 61, felt like working in a submarine; cramped, equipment everywhere, some rooms actually with waffleplate floors and steel stairs.

Dave led me into the studio – a cramped little room, maybe 12 by 5, with a glass window along the long side that looked into the control room. There were three seats with microphones along a desk in front of the window. Don sat at the host’s seat, with an ancient push-button telephone controller and a large, gray steel braille machine.

Don sat down heavily. “Sorry I’m late, gentlemen. I was at the bank. The woman behind the window was…” Don switched into a John Houseman accent “…an idiot. A moron“.

I spoke up. “I’ve been having trouble with my bank, too.”

Dave turned to me. “What bank’s that?”

“The S**t P**s F**k Bank”.

Don broke up laughing, with the gusto that so many native Chicagoans bring to laughing about scatology. “I think you’re going to fit in just fine!”

The rest of the meeting was taken up with Dave and I tossing out topic ideas, and Don knocking most of them down. Finally we settled on some things – a few newspaper articles and magazine pieces Dave had come across. The last half hour involved dictating the ledes of the articles, and things like the weather forecast, to Don, who typed them out in braille and arranged them on the desk in front of him.

Then, Dave took me into the control room. I sat down at a little chair wedged between Dave’s control panel and the glass wall of the studio, with a five-line telephone and a microphone. “Just answer the phone, screen them, write down the ones we want to take, and pass them through to Don”, Dave instructed as ABC News played on the monitor overhead and a large man who looked for all the world like Tip O’Neill ambled heavily into the studio. “Mitch, this is John MacDougall”, Dave announced. “News Guy”.

Mac flipped his glasses down his gin-blossomed nose. “You’re Don’s new screener?” he asked in a crotchety-sounding baritone, glaring over his glasses frames.

“And here we go”. Dave at the control board fired off the theme song.

I don’t remember much about that first show – it was the same as most of the subsequenct 13 months’ worth of shows that Don, Dave, John MacDougall, sports guys Bruce Gordon and Mark Boyle and I did; juvenile banter, heckling, mocking and ridicule of the news and the people in it.

I do remember that about a minute into the show – before Mac had finished the newscast – line 1 on the phone lit up. I picked up; “Don Vogel Show”.

“We are not of this world” said a raspy, geriatric-sounding voice. “We are of the infinite world”.

I hesitated. “Excuse me?”

“Stanley Hubbard is the devil! He will be sent to hell with all the other evil sinners!”

My first call was an insane crank.

I knew I was going to love this job.

It was Friday, December 14, 1985.

After my interview at KSTP earlier in the week, I’d decided I could stand a long weekend. It’d been almost two months of constant interviewing, scrimping, trying to figure out ways to parlay my fairly limited job experience (a couple of years at three radio stations, along with stints as a stagehand, remedial English tutor, bellhop/banquet setup, roofing and siding, landscaping, and…er, my paper route, basically) and, when all else failed, waiting. The kind of waiting you do when you’re hoping for something, but not really expecting it.

A look in the papers showed there was plenty of work for security guards and waiters; I gave myself three more weeks, until after New Years.

And I figured I’d take a long weekend. I might not get another for a while.

Yesterday – December 13, a Thursday – I drove back to North Dakota. Now, a couple of friends and I – friends of mine from college who’d hailed from the Cities but went to college in North Dakota – had a bit of a competition; who could make it from the cities to Jamestown in the fewest road hours? We had a consistent speed course marked out; one end was the 694/River bridge, and the other was the easternmost of Jamestown’s three exits on I94. Jeff Sisk had the current record, 4 hours and 30 minutes for the 335 mile course.

I left a message for Rob Pendelton at KSTP (he’d told me to call Thursday), and then set out in my old Malibu – with 175,000 miles on it, and an outer door panel flapping in the wind from salt damage – around 1 or 2PM, after allowing myself the rare luxury of sleeping in until ninish (I may have been an unemployed bum, but I was a bum with a ton of self-discipline; I was up and on the phone by 8AM every single weekday during those two months)…

…and I punched it. I kept it around 75 in Minnesota, keeping a keen eye out for cops (of whom I saw none), making it from The Bridge to the Red River in a shade over three hours. Then, once I got through Fargo’s traffic and go-slow zone, it was out onto the open prairie.

Back then, North Dakotans had a custom; if it was daylight and they passed a cop or a trooper in daylight, they’d flip on their lights and keep them on for a few miles, to warn oncoming traffic. If it was broad daylight and you saw lights? Dial it back (I don’t know if this still happens, because I pretty much drive close to the speed limit these days, and the limit has gone up from 55 to 70 on the open freeway, which is just fine by me). Once I got past the West Fargo exits headed west, the lights were out. I punched it up to 85. 23 year olds are immortal, of course; thinking back, the thought of pushing that rotting old jalopy with its rattly bearings and flapping door panels and iffy tires past 40 makes me blanche. But I kept it over 80 all the way to Jamestown, except for a stretch near Casselton, when the oncoming lights came on; I passed the trooper doing a perfect 55, two miles later.

It was a cold day out – probably a bit below zero. The air had the beginnings of that crystalline quality it gets when it’s very cold – once you got to the Red River Valley with its pool-table topography, you could see forever. The clouds were high and piled on top of each other, just like the day I’d moved to the Cities, almost two months earlier. And as I nosed out onto the prairie, the sun was just starting to dip below the horizon. I was treated to one of nature’s most glorious spectacles – a sunset on a cold day. Yellow, then pinkish-orange, then a glorious red as the light dipped below the long, gently undulating horizon to the west.

Finally – sixish, I think, around dinner time – I made it back to Jamestown. I spent the evening at some friends’ dorm room up at the college – Rich Larson and Scott Massine, I think – and hung out with a few of the people I’d known who still remembered me from the year before.

“So you’re still down in the Cities!”, Scott said. “Wow. My mom said you’d have given up and moved back by now!”

Looking back, that was one of the things that always pissed me off about the place. “You might move elsewhere, but you’ll be back. It’s a big, ugly world out there, it’ll eat you alive. Just like [fill in name of high school basketball star who’d gone to Fargo or Denver or Minneapolis or Boston or Des Moines, and moved back after a year or five]; he just decided the big city was too crazy for him. ” The unstated coda: “And so will you!”

I fulminated on that one for a while. Slights like that made a lot more difference to me back then.

The next morning, at my Mom and Dad’s place, I had breakfast, relaxed a bit – and, almost as an afterthought, made a call to the Cities, to KSTP-AM, to follow up from yesterday’s call.

“Yes, Mitch – we were wondering if you’d like to start next Tuesday?”

I figured I would, yes, thanks.

So maybe I wouldn’t come crawling back to Jamestown just yet. “In your face“, I thought as a silent message to Scott’s mom.

Wednesday, December 12, 1985. I’d turned 23 the day before. Winter had struck, a warmish October yielding to a wet, chilly, snowy November that included a bit of a blizzard the previous weekend. I’d driven to a band audition in White Bear Lake, from an ad in the City Pages. The ad said they – a bass player and a drummer – wanted to start a good rock and roll band with some room for originals. The ad didn’t say they were a couple of high school kids playing in their mom’s basement. As the blizzard formed, I drove out to White Bear – it might as well have been Wisconsin – slogged through “Immigrant Song” and “Sweet Emotion” and a little very uninspired jamming, and then picked my way home through near-zero visibility (my car nearly bottomed out – in the middle of 35W!), cold, tired, crabby, and out a couple of bucks on gas that needn’t have been burned in the first place.

I’d been in the Twin Cities almost two months, and with the exception of Wednesday (today!) and my interview at KSTP-AM, I really didn’t have a thing going on. My resolution was to find a job – any job, no matter how crappy, just to pay the bills, if I didn’t have something else by New Years.

I also resolved that I was going to go back to Jamestown for a long weekend, starting tomorrow, December 13.

But first things first; the interview.

I drove out to KSTP; successfully, this time. I was ushered into the kitchen area – same as my previous interview. I met Rob Pendelton, the “Executive Producer”, at the time a 31 year old guy who looked like he’d be more comfortable in sandals and shorts, with a laid-back attitude to match; we went through the basics of the job (I’d be a call screener; minimum wage; three hours a day plus the two-hour production meeting; no guarantees of going anywhere). I nodded enthusiastically, smiled, and kept my eye contact without flinching; I’d learned! By this point, I didn’t care; anything was better than nothing.

Then, I met with David Elvin, the producer for a guy named Don Vogel.

We chatted for a bit. The cast of the Vogel Show had just had a minor local “hit” in the novelty song market, “Like A Roving Coach”; I’d caught it on the show the previous week as I was doing my “research”, listening to the program; it was Don’s take on Lou Holtz scramming for Notre Dame (done in Don’s impeccable Bob Dylan impression). “Yep, I heard it”, I allowed. “I do a lot of music; I play guitar”.

That brightened Dave up a bit. “Cool! I kind of suck on guitar…”

The interview went uphill fast from there – and for the first time since I’d moved to the city, after umpteen interviews, I was finally starting to smell paydirt.

Where “paydirt” is $3.35 an hour.

But no matter. I drove home feeling an exhilaration that had long deserted me, at least on the job-hunting front. Maybe this can work after all.

I got home and started thinking about the trip back to North Dakota. Or as I put it in my mind as I thought about it, “home”. I was acutely aware that NoDak was still the home base.

It was fading, but still there.

It was getting cold out.

December 4, 1985. A Wednesday.

I was closing in on two months in the Twin Cities. No job yet – no real nibbles, really.

A job as a technical writer at a local defense-related contractor flared briefly in November – and flamed out as the company imposed a hiring freeze that lasted the better part of a decade. I ended up working in tech writing – starting in 1993. But that would wait.

And wait.

And wait.

I’d been to a bunch of band auditions. I figured the best way to get into the music scene was to get into a band that was sort of, kind of, like what I wanted to do.

My first audition was sometime in mid-November, after I’d moved into my apartment in South Minneapolis. It was in a warehouse on and Washington Avenue North. I parked my car in a trash-strewn dirt lot abutting a railroad track, and hauled my gear – my guitar and amp – up a cement stairway onto a ratty loading dock that smelled of grease and urine. A bum was passed out in a neighboring doorway. I took a ricket freight elevator up to a drafty room that smelled like rodent droppings with a couple of hanging 110 volt outlets and fist holes in the wallboard, in a warren of similar little spaces housing small bands and wheezing artists. The audition? A couple of synth-pop dweebs from Woodbury-via-The Wedge. Dreadful music, worse “audition”. Hated it. I only bring it up, really, as a way of noting that I walked by that same building about a year ago. It’s been renovated into lofts that start around $375,000; the building next door where the drunk was passed out is a chi-chi office block. I barely recognized the place.

The other event was “Today”, Wednesday. After a bunch of tries, I got a hold of Rob Pendelton at KSTP-AM. “Sorry, I’ve been so busy – but we have a job working as a screener for the…” I didn’t catch the host’s name. “We’d like you to come in for an interview next Wednesday”.

I accepted, naturally. The bank account was in free fall. My goal; if I didn’t have a job I actually wanted by New Years, I was going to take the first security job that I could get.