It Was Thirty Years Ago Today

I was in the control room at KSTP-AM.  It was a hot, stiflingly muggy July day.

I was screening calls for the Don Vogel show.    With me in the control room were Dave Elvin, the other producer, and news director John MacDougall.

I got a call on the hotline from John Lundell.  Lundell – the manager of the Twin Cities’ Metro Traffic branch – was doing an experimental traffic broadcast from an airplane that day.

Lundell told me, with some urgency, that he and his pilot were watching a tornado as they flew over the newer, sparsely-populated suburb of Blaine.

We put him on the air immediately; Lundell did play by play as he watched the storm develop.

I flipped on KARE11 on the control room TV, and watched as the Bears put up their own coverage, live from one of their choppers:

We’d beat them by a solid minute or two – but the video footage was some of the best taken of a live tornado to date.

It was one of the more amazing afternoons I ever spent on the radio.

12 thoughts on “It Was Thirty Years Ago Today

  1. I was about a mile south of there, stuck on University Ave, watching this take place – and trying to figure out how I’d get out of the gridlock if tornado came any closer! (It died out after trashing the nature center).

  2. I landed at Crystal Airport and was still tying the plane down as the tornadoes went by to the north. That was as close as I ever wanted to come to one.

  3. Is that the one that missed all the houses, shopping centers, and parking lots, and managed a touch down in Springbrook nature preserve?

  4. DG,

    Alas, you’ve gone back to your old habits – making snide, dismissive, condescending claims that your facts (“ironically”) can’t support, and scampering away, thereby using my comment section as a metablog.

    I told you I wouldn’t tolerate it.

    So this time, in addition to needing you to start discussing the claims you make in my comment section, I’m going to need some answers from you.

    • You recently claimed you’d been “published” in the London School of Economics’ blog. I’ve asked you repeatedly; the “publication” was actually just a link to one of your articles on “Minnesota Progressive Project”. Am I correct? If not, please provide a link, either publicly or privately to me. it appears you are trying to stretch five pounds of bag over ten pounds of reality.
    • Another: many years ago, you claimed that Salem Twin Cities was in imminent danger of being sued into receivership, because of a scam being run by one of its paid programs. You made a big show of it, in fact. You made a big show of how one of your neighbors – an expert in corporate law, but naturally nobody we could talk to, of course – backing you up on this.
      . So – whatever became of that? That was at least seven years ago; any updates?
    • In 2012, you claimed that Rep. Cornish’s “Stand your Ground” bill – which passed both chambers of the legislature with a bipartisan majority – was “crap legislation”. When asked to substantiate the claim beyond the level of opinion, you provided some stats that, in fact, proved that Stand your Ground was excellent legislation that did exactly what I said it would; you just didn’t know any better. So – please either substantiate your claim with actual facts (and be prepared to defend your defense!), or admit you were talking out your ass

    I could find a lot more, but I have a life.

    God bless ya, DG, but I’m calling BS on you.

    Cue Springsteen singing Glory Days.

    A very memorable moment.

    One I’m sure you’d rather focus on than say…….the Republican plank against porn, once more puritanical righties trying to insert themselves into people’s bedrooms and sex lives.

    Remember – or are you deep in a memory hole – when you were on and on about supposed lefty intrusion in sex for promoting clear consent to sex as a push back against rapists using ambiguity to justify their criminal conduct? Oh – wait – that would be the GOP again, the rape party, trying to push against rape on campus efforts from the Obama administration.

    I’m no apologist for porn, but the primary function it serves is an aid to masturbation and it is not demonstrably widely addictive. It is worth noting that the American Psychiatrists Association define it, where it is a problem behavior, as more compulsive than addictive, one more thing compulsive people are prone to. In contrast they define both internet gambling and internet gaming like world of warcraft as genuinely addicting — yet no sign of the right giving a damn about any real addiction.

    No, the right only gets their knickers in a bunch over sex and sexuality. No other far more legitimate and deserving focus of public health, including gun violence, AIDS, opiate addiction, to list a few, get inclusion on the GOP platform.

    Yeah, much better to focus on weather. Much safer. Less hypocrisy involved in avoiding current events.

    I focus on whatever I want. It’s my blog. You seem to have trouble with that concept.

    I asked you three questions, above. Please see to them. Thanks.

  5. I remember that show clearly. My wife and I were commuting home and listening to the “Round Mound of Sound” when the storms went through just behind us.

    DG….PISS OFF!!

  6. I miss the gray colored text in Dog Gone comments, especially for thread jacks that just go on, and on, and on, …

  7. These, BTW, are the words of the ‘plank’ DG has a problem with:

    The internet must not become a safe haven for
    predators. Pornography, with its harmful effects,
    especially on children, has become a public health
    crisis that is destroying the lives of millions. We encourage
    states to continue to fight this public menace
    and pledge our commitment to children’s safety
    and well-being. We applaud the social networking
    sites that bar sex offenders from participation. We
    urge energetic prosecution of child pornography,
    which is closely linked to human trafficking.

    Five will get ya’ ten she never read them.

    I had a vague memory that back in the 80s Minneapolis feminists shutdown some porn shops and had porno seized and burned. I found this online, it’s wikipedia, so buyer beware:

    In the fall of 1983, MacKinnon secured a one-semester appointment for Dworkin at the University of Minnesota, to teach a course in literature for the Women’s Studies program and co-teach (with MacKinnon) an interdepartmental course on pornography. Hearing about the course, community activists from south Minneapolis contacted Dworkin and MacKinnon to ask for their help in curbing the rise of pornography shops. Dworkin and MacKinnon explained their idea for a new civil rights approach to pornography, which would define pornography as a civil rights violation against women, and allow women who had been harmed by pornography to sue the producers and distributors in civil court for damages. The Minneapolis city council hired Dworkin and MacKinnon as consultants to help the city find an approach to deal with pornography. Public hearings were held by the city council, with testimony from Linda Boreman, Ed Donnerstein (a pornography researcher from the University of Wisconsin–Madison), and Pauline Bart, a radical feminist professor from Chicago. The ordinance was passed on December 30, 1983 but vetoed by Mayor Donald M. Fraser (who opposed the idea on its merits and also claimed that the city ought not get involved in litigation over the ordinance’s constitutionality). The ordinance was passed a second time in July 1984, and was vetoed again by Fraser. In the interim, the city council in Indianapolis invited Dworkin and MacKinnon to draft a similar ordinance, and also held public hearings. A different version of the ordinance, rewritten to focus specifically on pornography that depicted violence, was passed by the Indianapolis city council and signed into law by Mayor William Hudnut on May 1, 1984. However, the law was quickly challenged in court, and overturned as unconstitutional by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals’s ruling on American Booksellers v. Hudnut. The Supreme Court upheld the appellate court’s ruling without comment. The case is often cited as an important decision on freedom of speech as applied to pornography.

    And, of course, we all know that Hillary believes that political speech should be subject to criminal prosecution, especially political speech that criticizes Hillary Clinton.

  8. I am no great expert on pornography, thankfully, but one thing I have learned is that the industry maintains its own clinics for STDs and mental illness. It is as if they don’t want independent doctors and psychiatrists raising the red flag at what they’ll see.

    And really, I have learned a touch about predators on children–I’ve helped set up programs to avoid it at two different churches–and it appears that about 25% of girls and 16-17% of boys are molested in some way. And yes, the arrests one reads about in the papers do indicate that pornography is a factor, part of the process by which offenders “groom” their victims to think that what they’re about to do is normal.

    Not the only factor, but hardly to be dismissed, either.

  9. I’ll give her props for this: That WAS a pretty-epic thread jack.

    Fever-swamp, and hypocritical (short memory of Hosebeast Dworkin’s local romps?), but epic nonetheless.

  10. And DG?

    Not only was the thread-jack the least elegant I’ve ever seen, but even by the standards of thread-jacking, it was irrelevant to the thread at hand.

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