{"id":48515,"date":"2005-12-24T09:36:02","date_gmt":"2005-12-24T15:36:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=48515"},"modified":"2014-10-24T09:44:12","modified_gmt":"2014-10-24T14:44:12","slug":"xxi-122405","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=48515","title":{"rendered":"It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It was Christmas Eve, 1985. I&#8217;d been working at KSTP-AM for a week.<\/p>\n<p>The bad news: it was a part-time job that started at $3.35 an hour.<\/p>\n<p>The good news: I&#8217;d managed to find a mid-day board-operator shift that the Executive Producer, Rob Pendelton, was working. &#8220;Why should a highly-skilled executive like yourself be working the board?&#8221; I asked; Rob agreed, which gave me two more hours a day.<\/p>\n<p>My budget was looking like it was working out like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Half of my money was going to my rent.<\/li>\n<li>A further quarter was going to my commute &#8211; from south Minneapolis to Maplewood, northeast of Saint Paul. As the weather got colder, my car&#8217;s mileage got worse; during one cold snap that first winter, I figured that I was getting about 8mpg.<\/li>\n<li>The rest of the budget &#8211; $100 a month &#8211; was for me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I was <em>so stoked<\/em>!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I worked through the day &#8211; Vogel had a fill-in, as I recall. The snow started around mid-day; it was cold, and it began snowing heavily.<\/p>\n<p>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, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tpt.org\/almanac\/bios.html\">that<\/a> Cathy Wurzer) and me.<\/p>\n<p>I went out to start my car. Nothing. Zip. Not even a click.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8216;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 &#8211; or the ones that were cost a <em>lost<\/em> more than I could afford on Christmas Eve.<\/p>\n<p>Dave offered to drive me home, and Rob Pendelton could give me a ride to work the next day, Christmas.<\/p>\n<p>I took him up on it. Dave dropped me off at my apartment in a slushy, white-coated South Minneapolis, and I went inside.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>I pulled out and baked a Tombstone pizza &#8211; at $3, a bit of a splurge &#8211; and a couple of beers (Stroh&#8217;s, as I recall), opened a couple of presents I&#8217;d gotten from my parents, and turned on the TV. I had two beers left, and ran through one of &#8217;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).<\/p>\n<p>By 9-ish, that was pretty much it. I kicked back on the couch, ate the pizza, drank the last beer, watched the Pope&#8217;s mass on TV, read the book Dad gave me&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>By 11ish I was bored. The TV ran an ad for &#8220;Gab Line&#8221;, 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&#8217; <em>know<\/em> about their seedy reputation). &#8220;Only 10 cents a minute&#8221;. I dialled in.<\/p>\n<p>There were two people on the line; a very drunk-sounding black woman who&#8217;d just moved up from Chicago, and a guy who sounded like he&#8217;d lost all his teeth and could neither pronounce nor enunciate. I don&#8217;t remember what the conversation was about &#8211; and with a drunk and a guy who in retrospect was probably a meth addict, does it matter? &#8211; but it killed half an hour and $3, yet another big splurge on this red-letter Chrismas Eve.<\/p>\n<p>I hung up and sat down on the couch, playing guitar for a bit, thinking about things.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Upside: Things were moving, finally. I had a job &#8211; I knew that I could <em>get<\/em> a job, that I wasn&#8217;t completely unemployable and worthless &#8211; 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.<\/p>\n<p>All in all, not bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was Christmas Eve, 1985. I&#8217;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&#8217;d managed to find a mid-day board-operator shift that the Executive Producer, Rob Pendelton, was working. &#8220;Why should a highly-skilled executive like yourself be working [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twenty-years-ago-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48515"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48542,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48515\/revisions\/48542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}