Excerpt From My New Memoir, 'None of Your Beeswax': Making Up the News at KRCQ Radio in Detroit Lakes.

Recently divorced, I was working as a bill collector in St Paul and was desperate to get out of the Cities and do something less stressful. I usually spent nine months a year as a circus clown, but that year the divorce proceedings had put a spanner in the works as far as traveling with a mud show. So I fell back on my other career, radio news. I had a bona fide certificate from Brown Institute of Broadcasting, so I decided to put it to use.

 I got the job as news director at KRCQ up in Detroit Lakes mostly because I didn’t baulk at the miniscule salary. The janitor at the station made more than me. (Well, the janitor was the station owner’s wife . . . ) My broadcast name was Tim Roberts. You can still find it in old copies of the Fargo Forum . . . 

The owner had only one caveat for me -- ten minutes of fresh local news every day, no matter what. During the summer this was easy -- the town was swarming with tourists and their shenanigans. The police blotter was chock-a-block with juicy items. 

But come winter, when all the tourists skedaddled back home, local news became as scarce as snowflakes in the Sahara. 

I distinctly recall one desperate morning in February, when all I could scare up was a missing manhole cover on Main Street. That was my lead story -- everything else was recycled, rehashed, and stale. The station owner grimly informed me that if this turn of events continued, I would soon be out of work. I was even stealing all the lost pet announcements from the dj’s to use as news bulletins.

So I went to my favorite bar and began to think . . . and drink. Around midnight an idea penetrated my sozzled brain. I would just have to invent stories. When I sobered up the next morning, that is exactly what I did.

Some of the ones I still remember include the Pelican Rapids farmer who discovered an elephant skeleton in an old barn, and how he planned to donate it to the Children’s Museum in St Paul. Then there was an old state law in North Dakota that prohibited bringing pennies into the state from Minnesota. Something to do with Depression era economics. Meteorological records indicated that northwestern Minnesota had become fifty percent more humid in the past one hundred years due to the influx of railroad lines. And an evangelical pastor in Ogema raffled off tickets to raise money for a new church roof -- the winner would get a front pew seat in the chapel when the Rapture occurred (and the pastor knew the exact date and time.)

As I became more creative with my faux news I also felt more certain I would soon get caught out -- which, in turn, led to serious drinking sessions every night to subdue the anxiety and guilt.

I finally did get caught, when WCCO radio down in Minneapolis called the station to ask about a story I had run about a man who was involved in a lumberjack accident -- my report stated that his head had been accidentally chopped off and was being kept alive in a jar at the Bell Museum at the University of Minnesota. After a brief interview with the owner I was on my way back to life of a bill collector -- the only job an incipient alcoholic like me could get at the time.

I finally sobered up after several years in AA, and finally went back to the circus, first as a clown, then as Ringmaster, and I ended my circus career as publicity director -- a job that required a great deal of exaggeration and ballyhoo -- something I had already prepared for back in Detroit Lakes.

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An email response from a reporter up in Minnesota:

Reinan, John	Tue, Feb 4, 2:57 PM (8 days ago)
to me

Tim, thanks for this note. I appreciate your sharing your story – it is not the kind of career path one hears about every day!!

I grew up in Fergus Falls, but left town after my HS grad in 1976, so I never had the chance to hear your *fascinating* news stories on KRCQ! But I’m very familiar with DL and the general area.

My first newspaper job was in Little Rock, Ark. Some of the old-timers told me that back in the day, they made up a character named Omo Fevers Bartlett, and they’d insert him into the paper occasionally on a slow day. Omo Fevers Bartlett led Arkadelphia State Teachers College to gridiron glory, or Omo Fevers Bartlett had developed a new type of cattle prod. I thought this was the greatest thing I ever heard, and the next day I quoted Omo Fevers Bartlett in a story about the state of the economy. My editor kindly but firmly informed me that we didn’t pull that kind of stunt anymore, thereby possibly saving my career.