You know, most reporters can't go back to the towns they wrote stories about. I never wrote that kind of story.

The storytelling tradition that you bring from the South, I don't know where it arose, but it's still there. You can't go to the feed store, or the country courthouse without running into storytellers.

It was cold out there, bitter, biting, cutting, piercing, hyperborean, marmoreal cold, and there were all these Minnesotans running around outdoors, happy as lambs in the spring.

In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality.

I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.

Now that I look back on it, having retired from being a reporter, it was kind of romantic. It was a wonderful way to live one's life, just as I imagined it would be when I was 6 or 7.

That was the overwhelming thing to me, the joy of carrying my portable typewriter to an event and trying to describe it.