February 4, 1998 - Yet another Twins stadium package has emerged at the Capitol. Senator Roy Terwilliger introduced a bill, yesterday, that would fund a 270 million dollar outdoor stadium. The private sector would have to raise a third of the money, the rest of the money would come from the taxes raised by player's salaries. In addition Twins owner Carl Pohlad would turn over the team to a charitable foundation which would sell stock to the public. Lobbyist and former State Senator Kevin Chandler has been following the activity at the Legislature this Session. He says this bill will have a tough road to hoe.
February 4, 1998 - Tracy Moos is the owner of an unusual property that's for sale in Saint Paul. She had a hard time finding a buyer for her work-of-art, a shoe-covered home...but now has two bidders lined up. HOWEVER, she is still holding out for her dream....someone to turn the place into a museum. She bought the house after her husband, Malcolm Moos, the former University of Minnesota president, died. Moos gave me a tour and told me how the building came to be part of an "Outside Art" exhibit in 1996.
February 6, 1998 - Lou Bellamy, Penumbra's artistic director, says his theater has outgrown its current home in the Hallie Q. Brown/Martin Luther King Center and is looking to be a part of African American arts complex in St. Paul.
February 9, 1998 - For decades, the rule was you couldn't win against big tobacco. The companies had deep pockets to wage legal battles. Juries and judges consistently blamed smokers for their own use of cigarettes and the harm they caused. Then, in 1994, a friend of Mississippi Attorney General Michael Moore came up with a new idea. If a state sued for money it paid out in medical bills for cigarette smokers, the companies might be found responsible. The tobacco companies could not claim that a state smoked a cigarette. In a new book about how the states took on the tobacco companies, The People Vs Big Tobacco, the authors follow both sides of the story that lead to the trial here in Minnesota. Co-author Adam Levy says its been difficult for individual smokers to make headway against tobacco companies.
February 10, 1998 - A logger in northern Minnesota is preparing to cut a tract of century-old red pines known as "Little Alfie" in Superior National Forest. Environmental advocates lost a series of court challenges to prevent logging of as many as 6-thousand trees on a one hundred acre site. As of 4pm today, the logging can begin. Minnesota Public Radio's Mary Losure is at the logging site and joins me on the line.
February 13, 1998 - Romance and glamor are words often attached both to Valentine's Day, and the heady world of publishing, although not by commentator Debby Bull. She's the author of "Blue Jelly." When she's not on book tours she lives in Chippewa Falls.
February 13, 1998 - Mainstreet Radio's Catherine Winter has this remembrance of Terry Wilkey, former Bovey police chief. Wilkey spent more than 30 years on the town's police force and the 800-some residents of Bovey all knew him. But his fame spread much farther; to the Twin Cities, even as far as Texas and North Carolina…because of Terry Wilkey, the writer.
February 13, 1998 - A Westminster Town Hall Forum address by former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove. Rita Dove's speech is entitled "The Poet's Voice."
February 16, 1998 - Jay Weiner reports from the Olympics in Nagano on men's hockey, Minnesota ski jumper, speed skater Amy Peterson, and women's figure skating.
February 16, 1998 - Today is President's Day, the day we honor the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. When Washington became President he appointed Alexander Hamilton as the first Secretary of the Treasury. These days politicians talk a lot about the importance of balancing the budget and reducing debt, but Hamilton had a different view. He called the national debt a blessing and Hamilton's Blessing is the name of a new book that looks at the role of the national debt through history. Author John Steele Gordon talked to Bob Potter about how this tradition of borrowing got started.