Description
The Good dust jacket has wear and creasing at edges, price-clipped. The Near Fine binding is orange cloth over boards, black lettering, very slight rub wear to corners. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book measures 9″ tall x 5.8″ wide.
First Edition
About the book (from the dust jacket)
The impulse to classify newspaper columnists into tidy categories based on style, tone and ancestry meets an impasse when the columnist is Jim Klobuchar of The Minneapolis Star.
Readers with a sentimental fondness for the old Golden Age of personal journalism see some of H. L. Mencken in his sly irreverence, of Damon Runyan in his eavesdropping on curbstone characters and of Paul Gallico in his energies.
His colleagues, though, recognize him as an original who eludes easy classification. “Jim is about what would have happened,” one of them says, “if Marco Polo could type.” His thousands of regular readers made the discovery several years ago. It is likely to be freshly made by a developing national following, nourished by the first publication of his collected columns in 1967 and by some of his clip-and-mail readers.
There is a question whether the natural environment for his craft is the political hall, the athletic arena, the mountain ridge or the boudoir. He is a humor columnist, frequently. His targets are the over-zealous, oversold, the pompous and the thrashing institutions of our times. Mostly, though, he is a story-teller whose stance is to be awed and sometimes numbed by the lengths to which the human animal will go to get himself loused up.
Yet his daily readers are likely to agree he rarely writes from anger or to hurt. He buffets more than he hammers. He would like to make the objects of his caricatures participants in the joke rather than the butt of it, and he usually manages.
His description of the mini-skirt on first encounter in London already has become a standard in the public speaker’s manual around the country: “Never in the field of human endeavor,” he declared, “”has so little fabric been lifted SO high to reveal so much that needed to be concealed so badly.” But of the outdoors, or the small, anonymous sacrifices of the human spirit, he writes with a tenderness and sensitivity that give him another dimension. And in yet another setting, he delivered on-the-spot reportage that drew from one metropolitan managing editor this judgment:
“His coverage of the 1968 presidential election was the best reporting I saw from the campaign trail in its scope and feel.” All of this has made him a professional of weight on the national newspaper scene. Some of it is reprinted in this book, the swashbuckling escapades of Billy Martin, the unforgettable hour of the moonwalk, the half-winking account of the search for the Abominable Snowman of California. You will meet, in their own habitat, penitentiary cons, athletic stars, civic crusaders and maybe a hooker here or there.
Their custodian is a native of Ely, Minnesota, who worked in an iron mine to help finance his college education. He served in the Army and worked on three Twin Cities newspapers and the Associated Press before joining the Minneapolis Star as a columnist in 1965. He is a popular after-dinner speaker and in 1968 began a weekly television program in the Twin Cities.
By avocation he is a mountain climber, pilot, paddleball player and jogger – managing, he says, “to stay a half step ahead of the sheriff most of the time.” He is 41, married and the father of two girls, Amy, 9 and Beth, 6. The family lives in the Minneapolis suburb of Plymouth.
