Notebook
March 2nd, 2018 by Gary Osberg

“Walleye Willie” has had a good winter of fishing.  One Saturday he caught a 14” inch crappie, a 9” bluegill and a 26” walleye.

William Harley Osberg will celebrate his ninth birthday tomorrow.  The big party will be poolside at a motel in Wadena.  One year we celebrated his birthday at the St. Cloud Holiday Inn & Suites, like we used to do every winter. That tradition was started by friends that wanted to do something nice for the Osbergs.

We had a purchased a farm on Cedar Lake, west of Upsala in 1973 and beginning in 1974 we would invite a bunch of classmates and their families to camp on the beach and celebrate the Fourth of July.  It went on until we moved to Charlotte, NC in 1988.  In 1976 we had thirteen rigs from a two-man pup tent all the way up to a 35 foot motor home with a color TV.  Ronnie would bring his converted school bus the weekend before the 4th and stay until the weekend after.  After many days of having a camp fire, Ronnie would bury a kettle, containing a beef roast, in the dirt under the fire site early in the morning and that evening we would have a feast.  This was a scouting tradition. The kids loved staying up all night, in their sleeping bags around the campfire.  Many of them said it was better than Christmas.

Our friends decided to repay us by planning a weekend at a motel with a pool and we ended up at The Holiday Inn in Saint Cloud, always on the second weekend in February.  The first year that we did it we had to sneak the food into the hotel, since the hotel policy was “no food or drink in the rooms”  Today if you go there on any weekend during the winter months, there is a smorgasbord in front of most of the pool side rooms.  It is a blast.  Thank you to Dick Anderson for changing the policy and providing a winter break for all of us. Now the host at the Holiday Inn is Leo Sand.

This week Live From Here is back at the famed Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul with another live broadcast. From Cannon Falls, Minnesota girl to Nashville songwriting star, Caitlyn Smith is on hand performing songs from her new album Starfire; old friends Väsen are back for some barn burning instrumental tunes; and comedian and actress Mary Lynn Rajskub joins Chris for sketches and stand-up. Plus: this season’s 14th Song of the Week from Chris Thile; a barrel full of music from the house band (Madison CunninghamRich DworskyStuart DuncanChris Eldridge, Matt Johnson, and Chris Morrissey); a duffel-bag-full of scripts from the radio acting company, Serena BrookTim Russell, and Fred Newman; and Chris will travel even further into yet-uncharted musician birthday territory. All that, and a new “Out. In. America”. segment from our traveling correspondent, Tom Papa. It’s two hours of high-wire radio you won’t want to miss. Tune in on your local public radio station or watch live (Saturday, 5 p.m. – 7 p.m. Central Time) at livefromhere.org!

“If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life”.  Albert Camus

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