The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Over several nights about a year ago, a small miracle of human interaction took place on KSTP late-night radio. Host Tommy Mischke was embarking on a self-styled pitch for the Spectacle Shop, one of his show’s handful of loyal sponsors, when a call came over the transom. It had been a slow night and Mischke, who regularly acts on whims and lives for surprises, interrupted the ad mid-sentence to pick up the line.

The call was a wrong number. A man named Al was trying to reach the weather line at KSTP television news. Mischke didn’t let that small fact get in the way. He claimed to be the evening weather person himself, a guy named Blow Zephyr. Either Al didn’t make note of the oddly perfect weatherman name, or he didn’t care. He began explaining his point, which was that people, when confronted by tornadoes, should take more care in “getting out of the way.” It’s simple, counseled Al. One need only step aside, as though avoiding a speeding car. Al revealed that he lived in Maple Grove and had been through four twisters during his fifty-five years.

Using made-up stories and half-baked facts, all delivered with ease and in impressive detail, Mischke engaged Al, who turned out to be a lonely divorcé recently fired from his insurance job.

Mischke started off by claiming that his uncle Ned had been killed by a tornado. Because he was a quadriplegic, Ned had been unable to get out of the way, as Al would have suggested. “There is a guy who would have taken a step to the right or left but couldn’t,” said Mischke. “He wanted to, badly. And then, there was old Ned in a cottonwood.”

“Holy cow,” responded Al, guileless as Sancho Panza. “I’m sorry about that.”

Mischke, who is forty-two but was claiming to be sixty-three, went on to ask whether Al ever thought that tornadoes might “have some sort of consciousness” or, perhaps, possess personalities.

Al pondered this and then, excitedly, told of a tintype photo of his great-great-grandfather that used to hang on his wall. After a tornado ripped apart the house, he found that the picture had disappeared, but its frame still hung in the original spot. Another tornado, he said, had dumped fish on his lawn from a nearby lake. Mischke claimed to know of a twister that had removed a woman’s bra while leaving her shirt on. “That’s what I mean about personality types,” he said.

“You think, What’s with that tornado?”

And then he really pushed things. “You know in the old days tornadoes used to bring up slaves from down south.”

“What?” said Al. “That I don’t believe.”

“Imagine this situation, though,” Mischke pressed on. “You’re down south. You know that tornado alley goes all the way down to the Panhandle of Texas.” Mischke’s eclectic bank of knowledge makes riffs like this seem almost believable. “You’re down there in slave country and you have a tornado coming and you are owned by a man as sure as a dog or cattle are owned. And you have this one out. You know this tornado could do you in, but you also know it could be your ticket to freedom. What do you do?”

Al had to admit, “You’ve got a good question there.”

“There are some, obviously, who went for it and died. I’m not saying they were all sent north. But tornadoes, because of the way they move, can pick things up gently and drop them down gently.”
“Oh, absolutely,” said Al with a chuckle. “You’re preaching to the choir on this one.” The lonely man found himself, unexpectedly, delighted. “I love talking to you,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind me calling again. You are a piece of cake. This is the best conversation I’ve had in years.”

It’s this affectionate if not quite on the up-and-up relationship with listeners—one that is not formal or degrading or belligerent—that makes Mischke’s show so fascinating. It’s also what makes him the area’s best known underground radio sensation, the favorite of pizza delivery drivers, DIY auto repairmen, factory workers, insomniacs, late-night lonely guys, and women who lie in the dark wishing their boyfriends were more original.

Mischke is a self-described throwback to the days of entertainment radio, before the AM dial was given over to political belligerents, when the possibilities and probabilities of the medium seemed endless, and the Lone Ranger always rode again. Garrison Keillor, in a recent Nation essay, described him this way: “a free spirit who gets into wonderful stream-of-consciousness harangues and meditations that are a joy to listen to.” In nearly two decades of broadcasting, Mischke has been compared to Robin Williams, Andy Kaufman, and Keillor himself, but on acid. He has been described as the Onion meets The Simpsons. You simply never know what he’ll say. Once, when interviewing an expert on the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, he began to ask all of his questions to the tune of the famous Gordon Lightfoot song: “Could something like this ever happen a-gain? / Is there any way we can a-void it? / Should they be worried to-day / Up there near Whitefish Bay / Or am I just getting all para-noid-ed?”

After several nights of conversations with Al, Mischke, as Mischke, called to confess. It wasn’t a ha-ha, gotcha, Candid Camera moment. Far from it. It was more of an invitation for Al to enter Mischke’s real world, or at least his real radio world. This often happens to the host; his show and the people he meets there bleed into his off-air life. He doesn’t keep neat boundaries. Once, when a regular caller named Cynthia—who sounds more than a little crazy—was out of town appearing on Judge Judy (she would lose her case against a neighbor), Mischke went to her house and fed and watered her dogs. That’s not typical radio-personality behavior.

The confessional call to Al, which was broadcast live, was handled this way: Mischke explained that he’d simply grown too fond of the ex-insurance man to keep up the act. “I made up the name Blow Zephyr,” he said. “But the guy you were talking to, who enjoyed talking to you, that’s me. That’s the real me.” It was after the confusion cleared (Al: “You still sound like Blow.” Mischke: “I’m Blow and I’m T.D. Mischke”), that the small miracle happened. Al simply didn’t care. He didn’t get mad, didn’t act embarrassed, didn’t seem to mind that he’d been duped. “I hope you enjoy talking to me,” Al said. “I love talking to you. Tommy, the whole thing is, you got to laugh. The key to life is you got to laugh.”

Mischke introduced Al to Wildcat Fox, the show’s newscaster, and another regular caller, an old-timer named Undertaker Fred. “Well hi, Al,” said Fred. In one well-constructed moment, Mischke had knitted Al into the family of misfits and weirdoes that populate the Mischke Broadcast. From there on out, Al could call anytime, and he would. (Al continues to phone, even though his home line has been disconnected. And when he signs off he says, “I love you, Tommy.”) Mischke asked whether Al knew any songs—a frequent question he puts to his guests—and Al suggested “The Auctioneer,” which he then sang a bar of. Nobody knew that one, but Mischke had another idea. “I tell you what, guys, I think we’re going to end it this way: I want us all to yodel in our own ways. All four of us.” And that’s how the show went out that night, with Al, Fred, Wildcat, and Mischke, all yodeling together, but in their own ways.


Mischke’s first time on the radio wasn’t nearly so auspicious. It was just about twenty years ago and he was working as a freelance writer for several local publications, and as a delivery truck driver. On his route, he’d become a regular listener of KSTP’s Don Vogel. Vogel, who died of bladder cancer in 1995, was a throwback himself, a gag man and impersonator who was said to do Larry King better than King himself. One quiet night, Mischke pulled his truck over near a pay phone and dialed. Vogel put him on the air immediately and he panicked. “I must have been their only caller,” he said. “I was on. And it was the strangest feeling. I really empathize with those who get on the air with me and are nervous or lose their focus. It’s sort of like two giant doors just got pulled away and you’re looking into the Grand Canyon. You are in this gigantic world now and there is no going back. And I just screamed something and hung up.”

Mischke lives in a tidy house in St. Paul near the Midway with his wife, Rosie, who is a psychologist, and their two preteen sons, McCullough and Malone. On the morning of our interview, the house exuded old-fashioned coziness. A wood fire burned in the fireplace. There were tulips on the coffee table and throws over the armchairs. A shaggy dog named Shep napped on the hardwood floor, woofing occasionally. “The thing is, I wasn’t prepared,” Mischke said with a laugh, remembering that first call. Then he slipped into what can only be described as his amused voice, which sounds like he’s inhaled a bit of helium. “That’s what happens when I’m not prepared.” After hanging up the phone, Mischke sat in the delivery van and listened to himself on the air (the station employs an eight-second delay). It was horrible, he said, but then a very important thing happened. “There must have been something about it, some sense that this wasn’t just a guy who called up to scream, but a guy who kind of panicked. And they started laughing. That hooked me to try again the next day.” Playing a different character with each call, by the fourth time, Mischke had a moniker, the Phantom Caller. He was hooked forever. “I’m on the radio today because Vogel laughed.”

Thomas David Mischke was born on September 19, 1962, at St. Joseph’s Hospital in downtown St. Paul, the seventh of eight children. His mother and father were both German Catholics from central Minnesota; his father Maurice was from Buckman and his mother Jeanette came from Holdingford, a town Garrison Keillor once dubbed “most Wobegonic.” For most of Mischke’s upbringing, his father owned and ran the Highland Villager community newspaper. (Tommy’s brother Michael is currently the publisher; his brother Dale is an editor). The value of independent thinking and storytelling, along with an appreciation of small shops, was impressed upon the Mischke children. “My dad got me out of high school early every afternoon to work at the paper as part of my education,” Tommy said. “And I’d go home and write stories at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.”

A quarter-century ago, good Catholic boys in St. Paul had two choices for high school; both were military. After graduating from Nativity of Our Lord Elementary, Mischke selected Cretin High, which, at the time, was an all-boys school. He lasted one year. “I just couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I felt like I had joined the service and I’m not the kind of guy who would join the service. I wouldn’t do well with authority like that. So here I am in a situation, at a rebellious age, with guys telling me to come to attention and shine my shoes. And there is no way I am going to do that.” He was in trouble from the start, even getting into a physical fight with one teacher. “You’d have these military guys with whiskey on their breath coming up to you and then you’d have these Christian brothers who looked like they could swing their arm and take your head off, and wanted to.” The only good aspect of the experience, Mischke said, was that “it was a great fraternity. You bonded in your connection with the other guys to try to fight and beat the system. What it created was lifelong friendships.”

He was finally expelled after he walked into the Cretin principal’s office and asked to speak with Colonel Klink. “I guess that’s only a TV show,” he explained, deadpan. The alternative to Cretin was public high school. Mischke, who couldn’t wait to grow up, called his time at Highland Park Senior High a “bad stretch,” though he was voted “best sense of humor” by his class. The combination of misery and laughter would become a running theme throughout his life.
Mischke went on to attend St. John’s University in Collegeville. “When I was a little boy,” he explained, “I used to take a Greyhound up to St. John’s to visit my older brothers. This college was in the woods on water away from all the world. It was an island and I just loved that.” There were no anti-authority, Hogan’s Heroes stunts, only a little time off to travel overseas. Two years in, Mischke transferred to the University of St. Thomas for its journalism program and, after graduation, was “shocked” to find that there was no money in freelance writing. He bummed around the country, hopping freight trains and sometimes playing piano in saloons. He’s been to seventeen countries and forty states. He always thought he’d find the place where he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

For a while in the late 1980s, it looked like that place would be Butte, Montana, which he describes as a renegade town. Mischke prefers the small, the underground, the individual, and the unique, as evidenced by the introduction to his show: Ladies and gentlemen, KSTP now presents the Mischke Broadcast, featuring the broadcast outcast transmitting live from his renegade radio outpost here in the final ninety feet of the city of St. Paul. “Butte didn’t consider itself part of Montana,” said Mischke, sipping coffee, his feet propped up on the coffee table. “It called itself Butte, America. So it was this independent-thinking, wild, former big-labor town. They used to have a ritual when they opened a bar in that town. They’d break the padlock and they’d never close. Evel Knievel was from there. I used to stop into a bar sometimes—I’d see he had his fancy car outside at ten in the morning, and I’d stop in there and he was sitting by himself. I’d talk to him.”

Even in that setting, tossing back drinks with the daredevil, whom he had idolized as a kid, Mischke felt an uncomfortable tug—the nagging truth that Montana wasn’t home and never would be. “Where you live is really going to have a dramatic effect on your life,” he said. “And I thought if I was going to have a place like that, let it be where fate threw me in the first place.” So he returned to St. Paul and got the job as a delivery truck driver and started listening to Vogel on the radio. Home has come to mean a lot to Mischke. It’s the root of the Mischke Broadcast and of his personal identity. “You turn a corner sometimes and what would be just a corner to anybody else coming through town brings on this sudden rush of memories. That’s inside you. Nobody else can feel that. And you think, Wow, this place is bigger than just what it is.”


In 1992, six years after his first phantom call, Mischke was hired as Vogel’s sidekick for twenty dollars per show. They worked together for two years before the relationship crumbled. At issue was the fact that Vogel liked to wing it with little or no preparation, while Mischke believed (and still believes) in gathering and fine-tuning a full load of material each day. For every show, he typically spends about six hours combing through newspapers and writing tunes on the upright piano in his home office (he’s painted the black keys red and replaced the front panel with glass, so he can see the hammers as he plays). Preparation is a security blanket of sorts, in case nobody like Al calls in. In case there are no surprises.

On top of the differences in methodology, Mischke says, management consultants were pressuring him to push Vogel in a new and unwelcome direction. “They should have gone right to Don,” he said. “But they knew they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with him. So they would go to me, and Don resented the fact that I was trying to get him to change the show. And he should have. It was his show.” Finally, he said, a blowup ended the partnership. “But he was a real gentleman about it and a couple of days later he asked me back. I just said, ‘You know, I don’t think we probably should do this. I think what happened probably will happen again.’ And so he went his way and I went mine.”

During Mischke’s first few months on the air solo, he played it straight, delivering a news program with a lefty bent. He covered all the topics of the day—abortion, gun control, race relations. “I thought I had to go to the complete other side,” he said. “I was thinking that maybe this radio thing is a little too frivolous and silly and ridiculous.” He’s sure these early efforts rankled Vogel, whom he called a mentor “in a half-dozen ways.” Among other things, his former boss was a force against pretension. “I don’t own my own headset because of Don Vogel,”
Mischke said. “He thought it was the geekiest thing in the world to have your own headset. And it probably isn’t. It probably is a good idea.” The mentor watched his pupil with dismay, interpreting his newsy approach as a pointed commentary on how radio should be done.

Mischke found rather quickly, within six months, that he didn’t like contributing to the cranky churn of AM radio, designed as it is to incite apoplectic fits. “It was everything I hate about talk radio,” he said. “A bunch of people set in their ways calling up to say they’re set in their ways.” Radio callers, he added, tend to be more arch than the general public; industry wisdom suggests that fewer than five percent of listeners ever pick up the phone. “We have so damn much more in common than we will ever have separating us,” he said. “If you get most Americans together, it’s probably going to work best not to harass gay people. It’s probably going to work best not to care so much about whether they’re adopting a kid, but to care about how that kid is being treated. Reasonable people would see this. And I think most people are reasonable.”

The proliferation of rant-filled, right-wing AM radio can be linked to the repeal, by Ronald Reagan in 1987, of what was known as the Fairness Doctrine. The 1949 FCC rule mandated that in return for a license to broadcast, radio stations had to cover “controversial issues of public importance” in a way that allowed for a “reasonable” representation of opposing views. Once that pesky standard was out of the way, a man named Rush Limbaugh emerged. Limbaugh built his career on the notion that mainstream media outlets were liberally biased. Through endless chest thumping, he enraged listeners already mistrustful of the news and ensured an appetite for more conservative fare. The biased media morphed into the elite biased media, and talk radio’s modern audience was solidified. AM talk stations have been propagating ever since, born of the syndicated likes of Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

KSTP-AM 1500 program director Joe O’Brien doesn’t like to think of his station, which is owned by St. Paul-based Hubbard Broadcasting, as right wing. He says he chooses hosts according to their entertainment value and their understanding of Minnesota culture, not by any certain ideology. “If radio were a party,” he said, “these would be the people everyone would want to hang out with.” But the fact is, nearly all of KSTP’s hosts are conservatives.

“I’m around that climate every day,” said Mischke. “It’s all get on board the train. And I’m not on the train. And what I hate is that there even is a train. Because what I love about this country, what I used to see, is that you just had all these wild individualists and all these different ways of thinking and just this cacophony out there of different views. There should be 280 million different views, to go with every American, and somehow that has been winnowed down to two. I don’t know how in the hell that happened.”

Mischke eventually abandoned straight news in favor of his vaudevillian style of humor, certainly a more nuanced and difficult format. For most of the last eleven years, his show has been a speedball of fabricated news reports, songs, poems, interviews, and conversations with callers who would likely be barred from any other program.

His worldview still bubbles up between the cracks. He recently talked with a co-author of Why Business People Speak Like Idiots and wondered aloud whether the business world makes people “less human.” Such comments don’t draw hate mail or even angry calls. “People see it as almost a loveable way to deliver the message,” he said. “If I say the same stuff in a Hannity delivery, I’m a dead man. Right there is why I survive at KSTP. Because I shouldn’t survive there.”

Mischke enjoys an unusual amount of freedom at the station. In part, that’s because he’s on late at night, from ten to midnight, when things are more laid back. Revenue expectations are low and, as he repeatedly points out on air, management is sleeping. “The show is whatever I am that particular day, whatever I’m feeling,” he explained. “That’s the beauty of it. I always think that Letterman must some days not want to be funny. He must. And God, he should be able to not do that. And then it would be so authentic. And people would talk about how last night, David Letterman said, ‘Screw it, we’re not doing this format.’” The randomness of the Mischke Broadcast doesn’t appear to ruffle longtime fans (though it sometimes confuses new listeners), perhaps indicating that we as a people are less brain-dead than we’re led to believe. Mischke wants listeners to be “somewhere between intrigued and puzzled—and sort of drawn in, but not really so positive that this is a wildly good time.” An avid eavesdropper himself, he attempts to create that same experience for his fans, the feeling of “peeking into a little window.”

One of his most poignant broadcasts came on a night when Mischke said—had to say—screw it. It was September 11, 2001, and he wasn’t even supposed to be on the air. At midday, KSTP had switched back from a national news feed to local hosts. Somebody from the station called Mischke, the oddball, the non-political guy, to say that Bob Davis, a conservative daytime host, would do the nighttime program. “I was furious,” Mischke recalled. “I said, ‘I’ll do my show.’” He remembers arriving at the station five minutes before eight (at the time, his slot was from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.). “The general manager and the program director were standing just outside the door of the studio. And I walked right by them and right in and just said, ‘Hi.’ But there was all this tension. And I don’t know this, but the sense I had was that they wanted to say, ‘What kind of a show are you going to be doing?’”

Mischke’s turned out to be one of the most humane commentaries delivered in the immediate aftermath of the bombings. While pundits announced that the world had fundamentally changed, Mischke made the opposite case. “This kind of thing has been happening for years and our country simply has been too asleep or too busy with shopping and TV to take notice,” he said.
“It’s a terribly violent world, be it the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Somalia, Central America, China, North Korea, Algeria. Violent retribution, aggression, and retaliation are the story of daily life somewhere on the planet all the time. This is just new for us. But it’s not new for people. It’s not new for the children of this planet, and for women and old people, who mean to hurt no one. This is the horrifically violent world we live in, which operates parallel to the profoundly beautiful, loving world we also live in. While these planes this morning were barreling into the World Trade Center, elsewhere, in all parts of the nation, heroic deeds of selflessness were ongoing. The same sort of selfless acts that can be found tonight in the Middle East and Northern Ireland. The world didn’t change today. No.”


Despite his gregarious on-air personality, Mischke himself, in his daily life, is quite private. He likes radio partly because it allows him to hide out—to speak into the darkness late at night, when AM waves travel the farthest, without a bunch of people watching. He rarely makes public appearances, doesn’t have his face plastered across billboards or coffee cups. “I walk all around this neighborhood and all over this community here and nobody knows who I am,” he said with relish. Indeed, while we were talking, a lawn-care guy came to the front door and didn’t recognize him.

The problem with large-scale publicity, said Mischke, is that it ruins the “theater of the mind”—the picture of him that exists only in listeners’ imaginations. He described a public forum where, afterward, a fan approached to express disappointment that his favorite radio host doesn’t look like Woody Allen. Mischke responded, jokingly, “I hope it didn’t ruin the show for you.” The man answered, “Well, it kind of did.”

Contrary to what many expect, Mischke is really quite normal-looking. He’s got all of his hair, a sturdy build (no, he’s not stringy like Harry Dean Stanton), and eyes that crinkle when he laughs, which he does often. He said, “It’s a little unnerving to hear what body they think your voice belongs to.” But, he added, “You can’t tell people how to like you.”

Most weeknights at around ten, Mischke steps from his house into a neighborhood that’s asleep. He drives along an industrial back route to the station on University Avenue, encountering no other cars. “It reminds me of a ghost town,” he said. When he gets to the station, the hallways are deserted, aside from a night security guard. He enters the broadcasting booth, where his boardman “Boomer” waits (Mischke nicknames all of his producers). For the duration of the show, Mischke keeps mostly to himself. He doesn’t chit-chat during commercial breaks, which he’s sure people gossip about when he’s not around. And at midnight, he returns home along the same industrial route, into the same quiet neighborhood. “In my mind,” he explained, “I go and open up this little store and work for a couple of hours and come home.”

It’s a solitary routine, or at least it feels that way to Mischke, despite an estimated thirty thousand listeners. “I like to think that nobody is listening, or just five guys who are like Undertaker Fred,” he said. And that’s how it has to be. Flipping on the lights in Mischke’s dark corner of the radio world, with a daytime slot or a sidekick, would fundamentally alter, and no doubt degrade the show. His one-man-band approach allows him ultimate control and flexibility. Sometimes he talks over the top of commercials, mocking slogans or background music that he finds absurd, or he delays breaks altogether. At the top of a broadcast a few years ago, he paused to think of what to say next and didn’t speak another word for nearly two hours. When listeners called in, he put them on the air without explanation. The show took the form of a sound sculpture with people singing, reading poems, and playing instruments.

Kookiness tends to attract kooks. Mischke’s regular callers have included Al, Undertaker Fred (who claims to have embalmed both his parents), Cynthia with the dogs, a ten-year-old boy named Luke, a host of northwoods back-to-the-landers, and Great-Great Grandma JJ. Before dying at age ninety-six, Grandma JJ frequently called in to play ditties on the harmonica and to speak in Polish. “Tom’s compassion and willingness to listen to those who are usually ignored is a big draw,” said Derek Larson, a thirty-six-year-old suburban postal worker and one of Mischke’s most dedicated fans. Thanks to server space donated by a fellow admirer, Larson posts dozens of audio clips at www.mischkemadness.com. “A good example is Undertaker Fred,” Larson said, “who was banned from most programs at KSTP. That only made Tom more willing to let Fred appear on his show. Everyone is interesting in some way. Tom lets these people talk, and it’s interesting to see how some very different people tick.”

To some degree, Mischke has created a situation in which he can be morally honest. He stands up for small businesses while disparaging Wal-Mart (he recently recounted one of his made-up news stories, about how the company was hiring corpses because they didn’t require health benefits) and the Mall of America, which he calls the Mother of Abominations. He creates personalized commercials solely for local companies to which he can lend his full support, like R.F. Moeller Jeweler, which underwrote his most recent musical effort, a bluesy CD called Whistlestop. Of Mark Moeller, Mischke said, “He is a good guy, a friend of the family. Doing ads for him is just so easy.”

On the flip side, operating in a self-constructed, small-town world has made it difficult for the show to expand to new markets, something Mischke would like to see. It’s not as though there hasn’t been interest. In 2002, the Jones Radio Network was set to syndicate the Mischke Broadcast—which counts among its listeners Garrison Keillor and David Letterman—from one coast to the other. Unfortunately, and perhaps this is why Mischke feels so comfortable among the misfits of the world, the man who can be laugh-out-loud funny also suffers from severe depression. Several times he’s dropped out of his show for months at a time (listeners were convinced he’d died), paralyzed by angst. Stress is a trigger, and the syndication process was nothing if not stressful.

Big meetings, thick contracts, marketing efforts, spin-off products, national ads, news stories about the deal: The negotiations, he said, “were the longest, most drawn-out thing.” And at the end of it all, “There was this date hanging out there, what they call a hard launch, where I am supposed to go from being St. Paul Tommy Mischke to being nationally syndicated Tommy Mischke overnight.” He began to look upon Monday, March 25, 2002, with intense dread.

Mischke expressed consternation on the air, noting that he had the worst ratings at KSTP (he no longer does). “I mean it’s ugly, painfully ugly,” he told listeners. “I stink in terms of ratings, people. Absolutely stink up the joint. I’m an embarrassment. And I sit here tonight absolutely accepting this assessment, and yet the show is supposedly heading to the big time. Syndication, here we come. How does one explain that? My show may very well be, how you say, a dud. Which is kind of funny in a watching-someone-slip-on-a-banana-peel kind of way. And I can live with that because we all have something we’re capable of being bad at. But then why in the hell is this moronic syndication company getting involved?”

By the end of Mischke’s show on the Friday before the launch, he found himself spiraling into a “mental implosion.” He described the experience this way: “If your brain has all these circuits, it’s sort of like some guy was going through and pulling out cords. And literally, each of those cords went to some important function. One dealt with your ability to get up every day and walk out the door. One dealt with your creative side. One dealt with your ability not to find it terrifying that we’re all going to be dead in forty years. Another one helped you be able to read the paper without being bothered by what you read. However many of those cords got pulled out the last time, it was the most number. It happened overnight.”

He knew the syndication deal was dead, “Because I’m now going to report in that I’m leaving for a while. You know, when you play this thing out so publicly, it’s bizarre. You feel like your life is this play on a stage.” After his return to the show, he went to KSTP management and asked why they didn’t fire him. “I really wanted to hear the logic behind why they didn’t because it made no sense to me. If it’s not working, people always say, ‘You don’t want to get fired, do you?’ I really do. I want to get fired if it’s not working.”

Joe O’Brien, whose admiration for the host is obvious, wasn’t about to fire Mischke. Instead, a year ago last January, with Mischke’s consent, he moved him to the ten o’clock slot because he “seemed more like a late-night guy to me.” He added, “Tommy is a very, very talented guy, a very smart, observant, creative guy. He puts a lot of time and effort and thought and creativity into what he does. And he’s doing wonderfully.” Regarding Mischke’s bouts with depression, O’Brien says, “Things like depression aren’t uncommon in our business. In Tommy’s case it was a little more mysterious and probably a little more severe. But it comes with the territory. If we had completely sane, healthy, well-adjusted people doing talk shows, it might be a little dull.”

Mischke counts himself lucky that “the Hubbards don’t operate like corporate America,” but rather “like a family business.” He has a hard time imagining a scenario where he would survive long working for Clear Channel. However, behind the microphone at his renegade radio outpost in the final ninety feet of the city of St. Paul, he somehow fits. “I didn’t come flying in from five, six other radio stations in other cities,” he said. Mischke is a true son of St. Paul, a populist, eschewing the big ideas of the left and right in favor of smaller, more personal ones—those fringe beliefs that really are not of the fringe at all. “I’m sort of a creation of KSTP,” he added. “I’m their guy.”