T-5 Days to Great Northern Radio Show: The Nelson boys

Each day this week I’ll be sharing a story about the Great Northern Radio Show, an original live radio variety show debuting 5-7 p.m. Saturday on 91.7 KAXE from the stage of the HCC Theater in Hibbing. You can follow the show on Facebook or find out more at KAXE.org.

Today I’d like to introduce you to Matt Nelson and his dad, Ed. I met Matt when he was in high school and I was coach of the Hibbing High School speech team. Matt was a good writer then and has only gotten better through college, to the point where he’s arguably better than me. (I’d argue, of course, only because I’m a writer trained to protect my ego to the death).

Matt has penned the largest, most ambitious sketch in the Great Northern Radio Show, a full comedic radio melodrama set at the bottom of the Soudan Underground Mine, where Matt worked as an intern two summers ago. If you know the Soudan mine, you know that A) it’s an important historical mining site and state park, but B) it also houses one of the world’s most sophisticated physics laboratories, studying those neutrinos you’ve heard about in the news, and C) it was the site of a massive underground shaft fire last summer.

Matt combines these dramatic elements and more to create one of the more amusing parts of our show this Saturday. I’m sure you’ll like it.

Matt’s dad Ed is also in the show, and he’s no slouch either. He’s a historian at the Grand Rapids Forest History Center and formerly of Ironworld. Ed is the guy who tells lumberjack stories to the kids and makes fun of them for wearing watches in the 19th century, though that joke doesn’t work as well now that kids don’t wear watches. I’m sure he now includes cell phones. Ed has written a lumberjack dialogue and will be a part of the show along with Matt.

The show has something for every generation, literally!

(Photo Ed and Matt at the Apple Store, per Matt’s blog).

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