Paul Linnman’s place in Oregon history is secure. And that place, a blustery stretch of beach in 1970, is perfectly summed up by the title of his memoir: “The Exploding Whale.”
On Thursday, the former Portland TV newsman will sit down with Oregon Historical Society executive director Kerry Tymchuk to talk about his most famous reporting assignment. The Zoom event, “The 50th Anniversary of Blasted Blubber: A Conversation with Paul Linnman,” is free to the public.
The Nov. 12, 1970, dynamiting of the dead whale, which had washed up on a beach in Lane County, is a beloved, only-in-Oregon moment and a longtime internet video hit. Linnman famously kept his cool on air as whale bits flew like shrapnel.
“Our cameras stopped rolling immediately after the blast,” he reported for KATU-TV. “The humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of whale blubber fell everywhere.”
But while Linnman’s name is synonymous with huge chunks of whale blubber falling everywhere, there’s more to his Oregon tale. The subtitle of his 2003 memoir is: “And Other Remarkable Stories from the Evening News.”
Those stories, told with humble good cheer, range from the amusingly trivial (trying to make sense of a dazed-and-confused Ken Kesey) to the even more amusingly trivial (An April Fool’s Day spoof about a two-headed dog that had KATU’s phones “ringing for days.”)
Linnman, now 73, says he ended up in journalism thanks to a stray motivational comment from an English teacher at Portland’s Wilson High School: “It’s too bad you don’t give a s–t, Linnman, because I think you can write a little.”
The teenager took the backhanded compliment to heart, and he was soon writing for the student newspaper. He then worked in customer service at The Oregonian before landing at Channel 2, first as a film editor and then as a reporter.
Soon enough this led him to that dead whale, and he’s regularly been returned to it, “Groundhog Day”-like, ever since. He’s lost count of how many times someone has called out to him: “Hey, aren’t you the guy who blew up that whale?”
He did not blow up the whale, needless to say. That was the Oregon Department of Transportation. But, being a news pro, Linnman on that long-ago day tried to come across as an expert on blowing up whales.
“As I moved steadily toward the whale, I looked around and made some observations,” he recalls of arriving on the scene. “A reporter likes to appear as if he or she knows what’s going on, so I tried to act nonchalant, like I had attended several mammal bombings.”