Karen Kilgariff
speaker
3,962 appearances
39 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 8 Jun
Karen Kilgariff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's going to rain tomorrow. And it fucking never does. Or it doesn't, doesn't. A lot of this. It's fun to gesture. Dallas, I'm calling you out. We all love a green screen. And yeah, full props to Dallas rains. Always and forever. Still working, I believe. Still doing it. I think so. Legendary.
If you're from somewhere else and you have never heard of the legendary Los Angeles weatherman, Dallas rains. Yeah. With it. Get on board. He's one of the greats. I used to, in my studio apartment when things were very dark, I would get nice and high and watch the 11 o'clock news. And I was always positive Dallas Rains was high along with me.
Because the stuff he would say, I'd be like, this is hilarious. I'd be like, why is this weatherman saying this weird shit and making me laugh so hard? Probably. Okay. So all this in mind, January 12th, 1888, in this same mild morning where Minnie Freeman is heading off to work, Army forecasters in D.C.
are sending out reports via telegraph warning of impending severe weather across several states, including Nebraska, of course, which is where Minnie is, Minnesota, Iowa, and what's then known as the Dakota Territory. Okay.
Because this is still before radio in America, the way important news is communicated when it can't wait for the next day's newspaper is frontier settlements hoist a flag to alert residents of emergency weather situations. Problem is that homesteaders out in a place like central Nebraska live nowhere near each other or a central community. Sure.
So if people aren't nearby when those emergency flags are hoisted, they just don't know. And it's all kind of word of mouth. So Minnie and her students experienced this abrupt and shocking weather change around 3 o'clock, right basically when the school day is ending. So the temperature on what was a warm morning and into the afternoon dropped. Suddenly plummets almost 70 degrees. Holy shit.
And goes from the 40s to minus 20 below zero. No. Yeah.
And then, of course, the sky opens up. Ice and hail begin to pelt the sod schoolhouse and hurricane level winds kick up. Dude. So now... Basically, it's a strong wind that just keeps on building and then ice and hail and last night's snowfall all start getting blown around. They're all in the pit, moshing. That's right. All together. Nasty trio.
So suddenly across a huge swath of the Midwest, countless people are caught in extreme weather. A schoolboy named H.G. Purcell, who lives in the Dakota Territory, now South Dakota, describes the situation like this. We were all out playing in our shirt sleeves without hats or mittens.
Suddenly we looked up and saw something come rolling toward us with great fury from the northwest and making a loud noise." I never thought about that part of it. The storm rolls in. It's like it rolls in loud. It looked like a long string of big bales of cotton that looked to be about 25 feet high.
The phenomenon was so unusual that it scared us children, and several of us ran into the schoolhouse and screamed to the teacher to come out quickly and see what was happening."
So it's hard to overstate the shock people experience on this beautiful morning that basically it lured people outside, many to go run errands on foot or tend to their land or, in the case of children, walk to school without their warmest winter coats. Some without shoes. Oh, dear. Or at least some in just in basically off-season shirts and sleeves, whatever.
So then now they're out of nowhere caught in weather they're completely unprepared for. Author David Laskin reports, quote, even in a region known for abrupt and radical meteorological change, the blizzard of 1888 was unprecedented in its violence and suddenness. One moment it was mild. The sun was shining. The next moment frozen hell had broken loose.
So it's the end of the school day, as I said, when the weather suddenly turns. So young Minnie, who's the sole adult in charge, 19 years old, she does not think going outside is a sensible option. At this point, hurricane force wind gusts are now pummeling the tiny schoolhouse and they blast the door right off its hinges. Shit. Okay. Okay. So for the time being, that's held in place.
But now Minnie has to plan her next steps. She and the students all live at least a quarter of a mile from the schoolhouse. So she's trying to figure out, is it less risky to dismiss the children and hope that they make it back home or keep them inside to wait out the storm in a schoolhouse that isn't exactly structurally sound, has a dwindling amount of fuel for the fire? Yeah.
and basically doesn't have any food.
So teachers across the Midwest go through the same horrible dilemma because, like many, they teach in shoddy buildings or soddy buildings that are, of course, not equipped to handle weather this extreme. And many teachers believed that the better option that day was to dismiss their students and send them home in the storm.
Minnie decides, no, she's going to hunker down and ride this storm out with her kids in the schoolhouse. But she's just praying the schoolhouse can make it. And as she's doing that, a gust of wind picks up the roof of the schoolhouse and blows it away. Shit. So now as the snow and hail and ice are pouring into the schoolhouse, Minnie has to make a new plan fast.
With the front door, the only door nailed shut, she starts wrangling her students and throwing them out the window to get out.
So there was a legend that Minnie tied all the kids together with twine. But that detail has actually been disputed by at least one of her actual students who went through it that day. Great visual for like the legend of the story.
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