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52-year-old news footage of a teacher's strike revealed an interview with a young Prince

What incredible luck.

prince, prince as a kid, wcco-TV

via Wikimedia Commons

Prince performing at Coachella in 2008.

Late last month, educators and school district officials in Minneapolis, Minnesota came to a tentative agreement that ended a three-week-long teachers’ strike. The agreement put an end to a standoff that closed classrooms for around 30,000 public school students.

The strike was the first for Minneapolis Public Schools in 52 years. In April 1970, teachers left the classrooms and grabbed picket signs for a historic 20-day standoff. At the time, the teachers took a huge risk because public employees were banned from striking.

“The moment they picked up a placard and set foot on the pavement to join a demonstration, they had violated state law,” Dr. William Green, an Augsburg University history professor, told WCCO.

Although the teachers eventually returned to work without a pay raise, the strike prompted the state to give public workers the right to bargain collectively.

As part of its coverage of the 2022 strike, Minneapolis CBS affiliate WCCO hunted down some archival footage of the 1970 demonstrations to show the common themes between both movements. WCCO Production Manager Matt Liddy dug up 13 minutes of restored footage from the original strike in the station vault to use in his new report.

The footage included a reporter interviewing schoolchildren as teachers picketed near a school. Liddy was shocked when he noticed that one of the children being interviewed looked a lot like Minneapolis and worldwide music icon Prince. In 1970, the artist was known as Prince Nelson.

“I immediately just went out to the newsroom and started showing people and saying, ‘I’m not gonna tell you who I think this is, but who do you think this is?’ And every single person [said] ‘Prince,’” Liddy said.

The newsroom didn’t have the correct equipment to hear the recording, so it found a specialist to extract the audio of the interview.

“I think they should get a better education too cause, um, and I think they should get some more money cause they work, they be working extra hours for us and all that stuff,” the child suspected to be Prince said.

It’s pretty clear why Liddy thought the child in the footage was Prince. The kid physically resembles Prince and his smile is definitely reminiscent of the “Raspberry Beret” singer.

Unfortunately, the child doesn’t say his name to the interviewer. But one of his friends in the video enthusiastically announces that he is "Ronnie Kitchen." The news crew attempted to find Kitchen but their contact information turned up dead ends.

WCCO then reached out to Kristen Zschomler, a Twin Cities historian who is also a big fan of Prince. She had collected a large, 100-page document following Prince's rise from Minneapolis to worldwide fame that included pictures of him as a kid.

“I think that’s him, definitely. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I think that’s definitely Prince,” she said.

Zschomler connected them with Terrance Jackson, a boyhood friend of Prince's who played in his first band, Grand Central. When shown the video, Jackson immediately noticed Kitchen and Prince.

“Oh my God, that’s Kitchen,” Jackson exclaimed as the video began. “That is Prince! Standing right there with the hat on, right? That’s Skipper! Oh my God!”

Prince’s friends called him Skipper when he was a kid.

Liddy’s find is an incredible discovery for Prince fans and people who grew up in Minneapolis. It shows that even before Prince was a teenager he had a twinkle in his eye that would become a trademark of his larger-than-life personality. Nobody knows where incredible charisma comes from, but after seeing this footage, maybe Prince was just born with it.

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Video: Cuba's repair-first culture is an extreme, but remarkable, example of sustainability

The unintended consequences of being cut off from the world.

via Pedro Szekely/Flickr

A woman stands by a vintage car in Cuba.

The growing worldwide “right to repair” movement seeks to make it easier for consumers to fix their products by pressuring manufacturers to share repair information, provide diagnostic tools and supply service parts.

The movement believes that by creating a repair-friendly culture, we’ll be on a path to greater sustainability in a world of finite resources and a changing climate.

Hugh Jeffreys, a right-to-repair advocate and YouTuber with over 849,000 subscribers, took a trip to Cuba to see first-hand how the country’s people have created a culture of repair out of necessity that may provide a lesson for the rest of the world.

Unfortunately for Cuba’s population, they’ve been forced to develop this repair-oriented culture due to 7 decades of communist oppression and a 61-year U.S. trade embargo. An unintended consequence of this political climate has turned Cuba into one of the world's most "repair-friendly countries.” Cubans repair their watches, cell phones, cars and television sets instead of throwing them out like in most counties.

"What is it like in a country with no other option than repair?” Jeffreys asks in a video that shows a country where most cars are from the ‘50s and people still watch television on old Soviet sets from the ‘70s.

Cuba’s political climate has put its people in the unenviable position of improvising and making the best use of what they have. But their ability to be resourceful and repair things instead of having the knee-jerk reaction to throw them out shows how far a repair-first mindset can go when you don’t have the luxury of being wasteful.

it makes one wonder: What would the environmental impact be if everyone in America first considered repairing their damaged goods instead of throwing them out?

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A small town was about to lose its only daycare. The community voted to raise taxes to save it.

"I was a little shocked because I had made myself think that it wasn't going to pass so that I wasn't super disappointed at the end."

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Warren, Minnesota was in danger of losing its only daycare, so the community raised taxes.

Child care is essential for the majority of parents out there. Over the past couple of decades, it has become a necessity for both parents to work in many American households. When no one is home to care for the children, parents rely on daycares to fill the gap. But what happens when the only daycare in town is about to close?

In a small Minnesota town, that question became reality because there weren't enough workers and the cost to run the Little Sprouts Learning Center was high. Families, including the board members of Little Sprouts, were worried they'd have to relocate if the center was forced to close. They needed a radical plan.

Warren, Minnesota, where the childcare center is located, was in desperate need of a miracle since they're located in a childcare desert. A CBS Saturday Morning segment about the center mentioned that 51% of Americans live in childcare deserts, "where there are more children than available daycare providers."

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