“I had a columnist ask me this week if the exploding whale didn’t define my career.” It may not entirely define Portland news icon Paul Linnman’s career, but it symbolizes it enough to have been the title of his 2003 memoir, an inside view of a life in journalism titled The Exploding Whale: and Other Remarkable Stories from the Evening News.
Linnman has forty years of stories from the job now, but he’s lucky he and his cameraman even got this early one onto the air, considering the fate of a nearby car. As it turned out, he suffered only a ruined coat that day, lived to enjoy a long and distinguished career, and lucky for us, write it down.