December 29, 1979 - Midday presents the documentary “Trampled Grass.” MPR’s Greg Barron accompanied a team of medical doctors and nurses from Minnesota as they worked in Cambodian refugee camps along Thailand's border with Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge-controlled state that controlled Cambodia from 1975 until 1979.
January 5, 1980 - Nancy Fushan interviews magician Harry Blackstone, who will be performing at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis. Blackstone shares details of his traveling performance.
January 7, 1980 - MPR’s Tom Meersman reports on Laotian refugees arriving in Minnesota. Meersman highlights struggles and adjustments the refugees face.
January 26, 1980 - Dr. Gerry Webers, a geology professor from Macalester College in Saint Paul, led a scientific expedition of over 150 researchers to the in the Ellsworth Mountains in Antarctica. There, using Camp Macalester as a base of operations, the scientists gathered information on the continents weather, magnetic structure and past life. Webers and others believe that Antarctica was once a part of Africa. And, to support their belief, they have found fossils of animals and plants that could only have lived in a climate much warmer than that of the South Pole's. For about the next 18 minutes, we hear a portion of a tape journal that Webers sent back from the Antarctic.
February 1, 1980 -
February 4, 1980 - MPR’s Nancy Fushan interviews George White, director of O'Neill Theater Center, about Eugene O'Neill's play "A Touch of the Poet."
February 25, 1980 - MPR’s Nancy Fushan interviews poet and activist Marge Piercy. Segment also includes Piercy reading two of her poems.
March 1, 1980 - On this Weekend program, Albrecht Thiemann, representing a German-based group called the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, talks of the Holocaust and about insuring that such a thing does not again come to pass.
March 1, 1980 - The Milkweed Chronicle is not a run-of-the-mill newspaper; it is printed on stiff, durable paper and contains poems and illustrations. The paper has just published its first issue. Guests are Nancy Keating (business manager), Emilie Buchwald (editor) and Randy Scholes (art director).
March 8, 1980 - MPR’s Nancy Fushan profiles and interviews poet and novelist Marge Piercy.