Behind The Scenes: Uncovering Priceless Footage Of Prince At Age 11

do most of the kids you think are most of the kids in favor of the picketing yes how come i'd say when it comes to the discovery we didn't make the discovery but joe and i are the lucky ones who get to investigate it you would say yep but it did begin because we had been in the midst of a teacher strike and one of our managers wanted to look back at the teacher strike in minneapolis from 1970. it's been 52 years since the minneapolis strike happened for the teachers and so we don't usually go to the basement to look at film well thank goodness matt liddy is a music aficionado and so he uh while scrolling through this old film and he came across this scene where a reporter was interviewing some kids outside of a school and he and he happened upon this one shot he said my god that looks like prince so he's crossing his fingers let's send it in to a professional who can extract the audio and i'm going to watch it and that reporter is going to ask his name and he's going to say my name is prince nelson and the reporter dropped the ball reporter did not ask the name and then i'm sitting at my desk just looking at the video thinking there's got to be a prince historian around here in addition to there was one person in the video who does say his name and that's all i feel my name is ronnie kitchen thank you very much ronnie kitchen charismatic kid again the reporters never asked names but he goes and my name is ronnie kitchen and immediately we're like we gotta find ronnie kitchen we spent almost a day looking for ronnie kitchen and or his some trail of him got to start over who else can we try to find that might know him at that age and as we're hoping to find those friends and family through google searching and trying to find prince historians there's a local historian and archaeologist who that's her side hobby is researching prince and she knows her stuff so it would mean that you know his birthday is june 7th born in 1958 and when she saw this video it blew me away because they were being working extra hours for us and all that stuff oh i think that's him definitely oh my gosh i yeah i think that's definitely prince the great part about kristen so she asked us have you tried to contact family which kind of tried to contact friends and i mentioned how you know we got one person calling this person one person calling that person we haven't heard back well she's the historian i have contacts with all their family friends i have contacts with family members i have contacts with former band members do you want me to reach out to them yeah yeah thank you that would be great that would be a huge help within an hour of us leaving her house she had a former childhood friend and former band member who was available to talk with us well the artist known as prince we go back as far as kindergarten at john hale elementary in north minneapolis terry lived next door to prince as a teenager was in one of their first bands together grand central this is a real prince so he called him skipper skipper so we learned from kristin through looking at these old images they were in the images the caption would say skipper sitting on so-and-so's lap well skipper is what they called prince so she told us that when terry's watching the video and sees prince he doesn't even i don't know if he says prince first he says that's skipper that skipper oh my god and that's that's ronnie kitchen oh my gosh that's him okay okay keep going keep going oh my goodness oh my goodness oh wow that's him i'm sorry and that fully confirmed like not only is this he knew him by that nickname we only saw in pictures he kept saying skipper he even knew who ronnie kitchen was when the video played that that that name we were trying to find he sees the images oh man that's kitchen and right from right there we knew like this is the guy who's going to know everybody in this video wow wow that was him what do you uh i'm like blown away and flabber totally i'm totally blown away that was that was that was that was i see i grew up calling him skipper i never referred to him as friends he he might even got mad at me when he got famous but i caught him skipper so wow he's watching it you see the smile on his face coupled with these just gentle tears coming down it's like we transported him 50 years back in that instant it really it was pretty powerful moment to see but then upon watching the video it's like it unlocked another door of memories i don't think i've done a story in my many years here that that uh had this has this feeling or or evokes this kind of emotion and i think the viewers are going to feel it too i think they get a better education too because um and i think they should get some more money because they work be working extra hours for us and all that stuff

Channel: WCCO - CBS Minnesota

Views: 23,169

Keywords: WCCO 4 News

Id: FdUsFuR2DbI

Length: 5min 41sec (341 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 04 2022