Minneapolis is abuzz after local news station WCCO uncovered footage of an 11-year-old Prince answering a question posed by a TV reporter about a possible teacher strike at schools, including Lincoln Junior High, where Prince went. The filmed footage had remained buried in the station’s archives since 1970, when the artist born Prince Rogers Nelson was learning to play music and stardom was far away.
The discovery was made by Matt Liddy, a WCCO production manager who’s also a music fan. Researching the archives for a report on a March teachers’ strike in Minneapolis, Liddy was scrolling through footage of the station covering a 1970 strike when he came upon a kid wearing a knit cap that covered a short afro. The boy looked strikingly like Prince, but he wasn’t identified in the clip.
“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, as quoted in WCCO’s news story Monday on the discovery.
