In addition to his newspaper columns - 8,400 of them by the time he retired from The Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1995 - he wrote 23 books, held a football clinic for women, hosted talk shows and for almost four decades led annual “Jaunt with Jim” bicycling trips around the state, stopping at pay phones along the road to call in and dictate his column. Klobuchar was long popular in Minnesota, even a folk hero. He survived a bout with Covid-19 last year. Senator Klobuchar, who announced his death on Twitter, did not specify a cause but said he had had Alzheimer’s disease. Klobuchar died on Wednesday at a care facility in Burnsville, a suburb of the Twin Cities. She accepted the apology, adding, “When you have a parent that’s an alcoholic, you’re pretty careful about drinking.” He turned the question back on her, a breach of decorum for which he later apologized. She asked Judge Kavanaugh whether he had ever drunk so much that he could not recollect events. Klobuchar noted that her father, then 90, was a recovering alcoholic who still attended meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.ĭuring her questioning of the nominee, Ms. A dying little girl, taking her last train ride.”īut he did not come to national attention until 2018, when his daughter, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, mentioned him during the contentious televised hearings on Judge Brett M. He scaled the Matterhorn eight times and Kilimanjaro five.Īnd he could make readers weep, as when he wrote about a 5-year-old girl with a brain tumor who loved to ride the rails: “She was cradled in her mother’s lap on the observation car of the Milwaukee Road’s Hiawatha, a tidy young lady. He was a finalist for NASA’s initiative to send a journalist into space, until the Challenger explosion in 1986 ended the program. Straight out of central casting, he was celebrated for his derring-do: He once held a piece of chalk between his lips while a sharpshooter took aim at it. Jim Klobuchar was a renowned sportswriter and general interest columnist in Minnesota for decades.