By Mark Fischenich
WASECA — A Waseca family and their friends will be getting some long-awaited nationwide television exposure starting tonight that celebrates their passion for owning and driving battle tanks and other armored military vehicles.
“Wreckreation Nation,” a Discovery Channel program that showcases the unusual hobbies of average Americans, spent a weekend in Waseca and Morristown in December interviewing Tony Borglum, his parents and friends of the family — and watching teams race a British-made self-propelled 105-millimeter gun.
Borglum, owner of Drive A Tank Inc., said he hasn’t gotten a sneak preview of the segment and will see it for the first time at 9 p.m.
today along with viewers across the country. He said he isn’t nervous about how he, his colleagues and his business will be portrayed.
“It’s Discovery Channel,” he said. “You can’t get much better than that.”
He is curious about how two days of taping will be boiled down to a segment a few minutes long, and he’s a little bit anxious about being able to handle the potential flood of contacts the show might produce.
Even short promos of the segment on the Discovery Channel have boosted the number of hits on his Web site from fewer than a thousand to more than 14,000 a day. He talked to the Minnesotan who owned USA-1, one of the first monster trucks to get national television attention following a competition with Bigfoot on the show “That’s Incredible” in the early 1980s.
“He said, ‘You better be ready. When I was on national TV, I needed three phone lines,’” Borglum said.
The rural Waseca family has been working for several years to make a business out of their collection of tanks and other military gear, hoping employee groups might spend an afternoon driving tanks as a fun team-building exercise or that others might be into the idea for birthday parties and other special occasions.
After running into zoning issues in Waseca County, they’re still working to find a permanent base for tank-driving and related activities. But Borglum said Drive A Tank has locations it can use, including the expansive property near Morristown where the Discovery Channel program was taped.
For anyone who misses tonight’s debut of the tank segment of “Wreckreation Nation,” the show will be rebroadcast at 1 a.m. Wednesday and 10 a.m. April 4.
