At seventy-seven, Paul Linnman looks back on his career in broadcast journalism with a range of emotions. He feels lucky to have had the chance to report on historic events, and to have had the freedom to chase down idiosyncratic stories that caught his interest. But it isn’t all rosy memories. There was that exploding whale.

In November of 1970, Linnman went to the coastal town of Florence, Oregon, where the carcass of a forty-five-foot sperm whale had washed up on the beach. Nobody could figure out how to move it, so the State Highway Division decided to blow it up. Linnman was on the scene with good humor and an alliterative take: “The sand dunes there were covered with spectators and landlubber newsmen, shortly to become land-blubber newsmen, when the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.”

What Linnman didn’t realize was how the story would take off. It was rebroadcast around the country, and the exploding whale became a kind of mascot for Florence and a point of pride for many of its residents. As for Linnman himself, he became forever associated with the blast. In Winslow Crane-Murdoch’s documentary short “Oh, Whale,” Linnman returns to that fateful beach and reunites with his old partner Doug Brazil, as the two reflect on the strangeness of that day and the story’s improbable sticking power. It wasn’t the loftiest moment in Linnman’s career, and it wasn’t what he would have chosen to be known for, but, as one local tells him, of what his work meant for the town, “It matters, and it’s good.”