I tend to doubt Welch’s involvement. There were two carnivals operating in the area that weekend. One in Kimball at St. Ann’s church. I spoke with the owner of that carnival and he said he had a young man named Lloyd on his staff, but he was from Appleton, WI and was arrested for writing bad checks in the area that weekend. The other carnival was put on by a locally owned operator. There were actually two local carnival operators at that time, the other was idle for the weekend based on classified ads in the papers.
According to the
Minneapolis Star of September 3, 1974 (available from newspapers.com) the Minnesota State Fair closed September 2, 1974, the same day the Reker sisters were last seen alive. From same article by Minneapolis Star Staff Writer Randy Furst:
The fair is officially ranked third largest in the country, behind the Texas and Ohio state fairs. But fair authorities contend that because Texas and Oho only estimate admission, their numbers may be inflated and the Minnesota State Fair, which takes a turnstile count, may be the nations' largest fair.
Since (according to the article) 1,596,214 visited the fair, one can imagine accommodation may have been hard to come by in the Twin Cities area. St. Cloud is only about 70 miles away. And St. Cloud was hit by Minnesota's deadliest ever tornado April 14, 1886. Sure, only 20 of the dead were in St. Cloud whereas 38 of them were in what your book calls the rural Sauk Rapids area (which your book mentions as the location where there was an unconfirmed report the Reker sisters had been seen dining with two young males the day they were killed and where James Wagner was from, who on September 25, 1976, along with Herb Notch, Jr., did kidnap and sexually assault a 14 year old girl after robbing the store she was working at). The reason Sauk Rapids is rural is because the business district was devastated by the tornado and so was out competed by St. Cloud. Gillian Welch could have added a stanza about the tornado to one of her two songs about "Ruination Day". She mentions Lincoln getting shot in 1865,
Titanic hitting iceberg in 1912, and 1935 Black Sunday worst-ever Oklahoma dust bowl storm were all on April 14 (but fails to mention
Medora blew up in the Baltimore Inner Harbor April 14, 1842, killing 28, and that her hull was re-floated and remade for the Baltimore Steam Packet Company (the Old Bay Line) into
Herald (as in David Herold) or that Mary Surratt's boys ended up working for the Old Bay Line). An accommodation train tried to flee to St. Cloud from Hinckley during the Great Hinckley fire of 1 September 1894, the same day sidewheel paddle steamer
General Slocum lost her rudder after backing up into the tugboat that had rescued about half the occupants of the tug
James D. Nicol (which had been chartered by the German speaking Herring club for fishing when it sank 24 June 1894 off Sandy Hook, NJ, the same day President Carnot of France was fatally stabbed by an anarchist in his carriage in
Lyon, and the day after the future King Edward VIII was born and the Albion mine blew up killing 281, 50 years to the day before rare Appalachian tornadoes hit (most destructively) Shinnston, West Virginia, and also tiny Dry Tavern, Pennsylvania, where little Debra Makel, 8, had just gone to elementary school when last seen alive as she was leaving school bus in October 1973. Like I believe I said earlier in this thread, Linda Pagano was last seen alive in Akron on 1 September 1974. Just northwest of Akron is Bath (the 1927 Bath, Michigan, School massacre is still the deadliest school killing in US history), where Dahmer lived, and just northwest of Bath is Hinckley, and just northwest of Hinckley is Strongsville, where someone died from tornado in the 1965 Palm Sunday tornado outbreak that happened on Pagano's eighth birthday, and where her remains were found not far from an Eastland Road. Keep going northwest and (eventually) you get back to Minnesota. The 1915
Eastland disaster trails insofar as number of dead Americans on a ship from a maritime purported accident only the Sultana sidewheel paddle steamer explosion that happened the day after Boston Corbett killed Booth and the 15 June 1904 sidewheel paddle steamer
General Slocum fire. Fourth would be the 31 March 1865 sidewheel paddle steamer Army Transport
General Lyon fire off Cape Hatteras.
Reker is a palindrome.