Butch Thompson Trio, George Fenneman, Red Maddock. Odessa Balalaikas, Robin and Linda Williams, Runasini,
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Bob's Bank Butch Thompson Music Corporation Hotel Minnesota (The ploughboys) Jack's Auto Repair (The intuitive jazz) Whippets
Well sir, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. I've been a little bit out of touch since coming out west about a week and a half ago, but in a sense, an exile is never really out of touch because it is, after all, the little town that time forgot. So when I stop and close my eyes and remember it, I can be pretty sure that it's still like that up there even down in Los Angeles. Seeing all these exciting sights that Mr Bergmeyer geography class never prepared us for.
I still stop and look at my watch and think well my goodness it's noon back home, the siren is just going off right now. Bud turns on the siren there, he takes a nap starting at 11:30. He sleeps in the front seat of the fire truck in the garage beside the town hall, but he sets an alarm for 12 noon, you see. So then it goes up and turns on the siren, indicate it's noon, and then he goes back and naps for a little longer.
At noon everybody’s eating lunch and everybody reaches over towards their radios and they turn on the Noontime Merry Go Round with Newton Minnow with the livestock and the grain markets reports and recipe exchange and the lost and found and the thought for the day and the hymn and the buy, sell and trade column and the rest of it.
Father Emil, when he hears the siren, picks up his breviary and says the Angelus, the noontime prayer for working people though he doesn't read it out of the Angelus, 'cause he knows he knows his own words, but he kind of holds his breviary there sitting in the rectory at his lunch- holds the breviary- give a little top spin, you know. And he says, “dear God, rich people have so much time to think about things and to praise you if they want to. So think about the poor people who have to work so hard and don't have time for everything and consider their work as praise 'cause that's all they got Amen.” And then he takes his nap.
Down at Bunson motors, when he hears the moon siren, Mr Burgie puts down his tools, no matter if there's just one more screw left to tighten, he puts his tools right down, washes his hands, goes, sits in the Chatterbox Cafe at the counter at the senior stool up by the cash register. Dorothy pours him a cup of coffee and he asks her what what's special today on the menu, she tells him, and then he orders the hot beef sandwich. As he's done every day, every day for 20-30 years. Yes, sir, that's all what happens at noon.
It's a clear summer day in Lake Wobegon. Up at the Tollefson house up at the north end of town, the big white house looking out towards the lake. There's this tall skinny kid walks out on the porch in his pajamas at 12:00 o'clock noon, drinking a cup of coffee. The Tolefson boy. The boy who graduated from high school just three weeks ago and is still basking in the glow of it. And of being elected to the Order of the Shining Star, the graduate considered most likely- and getting the $200 Sons of Knute scholarship. Still basking in the glow of it and staying up now until 4:00 in the morning reading books and practicing smoking cigarettes.
His parents are basking in the glow too, otherwise they'd make him get dressed and go out, and hoe sweet corn in the garden. But they don't. They're so proud of him. His mother comes out on the porch.
And she says “You still in your pajamas, Johnny?”
And he looks at her, and he sighs “Yes, mother. The answer to your question is yes. These are my pajamas, this is me in them.”
She says would “You like some lunch?”
He said “no, I'm not hungry.”
She said “I’ll fix you some breakfast then.”
He says “I'm not hungry. I just told you I'm not hungry.”
“Oh what's wrong Johnny?” She says, puts her hand on his shoulder and he shrinks away.
“Nothing” he says “just leave me alone. Nothing is wrong.”
Well there is. What's wrong is that this kid is just about to be exposed to a terrible, humiliating experience that he's been dreading for weeks. In a little while, he's gonna get into the Chevy with his mother and they're gonna go pick up his Aunt Mary and Grandma and his great uncle Senator Kay Torvaldson, and all of them are going to drive into Saint Cloud where he is to register for the fall term at Saint Cloud State University. The whole motley bunch of them.
“why? Why? It's just registration” He's told his mother” it's like getting a driver's license. Takes about 10 minutes. Why do we have to take everybody with us?”
She says “because they're proud of you. They wanna be there.”
“Oh”, he says, “why don't you just take them and leave me at home.”
“Oh no, Johnny” she says “you're the one who's getting registered for college”
A joke and she doesn't even get it. He doesn't know how to tell her, but there's something funny about his relatives. They look funny. And they talk funny. And it's not so noticeable in a town like Lake Wobegon where there are a lot of people like them. But you take them into a city like St. Cloud, MN. And it's like they got a sign around their necks. And it says Hicks. We're from the country. We've eaten cornflakes for breakfast every morning for 30 years. We got these clothes from Montgomery Wards years ago.
Saint Cloud is kind of a cosmopolitan town, you know. People there have kind of a shine about him, not like in Saint Paul of course, but still. The thought of getting in the car and driving with this bunch is more than he can bear. He thinks about the Flambeau family in the Flambeau family mystery series of novels, which he's read all of them twice. Amile Flambeau is a Nobel Prize winning microbiologist who works for the World Health Organization and in his travels around the world he often gets put right in the middle of very complicated criminal conspiracies, which he solves using his superior intellectual capabilities and those of his wife, Eileen, the former film actress. And also their son Tony Flambeau, who is like the Tollefson boy, 18 years old, but what a difference that family lives in Manhattan in New York, where they relax and they have fun together in between their adventures. And where they do what they feel like doing when they feel like doing, there's no noon siren that goes off in Manhattan and everybody has to sit down and eat tuna fish casserole. They eat when they want to and Tony is treated like a real person with abilities and talents and feelings of his own.
And the Tolefson boy just wishes his family could be like that. Thinks about when Tony Flambeau celebrated his 18th birthday, his mother came to him and she said, “Tony, Emile and I would love it if you'd join us on the balcony for wine before dinner.”
And Tony said, “oh thanks Eileen.”
To call your parents by their first names and to sit around drinking fine wine with them this almost never happens in Lake Wobegon. He thinks about the Flambeau’s as they drive him to Saint Cloud. Him in the front seat squeezed in between Grandma and his mother, driving his uncle, Senator Thorvaldsen, in the backseat with Aunt Mary. All the windows are rolled up 'cause grandma can't stand drafts. And they're all talking at the same time and saying dumb things.
Aunt Mary reads billboards out loud. They're right there where you can see them but she reads them! You drive down the highway and there in front of you is a house being carried on a flatbed truck down the highway, and you get up right behind it, and Mary says “Well, look at that Johnny. There's a house on the highway ain't that a deal?”
Of course it's a house. Anybody can see that.
“Look at them horses over there, Johnny, my there are a whole bunch of em. Well, it's a warm day today ain't it Johnny?”
And his great uncle in the back seat, who ever had a great uncle whose first name was Senator? How do you explain to people that his mother just named him Senator 'cause she thought it sounded good? When he's sitting in a back seat and he's talking a mile a minute, even though everybody else is talking, he's saying, “oh, what a wonderful day it is today, Johnny. Ah boy, you're going to remember this day the rest of your life. Ah, the sun shining. Ah, God is good Johnny.”
Sitting there and grandma’s sitting next to him with those big, thick eyeglasses make her look like a lizard almost. Clutching onto her pocketbook is if somebody gonna rip it out of her hands.
Why can't we be more like the flambeaux?
Finally they come up towards the campus and he's crouching lower and lower in the front seat. Ducking his head and putting his hand up to his face. What if somebody sees him with this bunch? He wants to be somebody here at this college. He wants to write for the Saint Cloud state literary magazine Cumulus. But what if? What if when he takes his poems into the editor, the editor looks up from the desk and says “oh yeah I recognize you, you were within a car with a bunch of funny looking people weren't you?”
Around and around they go looking for a parking space up one street down the other round the block 3-4 times and finally his mother says, “oh gracious, I don't know what to do. Should we park downtown and walk or should I double park er... and he said “no. So just stop here”, he said. “I'll run in and it'll only take me a couple minutes. You all stay in the car” And he jumps out of the car right over his grandma and runs as fast as he can go up the walk and into the building.
Poor child. Poor young man 'cause it's love that he feels it really is. He doesn't know it, but what else could make us behave so badly if not love? What else could be so embarrassed? So self conscious and so easily humiliated? Then just love. He really wants him to run after and catch up with him. But they won't today.Someday they will. Meanwhile they sit there in the car. Aunt Mary and Senator Kay in the back seat and Mama and Grandma in the front. And Senator is saying “It's a wonderful day. He's a good boy. He's going to do well. I'm proud I was here to see it.”
That's the news from Lake Wobegon Minnesota.
Congrats to LA Lakers on championship
1984-06-30 1987-09-12 1990-06-23
Ad from May 26 Los Angeles Times. 1982.06.12 Louisville Courier / Audio of the News available as a digital download.
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Carl C.