Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, James Dapogny's Chicago Jazz Band. Peter Ostroushko,
[undocumented]
Hedlund, Roger Lake Wobegon Leonards Norwegian American Socialist Temperance Equal Suffrage Party
Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown, this last week. Kind of a surprising thing happened there on Monday when Mr. Lundberg was coming out about noon from the mercantile where he had gone to, they got in a new shipment of shorts, size 48s, and he went in to buy a bunch of those.
He'd come out the door and he looked up He couldn't believe it. Coming over from just on the other side of Adams Hill, coming in from the north, was a flock of geese flying in the formation heading south. First week of August. Couldn't believe it. Evidently they'd seen something up north that frightened them.
But it made him pause and think, what could be coming next? Some kind of real sharp mid-August frost or something. A few flakes on the ground around Labor Day, he wasn't sure. He'd already eaten lunch, but he went up to the chatterbox and had another lunch. Trying to become a size 50.
You figure if it's going to be a hard winter, you'd like to be carrying a little bit extra around with you in case you need it. There were a lot of people who were, not a lot of people, a few people. Well, actually there were a lot of people, but there weren't that many of them, but there was a lot of each one. Were thinking about their waistlines. last couple weeks up in Lake Wobegon because tonight is the 25th reunion, the 25th anniversary reunion of the Lake Wobegon High School class of 1960, including myself. Going up there after the show. And Roger Hedlund, who about Tuesday night was lying around in his lounger chair looking at the old yearbook, the 1960 Aurora. And looking at the picture of the Lake Wobegon Leonards, the basketball team from that year, himself there, the second row, the fourth from the left, with all these lanky guys with real short hair you don't see anymore, except on girls sometimes now, but... Standing around in the picture in the old gym. They're in their baggy basketball uniforms. looking at his old picture until he could almost imagine that it was the day that that picture was taken and he could smell the wax on the boards on the floor of the gym in the dim old gymnasium there where they used to practice and then all of a sudden he looked down and here around his waist was this hummock of himself all bunched up there. He jumped to his feet, he was alarmed, he was surprised.
He jumped to his feet and threw back his shoulders but it still didn't go away. It was there, it was like some kind of a, it was like a backpack that had slipped around and become a belly pack there with potatoes in it and canned goods and what was left of hundreds of six packs of beer. was hanging down there. And one minute he was back on that ill-fated basketball team of 1960, the Leonards, and thinking about how Cully wouldn't turn on the lights in the gym until it got dark, so the boys would be practicing, would be shooting in dim light, twilight, and almost dark, so that then when the lights came on, they could hit shots without even looking at the basket. What a great team. Just turn and shoot. And then all of a sudden he was 43 years old, and it looked like he'd swallowed the basketball. Marie was in the kitchen, she was cooking dinner, so it was too late to go on a diet. He could smell it.
And he didn't know exactly what it was out there, but it smelled as if meat was a main part of the meal. It was not lean cuisines that Marie was making out there for supper on Tuesday. Which is an idea, the idea of frozen low-calorie dinners. has not really caught on yet up in Lake Wobegon.
Something not quite right about it to those people. It's like it's not quite enough, you know. It's like playing two innings of baseball or something. It's just not really worth the effort. Like skiing North Dakota. spending his summer vacation in Minneapolis. I mean, it just doesn't quite, it doesn't quite satisfy.
But he thought, well, eventually I may have to do it, looking down at himself. Eventually I may have to do it, Roger thought. He thought, I might even have to drink low calorie beer. What a disgrace. Beer that isn't beer at all. It doesn't taste like beer.
It tastes like, it tastes like the worst water that you've ever drank. Water, artesian well water at your brother-in-law's house that's kind of amber colored and has a skunky smell to it. And he gives you a big glass up and says, here, it's got a lot of minerals in it.
Well, dirt has a lot of minerals in it too. If you're going to put some on my plate, make it a small serving. Low calorie beer, what a disgrace. But Roger Hedlund knows something about disgrace, having been in the class of 1960 and a member of that 1960 Leonard's basketball team. Because it was a great team.
Greatness was part of that team. Starting in their junior year, I remember that, in the spring of 1959, they went out and they almost beat a basketball team from the city. A team that they had no chance of beating, but they almost beat them.
So we could see where they were really going to be a good team the next season, their senior year. And then that summer, they grew incredibly. There was a kid named Lee Grady who was on the team who just grew all summer. It exhausted him. He'd just lay at home on a couch, growing. go to bed at night and in his sleep the blanket would slip farther and farther. Call him up, say, what are you doing? Leave. He got real tall, Lee Grady did, and it was going to be a great team.
We could just see that in our senior year, this Leonard's team was going to put Lake Wobegon on the map. They were going to win the district tournament and go on and win the regional tournament and then go on to the state tournament and beat a team from Minneapolis.
We were going to beat Minneapolis and win the state championship. And it would sort of be the turning point in our lives, we in the class of 1960. So that years later, we'd go and apply for a real good job, you know. A job that we didn't have a chance to get.
And we'd be there in the waiting room of this Big Shot's office. And all these Harvard guys and Yale guys would be there, you know, and Cambridge guys and Dartmouth. And they'd all be there in their fancy blue pinstripe suits and wingtips.
We'd be sitting there in our Robert Hall suit, you know, and the little black shoes from Sears. But we had put on our job application form, you see, Education, Lake Wobegon High School, 1960. And the big shot would call us in and say, you're from Lake Wobegon. I can't believe it. He'd say, you're from Lake Wobegon.
We'd say, well, yeah, it's just a little town, you know. It's up north of here. Lake Wobegon. the team that won the state basketball championship in 1960. Son, you and people like you have been an inspiration to me for years. This company was started because of your little town and your brave little basketball team that went and beat the big guys for the championship. I said to myself, I can start a company. This company was started on $13 in loose change, and now we're part of the Fortune Top 500 corporations in America's sun. I've been looking for a right-handed man for a long time, and you're it.
You name your salary. All right, I knew it wasn't going to be exactly like that. But I thought it was going to be something like that. That anyway, people would know where I was from. But the little guys didn't beat the big guys that year. An even littler guy came along and beat the little guys that year.
And the Leonards went to play in the first game of the district basketball tournament. And they lost to St. Melissa, 53 to 52. They had been leading by nine points. I don't know. None of us went because, you see, we were saving our money to go and stay at the Curtis Hotel. for the state tournament.
So we didn't go and see Saint Melissa cream our great Leonard's basketball team back in 1960. They beat them and that was all there was to it. That was the end of the season and that was the last hope of glory for the class of 1960.
I thought I was going to be able to talk about this today without kind of tearing up a little bit. Boy, that was rough. There were 15 guys on that Leonard's basketball team. They were sick for a couple days after that. They missed school. They really were sick. Fifteen guys. Only four of them, we know their addresses.
Only two of them, Roger and I, are showing up for the reunion. Only two. All the rest have gone, scattered. We don't know where they are, those old Leonards. Sometimes I've thought in the past that maybe out of shame at losing to St.
Melissa in the district tournament, they just gave up hope and they went and rode boxcars across America. and became sad, miserable people. Just kind of turned their faces to the wall and gave up on life. And that that's why we haven't been able to find out where they are. These old classmates who were lost.
But lately I've been thinking maybe they went to California and forgot, managed to forget that they were from Lake Wobegon and that they were Leonards and that Curtis and Wayne and Dwayne and Elwood became Jeff and Biff and Brad and Hal, changed their names and got terrific tans and great jobs and look really good. No, not like they did when they were Leonards, but really trim and they eat a lot of salads and avocados. And gradually they've been forgetting that moment of shame in their past, becoming happy, well-adjusted people. who don't come back for the reunion because, you see, they don't need us to be their friends anymore because they are now their own best friends. The California way. I think maybe that's what happened to that old basketball team. They went off and became cool guys somewhere. I'll miss them. I wish they'd show up. I hope they didn't take defeat and disgrace too heavily.
Because Lake Wobegon is a town where you can see a lot of it, really. It's all over. You just walk around town and you see it. Signs of it everywhere. You head up Elm Street from downtown. First of all, you notice there's no elms. They're all dead. all been killed off by a virus or something.
Whoever thought that could happen? Elm trees, those beautiful, majestic boulevards, all killed off by a virus. If that could happen, lakes could just dry up. A hole could spring a leak in the bottom of the lake. It'd just all be gone. We'd live in Wobegon Swamp. No almond trees.
You walk out beyond that, you see that old wreck of a car behind the Tollefson's. That was meant to be a racing car. Byron stripped that thing down. He was going to put a new engine in that thing. That was going to be a racing car.
But before he could get it fixed up, it rusted and fell apart. You walk on beyond that out in the country up past the Tallerud's farm, you hear hundreds of bullfrogs up there in the swamp. The remains of Mr. Tallerud's great project of about 20 years ago to have a frog farm.
And a salesman came through town and sold him a whole crate full of breeder frogs. Put them up there in the swamp. This salesman told him a whole lot about, you know, high prices on the New Orleans Frog Exchange or something. And he put them out there and they were breeding all right, but he forgot about the problem of harvesting them. I mean, you don't go out there with a combine, you know, and bring in your bullfrogs. You go farther out there, you find Art's Baits and Night Arrest Motel. A lot of dreams have been frustrated out in that area. Not that we're here to talk about that, are we?
But we sure came close. If you go out a little bit farther, you look, if you go out there past the Hanson's place and you go across the ditch, you stick your head in the woods, you see about 50 feet of old foundation. That's all that's left of New Albion College. Used to be out there.
There weren't trees there then. That was in 1857. Young men came from all over Minnesota to study Latin and Greek. and oratory and poetry, it's all gone. It's been gone for so long nobody even remembers it. That's what that wall is from.
You go out a little bit farther, you come to where the, to the, the Akergaards used to live. Mr. Akergaard came over from Norway, was a founder of the Norwegian American Socialist Temperance Equal Suffrage Party. An idealistic bunch. But either his English wasn't that good or he was just such a dreamer.
He didn't realize that the initials of the name Norwegian American Socialist Temperance Equal Suffrage would lead people to call them the nasties. Which they did. And so it came to nothing. They became a joke. They became a laughing stock. His son was so ashamed of his father's failure that he changed his name to John
Johnson and went off and became a major league baseball player. And he was the player, I believe it was for the Boston Braves, who in the World Series of 1932, John Johnson made the last out of the seventh game of the World Series, caught off second base by the hidden ball trick in the World Series.
That's disgraceful, isn't it? That's failure in a big way. The hidden ball trick. But we sort of love each other anyway, despite all of it. I don't know how. We don't say that we do. We don't really show it all that well, but we sort of do.
I remember, I've recited this poem for you before, but it's a great poem. I remember after the Leonards lost to St. Melissa 53-52 in that district basketball game, even though Roger Hedlund had those two free throws coming to him with zero seconds remaining. Two free throws.
If he'd made only one of them, it would have gone into overtime. But no, I missed both of them. In the unit on Shakespeare, we had to memorize a sonnet. And I was hoping to memorize something more romantic, like Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds and Mid-Impediments, which I thought might come in handy someday.
Somewhere where the light was dim and you wouldn't be able to read it off a page. But instead was assigned by my English teacher to memorize this one. I've remembered it now for 25 years. And I think of it now as I think of the class of 1960. My old friends.
When in disgrace with fortune in men's eyes I all alone beweep my outcast state And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries And think upon myself and curse my fate Wishing me like to one more rich in hope Featured like him, like him with friends possessed Desiring this man's art and that man's scope With what I most enjoy content at least Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising Happily I think on thee and then my state Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings that I would scorn to change my lot with kings.
That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all that show you how God loves you.
Charlotte News Aug 1 1985 Montana Standard Jul 31 1985 Tampa Tribune Jul 31 1985 Winona Daily News Aug 4 1985
1985.08.04 Winona Daily News