Philip Brunelle, Butch Thompson Trio, Prudence Johnson, Garrison Keillor, Tom Lieberman, Howard Mohr, Eli Newberger, Peter Ostroushko, Vern Sutton, The Goodhew Choir. The Polka Drops, Butch Thompson,
The Judlia Polka (The Polka Drops ) What A Little Moonlight Can Do ( Prudence Johnson ) Please Don't Do It In Here ( Prudence Johnson ) Don't Weep For The Lady ( Prudence Johnson ) Breeze (Eli Newberger , Butch Thompson Trio , Tom Lieberman ) Turkey in the Straw (fishing song) ( Garrison Keillor ) Helsa Demder Hemma (The Polka Drops ) The California Polka (The Polka Drops ) Can We Go Back to the First Day of School? ( Vern Sutton ) In the Little Red Schoolhouse ( Vern Sutton ) The Ticatto for Organ ( Philip Brunelle ) The Rose of Red Wing ( Peter Ostroushko ) Summertime ( Butch Thompson , Eli Newberger ) The Australian National Anthem ( Vern Sutton , The Goodhew Choir ) You Go To My Head ( Prudence Johnson ) Loves Old Sweet Song ( Garrison Keillor ) Smile Awhile ( Garrison Keillor ) Just a song at twilight ( Garrison Keillor )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique (Couch Sale: one for you and one for your cat!) Minnesota Language Systems (Discussions of the phrases "It's No Big Deal", "It's A Good Deal", It's Quite A Deal"!) Pork Brand Shoes (One Minute Romance: Meeting in the Detergent aisle in the grocery store.) Powder Milk Biscuits (Driving around Red Wing looking for a castle from childhood.) Slow Decay Snack Cakes (Remember they will last longer than you!) Twin City Casting (Putting you in the background of a major motion picture.) Wayne DeJour (Eating limp vegetables and gray meat will help you loose weight by losing your appetite.)
Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. School started up again on Tuesday morning after Labor Day, as it has now for, I don't know, decades, I guess, I'm sure. Probably my grandfather went back that same Tuesday. My father, I went back Tuesday after Labor Day. processions of little children heading up the hill about 8.30, about quarter of 9, up towards the big brick high school and the brick grade school, both of them on the same block up there sitting down at the foot of the hill but up above Main Street.
Bill the janitor had waxed all the floors over the weekend using a special floor wax that he probably used when my grandfather went to school there. It's an odor that if you smelled it right now, you'd recognize it. You'd think, school, that's school, and I better hurry because the bell's going to ring pretty soon.
I better get in there and find my seat. There was a little green Dodge Dart came racing down the hill and along Main Street. Probably did not smell that floor wax. It was going pell-mell heading south and east toward Minneapolis. Randy Johnson at the wheel of his car that he got this summer. Randy is a member of the class of 1985 and he's in a hurry to get back out of town. and go back down to Minneapolis where his future awaits him. He came down Elm Street and turned the corner there on McKinley in such a way that the school patrol on the corner looked up and saw he wasn't going to stop so didn't put the flags down. They let him go. He's been living down in Minneapolis, Randy has, since back about the middle of June. He has an apartment down there and he has a job at the zoo as curator of mammals already.
And he had come back in order to get some stuff that his mom told him back in June he would need, but he didn't think so, but it turns out he does, so he came back and got it. Things like pots and pans, utensils, that sort of thing.
He loaded up about 11 cardboard boxes into the backseat of that Dodge Dart. His mom said, You could take Chris and Cynthia up to school now, couldn't you? They're a little bit late. You could only take you half a minute. It's not out of your way.
He said, oh, Mom, I'm in a hurry to get down to the city. I can't give them a ride. Please, she said, take them. Just drop them off at school. So he did. He dropped them off about a block from school. He didn't want to be seen with his younger brother and sister getting out of his car
And I'll tell you why. It's an odd situation up there at school. You got the high school, the old brick building with the two wings on it, which was junior high, seven, eight, and nine, and senior high, too, all under one roof. And you got the grade school just across the ground, a few yards away. so that all the kids in school, all the kids in town, spend 12 years there in one plot of ground. And if you have younger brothers and sisters, you never get away from them, no matter how much you want to. There comes a point, you know, when you're 16, 17, 18 years old, you're ready to move on out, make a name for yourself, you're ready for people to notice you. You'd rather not have them around so they could see where you come from. Stand out there behind school and you're talking to the most beautiful woman in your class who has never paid you the slightest bit of attention.
But now she's listening to you. And you're releasing some wonderful sentences out in the air. And you feel a tug on your trousers. And look down and there's your kid brother. Saying, do you have a hanky? I need a hanky, quick. And he's got his hand pressed over his nose. Yes. And the most beautiful girl looks down at your kid brother, and she thinks to herself, if he and I were to get married, our kids would look like that. So he didn't want to be seen anymore with them. He just wanted to get down to Minneapolis as fast, as fast as he could, because he was in love.
Oh, it's such a hard thing, isn't it? When you're in love, when you're in love, you wonder if the people who love us knew more about us, would they like us more or less? Everybody likes attractive people. You know, it's the truth. We all want to be attractive.
So is love only based on how we look or is it based on the truth? You could spend a good part of your life trying to answer that question. He was in love with a beautiful woman in Minneapolis and they had already talked about marriage. He wanted to be as attractive to her as he possibly could be.
Actually, they talked about marriage in kind of a general way, not specifically, for example, like to each other, for example, but in more of a theoretical way. And actually, he doesn't live in a big apartment. It's a kind of a studio apartment. It's above a pet hospital.
And it's kind of one big room, not that big, with a sink in the corner and toilet down the hall. And he's not a curator of mammals at the zoo. He's a junior herdsman, is what he is. But there was this girl, this beautiful girl, and he met her back
It was in early July at Lake Calhoun at the beach where he had gone every day for weeks hoping for something like this to happen and finally it did. It was in the middle of the afternoon and Randy was sitting on the diving dock with his feet in the water trying to look as if he might get up and dive in a minute, though he'd been there for a couple of hours. He sat and was thinking about maybe getting in his car and going getting some pizza. When he saw a girl with long black hair swimming out towards the diving dock.
And she came up to the ladder which was beside him. And she pulled herself up on the ladder out of the water like a mermaid. She was tall and tan. And as she came up the ladder, she placed her right hand on his knee. And she said, excuse me. And she smiled the most dazzling smile.
He said, that's all right. Thinking that when she lifted her hand from his knee, steam would come up. She lifted her hand from his knee and climbed up on the dock and did what girls always do when they climb up onto a dock. She reached for the bottom of her suit and pulled it down slightly. His nostrils flared when he saw that. She walked across the diving dock and poised on the edge. She made a beautiful dive into the water and without even thinking about it, Randy got up and walked across the dock and he dove, something he'd never done before.
He'd always gone feet first and always held his nose and closed his eyes. He went in head first. With his hands out in front of him, he felt the water slap him on his stomach. And he kept his eyes open as he went down deep and then he felt a little water come up his nose and he saw her ahead in the murky depths and tried to reach her and just managed to touch the heel of her foot and then couldn't stay under anymore. Came to the surface, coughed and sneezed twice. made it back to the diving dock, held on with both hands.
She surfaced beside him, looked at him and smiled. He said, I've never done that before. She looked at him and she said, aren't you the guy? I've met you. You're the guy who was at Sandra Singleton's party that night who spilled the mustard. Aren't you? He said, yeah. He was willing to be that guy. He could be that guy for a while. It wouldn't hurt anything. I said, yeah, right. I remember. I saw you there. Mustard at Sandra Singleton's party. She said, you told me you were going to call me. Well, consider this a call, he said. They swam into the beach. Her name was Frances, Frankie was her name.
And she was there with her friend Janelle who stayed under the beach umbrella because sunlight gave her terrible headaches. Janelle was white, the color of the belly of a carp. And she lay there on the blanket in the shade as if she had a fierce headache at the moment. And as soon as they got to the blanket, she said, Frankie, this is no fun. There's nobody here. Let's go to my house and let's have some supper and go to a movie tonight. Frankie said, I want you to meet a friend of mine. I just met him. He was at Sandra Singleton's party. She turned to Randy.
She said, I've forgotten your name. Randy had had time to think about this on the way into the beach. He decided he wasn't going to be Randy Johnson for her. He decided he would use a name that he used when he was a little kid and he used to play detective. Ryan Tremaine. Ryan, he said. Ryan Tremaine.
It didn't sound that good coming out of his mouth, but he figured he'd learn how to say it. Ryan Tremaine. They lay around on the blanket for a while. Janelle wanted to go home. Frankie wanted to stay. Finally, Janelle left. The two of them were alone. It got darker. The sun went down. They had some burgers and fries. They talked. They talked about love in kind of a theoretical way. And marriage. She got a little chilly because her bathing suit was wet. He put an arm around her. They put the other arm around her.
You put one arm around somebody, it seems like you had to put the other arm around. They lay there for a while, getting close to each other. Finally, she said, no, I'd rather not, she said. Why not, he said. I believe in waiting, she said. He thought he had waited a long time already, but it was all right. I've got to go. She's got to go. I've got to go home, she said. Really, you've got to go? We stay for a little while. He didn't think he'd ever see her again if she left right then.
But finally she was about to go and he had an idea. He said, are you going straight home? She said, yeah. He said, I don't have my car. Maybe you could give me a ride to my house. She said, where do you live? He said, out, you know, out your way.
He got in her car, a Mustang convertible, light blue, brand new. And they headed out towards Lake Minnetonka. They had it out through the southwestern suburbs of Minneapolis, out through neighborhoods he had never seen before, where there were fabulous big houses sat way back off the road behind groves of trees with high brick walls around them and gates, gates, some of them shut. They drove way back, a long way on little winding roads until finally he said, it's right up here on the left. He picked out a big white house that was far enough back in the trees so that he could just walk in that direction.
He wouldn't have to go in. They stopped. He turned to her. He said, can I see you again? What's your phone number? And she gave it to him. That was what he wanted. It took him a long time to hitchhike back to Lake Calhoun. People out in that part of town don't give a lot of rides.
He had a lot of time to think about it. And he wondered if she would have given him her phone number. if she hadn't thought that he lived in that big white house and that his name was Ryan Tremaine. He wondered. He went back to Calhoun, got his Dodge Dart and went to his studio apartment above the pet hospital and lay in bed thinking about her and thought about her all the next day and knew he was in love with her. He thought about her all day, imagined what she might be doing at that moment, and found it hard not to pick up the phone and call her immediately. But he couldn't because it was a hard day at work. He didn't have time. He was a junior herdsman out at the zoo. The zoo is a big zoo in which the animals are kept on large tracts of land, wooded with underbrush.
The idea is that the moose and the elk, the tigers, the wild horses, they'll all be out in their natural habitat, you see, free to roam. The problem with that idea is that when taxpayers come to the zoo, they like to see the animals. It's a tough problem. But in the end, taxpayers are not satisfied to walk around and look at trees and bushes and know that tigers are back in there someplace. So the junior herdsmen out at the zoo have to creep along down through the little alleyways that go between the pens where the animals are kept. And they've got to poke the animals and get them to...
Get down there where the people can see them. Like the moose and the elk. Get them down there. Poke them and get them out of the high weeds and the underbrush so that the tax-paying citizens can see their animals that they've paid for. And it was a hard day that day. because they had built a fence, you see, to keep the elk down front. But then one of the elk, Peggy, tried to jump over the fence, and she bruised herself, and it was scabbing up and looking terrible, so they had to bring her back around behind the fence so the taxpaying public wouldn't see Peggy.
But meanwhile, the elk who lived with her, Jack, was lonely for her. Now he wanted to get back behind the fence, and it was all the herdsmen could handle for a day. Randy didn't want to rush it anyway. He wanted to think a little bit more about Ryan Tremaine and who Ryan Tremaine would be. In their conversation,
Frankie had said she was interested in sailing and that she and Janelle were going to go to Princeton University in the fall. He took books out of the library and read up everything he could about Princeton and read everything he could about sailing, memorized all of the parts of a boat, all the nautical terms, the terms for all the rigging and all the sails on boats large and small so he could cover that. So if she asked him, do you sail? He could say, yeah, I used to sail a little bit. I don't much anymore, but I used to sail quite a bit and be able to handle himself.
He called her a few days later and asked her to go out to a movie. And she said yes. It was a Friday night. He left his apartment two and a half hours early. And was glad that he did because the streets out near her house were all winding and turning over hill and dale and down through the woods and a lot of them were unmarked and a lot of those gates didn't even have house numbers on it as if the people who lived out in that part of town didn't really want to be able to be found all that easily.
It took him a long time. He pulled up a long driveway, a long gravel drive, and there was an immense brick house, and walked up to the door and knocked. Man opened it, an older man. Randy said, I'm sorry. Why? The man said. I don't know. I'm a little bit early. Well, come in, he said. It was her father. They went down the stairs into a dark room with couches and chairs made of leather and dark paneled walls. The man said, have a seat. He sat down on a couch. You care for a drink? Randy tried to think what. Whiskey, he said. ice with that? No. You want one shot, two shots? Two.
So what do you do with yourself, he said. He had thought about this a little bit. He was either going to have Ryan Tremaine be in wildlife management or he was going to have him be in the ministry. He figured being in the ministry or being in seminary, going to go into the ministry, maybe they'd trust him a little bit more. He said, ministry. I'm in seminary. I'm going to be a minister. What church? He hadn't thought of that. He didn't think Lutheran would go real well here. Congregational, he said. So you live at home? Yeah, sort of. I live with my aunt. My parents are dead.
They died three years ago in a plane crash in Bolivia. I kind of took care of that. Finally she came and rescued him. She was dressed in a beautiful white dress with wonderful tan collar bones and a beautiful gold necklace hanging down around her neck and a jewel hanging at the end of it. He looked at the jewel. She bent down and kissed him. The jewel hung right in front of his eyes. Let's go, she said. He followed her out. They got in the car. They drove. He was trying to remember what he had told her about Ryan Tremaine. So many lies, hard to keep track of them.
He was feeling guilty. He wanted her to know one true thing about himself. He couldn't think what to tell her until they got to the drive-in movie and they sat and the movie started. It was Zombies at the Beach. A young couple like themselves got in a boat and went out to an island and landed at the dock. And strange people were there who walked funny and had big blank eyes. But the young couple didn't even notice. They just walked on this island. Zombies popping up out of the sand everywhere.
They had big gory heads walking their strange zombie walk. This young couple just walking around on the island. sitting there on the beach kissing and holding hands and hugging zombies walking around after. It started to make him nervous. Randy said, I got to tell you something. He said, I am not really in college this summer. He said, actually I work at the zoo. She said, oh. In a minute she said, I don't go to zoos. I don't like zoos. Why? He said. I don't think it's right that we put animals in cages for people to go see." I don't know, he said, I think the animals are all right.
They're well fed and everything and they're not in danger. She said, I just don't think it's right. He tried to explain to her how out at this zoo all the animals were in their natural habitat. But he went too far and he told her that his job as junior herdsman was to go back in there down the alleys behind the pens and make them move out. She pulled back from him and looked at him. She said, you sound like you're proud of that. I don't hurt him or anything. He said, I don't throw rocks at him. I just poke him. Poke him.
Boy, she said, how do you like it if somebody poked you? How would you like it if you were behind bars and people come stare at you? How do you like that? Well, he said, that's just your opinion. You know, that's a way of looking at it, but that's not how I see it.
She said, well, that's how I see it. Boy, she said, I wish you'd told me that before. This is a dumb thing to argue about, he said. Well, she said, you brought it up. And that's how the evening ended. He drove home with her and let her off, and she didn't kiss him goodnight. She thought he was a terrible, cruel person just because he poked a few elk. He went back to his studio apartment and he did his calisthenics as he had been doing every night since he first met her. So much in love that he did 50 sit-ups every night and 25 push-ups.
He did his sit-ups and as he did, he didn't notice that he inched across the floor backwards, sit-up after sit-up. and finally came to number 50 and sat up and then fell back and his head hit the dresser drawer as hard as he'd ever hit his head before.
He rolled over and he curled up and moaned in pain. It hurt so bad. And in that moment that he lay there, he thought to himself, that he would never be Ryan Tremaine again, that he would always be Randy Johnson, but that something would happen, something would come along, something would be there for him like getting on a train and his life would start and he would do something illustrious. he would do something illustrious in his life as Randy Johnson. And he would start right now by doing 25 more sit-ups. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.
Howard Mohr and Garrison talk about Red Wing and Lake Wobegon being "sister cities" Garrison leaves a hideous plaque for the Mayor of Red Wing The Whippets lose the last game of the season to Upsula 7-0.
Tennessean Sep 12 1985 Fort Worth Star Telegram Aug 31 1985
1985.09.08 Star Tribune: "Greg Brown exits the show as a regular"
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl