Butch Thompson Trio, Charlie Devore, Brian O'Connell, Sally Rogers.
[undocumented]
It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon- quiet but sort of interesting. I also want to get up there to congratulate Mr Olson on his having escaped his Allis Chalmers here this last week I heard about it. This old Mr Olsen is Carl's dad who's given over most of the farming to Carl now that the Mr is pushing 80 but he does like to feel useful now and then and he got out on the tractor here on Tuesday this last week to cultivate the garden. And it sort of got away from him, he was heading out across the field and the tractor, sort of lurched as if it were about to tip over and he jumped from it and the tractor didn't tip it sort of gained fresh courage to go on and he stood there and watched it.
Had the cultivator on behind it and it went round and round in wider and wider circles and pretty much took out most of about 20 acres of winter wheat before it finally ran out of gas. Sputtered to a stop. Carl had come out by then and his father was so happy to still be alive. He turned to Carl and he said, “look at her” he said. “She did almost as good a job as if I were on her myself.”
The Bunsens too... I got to see them because they they're putting in a garden here with all this warm weather we've been having, they decided to put in a rock garden in their backyard. It's kind of a serious decision to make when you actually decide to do it and you get a truckload of dirt and a load of big rocks dumped on your grass sorta like starting your own mudslide back there.
But they've gone to work on it. It was Clarence’s idea that it would eliminate yard work and also they just get tired of things being so level up there. And they figured that it'll probably start to look nice about August, about the time the petunias come in.
It's been kind of a week for big projects up there from what I hear. The Krebsbachs- Wally and Myrtle- are redoing their downstairs and this past week they knocked out the wall between the dining room and the living room. Which of course they had discussed, but discussing it is not the same thing as actually doing it in taking a sledgehammer to your own home. And you always think that maybe that wall was put up for a good reason. Which you may soon enough find out. But it looks nice now they have all the debris wheeled away and Wally also removed the body of the cat which had crawled in there in the wall. Which he thought was in there and which was the reason they have not been getting the full use of the dining room here for the past month or so.
The family is happy about it. You know when you first smell a smell like that, it's natural to begin by blaming each other. So that’s cleaned up.
That's all the news I have. I have been gone for two weeks. That's Lake Wobegon- there's no other town like it- where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.
1981.03.15 Berkshire Eagle
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, musicbrainz