Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Dave Moore. Swedish Fiddle Trio,
[undocumented]
Well, sir, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. The gardens are coming along very nicely. Thank you. People are looking forward to the first of the peas and the first of the green tomatoes that they can fry up. Should be able to be harvested in a few weeks.
The class of 1981, Lake Wobegon High School, which was harvested here a few weeks ago, has now mostly left town. There being not much future there for most of those people, and they have gone off elsewhere in the world to seek their fortunes.
Some of them remain, but not very many, and not necessarily the brightest or the best. Lake Wobegon's major export, I think, is 17- and 18-year-old young men and women with high ideals and high hopes for the future.
And on behalf of their parents, I wish them well in the world, and I hope that the world does not turn out to be so discouraging that they feel it is necessary to come back. I'm sure their parents join me in that wish.
That happened back about a year ago in Lake Wobegon to the youngest Krebsbach boy, Carl Krebsbach, who graduated from high school with high honors and went off expecting to earn more elsewhere.
But all that Minneapolis had to offer this boy was a job as a parking lot attendant, which he worked at for a few weeks and found to be fruitless and frustrating.
He would get the cars all lined up in perfect rows in the morning and get everything all straight and all the lines were straight and the lot was full.
And he'd no sooner get his job done than people would start leaving and it would all go to pieces and it would all be raggedy and all his work had been for nothing. And he was discouraged and disheartened and he decided to go back to the one place in the world where people seemed to appreciate him back home which his parents did not appreciate because they had gotten their lives in order since he had left and they had gotten their lives turned around had taken over his room to use as a sewing room and his mom had her patterns all laid out on his bed
And then in comes this tall fellow and sets himself down in the middle of them and says, I don't know what it is I want to do, but I'm going to stay for a few months until I find out.
Well, they took him in for some reason, and they kept him on, although people in Lake Wobegon did not understand it, many of them and thought they should have sent him right back where he had gone to originally there are a lot of people in Lake Wobegon who do not believe in forgiveness who believe that forgiveness only encourages a poor attitude and inattention but they took him in and he worked all last summer around his parents home mowing the lawn and taking care of the garden which were jobs that they could do perfectly well on their own
They didn't really need a full-time gardener but he seemed to be trying. Months went by and August turned into September and September turned into October and October into November and people began to talk in town about this young man who refused to leave home and some people thought that he was disturbed
Though to his parents he did not appear to be disturbed at all. He appeared to be perfectly relaxed and to sleep long at night and to be getting along just fine. They were wondering how to make him a little bit less relaxed. And in the end they did what they had been reading people ought to do had been reading in Ann Lander's column for years. They went and they talked to their minister. One of two pieces of advice that she gives. Now, the other is wake up and smell the coffee, but they made some coffee and went off to talk to their minister.
Now a lot of ministers would rather not be bothered with problems like that because a lot of ministers have things pretty well figured out. And they have their principles and their ideas arranged in an orderly fashion. And they don't care to have them upset by having to deal with a lot of real life problems.
But Father Emil listened to this. Father Emil's used to dealing with tough problems. And when he'd listened to the boy and listened to the boy's parents, he turned to the boy and he said, Carl, he said, you probably think that I'm gonna have a little talk with you and then you're gonna go back home.
But what you're gonna do is to get on the bus and go down to Minneapolis and I'm going to give you the address of my sister's home, Mary Frances, and you may go and stay with her." And that's what he did. When Father Emil says it, people do it. And he did it.
And he moved in with Mary Frances, who has thirteen children, and whose life is not orderly at all, and none of the children are appreciated more than any of the others. and certainly not a newcomer. It is a home that always is bordering on chaos.
A home that always seems to be about to go right over the edge, but never quite does. It was a lesson to this young man. Within a few weeks time, he learned that nobody was going to give him any money. And nobody was going to pick up after him.
And nobody was going to tell him what to do. And he also got into a fist fight that he hadn't expected. So that life got shook up for him. And he went off on the basis of this disorder and chaos. And he did some surprising things. Youth loves uncertainty.
It's a great time for uncertainty and disorder, the age of 18. He went off and registered for a course in photography, which he had never done before, had never picked up a camera, but he thought he might like it. And he fell in love with a young woman whom he'd only met but two days previously.
And then a few weeks later, he went off to Kansas City, Missouri, a city he had never seen, to meet up with three strangers on the basis of a classified advertisement looking for partners to go up and start a salmon fishing operation in Alaska. And he went off, and I haven't heard from him since.
I don't know that it is salmon fishing season anymore in Alaska. I kind of doubt it, but I don't think it makes much difference. I think it would be marvelous for him to go up there and find no fish at all and learn how to live despite it.
It's a great age at which to fail, to make stunning failures, and to learn to go on anyway. A lot of us, you know, at a later age, we learn how to defend ourselves against failure, but we lose a little freedom in the process, and that's the freedom to fail and to have disasters happen to us.
I've taken a couple of tremendous falls coming on stage in the past, and I've learned to be careful coming on stage, but I'm not so sure but what it might be good for me to hit my head again, and it might be entertaining for you as well. So I wish him well.
I wish him well, not that he necessarily succeed, but that he learn to live with it despite it. Because that's the meaning of fishing, you know. You hope to catch something, but you learn to live with spending hours not catching anything. It's a line of work in which failure can be almost as enjoyable as success.
And when you can enjoy the attempt and appreciate the success and also enjoy the failure, you've got a heck of a deal. It's a heck of a deal. The Whippets, by the way, won last Saturday. When we left you last Saturday, the score was tied 13 to 13 at the end of 14 innings.
And they won it in the bottom of the 15th inning when Wayne warning track Tommerdahl came up with the bases loaded. The bottom of the 15th, the score tied 14-14 with the Albany Allgemeinschaft. And Wayne Tommerdahl hit a 12-run home run never been seen before in that town I'll tell you the guys were so excited they just kept running around the bases and the umpire was so busy making sure that they tagged up that he didn't notice that the guys were running around the same guys that had come around before the Albany Allgemeinschaft protested and in fact Dutch and the rest of the whippets came out from the dugout and they were unhappy about it
They hated to win a game in that way, to have their victory overshadowed. But the umpire threw them out of the game even though the game was over. So they're winners. I doubt it will continue, but I hope they still enjoy the game as it gets on through the summer.
And 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. Lake Wobegon.
1981.06.06 Eau Claire Leader / Transcript from https://garrisonkeillor.substack.com/p/the-news-from-june-6-1981