Butch Thompson Trio, Dale Warland Singers, Laketown Buskers. Tom Lieberman, Peter Ostroushko,
[undocumented]
It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. Quiet and kind of a dismal week. March in Minnesota can be pretty dismal all by itself without any help from events, you know. But there were other things to help it along in Lake Wobegon. Dusty streets and dirty snowbanks and cold and cloudy and windy. A day that I remember when I was a boy living there- is a sort of day when you walk along kicking stones down the street for want of anything better to do. Your fort is all caved in. There's nothing else to do outside.
I remember days when I spent the better part of a day behind a stone. Just following it all around town. That's the sort of week it was in Lake Wobegon.
And then with the Lake Wobegon Leonards, that fine basketball team, the best they've had in decades- having last week before last to Saint Agnes- bunch of nobodys. It kind of put the damper on a week that was pretty damp to begin with.
The nights in the Gardens of Spain Theater was dark. There were no movies this week because Earl got the wrong one from the distributor. It was a movie he didn't dare show in that town- hardly dared look at it himself. Called “Debbie Downtown.” I think he watched half of the first reel.
It was a week when Bud decided to go up to the dump up on the hill and do some burning. Naturally, the wind blew it right down into town. Kind of a gray greezy smoke smelled like something died up there. People walked around losing their appetites. Finally, Clint went up there, told him to put it out.
So he put water on it for about an hour. Made it worse. They were going to have a parade this last week for the Leonards but the boys were still feeling bad about it. They didn't care to be hauled around town in public view. Basketball team losing it’s game and ending it’s season in some strange gymnasium to a team they'd beaten so easily they didn't want a parade. So they held a pep rally instead. And the school gave the boys sportsmanship trophies that the shop class had made up in kind of a hurry.
Didn't look so much like trophies as they look kind of like boot scrapers. Couple of the names were misspelled including the Deener boys, he took his home with him and went out behind the garage and threw it as far as he could into the woods. Didn't wanna see anymore of it.
It was kind of natural in a week like this week that the big topic at the town Council meeting on Tuesday night was civic improvement. It’s something that comes up every year and the man who generally talks for improvement is Mr Tollefson, not Jim, that's his brother, but L Eugene Tollefson, who runs the insurance agency, does little surveying and little light construction work.
A man whose first name I never knew what it was. Somebody once told me it was Lois. But he gets up every year and has for years and tells the Council that they ought to pass a bond issue and do some paving in Lake Wobegon and do a little bit of improvement. Most of the streets, in fact all the streets except for Main Street are not really paved in Lake Wobegon- they're just sort of 40 years accumulation of oil on them- they're basically dirt streets. Every year Bud gets the tar truck out the tar wagon and lays down another layer.
And Mr. Tollefson feels that it's time to get Lake Wobegon moving and to put in paved streets with gutters and curbs and to put in new vapor lamps, streetlights, all over town. Put in sidewalks which would be kind of an innovation there and encourage industry to come in. Fix up some of those buildings on Main Street. Those old buildings, old brick buildings from seventy eighty ninety years ago.
He says “it's a shame the way we let this town go”, he says. “Most of this town is like some kind of museum.”
About five years ago, he got the Council to zone a piece of woods that he owns at by the dump- industrial. He put a sign up there, said Lake Wobegon Industrial Park- L Eugene Tollefson developer. He goes up there every summer and clears the sumac away from in front of it. But he does this every year. He has for years, tells them they ought to pass a big bond issue and get this town moving. Then it's reported by Harold Star in the Lake Wobegon Herald Star. Along with an editorial. In which Harold says that this is certainly something that we all ought to be thinking about. And then in the next week's issue, this happens every year, in the next week's issue, there are letters from people like me who left Lake Wobegon years ago, but who still subscribe to the paper and who want to see it remain exactly as they remember it. And for whom it is a museum.
The week after that, Mr Tollefsen writes his letter back, in which he says that if they like it so well, why don't they move back? And that's it for another year.
About four or five years ago, there was an art teacher up to the high school who came down and talked to the council about how they ought to restore Lake Wobegon, which was something people hadn't heard of before. “Restore it to what?” they said. I mean, this is not exactly the glory that was Rome, you know this is a bunch of old buildings.
Well, he’d worked up some drawings- sorta water colors- that he took pictures of and brought his slides and a projector and brought them down to the town council meeting and they turned out the lights and they had a look at him. And they were fairly incredible. For one thing, he had put a lot of big trees there on Main Street that were not there at the time and would take years to grow.
All of them buildings were more or less as they are except all kind of fancied up. There are a lot of carriage lamps and a lot of brass fittings and a lot of antiques around and all of the lettering on the storefront kind of antique lettering. And the Chatterbox Cafe had become some restaurant and the Sidetrack Tap had become a pub. And there were a whole bunch of people in these drawings that looked like they've been flown in from the cities for the occasion. People in tweed sport coats and expensive jeans. Old Mrs Inqvuist looked at it and she said. “You mean we'd have to get dressed up to go to town?”
Well, that was about the last of that. I mean it looked like a nice place, but it didn't look like the sort of place where anybody you know lives. Not home in other words, so I doubt that they'll ever restore like Wobegon. And frankly, I doubt that this paving project and the redevelopment is ever going to go through either. I just don't think they can afford it, but I don't care what they do. It doesn't make any difference to me. Cause I don't live there. And the town that I love- I took away in my heart when I left and when I recall it- it's not architecture that I remember- but it’s people.
Though sometimes I do remember rooms. This morning for no reason whatsoever I remembered a laundry room at the Bunsen's on a June morning- a Monday morning. After ninth grade. And Donna Bunson was down there sorting clothes. Sorting out the white clothes and putting them into the washing machine. I hung around her a lot 'cause I was in love with her and she might have been a little bit in love with me.
Anyway, we had agreed that we were both going to read the same books that summer and read them at the same time. So that I in my bedroom and she and her bedroom would be going over the same passages and thinking of each other. I remember that she was barefoot and wore white shorts and she wore a blue blouse and she had just cut her hair short and she was talking about the first book that we were reading together- a novel called Love Knows No Night- which was kind of a stately old fashioned romance for a healthy young man like myself, but I read between the lines a lot. And she was saying that she wondered if love was really like that. And I leaned over, and I kissed her, sorta half on the lips and kind of half on her chin. I remember she was just pouring Clorox bleach into the washing machine and the aroma of it came up and sort of overwhelmed me and I kissed her again and she kissed me back.
I didn't put my arms around her because I really wasn't sure how to do that then. In these books they always described couples embracing passionately. But I didn't know how much passion to use and if you were supposed to kind of wrestle a little bit or what so I just kissed her. And then she put the rest of the wash in the machine. And she said, “you have very nice lips.” Which was something I had never thought of before. I wasn't particularly worried about them, but it was nice to know that someone thought highly of them.
I tell you someone who has a few thousand memories like that can never be entirely unhappy. You're never without resources. I think all I would have to do would be to just pour a little Clorox bleach in the sink and it all come back to me.
That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Where all the women are strong, where all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.
1982.03.06 Sacramento Bee / Audio of the News available on CD.
Archival contributors: Ken Kuhl