Chet Atkins, Philip Brunelle, Jethro Burns, Butch Thompson Trio, Garrison Keillor, Helen Schneyer, Stoney Lonesome. Vern Sutton,
My sin was loving you (Butch Thompson Trio ) Weather-beaten rag (Butch Thompson Trio ) Why don't you tell me so (Butch Thompson Trio ) I'm leaving Detroit (Butch Thompson Trio ) All of me (Butch Thompson Trio ) Song of the wanderer (Butch Thompson Trio ) Go wash in the beautiful pool ( Helen Schneyer ) Water in the wing ( Helen Schneyer ) Please Mr. Conductor ( Helen Schneyer ) Man on the flying trapeze ( Vern Sutton , Philip Brunelle ) Falling in love with someone ( Vern Sutton , Philip Brunelle ) Avalon ( Chet Atkins , Jethro Burns ) Scotland ( Chet Atkins , Jethro Burns ) Cattle in the Cane ( Chet Atkins , Jethro Burns ) Roanoke ( Chet Atkins , Jethro Burns ) Some of these days ( Chet Atkins , Jethro Burns ) Limehouse blues ( Chet Atkins , Jethro Burns ) Lara's theme ( Jethro Burns ) Falling leaves ( Chet Atkins ) Old Family Radio ( Garrison Keillor ) Whose shoulder will you cry on (Stoney Lonesome )
Ajua! Hot Sauce Art's Bait and Night of Rest Motel Bertha's Kitty Boutique Chatterbox Cafe Chet Atkin's Corporation Player Guitar Christian, Teena Diener Boy Diener, Harold Diener, Marlys Jack's Deep Valley Bed Our Daily Bread Toasters Powdermilk Biscuits Sidetrack Tap Skoglund's Five and Dime
Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, the little town that time forgot. Gardens are coming up, little green onions poking their heads up and all those little garden plots and all the backyards all through town. The Garden Club awarded the Yard of the Month award to the Magandanz’s. This last week, Father Emil had always felt that the Garden Club had been prejudice against Catholics in awarding this prize, and had taken off points for backyard shrines, but the Magandanz’s won it even though they have two of them, the BVM, and also their Saint Francis of Assisi birdbath and bird feeder with Saint Francis counterweighted to keep off squirrels.
It's quite a backyard. You ought to see it sometime. There's hardly room in it for the Magandanz children to play- they all have to go to the neighbors. Theie oldest boy is- he's graduating. He is in the senior class Lake Wobegon High and along with all of the other seniors was released from school on Friday. Graduation is a week away. It's next Saturday. And there did not seem to be any point in keeping those children any longer. Their minds were elsewhere. They were champing at the bit, waiting to be let go and it was discouraging for the teachers to look at them- to realize how much they had to learn and how little time remained. And to try and drill em. To look at a class, to lecture to a class, to ask a question based on something the teacher had said 10 minutes before. And have a child look up at you and say what? Would you mind repeating the question? Uhm, and then the child screwing up his face as if of course he did know the answer, but he didn't quite know how to phrase it he couldn't find just exactly the right words.
Mr Halvorson’s history class on Thursday- none of the kids had a thing to say about the Gadsden Purchase, Smoot Hawley Act, Sacco and Vanzetti, to those seniors Sacco and Vanzetti might have been an old Italian vaudeville team. They just had no comment to make about any of it. Didn't seem to recognize it. Miss Falconer's English class, none of them had a thing to say about Shakespeare's sonnet “when in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes I all alone be weep my outcast state” even though Miss Falconer suggested that some of them might soon know a lot about disgrace. She had gotten done reading the term papers. Including one the dDener boy sent in. A term paper on the Renaissance that began “the Renaissance like so many other periods of history, both past and present. Included so many different ideas, moods, attitudes, theories that it is difficult for me to say exactly what sort of period of history it was. But in the short space allotted to me, I will attempt to give a few impressions of the Renaissance as a period of history."
And then he went on to give a few impressions of things he had finished reading in the Colliers Illustrated Encyclopedia. Ahhh children. Children, children, children. What can we do? What can we do but love you? It's important to do well in school. You're going to need this someday. School helps to develop intelligence. And 9/10 of intelligence is just paying attention. Just being alert. Keeping your head up, just an attitude of wakefulness. That's intelligence, and you'll need that someday. Life is short. We can't sleep through it.
So how did the seniors show their intelligence and their alertness? Drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. That's what they did. Friday night last night out at the gravel pit. They were all out there. Got a keg that somebody brother had found and cigarettes they had snuck off their parents and they all stood around there, around their parent’s cars and the gravel pit late at night talking about life. The Deener boy was pulling up the gravel road into the pit when he lit up a cigarette- I think the first of his life- and he sort of heisted himself up in the seat to see in the rearview mirror how it looked when he exhaled through his nose. He is doing it the wrong way. He coughed, he hit the brake pedal, except it wasn't the brake pedal. It was the gas pedal. The car went down the slope wound up in the creek- his father's car. He got out of it, waded into the creek and noticed all of a sudden that the creek was kind of black and greasy. Transmission, transmission. Oh, that wasn't that. That's not bright. That's not intelligent.
Well, he left it there. He left it sitting there and went off to join his friend zoned on the road. I don't know. He figured maybe it would get better if he let it sit there. Maybe this creek was kind of a lourdes you know, for transmissions. He went off down, stood around in a gravel pit, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, being cool, talking about life. Playing the radio at top volume some rock and roll station in Saint Cloud. Putting on some kind of Jimi Hendrix memorial.
Well, up over the hill up. Over the hill and across the pasture the Christian sisters, Sarah and Tina lay in their beds. And they listened to the yelling, and they listened to the rock and roll until they had heard all that they were going to hear and Tina got out of bed and she loaded up the 12 gauge. And she headed off down there. Came marching over the hill in her nightgown and her winter coat and a raccoon cap with the gun at the ready.
And it was right about at the moment when Curtis Ingvist was leaning back against the car taking a long drag and saying “I think we'll have nuclear war in two or three years. I'd say two or three years. I don't think any of us have long to live.” Saying this for the benefit of the Tolerude girl who had always looked up to him, but not enough. And it was at that moment when Tina let fly with both barrels.
Oh, there was some intelligence then I'll tell you there was a real attitude of alertness then. They woke up but fast. And I do not say this to advocate the use of firearms or to take a position on gun control. I only just describe something that happened. After all, she came marching over that hill. She she didn't come crawling on her belly, you know, with little branches of sumac around her flak helmet for camouflage. She came marching straight up there as big as life, Tina did, and she got a pretty good reverberation in the gravel pit I'll tell you. She walked up as close to them and I am to you and if they had not been quite so absorbed in themselves, they would have seen her.
She took a straight bead on the Milky Way and she fired both barrels and they took off as fast as they could go, including the boy with the car in the creek. It turned out not to be the transmission. At least it wasn't the reverse gear.
Ohhh your children, you children what’ll ever become of you I have no idea. But I do know that back in town the Deaners were sitting on their front porch. Harold and Marlys. Their boy, their youngest boy, leaving now but graduating the last of seven children. Sitting out on their front porch in the twilight of a Friday night on a May evening. Just looking at each other. All these years, all those kids. Poking em, prodding em, reminding em to be careful, and to brush their teeth, and to be clean, and to be nice. All those years with all those kids.
And those two sat and looked at each other. Starting to remember what it was that led them to get married and have kids in the first place. He is a handsome man. She is a good looking woman. I think they'll remember.
And to that boy I would just say. Grow up. Go away, have your problems, but don't trouble those two. They've got some work to do now of their own. I think they'll do it.
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.
First Chet Atkins appearance on PHC. GK Talks about Helen Schnare
1982.05.15 Berkshire Eagle / Sliker and Berto both have this tape. It was rebroadcast on May 20, 1989. / Audio of the News available on CD.
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