Brave Combo, Butch Thompson Trio, Arne Fogel, Charlie Maguire. Skyline, Becky Reimer Thompson,
Nobody's sweetheart now (Butch Thompson Trio ) Strutting with some BBQ (Butch Thompson Trio ) Till Then ( Arne Fogel ) Catastrophic carpentering ( Charlie Maguire ) He was a good old man ( Charlie Maguire ) Sing a song for the baby ( Charlie Maguire ) I still have a ticket back (Skyline ) You're late to work (Skyline ) Three men on a mountain (Skyline ) I Can't Believe (Skyline ) Between 18th and 19th on Chestnut St ( Becky Reimer Thompson , Arne Fogel ) Easy street ( Becky Reimer Thompson , Arne Fogel ) People are strange (Brave Combo ) Breslau (Brave Combo ) Perfidia (Brave Combo ) La Francicita (Brave Combo )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique Bob's Bank Chatterbox Cafe Father Emil Fearmonger's Shop Jack's Auto Repair Lake Wobegon Leonards Powdermilk Biscuits Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Sidetrack Tap Wine Council of Minnesota
Well, sir it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Not a whole lot in the paper, the Herald Star this week. A little bit on soil erosion if you want me to talk about that for a while.
The Tolerudes came down to Minneapolis on Tuesday, came back home Wednesday, stayed overnight in Minneapolis- visited his sister. Donna, who married a Krebsbach, which was why she moved to Minneapolis. If you’re a Tolerude and you marry a Krebsbach, that's pretty well considered the first step on the road to Minneapolis. A few relatives come and visit you after a while and there may be a reconciliation someday if they all live long enough which I doubt. It's been 20 years now for those two.
The Lake Wobegon Leonards started their fall football practice here on Monday, 11 boys came, suited up, so it looks like the Leonards will be in the Central Mini Six Men conference this year, and probably for a while. Coach Magandanz was moving around town trying to scare up some additional recruits, but most of them saw him coming and showed good lateral mobility. Getting away, they knew what was in store. Those Leonards all week, just been doing wind sprints until the poor boys dropped. ‘Cause running, as you know, if you've ever played six man football is sort of the major part of the game there. Not a whole lot of fancy plays, it's just pretty much all you guys go real deep and I'll fake a pass and I'll run around the end. Pretty much 12 guys chasing each other an awful lot on a field. So they started practice there.
School starts the day after Labor Day. What would that be, the 7th Tuesday the 7th? I guess. Most of the pupils looking forward to it by this time in the summer. Freedom gets kind of thin when you're too young to do what you want to and that sort of thing isn't offered in your town anyway. As it gets on towards the middle of August summer starts to wear on a boy. I remember that so well.
Go hang out with the gang in the afternoon. Just sit around out at the hideout. Don't even use the secret password anymore. The little kids who were the sentries for a while they're tired of sitting out in the bushes, getting bit by mosquitoes. Just all sit around in the shack. Saying, “well, what do you want to do?”
“I don't know what do you want to do?”
“Wanna play World War Two you can be Americans this time.”
“Naw... I don't want do that.”
So you wind up doing things like seeing who can spit the farthest. Seeing who can hold their breath the longest. And you might take a couple of dried up old leaves and crush him into little bits and put him in a pipe and smoke em. Which is a little ceremony that cured a lot of boys of the habit of smoking even before they got started. As long as you're bored, why not make yourself sick? Crush little leaves put him in the pipe, give it to the little kid first.
“Here, Jim. Take a good deep drag on this here. Suck that smoke in your mouth and then take a big deep breath, OK?”
[inhaling, getting sick]
““Not in here, Jim, out in the bushes, go out in the bushes! Boy, look at him go. Never saw Jim look so green as that. Yep, there he goes. Boy looks like he ate tomatoes this morning for lunch, little green Peppers or something. There goes the Wheaties.”
Tomato crop has been coming along well speaking of tomatoes. We’ve been hauling in those little vegetables by the bushel basket, even with it being so dry. People have had to water their gardens a little bit this week, 'cause the ground got real hard and cracked and curled up at the edges, you know.
Mr. Deaner’s set his hose out in his garden and came back in for the sprinkler and the phone rang and sort of one thing led to another. He forgot about it until he went out to dig potatoes for supper. Found the potato plants were sitting there in kind of a little lake. Sort of a potato patty you might say.
That's humor. Took me a long time to think of that.
So he pulled them all out there by the roots and brought them all in and I guess probably the Deaners will have to reduce their potato ration a little bit this fall, which by the looks of them they could probably stand to do, especially the especially the Mr who's carrying quite a load around with him these days and having a hard time getting up out of chairs.
And I've always been curious to know h ow he ties his shoelaces. I think he must lie on his belly and bring his feet back up over his shoulder. You know, 'cause I don't, I don't think he folds frontwards- Mr Deener. He’s got a lot there.
My Uncle Earl lost a whole lot of weight here- about 40 pounds since spring, which may not seem like big news to you but it’s big news in Lake Wobegon, 40 pounds. For an older man to lose, you know, the idea of older people being slim was late in arriving in that town and never really has quite caught on. It's it's the town where it's expected that as you grow up, you get big. You become a substantial citizen. Become a major figure. If you're thin and you're older, it's assumed that you're sick. There's a lot of thin people up there who worry a lot about their health and it keeps them thin, but most of them are quite portly. It's a town of large women, portly gentlemen home of good eaters.
I've got friends who are a little hefty who feel real self conscious down here in the cities among all these young trendsetters in the fast track you know- slim is a rail- they like to go up to Lake Wobegon, spend a weekend, go to church, feel normal. With big people. But he decided he was going to lose some weight.
He was always husky- Uncle Earl was. He was large boned. He played for that great Leonards team back in 1932 when they played eleven man football, came down beat Minneapolis Roosevelt and dropped about 200 water balloons out the 4th floor of the Hotel Andrews. Great team.
But as the years went on, he sort of added to his playing weight, so that later in life, he probably could have held down the whole right side of the line, you know. Played on a six man team and faced an 11 man squad without too much trouble. He decided he's going to take off some pounds. It's kind of a simple decision, sort of like you know, if you if you picked up a large rock, say and you carried it around with you, you sort of got used to carrying it, held it in your lap when you ate. Took the rock to bed with you, lay it on top of you. Carried it around. Eventually it occurred to you to set it down someplace.
And that's how he felt. And he knew that if he's going to lose weight he was not going to be able to do it on Aunt Myrna's cooking, he had no illusions that he's going to lose weight by taking small portions of the dinners that she sets out.
Small portions are not part of the logic of her cooking. You can start with a small portion, but it leads to additional small portions and eventually to a nap lying on your back. She's a great cook. The idea of sitting down to her dinner and taking a small portion would be like going to the movies and promising yourself you were going to leave as soon as it got interesting.
Like a lot of great cooks, she's a thin wisp of a woman herself puts so much energy into cooking you know that when she finally puts dinner on the table, she sits down and rests, drinks little coffee. Gets up every few minutes. Check on things in the kitchen. Check on the pie in the oven. Heat up the gravy. Bring in some more potatoes- she don't eat on the job, you might say.
But he wanted to lose some weight. And so for the past four months, he hasn't eaten a bit of what we would call food. He's been living entirely on a clear gelatin, a transparent gelatin that he makes himself in a bowl of hot water, pouring in little packets of powder that he sent for by mail from an advertisement in the Gospel Digest, which is a Christian magazine that he subscribes to.
And the advertisement, I don't remember just how it went, but it said that although we Christians have a great deal to rejoice about, we don't need to kill the fatted calf on a daily basis. See that was just for an occasion- that was when the prodigal son came back was when they killed the fatted calf. The apostles didn't have fatted calf for lunch every day. There were fishermen, some of em, so they probably ate a good deal of fish.
Scripture mentions fasting, you know? And whenever God has provided food directly to people, it's always been sort of low calorie foods, loaves and fishes, and when he fed the prophet Elijah with the with the little bits of food that the raven carried in his beak, you're not going to gain a lot of weight on food, that's brought in on a raven’s beak. And of course, the manna that he dropped from heaven, not that was low calorie, you know, it must have been to fall from the sky without hurting anybody. It wasn't cheesecake and reuben sandwiches that God dropped out of the clouds. It was manna.
So he sent for this jello, this gelatin. It's called Manna Gel. Been eating on that now for four months and dropped 40 pounds. Which is kind of strange to me because you see, when I was a little kid he was always such a big person. I remember him playing football in the backyard with the cousins and myself where he'd pick up the ball and go across the line and pick up the defense one after the other carry us all across the goal line. Now I look at him as I'm grown up and become a major figure. And he looks kind of svelt- he looks kind of well, I wouldn't say petite but slim, kind of a little guy. I could probably pick him up now if I wanted to. My old uncle Earl, tuck him under one arm, make him do what I want him to do.
Though of course I wouldn't do it. Those of us who grew up in Lake Wobegon even when we grew up and became grown up and become big, you know, still, whenever we see our elders, we always defer to them. We always feel as if we're 12-13 years old again. Isn’t that an odd thing, even when you're middle aged. I'm as old now as my parents were back when I was 13 when I thought they were pretty old.
And yet I go up to Lake Wobegon Father Emil claps his hand on my shoulder he says “what’s you been up to den?”.
I say “nothing Father, nothing.”
He wants to hear a success story or something, but all I can think of is I didn't do it I would been here all this time there must have been somebody else.
He says “I hear you on the radio down there den.”
"sort of.”
“I hear you've been talking about me now and then.”
“Oh no, I'm... well... I mean, maybe once or twice I've mentioned you... it’s just talk... you know, just to show... it's nothing out of the ordinary.”
It's an odd thing. Suddenly when you're in middle age to feel like you’re a child. It's partly the way we were brought up. They worked so hard to give us a simple, uncomplicated childhood. Believing as they did, that children should not know about poverty. We should not know that we don't have much money. We should not know about troubles and so they hid from us their disagreements and sadness and confusion and their occasional unhappiness. Believing the children were supposed to grow up under a blue sky and to feel safe and secure and lucky. And they worked to make simple pleasures seem like extravagant privileges.
Staying overnight at your aunt and uncle's house. Helping grandma bake bread. What a privilege. Riding in the Heyrich with Uncle Jim taking hold of the reins as the big Belgians trotted down into the Meadow- their harness jingling. And then staying up late at night as the relatives sat around in the living room telling stories. And as it got later and later, we kids would lie back in the dark. Not daring to move, afraid to breathe, for fear they'd find us and send us up to bed.
And so ever so often, you can be walking down the street and something about the trees or something in the air- something about the sunshine will make you feel like your child again. What brings me back, of course, is the fact that often when I'm walking, I am walking alongside a young man who is the same age that I was when my parents were as old as I am now. A young man who I've been arm wrestling with for many years now, for fun. At least it used to be fun. I'd pretend to struggle and grunt and groan and finally force his arm down on the table. But it's been getting serious lately. The grunting is for real. It takes me a long time to beat him. Longer every time and when I'm done, I'm exhausted and I go out and sit on the porch. And I can hear him upstairs in his bedroom doing push-ups. Bench pressing 100 pound barbells up there. I sit down on the porch and bench press a bottle of beer. 12 ounces. It gets lighter as you go along.
His day is coming. His day is coming.
I don't know whether I ought to send for the Manna Gel and maybe go into some kind of program to build upper body strength. Put off that day as long as I can. Or maybe it be better to welcome it. Let him win. Do it as a sort of a gift.
That's the news from Lake Wobegon Minnesota, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.
Shy people collect Percy Faith records so they can never be really popular. Big cat sale at Bertha's. Charli MacGuire sings a song devoted to Lee Hayes. Drink a 1982 Duluth wine with tuna fish casserole. Letter from Jack's suggesting that if the show was snappier, it would sell more auto repairs. Fearmonger's natural gas shoes.
1982.08.21 Missoulian / This is a Berto tape. Complete. Audio - Good. It was rebroadcast on August 25, 1990. / Audio of the News available on CD.
Archival contributors: Frank Berto