Philip Brunelle, Butch Thompson Trio, Bill Evans, Tom Lieberman, Red Maddock, Chuck Mitchell, Riders in the Sky, Vern Sutton. Butch Thompson,
The Gnu ( Chuck Mitchell ) Rainbow Race ( Chuck Mitchell ) The Peaceful Sound ( Chuck Mitchell ) Labor Day Jump ( Tom Lieberman , Butch Thompson , Red Maddock ) Gee Baby Ain't I Good to You? ( Tom Lieberman , Butch Thompson , Red Maddock ) Cowboy Jubilee (Riders in the Sky ) Old Cowpoke (Riders in the Sky ) How the Yodel Was Born (Riders in the Sky ) Back on the Salads Again (Riders in the Sky ) Master Plumber March ( Vern Sutton , Philip Brunelle ) You're The Top ( Vern Sutton , Philip Brunelle ) Brother Can You Spare a Dime? ( Vern Sutton , Philip Brunelle ) We gather together (Riders in the Sky ) I Still Do (Riders in the Sky ) Christopher Columbus (Butch Thompson Trio ) When Somebody Thinks You're Wonderful (Butch Thompson Trio ) Windy and Warm ( Tom Lieberman , Butch Thompson ) Hello My Honey ( Vern Sutton , Philip Brunelle ) The Blue Bonnet Lady (Riders in the Sky ) Turkey in the straw (Riders in the Sky ) Chicken Reel (Riders in the Sky ) Devil's dream (Riders in the Sky )
Ajua! Hot Sauce Bertha's Kitty Boutique Bunsen, Irene Butch Thompson Music Corporation Chatterbox Cafe Consolidated Foods (Back on the salads again) Halsademder Salsa Company Mrs Rider's Home Salads Powdermilk Biscuits Sidetrack Tap Whippets
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Well, sir, it's been a quiet week, and like Wobegon, Minnesota school starts on Tuesday. Bill the Janitor has been applying varnish to the floors up there at the school, varnish that's been used there for so many years that you just pass by and smell it and brings back the memory of school and makes even us older people kind of snap up to attention. The harvest of tomatoes is about coming to an end. Irene Bunsen has sold the last of the seeds from her championship tomato, still reaping some of the benefits from that one too. Mr. Crandall was in the hospital briefly... some kind of internal bleeding. I thought he might have swallowed some nails. He always held him between his teeth when he went hammer, you know. But before they could find out what it was, it got better. So, rather than keeping on trying to find out and doing tests with magnets or whatever they were going to use, they might as well let him out and let it go at that. Which was about the time that the Oberg's baby went into the hospital. Darlene and John sitting up there in their house on the hill, feeding the baby one night this last week. The mother looked down and saw that it was not breathing, which made the mother stop breathing. But she yelled and her husband came running. One of them took the baby, another one called Gary and Leroy. They weren't sure which one did which. Gary and Leroy came screaming up the hill. Whether it was the sound of the siren or what it was, the baby started breathing again and gave a big gasp. They took it to the hospital. The doctor said, well, he said it's not common, but it's not uncommon. I wouldn't be too concerned about it. That was what he said, don't be too concerned about it. They spent the rest of the night kind of hovering in mid-air above the crib there, where this kiddo was sleeping, exhausted. And in the morning, they were still thinking about it, and they thought about it for days after. Suddenly, it would feel terrified and would run to find that kid. They talked to other parents, hoping for some kind of reassurance. You know somebody might tell them, well, that's nothing. That happens a lot. You just get blue; you grab them by the heels, shake them up and down a little bit. It goes away. Of course you tell a story to a parent, tell a story like that, and your heart starts to pound. Your knees get weak. You want to sit down because of course that's the very thing you've worried about in your spare time. All your life. If you kids had any idea how often your breath has been checked. Kids go to bed, parents sit down in the living room, Dad gets up to go upstairs, and Molly says, where are you going? He says, well, it sounds like a toilet is running up there, so I hear water. That's a breath check. Sometimes they go up and wake them up, shake them and say, you breathing? The kid says, what? Well, breathe a little louder in the future. I used to think about that when I was a child before I'd go to sleep. I thought, what if I stopped breathing? What if I forgot to breathe? What if I just neglected it? Got interested in a dream or something and my breath stopped. So I'd always breathe rhythmic breaths as I lay in bed and reminded myself, keep breathing. Maybe if my parents had known that I was remembering to do that, they wouldn't have been so concerned. I don't know. Which doesn't mean that parents are not looking forward to the beginning of school on Tuesday. They certainly are. Some of those kiddos up in Lake Wobagon, these last few weeks have been expecting their parents to not only feed them and clothe them, check their breathing, but also to be entertainers, you know, to be recreation directors. Little kids dragging themselves into the kitchen four or five, six times a day. They say, I don't have anything to do. There's nothing to do on board. The parent runs down a whole long list of things to do. The kid says, no, I don't want to do that. I've done that already. No, he's not home. That's no fun. I've already done that. I don't want to do that. That's all he said. A beautiful sunny day, and you know you ought to be thankful to have beautiful weather, parents, and a home. But you're bored. This is the 87th beautiful day all summer. Had enough of them. Wish God had sent a tornado. Just for entertainment. Blow all this away. That'd be interesting then. There'll be a lot to do. Maybe if you won't send a tornado, maybe I'll wander off as if I'm lost. Sit up there by the church. Watch them look for me. I'll take my little shoes and socks, my little trousers, and my little shirt, and put it down by the lake. Man, that'd be something I could do for fun. Oh my goodness. Not just children. Not just children get bored with happiness. You know, parents and adults too, I could name you four people I knew, and like Wobagon, who in the last few years have traded in, was a very happy situation. For something that's satisfied their need for misery. I saw it all sorts of ways to complicate their lives. Chasing some kind of fantasy over a hill. And we're rewarded with the pleasures of sorrow and guilt and shame and loss, which I guess they're enjoying. The fantasies we've come up with. I was thinking this last week about one of mine. A beautiful young woman I grew up with in Lake Wobagon. She was taller than I was by the time we got to the fifth grade. She was smarter. She could spell better than I could, and she could run faster. She used to catch me and pump, pump, pull away. And it was a pleasure to be caught by her. She was tall. She had a big nose. And long black hair and long legs. And I remember once being chased by her and pump, pump, pull away, and falling to the ground and pretending to twist my ankle so that she would help me up, and so that I could put my arm around her shoulder and feel her beautiful thin shoulder blades like little wings. As she helped me over and set me down under a tree, sat down beside me and she asked me if I was all right. I never felt better. And for some reason when we were 14, 15 years old, we kind of, our paths diverged. I guess we didn't think it was as good an idea to be pals, you know? For boys and girls to be pals and tell secrets and hang out. Until when I was 17, I decided that there might be something wrong with me because I had never had a great deal to do with girls in the last few years. Friends of mine, according to them, they had a great deal to do with girls. Almost every night. Did all sorts of fabulous and extravagant things in the company of young women. So I called her up and I said, let's go out to your folks cabin and go fishing. It was a good time for walleyes. They bite about eight, nine o'clock, and a clock got to catch a couple of walleyes, fix up some dinner. And so we went out. Well, God rewards liars sometimes. I didn't know anything about walleyes or any other kind of fish. But we caught a couple or something. I don't know what they were, pan fish off the end of the dock. Took them in her folks cabin, cleaned them. She cleaned them actually. I didn't clean fish. I cleaned them, fried up some potato sat down eight. It was a real quiet dinner. I was trying to think of what my next step was going to be. To get to know her very well in a short period of time. So we sat in the porch as it got dark. And I told her I had been reading this book called The Art of Love. Actually, I hadn't. I'd only seen the title, but it sounded like a good title. So I made up a lot of stuff that I'd read in there. That love is a way of knowing other people. Really, I mean, that's all it is. Just a way of knowing other people. And it's really an essential part of life is love. And our parents are old. They don't know much about life or love. But we're young and we should be free to be able to share in an easy and natural way without making any kind of big fuss about it at all. That which is ours to share with other people, our individuality and ourselves. It's a natural thing. It's like eating or something. I mean, you don't think about it. You don't have to talk about it even. I mean, eating. You know, I mean, just eat, right? You just eat it. It's natural. It's perfectly natural. I must have talked for a long time. Because I looked over to where she was sitting on the porch swing. She was asleep. She was stretched out there. She'd gone and gotten a blanket, covered herself up. I hadn't remembered her leaving. The porch or anything. And so I stopped talking. And it was a relief. Having sat and told nothing but lies all this time. It was kind of a relief. Like not paddling against the current, you know, but just letting the oars down and just drifting. Kind of the way I'm drifting right now, you know. Trying to think why I was going to tell this story. It's not an easy story to tell because I was full of strong feelings at the time and they come back to me as I tell this to you. So that I'm almost tempted to change the ending. Still trying after all these years, but that's the way it happened. It was raining. It was raining. I were in the cabin and rain was falling under roof. And that's why I remembered the story this last week was because it rained during the night and I woke up and sat up in bed and heard the rain overhead. Which in a dry summer is a beautiful sound and to those of us who live here on the prairie is kind of like ocean or like the sound of surf. It's a sound that appeals to your imagination. And whenever I hear it, I'm kind of lifted up out of wherever I am and taken into a place where everything that ever happened to you is still happening. And everybody that you ever knew is still there exactly as you knew them. Nothing is finished. Nothing has been decided. Everything is still happening. So that as I sat in bed, I was sitting on the porch. She was lying on the swing. This beautiful, beautiful woman. A sleep. She was snoring. Making little snarts in her sleep. Which I never did know that girls did that in her sleep. Of course I didn't know that. That was one of the kinds of knowledge that I was after you see. And I remembered as I sit here and she's sleeping over there. I remember a day when we were eight or nine years old and it had rained all day and it was in late summer. We went to her house. We read books. We went up to the attic. We tried on clothes. We played animal lotto. And finally we were bored to tears and we sat down in the attic with the rain coming down on the roof. And she said, let's have a laughing contest. I didn't know what that was. I guess you don't either. She said, we'll see who can laugh the hardest. So I did. I laughed. I laughed a terrible flat hollow laughed. Hahahaha! Which made her laugh. She thought that was awfully funny. She laughed and laughed. Then I started laughing. Tears were coming down our cheeks after a while. We didn't tickle each other. We didn't tell any jokes. We sat there on the floor and laughed. Laughing and laughing was like sound of geese playing trombones. It was very musical. Horse screaming, lying there weak on the floor. Couldn't even lift my hands. I remember thinking I'm going to have to get up in just a minute. And I was right. I did have to get up. We never played it again. I think it's this sort of thing which you only do once. But I remember Dad as I looked at her lying on the porch swing and liking her a lot. And knowing that somehow we would always be friends. Just as the headlights of a car suddenly came on straight in my face. And I heard a door slam and it was her father. I guess he had coasted down the hill with his motor off and turned off his lights. And had brought it up right straight even facing the porch. And then turned him on and ran in. I said, Hi Mr. Detmer. He looked at her. He looked at me. He put his hands on his hips. I kind of knew what he was thinking. I knew he was trying to find words to express it in. He said, If you had the sense that God gave geese, you would know that there are people in town who are wondering where in the world you have been for eight hours. I said, Well, we were sitting here talking and we fell asleep. That's all. He looked at me and he figured that was probably true. That sounded about my speed. He went over, woke her up, put his arms around her, which I had been kind of thinking of doing for a while. And I was that. In a town that size, news travels fast. And I found the next day that all of my pals at school thought that I was a real smooth operator and a man among men. And I denied it and denied it. But the more I denied it, the more they believed it was true. And now I didn't care to get credit for that. It was a relief that I no longer had to impress them. Even when you're 17 years old, you can still see a possibility of a life in which you don't have to perform for people, but in which you can be truthful. And in which you can keep an honest affection for your friends. Out of which all sorts of wonderful things may come more wonderful than we may ever imagine. That's the news in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average,
UM could recall all English majors. Shirley had a nervous stomach and wasn't to be called on - until a substitute made the mistake. What is the Wilmot Proviso? Try try again? I'm not sure.
1982.08.29 Louisville Courier / Audio of the News available on CD. Chuck Mitchell: "The show was outdoors in a city park, in St. Paul, I assume. It was a difficult setting, traffic noise, Garrison's soft spoken commentary was often lost even with the PA amplification. I remember thinking what was broadcast had to be way better than what I was hearing on the stage. Same for my performance, which bombed."
Archival contributors: John Hall