Philip Brunelle, Butch Thompson Trio, Richard Dworsky, Gene and Evo Bluestein, Janis Hardy, Garrison Keillor, Sima Schumilofsky. Vern Sutton, World Theater String Quartet,
Martha (Butch Thompson Trio ) Sweet like this (Butch Thompson Trio ) Darkness on the delta (Butch Thompson Trio ) None but the lonely heart ( Vern Sutton , Janis Hardy , Philip Brunelle , World Theater String Quartet ) Non du lien ( Vern Sutton , Janis Hardy , Philip Brunelle , World Theater String Quartet ) Ich liebe dichta ( Vern Sutton , Janis Hardy , Philip Brunelle , World Theater String Quartet ) Under the Stars ( Vern Sutton , Janis Hardy , Philip Brunelle , World Theater String Quartet ) Selections from Hi Jinx ( Vern Sutton , Janis Hardy , Philip Brunelle , World Theater String Quartet ) My soul to sing ( Vern Sutton , Janis Hardy , Philip Brunelle , World Theater String Quartet ) Skadahat America (Gene and Evo Bluestein ) Old true love (Gene and Evo Bluestein ) Going across the sea (Gene and Evo Bluestein ) Freight train (Gene and Evo Bluestein ) Old cat at home ( Garrison Keillor ) Heartbreak don't hold no surprises ( Garrison Keillor ) Apple trees bloom in springtime ( Sima Schumilofsky ) Together forever ( Sima Schumilofsky ) Which boy for me ( Sima Schumilofsky )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique Bunsen, Clarence Butch Thompson Music Corporation Chatterbox Cafe Father Emil Fearmonger's Shop Jack's Auto Repair Jack's Scraps for Dogs Krebsbach, Carl Krebsbach, Donny Opera Lunch Restaurant Powdermilk Biscuits Sidetrack Tap
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, my hometown. Been a very quiet week, as a matter of fact. Weren't even answering the switchboard in town. Here this morning. There was quite a bit of snow, though, that fell on Tuesday, which caught most everybody leaning in the wrong direction, including the weather forecasters who hang out at the Chatterbox Cafe, the old guys who look out the window at the weather and say, "Boy, she's really coming down, isn't she?" Back during that warm snap that we had, most of them were taking the position that, "Oh, we're going to get more snow here before April. We'll get more snow." But then this warm snap hung on, and some of them changed over to, "Well, you know, this could be it. This could be spring." Pretty warm out there. And just about then, the snow all fell. And some of them tried to change their vote back to, you know, I sort of expecting this, uh, 6, 10 inches of snow. I don't know what they got. I suppose there's a lesson in that somewhere, but it's a lesson I don't care to learn. I believe in hope, even false hope, you know, sometimes it turns out to be true. Two weeks until easter two weeks from tomorrow end of lent some of them were thinking about that now karl krepsbach particularly who gave up smoking for lent and who has sort of limited his sacrifice in the week since giving up smoking for karl does not mean that he cannot sit right next to somebody else who is smoking Pretty soon his sacrifice will be just not inhaling. Father Emil was down with the flu, has been down for about a week, and just crawled up out of bed here a couple days ago and went around to hear confession door to door to catch up on the caseload, I guess. He's done it over the phone before, but in a town like Wobegon, that's not safe. Telephone confession tends to be congregational in nature. It was odd. I wish I could have been there to see it. He got distracted going from door to door, and he knocked on the Bunsen's door, even though they're Lutheran, of course. Clarence opened the door and the father said, I'm here to hear a confession. Then he saw Clarence and he said, oh, I'm sorry. Clarence said, well, wait a minute. Father Emil said, no, I'm sorry to bother you. Clarence said, well, you could come in. I wonder what he wanted to tell him. I mentioned last week on the show, I'm not a mind reader, you know. I mentioned last week on the show the Lake Wobegon-Leynards, our basketball team, back when I was in high school, who lost a crucial district tournament game back in 1958. I didn't mean to dwell on it or anything or bring up bad memories, but I got a letter here this last week from an old high school classmate of mine I hadn't heard from in years who writes, Dear Classmate, Your mention of the 1958 Leonard's basketball team, the power and the glory, the district tournament, the defeat, pulled a chain that unloaded a ton of memories for me. Not that you should feel proud of your narrative skills, I felt the same a few years ago when I met a man named Leonard. Leonard Swedeen was his name. He walked into the community mental health center where I work here, and complained of chronic depression. He had lost his job teaching. His wife had left him. And in order to walk in and ask for help, he had put away quite a bit of gin. As I talked to him and said his name, let's talk a little bit, Leonard. Then what happened, Leonard? I remembered our team, the blue and the gold, all of us standing and singing, we are the Leonards, the mighty, mighty Leonards. And then at the end of a game singing L-E-O-N-A-R-D, I went to games with LaDonna Scoglund. We had made plans to get married, have children, stay home and be happy. And as we held hands and sang L-E-O-N-A-R-D, somehow to me it meant that life was good and just. That year, as you remember, we were undefeated right up to that first tournament game against St. Francis. Pitiful St. Francis. Most of our classmates didn't bother to attend that game. And I suppose in a way they are still undefeated. All this came back to me in a split second as Mr. Swedeen sat in the conference room and talked about the disasters that had suddenly ruined his life. And I thought, maybe I couldn't help him if I were going to sit across the table remembering my youth. Sitting there, a mental health professional, and I wanted to say, "That's all very interesting about your job and your wife, Leonard. Now let me tell you something happened to me about this basketball team." Back in 1958, 25 years have passed since that final buzzer that killed our hopes, and yet I can still hear it. And when I come to the end of my life, in the final second of consciousness, I expect to hear it again. Yeah. I sent Mr. Swedeen to detox and he was glad to go. The big step for him had been the step across the threshold. That was his mountain and he had crossed it and now he felt the wonderful relief of being a patient, a sort of pupil, following directions as if after a disastrous vacation he was safely back in school. "Go to detox, Leonard," I said. And I envied him a little bit. And wondered where can a person go to get over a basketball game? A game he did not even play in, a game that is now a quarter century old. The score, as you remember, was 53 to 51. I still remember my face burning at the end. I still remember our starting lineup. In fact, I saw Donny Krepsbach the summer before last on a golf course in Alexandria, Minnesota, where my in-laws have a lake cabin. Donny was in the foursome ahead of us. It seemed like God's will I should ask, so I introduced myself and I asked him. Ten seconds left when he stole the ball and had a clear break to the basket. Why, instead of taking the layup, did he try a jump shot from 12 feet out Donnie looked at me and said, "Huh?" I said, "58, 1958, St. Francis, the tournament." I had to go over it a couple times before he knew what I was talking about. And then do you know what he said to me? He said, "Well, you win some, you lose some." Then he teed up his ball and drove it 200 yards right to the edge of the green like it was nothing. I followed him around for 18 holes. And this man who couldn't make a simple layup when our lives depended on it now had a magic touch and his drives rolled down the fairway. He chipped and the ball grabbed onto the green. He putted and it broke through the hole like it had magnets. By the ninth hole I was playing in blind rage. A loose cannon driving big lumps of turf toward the hole as the ball whistled off into the next fairway and by the end my father-in-law and his two cronies had about broken their necks trying not to look at me my score was 148 beat saint francis by 95 points I truly believe that nothing has been that important to me since then. Maybe as you get older you learn not to invest so much in one place, to spread your bets around so you can absorb the losses. When Kathy and I split up in '79, we had each withdrawn most of our chips from the pot long before. So the divorce was almost anticlimactic, as if we had only been friends after all and had three children as a hobby. And been a family only as a way to pass the time until something better came along. This seems crazy to me. I flip on the TV and see a basketball game and it's only figures running up and down the floor. And yet I can remember a team and a game 25 years ago and anger and grief come back to me that make my own divorce seem like a simple transaction. I think back to our driveway and the hoop and the backboard over the garage door. My brothers shooting baskets all summer and through the fall and sometimes up to Christmas. They'd shovel snow to make a court and wear gloves with the tips cut off the fingers. My bedroom looked out on the driveway and from up above I'd look down and watch Bob and Leroy and their friends and admire them, their great moves. The dribble to the corner, the head fake, the jump, the ball coming off the fingers and swish, no sound like that. Rubber on cotton, the sound of perfection. When I played, it was no fun. I was a little guy dragged in because they were short a player, and I stood around in the forest and hoped that the ball wouldn't come to me. But up in my bedroom, it was a fabulous game. I could imagine sinking impossible shots myself. And then along came the Leonards, my team, guys my age, and I put everything I had on them. By then, of course, I had learned my place in the world, a lesson of geography. You learn that what you thought was the whole world is really just a tiny dot in North America, only one of seven continents on Earth, which is only one of nine planets in the solar system, which compared to the universe is spit in the wind. I had also learned that my dad was not Albert Einstein or Robert Young. But through all this bad news, the Leonards were a little ray of hope because even though they were from Lake Wobegon too, they still got to have five guys on the floor and use the same ball as say a team from Minneapolis. And they could be as good as anybody and could go all the way to the Minnesota State High School tournament at Williams Arena. And at first, those big city guys in their suits and the Cadillacs would say, Lake, what? Where'd you say you're from? What is that, a joke, Wobegon? But our guys would just run out on the floor and play basketball and throw the ball through the hoop like they did in our driveway. And we would slowly force people bigger and stronger and smarter than us to respect us. And we would do this by creaming them. Lake Wobegon, us, we would be winners. What I used to imagine up in my bedroom, little bugger being a winner, our team really could do and go out and beat the big guys. But unfortunately, St. Francis, an even littler bugger, looked on us as big guys. And that one game, I saw my dream become real in every detail except the colors were reversed. It was a perfect come-from-behind victory and everything. But they were us. They got to wear the white hats. And what was supposed to be like from my bedroom window, the great moves and the swish, was more like I was down there on the court myself in the forest, surrounded in the basket so far away. I suppose it's like what happened to Leonard. One moment you're a good citizen sitting home watching TV news about poor people hit by disaster. Then you hear a strange sound like a locomotive coming closer and closer. Leonard is doing all right now. At first he thought he could go back and retrieve his job, pick up the wife and family, and it would be like two years ago. Just like Roger Hedlund after he missed those crucial free throws with one second left and went back on defense, hoping to get the ball back. And then it was all over. Just like me listening to your show. I think he's from Lake Wobegon. He's my guy. I hope he goes out there and kills him. And then... It's all right. You don't have to kill anybody. Let's get together sometime and roast marshmallows and talk about our children. Mine are smart, handsome, tall, and have great moves. How about yours? That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. All the women are strong. All the men are good-looking. And all the children are above average.
Shy person's problems when they have children. The autoharp was a Sears Roebuck automatic zither.
1983.02.18 Fresno Bee / 1983.03.13 Star Tribune/ rebroadcast on March 11, 1989 / "This date is a guess"- Berto
Archival contributors: Frank Berto