Greg Brown, Walter Eriksen, Marty Grosz, Garrison Keillor, Kate MacKenzie, Peter Ostroushko, Stoney Lonesome.
Trucking in Harlem ( Marty Grosz ) A hundred years from today ( Marty Grosz ) All God's children got swing ( Marty Grosz ) Porter's love song to a chambermaid ( Marty Grosz ) Little Willie (Stoney Lonesome ) Let me into your heart (Stoney Lonesome ) The panic is on (Stoney Lonesome ) Rocking Alone in a Rocking Chair ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie ) Flat Stuff ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie ) Canned Goods ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie ) Swedish polka ( Walter Eriksen ) Midsummer dance ( Walter Eriksen ) Cuckoo waltz ( Walter Eriksen ) It gets lonely in a small town ( Greg Brown , Garrison Keillor ) Panhandle country ( Peter Ostroushko ) White horse breakdown ( Peter Ostroushko ) Monroe's hornpipe ( Peter Ostroushko )
Ajua! Hot Sauce Bertha's Kitty Boutique Chatterbox Cafe Fearmonger's Shop Hotel Minnesota Lukenmeyer, Jimmy Mylar Foot Strips Powdermilk Biscuits Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery RPM Minnesota Real Estate Sidetrack Tap Skoglund's Five and Dime
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"Well, sir, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, my hometown. I called back there last night, talked to them. That's what they said. I said, 'Not much.' They said, 'Been pretty quiet.' I said, 'How's it out there with you then?' I said, 'I always talk louder on the phone, especially if it's long distance.' I said, it's going pretty good so far. I said, we had a wonderful audience here at the show and did a TV show and there's an article in the newspaper. You want me to read it to you? I said to them, they said, no, that's all right. We can wait. They said, so it's going pretty good out there. They said, you know, you remember Jimmy Luckmeyer? They said, "Yes, of course I remember Jimmy Look-a-Mire." They said, "Well, you remember what happened to Jimmy Look-a-Mire." They always remind me about him half of the last two years. He was a boy who was about ten years ahead of me, and he was a boy who loved to be the center of attention. And since he'd done nothing remarkable except read books, He learned to tell lies. He had grandparents who lived in Florida. He went to visit them every summer. He set most of his stories in Florida. I believe I was the last one in town to believe him. I wanted to believe him. I even believed him when he told me that he had been to France. I even sort of believed him when he told me he had been sent there on a special mission by President Harry S. Truman to go find Glenn Miller, who was being held by communists and who demanded atomic secrets in exchange for the band leader's return. But then he mispronounced the name of Paris. And I knew he was lying. He pronounced it Pelly. I knew it was Perry. And I said, "You're lying to me, Jimmy." And it was not long after that that he left town. But we still hear about him. He's our celebrity. So far as we know, he drives around the country in a red 1982 Pontiac with all of his worldly goods in the back seat, lining up receptions and speeches and press conferences for himself and giving speeches to high school assemblies about things that he's done in his life, which include, from time to time, being a member of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team, being an American hostage released, a former heroin addict, a close friend of the Beatles at one time, and the sole survivor of the crash of a Bolivian airliner who spent 40 days in the Andes living on twigs. And saw a shining figure descend from the sky who gave him a message which he will give to the world in 1987. There have been more press clippings about Jimmy Leukemeyer than anybody else who ever lived in Lake Wobegon combined. He's spoken at thousands of high schools and JC luncheons. So they say, remember Jimmy LaComire, they say. Keep moving, they say. Don't stay there long enough so they can check your references. Like, Wobegon doesn't go in for celebrities. He insists that everybody do some kind of work. Though, I often think of that bench out in front of the sidetrack tap as being kind of a little talk show out there where the old guys sit in the afternoon at Faces West. They sit there, talk about their careers, their marriages, their problems, exciting projects that they're involved in. Old guys a little dazed by the first round, ready to go back in for more. But they're not really celebrities. They only celebrate themselves. Everybody else just thinks of them as characters, harmless characters. The one great celebrity of my youth in Lake Wobegon was my English teacher when I was in the seventh grade, whose name was Mr. Anderson, Wild Bob, we called him. He wore his hair short in what I learned later was called an Ivy League haircut. He wore heavy black horn-rimmed glasses with those kind of oblong lenses that made him look like a raccoon. He wore a sort of constant expression of faint interest. And he had three sport coats more than anybody else. And each of them had leather patches on the elbows, which was a first in that town. And which made him an object of pity among our mothers who thought that he might be supporting an elderly parent somewhere. And they sometimes would send him food, casseroles mainly, and Tupperware dishes wrapped in tin foil, which he opened with disgust. He was the first sophisticate that I ever knew because he was the first person who had been to New York City and liked it. I knew other people who had come through, including Mr. Kruger, who spent two days here in 1944, holed up in the Dixie Hotel, on his way to joining his post office battalion in France after D-Day, and never left his room, never ate anything for fear of what might be in it. Spent two days reading the only book that he found in the room which promised to deliver him from this place. And he soon was and never came back. But Mr. Anderson had gone there of his own free will and had a wee of a time and came back home and talked about it. He made the mistake of telling people that he had spent $15 for dinner in New York, which got around town. And confirmed a lot of people's suspicions that teachers were kind of a feather-brained lot who probably earned more money than was good for them. And that New York was that kind of city to bring out the excess and the indulgence in a man. And though he pointed out that this was dinner for two, still, it was 15 bucks. I come from people who can't go to a restaurant and eat a meal without thinking how much cheaper it would have been to make it at home. But here he was. He never spoke about it much to other people after that because he was already under a shade of suspicion in that town, having broken an unwritten rule for teachers there. Having gone into the sidetrack tap and drank whiskey. Not once, but more than once. During the day. But he confided in me. He said, you're different from the others. He said, you're cut from a different cloth than these people. And I wanted to believe him. I hoped it was a wool tweed like his. And he let me sit in his classroom after school and look through pictures, a booklet of pictures of New York. He said, stare at these sights of this extravagant city, including the Chrysler Building. What a beautiful building with those little scallops up on top. Leafy top up there, lit up at night by those little neon loops. When you walk out the front of the theater and look to your left, you can see it up there. I saw it last night, and when I saw it, I felt like I was back in his classroom, sitting there looking at pictures of it. So magnificent. He also had a program from a Broadway play. He had been to a Broadway play. And he told me the costumes were fine, but the plot was a little weak. And I marveled at that, that somebody here in my own town not only had been to a Broadway play, but was able to criticize it. I come from people who, if they go out to anything at night, they, by God, do their best to like it or die in the effort. But the most beautiful thing was the menu from the restaurant where he had spent $15 for dinner. It was a Chinese restaurant. And the menu was huge and had a red tassel on the side. And was in a shade of red that I had never seen before and gold that was like real gold and ornaments around it, a border around it, fancy ornaments and a picture in gold on the front of it of a Chinese lady and a gentleman sitting at a table underneath umbrellas held by two guys standing behind them and inside the names of dishes I had never eaten before except for chow mein and writing in Chinese from the mysterious East. The East that is still part of my country, but yet is connected to other countries. And so is a fabulous place where a person would be right to spend 15 bucks on a dinner, even if it was their last $15, and especially if it was their last $15. Like in fairy tales where the peasant gives his last pennies to a stranger and then is rewarded for not being cautious by finding a pot of gold around the next road. New York was a city like that. You'd be rewarded for extravagance, I thought. We weren't like that. Saturday night, we'd sit down to eat in the kitchen because we were savers, not spenders. We were savers. We ate in the kitchen to save the dining room table for company. And for our Saturday supper, we brought out dozens of little dishes out of the refrigerator, saved up from all week. Little bits of vegetables, little bits of this, that. Even a quarter cup of gravy would be put aside and saved against Saturday supper. Everything you put on your plate, you ate every bite. You didn't sort of take a flyer on a dish in this house, and if you didn't like it, you'd throw it away. No, sir. Because there were children starving in Asia and that was meant to make us careful. And on that kitchen floor, my mother, Saturday afternoon, had just washed it and waxed it. And after waxing it, she had carefully laid newspapers across the entire floor. So as to save the shine. Which now, since there were newspapers on it, we could not see. Which made no sense to me. I thought, you might as well leave the floor dirty and put papers on top of that. But it's made sense to her. She was a saver. I wasn't going to be like that. I was going to come to New York, order any kind of exotic food I wanted to, have a few bites and pass it down. Go to a Broadway play and come out afterwards and say, "Ah, it's all right." Because I was cut from a different cloth. I was different from the others. And yet, Every time I come to New York, the first thing that I do is ride the Staten Island ferry, which costs a quarter going over and back. I'm their boy after all. And even now, this extravagant moment, standing here on West 43rd Street, between Broadway and the Avenue of the Americas. What a name for a street. There can't be another one in America anywhere. Even at this extravagant moment, dressed in this lavish white suit. You know, if she were to walk out on stage right now, my mother with a bunch of socks in her arms. And I suddenly realized that this isn't a stage. It's my bedroom. It's a bedroom. I got a dresser right here. And this isn't a microphone. It's the handle of a Hoover Upright vacuum cleaner. And the faces of these lovely people, not people, they're flowers, they're blue violets on the wallpaper. I wouldn't be much surprised if that happened. And if she asked me, what are you doing? I don't know what I'd say. I'd say, "I'm practicing. Practicing a speech for school." She'd say, "I sent you up here to clean your room two hours ago and you're standing there holding on to a vacuum cleaner." I'm gonna do it. I'm going to. I was just about to do it right now. Well do it then you keep saying you're gonna do it and you don't do it I will do it I'm just about to do it well you haven't done it so far have you haven't touched a thing in here that I can see place looks like a cyclone headed how in the world you ever gonna get ahead in the world if you don't learn how to buckle down do a job I'm going to try. I really will. I'm just about to try right now. Put that vacuum cleaner away, too. Lean on that handle like that, you're going to break it. Right off. All right, I will. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Well, all the women are strong, and all the men are good-looking, and all the children... Our brother, Anthony.
Scott Fitzgerald and Dave Winfield are Minnesotans who made it big in NYC.
1983.04.03 Asbury Park Press
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl