Greg Brown, Philip Brunelle, Butch Thompson Trio, Charlie Devore, Prudence Johnson, George Latimer, John Niemann, Peter Ostroushko, Mike Polad, Sally Rogers, Claudia Schmidt, Vern Sutton. Thompson Brothers Band,
Back home in Minneapolis ( Peter Ostroushko ) Paddling Madeline home ( Claudia Schmidt , Prudence Johnson , Sally Rogers ) Beggars to God (Gypsy David) ( Claudia Schmidt , Prudence Johnson , Sally Rogers ) Try and pass away ( Claudia Schmidt , Prudence Johnson , Sally Rogers ) Take Me Back, Oh Hills I Love ( Claudia Schmidt , Prudence Johnson , Sally Rogers ) We couldn't say goodbye ( Claudia Schmidt , Prudence Johnson , Sally Rogers ) There'll be some changes made (Thompson Brothers Band , Claudia Schmidt , Sally Rogers , Prudence Johnson ) Algiers strut (Thompson Brothers Band ) Memories of You (Thompson Brothers Band , Prudence Johnson ) William Henry Harrison ( Vern Sutton ) Cats may safely sleep (Songs of the Cat: Bach Cat chorale) ( Vern Sutton , Philip Brunelle ) Because you're you ( Vern Sutton , Claudia Schmidt ) Love in the dictionary ( Vern Sutton , Philip Brunelle ) Say a little prayer ( Greg Brown ) Beaumont rag ( Peter Ostroushko , Butch Thompson Trio , Thompson Brothers Band , John Niemann ) Try And Catch The Wind ( Claudia Schmidt , Vern Sutton ) Tell Me It's Going to Be Alright ( Greg Brown ) Mountain Dew ( Greg Brown , Sally Rogers , Claudia Schmidt , Peter Ostroushko ) Teddy Bear's Picnic ( Vern Sutton ) Faraway Lullaby ( Sally Rogers ) Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening ( Greg Brown ) Fried Ham ( Sally Rogers , Claudia Schmidt , Prudence Johnson ) My Wild Irish Nose ( Vern Sutton ) Soap ( Claudia Schmidt ) Walk Shepherdess Walk ( Prudence Johnson ) She Died She Did ( Sally Rogers )
American Board of Gastronology (PHC cast - Board of gastrologists: Fear of making noise while eating) Bertha's Kitty Boutique (Garrison Keillor - Kibble Con Carne) Chatterbox Cafe (Flo is still subbing for Dorothy) Day Old Bakery Store (Day Old bakery store...) Day-Old Bakery Shop Fearmonger's Shop (Garrison Keillor - Dangers of running...Always be careful to the tune of "Roll out the Barrel!) International Waiting Month (Garrison - International Waiting Month... for food servers throughout the world.) National Danger Month Powdermilk Biscuits (Garrison Keillor - Miffed at shy persons: Speak up) Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Shirley Goodness Dry Cake Mixes (Shirley Goodness dry cake mix advertisement) Sidetrack Tap
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. I want you to know that the big blizzard did not hit them last Saturday night, the terrible blizzard that swept so suddenly down out of the Dakotas and through western Minnesota and around the south. Some people died in that blizzard. It did not reach Lake Wobegon, but they have relatives out in western Minnesota, so they heard about it and they were talking about it all week. Clarence Bunsen has a nephew out in Lyon County who said that last Saturday night at 7 o'clock, When our show went off the air, there were just a few snow flurries and a light wind out of the northwest. And by 7.05, before the tubes had cooled off, while you couldn't see across the yard, you didn't dare go to the barn. And the wind was up to 80 miles an hour. It just came on so suddenly, nobody had any warning. There were people who were just going over to the neighbors, just driving into town to church, just running simple errands that suddenly turned into pretty heroic enterprises out there in western Minnesota. It was terrible. And a lot of close calls, and some calls not close. Some people were called. And there were many stories out there of people who risked their lives for each other. Well, they were talking about it in Lake Wobegon this last week because, of course, it made them remember all of their close calls, especially with blizzards. Anybody who's lived in the country for any period of time had been caught in one one time or another it's almost inevitable You live in the country you have to be someplace you just get in your car and you go you don't let a little snow stop you and Then as you drive along and as it gets worse and worse It's hard to give up and turn around and go back especially for guys and Because there never was a man who ever would admit to being less than one of the world's great drivers on a snowy track. And so you keep on going and you're going slower and slower and you're concentrating harder and harder in this glaring white on the little tire tracks in the road ahead of you of the car before. until after a while you realize that your tremendous skill as a driver isn't going to do you a lot of good because you can't see anything. There are no tracks up there at all. It's just all white. There's no horizon. There's no sky. There's no road. There's nothing, sometimes not even a hood ornament. It's just pure, blinding white. And some of us still keep on going. I remember one time it got to that point with me and I opened the door on the left hand side and I opened it about three feet and I leaned way down and looked down there to follow the little shadow of tire tracks. Kind of hoping that there wasn't anybody coming towards me who's doing the same thing, you know. thinking about all those stories true stories about people who have died about a hundred feet away from safety and thinking about how lightly dressed I was but going along with my head sticking out the door way down following that track and what I didn't realize of course was that I was following the track made by my left front tire and When you do that, it's just a matter of time. And you're down in the ditch, and that's it. That's all she wrote. It's over. Except the time that happened, it turned out not to be such a close call. I got out of the car, and it wasn't as bad as it had looked inside, because a lot of that blinding white was on the inside of my windshield. My defroster didn't work and I was breathing pretty heavily at the time. But I got out and I could see the neighbor's mailbox up a little ways and went up there and I knew I was just a quarter mile from home so I walked home in the blizzard. The close call was two days later when I went to dig it out. My son and I walked over there. Car was in the ditch. We walked down Township Road to the corner where it turns down. So beautiful after a blizzard. Fresh snow and troops of corn standing in ranks there in the cornfield. And the plow had come around the corner and kind of sculpted it out so it looks kind of medieval almost, like a buttress or a bulwark there. And we turned the corner around the high snowbank. There was the car down in the ditch. Looked kind of medieval too in a way, kind of like a ship that had gone down on the reef. So I went to dig it out and I had it pretty well dug out and then of course the neighbor came by with his tractor. After I dug it out, I mean they always do. I'll let you do a little recreational shoveling first. I attached a chain to the rear bumper and hauled her out, and we got in and we drove. And I knew that there was a big drift in the driveway, and I thought I was probably going to have to do some more shoveling. But I thought maybe I'd take a run at it and kind of get the car in about 20 feet, you know, and not have so much shoveling to do because I'd already done a lot of shoveling. And then as I turned into the driveway, it was a long driveway, and as I saw that the first, oh, about 200 feet of it, the snow was all blown clear, I thought, no, I can make it. I just gun it. If I get it up to about 30 miles an hour, I can go right on through that drift and get all the way into the yard, and I gunned it and got it up to speed, and I was not too far away from the drift. when it suddenly occurred to me that my three-year-old son was standing on the seat right next to me and I took my foot off the gas and I threw my left arm around him and it was about all I could do to hold on because we hit hard we hit like a ton of bricks and stopped and he thought it was just wonderful he wanted to go back do it again Oh, Lord. It's when the close call is the result of your own stupidity that it really scares you. I just sat there shook for a while. Lord, that's when a guy says the dad's prayer. You know, our Father, which art in heaven. I thought I was ready for this, you know, having gone to college and everything, but evidently I'm not. So if you want to bring in a substitute dad here... Turn me into a pillar of salt or something else. I don't care. It's all right with me. And if you want me to stay on being a father, Lord, we need more angels than just 12 that you've assigned to the case. I'm working overtime on this. And Lord, just remove all the sharp objects from our home and everything with moving parts and fire. Take the fire away, Lord, for a while and we'll just hunker down on the floor and eat cold cereal for a while until I kind of get the hang of this, being a dad. Oh, dear. I was telling a story two weeks ago about Jimmy Beeler. reminds me of that. Jimmy Beeler, who came down to St. Paul and stood in line all night outside the Civic Center to buy tickets for a concert in March by a rock and roll band named Mammoth. And even as he did that all night, his mother up in Lake Wobegon, Mavis, lying awake all night, sick with worry, especially after she read an article in Home and Hearth magazine about the evils of rock and roll and and of that band in particular. And I left the story with Jimmy Beeler back home in Lake Wobegon. He'd gone up to bed, sleep it off, and Mavis was sitting at the kitchen table, as you may remember, looking at those two tickets that he'd gotten and thinking about whether she didn't owe it to him as his mother to rip them into tiny pieces and save him from this. I left it at that. A lot of people wrote me angry letters saying I had no right to leave a story unresolved like that and leave them hanging. I don't know what their lives are like, but mine has a lot of unresolved stories in it. I'm still waiting for the ending of some of them. But I'll tell you that she has not ripped them up so far. Mavis has not ripped up Jimmy Beeler's tickets to the rock and roll concert. Although his father Ed has said three, four times that he was going to. But he hasn't either. He said it was his duty. He couldn't allow his son to go to a concert like that. And he was going to take charge, lay down the law, draw the line, do his duty as a father and destroy those tickets. Well, Mavis just looked at him, and she said, "'You remember the elephant, Ed?' And that took a little starch out of him." It was about 12 years ago when those Beeler kids were all little tiny children that the Nobles and Norman circus came to the ballpark in Lake Wobegon, and they all went to see it, as everybody else did. It was one of those one-ring circuses that travels around under a tent. One of those circuses where you walk in and the woman who sold you your ticket turns out to be the bareback rider and has a trained dog act. And the guy who sold the cotton candy turns out to be the ringmaster and the trampoline artist and the lion tamer. Except it isn't really taming lions, it's kind of lion awaking is what it is. Crack the whip pretty hard to keep that lion from rolling over and taking a nap. And on the way out, the lion tamer is selling you souvenirs of the circus and tickets for ten cents to go into another tent and see the tattooed lady. And she turns out to be the bareback rider and ticket taker. And she has, oh, about three tattoos. But she's a nice person. Anyway, it's that kind of circus. Not the kind of circus that you run away to join. The glamour of show business is spread kind of thin on... Circus like the old nobles in Norman, except for kids. The Beeler kids thought this was just the last word in entertainment to go to this circus and sit up there on the top row of the bleachers underneath the tent and jump off the bleachers down to the ground, run around under the bleachers and sit up there and poke each other and throw popcorn at each other. Just a lot of fun for them. And taking little wisps of cotton candy and sticking them to the back of your dad's head where he doesn't notice it. So when they got done with the circus and they went outside, Ed and the six little kids, and they all got into the old VW. It was like a clown car. I mean, they're all kids bouncing around and laughing and whooping it up. And Ed pulled out of the parking lot, and there they saw the elephant staked out in the field. Old Mazumbo, who had been in the circus and walked around a couple times and sat on a stool and said her prayers and did some other stuff. And the kids wanted to go feed the elephant. They said, please, Daddy. Oh, please, please, please, please, please, please. Can we please? We got peanuts, they said. We got peanuts. Can we go feed them? And they did have peanuts. They'd been to the grocery store before the circus. They had about a month's supply of peanuts there in the grocery bag in the back seat. So Ed said, all right. But he said, you stay in the car. He said, nobody gets out of the car. We all stay in the car. And he drove the VW up right in front of the elephant. And they rolled down the window, and the oldest Beeler kid took a handful of peanuts and stuck it out for Mazumbo to see. And she put her trunk down there, and she picked them up and put them in her mouth, and then it was the next kid's turn to feed her, all six of them. And by the time they got to the sixth handful of peanuts, Mazumbo had quite a bit of her trunk inside the car. feeling around in there and looking around for provisions, which kind of made Ed feel a little queasy because he's always had a fear of snakes. And here was a gigantic, long, bristly thing snaking around inside the car and looping around people's necks and feeling around on the floor and snuffling and wheezing. And the tip of Mazumbo's trunk looked like Mazumbo had kind of a bad cold. Oh, they just couldn't feed her fast enough. They just stuck fistfuls of peanuts in the end of her trunk. And then they were out of peanuts. And by that time, Mazumbo had almost the whole trunk in. And Ed was trying to keep his calm so as not to frighten the children, but there was no danger of that. Those kids laughing, laughing, thought that was the funniest thing they'd ever seen in their lives. Ed turned around, fished down in the grocery sack for some more food, and he felt this huge cold thing on his face. He banged his head on the ceiling. He grabbed Oreos out of there and stuffed it in Mazumbo's trunk. They grabbed candy bars, potato chips, everything he could find. All he had left was canned goods. And then Mazumbo just kind of lifted her head a little bit, and the left side of the VW went up about two feet. And that's when Ed started saying the dad's prayer. Oh, he could see it then, family of seven crushed by elephant, car flattened like a pancake. Investigation reveals father error. He didn't know what to do. He's trying to think, what do you do? You stay with your car? Do you get out and run? What do you do when you got an elephant's trunk inside your car? finally just panicked. He just slipped it into reverse and he backed up kind of slowly because Mazumbo was hanging on by the window. And as he inched back, with every inch that he went, he heard the ridges on her trunk go bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. And he was free. Oh, the kids thought that was the most fun they'd ever had in their lives. All the way home, laughing, laughing. They took their arms and put them up to their faces to make trunks and were feeling around and tickling each other and grabbing onto each other. Oh, they thought that was the best fun. His little girl in the back seat stood up and put her arms around his neck. And she said, Oh, thank you, Daddy. She said, You're the best daddy in the whole world. and she couldn't see that the sweat was running down the world's best daddy's face and that the world's best daddy's hands were shaking so he could hardly drive. And the tears were running off his eyes because it wasn't until right then, you know, that he realized how much he loved Mom. So he could hardly speak until they came up to the driveway and the kids were saying how much fun it was and they couldn't wait to go in and tell Mom about all the fun they had with the elephant. Then the world's greatest dad took the long way back around town until they quieted down a little bit and made them all promise that they would not tell mom about all the fun that they had at the circus and especially not about the elephant. And they all promised, but how could you keep a promise like that? How could you not tell about something as wonderful as that? So they told her the moment they got in the front door. They told her everything. And she looked at Ed and she said, Ed? And Ed had to put on his most authoritative, all-knowing expression, the look of the leader of men, the old hand with elephants, the master dad. And he said, it was all right, he said. We stayed in the car, he said. It was all right, he said. I was there. It wasn't until years later he told her the truth. He told her the truth. And she's kept his secret pretty much except when he becomes very authoritative. She'd just look at him and say, elephants. Or sometimes she'd just look at him and she'll go... Well, I don't mean to make him look like a fool or make him look incompetent. He is competent, but there are limits to competence, you know, it's not magical. We just think that it is, sometimes think that we can draw a little circle around ourselves and nothing bad will ever happen and we'll have no close calls. But it isn't true. What people in Lake Wobegon didn't say when they were remembering all their close calls with blizzards and the rest of it was what everybody knows whenever that happens and that is that each other is the only thing that we have in this world that's really important to us. And you know that when you're in big trouble, that we really are devoted to each other. You kind of know it the rest of the time, but it takes real trouble to bring it out in you, that we really do love each other more than we'd ever let on. And love has brought a good many people to safety when competence was exhausted and could do nothing, including the competence of fathers. 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.
Red Maddock is in the hospital. Tom Andrews on drums. President's Day. Butch Thompson's birthday. Start of "Save the World." Department of Folk Songs: Good old mountain dew, Teddy bear's picnic, Come to sleep tonight, Who's woods these are, Fried ham, My wild Irish nose, Soap medley, Walk sheperdess walk, She died she did. George Latimer - Proclamation from Mayor George Latimer for Butch Thompson's birthday. GK & guests - Save the World Theater committee.
1984.02.11 Berkshire Eagle /1984.02.10 Star Tribune
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl/ Michael Owen