Kenny Baker, Bob Black, Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Vince Giordano, Lou Green, Red Maddock, Abby Newton, Peter Ostroushko, Jean Redpath. Vince Giordano & the Nighthawks,
Hello to the Hometown Folks ( Greg Brown , Lou Green , Peter Ostroushko , Red Maddock ) Mockingbird Hill ( Greg Brown , Kenny Baker , Bob Black ) Somebody stole my gal ( Lou Green , Vince Giordano , Butch Thompson Trio ) There'll Come A Time (Butch Thompson Trio , Vince Giordano , Lou Green ) Spider Bit The Baby ( Kenny Baker ) Neil Gow's Lament's His First Wife ~ R. Burns ( Jean Redpath , Abby Newton ) Sonny's Dream ( Jean Redpath , Abby Newton ) Farmyard Swing ( Kenny Baker ) Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider ( Vince Giordano , Lou Green ) The Jazz Me Blues ( Vince Giordano ) He Wipes The Tears From Every Eye ( Jean Redpath , Peter Ostroushko , Abby Newton ) Marjorie's waltz #3 ( Peter Ostroushko , Kenny Baker , Vince Giordano ) First Day in Town ( Peter Ostroushko , Kenny Baker , Vince Giordano ) Cincinnati Rag ( Peter Ostroushko , Kenny Baker , Vince Giordano ) She Wandered Down by Broken Brook ( Jean Redpath , Abby Newton ) Blue Days at Sea ( Jean Redpath , Abby Newton ) I Ain't Got Nobody (Butch Thompson Trio , Vince Giordano , Lou Green ) The Denver Belle ( Kenny Baker ) Dirty ( Kenny Baker ) The Denver Belle ( Kenny Baker ) Birdie ( Kenny Baker ) Cello Interlude ( Abby Newton ) I Will Make You Brooches ( Jean Redpath , Abby Newton ) Jock Stewart ( Jean Redpath , Abby Newton )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique (GK - Big, beefy Bed Cats - Keep you warm.) Chatterbox Cafe (This portion of our show brought to you by the warm and friendly people up in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, the little town that time forgot that the decades cannot improve, including the Chatterbox Cafe, where Dorothy presides, the place to go that's just like home. Dorothy will be taking off on her vacation soon down to Tucson, Arizona, when her cousin Flo from Burnsville will be filling in for her at the Chatterbox. So... Time to eat up here in the next week or two.) Kevin's Dad (Call Kevin's Dad for a ride.) Minnesota Language Systems (Tapes and Study Guide - Linguistic security. Hot Dish Casserole) Powdermilk Biscuits ( Groundhog Day / Furnace out at home / Car thefts down in cold / Warm weather is out to get you.) Prairie Things Considered (Greg Brown - What you wanted...) Raw Bits (GK and Cast - It's not for everybody / Helps you get by.) Russ' Health Club and Cocktail Lounge (Amenities include Smoking, Drinking, and Dancing Girls. No other health club like it - Accommodates your needs.)
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Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. My, somebody sings a beautiful song like that right before I come out and talk. Makes me feel obligated to tell nothing but the truth. But it's hard for me to do that, especially at this time of year when it is as cold as it is. It's hard to tell the truth because it's so cold up here in Minnesota that you would not believe me if I told you how cold It is. Even a professionally trained and licensed liar like myself would be hard put to make people believe it. You would say, it's not as cold as that if I told you how cold it is. It is literally unbelievably cold up here. It's so cold that up where I come from, it is still Wednesday today, and they are forecasting that they may reach Saturday sometime next week. But they are now behind, so that when spring arrives in April, they will still have several weeks of winter left, is how cold it has been. And you may say, oh, it wasn't as cold as that. You're exaggerating. Well, yes, I am. But you see, winter in Minnesota is one of those things that you cannot accurately describe unless you have the latitude to exaggerate. The facts do not suffice. But it is Wednesday up there. Not everywhere, of course. I was exaggerating on that. Only in low-lying areas. But up in Minnesota at this time of year, most of us are lying about as low as we can get. But I probably could not convince you of that, so I will stick to the facts. as prosaic as they may be. Up at Bunsen Motors in Lake Wobegon on Monday, it was a big deal there at the Ford agency when Clarence came round to work on Monday morning. He found a brand new white and gold 1985 Thunderbird parked out in front that the truck from the factory had delivered. He knew it was a mistake, of course. He'd never ordered it. Nobody in that town would. But the truck had left, and as long as it was there, he started it up, and he warmed it up. And what a beauty she was. shining white and silver and everything on that car that the mind of man could devise, imagine or want. Electric windows and a radio aerial that went up and came down whenever you turned on and turned off the radio, which he did a dozen times. factory air and everything. He got in it and he smelled some of that factory air, which really smells good when it got warmed up a little bit. It's the air that they put in a new car at the factory and it gives a new car that new car smell. And of course the factory air doesn't last long. We breathe it in and then it's our air. But it's good while it lasts. He got in that T-bird and he thought he'd drive it around the block and wound up driving it around 10 blocks. Dozens of people saw him and their eyes just fell out on the sidewalk. Got back to Bunsen Motors and there were already 15 spectators there to have a look at it. The truck came back about noon, realized it was a mistake, put it back up. But my, what a wonderful thing. It just made his whole day for about, well, until about 15 minutes later when he was walking out the back door. He opened the back door and he stepped down. And the bottom step wasn't there. Somebody had taken the concrete block away. And he kind of lurched in midair. the way you do if that happens. Stepping off and down onto a step that is not there is kind of like telling a joke that nobody laughs at. You kind of lurch. And you can do something to the small of your back if you're an older guy that will last you for quite a while. And that's what happened. He re-injured an old injury that he suffered about 15 years ago when he bought an orthopedic mattress and insisted on carrying it upstairs all by himself. He picked up his bed and walked upstairs and when he got up he lay down on it for about two weeks. They had to pick him off the ground out back of Bunsen Motors on Monday and carry him home and put him to bed. And that's where he lay for the rest of the week in pain and misery and grief. One little shining moment at the beginning of the week, driving around town in a T-bird that didn't belong to him. And the rest of it was just pain and darkness and misery. I don't know why. I thought I was gonna know why when I got to the end of it there, but as it turned out, I didn't. That sometimes happens when you keep your hands in your pockets the way I do. Across the street over at Krebsbach Chevrolet, Florian Krebsbach had a wonderful time on Tuesday. A great time when a kid from Minneapolis came in with a 53 Chevrolet. This kid from Minneapolis had come up through town. He had stopped at the Chatterbox for some lunch. And then he came out, the car wouldn't start. He got somebody give him a push, go up to Krebsbach-Chev. He got out, Florian come out to see him. The kid said, I think it's the battery. Florian took up the hood of the 53 Chevy and he said, nope, voltage regulator. went back inside into the back room. Two minutes later, he had his hand on one, a 1953 Chevrolet voltage regulator. It was just the high point of his week. He came out, installed that thing in about two minutes. He was so thrilled. It just seemed to justify his whole way of thinking. After all those years that Wendell has been telling him, how come you got all these old parts back in here? You're never going to need these. Let's get these cleaned out of here. Florian has just been waiting for a 53' Shiv in trouble to come in and need something from him. Florian's way of thinking is, those were good cars, there's no reason they shouldn't last for 30, 35 years. That's his way of thinking. So that was a high point for him. The only sad thing was that Wendell wasn't there to sit. Wendell was down at the chatterbox having lunch. It would have been nicer too if the kid hadn't had such long hair and been so sulky. But it was a high point. That's the moment that a man waits for when you go into the automotive mechanic field. It's for that moment. Not when you're standing around kind of clucking to yourself and saying, well, I don't know, she don't look good. Kind of a puzzler, isn't it? No, sir, a man waits for that moment. When you pick up the hood, you look at it, you say, voltage regulator. You walk into the back room, you've got one. Somebody driving a 38 Chev got in trouble, was in Lake Wobegon, he might be able to help you. That was a great moment for him, for a conservative man. He just wished the kid would hang around a little bit and talk about it. Kid said, how much I owe you? Florian said, 12 bucks. Kid paid him. Usually there's a little conversation that follows after that, you know. You talk about it being so cold or something. It's supposed to lead to something. Kid just said, how much I owe you? All right, here you go. Then the kid said, you got a lot more? 53 Chevy parts? Back there. Maybe I'll buy some off you. Florian said, nah, you never know when somebody might come in and need one, you know. He's a conservative man, Florian Krebsbach is. He still drives a 66 Chevrolet. It's got 42,000 miles on it. He's proud of that. That's conservative. In his garage at home, he has two little doormats glued to the concrete floor at the exact two points where when you bring that 66 Chevy into the garage, the front doors are. So you wipe your feet before you get into the car. It looks like new. It looks like nobody ever sat in that back seat unless they were gift-wrapped. Now he's conservative. He and Myrtle have been married now for about 47 years. And every Friday night of every week of their marriage, she has served breaded fish filets. That would be about 2,500 servings of breaded fish filets. but she makes good ones. It's her masterpiece. And so every time he has them, he takes one bite and says, oh, that's the best you ever did. He always finds something new in each Friday night supper of breaded fish filet, something new that he hadn't noticed last week or any of the 2,497 weeks before. Some people think that Florian is so conservative and so straight-laced because he's trying to make up for his younger brother, Julian, who ran away from town in 1942 to join the Marines, so I never met him. But people who knew Julian Krepsbach say that he was dishonest, incompetent, lazy, and unpleasant, which is an unusual combination in a person. Lazy people tend to be pleasant, by and large. Dishonest people usually aren't lazy about it. But Julian seemed to be attracted to all the worst chromosomes in the Krebsbach family. And when he left, he left a lot to make up for, and Florian has been working at it ever since. When Julian was a little kid, he raised chickens, which people did then in town. But his chickens he mostly got from other people after dark. He discovered early on that if you put a chicken in a cage and put the cage on a hot plate, the chicken will dance. He enjoyed watching that. had other children over to watch it and charged admission. Then he used some of his egg money to send away to a novelty company for a supply of small bombs, which used to lie in his bed upstairs in the summertime, and when he heard someone coming down the street, he'd light one and throw it out the window. And if you went up there and accused him of it, even if he had a smoking match in his hand, he'd deny it. Up one side and down the other, cross his heart, put his hand on a Bible. When he was 18 years old, on a dare from a friend, he took one of his small bombs to a revival meeting. Sat in the back as the evangelist preached. And when the evangelist got to the point in his sermon when he urged people not to put off repentance for another moment because the second coming could occur at any time was when Julian lit the bomb and threw it down underneath the pews. It went off and 14 people were saved in about four and a half seconds. including shortly thereafter Julian himself. The evangelist saw him do it and came out from behind the pulpit and up the aisle and grabbed that young man by the back of his shirt and dragged him down the aisle and threw him against the rail and knelt down with one knee in the small of his back and prayed for some light to shine in this young man's soul. And eventually a small amount of light shone and Julian repented and he reformed briefly. He went to work for the railroad. He got a good job and worked for the railroad and even thought about maybe sometime paying people back for those check-ins someday when he got on his feet. He got a job as a switchman up near St. Cloud on the main line. Sat in a shack all day and worked the switches. He lasted three days. It was a kind of a boring job. Not a lot of traffic came down that line. So he'd go to sleep every so often. But he was always careful before he dozed off in the afternoon to close the switch. so that the fast freight, the through freight, the hot freight could come straight on through. He always closed it before he took his nap. And on the third day, He woke up and it startled him. It was only about a quarter mile away and coming on fast, it blew its whistle. He leaped to his feet and he wasn't concentrating. And he reached down and he opened the swedge. And that train hit it going 45 miles an hour. It jumped the tracks, it went along for a while down in the ditch, you know, but there wasn't a lot the engineer could do at that point by way of steering it and trying to bring it back up. And that fast freight became more or less a permanent tourist attraction there along with about half of the Durham wheat from the state of North Dakota. They looked around for Julian afterwards and he was gone. He disappeared about the same time as a nearby pickup. People figured they'd probably gone off together. I was in 1942, he joined the Marines, and you know when people back home in Lake Wobegon thought about the idea of making the ultimate sacrifice, Julian would have been the first one they'd pick for the honor. But the Marines could see right away he was the sort of person that you shouldn't ever put him in a place where you expected him to do any particular thing at any one time. So he spent the war in San Diego. Spent the war there and came out without a mark on him. Killed about as many of the enemy as they killed of him. Went into the trucking business and was a big success out in the West Coast and never came home much after that and never has been home since he sued the family for a share of their father's will which he had been left out of. A person like that uses up about all the license that a family is allowed. And so that makes it necessary for someone like Florian to come along and be so careful and watch his step every moment and never cross the line and never do anything wrong if you can help it. I come from a different family background. Before I came along, my family had a reputation going back several generations for absolute honesty and industry and integrity. So when I came along, I could see that we had worked up, our family had, a lot of forgiveness that we had never called on from other people. which was simply going to waste. I started out slowly. I only told four lies the first 16 years of my life. But the fourth one was so good that I saw that with regular practice I could get good at it. And I have. I've worked at it now until I've become one of the better liars in the English language that you will ever find. I wouldn't say it if I didn't know that it wasn't the truth. It's an awesome thing to have the ability to tell lies as well as I do. And so I try not to tell them as well as I could, but to leave a few strings dangling. Because when you tell lies so well, Irresponsible for a lot of people like Clarence Bunsen. Laid up because he twisted his back when he stepped off the back step of Bunsen Motors on Monday after the 1985 white and silver Thunderbird was parked in his driveway. Laid up in pain and misery all this week suffering. He thought, why did this happen? Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this? I don't know. And it's my story. I don't understand it myself. I did promise my mother and father a few years ago, however, that if I told stories about them, I would never tell stories in which they fell down or hurt themselves. And I've kept that promise to my mom and dad, and they are doing well today thanks to it. But I can't take care of everybody. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, I believe, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
Garrison discusses the St. Paul Winter Carnival.
Spokane Chronicle Feb 4 1985
1985.01.27 Star Tribune / 1985.01.31 Madison Capital Times
Archival contributors: musicbrainz, Ken Kuhl/Michael Owen