Roy Blount Jr, Richard Dworsky, Alasdair Fraser, Garrison Keillor, Tom Keith, Kate MacKenzie, Abby Newton, Eily O'Grady, Frank Patterson, Jean Redpath, Robin & Linda Williams.
Shovel Snow ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie ) Happy Birthday ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie ) Pan American Boogie (Robin & Linda Williams ) Road Looks Rough and Rocky (Robin & Linda Williams ) The leaving train (Robin & Linda Williams , Kate MacKenzie ) Green Pastures (Robin & Linda Williams , Kate MacKenzie ) Miss the Mississippi and You (Robin & Linda Williams , Kate MacKenzie ) Cradle Song ( Jean Redpath , Abby Newton ) All Doon for Lack O'Johnny ( Jean Redpath , Abby Newton ) South Wind ( Jean Redpath , Abby Newton ) Song of Wandering Angus ( Jean Redpath , Abby Newton ) Dainty Davy ( Jean Redpath , Abby Newton ) Bright morning stars ( Jean Redpath , Abby Newton ) The Rose of Tralee ( , Eily O'Grady ) Memory ( , Eily O'Grady ) Danny Boy ( , Eily O'Grady ) New Traditional Work Songs ( Roy Blount Jr )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique Chatterbox Cafe Do-Tell Records Pepper Institute Powdermilk Biscuits Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Scotty's Cough Syrup for Dogs
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Well, it's been a quiet week in my hometown of Lake Wobegon. Let me take this tie off so I can talk to you in my normal tone of voice. My gosh, it's been knotted onto my head. There. It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. We've got just a little tiny bit of snow. About 14 snowflakes fell yesterday. People could almost count them as they came down, floated down through the air in front of the Chatterbox Cafe, which was closed part of this week anyway, but it was open yesterday. And then just a little bit fell last night, just enough to make the ground gray, you know, same color as the sky, sort of go together. It's the month of March. It's the month of March. It's the month for people who don't drink, so they know what a hangover is like. This is what it's like. What you got out there. Be a lesson to the young people. You drink too much beer, son. This is what your life will be like. Every day will be like. Will be like March. On WLB radio station up there where I come from, they don't even bother giving the weather forecast anymore. It's been such a strange, strange, warm, brown winter. They just do more beer commercials and talk about baseball coming up and play more polkas is pretty much their principle. Such a strange season that we've had. The chatterbox was closed on account of fluid was leaking out the walls of the building. It was kind of a sickly, yellowish, gelatinous... foul-smelling fluid that came trickling out. People had no idea where this came from. They said there was nothing to be alarmed about, but it kept kind of oozing out and freezing there on the sidewalk in front of the cafe, so they closed it up. It had something to do with this weather. We still don't know what it was, but it went away eventually or froze, probably to start up again soon. Harold Diener, was picked up by the rescue squad. They had to send an ambulance out for him. He just got too depressed. He was on a walk. Marlis was tired of him being around the house. He was so moody. She said, go take a hike. He did. He got down to the south shore of the lake out there near the slough and he was too depressed to walk any farther. He just sat there. They had to send the volunteer fire department out in the new rescue truck out there. Just sitting there Couldn't breathe. He was too sad to breathe with his problem. Sat there, didn't want to move. Ronnie said, you want some oxygen? He said, no. He said, I already tried that. That's what I'm out here for, was to get air. Just made it worse. So they had to pack him up and take him home. She wasn't any that glad to see him again. It has to do with this strange brown warm winter that we're having which is really not normal. It's not normal. It's frightening to see these old men sit in the chatterbox cafe and have so little to say about the weather on which they are usually experts. But nobody's ever seen a winter like this, so there's nothing to compare it to. See, there's nothing to say about it. Just sit there and drink coffee and wait for it to end. Well, it's an object of curiosity when people that age come in to get married. She was real skinny, the woman was. She was extremely thin, and she had kind of a little mustache, but she was very lovely, and she wore kind of a print dress, and she was nervous, and the man was in his mid-50s, and he was bald, and he was kind of heavyset, and he had kind of a little mustache. And they were like teenagers, so embarrassed, standing in Jack and Jeanette's living room to get married on Sunday afternoon. Jack sent over to Leroy next door, the constable, to come over and be a witness. And Jeanette says, where are you from then? And they said, we're from Grand Forks, North Dakota. You kind of wonder who they are, you know. They're atheists or what, you know? Why wouldn't they get married in the Lutheran church, the Catholic church? Grand Forks, she said. My, that's a long drive, she said. Where'd you spend last night? They drove down from Grand Forks. They're on their way to the cities and they thought they'd stop in and get married. So he married them. Leroy was there. They played True Love, a recording by Paracomo to close off the service. The service was begun by Jack turning to the man and saying, I usually ask for money in advance because a lot of people are in kind of a hurry to get out of here after the ceremony. It's an old Justice of the Peace joke. They took off and Jeanette and Jack sat around their dinette table eating cold chow mein out of Tupperware dishes. Leroy sat there with him talking about how he'd been feeling sick. Doesn't know if it's the flu or if it's fumes from the town patrol car. He's had Clint Bunsen look at the muffler. Clint Bunsen says it's all right, but Clint has been kind of sick, so maybe he missed something. Leroy gets headaches from sitting in the patrol car all those hours, sitting there idling. He was feeling ill. Jeanette was feeling ill. And it wasn't just the flu and it wasn't just the fights on the way back from Florida. It was the fact... that when she flew down, and she flew down a week ahead of Jack so she could visit her mother down in Tampa, when Jeanette flew down to Florida, she set off the metal detector in the airport, and she knows it's because that magazine article she read is true, that if you have a faulty can opener, it will make steel filings that will drop down into your food... And you will eat them year after year in beans and beef stew and in tuna fish and salmon. And these will accumulate in your stomach shards of steel, razor thin, gradually causing internal hemorrhaging. And you will drop over dead from this. Imagine a can opener. She's had the same can opener all of her marriage. Her mother-in-law gave it to her as a wedding gift. with a kind of a sarcastic comment about her cooking. And this has been dropping steel filings down into her food. Your own can opener killing you. What next? Your wastebasket or something. Your slippers will kill you. Foot-and-mouth virus traced to pink scuffs. What will happen next? How do you know it was steel filings, said Leroy, that made the metal detector go off? Because, she said, because I know it. How did you ever get on the plane then, he said, if it set off the metal detector? She said, I took off my cinch belt, and then the buzzer didn't go off anymore. Well, he said, there's your problem, is your cinch belt. No, she said, my cinch belt never set off the alarm before. So you see it's these metal filings reaching a high level, exceeding the metal limits that are causing this. She was feeling sick. Gary and Leroy feeling sick. Everybody else feeling sick. Now it was Tuesday when this car came through that was speeding. I knew I was going to get back to this. This car went through about 65, somebody said 70 miles an hour. It came through right about in the middle of the afternoon. It came right down the main street. It was a green Lincoln Continental. It just went straight through town without even slowing down. And Jeanette was just about to get off the curb right in front of the bank to go across to the clinic on Tuesday to see if maybe she'd get an x-ray of her stomach. And she heard the whine of this engine winding out. She looked up to her left, and it came by in a streak. It hit that pond in the street right out in front of her that she was about to step across. A sheet of water came up and hit her in the face. She thought she was having a stroke. Gary and Leroy were sitting back in the Chatterbox Cafe talking about various ailments. They came running out, jumped in the patrol car, and took off with the siren running. Well, they couldn't catch this thing for six miles it took them to catch up with that green Lincoln Continental. They almost ran up the rear end of Raleigh Hockstetter driving the farm hall and the manure spreader down the road. They had to swerve around him, and then they almost took out a couple mailboxes. but they went over hill and around, bend and down and up and around, and finally there it was just ahead of them, and it was stopped by the side of the road. They pulled up behind it, and they turned off the engine, and they didn't know what to think. They walked out, each of them, out their side doors, and it was all quiet. This green Lincoln Continental sat there, and its motor was off, and they could hear a man talking. But there was nobody else in the car but him. They pulled their revolvers out, though they weren't sure if they were loaded or not. They've never been in the past. and they walked up along either side of that green Lincoln Continental, and they could hear him talking as they walked up alongside, and Leroy tapped on the window, and he rolled down the window, and he was still talking, and they saw he was talking on a telephone, and he was talking a lot of numerals, and what sounded like chemical formulas and scientific stuff that you wouldn't know unless you'd been real good in school and by now it's too late. Hey, Leroy said, hey. He turned around and he said, just a minute, I'll be with you in just a minute. He was dressed in a blue pinstripe suit and a white shirt and he had silvery hair swept back from his head. He was talking on a phone and they waited. They'd never seen a man talk on a car telephone before. They stood and waited. And finally he put the phone down and he said, yes. And then he said, oh no. That was a town back there, wasn't it? They said, yeah. You better come with us. I don't know what to say, he said. I don't know what to tell you. I feel so bad. This is the worst day of my life, he said. Gary got in the green Lincoln and drove that back, and the man drove back to town with Leroy. The Lynch party was waiting in front of the Chatterbox Cafe when they pulled up. Jeanette was there and Jack was there. And Gary and Leroy and Dorothy were there. Gary and Leroy came up with the man. They pulled up in the two cars and they got out. And Gary noticed that Leroy, who'd been riding into town with the man, was now calling him Walter. Walter. And they seemed to be on good terms. They walked into the chatterbox cafe and the lynch party stood around him and they said, what business do you have driving 65 miles an hour through our town? Are you crazy? He had shown Leroy his identification. Leroy looked up at him. He said, he's a doctor. Well, ah, it's a doctor. That took off a little steam. A doctor. Dr. Walter W. Ingersoll, Biomedical Laboratory, St. Francis, Ontario. He handed them his business card. I don't know what I can do, he said, to make up for this. I've got no excuse. I've never done this before. And I feel ashamed to think that I, a doctor, who's been in the business of saving lives all these years, I could have killed somebody. I could have killed a child or something. Leroy put his hand on the old man's shoulder. He said, where were you going so fast? I've got no excuse, the guy said. I've got no excuses. I was on my way down to Chicago, going down to the University of Chicago Hospital. I've got cartons of medicine I'm supposed to have there at 8 o'clock tomorrow morning. But that's no excuse. what are you taking down there? They said, oh, he said, that's too complicated. It's hard to explain to lay people. I couldn't tell you. They said, tell us. We know something about medicine. What? What are you carrying? Well, he said, if you know something about medicine, you probably heard about the experiments that they're doing with Compazine and with its derivative limousine up in Alaska. Yeah, they said they'd heard of that. Jeanette thought she had read about that. Well, you see now, this is a chemotherapeutical drug which is used in treatment of cancer, compazine and limousine, but it had these terrible side effects of causing people to lose their hair, and so another drug had to be developed to combat loss of hair, and this is the drug that I am carrying, he said. It's called bilastolone, and I have to get it down to Chicago tomorrow. But he said, that's no excuse. That's no excuse for what I've done. But lost alone, they said, yeah. What does that do? Well, he said, it was developed to combat the loss of hair. But it turned out to be more powerful than that. And it turned out to have the effect of reversing the effects of aging. You mean it makes you younger? No, I didn't say that, he said. Your chronological age stays the same. But when you use it, the effects of aging, the physical deterioration that accompanies aging in so many cases is reversed, actually reversed. It's an amazing drug. But he said, that's no excuse for what I've done. I should have slowed down. That's amazing, they said. He said, I shouldn't have told you as much as I've already told you. He said, remember, this is a secret between us. If this got out to anybody and got back... to St. Francis, Canada, back to the Canadian Medical Board or down to the University of Chicago Hospital, I would not only lose my license to practice medicine in Canada and the United States, I would also lose my PhD in medical technology. I'd lose everything. I wouldn't be able to have a career anymore. He said, what I did was wrong. What I did was terribly and desperately wrong. I could have killed somebody. I can't think of anything to do to make it up to you, except by doing something else, and it's wrong too. But I guess it's the lesser of two evils. I hate to steal from somebody, but I'm going to do it. He said, I'll just have to find a way to explain it to the hospital tomorrow, but I want you to have it. A few bottles. They're very tiny bottles. The dosage is very slight. About five cubic centimeters per day. About five cc's. A few drops in your coffee. I want you to have a few bottles of bilostolone. It's no way to square this with you. But it's all I can do. They went out to his car and he opened up the trunk and it was full of sealed cartons and a black bag and an aroma coming up from the trunk that was like, it was like the antiseptic that you smell in doctor's offices. It was really the smell of that antiseptic floating up from the trunk of the green Lincoln Continental that made the posse relax at last. He pulled out some tiny little bottles. He said, remember, the dosage is small. It doesn't take much. This ought to do for you, and you can share it with your friends. He said, accept it with my blessings. The posse looked a little uncomfortable. They shifted back and forth from foot to foot. Reverses the effects of aging. Finally, Leroy said, we can't let you steal this for us. We got to pay you something for this. The man said, it's impossible. He said, you couldn't even pay me my costs on this. The costs of medical research, of developing an experimental drug, you couldn't pay for this. Take it. What are the costs? Said Gary. Ah, he said... It's too much. Even just the costs on a bottle like this would be $15. Now we want to pay you, they said. So they paid him. He gave him a couple extra bottles as a special favor. And they said goodbye and he drove off and only after he drove off Did Leroy look down in his hand and realize that he'd never written out that speeding ticket? He disappeared off down the road. Well, they each had a little dose of bilastolone on Tuesday and a little more on Wednesday and some on Thursday. Didn't tell anybody about it. Finally, Thursday, Clarence Bunsen found out about it from Jericho. Clarence just about fell over. He said, doesn't that take all? I can't believe it happened in my lifetime, he said. Well, he said, I guess we know what the monologue is going to be about this Saturday. He said, you ought to have this copyrighted so you get some royalties off of this deal. Oh, he said, that's too rich. But you know, they were feeling better. feeling good and Gary's headaches went away and Leroy's too and Gary's got another problem from sitting too long in a patrol car and that kind of cleared up a little bit here this last week Jeanette started to lose a little weight and feel better and feel a little more flesh and Jack was feeling good and everybody was feeling good on Thursday and even better on Friday and that's when their supply started to run low was Friday He was a fake, I guess. They called University of Chicago Hospital. They never heard of him. They never heard of him up in St. Francis, Ontario. He was a fake, and it was a fake drug. And, you know, that's the problem with fakes, that when they work, there's no way to get more. He's gone. That's what a fake will do. That's what a liar will do to you. A liar will take you out, out to the middle, and then a liar and a fake will leave you on your own to figure out the rest, just like I do now. That's the news from Lake Wobegon. Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
RB talks about ugly versus pretty hair. No message from the Bobists. Radio Theater: Timmy, Fr. Finian, Buster, and Sheila the Christian jungle girl sail on a derelict fruit boat crewed by writers.
Democrat and Chronicle Mar 13 1987 Winona Daily News Tue Mar 10 1987 Detroit Free Press Mar 15 1987
1987.03.13 Star Tribune
Archival contributors: Ken Kuhl