Chet Atkins, John Hartford, Garrison Keillor, Jason Keillor, Kate MacKenzie, New Grass Revival, Vern Sutton.
The old family radio ( Garrison Keillor ) Slow days of summer ( Garrison Keillor ) Living in the Mississippi valley ( John Hartford ) The annual waltz ( John Hartford ) Learning to smile ( John Hartford ) Take me away (New Grass Revival ) Metric lips (New Grass Revival ) Gentle on my mind (New Grass Revival ) Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms (New Grass Revival ) Good woman's love (New Grass Revival ) It just is (New Grass Revival ) Would Jesus Wear a Rolex on His Television Show? ( Chet Atkins ) Cheek to cheek ( Chet Atkins ) My Mother's Eyes ( Vern Sutton ) Mama ( Vern Sutton ) You Can't Buy ( Vern Sutton )
Adventures of Buster the Show Dog Bertha's Kitty Boutique Bud's Mobile Home Service Fearmonger's Shop Mr. Pickle Restaurants Powdermilk Biscuits Scotty's Cough Syrup for Dogs World Theater Lost and Found
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobecon, my hometown. It's been cool and sunny up there. People have started to put in their gardens now, for sure. You can see bean poles in the backyards all the way up and down the alleys if you go walk around. It's been busy up there, actually. Fishing season starts in a couple weeks. They're getting ready for that. Graduation in about three weeks. The junior-senior spring prom is coming up at the high school. It's either tonight or next week. I don't know which. If I were 17, I would know, but I don't know which it is. And last Sunday was the living rosary procession at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Church. All of the young women of Our Lady School dressed in their finest, carrying garlands of flowers, to string around the statue of the BVM out behind the church. Last Saturday was also the day of the great pontoon boat race there in Lake Wobegon. I hear from your reaction some of you missed it and probably wished you'd been there. It was a great event, though like the greatest events in the history of that town, it's not the easiest thing to describe, We'll try as long as you seem to be interested in the subject. Wally at the sidetrack tap, as you know, has a pontoon boat called the Agnes B., named for his late sainted mother. A 26-foot pontoon boat with a green-striped canopy, he put it in the water a week ago last Saturday. He'd been in the water for a while. up at Arts Bates and Night Arrest Motel put it in and has been around the lake. And last Saturday morning, Jack Kruger, Mr. Kruger, came into town with his new pontoon boat, which actually came into town under its own power. His trailer hitch came loose as he came over the... railroad tracks. And first people saw it, they looked down there, and it looked like the boat and the trailer were chasing Jack and his 86 white Cadillac. chased him a little ways, and then the boat and the trailer kind of skewed off to one side, didn't hit anybody, bounced off a telephone pole and came to rest there in the street Saturday morning about 9.30. Well, everybody was watching and was interested, a lot of spectators alongside. We are observers of human behavior there in Lake Wobegon, and And we like to learn things from other people's experiences, especially disasters, and see how they react to them. Jack seemed a little shaken, Mr. Kruger did, when he got out of his Cadillac and walked back to look at the new pontoon boat on the trailer. But there wasn't much damage to it. He was glad to see just a couple of bumps in the... in the rear starboard pontoon, which was disappointing to us. A crowd of people gathered in more. We were hoping for more damage than that. Mr. Kruger is a man who could stand the expense and who could use the experience. It's not that we dislike him. It's just that he's a man who's had such good luck for so long that he's come to have delusions of competence. And a man with money in the bank who is the youngest 64-year-old man in town by a long shot, most people think he's about 50, tan and trim and well-off. the sort of man who is sitting beside you and you say, you say, boy, I wish I could quit smoking. He'll say, never tempted me cigarettes. Never was tempted by them. If you say, I drink too much. I wish I drank less than I do. He'd say, I only drink when I'm with you guys somehow. I never drink otherwise. And if you said that you wanted to lose weight, he'd say, hit me, hit me one, right there. And you do, but it doesn't seem to bother him. So there he was with the pontoon boat. We all helped him get it, wheel it down to the lake, just a couple dents on the rear starboard pontoon, and we put it in the water and watched him go off with it, hoping that it would sink, but it... But it did not. And he proceeded and went on out of sight. There were about 25 people watching him as he put that thing in the water last Saturday morning. There was a big crowd in town, a lot more people than usual, which was puzzling. And a lot of people asked each other, how come there's so many people in town Saturday morning? It was like people had forgotten, thought that last Saturday was toast and jelly days, but that's not until a week from this Saturday when there will be a lot of people in town for the Holstein roulette that they have for toast and jelly days where they bring two Holsteins, lead them down the street by ropes, and... Whichever, if you've guessed correctly whose business those Holsteins will drop something in front of, then you're the winner. It's popular. But last Saturday was not toast and jelly days. And yet it was hard to find a parking space if you look up and down the street. And they got diagonal parking. Hard to find a space except by the two parking meters. Mr. Andreessen was on his way out of town to go up to Pequot Lakes and to visit an aunt. And when he saw all the cars and all of the people walking up and down Main Street, the first thing that occurred to him was that cat leash law. that he proposed a couple weeks ago to the town council of which he is a member. He is a man who has been kept awake by cats in love for weeks and has been losing sleep and becoming irritable, and so he proposed an ordinance requiring that cats be kept under control at the end of a chain or a leash. And he thought that's why these people had come to town for the Saturday luncheon meeting of the city council, although that had been canceled. Well, he thought, I'm not going to run away from this. I'm not afraid of these people. I'm going to stay right here. And if they want to make a big stink about that cat leash law, well, let them. Won't have it be said that an Andreessen turned his back on a fight. So he stayed. Elmer, the grand oya of the Sons of Canute Lodge, was down at the Chatterbox Cafe for coffee in the morning, and he suddenly noticed that all the booths were full and all the benches, all of the stools at the counter were full. He looked outside, and there were people up and down Main Street. He thought to himself, a living flag. We could do the living flag today. Last one we did. Last 4th of July was pitiful. Just a couple hundred people came, and it took a long time to get them in line. He said, we could do a better one today. If I just go up to the lodge and find the red, white, and blue caps, we could do the stars and stripes, I bet you, in 45 minutes, get about 800 people on the main street and do it right. Wouldn't take more than that, would it? Not if people followed directions. It wouldn't take long to get him lined up, so he went up the street to the temple. This was about 10.30, about quarter of 11 in the morning, parking spaces all gone on Main Street. Florian come in from out of town. He had to park up by his daughter Aloazis. She said, what's going on downtown? He said, I don't know. That's what I come in to find out. He went down to find out. So crowds, crowds of people. Her little boy, Chuck, looked out his bedroom window upstairs and saw the people down on the main street, and he thought of getting all of his eczema cream together in a paper bag and maybe going downtown and selling that stuff. He saw an ad in a boy's magazine two weeks ago that said you could win a baseball glove if you sold 10 jars of eczema cream. He didn't want a baseball glove. What he wanted was a radio. You had to sell 20 jars of eczema cream for that. So he sent away for it. And he's still got 18 of them. He's discovered that when you go door to door and talk to people about skin problems... And you mention eczema. It's an uncomfortable subject. People are reluctant to buy from you. In fact, he hasn't been around at all. So he thought maybe this would be his chance. He could go downtown and get rid of all of them, sell every last bet. His sister Rachel was sitting in the living room playing the piano And when she heard him go out the door, she looked off down the street and saw all the cars and all the people downtown. And the first thing that occurred to her was that they had come for Miss Hoagland's piano recital that evening. All of these people had come to town to see her and other students of Miss Hoagland play their piano pieces. She was going to play Edward McDowell's To a Wild Rose, which she knew perfectly. But now she thought she would sit down at the piano and practice it some more, and perhaps play it better, now that she was going to have a large audience. She sat down and placed her fingers on a keyboard, her hands curved at the wrists, and began... It was about 11 o'clock. There was a line of people standing in line for lunch outside the Chatterbox Cafe where Jim the barber had gone in for lunch and closed the shop for a half hour. The sign said, be right back, though he was in no mood to go back. He didn't like the sight of it. All of these people downtown, he was asking Dorothy, what are all these people doing here? She said, I have no idea. I have no idea. Half of them have come down to see why everybody's here, she said. Jim had put an ad in the Herald Star a few days before it had come out. Jim's Banton Barbershop, friendly service at reasonable prices, Win the drawing and win a free trim. He had meant the ad to say, but Harold Starr had printed it wrong. Win a free trip, it said. and he was worried about it, about people coming into his shop and pulling slips of paper out of the white cardboard box for the drawing and a trip to where he wasn't sure where they'd want to go if it was a prize, sending somebody he didn't even know off to some luxurious place on some kind of vacation, and he had to stay behind and work to pay for it. It just wasn't fair. It wasn't right. He got angrier and more bitter the more he thought about it. It wasn't fair. He's tired of being a barber. He's sent for a brochure to take up welding instead. Tired of cutting people's hair. To him, it's all the same head, no matter who it is, no matter what voice comes out of the front of it. It's the same head that sits there. And he gets the haircut trim, and then he turns around, and there it is long again. except now it's white. He was waiting for somebody to come in to his shop. This was about 11.30, about 12 o'clock noon. And my cousin Larry, working down at the co-op grain elevator, My cousin Larry saw the crowds of people uptown, down Main Street. People parking all the way up in the parking lot at the Lutheran Church. Parking spaces taken. The stores were full. People going in and out of the mercantile. Larry stood there in the shadows in the door. And he felt like God wanted him to go uptown, that God was speaking to him. That's why these people were there. The Holy Spirit had brought them to town because he, Larry, was supposed to go and preach to them and tell them the truth. My cousin Larry was saved 12 times when he was a kid in the space of about three years. He's never been the same since. I guess you're not supposed to be But he's been reading a lot in the book of Leviticus. And then it suddenly occurred to him this last week that he's worked at the co-op elevator for six years. Six years. And maybe he should take a sabbatical now, the seventh year, like it says in the Old Testament, and preach. Surely that's what it's meant by it. He's 34 years old. Three and four is seven. He's been working at the grain elevator since 1981. One from eight is seven. And the last four digits of his driver's license are 8341. Prove something? To him it does. So he took his New Testament and he put it in his pocket. And he walked uptown without telling anybody, telling Byron at the elevator. He walked uptown because the Lord had sent this crowd of people there for him to preach to. He sat down on the plank bench in front of Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery. There in the midst of the sinners, the Norwegian bachelor farmers, he sat down there. listening to them chew and spit. And the thinking of our Lord's words in the gospel according to St. Matthew, that broad is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth down to destruction, and many are the people who will take it. And narrow is the gate, and narrow is the way that leadeth to eternal life. He wasn't sure how he should do this. leap up and start talking to people. He sat waiting for the Spirit to lead him to do it. And it was 12.30, and it was 1 o'clock, and the Spirit still hadn't led him, and the Spirit hadn't led him to go have lunch either. And it was 1.30, and it was 2 o'clock. Everybody was downtown. Ella and Henry Anderson were downtown. People hadn't laid eyes on them in months. Old people, they've been cooped up indoors. What are you doing downtown? People said to Ella. She said, well, she said, I heard everybody was down here. So we come down, heard it was a parade. But it wasn't a parade. It was just a lot of people downtown, walking up and down, in and out of the mercantile. Clifford said to Irene, he said, didn't I tell you? Didn't I tell you that old window display wasn't pulling him in? I said we ought to change it. See? You see? People were coming in and out. He tried to call his part-time clerk, Barbara, at home, see if she could come down work. She wasn't at home. She was downtown already someplace. Mr. Andreessen was standing there in front of the town hall just waiting for somebody to come up and talk to him about cats. And young Charlie was walking around and around just holding a big grocery sack with 18 jars of eczema cream inside it. And Elmer was up at the Sons of Canute Lodge up in the attic looking through old things, trying to find boxes with red, white, and blue caps in it and finding instead old photographs of old Sons of Canute photographed there in front of that very temple Years ago, old Ike, old George, Barney, and Fred, standing there in front of the four pillars that signify the four virtues, standing on the 11 concrete steps that represent the 11 steps to Canute-hood. Old Canutes, dead these many years. Once they were here, and now they're not here any longer, he thought to himself as he sat down in the dust and wept, not here any longer, and soon I won't be here any longer either, he thought. And up on the hill, the little girl sat at the piano playing la-di-di-di-di. La-di-di-di-di. So you see, it was a volatile situation. People were looking something, and it was no wonder that somebody standing alongside Ralph's Grocery looked out into the bay, out on the lake, and saw the two pontoon boats out there. Somebody, forget who it was, just said out loud, look at them, Wally's ahead, and pointed out towards the lake. And a crowd gathered and stared out, and yes, it was Mr. Kruger and Wally alongside And Wally seemed to be ahead. And a whole crowd of people rushed down the alley, the little boys going first and the girls and the old people coming up in the tail and stood down on the shore looking out towards the boats. And Wally and Mr. Kruger noticed a big crowd of people standing on the shore. And all the people seemed to be cheering and all the people seemed to be waving at them. So... They pulled in to see what was going on. And Wally got there first. Wally got there first and was surprised. It seemed to mean so much to them. People jumping up and down and cheering and somebody jumped up on Agnes B and grabbed him by the hand, pumped it up and down, had no idea what. Mr. Kruger pulled up a moment later alongside him. in his new 34-foot pontoon boat with the twin 40-horsepower engines on the back. Well, they were both curious. And then when everybody said that it was a race, Mr. Kruger threw his head back and laughed. He just laughed at the idea that Wally had beat him in this little boat with the 35-horse engine on the back. He laughed. He stood there and laughed, and Wally watched him. Ha, ha, ha, ha, he said. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. And Wally said, you want a race? Well, it couldn't do any harm, Mr. Kruger said, as long as nobody's feelings would be hurt. Wally said, my feelings wouldn't be hurt. Just because you pay a lot for a pontoon boat and it's a little bit longer doesn't mean that it's faster. He said, I've heard that your boat is pretty fast when it's on a trailer. But I haven't seen it do a lot out in the water. Well, Mr. Kruger guessed maybe he'd show him. So they lined up the race from the beach to the dock at Arts Bates Night Arrest Motel, touched the dock, turned around, and come back. A good, long course. They agreed on it. Wally's 35-horsepower engine throbbing there as he pulled off the beach and those big twin 40-horsepower motors vibrating hard. It was not a fast race because the spectators went along. About half of them went on Wally's boat and about half of them went on Mr. Kruger's so as to be able to get a good view of it. I took off from the shore, and it appeared as if it would take them a good long while. So that was that. Mr. Andreessen decided he'd stayed around long enough. He'd showed them. He hadn't turned tail and run. He'd been ready to talk about cats if anybody wanted to. Nobody had, so he got in his car and he headed for Pequot Lakes. Elmer thought, well, we won't do it this time, but next Flag Day, June 14th, we'll go all out and really make it a good living flag. We'll get everybody here and make it one we can all be proud of. Charlie was standing on the corner by Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery with his sack, and Larry, my cousin, was sitting on the bench about six feet away when suddenly Larry thought he felt the stirring of the spirit. But to do what? He wasn't sure. And he looked at the boy with the sack, and he pointed at the bag, and he said, I want that. Charlie said, there's 18 of them in here. I want it, he said. 18. One from eight is seven. That's $18, Charlie said. He gave him a 20. Charlie reached in his pocket. He had $2 in his pocket that his mother had given him to go have a haircut. He gave it to Larry as change. And Larry stood there with 18 jars of eczema cream. And exactly what he was going to do with it, he wasn't sure, but he was sure that he would find out. Charles went up the street to Jim's barber shop to get a haircut. Before he sat down in the chair, he reached in and pulled out a slip of paper out of the white box, and it was one with a gold mark on it. He was the winner. Where is the trip to, he said, the free trip. Jim said, St. Paul. Okay, all right. Better than winning nothing at all. He sat down, and he had his haircut. Wally won the race. He came back in and beat Mr. Kruger by the length of one tow rope. He had been trailing early in the race, heading on over to Arts Bates and Night Arrest Motel. And then Wally noticed what Mr. Kruger could not see, that it was not just two little bumps in the rear starboard pontoons of his new 34-foot pontoon boat, but that indeed that little collision on Main Street had put a crimp in his oil valve. There was a long trail of oil that followed in his wake as his car pushed forward towards Arts. And then, back on the Agnes B, they could smell Mr. Kruger's engine as it burned up, which he, because he was going so fast into the wind, was unaware of until it actually happened. Wally tossed him a rope as they went by, and they towed him in. They towed him in, and everybody came home, and they walked up home, and it was supper time. And it had been quite a day, quite an exciting day, though, as I say, it's not the easiest sort of thing to describe. They walked up to have their suppers, and as they walked up past Elm Street, they heard a little girl sitting at the piano playing lie, die, die, dee, dee, dee, lie, die, die, die, die. The piano throbbed with passion on a Saturday evening. Die, die, die, dee, die, die, dee, dee, dee, lie, die. That's the news from Lake Wobegon. For all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
GK's poem about motherhood. Old Minnesota 78 records. Radio Theater. Timmy, Fr. Finian, Buster, and Sheila. Buster parachutes from the rocket into their arms. Fr. Finian is carried off by a giant condor.
Ken Kuhl was at this show!
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl