WLT

by Garrison Keillor

  Then Little Buddy hurt his voice. Leo told Francis the doctors weren’t just sure how but that some of the WLT people thought he had been choked by his dad. “Throttled the little booger and squeezed his vocal cords and now he sounds like the wind in the outhouse.” Leo said that Slim couldn’t keep the show going for two minutes without Little Buddy. “Isn’t that the hell of it? Here’s a darn good guitar player and he needs this brat to put him across with an audience. Makes you think twice about being in this business.”

  Slim played on Friendly Neighbor the next day and sat around after in the Green Room. Francis had skipped school. Slim was a sawed-off guy with a weathered face and a sad smile. He was a lot smaller than on the radio, Francis thought. Slim rolled a cigarette on his knee and lit it. He told Leo, “I think it got to be too much for the kid, all that acclaim and attention, and he fretted about losing it, and it tightened up his voice box, and when he craned his neck, it strained him. A few days rest and he’ll be good as new.”

  But a few days rest did not help. Buddy lay in bed and if anybody suggested that he get up and go to WLT, he moaned and wept and hugged the pillow and said his throat was burning.

  Slim did the Cottage Home Show alone the next week, and according to Leo, WLT got a thousand calls and letters asking, Where’s Buddy ? Even the Tribune printed a story about it: Child Star Home Sick, But Show Goes On.

  The next day, Leo was waiting for Francis when he arrived. “Grab a glass of water and follow me,” he said. Slim was waiting in Studio B, tuning his guitar. He glanced up and smiled. “Leo says you can sing real good,” he said softly. Francis shook his head. “Let’s give it a try, pardner. What you say? You know ‘Red River Valley’?” He strummed the old guitar. “Key of C ought to work for you,” he said. “Try it. Come and sit by my side if you love me, do not hasten to bid me adieu.” Francis looked for Leo but he had disappeared up into the control room, where he and Gene were laughing about something.

  “I can’t sing,” Francis whispered.

  “Try,” said Slim. So Francis did. He closed his eyes and sang as much of “Red River Valley” as he knew. And Slim said, “You’re right. You can’t sing. But that’s okay. I can’t stand on my head.”

  “I’m very sorry. Maybe if I took the music home and practiced—”

  Slim smiled. “I don’t believe that’s gonna help, pardner.”

  Francis was about to say again that he was very sorry, and then Slim shook his head. “I don’t believe that anything is going to help me now,” he said softly. And Francis could see that was true. The broken brown teeth, the scaly white hands, the lost eyes: this man was on his way to the crash, about to become Daddy.

  CHAPTER 19

  Bryan

  Ray’s wife Vesta appeared at WLT every morning at ten, a pair of sensible brown shoes, big legs in a long brown tweed skirt, a thick torso in a brown silk blouse, and Vesta’s large head and short brown hair. She was nearly six feet tall. She carried a lit cigarette and a black leather briefcase and her feet clomped as she headed west along the back hall. There was a flash of lipstick and a turban with a green plume, but brown was her trademark. She disappeared into her office in the Women’s Bureau, emerged at five minutes before eleven, strode into Studio B to introduce the Classroom of the Air speaker and tell why his or her topic (“Meeting the Needs of the Cities” or “The Future of Architecture” or “Women in Broadcasting”) was of vital interest to all of us, and then disappeared for the rest of the day to clip out articles from The New Republic and The Women’s Precepts Weekly and to compose a memorandum to Ray, reminding him why he should fire Leo (“a fool”), why they should broadcast the Metropolitan Opera (“to inculcate a love of opera in young children”).

  “A child who has learned to love Wagner is a child who could learn to enjoy a pig slaughter,” replied Ray, who was no fan of pig slaughters.

  Vesta did not mingle, except at Christmas, and then only because it was Christmas and people expected it. At the WLT party, she stood in a corner of the Star of the North Ballroom and sipped sherry for a few minutes and escaped before the entertainment began. She loathed the sight of smiley people on stage laying on the charm and telling jokes and showing off. To her it was embarrassing that people should be so dishonest in public, but of course that was the point of entertainment, so she preferred to stay away. The terrifying prospect was that Santa (Leo) would see her and call her up to the stage and she would have to stand and grin like an idiot and give away trashy gifts. She fled before Santa arrived.

  The worst part of radio was the comedy, and after that came the commercials. Whenever she heard one, she reached for the knob. Disgusting, vile, repulsive things. Someone paid you money to say what they wanted you to say and you said it. “Here’s ten dollars. Say shit,” so you took the money and said it. You said it ten times, as many as they wanted, and you said it with a grin, or whatever they wanted. A horrible truth in America: money talks. Not truth, not society, not art, but money, and when money talks, it doesn’t tell the truth, it talks money.,No wonder the Republic was in the hands of midgets like Harding and Coolidge, when the greatest educational innovation of all time—the permanent invisible universal classroom of the air—is given over to dumbheads to use to sell toilet bowl cleaner. Throw out the professor, bring in the janitor to teach the class.

  “This could have been the Acropolis,” she told Ray bitterly, “and you made it a bazaar.”

  “It’s only Minneapolis,” he said, “and what’s bazaar about that?” He grinned. She did not feel the slightest impulse to laugh.

  Patsy Konopka and Vesta Soderbjerg met in the halls of WLT once, when Patsy took a wrong turn en route to the Ladies’ room, and they circled one another with the poisoned courtesy of wasps in the arborvitae. Patsy considered Vesta an old snoot and Vesta thought Patsy was one of those women Ray took to New York. A whore, in other words.

  “Mrs. Soderbjerg—an unexpected pleasure!” said Patsy much too warmly.

  Vesta winced. She peered at the girl. “My dear, you have a scrap of fruit in the corner of your mouth,” she murmured, and sailed on.

  Patsy dabbed at her mouth. Nothing.

  “You have blood running down your stocking,” she called, but the ship had gone around the corner.

  The next day, Patsy introduced a family called the Plumbottoms to Friendly Neighbor, William Jennings Plumbottom and his wife Lester. Lester had a voice like a man’s, except plummier and warblier. She talked up in her nose and came to borrow fresh vegetables from the Bensons and stand around as the Bensons picked and she yammered on about the beauty of opera. Lester adored opera, and sometimes she would get so enthused, she burst into a song, “Vesta la jujube,” and she sang out the one line and the rooster crowed. “Well, he likes it,” said Dad.

  Vesta never heard the Plumbottoms, but Ray did and he was touched. William Jennings Bryan was his hero. “Patsy knows that, God bless her,” he said. “And I don’t take it amiss. By God, if Bryan had been on the radio, nobody would remember his name today anyway.”

  People looked around for the door anytime that Ray mentioned the Great Orator. They remembered urgent errands awaiting them, friends waiting on streetcorners, phones left off the hook.

  Ray had seen Bryan in 1896 in Fargo, North Dakota. He remembered the crush of people under the blazing sun, the clouds of dust, and the faraway man in the black frock coat standing tall and motionless on a platform, the bunting and the banners, the crowd so still, straining to hear every word, and the man’s voice rising and calling, crying out —Ray didn’t remember the words, but the voice was clear as a bell. He had waited for Bryan to arrive, counted the days. “This is history,” his father said. “This is something you will remember and tell your grandchildren.” Ray had pressed forward in the crowd, tripped and was nearly trampled, his legs were stepped on, his father shoved through and cursed in Norwegian and people stepped back and he yanked Ray to his feet. He remembered his mother had lost a silver brooch in the crowd. It
was hot. A team of horses bolted, it took six men to hold them. Somebody sold cups of cold water for two cents a cup and it was cold. Bryan’s voice—so strong, so vibrant, so beautiful, and he spoke for more than an hour, and the crowd was so still, you could hear the banners flapping when a breeze came up. Bryan was too far away for him to hear, except for a word now and then, and yet it was so moving and memorable. The address was printed the next week in the newspaper. People bought it and read it and then placed it neatly in a trunk, or a box, or in a Bible, pressed like it was a leaf and, though seldom read, it was cherished.

  Now it was all gone, Bryan and the Fargo of 1896 and his father and horses and the steam threshers on the farm, all gone, and what had killed it? Radio had.

  “Nobody today would walk across the street to hear Bryan speak,” Ray said. “They just want to listen to the radio. You could put Bryan on the radio and there he’d be, the same as a comedian or the fellow who sells soap. Back then, that man could stand on a train platform and hold ten thousand people in the palm of his hand. Today, any jerk who can keep talking, you stick him behind a microphone and fifty-thousand will sit there and listen to him blabber about nothing.”

  The tragedy was that Bryan was right. Bryan lost in the 1896, 1900, and 1908 presidential elections, but he was right, boys.

  Ray’s voice warmed up. Roy Jr. slid glumly down into the chair. Dad looked out the window streaked with rain. Bryan was opposed to monetary policies that enriched the rich and impoverished the poor—he opposed bloody American imperialism and that jackass Theodore Roosevelt who wanted to out-England the English—he opposed America’s entrance into World War I, the most worthless and ridiculous war ever known to mankind.

  Ray stood up and came around the desk. Bryan lost on all these issues! and then he lost in the history books! Today, we mainly remember him as the tired old man who lost to Clarence Darrow in the Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, 1925. He died of a broken heart. A complete loser on all counts and yet—he was right!

  “Remember that,” Ray told Roy Jr.

  1896, when Bryan lost to McKinley, was a watershed year. We will be paying for that a long time out here on the prairie. We had no interest in owning Cuba or the Philippines and damn little interest in fighting a crazy worthless European war, but we lost and over we went. Out here on the prairie, we wanted free trade, low tariffs, to keep prices of goods and machinery low, and we lost. We wanted the government to intervene, in behalf of the people, against the power of the railroads and large corporations, and we lost.

  “That was the year we voted down the people and voted in Wall Street,” said Ray. Bryan was the great champion of the prairie—but those New York bankers beat him down.

  “They tried to buy me out in 1926, the year after Bryan died,” said Ray. “I wouldn’t sell. Those New York bastards tried to get WLT so they could spread their lies a little farther. But I wouldn’t give in to them!” The phone rang. He picked it up. “Yes? Oh. All right.” Roy Jr. could tell it was Vesta on the other end. He nodded to Dad. They stood up and slowly made for the door.

  CHAPTER 20

  Slim

  With Little Buddy laid up with laryngitis, Slim was out of work. Cottage Home cancelled their show, and Slim took to living a life that he and Buddy hadn’t sung about, staying out till 3 a.m., belting the grape and breathing hard on young women, and from the pals he found jamming in smoky clubs down around the switchyard, he formed a cowboy swing band called The Blue Moon Boys, which played the WLT Barn Dance on Saturday night—one song in the Sweetheart Chewing Gum segment, for $35, seven bucks per man, pretty pitiful. Slim tried to get a show of their own, telling Roy Jr. that their music was ten times better than the Cottage Home crap he’d done before, but unfortunately the public had liked that crap and didn’t care so much for his new songs, which were about roaming around and finding women.

  Come with me, my pretty little miss,

  Come with me, my honey.

  Come with me, my pretty little miss,

  And I will do your laundry.

  How old are you, my pretty little miss,

  How old are you, my honey?

  How old are you, my pretty little miss?

  I’ll be sixteen next Sunday.

  I’ll be sixteen on Sunday.

  Would you forsake your husband dear

  Would you forsake your baby?

  Would you go for a ride with me

  And be my honey maybe?

  “Couldn’t you have said she was eighteen?” asked Roy Jr.

  This type of material simply did not draw listener mail like Little Buddy had. Too bad, but mail is mail, and if the folks don’t write, then chances are they aren’t out there listening very hard. Tough luck, said Roy Jr. Lots of performers improve their act and lose the public’s favor, Roy Jr. explained, and that is exactly why the successful performers try so hard not to improve.

  Leo said, “Little Buddy was big and you can’t knock success. The kid was a crowd pleaser.” Six months off the air and WLT still got so many inquiries about him, they had made up a mimeographed letter. He showed it to Francis.

  Q. Why did Little Buddy leave WLT?

  A. Buddy did not “leave” WLT. The little fellow suffered a sudden injury to his vocal cords that made singing painful and doctors advised that he take a long rest to avoid permanent damage. WLT fully concurred in the necessity of this, and will welcome Buddy back anytime the doctors allow it.

  Q. Where is Buddy now?

  A. Buddy lives with his daddy and mother and his baby brothers, and attends public school and church and is active in Boy Scouts. He misses his radio friends, but he is very busy and happy in the normal life of a 12-year-old boy.

  Q. Will he ever return to the air?

  A. Buddy’s future plans remain uncertain but it can safely be said that a talent as true as his will not go untapped for long.

  Buddy improved, but Slim was sick of all those weepy songs, and besides, the kid refused to come back.

  “Make him do it. You’re his father,” said Leo one afternoon in the Green Room. “You got to stick with what works for you. The cornball songs are what put the pancakes on the table. Seven bucks? You can’t live on seven bucks. Get that kid’s butt back in the studio.”

  “The kid will not go back on the radio. Period. So what can I do?” Slim glanced at Francis and then looked away. “I tried to find somebody else and they weren’t there to be found.” Sorry, thought Francis. What a disappointment he was to everybody!

  Art never looked him in the eye anymore. Clare only spoke to him through Art (“Tell him to put the newspaper back the way he found it! I keep finding the comics pulled out. And tell him to leave the crossword alone”). Mother and Jodie never wrote to him, except a few paltry sentences every other month. Jodie always said that everything was fine and she was enjoying school and how are you, and Mother said that she was having one of her bad days and was thinking of him, poor kid. She only wrote on bad days, it seemed, and she wrote on scraps of cereal boxes, the backs of old envelopes, candy wrappers, as if her letters didn’t deserve their own paper.

  She wrote on a piece of flour bag, “Today it is six years since your daddy died and I meant to go to the cemetery but did not have the strength. I still can’t believe he’s gone. Seems like a cruel joke to be alone and I am only 36 and I feel like 72. But there’s no reason you should want to hear about this. You have your life. I sure wish I did.”

  Slim did his best with the Blue Moons and Dad Benson went to bat for him, Slim being his neighbor. Dad told Roy Jr., “They’re a little lowdown, sure, but they’re not mean anyway. They’re all young fellas, they don’t know what’s what. Besides, Slim has another little boy, he’s three. Cute little bugger. Give him a year and he’ll be right up there where Buddy was.”

  So Slim got the 7:30 a.m. slot, right after the Shepherd Boys Gospel Quartet on The Rise and Shine Show, sponsored by Sunrise Waffles. Slim’s sponsor was Prestige Tire & Muffler so he renamed his band The
Blue Movers.

  They replaced Wingo Beals and The Shoe Shine Boys, a fine band—twin fiddles, electric guitar, doghouse bass, and Wingo playing piano, a country swing band doing hot versions of old tunes, but after four years they were lighting no fires, and so the Artists Bureau sent them on a four-week tour.

  That was how WLT killed off the lame and the halt: the Bureau put you on the road, in an old schoolbus, rattling from one end of the five-state area to the other playing $15 dates at high school assemblies and insane asylums and sleeping in your clothes on couches and eating slabs of grease and enduring the shame and the squalor until one day your mind snapped and they found you in your underwear crawling down a corn row in Kandiyohi County with an empty in your hand whereupon they shovelled you back to Minneapolis and put you in a Home for the Wretched and that was it, you were done. And that was how they got rid of Wingo Beals.

  Roy Jr. called him in and said, “Sunrise isn’t happy, the audience seems a mite low for that time slot, so I think we need to get you out where the public can see you.”

  “Please don’t do that,” pleaded Wingo. His old brown eyes glistened, his old hairy hand trembled as he gripped Roy Jr.’s desk and looked the young executive in his steely blue eyes.

  “Folks need to see you, meet you, get acquainted with the boys. That’s how we build up a public following.”

  “Please. I’m begging you. Don’t send us on tour.”

  “I know it’s hard work but you’re all young and you have your health—you see if touring doesn’t make a big difference.”

  So the Bureau worked up a sixteen-page itinerary, and when Wingo looked at it, he saw it was their death sentence. Four weeks on the road, four shows a day, sometimes five, some of them a hundred or more miles apart. All told, he’d play a couple hundred different pianos, all of them out of tune and with missing keys, some so badly beat up they sounded like somebody banging on bedsprings. Wingo knew the road, he’d gone out with Courteous Carl Harper and the Pierce Sisters and four times a day had to hear the Sisters render “A Big Brass Bed, a Rocker, and a Range” and Carl sing slightly flatter than Ernest Tubb: