WLT

by Garrison Keillor

  “We are showing weakness. You should’ve kicked his skinny butt across the street,” said Ray. “Now the word is out. Sex is okay, just don’t do it on the desks. We are in for a storm.”

  But he agreed with Roy Jr. about the horror of replacing Knox: when you thought about all the clergymen you’d have to interview for the job—days and days of aimless uplifting conversation with flabby men in dowdy clothes, men with big watery eyes and trembling lips and a perpetual look of faint hope on their faces—plus the inevitable Bible-beaters and the whoopers and jumpers—who would you find in the end? At worst, some brilliant demagogue like Pastor Paul Anderson the Lutheran Lothario on WEVE (“A Man Named Paul”), who would draw an immense audience of peabrains and then you could never get rid of him, and at best, you’d find another sad sack like Knox.

  But Ray was right about the storm. After Knox was not fired, WLT went through months of heavy erotic activity. John Tippy fell in love with the music librarian, a young pianist named Jeff, and they were said to spend weekends together in Duluth. The staff organist Miss Patrice had a fling with Phil Sax and for a whole week she showed up for the 7 a.m. Organ Prelude with an exhausted, moony look about her, smelling like a cigar. But the busy boy was Wendell Shepherd of The Rise and Shine Show. In his Milton, King Seeds pocket calendar, he drew in twenty-seven shining suns in one month, twenty-seven times with three different women, three very different women. Lottie Unger was a secretary in a pretty tweed suit that Wendell removed and hung up without a wrinkle, and Julia Jackson Butts was a fine young woman with long black hair piled on top of her head, the assistant editor of Dial: The WLT Family Magazine, whose hair Wendell unpiled, and Lacy Lovell was an actress on Up in a Balloon who mistook him for the producer of The Hendersons.

  “The staff is acting just like the President,” said Roy Jr. “And I don’t mean Mr. Truman.”

  Ray bristled. “I do not run around here jumping secretaries,” he said. “The women with whom I am acquainted are women of attainment—”

  “Employees, nonetheless.”

  Ray stared him down. “Life is not always reasonable, or even logical,” he said. “There are exceptions and anomalies. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. I am extremely fond of a number of women who work for me. True. I wouldn’t dream of lying to you about that. And yet I do not permit the men who work for me to run around here like animals. Do you understand?”

  “Perfectly. ”

  And now, on a warm October morning, there was a boxful of allegations about Knox himself that Roy Jr. had found locked up in Sloan’s old file drawer (under “Knox: Testimony in re Patrimony: SAVE”) that pointed unmistakably toward debauchery on a scale that would shame a goat.

  “Frank! The man is crazed. He’s besotted with lust. Look at this! Letters in his own hand, written to schoolgirls! Offers of private swimming lessons! Invitations to travel! Invitations to pose for photographs! Hikes in the woods! Rendezvouses in the library stacks! Romps in the hay! Fondue parties! Listen to this: ‘My darling dearest Marjery, Yes, I do love you, deeply and absolutely, and it has taken me months to get up the courage to say so, and now, with a trembling hand and a heart full of profound feeling, I am asking you to—’ Outrageous! The man seduced Little Becky! Look at this—” And he tossed Frank a packet of letters, from Marjery to the minister, whom she addressed as “Nervy Irvy” and “Snuggums” and “My Little Lemon Drop” and who, evidently, she accompanied to ministerial conferences in Seattle and Cleveland, in the role of his niece.

  “Well,” said Frank, “she’s a grownup person. I suppose she knew what she was doing.”

  “So did he. He knew he was cutting his nuts around here.” Roy Jr. picked up the phone. “Damn. And now I gotta go find another one.”

  “How about Reverand Odom?” said Frank.

  “Who’s he?”

  “He works here. Harold Odom. He’s a janitor. But he’s also a Lutheran minister. He’s a very sensible person.”

  “Odom. I know him. He’s the guy who’s in love with Patsy Konopka. How come he gave up the ministry? Is he some kind of nut?”

  Frank sat down and leaned across the desk. “No. Not a nut. Just a very practical person. He had a church in North Dakota and he thought he wasn’t doing any good, he was only being a minister. So he asked himself, What job can I find where I know I’ll do some good? and he came up with janitor. But he’d make a great radio minister. You should try him out.”

  Frank stopped—he was trembling. He had never tried to tell Roy Jr. what to do before, and it felt as if he had walked up to the edge of a chasm.

  “If he did a radio show every day, could he still continue as a janitor?”

  Frank said he thought Mr. Odom would insist on retaining his janitorship.

  “Good. So you tell him. Monday through Fridays, the ‘Scripture Nuggets’ segment of The Rise and Shine Show, and the five-minute meditation at ten-fifteen, and Sunday morning, the chapel at six a.m. and vespers at ten-thirty. Right? Good. Now I just have to fire Snuggums and then deal with Wendell Shepherd and his hormones.”

  Frank found Reverend Odom wet-mopping the lobby and when he told him about Roy Jr.’s offer, the man’s eyes filled with tears. He put his arms around Frank and squeezed him so tight his back cracked. “I knew something good was going to happen to me today,” he said.

  And the next morning, he was on the air. He read from Ephesians on Rise and Shine—the Shepherd Boys were glad to see him, they knew him from way back, Elmer Shepherd said—and a few hours later the old minister did a nice meditation about leaving our burdens with the Lord. Roy Jr., on his way to lunch with Ray, gave Frank a thumbs-up and said, “Good man.” And Ray said, “Frank, you’re the first smart person I’ve met who hardly says anything. Come and have lunch with us.”

  Come and have lunch with us. What sweet music to his ears! He had raised up Reverend Odom—lifted him up from his mop and pail and put him on the Mountain of Radio—just like Dad Benson, who lifted up his brother and his friends. Dad had once said, “It takes genius to elevate the ordinary, a very ordinary genius,” and that’s exactly what I am, Frank thought, an ordinary genius. He had unlocked the secret of radio. The sport of the ordinary! Brilliant men like Reed Seymour couldn’t figure this out for the life of them! Reed was ashamed of radio. Vesta was ashamed of it. Reed wanted to do something worthy with his life, like write books. He had part of a manuscript in his desk drawer. Frank had read it. Very intense, very poetic. And very hard going. Vesta wanted to bring in the treasures of the world and display them on the air, like opening a museum and showing postcards of the Venus de Milo. No, radio was a cinch if you kept reaching down and grabbing up handfuls of the ordinary. Keep your feet on the ground.

  CHAPTER 32

  Tour

  Ray was looking for Dad Benson. Frank said, “He’s in the Green Room, but he’s feeling a little sick.” “I hope so,” said Ray. He walked up to Dad, who was lying on the couch, his face covered with the morning paper. “You in the sack with Faith?” Ray asked. Dad sat right up. “What does that mean?”

  “It means are you humping her? Are you hiding the salami? Are you pearl diving?” Sometimes, Ray thought, Dad had the worldly sophistication of a Camp Fire Girl. Dad probably thought “Tobacco Road” was about the evils of smoking. Dad probably thought that prostitutes were women waiting for buses. He probably wished they would dress more warmly and not smoke so much.

  “Are you balling Faith?” Ray asked.

  Dad looked stunned. “Ray, don’t try to go between the tree and the bark,” he said.

  “What in blazes is that supposed to mean?”

  “Like my father said: don’t say anything you wouldn’t want somebody to know.” Dad started to get up. Ray put a hand on his shoulder.

  “So the answer is yes.” Sweet little Faith, the radio housewife, turning tricks with her radio dad—it made a person blanch to think about it.

  Ray let him stand up. The two men faced each other. Ray cleared
his throat. “Dad, we have a long-standing rule here. Let me offer it to you as a recommendation: no fornicating between employees. Please.”

  “Ray, all I can say is that the big thieves hang the little ones.”

  “What does that mean?” But of course he knew what it meant. He blushed. He said, “Dad, I have just one thing to say about that, and that is: what’s sauce for the goose is Greek to the gander,” and he wheeled and marched out.

  Soon after, Faith Snelling announced she was leaving the show. “You can’t,” said Roy Jr. She said she wanted to do other things. “You’re doing this thing,” he said. She wanted to act in plays.

  “Be my guest,” he said, “but you can’t quit the show. You’re Jo. Nobody else can be Jo. Everybody knows Jo. She’s got to be there, on the radio. You can’t just go and murder a friend of five-hundred-thousand people because you feel like it. If it’s money we’re talking about, let’s talk. You don’t even need to say anything. I’ll offer you $300 a week. That’s a 25-percent raise.” Faith stayed and she did not act in plays after all. She and Dad remained close, so far as people could see. With her husband Dale playing the role of her husband Frank, Ray thought that might keep Dad in line, the old gander, but no such luck. Dale seemed to be running around with Laurel Larpenteur.

  It was one thing after another. Sex was on the premises, and there was no way to get it out.

  “What is that naked woman doing on the wall in Studio B?” Ray asked Roy Jr.

  “You never saw that before?” Roy Jr. clapped his hands to his head. “That’s been there since I was a child!”

  Ray said meekly, “It must have slipped my mind.”

  Roy Jr. was not in a kidding mood when he found out that Wendell Shepherd of the Shepherd Boys, stars of The Rise and Shine Show, was seeing a secretary in Continuity named Hazel Park. He got so mad he changed the show from seven a.m. to six.

  “She was a valuable employee, and you used her like you’d use a couch, and you broke her heart, you jerk,” he told Wendell. “Yes, you. You’re nothing but a gold-plated gospel jerk. So all right. Set your alarm an hour earlier.”

  Wendell pleaded for mercy. “The guys’ll kill me,” he moaned. Roy Jr. looked at him in disgust, splayed out on the sofa. Wendell was a tall slope-shouldered fellow with long hair oiled down and swept up high on his head in swoops, and he wore white shoes and pink socks and a glittery green suit that shone like seaweed in the moonlight. All the Shepherds were bold of dress and favored rare items such as checkered vests and brilliant ties with rural landscape scenes, but Wendell, the lead singer and the youngest, was the showboat. Wendell wore diamonds, a stickpin in the lapel and a tietack and diamond studs, and Wendell dyed his hair black. It had been mouse brown.

  The Shepherds were four brothers, Elmer, Al, Rudy, and Wendell, and they had been a big crowd-pleaser on the Barn Dance since 1937, when they came down from North Dakota, winners of a gospel quartet contest. The gospel contest was the bright idea of a Program Director named Milford Scudder, and it was his last; Ray fired him. “I didn’t get into radio to be in with a bunch of holy Joes with fancy clothes and brilliantined hair—gospel quartets! Holy cow, don’t you know what these people are like?”

  Scudder did not know. He was a Congregationalist. He imagined that gospel singers were like choir members, stolid, hearty, well-meaning folks, except fewer in number. He had no idea. Ray had to yell at him for awhile.

  “Gospel singers are nothing like choir members. Nothing. This is the grass-eater element you’re inviting in here, the Bible pounders, the snake handlers, the holy rollers. These are the people who run around church and howl like dogs and speak in tongues and faint in a heap and lie there and twitch like spastics, with foam dripping off their mouths. These people are faith healers, Scudder. And I will not allow that—I am not going to tolerate any faith healing around here. None! Nobody is going to write in to WLT for the holy hankies or the light-up crucifixes or the tiny New Testaments. Nobody is going to take a WLT microphone and speak in tongues into it. Never. We are not going to have snake handling here.”

  It was the grass-eater element that brought William Jennings Bryan down, those crazy fundamentalists who grabbed the old giant and flattered him and hoisted him up on their shoulders and hauled him down to Dayton, Tennessee, for the Monkey Trial. One of the most brilliant minds that ever graced the nation, one of the truest sons of the Middle West and a good heart and a great American, and the grass-eaters got him to shill for them against that cagey, money-grubbing appleknocker Clarence Darrow, a man who knew which way the wind blew and who blew with it, and Bryan was made the fool, the bear in the circus, and died, and all the greatness of his life would be forgotten, and his last dumb moments remembered, because he fell for the fundamentalists. Well, Ray would not.

  “I’m sorry,” said Scudder.

  “You’re exactly right you’re sorry. You’re fired,” said Ray.

  But the contest must go on, of course, and as winners, the Shepherd Boys had to sing on the Barn Dance and then, when they tore down the house with “My Lord Calls Me” and the crowd wouldn’t let them go until they did it three more times, the only way Leo LaValley could restore order was to invite them back for next week. And then it happened again. The Shepherds were powerful. They were young and dark and when they got into the Spirit, they moaned and whooped in a way that Minnesotans do not generally do in public. When Wendell sang, “Please, Jesus, please—don’t leave me here—the night so dark and cold—please Jesus, put your hand in mine—just like the Bible told,” women in the audience leaned forward and put their hands to their faces and shuddered and whispered his name, Wendell.

  So, on Monday morning, Ray called the Shepherds in, and the four boys sat politely, in dark plain slacks and black sweaters, as he told them he was offering them their own show, The Rise and Shine Show, five days a week at 7 a.m., to sing five songs, three of them requests, and to do birthday and anniversary greetings, the weather forecast, and a few jokes. Clean jokes. “You wouldn’t happen to do an occasional non-sacred song, would you?” he inquired. Rudy said they did lots of them, like “Red River Valley” and “Long Long Ago,” but that people preferred the gospel ones. Variety goes a long way, said Ray. Then he paused. “Boys?” he said. They smiled. Yes?

  “Boys, if there’s ever even so much as one tiny bit of faith healing on that show, one little smidgen of tongues, or one mention of snakes or hankies, I’ll kick your ass out of here so fast, your heads’ll spin. You hear me?” They heard.

  “You are going to sing your songs, give the weather, sell the seed corn or whatever, and you’re not going to cut loose and start whooping and crying and asking people to send their love offerings, right?”

  Oh yes, they understood. But even with no healing, no praying, no tongues, no snakes or hankies, there was plenty to put up with. The loud clothes, the clouds of cologne, the pinky rings, Rudy’s violet Pontiac ensconced in the parking lot like an ugly welt, the trail of empty vodka bottles, and the women, a constant parade of frowsy women.

  But it was Hazel Park’s fall that burned Roy Jr. She was a stocky girl with piano legs and a big cheerful grin and a ponytail that came out of the top of her head, and she sat by a radio and logged commercials in a big black ledger that she called Henry. She named other things around her desk. The typewriter was Vivian, for example. She kept four photographs on her desk and a great many little souvenirs, such as rocks she had garnered from her trips to the North Shore, and pine cones, a brass buffalohead coin bank, a cowgirl figurine, and a little plastic piano from Rapid City, S.D. Open the lid and there were souvenir matchbooks. The memorabilia came to form a sort of windbreak across the front of the desk, which faced the door to Studio B, where The Rise and Shine Show aired from.

  Wendell had spotted Hazel one morning when he came rushing back from the Antwerp, having forgotten the little spiral notebook where he wrote down ideas for new songs, and she helped him look for it. The two of them rummaged around, and “the
n she crawled on the floor looking under the record cabinets, and he got to look down the front of her blouse. She was awfully sorry about him losing all that hard work, she was terribly sorry, and so she went to dinner with him at The Forum. When he suggested that they get together at the hotel and try writing songs, she trotted right over the next day after work. They wrote a tearjerker called “Little Dan” (“When his daddy went away in a car crash one dark day, he became his mama’s man, Little Dan”) and then a gospel number, “One More Sinner,” during which Wendell collapsed from the strain of creation. “Lie next to me,” he moaned. She did. He told her that he had never met anyone with her raw songwriting talent. He would teach her everything he knew, and she would go on to write the songs he never could, not having her talent. She admitted that, yes, she did have quite a few creative ideas and notions—such as her idea of writing a tribute song to her mother, just to name one—and now that he had given her self-confidence, she could see that these ideas would make wonderful songs. She had been an odd duck in Mankato, never fitting in, always lonely, terribly shy—“a typical story for a creative person,” Wendell noted. Nobody in Mankato had ever seen this talent in her because she had not seen it herself. It took Wendell, a fellow creator, to notice it and to bring it out. She kissed him in gratitude. He smiled. “You’re going to be rich and famous and live in Chicago someday,” he said, “and you’ll forget all about your Wendell, but I’ll understand, and I’ll just enjoy reading about you.” She protested his assessment of her character. She would never forget him. He put his arms around her. He apologized. “Of course, you won’t forget me,” he said, “but I do know that the currents of life will sweep us apart. We are but islands in the sea of life, and seldom do our peripheries. touch. I want to touch you.” He unbuttoned her blouse and unclasped her brassiere and her perfect generous breasts spilled out and lay beside him, magnificent twins breathing, sighing, happy, wanting only to he cradled in his hands. ”This is a moment we’ll remember for the remainder of our lives,” he said, as he whipped off his pants. “Let’s make it the most memorable moment it can be.” They had sex every business day for two weeks, plunging in the percale like white whales, and when he got tired of her and her passive manner, he told her he couldn’t anymore, on account of his conscience. The Lord was telling him that this adultery would not go unpunished, and Wendell was afraid that Miss Park might have to pay the price—he had had a terrible dream in which he saw her body, decapitated, lying beside the road—and so, for her own protection, he had to stop their love-making, and because he was so filled with desire for her, he could not bear to ever see her or speak to her for awhile.