The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  • • •

  Nor did he believe in driving his children to school in town. It was almost half a mile from the Crandall farmhouse to the county road where the schoolbus would come and Dad had strung clothesline from our porch railing to the telephone pole at the end of the driveway and on, pole by pole, up the township road to the county road. On blizzard mornings we grabbed hold of that rope and followed it through the blinding snow. You could hear other children whimpering in the whiteness and sometimes hear wild animals growling—of course we thought of little Ralph, who had been small for his age and easy prey for coyotes. When we came to the county road, the girls huddled inside a snow fort that we boys had constructed; we boys stood on the outside and peed in the snow to keep coyotes at bay until the bus came—or if the bus didn’t come, then a sleigh came, pulled by a pair of black horses and driven by a man named Snead. A man with enormous eyebrows and a big mustache, he was said to have fought in the Battle of the Bulge and spent two years in an Army psychiatric ward. But he had a sleigh and a team of horses and the superintendent was deathly opposed to canceling school—“Once you start canceling school, where would you stop?” Mr. Bye liked to say—and so Mr. Snead got the job when the roads were too treacherous for motorized vehicles. We kids tumbled into the sleigh under the buffalo robes and he cracked his whip and off we went to school. It took almost two hours to get there, crossing the river over the ice, taking a detour around the woods where the coyotes dwelled, and avoiding the rocky ravine where the desperate O’Kasick gang had holed up in a sod hut after robbing the First National Bank of Anoka and shooting a teller in cold blood. I suppose Mr. Snead was trying to shield us from harsh reality by avoiding that ravine but we already knew all about the O’Kasicks and their bloody end, as we knew all about the grave-robber Ed Gein and the rampage of Charlie Starkweather, who shot his girlfriend’s parents, and the merciless deeds of Dillinger and Ma Barker and Alvin (Creepy) Karpis, not to mention the James-Younger gang.

  We knew that not far from the Crandall farm was the house where Confederate bushwhackers holed up in February 1865, on a foray to kidnap children for ransom to buy explosives in Canada—only it was bitterly cold and they were not properly dressed, so after they had ridden around and whooped for a while, they were happy to be taken into custody in a warm jail.

  Mr. Snead drove his team past these scenes of violence and despair and we could smell the smell—so strange to a child’s nose—of the raw whiskey he was nipping from a flask in his big hairy bearskin coat. Soon he was singing about the halls of Montezuma and the caissons rolling along, which moved him to depths of emotion and he wept and at the same time he lifted up a corner of the buffalo robe and yelled at us, “You kids know nothing. You think the world is peppermint candy and chocolate cake. Well, it isn’t. Just ask me.” One of my sisters said, “Mr. Snead—” And he said, “If any of you tells Mr. Bye that I’ve been hitting the bottle, I will kill you and burn your house down. Hear me? Don’t think I won’t. I was Jimmy O’Kasick’s best friend. Him and me went way back.” And then we were at school. None of us told on him. Who would we tell? Grown-ups always stood up for each other. It was them against us. Nowadays Mr. Snead would be locked up for psychological harassment and put into a treatment program, but back then he drove a sleigh and eventually was hired as a janitor when there was an opening at the grade school. Most janitors back then were shady characters with a seedy past but as long as they washed and waxed and kept the furnace lit, they were allowed to stay around. The O’Kasicks could’ve gotten janitor jobs if they hadn’t shot that bank teller.

  • • •

  Winter was cruel but it was beautiful, too, the snow drifted against house and barn, ice on the bare limbs of trees, the orange winter sun low in the sky. Cold as it was, we got out our sleds and knelt on them and opened our jackets for a sail and let the wind blow us across the crusted snow. That was how I met the Jacobson family who lived south of town, eleven miles from our house as the crow flies or as the sled blows—I got going fast and it felt like such an accomplishment, steering around houses and barns by dragging one foot or the other, zooming along in ditches and across open fields, and I just plain lost track of how far I’d gone.

  The Jacobsons had one daughter but they had always wanted a son and there I was, nine years old, bright as a penny, and I loved their house, which was warm and well furnished and had TV and no demented elderly persons in residence. My mother called the sheriff a few days later—the absence of a quiet, polite child is not noticed right away. He said I had turned up at the Jacobsons’ and eventually she got in touch with them, by which time they and I had become rather chummy. They’d given me the nickname Buddy. I had yearned for a nickname for years and now a wonderful family had bestowed one on me. They were Methodists and very lighthearted and given to playing cards and singing around the piano and telling jokes, none of which was big in my family.

  Mr. Jacobson called up Dad and invited me to stay with them for a few weeks and what with money so scarce Dad said yes and the few weeks turned into four months and by that time I had been pretty well corrupted. The Jacobsons gave me forbidden books to read, fiction and the like, and allowed me to taste red wine. They encouraged me to talk at the dinner table. They listened to my harebrained notions and didn’t scorn them outright. They lent me a typewriter. I wrote stories and showed them to the Jacobsons and they said I had a lot of talent. “A ton of talent” was what they said. “Talent to burn.” That was what did it.

  When I returned home, I was a different person, or so I thought. It was May, the lilacs were in bloom, I was a writer. For some reason, my dad called me Harold for a few weeks and nobody seemed to notice except me, and back then a kid didn’t correct his elders. So I was Harold for a while. I didn’t mind.

  • • •

  The winter of 1951 made every winter since feel like a Sunday school picnic. Some Minnesotans head for the sunny South after Christmas, and let me tell you—they are the ones we’ve always wished would move away. Complainers, malcontents, people who never shoveled their sidewalks. Good riddance.

  I live in St. Paul now, which is beautiful after a fresh snow, the old streetlights, the lights of houses through the trees, the walkers out, the headlights moving slowly. I have a car of my own and after I start it (instantly, no rolling) the heating pad in the front seat gets warm and so does the steering wheel. I still write stories now and then. Life is good. It could be worse, and it was in 1951, and now it isn’t. That’s as good as it gets.

  7.

  LITTLE BECKY

  I wrote three stories for The New Yorker about a fictitious Minneapolis radio station, WLT, drawing on faint memories of the radio shows of my youth, Good Neighbor Time on WCCO with Bob DeHaven and Wally Olson and His Band, and a Norwegian cowboy duo, Slim Jim and the Vagabond Kid, on WMIN, and the Sunset Valley Barn Dance on KSTP. I felt confident enough about the material to launch into a novel, WLT: A Radio Romance, which was about the power of the medium to deceive, gospel singers who were drunks and adulterers, that sort of thing. I ought to know: as a kid, I got very peeved at my dad pretending to be a hick, which he often did, and then I did the very same thing in the early years of A Prairie Home Companion. Put on a twangy accent, and wore a big straw hat, and sang sad songs about Mother and home and Old Shep.

  Friendly Neighbor with Dad Benson, the Ole Lunchtime Philosopher, came on the air at noon, and in a good many towns around the Midwest, the noon whistle was blown a couple of minutes early to give people time to get their radios warmed up. The announcer said, “WLT, seven-seventy, the Air Castle of the North, from studios at the Hotel Ogden, Minneapolis,” and the WLT chimes struck twelve, the organ played “Whispering Hope,” and the announcer said, “And now we take you down the road a ways to the home of Dad Benson and his wife, Mom, his daughter, Jo, and her husband, Frank, for a visit with the Friendly Neighbor, brought to you by Milton, King Seeds, the best friend your garden ever had.
As we join them today, the family is sitting around the kitchen table, where Jo is fixing lunch.” Wherever you were back then, everything stopped. Dad Benson ran a feed store in Elmville and he was like a real person who sat down next to you, he just talked and said the things you had always thought yourself. The show might start with Jo saying, “I don’t know why I can’t make this egg salad as good as what I used to,” and Dad saying, “Oh, your egg salad is the best in town and you know it,” and Frank saying, “Sure looks like we might get some snow tonight,” and then Dad would remember the big blizzard of ’09 and how dangerous it was, you couldn’t see two feet in front of your face, and how it taught everybody to keep a weather eye out and use the sense that God gave geese and take care of each other. Dad preached a pretty simple philosophy: the Golden Rule mostly, with plain common sense tossed in. Smile and you’ll feel better. East or west, home is best. There’s no summer without winter. What can’t be cured must be endured. Hunger makes the beans taste better. We must work in the heat or starve in the cold. Nobody is born smart. Do your best and leave the rest.

  The friends and neighbors in radioland thought of the Bensons as real people. Anytime the Benson family suffered misfortune, contributions poured in to WLT, even when Dad dropped a piece of glass fruit:

  (SFX: GLASS BREAKAGE)

  DAD: Oh gosh. What a butterfingers I am. And that was Aunt Molly’s good one. Did I ever tell you, Jo, about the time she and I went sugar-mapling and treed a skunk?

  JO (chuckling): I don’t believe I ever heard that yarn, Dad. Did you, Frank?

  FRANK: Nope, not me.

  The next day, dozens of glass apples, oranges, pears, and bananas arrived, cases of them, and from then on, Dad designed the Bensons’ troubles for charitable purposes. Once, for the Ebenezer Home’s annual spring rummage sale, Dad went walking down to the widow’s house with a pan of Jo’s fresh oatmeal cookies and tore his best suit jumping over a fence when a dog chased him, and the station received more than a hundred good suits in four days. In the fall when the Salvation Army needed warm coats, Dad would do an episode in which he forgot his coat on the train, and in a few days, the coats would be piling up in the WLT lobby by the hundreds, and Dad shipped them over to the mission. The coats were mostly size 48 and larger, because people thought of Dad as a big fellow, but as Dad said, beggars can’t be choosers.

  For the Home’s drive to build a recreation hall, there were several financial crises—a sudden hailstorm that wiped out the corn, a stolen wallet, a dishonest stockbroker, a needed operation for the dog, Buster—and the money rolled in.

  Friendly Neighbor ended at 12:30 p.m. and every day the WLT lobby was full of fans, twenty or thirty, standing modestly behind a rope, quiet, smiling, hopeful, like job-seekers or orphans. Some of them held gifts, hand-knit socks or bags of vegetables. They waited, almost motionless, as the minutes ticked by, and then suddenly the elevator opened and there was Dad. They all clapped, and he ducked under the rope and walked into the midst of them. Hi, Dad. “Hi. How you doing?” Fine. Real good. “That’s good.” Mighty good show today. “Thanks.” You got a minute? “Of course, I’ve always got a minute.”

  “How is your back doing?” a woman asked.

  Dad looked puzzled. She said, “You strained it last week pushing Pops Simpson’s car out of the snow.”

  “Oh,” he said. “My back. Yes, it’s fine. Just a strain. Thought you said my ‘bag’ and I was trying to think what you meant.”

  An old man shook Dad’s hand gravely, looking deep into his eyes. “Don’t you think Eunice is ever going to come back? We sure miss her.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she will. Nice to see you,” he murmured. “But which niece is that you’re asking about?”

  “You think Eunice will come back?”

  “Eunice! Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.” He was signing all the pieces of paper they held out to him. He pressed the flesh and nodded and beamed and squeezed elbows and patted heads and chummed around. He signed an autograph book, posed for a snapshot.

  “What about Carl?” a woman said. “Carl Farnsworth? At the Mercantile?”

  “Right,” said Dad. “Carl.”

  “He was married to Myrt. You know? She worked at the beauty parlor a while back?”

  “Right, Myrt.”

  “But today you mentioned Carl going to Little Rock with Margaret. He didn’t get a divorce, did he?”

  “No, of course not. No, they’ve never been happier. No, that’s just me being forgetful. I must’ve been thinking of Margaret Donohue at the bank.”

  “Donovan,” said a woman in back.

  “Of course. Quite a gal.”

  “We haven’t heard her in a long time. She didn’t leave town, did she?”

  No, Dad said, she was fine. Everybody was fine. He worked his way through the crowd to a door marked NO ADMITTANCE, STAFF ONLY and waved and disappeared.

  • • •

  The show was written by Patsy Konopka, who had sung in the Radio Cowgirls on Slim Jim and the Bunkhouse Gang, and she was a serious student of theosophy and positivism who had studied with a Gnostic master in Sioux Falls who could telepathically open a can of coffee. She had learned there the secret of the Oval of Life and the Four Powers (Ability, Capacity, Facility, Vitality) and the Seven Doorways of Celestial Selection. These are brief openings in the cosmos, when a great leap of spiritual knowledge is attainable. Now she was turning her attention more toward ethereology and the science of electivism with its vast lore on the determining power of radiation. Radiation was Patsy’s true passion, the study of the nimbus of light around the body. The practiced eye could read it like a book.

  She had told Dad Benson all about radiation one night when he had invited her to Charlie’s Café Exceptionale for dinner and drinks. He asked her to read his nimbus and she told him he was a man of generous spirit, swift of intuition, starved for truth, lacking depth but seeking to improve and to penetrate the darkness. “And,” she said, “you are hoping to get me to take my clothes off.”

  He agreed that this was true and inquired if it were possible.

  She said that there is a hand of inevitability that guides these matters and it can be perceived only with time.

  He said he was not only interested in sex, that he was interested in her, that sex was maybe his way of getting to know her, that he admired her as an artist, that he could get the Cowgirls their own radio show, perhaps a Saturday night spot.

  “I’m so sick of yodeling, I could spit,” she said. She told him she wanted to be a writer and help people understand the principles of theosophy—such as It is always too late for grief. Or Patience expects joy. Or Fate smiles on the one it fools.

  So Dad offered her a job as a writer at forty dollars a week. She accepted with pleasure.

  • • •

  She created Golden Years (Monday–Friday, 11 a.m.), about the multimillionaires Elmer and Edna Hubbard, who, dissatisfied with the frenzied pace of life in the big city and the emptiness of material success, move to the little town of Nowthen and open a coffee shop and bestow anonymous gifts on deserving townspeople through the mail. She wrote Love’s Old Sweet Song (Wednesdays, 8:30 p.m.), the story of Folwell Hollister, wealthy New York executive, who moves back to his hometown of Hollister Corner after doctors tell him that he has six months to live and buys the farm he had always wanted, the old Reddin place, and stocks it with prize Orpington hens and blackface Highland sheep and chops kindling and hoes the tomatoes and observes the slow graceful turning of the seasons and then falls in love with Jane Maxwell, his boyhood sweetheart and the woman he should have wed instead of chasing off east, who is married to a jerk, and to relieve the pain of “a love that cannot be,” Folwell does good for others in small, anonymous ways. It was hard, week after week, to compose rhapsodies to falling leaves and snowy fields, even for a positivist like Patsy, so one week Mr. Maxwell was k
illed in a gold-mine explosion and Folwell swiftly married Jane, who called him Folly, and the show took a sharp turn. Jane was quite a looker, even at sixty, and Hollister Corner was a place she’d been wanting to escape since she was eleven, and so the Hollisters purchased a large home in Golden Valley, a stone’s throw from Minneapolis, and she took up theosophy and they traveled to New York often.

  She created The Hills of Home and The Best Is Yet to Be (Monday–Friday, 9:45 and 11:30 a.m.), further variations on the theme of weary-striver-finds-contentment-in-doing-good, and she also created Arthur Fox, Detective and Another World and The Lazy W Gang. The approach of a deadline inspired her. The clock ticked, and she wrote, and the big hand crept toward airtime, and the pages came faster and faster. She believed in the power of threes, based on an old theosophist concept of virtue as triangular, and always looked for threes in a story, trios of characters, trilateral story lines, beginning-middle-end, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, quest-defeat-redemption. She believed in the morning, as her father had taught her (“Some work in the morning may neatly be done that all the day after may hardly be won”), and rose early and went straight to work at her trusty Underwood. She believed that friends steal away months and families steal years, so she stayed single and she kept friends at bay.