January 1983
To Whomever Is In Charge:
I continue to be amazed by your appeal. Sylvia and I were in Chicago, staying up past ten o’clock, and met several people who, when they heard we’re from Minnesota, asked about “Prairie Home Companion.” They reminded me of you: you know the type—people of the sixties, who think honesty is the main thing and if we all got to know each other better we’d like each other more than we do. And maybe that’s your appeal. You’re honest (you never claimed to be good), and people listen to you thinking that if they get to know you real well, maybe eventually they’ll like you. Well, I’ve been listening for years and must admit that its appeal is sporadic. We listen to it at low volume, and when something good comes on we jump up to turn it up loud, but it never lasts long. There is just too much simple heartfelt sincerity, which I hear enough of from customers who are late with their payments. Wish you’d say something funny. Just remember we’re listening at low level. If you think of something good, speak up. Cordially,
August 1984
To Whomever:
Couldn’t help but notice that Walter Mondale plunged downward in the polls the week after attending your show Saturday P.M. even though he tried to fix the damage by visiting a Presbyterian church Sunday A.M. Presbyterianism was a good choice, a solid well-known religion a candidate can attend without fear that people will suddenly start hollering and prancing around and woofing like dogs. You’d think a candidate’s staff would show the same caution in selecting a show for him to attend, one that all Americans know and love, like “Sesame Street,” and not one that raises questions in people’s minds about his judgment. A Minnesota Norwegian minister’s son has got three strikes against him in the charisma department, and if on top of those problems he is the sort of guy who gets goosebumps from hearing extremely slow jokes, then he can kiss charisma goodbye. Sincerely,
November 1985
To Whomever Is In Charge Out There:
It’s interesting to think of you out there on tour. Last week Seattle, and now Hawaii, and next week Los Angeles. Ordinarily a person stays in one place and works hard and builds a reputation but show business is different: you want to leave the jurisdiction as fast as you can. This week, I imagine you could no more sell “Prairie Home” tickets around Puget Sound than you could peddle bottles of swamp-water labeled as Peruvian Youth Tonic: people have tried a bottle already and their tongues turned white and scaly. If you attempted an encore, they might kill you. So you remove to Hawaii, a few thousand miles beyond the Seattle city limits, and feel pretty lucky. Well, don’t count on it. Show business makes for a grim biography; it just doesn’t take long to go from being Up and Coming, a bright magical talent in this dark world, a source of love and laughter, to wallowing in deep shit looking for the ladder. Suddenly you go from talent to star, which is a guy who sleeps all day and wanders around a tasteless mansion at 3:00 A.M. looking for someone to talk to and have a burger with. Let me give you one word of advice before you take one step too far. On second thought, I gave you that advice two years ago. Forget it. When are you coming back to Minnesota? Your friend,
January 1986
To Whomever:
Before you rent a tux for the grand reopening of the World Theater, maybe you ought to check the plumbing. This is a wise word of caution. Pay attention. There have been countless other projects to restore historic theaters to their former elegance and grandeur that ended badly because the money was spent on thin-waisted young men in designer coveralls talking about lighting concepts, meanwhile the historic water pipes burst and restored the theater to the grandeur it had before the world was created, when there was only mist upon the waters. You would know this if you were in a town with a decent newspaper. You fritter away funds on the visual aspect of things and ignore the underlying realities such as drainage—suddenly, as the star is about to sweep down the golden staircase and into their hearts, the folks in Radioland hear a sound effect that seems strangely out of place on a program about glamour and wealth, a sound effect that suggests a story from Scripture about God’s dealings with Pharaoh. Anyway I hope you got a good plumbing contractor but I suppose by now it’s months too late. Good luck,
February 1986
Great Hairy-Legged Leader:
We got your invite to the Grand Opening of the World Theater and Sylvia and I decided to stay home and shell peas or something. I hate these big glittery events, the velvet ropes, the cheese and wine, the unctuousness and bootlickery, the small fry craning their necks to see Who’s Here, and what’s more, you fixed up a perfectly good 1905 theater so that it looks fake. It was old and you made it Olde, like a set in Disneyland. Frankly, I liked it better when my shoes stuck to the floor. I remember sitting in the balcony in 1938 and observing Deluna DeMars in four consecutive performances of Romany Maidens, an operetta that was mainly interesting for Deluna’s deep bows. We fans clapped and clapped for her until she had no choice but come forward and bow and then we clapped until she did it again, taking curtain call after curtain call, no doubt convinced she had found an audience that appreciated her gifts, and we did, especially her gorgeous balcony.
I mention this to remind you that in your business (the one that there is no business like), cheap trash and light froth predominate, and if you let the Methodists take over and turn entertainment into something wholesome and thoughtful, you will lose your shirt. This happened to Deluna’s husband, Ernest DeMars, a St. Paul broadcaster sometimes referred to as “another Nick Portland,” which apparently was a superlative at the time. Ernest got it in his curly head that he was cut out for interpretive reading and booked himself into the World for an evening of Shakespearean sonnets entitled Love’s Not Time’s Fool, which drew a big crowd expecting a bedroom farce in which dukes chase the dairymaids in and out of closets, but instead they got a stageful of one man in a blue serge suit interpreting poetry at an oak lectern. He launched into “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit appliances” and at line 5 somebody yelled, “Start the show, ya jerk!” The tumult built up over the next four sonnets. When he got to “When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,” he was in real trouble.
This was in the days when theaters sold fresh fruit in the lobby, back when more men played baseball, and performers had to keep an eye on the crowd. Nowadays, the average theatergoer couldn’t hit the broad side of a soprano from the royal box, but in those days, a thespian learned to keep moving onstage and to use other actors as a shield at the sign of a sudden movement in the cheap seats. An actor delivering a long soulful monologue would flit about the stage, ducking, reversing direction, trying to throw off the customers’ aim. Even death speeches had a furtive, restless quality, the dying person even as he orated keeping a weather eye on the house. This was before television taught the American people to appreciate dreck, and a cast had to stay on its toes in a play that stank. Sometimes if a patron merely stood up to remove his coat or cocked his arm to scratch his ear, the actors dove for cover. Oftentimes, this improved the play. People clapped and the cast did it again.
Ernest, however, was a serious man and like most serious men he was slow to recognize what was happening around him. He plowed ahead, assuming that the commotion beyond the footlights was an emotional response to his art, which in a way it certainly was, and it also was the crowd responding to a man in the back row holding a Beacon apple in his right hand as he stood and judged the distance. He was only eighty-five feet from stage, closer than home to first base, an easy pick-off. The Beacon caught Ernest in a spot vital to his artistry and put him out of commission. He slithered to the floor, and Deluna dodged out from the wings and bent down to revive him and got a standing ovation. She stood and smiled at the crowd that had decked her husband. They clapped louder. She stepped over his prostrate body to the front of the stage and bowed deeply, and they all went crazy.
That’s show business, pal. I hope you enjoy it, because if you don’t then it’s not worth it, not even for all the B
eacon apples in the world. Cordially,
April 1986
To Whomever Is In Charge Down There:
What you are heading for in making your TV debut is, of course, a disaster, so it’s good it’ll be on television, where we can all see it for ourselves. Radio is the medium of imagination, but it’s hard to imagine something as awful as this will be. That’s what TV is for. Maybe you’ll see I was right when I told you: you look good on radio, better than most.
Perhaps you are too old to remember the radio personality of the forties, Sidney Cedargren, who held forth at 12:15 daily with humorous homespun observations on human foibles on “The Old Bean Walker.” (One of Sidney’s foibles was a weakness for expensive threads, and at 12:25 every day, after hollering “Hooo-eeee,” his signoff, he slipped out of his Oshkosh bib overalls into two-tone shoes and a silk suit and strolled to the Minneapolis Club to lunch with nabobs. A real swell.) In the summer of 1947, overcome by personal vanity, Sidney agreed to be on television, then an experimental device. There were 659 sets in the Twin Cities, each one the size of a refrigerator, with a screen as big as a tea saucer, but big enough for those 659 viewers to see Sidney clearly that August afternoon when he stood in the Dairy Building at the State Fair to talk about why folks should never never never use vegetable margarine. A cow named Martha stood next to him, which he didn’t enjoy, and he flinched when she lowered her head and sniffed around in the vicinity of his pockets, and he stepped backward into something the cow had left there. Sidney knew what it was but he just kept smiling and talking, but, believe me, nobody looks as dumb as a man in two-toned shoes standing in cow flop and pretending it’s Easter lilies. You see this all the time on TV but people never get tired of it. So we will all tune in. Hope you bring an extra pair. Cordially,
May 1986
To Whomever Is Down There:
I watched your show on television last week and can assure you that, considering what it was, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Some parts were better than others. Beyond that, I won’t comment. There are times in a man’s life when his self-esteem is paper-thin and he can’t bear derision no matter how richly deserved. Nonetheless, I would suggest in re the “News from Lake Wobegon” segment that thirty minutes of a man speaking in a flat Midwestern voice about guilt, death, the Christian faith, and small-town life is not what people look for in a stage performance. People don’t attend the Ringling Brothers Circus and after an hour of tigers and ladies in tights yell at the ringmaster to talk more, do they? You don’t see them stand up and stamp their feet and chant, “Share your experiences! Share your experiences!” No, they are having a good time and hope to continue.
So many radio announcers have plunged into these same pitfalls. I can’t help but recall Erwin Wombat, the Silver-Tongued Boy Wonder of the Airwaves, also known as The Voice of Minnesota Livestock, who anchored the 11:45 futures report from the stockyards. Like you, Erwin was tall and slightly pretentious and had good enunciation (which you need to have if you’re going to say, “Prices were $1.25 to $1.75 weaker on No. 2 and 3 275—330-pound barrows and gilts,” and have your audience understand you out in Aitkin County where reception is poor and not have some 220—245-pound farmer arise at 5:00 A. M. and drive 260—275 miles expecting a windfall profit from his load of 18—25-pound tabby barn cats). Erwin was a good reader of livestock prices. Unfortunately, he also spoke at a few church suppers, where, from all the chuckling, he got the impression he was a great untapped talent. He didn’t stop to consider that Lutherans are brought up to be appreciative come hell or high water. He just assumed that his tales of a prairie boyhood in bygone days was hot stuff. He began inserting warm humorous anecdotes into the market prices. “Barrows and gilts, $1.25 to $1.75 lower—and speaking of barrows reminds me of the spring day many years ago when Dad and I planted crabapple trees alongside the old asparagus patch,” he’d reminisce in his rich baritone voice, and soon his fifteen minutes was up and people didn’t know if prices were up, down, or sideways. But Erwin was happy. He stood there at the stockyard, microphone in hand, and expressed himself. One day, while reminiscing about his old Aunt Deborah, he felt the ground shake and heard the pounding of thousands of cloven hooves and turned to see all the No. 2 300—375-pound barrows and gilts galloping straight toward him. Someone had left a gate unlatched, offering the animals a choice between death and Erwin. Erwin’s listeners, who were following the tale of how he had learned to stop feeling sorry for himself by visiting elderly relatives, suddenly heard a gasp and a plop and a distant yell as Erwin dropped the microphone in the dirt and dove over the fence into a pile of lumber. That was the end of his career. He went into television soon afterward, sitting in a tiny booth and saying, “We’re sorry. Due to technical difficulties we have temporarily lost the picture. Please stand by.” When the union agreed to allow this to be recorded on tape, Erwin became a parking-lot attendant, sitting in a tiny booth, saying, “I’m sorry. I can’t change anything larger than a five-dollar bill. ”
As I mentioned, this must be a hard week for you, so I will stop now. Please say hello to your wonderful family and tell them that they may be seeing much more of you in the very near future. Cordially,
January 1987
To Whomever Is In Charge Down There:
The awards committee of the World Order of Old Fishermen (WOOF), of which I am a charter member, met this month to award the Old Spellbinder trophy for Best Storyteller of 1986 and I am writing to you because someone said you thought you were going to get this coveted prize and I want to be sure you know that you are not. No point in you making the long drive up to the lodge, rehearsing your acceptance speech behind the wheel, talking about what a big surprise this is and a thrill although you can think of many who deserve it more than you—we can, too, so we’re giving it to one of them. This year, the trophy, the battered old bait box emblematic of storytelling prowess, will go to Bob Jablonski. “What?” I hear you remonstrate. “Old Bob! Why, he couldn’t narrate his way out of a sheet of waxed paper—why, he couldn’t describe a flat surface—why, he couldn’t tell you the story of his own life in thirty seconds or more.” And of course you’re right. But one thing Old Bob has got and that is a lovely heated fish house and that’s where the World Order of Old Fisherman (WOOF) intends to spend its Saturday nights starting in a few weeks. The moon and stars in the high winter sky, the dazzling snow, the silence across the lake, the distant lights of town, and the sweet aroma of woodsmoke and whiskey and old fishermen—in a paradise like this, you don’t want a guy going on and on with a story. Winter casts its own spell, and when you get to the age of an old fisherman, you’ve heard most of the long stories already. You want the short sudden story of a fish. A handsome large fish and its tragic mistake and short struggle and then it is hauled up through a hole in the top of its world into the afterlife and, voilà, that fish discovers that heaven is a dark place full of old men in warm clothing chewing tobacco and sipping whiskey and stepping outside once in a while to piss and look at the stars. That is the story we care about, our story, and we intend to go on repeating it over and over. Have a good winter. Cordially,
THREE MARRIAGES
MRS. ROY TOLLERUD TO MR. AND MRS. FLOYD C. OLSON
Dear Floyd and Eleanor,
As you can see from the postmark, we got to Texas, though by the time you read this we’ll probably have left Brownsville and gone I don’t know where. We’re searching for that resort the Larsons recommended, on the Gulf. The ones we’ve seen don’t have weekly rates or else are not too clean, and the one the Larsons said was so nice, and half the price of what you’d pay in Florida, called Sea Drift or Sun Drift (or maybe it was Spend Thrift), we can’t find it where they said it would be. They said it was right on the ocean and a lot of seniors from Minnesota stay there, so Roy wants to keep looking. I’d be just as happy to stay at a Holiday Inn and just not stay so long but he’s set on finding this resort the Larsons liked, whether it exists or not. The weather is good along the c
oast and Roy is getting some color. We have met some very nice people in their own way, they are just like anyone else except for being Southern of course. It floors me the way they come right up to you the way they do and talk a blue streak. One minute it’s Hello, how are you, and the next thing they’re telling you about their daddy. I couldn’t tell my life story to complete strangers if you put a gun to my head but they think nothing of it.
You would get a kick out of seeing Roy down here when the waitress walks over and says, “What can I dew for yew, honey?”—he just turns to jelly and when he kids her a little she throws her head back and laughs like he was Red Skelton. I never saw anything so comical as him when his little remarks are laughed at by a young woman, and I’ve never seen him leave a twenty-five-percent tip before either. Oh well.
You know he was here in Houston during the war and then Corpus Christi. I came for a couple months after Richard was born. In fact we talked about staying in Texas because everyone said it was going to have a big boom as soon as the war was over, which of course happened. I reminded him of this the other morning and he didn’t remember it. I know that we talked about living here but he says no, that he would never’ve left Minnesota. But it was on the beach one afternoon, we had the baby with us, we were eating fried chicken, and he said, “How would you like to stay here?” or something very close to that, it was the fall of 1944. He says, nonsense, he wouldn’t have lived here for anything, but I remember. What happened was that we decided to stay here, and we’d both go to work, but then his dad was feeling bad and so Roy thought we should go back for a few years and help them out, and that was that. I’m not complaining, but I do know it was what we talked about. He said to me, “How can you even imagine us living here all these years? We wouldn’t have our friends, our church, nothing would be like what we got, who knows what it would’ve been like, we might not’ve had five kids. Is that what you want?” That is just ridiculous. If we had stayed we would have found something else. Anyone can see that. I think I could live here pretty well. There is a lot more to the world than what we have at home and a lot more perfectly good ways to live than what we’re familiar with, but it was a mistake to say so. He said, “Maybe you would have been happier with someone else. Go ahead. Say it.” Now he’ll be mad the rest of the day and half of tomorrow. Anyway don’t tell the Larsons we couldn’t find their resort. I am going to write to them and say it was beautiful all right but all booked up.
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