That Time of Year

by Garrison Keillor

  17

  Radio Days

  THAT FALL, I DROVE UP to St. John’s University in Stearns County and applied for a job at their new radio station KSJR. The manager, Bill Kling, was my age, twenty-seven, but dressed like a manager in a dark blue suit and white shirt, narrow tie, and he looked at me and saw a proto-hippie in a flowery shirt and fringed vest, leather boots and bell-bottoms, chain-smoking, bearded, longish hair, who claimed to be a writer. Mr. Kling and I had one thing in common: we’d grown up in the Forties before TV and we liked the old radio shows, especially the comedians. I got on a long spiel about audio being memorable and video self-erasing, that the ear, not the eye, is the door to the brain, and I kept yakking, and eventually it dawned on me that I was the only applicant and he needed me to do the 6 a.m. shift and to start soon. So I was hired. I was his sixth full-time employee.

  Mary and I and the baby drove up to Freeport with a trailer of beat-up furniture and ate lunch at Charlie’s on Main Street. Freeport was a railroad town, the tracks running along Main Street, beside the Swany White Flour Mill, a handsome yellow-brick structure on a stone base, five beautiful old enameled maroon rolling machines humming along. We set up housekeeping in a rented farmhouse a mile south of town. Rent was $80 a month for a four-bedroom brick house with a porch that looked out on a well-kept farmyard, a granary and machine sheds and corncribs and silo and windmill, and a classic red barn and feedlot where Norbert, the farmer I rented from, kept his whiteface beef cattle. This was the farm his wife had grown up on, her family now gone, the Hoppe farm. Beyond the windbreak of red oak and spruce to the west and north lay 160 acres of his corn and oats. Our long two-rut driveway ran due north through the woods to where the gravel road made an L, where our mailbox stood, where you could stand and see for a couple miles in all directions, the green fields, the thick groves around the farm sites. We walked west on the straight road toward town, the baby on my back, and took a picture of our farm site, the grove of trees, the barn rising, the windmill. We awoke the next morning to church bells. It was Sunday. We had missed church. Our first mistake. If we intended to know people in Freeport, church would be the place to start. Dress up, take a seat, wait for people to introduce themselves.

  One Monday morning, 4:30 a.m., I drove east to St. John’s to do the show. KSJR was a classical music station, but I ignored that in favor of free-form entertainment. On Sunday I had sat at a turntable all afternoon listening to LPs, picking music for the show, fugues, études, blues, Jew’s harp-tuba duets, Jussi Björling, the Fruit Jar Drinkers, King Porter Stomp, Sousa played on a kazoo. My theme song was the Mills Brothers singing “Bugle Call Rag” with a jazzy vocal reveille—You’re bound to fall for the bugle call; you’re gonna brag ’bout the Bugle Call Rag. I ran through medleys and sequences of things, minimal talk, some remarks on the weather, offered to play requests and got a few, wished a woman named Rhonda a happy birthday and played the Beach Boys’ “Help Me, Rhonda,” an inspiration. The phone lit up. A couple complaints, but they were more astonished than complaining. It was a good morning—no paper-pushing, no staff meeting. We were too understaffed for that. Rhonda called and said I had brightened her morning and that was good. A couple people whose mornings I didn’t brighten spoke to Mr. Kling and he comforted them.

  I felt good about the 6 a.m. show from the get-go. Taking requests gives you a feel for the audience—a diverse bunch: rural intelligentsia, librarians, Unitarians, sexagenarians, birdwatchers, Lutheran dissidents, nuns and Catholic lefties, office workers with an unfinished novel in a desk drawer, teenage nerds of a humorous persuasion, potters and artists but also farmers and truck drivers, prisoners at St. Cloud Reformatory. I put Bix Beiderbecke on the turntable and Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, and it was like David said in the psalms, serving the Lord with gladness, and I let the Georgia Sea Island Singers shout for joy and the Golden Gate Quartet sing praises to the Most High with a glad heart as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber. I drove to work through the darkened houses in Avon and Albany and thought, “That’s my flock, they need to be uplifted,” and I got to the studio fully enthused and hauled the stack of vinyl into the control room and sat down and did the show.

  My home life was dark. Mary’s depression, the silence between us, the little boy playing alone in the big house. My workroom upstairs, the Underwood typewriter, the stack of manuscripts in the works. The silent meals. This dark life moved me to do a show of gaiety and exuberant transitions from the Marine Corps Band to a steam calliope and spoon player and a tuba trio playing the “Ode to Joy” with scraps of poetry and items from the local police reports and commercials for Jack’s Auto Repair and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery. I just wanted to make people feel buoyant in the morning, including myself. If other people were sitting down to a glum breakfast with a silent partner, then maybe I could jiggle them out of it.

  “Help Me, Rhonda” became a running joke, the awful song you’re addicted to. I’d play it, then swear off it, go for days Rhonda-less, then weaken. In the middle of the forecast at the mention of six inches of snow and high winds, I’d softly sing the refrain. Help, help me, Rhonda. Help me, Rhonda, yeah, get her out of my heart. Something galvanized for me in that studio. Keep it light. Make it new. Keep changing the subject: A skip-rope rhyme, Mother called the doctor. Doctor called the nurse. The nurse she called the lady with the alligator purse—into a Bach gigue, a surf band, whales singing, a Welsh chorus, “Bells of Rhymney,” the Pachelbel Canon, a twenty-one-gun salute, and Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers playing “Walk Right In.” A man walks into a bar that’s crowded with dogs. The bartender is a dog and the waitress. She says, “What can I get you?” The man says, “I’m off alcohol, how about water?” She says, “The toilet’s down the hall, help yourself.”

  There were plenty of listeners who didn’t care for it. They had donated money to support a classical music station and didn’t feel they needed to hear medieval and Renaissance dances mixed in with ragtime and bluegrass and they were not amused by the chatter. I don’t blame them. I go to a ball game, I go for baseball, I don’t care about video close-ups of couples kissing. The dissenters protested to Mr. Kling, and he never breathed a word about it to me. Some of them were major donors. I sat in the control room in my fringed leather vest and jeans, and he sat in his office in his suit and tie and dealt with people on the phone.

  Long ago, I met a man in a remote village in Alaska, who’d escaped there from Minnesota where he’d been a hell-raiser in a small town and caused damage and was marked as a cheater and liar. He fled to Alaska to escape his notoriety. One night he drove his pickup through twenty-seven miles of blizzard to take a young woman in the throes of childbirth to a hospital, and on the basis of that good deed on a treacherous night, he became a town cop, and a good one. He was redeemed by the simple fact of making himself necessary. And that’s what radio did for me. As a poet, I was a mild nuisance, and on radio, I was useful, at least to some people, entertaining them at 6 a.m. on a winter morning when they really needed it. Useful work: the antidote to self-pity.

  The radio show changed my life. And so did the death of the poet John Berryman, which hit me like a hammer. He was a hero of mine, he taught at the U, I admired his formal verse:

  Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,

  inimitable contriver,

  endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon,

  thank you for such as it is my gift.

  I cared less for his famous Dream Songs, but I went to his readings: a brilliant man blind drunk, hanging onto the podium, ranting his poetry in a crazy unintelligible voice for an hour and then sitting down to a standing ovation. Insanity was considered a symptom of genius back then. But one cold winter morning in 1972, Mr. Berryman climbed up on the railing of the Washington Avenue Bridge, paused, waved goodbye, and leaped to his death in the coal yard below, joining the select society of Hemingway, Hart Crane, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath. He’d tried AA, had written a novel abo
ut recovery, had written a series of beautiful “Addresses to the Lord” (Whatever your end may be, accept my amazement. May I stand until death forever at attention for any your least instruction or enlightenment.), but in the end, his death came as no surprise to those who knew him. It seemed to have been his goal all along. I took a hard look at my own poems with their impressive display of despair, and I said to myself: You are not headed for the bridge, so it makes no sense to stand by the railing. Where is the nobility in lamenting stupid things you did to yourself? I had tried to think life is absurd, and now I decided to try comedy. The basis of comedy is the great question: If people saw us as we really are, one foot in pretense, the other in vulgarity, would they still like us? We look at the stars and worry about our hair. I had adopted a heroic tone:

  What the elders know in their Sunday clothes

  I feel: lonely and old, faraway, poor,

  Driving by day and night in the car

  That the moon has turned to rust.

  But what in heaven’s name is that about? It’s about a guy with a headache. Get over yourself. I did. I wrote Mr. Berryman a poem.

  There was a dark poet named John

  Who jumped from a bridge, landing on

  A yard full of coal.

  God rest his soul.

  He made a small hole, now he’s gone.

  I made a swift, sharp turn, and I accepted the idea of working within narrow boundaries. I was thirty, and my job was to entertain people, some of whom knew more about loneliness than I ever would. Do your job. I wrote about cats, fireworks, the prairie, sweet corn, socks. Mary recorded a piano track of “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and I sang,

  The theology’s easy, the liturgy too.

  Just stand up and kneel down and do as the others do.

  Episcopalian, saving my love for you.

  At St. Michael’s, we recycle.

  At St. Clements, we suck lemons.

  Morning dawns on great white swans on the lawns of St. John’s

  There’s white folks and Black, and gay and morose,

  Some male Anglo-Saxons but we watch them pretty close.

  Episcopalian, saving my love for you.

  I read items on the show from local police blotters, such as the one about the dog who swam under the ice and caught a walleye and with fish in mouth, burst up through the hole in the fishing shack of Mr. Bauer who was intoxicated and in his panic knocked over the propane heater and the shack went up in flames and the dog disappeared before the firemen arrived, and will the owner of a black Lab please notify the sheriff’s office. Some donors complained to Mr. Kling, who took them to dinner, listened to them, thanked them for their support. And the show gained a following.

  Three weeks after I started at KSJR, I walked out to our mailbox and found a letter from The New Yorker, on creamy stationery, two pages, hand-typed with scrawled corrections, the fiction editor Roger Angell apologizing for turning down my story “The Life of Nixon” (“which was good in so many ways”) but accepting my story “Local Family Makes Son Happy”—a short short story he said was “nearly perfect”—for which they would pay me $500. I sat down in a field of alfalfa and read it three times and thought to myself, Now I have done something with my life. If I die now, they’ll mention The New Yorker in the second graph of the obit.

  The night the letter from Roger came, we drove into Freeport to Charlie’s Café to celebrate, our little boy asleep in the baby sack on my back. According to my diary, I had the ham dinner with baked potato, lettuce salad, dinner roll, and coffee, which cost $2.50. And a five-inch high lemon meringue pie was $1.10 extra. I felt flush. I never bothered to balance my checkbook after that.

  My mother read the story, about a family who hires a call girl for their son, and asked, “Why can’t you write something more positive?” I said, “I need to write what pays, I have a family.” My pal Roland Flint wrote to me: “I was so happy when I saw your name in the Table of Contents that I forgot to be jealous for two, maybe three, minutes. The piece is damned good & funny. Nuts to modesty. Most modest people should be.” I set about writing a batch of new stories for Roger, what they called “casuals” to distinguish them from serious fiction. I worked Monday through Friday at the station, 5 a.m. to 4 p.m., plus Saturday night. After supper, I sat in my workroom upstairs and wrote. The New Yorker had been my goal since eighth grade. I went into high production, no brooding, all business, filling a notebook with fragments of ideas, sketching outlines, newspaper clippings, aiming to complete three stories a month, and bat .333. That fall, a letter arrived from a New York literary agent, Ellen Levine, who’d seen a story of mine, “The Magic Telephone,” in a literary magazine and wondered if I’d like to avail myself of her services. And soon she had wrangled a book contract with Atheneum, and I was in business. A show, a magazine, a book deal, all in a few months’ time.

  I worked in a small second-floor bedroom, my black Underwood on a slab of ¾-inch plywood atop two steel file cabinets, a stack of yellow copy paper by the typewriter, and Webster’s Unabridged, Second Edition. Out the window behind my chair, the driveway curved through the windbreak toward the county road where I could see the mailman come cruising along in his green pickup, a cloud of dust behind, and stop, or not stop, at our big tin mailbox on its post, and leave, or not leave, an envelope from New York from Roger Angell. Some of them began “Sorry about your story SUCH AND SO, which came very close indeed but which seemed to us to fall somewhat short and to lack the sureness and inevitability of your writing at its best and though there was much to admire in it, there was also a faint sense of strain to the writing. I am terribly sorry to disappoint you and trust you won’t let this discourage you or slow you up for an instant. This really came close, believe me.” And others started off, “Good news! We are taking your story YES INDEED, which seemed to everyone here really funny and surprising and perfect in every way.” The rejections were always soft, reluctant, “wonderful writing, but somehow it wasn’t quite you at your best,” and sometimes a “Perhaps we are all wrong about this” was tossed in. The acceptances were generous: “I’ve been passing it around the office and all of us here are in admiration of your latest.” And now and then he’d write a beseeching letter: “People come up to me in the halls to ask when we’re going to see another story by Keillor. Write, I beg of you.” And I went straight to my typewriter and wrote and a week later: “Sorry about your latest, which came very close indeed. There was much to admire in it.” Et cetera, et cetera. He was a great and compassionate editor, never dismissive. You were his author, and he was with you all the way. And he was pleased by my story “Don: The True Story of a Younger Person,” which contains a quintuple interior quote, a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote, the deepest interior quote ever published there, so he said.

  And then there were the envelopes that contained a check. It might be $700, or $1,200, or $1,500, a windfall, I’d throw a party on Saturday, buy bottles of Armagnac, friends drove up from the city, we built a bonfire in the woods, roasted steaks, drank a toast to the Pleiades and Orion. I knew I’d found my place in the world, the writerly life, the little room with the Underwood and the plywood desk, but I had a wounded wife, alone with our little boy all day, a wall between us. I took a long drag on a cigarette and snapped it, sparks flying, into the dark. I said, “A man can have a happy home life or a big career, but you can’t have both.” I was drunk, I said it to hear what it sounded like. “Go for the career,” someone said. I already had.

  Mary had been eager to have a family. Before we got married, she drew up a list of names for our children: Johann, Hugo, Eleanor, Elizabeth, Peter, and Katherine. But that year, as I sat upstairs and wrote stories, she became mournful and weepy and let her piano drift out of tune. I, the bustling industrious loner, was no help for a lonely woman. She went to bed early, and I worked late and arose at 5 and drove to the radio station. I came home for supper and went back to the typewriter. I knew we couldn’t go on like this, but what
could be done? She stands in my doorway, in her pajamas, waiting, waiting. “What is it?” I say and she shakes her head and walks away. Why can’t we face each other and talk about this? Because I can’t give up radio or my writing. A sensible life isn’t possible. I know men who are good family men and I am not one. I had to burn the candle at both ends. She walks down the hall and closes the bedroom door.

  An audience grew that liked the crazy-quilt show. Rev. Gary Davis into the Brandenburg No. 3 into “Hop Scop Blues” and “What Wondrous Love” by Southern shape-note singers, into “Hesitation Blues” and then a limerick for Bernie up in Baudette where limericks are bawdy, you bet, and men smoke smokes and tell dirty jokes till everyone’s trousers are wet. His daughter called yesterday and said he’s dying of lung cancer but still telling jokes and could I wish him a happy seventieth. Of course. Maybe I shouldn’t have put “smokes” in but it rhymes.

  I don’t know how many people complained: Bill Kling fielded the complaints. He listened to anger and never got angry back. He was out to create a network uniting Lutheran and Catholic and state colleges in one enterprise, build a news operation, open the door to bold discussion of public issues, promote the arts. He believed in a community with a strong magnetic center rather than a scattering of fringe interests. We broadcast La Traviata from the Met because he believed everyone had a right to get the chance to enjoy it, not just opera nuts but your uncle Al and cousin Millie and the butcher at Red Owl. When I was down in the dumps, he told me that he knew a lot of people who loved my show, “including some who would surprise you.” He never used the word “inclusivity” but he believed in it, the big tent, and if people came for the jug bands and the jokes and stuck around for the Met and the New York Phil and got a sense of how big the tent is, it was all to the good.