18
Joe
SOME OF THE LISTENERS BECAME friends, Father Hilary Thimmesh, Fred and Romy Petters, the writer Jim Harrison picked up the signal from Duluth in his cabin on the Upper Peninsula. Joe O’Connell was a sculptor, whose studio overlooked a meadow along the Great Northern tracks near St. Joseph, down the hill from KSJR. He invited me down one day after my show and I found him looking at a half-finished wooden Christ on the cross leaning against the wall, a tiny crack on the left cheek— Joe ran his fingers over the face, brushing away sawdust, squinting at the grain, worrying over it. He decided the nose was slightly off-kilter and needed reshaping; meanwhile, the church that commissioned the figure was hounding Joe for a delivery date so the dedication could be scheduled. The original date was three months ago. Joe was supposed to telephone the priest today—he groaned at the thought.
Joe had a wife and five children to support by carving and sculpting for Catholic churches, who paid modest commissions because how could you ask for more, knowing that churches could buy plaster statues that their congregations might even prefer to Joe’s work? His sense of the absurd kept him afloat, it was all comedy to Joe. He paid me a compliment in his last sculpture, commissioned by a church in Las Vegas, a granite triptych showing Christ among the poor and oppressed: I am in it, a prisoner behind bars.
Joe pours us each a glass of brandy and we sit in his little loft, like the bridge of a ship, with a bunk, a work table, a file cabinet, and shelves holding his tape and record collection, New Orleans jazz, Jelly Roll, Bix, Buddy, Ella, Benny, Fats, Duke, and postcards and clippings tacked to the walls. I sit on the bunk, and he brings out a few of his prints to show me: Peter strangling the cock that crowed when Peter, confronted by the mob, denied knowing the Lord, and Adam in the Garden waiting in abject boredom for Eve to finish doing her hair, her magnificent haunches visible through a window, and a print of a man in a suit grabbed by giant talons in the dark. Joe did not portray elation or contentment, his subject was the dignity of suffering. He’d been shipped to Okinawa in the closing days of World War II, had seen horrible bloodshed and destruction, and the one time he told me about it, tears ran down his face. He sticks a fresh log in the woodstove and turns down the volume of the Bix Beiderbecke tape and leans back in his swivel chair and lifts his glass.
Joe looked like an old boxer, a bantamweight. Wiry, with large sinewy hands, a hank of black hair falling over his forehead, black horn-rimmed glasses on a creased face, and a majestic grin. Joe knew how to bestow friendship. Through him, I met J. F. Powers, author of Morte D’Urban, a Catholic iconoclast, who attended Mass every week sitting in the balcony where the homily was unintelligible and nobody would try to shake his hand—he shunned the Exchange of Peace. If you google Powers, you find him bunched up with Flannery O’Connor, Evelyn Waugh, and James Joyce. Powers never googled anybody. The only Google he knew was Barney Google with the goo-goo-googly eyes. He loved baseball and old jazz and olives, despised Walt Whitman, disliked teaching creative writing at St. John’s and discouraged as many students as he could, and he was good company, though he never could accept the idea of grown men going around in jeans. He stared at mine as if I were wearing leotards.
One fall morning, Jim Powers and I sat in the studio and Joe told us about the circus that came to the ballpark in St. Joseph in July. “It was one of those little tent circuses where the woman who sells you your ticket is also the bareback rider and has a dog act, and maybe sells cotton candy on the side. But my kids thought this was the last word in entertainment, to sit on the top row of the bleachers under the canvas and jump down to the ground and run around. So we went, and the next day we drove to town in our old VW to get groceries. It was like a clown car with four of them in it and the back seat full of groceries. They were still talking about the circus when we drove by the ballpark and there, staked in the middle of the field, was the elephant, Mazumbo. This was a one-elephant circus and she was it. The kids wanted to go feed her. They begged me. ‘Please oh please, please, please, can we? This would be the neatest thing. We’ve got peanuts!’
“Well, we did have peanuts. Two big bags of them. I said, ‘All right, but you stay in the car. Nobody gets out of the car.’ And I drove onto the ballfield and up to the elephant. And Eric rolled down the window and stuck out a handful of peanuts and Mazumbo swung her trunk over and picked them up and put them in her mouth. Then it was Brian’s turn to feed her. And Laurie, and Duke. By the time they got through a bag of peanuts, Mazumbo had quite a bit of her trunk inside the car, feeling around for provisions. It made me nervous, this gigantic long bristly thing snaking around inside the VW and brushing the back of my neck and snuffling around the kids, especially since the tip of Mazumbo’s trunk looked like Mazumbo had a bad cold. But the kids, of course, were delighted. Utterly beside themselves. They were squealing and sticking fistfuls of peanuts in her trunk, of which almost the whole trunk seemed to be in the car. And when we ran out of peanuts, we opened up a pack of Oreos and some candy bars and potato chips. I was trying to keep calm, and then I felt the car lift slightly and then this large cold thing on my face and I jumped and banged my head on the ceiling and slipped the car into reverse and backed up, slowly, because Mazumbo was reluctant to let go of us. We inched back and I could hear the ridges on the trunk slide across the window frame, bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk, and the kids were laughing all the way home, and I was imagining the story in the newspaper, Family of 5 Perish in Circus Mishap; Father Parked Car Next to Elephant.”
Jim turned to me and said, “That’d be a good one for your show.” He said he wouldn’t dare write a story like that because if he did, someone might die. That’s the sort of writer he is. Irish.
Years later, I stole the story and put it into Lake Wobegon and sent Joe an $82 bottle of Armagnac, which he didn’t drink, on grounds that it would only make him dissatisfied with his usual brand, the $10 brandy at the municipal liquor store in St. Joseph.
When Joe died in 1995, Jim read one Scripture passage at the funeral Mass and I read another. At Joe’s instruction, there was no eulogy. I had written one in which I said he was an Italian artist of the Renaissance, a friend of Ghirlandaio, who was dropped into Stearns County in the mid-twentieth century, one of God’s better jokes. He was a fine artist who looked like a prizefighter and talked like a carpenter, and he was a Christian who lived by his faith, which included selflessness and so my eulogy got dropped, and they cut to the postlude, a jazz band playing “Please Don’t Talk about Me When I’m Gone,” led by Joe’s son Brian playing clarinet, and here I’ve gone and done exactly that.
The radio network grew. Father Colman Barry, the president of St. John’s University, was behind it all the way, and Dan Rieder, our chief engineer, was a dedicated problem solver, who knew about radio from his Navy days working with submarine radar. He assembled the KSJR transmitter and tower and ran the electric line out to it, and when we boosted power from 40,000 to 150,000 watts, it created so much heat it had to be water-cooled, so he built a giant radiator to run water through and a big fan to cool it. He devised ingenious gizmos to make the thing work. He was a bachelor married to his job, traveling around Minnesota to build transmitters and towers. He and Kling built the network, piece by piece. One looked like a successful insurance salesman, the other like an auto mechanic—one moved easily among the well-to-do, the other mainly talked to bartenders and waitresses—and together they created Minnesota Public Radio. I was a bit player, playing music, having a good time.
Mary was in severe distress, so we left the idyllic (for me) farm and moved back to Minneapolis, and I did the 6 a.m. show out of a jerry-built plywood studio in downtown St. Paul and the show happened to catch the ear of the two coolest people in town. Minneapolis Tribune columnist Will Jones gave it a glowing write-up, and Suzanne Weil asked me to do a poetry reading at the planetarium. She ran the performing arts program at Walker Art Center, the HQ of cool. She sponsored Merce Cunningham and Waylon Jennings both, Twyl
a Tharp, Philip Glass, B. B. King, and the Beach Boys too. She liked what she liked. There is nothing so buoying to a writer like having the right friends. Will and Weil: I was a made man. Another local columnist had dismissed me as “vanilla,” but he probably only knew vanilla from McDonald’s, which is artificial flavoring. Genuine vanilla has richness and complexity. To him, vanilla represented emptiness, but he was full of horseshit. Which itself is rich and complex and not without value. Though it’s no substitute for vanilla.
That fall, I got invited to introduce my hero S. J. Perelman at his reading in Minneapolis. I met him at dinner at Murray’s restaurant, at a narrow table in the corner; our knees kept touching, and I was worried about keeping up my end of the conversation, but he carried the ball. Once he learned that I wrote for The New Yorker, he complained bitterly about the editing, the miserly pay, the punitive first-reading contract, and then he looked at me and asked, “Who’s your editor?” “Roger Angell,” I said. “What’s that like?” he said. “He’s great, he writes very kind rejections,” I said. Mr. Perelman harrumphed. He tossed in a few disparaging remarks about the Marx Brothers and his regret that he ever agreed to write for the bastards, and then it was time to go do the show. I picked up the check. I felt honored, stunned, dazzled, that the great Perelman regarded me as a fellow professional. No monkey talk about subtexts and motifs, it was all about earning the dough and keeping editors’ clumsy mitts off your work. I was in his club. I called him Mister Perelman but I thought of him as Sid. I don’t remember the reading, just my dazzlement.
19
A Prairie Home Companion
I WAS CURIOUS ABOUT THE invisible radio audience who listened at 6 a.m. I wanted them to be friends, so one morning I announced tryouts for the Jack’s Auto Repair softball team and the next Saturday a big crowd showed up at a ballfield in south Minneapolis, and we chose up sides and played a dozen innings, drank a case of Grain Belt, and went home. But the idea took hold. A team of strangers spontaneously formed. John and Ann Reay took down names and phone numbers, and we held a practice and played against the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra team, their conductor Dennis Russell Davies pitching. We took the game seriously, regardless of ability. Lots of infield chatter, throwing the ball around the horn. Serious attitude. Remorse at your errors, no joking around until later. The Minnesota Orchestra sent over a team, the Walker Art Center, the Guthrie, serious play, a case of beer afterward. Friendships formed. When Prairie Home got big-time, touring, Sunday afternoon softball disappeared but some friendships remained. Russ Ringsak, an architect, a Harley and blues guy, wound up becoming a friend. He once built a long twisting snow slide on a hillside behind his house with banked curves designed for maximum thrills: you jumped on a plastic saucer and the slide threw you around for a couple minutes. He told a joke every time he met me. He got fed up with architecture and came to work for Prairie Home as our truck driver for the last twenty years or so, drove the big red Peterbilt cross-country and wrote up pages of notes on each broadcast city and, when he got sick and needed to retire, he played electric guitar and sang “Six Days on the Road” at our last broadcast at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. The loyalty of good people like Russ and Tom Keith and Kate Gustafson—I took it for granted at the time and now I’m astonished.
In the summer of 1973, thinking this was something a radio guy should do someday, I rode the train to Nashville with my friend Don McNeil from the softball team to see the Saturday night broadcast of The Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium, which was completely sold out that night so we stood in the parking lot behind the hall and listened to it on WSM from the radios in nearby pickup trucks. There was a whole crowd of us out there. We got to see Loretta Lynn’s tour bus pull up in the alley and she herself step out and walk by in glittering white gown, long black hair, and the crowd parted for her, nobody asked for an autograph, a few people said quietly “Hey, Loretta,” and she smiled and picked up her skirts and went around back to the stage door. The Ryman wasn’t air-conditioned and the windows were wide open, and when we ducked down behind a low stone wall we could see the lower halves of performers on stage, Dolly Parton and Roy Acuff and Bashful Brother Oswald, and almost all of Stonewall Jackson. My hero Marty Robbins sat mugging at the piano and sang “Love Me,” grinning on the falsetto part in the chorus, and then jumped up and did “El Paso,” strumming a little Spanish guitar up on his shoulder. Listening to the music from car radios in the parking lot surrounded by reverent fans on a hot summer night, I felt happy, excited, even exalted. I thought, “I’d like to do that someday.”
The next spring I went back to Nashville and wrote a piece about the Opry for The New Yorker. Roger Angell handed me over to a fact editor, Bill Whitworth, knowing Bill is from Little Rock and knows country music, and Bill at the time was the trusted deputy of William Shawn, the editor, and so the assignment was made, though Mr. Shawn’s interest in country music was slight at best. On this daisy chain of connections my whole career hangs. If Roger had handed me to an editor from Connecticut, or if Whit-worth had fallen out of favor with Shawn, or if Shawn had mentioned the Opry to Lillian Ross and she said, “You’re out of your mind,” I’d be wearing a TSA badge and patting down men with suspicious pants at the airport.
I went to the Friday night show and skipped the Saturday night because Richard M. Nixon would be there, trying to slip the bonds of Watergate, and I didn’t care to write about him. I sat in the balcony of the Ryman and watched the sequined ladies with big hair, men in gaudy suits, commercials for chewing tobacco and pork sausage and self-rising Martha White flour and Goo Goo Clusters, Cousin Minnie Pearl (I’m just so proud to be here! ), the red-barn backdrop, the haze of cigarette smoke, the fans and their flash cameras, the announcer in his funeral suit, and I resolved to go home and start up a Saturday night show of my own. I wrote the piece, Bill Whitworth shepherded it into print between ads for Chanel No. 5 and Cartier diamonds and Cricketeer yacht wear, and I went up the stairs to Bill Kling’s office at KSJN to talk.
Kling kept meetings short. He had a low tolerance for the prefaces and digressions by which people show they have a liberal arts education. He was a true believer in radio, listened to it religiously, and in public radio, surrounded by malcontents, he got excited by good ideas. I proposed the show and he told me to go right ahead. Saturday at 5 p.m., between the Met Opera and the New York Philharmonic broadcasts. He called in Margaret Moos, who worked upstairs in publicity, and asked her to produce it. “Have fun,” he said. It was a ten-minute conversation. Saturday evening was a dead zone in radio, but I was in a sinking marriage and had nothing to lose.
A few years later, I invited Mr. Shawn to come to Minnesota and play piano on the show, and he wrote back: “Unfortunately, I don’t travel and in my opinion I don’t play well enough, so I must decline.” A perfect Shawn sentence, not one unnecessary word in it.
Twenty years later, when the Ryman Auditorium reopened after renovation, Prairie Home was the first show back in, a classic show with Chet and the Everlys, Robin and Linda Williams, Buddy Emmons, Vince Gill, and Mary Chapin Carpenter, and I just stood off to the side and waved them on, one after the other.
The name A Prairie Home Companion came from a Norwegian cemetery in Moorhead, opened in 1875 by a man named Oscar Elmer who planned to make his bundle and head back East, leaving this godforsaken treeless plain behind, but then his brother John died, apparently a suicide, and the tragedy made up Oscar’s mind to bury his brother in Moorhead and call the cemetery Our Prairie Home. And Oscar wound up staying. The story appealed to me—Norwegians establishing a graveyard as a sign of loyalty—so I took the name and stuck “Companion” on it as a dark joke. I felt about radio as Mr. Elmer felt about North Dakota. Radio was a temporary job until I could finish my novel about a small town in Minnesota, but then I lost the manuscript in the train station in Portland, left it in a briefcase in the men’s toilet, went back and it was gone. The story of Oscar and his cemetery spoke to me. Here we are. Life has
its sorrows. Make something beautiful out of it.
I wanted an ecumenical show and Kling wanted a live broadcast, which eliminates the tedium of editing. I’d grown up with commercial radio so I invented sponsors, the Café Boeuf, the Fearmonger’s Shop (serving all your phobia needs), Guy’s Shoes, and Powdermilk Biscuits. (If your family’s tried ’em, you know you’ve satisfied ’em, they’re the real hot item, Powdermilk . . . Heavens, they’re tasty and expeditious.) I had musician friends who were game—Butch Thompson was a classmate at the U and I met Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson busking on the West Bank. And Robin and Linda Williams playing a college coffeehouse, singing to fifteen people with pinball machines dinging and cash register ringing. I knew Philip Brunelle, Vern Sutton, and Janis Hardy from the Center Opera Company. Vern and Janis had big voices and could improvise if I wrote a script about singing furniture, plus which they could do speaking roles. Vern did weaselish characters, con men, card sharps; Janis could sing precisely a quarter-tone sharp or flat and convulse the audience. One week she brought her dog Freckles and they did “Indian Love Call,” Freckles howling when Janis hit a certain note. Philip at the keyboard could sight-read or play by ear or both. The three of them could set any words to music in any style, on the spot, a pork chop recipe à la Chopin, a list of cocktails à la Philip Glass.
That Time of Year Page 16