GK and Bill Kling, KSJN studio, 1975.
The music was sociable, old jazz, love duets, bluegrass, ballads, nothing that took itself too seriously. No Dylan. His “Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth, ‘rip down all hate,’ I screamed. Lies that life is black and white spoke from my skull I dreamed ” was like stuff I wrote in my sophomore year at the U. Why repeat it? Go for the visceral, skip the gaseous emanations of sensibility.
I was the writer with the idea, but the musicians were the ones who made it real, as I very well knew. Bill and Judy did “Barnyard Dance” (It was late last night in the pale moonlight, All the vegetables gave a spree. They put out a sign that said, ‘The dancing’s at nine’ And all the admission was free.). Soupy Schindler played jug, did a steam locomotive on his mouth harp. Vern Sutton sang “Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight” about Nellie hanging on to the clapper of the church bell as the hangman waited to hear it so he could execute her daddy. Butch played “How Long Blues.” And so we proceeded down the road, not knowing what a fine education it would turn out to be. It went on the air on July 6, 1974, admission $1, 50 cents for kids. Margaret Moos sold tickets and her sisters Martha and Becky ushered, and Margaret quickly became boss because she knew what to do and we didn’t. I was the doubter. I thought it might last the summer. I wore a white suit and a big white hat to make myself look authoritative, but I was in over my head, which you could see if you went to the show, which luckily not many people did. Attendance at the first show was thirty-six, half of whom left at intermission. On the radio, it sounded better than it was; on stage, there was a grim-faced man in a white suit struggling to have a good time. And the next week I got the first fan letter, from a listener in St. Cloud.
We enjoyed the show Saturday night and hope you were happy with it all because it seemed to work out real good. You might want to try that sort of thing again. I heard most of the show while getting my file cabinet organized, the appliance guarantees, unpaid bills, vacation brochures, and all such. I don’t really believe it will work, but it is good to purge oneself on occasion and feel you have done good. People need this sort of thing. After the show Romy and I went downtown for dinner.
Tell those people to have it quit raining.
Fred
It was a folk music show that went on week by week, live, unedited, four microphones, no rehearsal, no stage monitors, songs thrown together on the fly and mixed on an 8-channel mixer. I tried to sound friendly because that’s what Bob DeHaven of “Good Neighbor Time” sounded like, so I tried to chuckle as I introduced the acts and promoted Jack’s Auto Repair (All tracks lead to Jack’s) and the Chatterbox Café (Where the elite meet to eat), Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery (If you can’t find it at Ralph’s, you can probably get along without it), the American Duct Tape Council (It’s almost all you need sometimes) and the Federated Organization of Associations (which became the Associated Federation of Organizations and then the Official Federated Organization of Associations), Bertha’s Kitty Boutique (For persons who care about cats), and the Catchup Advisory Board (These are the good times, strong and sure and steady. Life is flowing like catchup on spaghetti). Commercials freed us from the academic formality of public radio and let us talk about indigestion and sore feet, cat hair, bad breath, and the need for adhesives. Sponsors such as Bebopareebop Rhubarb Pie, Thompson Tooth Tinsel, the Coffee Advisory Board (Smells so lovely when you pour it, you will want to drink a quart . . . Keeps the Swedes and the Germans awake through the sermons).
Ray Marklund, an electrician for Northern Pacific railroad, was our lone stagehand (unpaid, at his own insistence; he said, “I don’t want to have to take orders from people who’ve got no idea what they’re doing”). He carried a toolbox and could solder wires and unlock doors, and once he unlocked a piano. He liked jazz more than bluegrass, but he stuck with us because he could see that we needed him. We played little theaters—one hundred or so capacity—and I learned that Minnesota audiences are thoughtful and cautious and don’t laugh unless people near them laugh. I learned to get their attention by speaking softly. I took no pay at the start because I felt unnecessary; the acts got $50 or $75 each—without them, there’d be no show. We finished our first year of shows, and I popped a cork in a real champagne bottle and it flew sixty feet to the back row and struck a four-year-old boy named Ben Ellingson, who cried out in surprise. I took the microphone up the aisle to apologize to him. (The family attended our twenty-fifth anniversary show; Ben was fine and had graduated from grad school.) For several summers, we played in a downtown park a block from the main fire station, across from the Church of St. Louis. Bells rang at 5 p.m. and now and then fire trucks came screaming past and we made ourselves ignore them. Once, an old drunk with a harmonica wandered in and tried to join the show and had to be restrained. Our audience, mostly Minnesota liberals, liked him because he looked like a Dust Bowl refugee, but he was a lousy harpist and a worse singer. Much to the liberals’ displeasure, we ushered him out. Some of them protested, but we were a radio show, not a treatment program, and the guy couldn’t play harmonica.
Our first engineer was a former Marine sergeant, Tom Keith, who mixed the sound until we added him to the cast doing sound effects, heart-rending loon calls, gunshots, talking dogs and hysterical chickens, and various varieties of flatulence. He did silly things with great dignity. I was a self-conscious English major and he made me a storyteller who could have a Chinese ICBM cross the Pacific heading for a Scout camp in Aspen where loons sing “Kumbaya,” but breeding dolphins east of Oahu emit high-pitched euphoric cries that confuse the rocket’s guidance system and it lands amid nougat storage tanks in a series of splats and splorts, and thousands of aspen release a cloud of aspen gases that are ignited by a Scoutmaster lighting an exploding cigar as a glockenspiel plays Bach. That sort of thing.
Mr. Ray Marklund, stagehand, seated at GK’s desk, 1984.
Tom Keith at the SFX table.
We rehearsed in my living room, Bill and Judy on the couch, Cal Hand playing dobro, Rudy Darling fiddling in the archway of the dining room, sometimes Mary at the piano, my little boy sitting enrapt in the middle of the floor, buoyant music in a sad household. I kept writing for The New Yorker, shipping the stories off, waiting for Roger’s response— his gentle rejection letters—didn’t seem entirely successful was as harsh as he got—and his acceptance letters: FRIENDLY NEIGHBOR is awfully good, and we are delighted to take it, of course. It grows gently but strongly as one goes along, and it’s like nothing else I have ever read. And Mr. Shawn wrote soon thereafter, saying, “This is the sort of deadpan humor one doesn’t see much of anymore. The more you write for us, the better.”
Lavish praise on a New Yorker letterhead and then a generous check and we were rich for a month or two, and then went back to oatmeal, hot dogs, and spaghetti. We lived in St. Anthony Park, a Lutheran neighborhood, and I could let my little boy wander out through the backyards and find his playmates and a few hours later a mom would call and ask if it was okay if he stayed for lunch. No need to hire child care, with Lutherans around. I sat at my Underwood with a faint O and off-kilter F and P and wrote the show.
I broke up with Mary in 1976. There was no anger, only silence, which we each misinterpreted as rejection. A simple language barrier, the inability to say what you feel. We had some good times in our little house with the gazebo on the hill where friends came for bratwurst and beer and played sweet old songs. She gave piano lessons to the children of friends. She took up guitar. We plotted the first broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion and she picked out “Hello, Love” as the theme song. We never made such a cheerful home as her parents had. I married for happiness of course and the mystery of love, and what I found was loneliness, which made me think there something wrong with me, and then I found someone who wanted to be with me, and so I left one mystery and walked into another. I packed up my clothes and papers. Our son said, “Couldn’t you and Mom take turns being right?” Mary said something about counseling. But we had ha
d so little to say to each other for so long, each of us burdened with remorse; where does one start? I drove away with no words of farewell and we hardly ever spoke again.
The show hit the road in a Winnebago motor home for twelve shows in twelve towns in twelve days, in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, pitching a tent each night—the Powdermilk Biscuit Band and I, and did fifty live broadcasts that year, with a shifting cast of Bill and Judy, Dakota Dave Hull and Sean Blackburn, Rudy Darling, Peter Ostroushko, Robin and Linda, and Stevie Beck, the Queen of the Autoharp. Eventually we settled on a house band of Bob Douglas, Mary DuShane, Adam Granger, and Dick Rees, a classic mando/fiddle/guitar/bass string band that, thanks to my ignorance of music, enjoyed a lot of freedom, covering gospel, swing, and old-time fiddle tunes. They started out at $40 apiece per show and got up to $150, not bad for freelance folkies.
Bob knew dozens of gospel songs, like “Prayer Bells of Heaven (oh how sweetly they ring)” and “Anchored in Love” (The tempest is o’er, I’m safe evermore, what gladness what rapture is mine. The danger is past, I’m anchored at last. I’m anchored in love divine). Tom Keith mixed sound and drove. I sang bass on the gospel stuff, and now and then sang something of my own. Once a boy in the first row threw up as I sang, The old radio, the old radio that held a place of honor in our home of long ago. The folks are dead and gone and I am moving on, sitting all alone by our family radio. He had the flu, his mother explained later. I stood and talked to give the band a chance to retune, look at the chord chart, get a drink of water, use the toilet, so I said: I am from Minnesota, a state that ranks forty-seventh in the use of irony, a serious state where every year, nature makes serious attempts to kill us, and then it’s summer and time for giant carnivorous mosquitoes, who no bug repellent even discourages. A crucifix helps but you have to hit them really hard with it. Why do I tell you this? Because our sponsor, Powdermilk Biscuits, is the only baked product that gives shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done. . . . Heavens, they’re tasty! And expeditious. And so on.
In Duluth, we played the train depot, using baggage carts for a stage. We played a Lutheran church in Sioux Falls, for which I wrote a Lutheran anthem:
Episcopalians are proud of their faith,
You ought to hear ’em talk.
Who they got? They got Henry the 8th
And we got J. S. Bach.
Henry the 8th’d marry a woman
And then her head would drop.
J. S. Bach had twenty-three kids
’Cause his organ had no stop.
I was raised to keep a lid on it,
Guard what you say or do.
A Mighty Fortress is our God
So he must be Lutheran too.
That night we got snowed in, slept on the floor of the Sunday School wing with the Good Shepherd looking down from the wall. We made it through on snow-drifted roads to Worthington and Mankato. When the audience had had enough songs about the lonesome whistle’s wail and When I’m dead, let your teardrops kiss the flowers on my grave, Tom Keith jumped up on stage with me and we did a story about dogs, engines with piston problems, a mammoth catapult, giant condors, demented elephants, stuttering butlers, exploding beer bottles, Alpine horns, fast trains—he was game for anything. I was merely the narrator, the enabler, winging it toward a big finish (a ship departing, seagulls, surf). People loved Tom. He had been a mere engineer and we made him a star. People asked for his autograph, so we had 8 x 10 glossies printed up.
Judy Larson, Bill Hinkley, GK, Bob Douglas, Rudy Darling—Worthington, MN, 1975.
We lived in close quarters on the road and had to endure Bob Douglas’s incessant practicing of Irish hornpipes and jigs on the mandolin and, to distract him, we worked up a Sons of the Pioneers number, “Blue Shadows on the Trail,” in five-part harmony with some tricky passing chords in it, and we got it almost to perfection so we sang it in Moor-head, or started to sing it, and hit a chord so awful we all collapsed in helpless laughter right around the line “a plaintive wail in the distance.” It wasn’t plaintive, it was putrid. Rudy fell on the floor and could not get up. The audience had never seen professional musicians fall apart physically like this before. To restore sobriety, we swung into On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand and cast a wishful eye to Canaan’s fair and happy land, where my possessions lie. A song about death always settled us down. We never ventured into “Blue Shadows” again. We knew that if we did, we’d see the plaintive wail approaching and we’d crash into it.
We traveled by motor home mostly, but once a small corporate jet was put at our service to fly up to do a tent show in Bayfield, Wisconsin. We did two shows and were driven to the airport for the flight home. The airport manager said, “Frank is on his way.” We asked who Frank was and he said, “He has to drive a truck ahead of the plane to scare the deer off the runway.” We boarded the plane and Frank raced down the runway and we followed, the plane took off, and Adam took a deep breath. I asked him what he was thinking. He said, “I was thinking I might be the answer to a trivia question: who was the guitarist on the plane that crashed and killed Garrison Keillor.”
I doubted the show would last but we drew capacity crowds and I was curious to know what the appeal might be, so I kept going. It sure wasn’t my personality. I was a tall sourpuss with a big beard and a white suit, looking like a Confederate general on trial for his life. But in 1976, the News from Lake Wobegon came along, and soon made the jump from one-page letter to fifteen-minute monologue—Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon—based on the four seasons, the school year, the national holidays, and the liturgical year—starting with a word about the weather, then the news of the Norwegian bachelor farmers, the Thanatopsis Society, the Sons of Knute lodge singing: Sons of Knute we are, sons of the prairie, with our heads held high in January, hauling our carcass around in big parkas, wearing boots the size of tree stumps. And with the arrival of Lake Wobegon, the show took on a clear identity.
I was out to play with the familiar, talking about a place where you could count on others in time of need as Mother had during the war. Religious and ethnic differences aside, it was tightly knit and had little tolerance for pretense. Satire was a sign of good health. Mutual benefit was fundamental, and industry and loyalty and a decent reverence for the natural world, while waste was abhorrent and cruelty not tolerated. Midwestern modesty prevailed. Children were brought up to be deferential and self-effacing and behave appropriately, which, it was assumed, you knew without being told. Nobody encouraged you to follow your dream. Spiritual longing was a private matter, as were grief and regret.
The town motto: Sumus quod sumus (We are what we are). Grace was the town librarian, Gary and Leroy the town constables, and Bud ran the snowplow. Dr. DeHaven was the physician, though he was seldom mentioned; he took a “Let’s wait and see what develops” approach to disease. A central figure was Father Emil of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility church, and to offset his sternness, I placed a nun in the church, Sister Arvonne, in honor of my friend Arvonne Fraser, a cheerful liberal and optimist despite personal tragedies, still canoeing, still smoking, into her late eighties. Her adversary, Father Emil, is strict and brusque: to the weeping girl who found out she was pregnant, he said, “If you didn’t want to go to Chicago, why’d you get on the train?” To the German Catholics I added, for dramatic interest, an equal number of Norwegian Lutherans led by Pastor Ingqvist. The Norwegians, ever status-conscious, vote Republican, and the Germans vote Democratic because the Norwegians don’t. The car dealers are Bunsen Ford and Krebsbach Chev, which means that Lutherans drive Fords and Catholics drive Chevies, and if you drive something else, people watch you very closely. Dorothy ran the café and Wally the Sidetrack Tap, and the Mercantile belonged to Cliff with his amazing comb-over, a piece of hair architecture. And it ended: And that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average. Like most of the best lines, it came out of nowhere. I wo
ke up one morning and it was in my head.
I put Lake Wobegon in central Minnesota because my city audience knew the scenic parts of Minnesota, the North Shore, the Boundary Waters, the Mississippi Valley, and nothing about the midsection with all the hog and dairy farms. The town was founded by Father Pierre Plaisir who named it Lac Malheur for the pestilence of mosquitoes. It was later settled by Unitarian missionaries. The town was not on the map, having been left off by surveyors in the 1860s who had surveyed more of Minnesota than there was room for between the borders, so about fifty square miles had to be folded under. I said that Lake Wobegon took its name from the Ojibway word that means “the place where we waited all day for you in the rain,” and somehow people believed this and other historic details. I said that, in 1938, Babe Ruth appeared in an exhibition game with the Sorbitol All-Stars barnstorming team and hit a home run that cleared the center field fence and was never found. Near the ballpark stands the statue of the Unknown Norwegian with the stalk of quack grass growing out of his left ear, from a seed implanted there by the tornado of 1965, which no herbicide has been able to kill off. The Unknown was so famous in the 1890s that nobody bothered to put an inscription on the base, and now nobody can remember if he was a Swanberg or Swenson.
Because I assumed the show would end in a year or two, I didn’t keep orderly notes on the town; it was all in my head. The ball club was the Schroeders, then it became the Whippets. The town barber began as Jim, then became Bob. The town clerk was Viola Tors, though before she’d been a Tordahl. I had a hard time keeping the Tordoffs straight from the Tommerdahls, Thorvaldsons, Tollefsons, and Tolleruds, and sometimes characters migrated from one family to another. Val Tollefson was married to Charlotte and later turned up married to Florence. I had the same problem with Krebsbachs and Kreugers: Wally, the owner of the Sidetrack Tap, was sometimes a Krebsbach, other times a Kreuger. Carl Krebsbach is the town handyman, married to Marjie though once he was married to Betty. The Ingqvist family is complicated, sometimes appearing as Ingquist or Inkvist or Ingebretson, and the relationships are not clear. Roger Hedlund is married to Marilyn except for a while she was Cindy.
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