It`s a few minutes before 5 o`clock on a Saturday afternoon in this river town of 13,736. A block north of Main Street–past the Family YMCA, past the grain elevators, past the Amtrak station, by which the trains roar in from Chicago and St. Paul-Minneapolis–a visitor discovers a pleasant little promenade on the banks of the Mississippi River, here only a hint of the majesty it will attain later as it rolls toward New Orleans.
Turning back and walking a block south of Main Street, where the St. James Hotel sits in refurbished Victorian splendor, the visitor finds what he has been looking for, the T.B. Sheldon Auditorium, a sometime movie theater, where people are settling into their seats to watch a live performance of ”A Prairie Home Companion” (usually based at the World Theater in St. Paul). From the auditorium, the show will be broadcast via satellite to 265 public radio stations in the United States and more in Australia.
The show is a throwback, in a way, to the classic radio comedies of the
`30s and `40s, an irrepressible mix of music and hilarity. Host Garrison Keillor is the chief cut-up. The Butch Thompson Trio, supplemented by a variety of guest performers, is the regular dispenser of music.
The audience listens attentively this evening to the kind of musical grab-bag typical of the show: Neal Ramsey on jazz saxophone, Leo Kottke playing folk songs on the guitar, the Red Wing Madrigal Singers, Stevie Beck on autoharp with Peter Ostrousko on mandolin and, finally, Karl Eilers at the auditorium organ. They hoot and applaud the ”commercials” for Powdermilk Biscuits, submarine cruises on Lake Superior and Vendo Bang (a combination vending machine and shooting gallery appealing to ”man`s primal urge to hunt and kill his own food”).
But when Garrison Keillor announces, ”It`s been a quiet week in my hometown of Lake Wobegon,” as he always does, the people turn silent. This is what they`ve been waiting for. This is the centerpiece of the show.
Keillor is wearing a handsome beige suit, a powder blue shirt and a bright red tie and red socks. He speaks without notes, his monologue based on a script he has written but not memorized. He paces himself with an eye on the clock, an ear tuned to audience response. For dramatic effect, his voice is often just above a whisper. His bushy brown eyebrows march up and down as his narrative proceeds. He is 6 feet 4 inches of preacher, then carnival barker, always a pitchman for life`s small pleasures.
In a seductive baritone, Garrison Keillor is telling a story about a dog who likes to fish, about the dog`s master and about the master`s aging mother. It is a poignant story about getting old and not getting enough respect. But since it is a story about a dog who likes to fish, it is also very funny.
When it`s over 20 minutes later, after the dog has ruined a party by diving into the smoked trout on a table of catered delicacies (inadvertently giving the old woman her revenge for being slighted), after he has signed off with his ”That`s the news from Lake Wobegon,” the audience is delirious with pleasure.
If hosting the radio show already has made the bespectacled 43-year-old something of a cult figure, his best selling novel, ”Lake Wobegon Days” may well make him both a rich man and a household name.
Like Jack Benny`s age, shyness has become this Minnesota humorist`s trademark. A prominent ”sponsor” of his radio show is Powdermilk Biscuits
”with that whole-wheat goodness that gives shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done.” And one of his most celebrated short stories, a parody of `60s liberation movements, is coyly titled ”Shy Rights: Why Not Pretty Soon?”
Lake Wobegon, pop. 942, is Keillor`s invention, the Minnesota town ”that time forgot, that the decades cannot improve, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.” In the novel, which is based on Keillor`s radio monologues, he writes: ”Left to our own devices, we Wobegonians go straight for the small potatoes. Majestic doesn`t appeal to us; we like the Grand Canyon better with Clarence and Arlene parked in front of it, smiling.”
It`s no wonder casual observers might mistake Lake Wobegon`s creator for an aw-shucks cracker-barrel philosopher, the voice of rural America and old-fashioned virtues. But the reality is far more complicated.
Not only does Keillor (pronounced Kee-ler) write about the small-town folk of Lake Wobegon, he also writes humorous pieces on other subjects for the urban sophisticates who read the New Yorker and the Atlantic. He seems to champion small-town life, yet for most of his life he has lived in or near Minneapolis or St. Paul. He is now known as Garrison Keillor, but that is a pen name he adopted in college. His parents gave him the less grand-sounding name of Gary. Born into a strict fundamentalist sect, the Plymouth Brethren, he still calls himself a born-again Christian, though he rarely attends church.
Gary Edward Keillor was born Aug. 7, 1942, in Anoka, a little Mississippi River town 14 miles north of downtown Minneapolis. His father, John, worked as a railway mail clerk on the line connecting St. Paul and Jamestown, N.D. His mother, Grace, minded the kids, who eventually numbered six. Gary was the third child and the second son.
Keillor home life was shaped by the strict demands of the their religion. Sunday worship was an all-day affair. Smoking, drinking, dancing, gambling and movies were all taboo. There was no television in the house, even in the mid
`50s, but Gary and his brothers and sisters were permitted the pleasures of baseball and bicycles and the radio.
The radio was, Kellior says, ”next to the state fair, the gaudiest and most extravagant entertainment we allowed ourselves. Nowadays, I guess, people think back to radio as something sort of benevolent, and they have warm, nostalgic feelings. But to me it was a great source of violence and horror, and comedy of course. A lot of excitement.
”There was a drama I remember hearing–was it the `Lux Radio Theatre`
?–where a monster came in the front door of a house where people were cowering and whimpering. You never saw this monster, but you heard breathing, footsteps, and you heard it beat down the door. It just came in like an inexorable force and it grabbed hold of a man and it shook him. And then it reached its hand down into his throat and pulled him inside out. I`ll never forget that sound. . . . It was the most horrible thing I had ever experienced in my life.”
Comedy made an impact, too. ”I remember `Fibber McGee and Molly` as being funny to me at that age. `My Friend Irma,` `My Little Luigi,` `Amos `n` Andy.` We all tried to do Amos `n` Andy accents.”
Young Gary`s model for storytelling was his great-uncle, Lou Powell, who came to the Keillor house on Saturday nights and would tell ”great disaster stories. . . . In one of his house-fire stories there were strong intimations of a family fortune that went up in flames, which hurt, and appealed to my imagination. He also told long monologues, which were just character pieces about himself and his family, just the same as any old gent would tell if he has a receptive audience. And we hung on every word.”
Gary found a friend and mentor in De Loyd Hochstetter, an English teacher at Anoka High School. Hochstetter virtually opened up the world to his writing-obsessed student. Hochstetter says, ”We`d go to a restaurant in north Minneapolis and have coffee and talk. He`d bring his manuscripts and copies of the New Yorker.” Later jazz, movies, plays and ballet became a part of Keillor`s life, in part due to Hochstetter`s influence.
This new-found worldly wisdom, however slight, may have contributed to a feeling that high school was pointless. His mother once had to talk him out of dropping out. Even later, in the early `60s at the University of Minnesota, Keillor never took his course work outside of literature seriously, though he did graduate with a bachelor`s degree in 1966. By this time, though, he was making his mark as editor of the Ivory Tower, the university literary magazine, for which he wrote essays, stories and poetry.
Gary was also transforming himself into a bohemian. He began smoking and drinking. According to his brother Philip, he took on the name Garrison Keillor, grew a beard and sometimes affected an English accent.
Keillor also rediscovered radio during those years. To help put himself through school, he took a part-time job as an announcer for KUOM, the university radio station. But before long he was in trouble. His bad-boy antics seem innocent enough now (”hot-air balloon traffic reports,” playing a Beatles album on a show devoted to the classics) but they upset the station`s executives. Unwilling to change his ways, Keillor quit.
Keillor later returned to radio at KSJN, the public radio station in St. Paul, and he has been there much of the time since. Eventually his bosses began marching to his drummer. From a New Yorker piece he wrote about the Grand Ole Opry in 1974, he got the idea of reviving an old-time radio program with live music of all kinds. That year he persuaded his bosses to start ”A Prairie Home Companion” with himself as host, and after experimenting with various comedy routines, Keillor settled into telling stories about a place called Lake Wobegon.
Since going national, the show has gained a huge audience, estimated at up to 2.5 million by executive producer Margaret Moos. Among public radio programs, only the daily news show ”All Things Considered” attracts a bigger audience.
By now the people and places of Lake Wobegon are familiar to regular listeners. They tune in to find out what`s doing with the Ingqvists, Johnsons, Bunsens and company.
To Jesse Bier, professor of American literature at the University of Montana and author of ”The Rise and Fall of American Humor,” the show represents ”a nostalgic throwback to rural American humor. It`s almost a last punctuation of small-town, rural American values. There`s more regret here than happy possession.”
Keillor, of course, denies that he is any champion of small-town life.
”There`s beauty in the countryside,” he says ”and something wonderful and beautiful about the people there.” But, more to the point, he says, ”I`m a champion of life`s small pleasures–and maybe a few other things that I`d be embarrassed to admit. But I certainly have not been urging people to go and live in small towns. I don`t know what they`d do for money, for one thing.”
For his money, Keillor has been writing steadily since the early 1970s for the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly and other publications. Writing is a very different kind of work from radio comedy, and he enjoys the rigors of both.
”Writing humorous fiction for the New Yorker has the great beauty of freedom,” he says. ”I can begin at any point that interests me. I can write about anybody and pursue wherever it follows. But the radio, though it is a little more circumscribed by virtue of being a performance, is emotionally freer.
”For someone as taciturn as myself and coming from people who tend to keep things in (especially the men), it`s good to put yourself out on stage where you`re in trouble. Sometimes you almost break into tears. I don`t believe in breaking into tears on the stage. But sometimes you are talking this story into the dark and you hear sniffling. You start to feel this heat in your eyeballs and you start to feel this twitchiness on your face. God, it`s exciting!”
