Butch Thompson Trio, Marty Dome, Garrison Keillor, Kate MacKenzie, Peter Ostroushko. Stoney Lonesome,
Old Family Radio ( Garrison Keillor ) Why must the show go on? ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie ) Old-fashioned love ( Kate MacKenzie ) Blue room ( Peter Ostroushko ) For mommy and daddy ( Peter Ostroushko ) Hey good lookin' ( Peter Ostroushko ) Some of these days (Butch Thompson Trio ) Waiting for the sunrise (Butch Thompson Trio ) Momma tried (Stoney Lonesome ) Going up (Stoney Lonesome ) Stony lonesome (Stoney Lonesome ) Stay all night (Stoney Lonesome ) Highway of regret ( Kate MacKenzie , Stoney Lonesome ) Organ sound effects ( Marty Dome ) Lucky day ( Marty Dome ) I got rhythm ( Marty Dome )
Ajua! Hot Sauce Bertha's Kitty Boutique Brother Bob Brother Bob Bud's Old Fashioned Salve Butch Thompson Music Corporation Chatterbox Cafe Father Emil Father Emil Organs by Barton Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Powdermilk Biscuits Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Sidetrack Tap Sister Verna Sister Verna Skoglund's Five and Dime Soderberg, Harlan Sons of Knute
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon Most of the storm windows have been put up, screens taken down, even despite this warm weather we've been having here. Except for a few people, of course, who put it off until the first snow flies, your dreamers, your unstable element in town. The Sons of Knute up to the Sons of Knute Temple held the annual ritual of the installation of the ancient and honorable storm windows. Here the other week in the annual House Cleaning. Day when the Grand Oya stands up on the steps of the temple and issues the call and says, Oh, and I'll ask the time for all you guys to come up and make this place spiffy! All the Oya's gathered down below, they sing, Oh, yeah. And they all go inside for a ritual taste of the amber essence of the blessed hops and spend a couple hours at that until they get to the point where you don't let them go at the storm windows for fear that storm window might jump out at a canoe and get them down on the ground, hurt them. So they all go home and sleep it off. Some of these can Knutes annual means that it takes a year to do it. I tell you, it's been a week. It has been a week during which things have just, I don't know, it's been chaos and madness in that town. I'm glad I'm away from it. Here this last Saturday they celebrated the feast day of St. Francis, a holiday that Father Emol detests above all others, but it's a tradition that precedes his pastorate there in town. So he's pretty much got to do it. Down on Main Street starts with the blessing of the animals and they bring them all in. They bring them all in dogs and cats and cows and sheep and pigs and horses and everything. They can find gerbils and rabbits and everything. You've got to stand up there and bless this whole motley crew, half of them attacking each other. And of course Father Emil is allergic to all of them except for snakes maybe or salamanders so after a while he's sneezing up there and people are saying, bless you, bless you Father. And he's got to climb on the back of an old perch around horse which has a big broad back that's kind of uncomfortable for an older gentleman and he has to lead the parade. Down Main Street and up to the church followed by the ocarina band of the third and fourth graders from Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility School. He's got to go get up in the pulpit and deliver a sermon on the teachings of St. Francis about poverty. Who believed that a wonderful freedom comes to people who renounce material possessions, a sermon that nobody believes. Well he's got to stand up there and say it. Most people like to have more to renounce before they get around to the renunciation. I'd like to save it until about the last 15 seconds of their life. And they'd like somebody to... somebody to put up a plaque on the spot, you know, with their name on it. I'll tell you, it's kind of a confusing week up there and of course this would be the week that Brother Bob and Sister Verna would come and visit town and carry on a four day revival up at the Lutheran Church. Along with their worldwide fields of harvest ministry team from Lincoln, Nebraska. This mainly consists of the two of them and their son Russell who plays the saxophone and their daughter Elaine who does a lot of witnessing. But Verna is Pastor Inquist's aunt and so when they get the Lord's call to come and preach he can't very well say no, but four nights of it. I tell you, there's a town you know in which people live year round in the belief that it's a town of decent hardworking Godfearing church going people who are just doing the best they can. And then he comes, stands up and that pulpit and fixes you with a good hard look and starts talking about Lake Wobegon. And some kind of Sodom and Gomorrah out on the prairie. A sinkhole of debauchery and sin. And collection of whitened sepulchers and looking at them especially the ones sitting down in front. Oh it's hard. His text is for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. And I'm sure that's true but it's not the only verse in the Bible. That's his text for the whole week and you've got to go to at least three out of the four services or people will talk. People come early so they can sit way in back. The latecomers have to come down front and sit where he can fix his eye on you. But he can make you believe in about 20 minutes that if you don't come up front at the end of that service and kneel down here and shed a few genuine tears that you're going to go out the back door of this hall and a truck is going to hit you. Well Father Emil looks on this with some amusement as something that Protestants do to each other out of boredom with an inferior theology. But I'll tell you brother Bob makes him feel good and uneasy too. Father Emil walks downtown one brother Bob and Sister Verna in town. He keeps a sharp eye who's coming up side streets who might be coming out of the front door. He's ready to turn on a moment's notice and flee. Well of course this would be the week wouldn't you know that the Soderbergs would celebrate their 40th anniversary at the Sons of Knute Temple. And I don't know what happened to Harlan I guess maybe with 40 years under his belt he got over confident. But he took himself a big drink. Something he promised Elsie years ago he would never do. Now Harlan is one of those people and like Wogegon. See there are no social drinkers and like Wobegon. There are no people who just come home in the evening and have a tooth. So you don't do that. There are guys who go for years and years and years and never have anything and then they'll have something. And as long as you have opened the bottle they figure you drink it all otherwise you're wasting the experience. Harlan was one of those. I tell you he must have thought he was invisible. Otherwise why would he have done what he did in front of so many people. Well it was the next morning. It was the next morning when Harlan was feeling at his worst. And he had gotten up and you know he was kind of holding his head under one arm. Being careful not to drop it on the floor. When Brother Bob came to pay a call and talked at him for a while and that voice it's like a chainsaw. Until Harlan reached over to the wall and he took hold of the shotgun. And he put it to his own head and he said that if Brother Bob didn't go out the same way he came in he Harlan was going to usher himself into eternity and take his chances. Then of course on Tuesday the town council had to take up the question of putting up a community antenna, a TV antenna up on top of the water tower. I don't know why they had to do it when Brother Bob was in town. It was like an open invitation and he accepted it. Right now television in Lake Wobegon is kind of radio with a few general outlines. So there have been people who have been agitating for this put up an antenna on top of the water tower. Let's have us a signal. When Brother Bob came and he got up first to speak there wasn't any way to stop him. He stood up and talked about television and all the trash and how it dulls people's moral senses and it breaks up the family and distracts people from their spiritual obligations. Well a few people kind of murmured something after that about educational television. The fact that there might be a few good things on Mayor Clint Bunsen stood up to say they probably couldn't afford it anyway. They had to get a new snow plow. Councilman Peterson said if Bud was going to be doing the plowing this winter probably everybody would be stuck in their homes they'd need some entertainment. So then Bud and his whole family had to get up and talk about Councilman Peterson for a while which they didn't. And then Brother Bob got up for another go around. He said he knew that young people would sometimes climb that water tower. It's wrong, it's disobedient to do it but young people will do it. It's just something you do if you live in Lake Wabagum. You come to a certain age and he said well it's time to climb the water tower. So you climb up it and you look out over the town you come down and that's it. You've done it. Or Brother Bob said there are children climbing that and he said I don't care what kind of insulation you use. He said you're putting electricity in proximity to water you're begging for the judgment of the Lord. And he painted quite a graphic picture of all of our children climbing that water tower at one time. And then it kind of a sizzling sound. And all of them dropping like flies. A mass funeral closed coffins. Well I hadn't bought killed it there wasn't anything anybody could say after that. They voted for the nothing against it with Councilman Peterson abstaining Bud and his family remarking that it was about the only time he had abstained. And that was the meeting. I tell you you know people talk about living in small towns and enjoying the peace and quiet. It's just a joke sometimes. Sometimes it just is too much. All these people coming at you living there. Cheek to cheek and elbow to elbow and sometimes you just have to get away from them. I'm glad I left on tour. When I'm back home what I like to do is go out the back door. Go out through the kitchen. Out through the mudroom down the steps out across the yard. Take a left at the grain ring. Go out past the old gas pump. Help me on the wind break. Go out there in the weeds next to the corn. Lie down. Look up at the sky. It's a great thing. I recommend it to you. Makes you feel better. You know you can look at the sky standing up. But when you do you tend to see it as kind of a backdrop to ourselves you know. A backdrop to the clothesline and the grain ring and the trees. And you see the sky as sort of a canopy that is centered over us. We are the center of it. But when you lie down you eliminate the horizon which gives us this strange realistic perspective. And you lie there and look up and see everything as it is. You see that we live on a little grain of sand in a vast ocean of light. For every one of those billion stars out there there's a billion that we can't see. There are beyonds that are way beyond that beyond. Endless. But all that we know, all that we know about anything at all compared to that out there is like a grain of sand. It's like a nickel thrown into the Grand Canyon or it's like the amount of the Pacific Ocean that you bring home in your swim trunks. Now sometimes when you leave to go out and lie down at night and look at the stars somebody will say well where are you going? And I say well I'm going to go out and look at the stars. And so they say well I'll come out with you. Now I sneak out. Because you know whenever you lie there and look at the stars with somebody else alongside you even if there's someone you love one of you feels obligated to make a comment about it. You can only lie there silent so long. One of you has to say oh it's incredible. And compared to the universe anything that a person can say is like a little pea that's dropped in a pale. It just makes a little clunk. It's beautiful you say and you're a little. When you think to yourself there I go again. One more pea brain has to lie here. Looking at the south wall of the everything there is of the world without end amen and has to say that he appreciates it. No I lie out there by myself look up at the stars and they seem to get closer and you feel that you could take a step and walk off the ground and walk up through the air and into past the moon and out into the stars. Sometimes I feel as if I came from there. That I came from a suburb of Andromeda. And my dad owned a chain of planets. And where everyone in our race had immense heads as big as bushel baskets and big bulbous eyes. And we looked around us and saw the whole universe and were not frightened because we knew that though we were small every part contains the majesty of the whole. That's usually when I come in. I do come in. I do come in. I don't stay out there. But about an hour looking at the universe is enough for me. I like to come in and you know this for a fact. That the sight of stars people do not pale in comparison to stars. When you lie on the ground and your pupils enlarge to receive this light some of it a million years old and to look at tiny tiny points of light in the sky. When you come inside you are opened up so that everyone that you see all the people that you see who might have disgusted you an hour before appear now to be wonderful beings with an aura of grace and light about them that you had not seen before. Well Duane Bunsen got himself a telescope back home. Set it up on the back stoop. His father Clarence thought that he was using it not so much to look at the stars and the cosmos has to keep track of Virginia Hulfenstein who lives across the street and down two houses. So as father's will he sort of jumped to the conclusion and he bolted that tripod down onto the porch and he put a nut in the transit so you could not lower it below 25 degrees above the horizon. Well Duane said, Dad he said it's alright. He said you know when I look at the Milky Way and at the universe all of our little fears our little suspicions seem so petty. So Clarence went out and took the bolts out and took it back. Duane is out on the porch right now I'll bet you with Virginia Hulfenstein looking at distant stars. His dad is inside listening to the Brewers game on television trying to adjust the channel get a little bit of a picture. Thanks to news from Lake Wobegon Minnesota where all the women are strong. All the men are good looking and all the children are above average.
The Milwaukee Brewers are playing the LA Angels in the AL finals. Station WHA is celebrating its 65th anniversary. GK knows that he is a biscuit, not a croissant. Skit: For Whom the Sun Rises.
Wisconsin State Journal Oct 5 1982 Wisconsin State Journal Oct 6 1982
1982.09.05 Wisconsin State Journal / 1982.10.05 Madison Capital Times: 'non-broadcast version' / 1983.08.22 Madison Capital Times: 'from Madison Civic Center'
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl