New Prairie Ramblers, Claudia Schmidt.
[undocumented]
Dr Newt
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It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. The big news item, I guess, is the news that Dr. Newt is retiring, the town dentist, retiring after some 44 years, I believe, as dentist in that town. A lot of people have grown up in his chair in more ways than one. Not quite sure what they're going to do without him. Probably have to drive 50 miles into another dentist, one of those young dentists, ones with the decor, you know, and the dim lights and the soft music, and the ones who keep their drill camouflaged back behind potted plants. Painless dentistry, what they call it, painless until you get the bill for it anyway. Dr. Newt, there was pain once in a while. People in town can testify to that. But he was a wonderful craftsman of the teeth, and he made those fillings to last. And they did. They were probably the only permanent part of your body. Stayed a lifetime, and so far as we know, long beyond. Long beyond. And his prices were reasonable, and sometimes worked for nothing. Nuns he worked on for nothing, and poor people, and chicken farmers he worked on for nothing. Going back to the Depression when he used to accept chickens in payment for dental work, and after a few years of that sort of diet, he decided it was worth it to him not to charge him anything. People who kept chickens or smelled like it anyway. It's going to be kind of a shock to him to retire as well as to his patients in town. You think of it all these years, 44 years, he has been talking to people with big cotton wads in their mouths, or people with their lips all floppy from Novocaine. And now he is going to have to adjust himself to people actually talking back when he talks to them, and making reply, which is hard after you've put in 44 years of a monologue. So he's going to ease into it and spend the first month or two here pretty much by himself. He's going to spend a lot of time fishing, which he is also good at, and a craftsman of the rod and reel. He doesn't just lean back and throw the bait out there. He leans over it and he works that bait around. He talks to those fish. He says, open up now. This may hurt a little bit. All right, now bite down. We wish him well, Dr. Newt, and also his assistant Rosemary, who's received a lot of job offers and can have her pick of any of them. I tell you, she has comforted just about everybody in that town at moments of great distress. And a person like that can have their pick of anything they want. Nothing is too good for them. It rained a little bit in Lake Wobegon here on Thursday, not a whole lot, but enough. And a lot of those vegetable gardens in town that were starting to droop have picked up steam now and picking up momentum. Coming up towards harvest now. A lot of people in the month of August are going to have to face up to the consequences of that vegetable fever that sweeps Lake Wobegon every spring. People get enthusiastic back in the spring and they buy a lot of seeds out of the catalogs and they put in two, three, four dozen tomato plants. And then they tend them so well that those plants just produce right up to peak capacity. And of course, it's wrong to let the stuff go to waste. And you can't give it away to anybody because everybody's got more than enough of their own. So you have to put up the tomatoes. And I know it seems strange to those of you who put down good money for three, four tomatoes wrapped in cellophane in the store. But after you have put up about 50 quarts of tomatoes and you hardly put a dent in the crop,it's a real temptation to go out into the patch at night and just start hurling them as far as you can throw them. Go out there and just dance on them. Oh my, we used to have tomato fights when I was a kid. I know it seems wasteful to throw away good food like that, but we didn't pick the good tomatoes to throw at each other. We'd reach down way under the vine, get those big ones that were so big they'd fallen off the vine and they'd sat on the ground for about three weeks. The ones that were about half rotten and turned about half brown under there sitting on the ground. You'd have to pick them up real carefully so they wouldn't burst. And there, just about 20 feet ahead of you down the row, was your older brother, bent over. Oh, I'll tell you, there's nothing like throwing a real overripe tomato at somebody. They just seemed to explode when they hit. It does you good, too. I'll tell you, throwing a tomato at your older brother who's been tormenting you all your life does you good that no psychiatrist can ever do for you. Just so long as you remember the moment you release it, you just run as fast as your little legs can carry you. You go right in the house and you find your mom. And you say, hi, mom. Can I help you with the dishes? Can I help you make the beds? Can I do something else? Can I just stand right here by you for a while? Yes, sir. Anyway, there's a big surplus of vegetables out there in Lake Wobegon. Sweet corn and zucchinis, or some kids would rather not see a zucchini. Had them three meals a day now for weeks. So if you should go out there and people offer you a big bushel of stuff, don't you turn it down. Don't say, oh, no, that's too much. I can't accept all that. Yes, you can. And you'd better if you know what's good for you. That's the news pretty much from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Big harvest coming up soon. The Whippets game, I should mention, the Whippets game was called off on Sunday on account of the hot weather. And they will play tomorrow a doubleheader against the Freeport Flyers at 1.30. So that's tomorrow, the Freeport Flyers. There will be a ceremony in between the two games of the doubleheader honoring the Whippet slugger Wayne Tomerdahl, old warning track Tomerdahl, who this last week hit his 1,000th long fly ball and will be given a plaque by the Boosters Club. Some of those fly balls were real long ones, too, about as long as a fly ball can be and still be caught, as all of them were. A lot of people have said that if the fences were just brought in about 30 or 40 feet, old Wayne could be in the bigs now. But Wayne isn't the fellow to look back or think about what might have been. He's proud of his record. As he says, he's always gotten good wood on the ball, always met it, and he always had. Yes, sir. Those were long fly balls, a lot of them. I remember a lot of them. Put all those fly balls together, they would have gone a long ways. Yes, sir. That's tomorrow in Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong and all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average. You're listening to A Prairie Home Companion coming to you live from the World Theater in downtown St. Paul.
1980.07.13 Murfreesboro Daily News / Audio of the News available as a digital download.
Archival contributors: Ken Kuhl