Stevie Beck, Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Richard Dworsky, Prudence Johnson, Persuasions, Sima Schumilofsky. Pop Wagner,
[undocumented]
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, and it's going to be a even quieter weekend, and probably part of this next week there's snowed in up there. Lake Wobegon is a town that is that is quite pleased to be snowed in. Actually keeps the wrong element out of town and keeps people to home to tend to their business. They had plenty of warning that this heavy snow was coming, so I think they're all stocked up on provisions and warm and comfortable in town and out all the farms around my little hometown, though, I do think during a blizzard of old Mr. Hogrood, during the last big one back in 1975 he and Elsie were all settled in out on the farm. They had the stock in, and everything was battened down as the blizzard hit. Got a lot of snow and it was quite windy by about two that first afternoon when Ernie noticed that he had only one cigarette left in his pack.
You know, a grown man kind of hates to get too excited about a little thing like that. So for the next hour or so, he took his mind off it by searching down behind the cushions in the sofa and all around the bed, under the rugs. He pretty well turned everything over twice in that house, and then he sat down and looked at the one cigarette which was there on the kitchen table. He said, well, well, Elsie. He said, I think the best thing to do would be just to smoke it, get it over with, and then I'll just forget about it. So he did. He took it down in about three puffs. He sat there for about five minutes. You could tell he was troubled.
Well, he said, I think I'll get dressed and go out and check on the stock. She said, No, or any don't she tried to stop him, but she couldn't. He broke away and he headed off down the road into town. Thank goodness the neighbors were able to see him. They were out towards the end of their driveway trying to plow out, and they saw him out there on the county road, leaning at about a 45 degree angle, not moving, just trying to hold his own against the wind. Well, it seemed to have done him some good. He was offered a cigarette by the neighbor who had a couple left in his pack. And he said, No. He said, I don't think it's worth killing yourself or something that doesn't taste that good in the first place. It rid him by the habit. So it did somebody some good.
I hate to think though of what had happened if he'd been in there for two three more days. Poor old man, they have plowed the skating rink off, though. However, even though they haven't plowed the roads, it is talking about the rink down on the lake now, not the one that used to be up by the school. That's not there anymore. In case you haven't been back for a while, I.
The skating rink has always been the real social headquarters in Lake Wobegon, all during the winter months, and it's also been the one place where people could feel graceful during the winter. You know, you walk bundled up in heavy clothes and walking on snow and ice, you don't exactly feel like a dancer, but when you strap on the long blades and you go out on the ice with someone whom you love, Lord, it brings out all sorts of things you never knew were in you. Some people have put on quite an exhibition up there, old gentlemen and older women doing figure eights and circles out there on the ice.
There was a motion before the town council here this last Tuesday to tear down the old warming house that's been there now for 57 years and to build a new one. Mr. Ink fest, old Mr. Ink fist been campaigning for that for years, saying that the old one is a fire hazard and a disgrace to the town. But when bud mentioned the figure of $1,500 to build a new one and haul the old one off, they tabled that motion as quickly as they could. Actually, they put it on the floor and put the table on top of it. They don't have money for that sort of thing.
They figured the town council did. It might be a fire hazard, but if it were to go up, the skaters could get out in time and be all the more warm for it. And as for it being a disgrace, I tell you, any town whose reputation is so slim that it could be disgraced by an old warming house has got a lot more things to worry about. 57 years it's been there on the side of the lake. It used to be somebody's tool shed, and then it was a chicken house before it was moved there to become a warming house. And whenever bud fires up the old wood stove and it gets warm in there, you can smell the chickens.
You think, yeah, there were chickens in here at one time, all right, old wood stove sits in the middle little pile of wood beside it, and a bench runs along the wall on three sides around that where generations of skaters have changed into their skates. The old wood floor is all carved up from the blades and the walls and the benches are pretty well carved up too, which may be what old Mr. Ink fist means when he talks about it being a disgrace. I don't know how to put this, but there have been a lot of children who have been surprised to see their mother or father's name linked romantically in carvings, in those historic carvings, with someone other than their father or mother.
It's a shock to children you know to realize that your parents might have, might have had their cap hung for somebody else at one time, might have had their eyes on someone other than each other. Child would like to think you know that as soon as your parents came of age, they would have just gotten down to the business of having you, which is, after all, their main reason for being.
But you read those carvings, and evidently some of them were skylarking around when they were when they were younger. When is the time for that anyway, in Lake Wobegon, I think that hot weather takes the starch out of a person, but in the cold weather, and especially in the warming house, in the cold weather, a person has all sorts of longings and urges that may be where your parents first sat and Got the idea of you in that old warming house, I bet if you looked at the records in Lake Wobegon, you'd find a lot more children born in the fall than in the spring, and the ones that were born in the fall, there was more conviction behind it, and that Old warming house is where a lot of it began. Shy children going out on the ice, getting into games of Pom Pom, pull away to crack the whip, learning how to hold a girl's hand as she flings you across the ice and.
And then, and then, of course, to skate as a couple. I tell you, there are a lot of couples in Lake Wobegon learn how to skate, holding hands with their arms crossed. And once you master that and learn how to do figures as a couple, I guess they figured it wasn't that much harder to get married. The one just seemed to lead to the other.
So bud be out plowing the skating rink tomorrow. The roads can wait until Tuesday. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
Minneapolis Star Jan 22 1982
1982.01.22 Star Tribune / Audio of the News available as a digital download.
Archival contributors: Frank Berto