Butch Thompson Trio, Garrison Keillor, Kate MacKenzie, John Niemann, Norman and Nancy Blake, Peter Ostroushko. Rising Fawn String Ensemble, Stoney Lonesome, Joe Trimbach,
Old Family Radio ( Garrison Keillor , Stoney Lonesome ) Sweet Lorraine ( Peter Ostroushko ) Mandy Make Up Your Mind (Butch Thompson Trio ) I Was Born 400 Years Ago (Norman and Nancy Blake ) Mandoline Medley (Norman and Nancy Blake , Rising Fawn String Ensemble ) I Never Goes Around Mirrors - Jukebox ( Peter Ostroushko ) A Girl to Fall in Love With (Butch Thompson Trio ) Sing A Song We Sang Together (Stoney Lonesome ) Chain Gang (Stoney Lonesome ) Bertha's Theme Song (Stoney Lonesome ) Mandolin music ( Peter Ostroushko , John Niemann , Joe Trimbach ) I've been mistreated (Butch Thompson Trio ) Billy Gray (Norman and Nancy Blake ) Nashville Blues (Norman and Nancy Blake , Rising Fawn String Ensemble ) Walkin' In Jerusalem Just Like John (Stoney Lonesome , Peter Ostroushko ) Ahua Theme Song (Stoney Lonesome , Peter Ostroushko )
Ahua Hot Sauce Al's Breakfast Cafe (For singles only...some people are morning people, and some are not!) Bertha's Kitty Boutique (better cat beds) Powdermilk Biscuits (Tripping on Stage, is there a doctor in the house?) Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery (He doesn't carry gourmet foods because of the deadbeat credit customers he has...Pay Up!) The Butch Thompson Music Corporation (Mazzola F-80 Sound System)
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Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Today was the start of duck hunting season, and most people in town were staying low, knowing that the Sons of Knute were out at the Pete Peterson Memorial Duck Blind and Hunting Lodge out to the northeastern end of the lake for the annual shoot. They were out there early. They didn't open at noon today. They were out early with Mr. Berkey's artillery punch, which is, well, you know why it's named that, and every drink is sort of a direct hit. By the time the season opened at noon, they were getting kind of loose and rowdy. The big decoys, the giant 10-foot decoys, they got them out there on the lake, all right? Though one of them sprung a leak, and one of the Knuts had to go out and sit on its back and put a hose in and pump. Rest of them were crouched down in the weeds, blasting away on their duck calls. There was one flight of ducks that went over just a little south of them. Well, early this afternoon, flew over town. People said it sounded like they were laughing. The news from the sidetrack tap this last week, Mr. Senator K. Torvaldsen was in at the Sidetrack here on Tuesday and announced that he will be leaving town to spend the winter in Orlando, Florida. Something that Senator Torvaldsen found it difficult to do, he's always maintained that only the age at end the infirm tried to run away from winter, which God gave us for a purpose after all. But now that he's 74 and has a pretty good case of arthritis, I guess he's starting to qualify. He's going down there because he got a letter from his niece, Donna, who's been having a lot of troubles lately, sort of prematurely depressed and needs a little cheering up. And of course, that has been his life work. Well, I think ever since he's born. Those of you who don't know him, I should point out that Senator K. Torvaldsen was never elected to office. He was named that by his mother who thought it had a sort of a ring to it. Named him after Senator Knute Nelson, who was the first Scandinavian elected to the U.S. Senate from Minnesota after a long string of New England Yankees. But if you didn't know him, you might think he was a politician. He's kind of got that sunny disposition that politicians aim for. If you met him on the street and heard him tell you what a fine day it was, how handsome your children are, how well you look, how young you look, and that your car is just the car he would have bought if he were going to buy a car. He'd kind of brace yourself waiting for him to put the bite on you. But you see, it's just his way. It's just his way. Somebody told me once that he knew more dirty jokes than anybody in town and knew just who to tell him to. I asked him once why he never told me, Annie. And he said, my boy. He said, you're in the flower of youth. And such innocent sir I could not bring myself to Sully. Which made all these cronies sitting there on the bench in front of the side track kind of fall over in a heap, cackling. He leaned up and whispered in my ear. He said, son, the jealousy of old men is not a pretty sight. Kind of brightened my day as he's brightened so many. Nobody ever knew how he earned a living. Others than just by giving people the big hello and the big greeting and making people feel better in town. He always sold a little life insurance, I guess, did a little real estate, little amateur legal work. Made a few investments, but most of them bad. A man who might invest in a car wash and the next day it started to rain. He would invest in wheat futures and the next day a drought began. But a lot of people, well, no, that doesn't make sense. If there were a drought and the price of wheat would go up and he'd make money on futures, wouldn't he? Well, maybe that's where he got his money. Maybe that's where he got his money. He's got more than I think he does. Ever understood wheat futures? A lot of people have felt that Senator Torvaldson lives on a stipend from the Powdermilk Biscuit Company. And there might be some truth to that kind of an interesting story. The Powdermilk Biscuit Company, it's a centennial, is coming here. Yommer Inqvist says he's going to celebrate it four years early, actually, the company that wasn't started until 1887. But Hjalmer isn't sure he'll be up for it in five more years. Besides his ancestors, the Incivest Brothers, who started the company in a manner of speaking, came over from Norway in 1883. So maybe they'll celebrate that next year. And Mr. Torvaldson will be there even though their arrival in Lake Wobegon was not an auspicious event. The Inqvist Boys, Pere and Iver, were sent to the New World by their father, who was a shipbuilder in Oslo. For the same reason, not a lot of families sent their young people over here because they weren't amounting to anything in the old world. They seemed to lack direction or drive or ambition. They're kind of wandering around, bumping into things, sort of dazed by adulthood, fooling around back in the old country. The family got tired of having two big lunks sitting around, gave them their inheritance, and said, go, grow up over there in the new world. Make something of yourself, and if you do come back in 10-15 years and show us what it is. So they sent the two boys over to America. They came to Lake Wobegon because they had a cousin there. The one they arrived, they found that he had moved on to Seattle. So they moved into his house. And about five years later, Iver married the cousin's wife. They're having been no word from Seattle. They went ahead and did the best they could. Took over the family. They spoke no English, and they were considered kind of odd ducks. And photographs tend to bear that out. Two tall fellows kind of angular, who didn't seem to know what to do with their arms or legs. One of them standing one sitting in the photograph I'm thinking of, decked out in bib overalls, white shirt, bow ties, and black derby hats. With kind of vacant expressions in their eyes as if they were looking at a point about five feet this side of the camera. The one who's sitting down is holding a rifle in his lab. And you look at them and you just hope that they don't hurt themselves. Well, they came to Lake Wobegon in 1883. And about 1884, the thought occurred to them that they may be ought to find an occupation or business or something. And one day, Pere suggested to Iver that they start a brewery. And I ever agreed, assuming by that that Pere knew how to make beer or knew something about it. And they had put up a fine building down by the lake, and the vats and the boilers and the machinery were shipped up and installed before the awful truth dawned on them. He found his brother, Iver did, found his brother one morning sitting on a bag of hops, reading a book about how to make beer. It was written in German. But he thought he could follow the main points. And he said, I think that you put these in here and this thing here and you cover it with water. And it sits for a while. And I ever said, it needs to be cries and doesn't it? Pere said, how do you spell that? Well, that was the day that I ever sent for a brewer from Chicago, the first of four that they hired and fired in about two months, all of them drunks. And eventually they did bring out an ink-vist beer, which was kind of yellowish and smelled funny. Did not produce a head and had some kind of grayish material in the bottom of the bottom. Neither of them dared to taste. Well, there was a man, a fine gentleman in Lake Wobagon, by the name of Hilmer Torvaldsen. And when his youngest daughter fell in love with one of the ink-vist boys, the one who hadn't married the cousin's wife. Hilmer took him under his wing and he taught him to speak English and he showed him how to dress. And because he had been a miller back in the old country, he came to work for him and they set up the Lake Wobagon Flower Mill, which manufactured Wobegon Flour. Until later they changed the name to Hygienic Flower and eventually became Powder Milk. Now it was a company that was run from below. It was kind of like one of those clown cars, you know, a couple clowns sitting in the front seat that get out the car chasing them. Hilmer ran the company and up in the executive suite the boys pursued their hobbies. They were the first in Lake Wobegon to own a camera. They were the first to buy a car. They were the first to go for a ride in an airplane, the first to own an Edison cylinder phonograph and later a Victrola. They were the first to own a movie camera and shot thousands of feet of film, mostly of people standing watching them doing it. They bought the first radio and later established their own little radio station and broadcast for a couple of days before they got interested in something else. And they just went in for everything that was new, everything that was amusing. They bought toys all their lives. People gradually came to accept that and to love them and to know that they would never change and they would never grow up and they never did until they died within two weeks of each other. In the spring of 1933 having completed what they considered their great project in life, filming all of Lake Wobegon's buildings, a feature length motion picture that many people have seen and said is quite interesting. People have wondered about the Inkvis boys, what was their legacy other than their gravestones? It wasn't Powdermilk Biscuits, that was Mr. Torvaldsen's work. They left behind a little radio scholarship fund, which I appreciated helped me get into radio, thank goodness nobody else knew about it to apply for it. But that's not a big contribution to make to the world. Their possessions were all sold, their homes were sold. People have wondered what did they leave behind? Well, they're foolishness. You know, when two of the founders, two of the founding fathers, the forefathers, the ancestors in a town are ne'er-do-wells and spend-threths and fools, it takes a lot of pressure off the rest of us. A lot of our ancestors stare down at us pretty fiercely from between those guilt frames, but the Inqvists look out from their photographs and give us kind of an absent look. They're not thinking about us, they're thinking about hunting squirrels, or building a big rocket, or thinking about learning the Mando-cello. They're thinking about radio, or they're thinking about training a dog to roll over and play dead when he hears the word Lutheran. All those things. We've all been given, you know? We've all been given kind of an inspirational account of our family's history. But back there, in your tree, there are some ancestors who are like us. Find them. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
1982.09.25 Winona Daily News / Conflicting date info- both Rochester dates can't be right - it's either the 2nd or the 12th, not both.
Archival contributors: Ken Kuhl