Roy Blount Jr, Butch Thompson Trio, Margaret MacArthur, Kate MacKenzie, Bill Staines. Stoney Lonesome,
Song of the wanderer (Butch Thompson Trio ) Echoes of spring (Butch Thompson Trio ) Sweet Wyoming home ( Bill Staines ) Faith of man ( Bill Staines ) A bug on the windshield of life ( Roy Blount Jr ) My sweet memory ( Kate MacKenzie ) Before the sun goes down ( Kate MacKenzie ) Bound to Ride ( Kate MacKenzie ) Fifty years ago ( Margaret MacArthur ) Oh Mary ( Margaret MacArthur ) Mary Shimansky ( Margaret MacArthur ) Darlin Cory (Stoney Lonesome )
Ajua! Hot Sauce Bertha's Kitty Boutique Bunsen Motors Butch Thompson Music Corporation Jack's Scraps for Dogs Krebsbach, Carl Porcelain Pig Products Powdermilk Biscuits Sidetrack Tap Skoglund's Five and Dime Tolerude, Marlis
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, Mr. Clarence Bunsen here on Tuesday, started in to redecorate his office down at Bunsen Motors had Carl Krebs Bach in to do the job. This is in the one story annex alongside Bunsen mortars the brick building. Carl went in to strip the wallpaper off the ceiling. Noticed the plaster was a little loose, scraped that off, reached up, grabbed hold of the Les a big piece of that came out, stuck his hand in, up amongst the beams, and pushed, and there was a cracking sound. All of a sudden, he could see blue sky from Clarence bunsen's office pushed a little bit harder, and a whole bunch of it sagged down two three feet. He ran out. He said to Clarence, it's a good thing I got here when I did. It could have fallen down and killed you. Clarence said, I kind of regret you're having taken that wallpaper off the ceiling. It's probably all that's been keeping it up. Now, what are we going to do? Carl didn't know. He didn't care to go in there and work on it. So it's been sitting there with a big hole in the ceiling now all week, while they discuss various alternatives and methods. And had better do something soon, unless Clarence enjoys sitting in the snow more than I think he does. It snowed a little bit here this last week, little snow that seemed to want to stay on the ground for a while and not melt right away, which it didn't have to, because it was cold most of the week too. People were going around smelling of moth balls from here all the woolens they had dug out of the cedar chest, including woolen underwear, which even now still some of the old guys wear, which I wore when I was a kid, woolen long underwear, until I got to the age where I had some say in the Matter, and I switched to cotton because it was sophisticated. I thought didn't make you look so lumpy. Also, it didn't scratch you so badly. Woolen underwear, I don't know how many of you have ever sat in it for a period of time, but it's impossible to do sit still, which is probably why we wore it, intended to keep us active in the cold weather. Read those stories about somebody getting lost out in a blizzard and feeling sleepy and lying down and freezing to death. Well, they wouldn't have done it if they'd had woolens on. Would have kept awake just scratching, would have wanted to get up from there and run home and get the things off. I just itched thinking about it, thinking about Sunday morning service, long service, two hours for a boy and a pair of woolen long underwear. And, of course, the places where it tortured you the most were all the places you couldn't scratch, at least not in church. You weren't supposed to for some reason, I don't know why I would think that you shouldn't, certainly not, because they thought God was there and watching us. I mean, he'd seen all that and seen a lot more than that, sit there with adults looking at you as you squirmed in your seat, and the preacher could scratch because he had the pulpit shielding him there. He was working at it pretty good, and older guys could scratch because they had learned that trick of reaching down into your pocket like you looking for a dime down there, looking for it and working it around until you solve the problem. But a kid didn't know that. Kid had to just sit there like a turtle and Les. I come from a decorous background, polite people, least on one side of my family. The other side was more country people, and they itched when they scratched, and if they had phlegm in their throats, they'd give out with a big and not care about it, which my mother's side of the family thought was just disgusting and awful, especially my Uncle Art, who was a bachelor and who was never much of a talker. But when he'd come in after chores in the evening, I remember he'd stand there at the door, and he'd give us a big blast, kind of like an elephant, letting the other elephants in the herd know that he's around. You know, everybody should be alert. They never talked much so that. How he expressed himself, mainly was through throat clearing. He'd clear his throat. You'd wait for him to say something he wouldn't. But if the conversation around dinner took a turn that he considered silly or wrong headed or unChristian or frivolous or something, remind us that he was still there and that he was listening to us. Now, on my mother's side of the family, they wouldn't do that. It was not uncommon for one of the aunts to excuse herself from the table and Go on upstairs and go into the bathroom and run water in the sink, and if you listen very carefully, listen very closely, you'd hear a little lady like going upstairs blow her nose. My father's family thought that was ridiculous. Uncle Art, he did it right at the table, pulled out a big red bandana about size of a dish towel, and examined it, picked out his spot, gave it a good honk, two longs and two shorts, and put it back in his pocket, juicy ones. My mother would stop eating at that point and look off into the distance till she recovered her composure, gotten her appetite back, and then he'd give her up, and she'd about jump out of her chair. I never knew just where to stand on that question of propriety and manners. I always kind of envied people who just let fly with it. You know, I never worried what other people might think, like the Norwegian bachelor farmers used to sit down on the plank bench on a summer day in front of the side track tap and in a town that showed so much rectitude and so much propriety, here these old grizzled guys sit there in ragged old clothes, Two three weeks worth of beard on them and hair uncombed and sit there and drink beer and snort at the idea of family or church or school or politics or anything, just made fun of all I sat there and leaned forward and let fly with a snus when they wanted To wipe their chins over the backs of their hands. A lot of decent people in that town were willing to cross the street to avoid walking in front of them, but those guys had considered themselves to be some kind of aristocracy, to be the most intelligent, the only sane people in town, people who lived the way they wanted to. I remember going out to see one of Mr. Hoggy about a dog he was going to sell, and seeing his little shack and his cot and his wood stove and the sink, and saying that I didn't think I could live out there all by myself the way he did. He looked at me and he said, No. He said, If I were you, I don't think I could either. Always envied people who were loose and loud and boisterous, but some of them kind of like cars with loud mufflers they didn't wear well over a long period of time. I think about the boy that marless tolerude married seemed so charming at first, because he could belch, he could yodel, he could do cartwheels, he could light big flames out of his rear end. But after a while, you noticed that those were the only things he knew how to do. He drew on them too often. And when they moved to Florida about three years ago, most people were quite willing to let Florida have him, the ones I miss are the ones I didn't notice so much the first time around because they were so quiet, like my aunt, who would go upstairs in the bathroom to blow her nose, Aunt Dee, she was a lady who, if you were Feeling bad and so cast down that you almost couldn't bear to be around other people, and every word that was spoken just seemed to cut you. She was somebody who would notice. See child has all this raw skin so little things. Hurt you that grown ups wouldn't notice, but she noticed, and it made me think years afterward that her good manners, her fragrant, old fashioned good manners, were not motivated by fear, but were a sort of gentleness that she was a child herself and was hurt by small things, and so if you were hurt, she'd be the first one to sense it, and she'd do some kind thing for you, or give you some gift or compliment you in some way to bring you back, she'd say, you know, I've never seen anyone do such a good job of peeling potatoes as you did. I just don't think I even want to mash them. I'm just going to boil them so everybody can see I was hurt by odd things. People would say, some kid on the playground say, You got skinny wrists, your teeth are green, you're dumb, and it hurt. She was hurt by things being out of place and all the care that she gave to little things and her elaborate manners and her delicate voice, and the delicate table that she set with everything perfectly in place, and the bouquet of flowers in A cut glass vase in the middle, which she pronounced Voss and which she fussed over, were all magical items to ward off grief and pain from us, and were tokens of her love. I miss her. I wish I talked to her more. I caught her once blowing smoke from a cigarette. It was her terrible secret that she bought two camels, two packs of camels every year on a trip to Minneapolis, and every couple weeks, she'd light one up, and she'd puff smoke at her African Violets to rid them of aphids. I came to her house to surprise her with a drawing I had made of her, and walked in without knocking, and all of a sudden, she was up in the air, and she was waving frantically at the air, trying to scrape the smoke away so I wouldn't see it. And she said, Don't Tell. Don't tell. I don't inhale. She said, I never had a grown person beg me not to tell before. Made me want to go tell everybody. But she turned toward me, and her eyes were full of tears. She said, don't tell. I haven't until now. She'd die if she knew. But she's beyond knowing she's already dead. I don't know why we hurt so much some people do, but you know, I think the best thing we can do for him is to do something so well that it's almost perfect, whether you make a perfect meal, or whether you just mow the law the lawn perfectly, get nail clippers out and get down and work on the borders and edge it so that it's just perfect, or do what Aunt Dee Did and spend days and days, tatting a little pillow slip and every stitch perfect, even if it was for Uncle Art to lay his head down and sit there and snort and still, somebody in pain might lie down there, put their head there and see it sometime, and that web, that fine web of tatting, would cure them in some way, because people who are in pain see things more clearly than we do, and see All of these messages that people leave in the fine work that they do, the way this man put these stones in this wall, he didn't have to work so hard at it and make it so perfect just to save concrete, or this little carving of Adam and Eve in the garden that somebody made out of pine. It. Look at these leaves here. Somebody carved the veins in them. These are messages of tenderness, the people who are in pain. See. Now, I don't know what Clarence is going to do about his roof. I think perfection is out of the question. Probably somebody's going to have to just run in there and kick it as hard as they can and run out and see what happens, but they'll solve it somehow. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
Roy Blount reads from his book about isms and oysters.
1982.11.06 Berkshire Eagle / 0982.11.05 SF Examiner / 1982.11.05 Waterloo Courier / Audio of the News available on CD. Rebroadcast 2/25/84
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, John Hall by Ken Kuhl