Bruce Allard, Stevie Beck, Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Quartet, Butch Thompson Trio, Charlie Devore, Garrison Keillor, Tom Lieberman, Mary Loughren, Peter Ostroushko, Ross Sutter. Pop Wagner,
Jitterbug waltz (Butch Thompson Quartet ) Kiss me sweet (Butch Thompson Quartet ) Words (Butch Thompson Quartet ) The sunny side of life ( Pop Wagner , Stevie Beck ) Gold Watch and Chain ( Pop Wagner , Stevie Beck ) Cannon ball blues ( Pop Wagner , Stevie Beck ) Midnight on the water ( Pop Wagner , Stevie Beck ) Cat town races ( Garrison Keillor ) Sweet Man ( Garrison Keillor ) Calling the sheep ( Ross Sutter , Mary Loughren ) Winter is past ( Ross Sutter , Mary Loughren ) Wee Willie Grey ( Ross Sutter , Mary Loughren ) Over the water to Charlie ( Ross Sutter , Mary Loughren ) Mornin' Blues ( Peter Ostroushko ) Gonna build a house ( Greg Brown ) Walking with my baby ( Greg Brown ) You've got to be a football hero (Butch Thompson Trio , Tom Lieberman , Charlie Devore )
Ajua! Hot Sauce Bertha's Kitty Boutique Chatterbox Cafe Powdermilk Biscuits Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Sidetrack Tap Skoglund's Five and Dime
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Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. Though there were a few moments here this last week, I think back to this last Tuesday when the Hockstetters had to come in off the farm, come into town. It was on Monday morning, Rollie needed a new belt for his wood saw, and they were only gone into town about two or three hours. But when they got back home, they found about 16 chickens and ducks and geese strewn out down the snow down in between the hen house and the tool shed where their throats ripped open, lying there, all bloody in the snow. And all the other livestock upset even the whole steams who looked like they'd been into a horror show and wanted to jump over the fence and into somebody's arms. They figured that a pack of wild dogs did it. Rollie found dog tracks around where the bodies lay and some of the neighbors had seen packs of big dogs out in the woods roaming around. It certainly was a caution to people to realize that the countryside was not so peaceful as it appeared and especially was a caution to some of those children who live out there near the Hockstetters and go to Sunnyside School, which is just west of Rollie's, and it certainly is a lot on a person's mind. If you are eight years old and you walk half a mile twice a day in dim light early morning and late afternoon, down a road into the woods and the woods are dark and you know that there are wild dogs out there and you can almost hear them breathing. It's scary even when there are older children with you and in fact especially when there are older children. Because it's the older children who like to talk about it as you're walking down the road and who say things like, it'd be about those dogs breakfast time right now. I'll bet they're real hungry right now. They can smell food long ways away four or five miles away and they run so fast you never even see them when they come at you. And you're a little kid and you walk a little faster. They were the same older children who used to frighten us little kids every winter on the subject of putting your tongue on a pump handle. Now I suppose they're right that if you put your tongue on a pump handle when it's bitterly cold, the saliva on your tongue would freeze to it and you'd be stuck there. But it wouldn't be just the pump handle. It would be the whole pump or anything. Metallic could be rain pipes or whatever but they kind of focused in on the pump handle as the lethal weapon out there behind Sunnyside School. And they terrified us. They said, you put your tongue on that pump handle and it'll stick there and they'll have to pull you off and it could rip your whole tongue right out of your mouth. Otherwise they'd have to leave you there till spring put a tent up over you. Of course you wouldn't be able to eat or anything. And of course we wouldn't go and put our tongues on the pump handle on purpose. But you know how it is when you're a little kid you believe that danger and evil have a power to lure you towards them and to draw you in. And we were afraid that if we went back there maybe that pump handle had talked to us and focused in on us and put us in the trance and it'd say, hey kid come here stick your tongue out. And suddenly the pump handle will start to look like a long licorice wept there. Suddenly we'd feel very tired. We'd walk towards it and put our tongue on it. And the last words that we'd say in this life would be, oh, help. We'd never be able to talk again. Only be able to hum. Oh I remember during recess at Sunnyside School we had little kids that all play out in front of the building and we'd all keep our mouths clamped shut afraid of that pump handle. And then wouldn't you know one of the older kids would grab on to somebody and say, let's go put his tongue on the pump handle. And all start again. Tell you when I get scared now one way that I have of quieting myself down is to think back to when I went into the seventh grade and so it didn't go to Sunnyside School anymore but caught the school bus into town to go to Lake Wobagon High School. And Mr. Deitman was the principal then and though it was September he was already thinking ahead to winter and to the blizzards that we had every year. And on the first day of school each of us children who rode the bus in from the country was handed a little slip of paper that said, your storm home is and then it's said. And we were each of us assigned to someone's home in town where if a blizzard came during the school day they wouldn't try and ship us home on the buses but we'd go to our storm home and spend the night there. Mine was the Kruegers. My storm home was the Kruegers. An old couple back then who lived in a little green cottage and was down by the lake. And I can see it now because I walked past it so many times looking at my storm home over the years. It was a beautiful green cottage and everything was so arranged about and so neat and so delicate. On the lake side there was a rock garden and terraces of a lissum and pansies and petunias rose up to a statue of the Blessed Virgin seated with marigolds around her feet. And there was a birdbath in the center of the backyard and two steel lawn chairs. And on the trellises the ivy just seemed to march up in formation and all the edges on the lawn were so neat. And the two cast iron deer grazing peacefully out in the front yard. It was the kind of house that if you were a child and were lost in a dark forest and you came across it in a clearing you would know that there was a kindly old couple living there who would take you in and rescue you and that you were a lucky child who had gotten into a story with a happy ending. They became very big in my imagination, Mr. and Mrs. Krueger. And there were many times I walked by their house and I felt like introducing myself to them. I felt like saying, I'm the kid who if there's a blizzard I'll come and stay with you. See, because we seem to have some relationship in the world. Now my family would have been a little bit shocked to know that a Catholic home was my storm home because we were suspicious of Catholics. We were quite capable of believing that maybe the Pope had ordered all Catholics to take in little Protestant children during blizzards and put little crosses around their necks and make them say the rosary for their supper. But I didn't care. That was my storm home and I wanted to believe in my heart that I hadn't just been assigned to the Krueger's, that they'd come down to school and they'd picked me out of the crowd. And they'd said, him, we want him, we want that skinny kid over there. We want him in the case of a blizzard to stay with us. I often dreamed of going to see them. When things got hard, blizzards aren't the only storms, you know, and not necessarily the worst thing that can happen to a child. And I often dreamed about going and knocking on their door and she'd open the door and she'd say, ah, it's you. I knew you'd come someday. I'm so glad to see you. Won't you come on in and get out of those wet clothes? Come on in to the kitchen, sit down, I'll make you some chocolate. Would you like an oatmeal cookie or something? She'd say, ah, it's terrible outside, didn't I? I'd say yes. She'd say it's going to get worse. They say, yes, probably yes. He'd say, Carl, come on down here, see what's in the kitchen. He'd say, is it our storm child? She'd say, yes. He said again, in the flesh, biggest life. We'd play cards and go up to bed or something. I never did go there. We didn't have any blizzards that came during the day, that year or the year after that. They're all convenient blizzards. Evening, weekend blizzards. But they became a big part of my imagination. And I always thought that I could go to the croakers. And I didn't, I guess, because all of my troubles were bearable troubles. But I'm certain that they were more bearable for imagining that the croakers were there, my storm home, and that I could go see them. Whenever things got bad, I'd think, well, there's always the croakers. Now I suppose that's a kind of fiction, isn't it? The storm home. Because after all, we never did go to our storm homes. So it becomes like fiction. Mr. Hedman might as well have written down on that slip instead of saying, your storm home is the Krueger's. For all the difference it made, he might as well have written, your storm home is puddled beyond marsh with Dr. Doolittle. Your storm home is Mr. Zuckerman's farm with Charlotte and Wilbur the pig. Your storm home is a raft on the Mississippi River. But I'm grateful for it. And when it comes to fiction, if it come down to a clear choice, I think that I would rather imagine going to the croogers than imagine putting my tongue on a pump handle. 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.
Reciting the counties of Minnesota. Poem about Stevie Beck. Robert Bum's birthday
1983.01.29 Louisville Courier / 1983.01.29 Orlando Sentinel
Archival contributors: Ken Kuhl