Butch Thompson Trio, Frank Farrell, Cal Hand, Howard Mohr, Peter Ostroushko, Rhos Male Voice Chior, Robin and Linda Williams, Thompson Brothers Band. Becky Reimer Thompson, Butch Thompson, Jeff Tordoff,
Song About Heat ( Peter Ostroushko ) Shreveport farewell (Butch Thompson Trio ) The Railroad Bum (Butch Thompson Trio , Becky Reimer Thompson , Peter Ostroushko , Cal Hand ) Railroad Blues (Butch Thompson Trio , Peter Ostroushko , Becky Reimer Thompson , Cal Hand ) Miss the Mississippi and You (Butch Thompson Trio , Peter Ostroushko , Becky Reimer Thompson , Cal Hand ) When It's Peach Pickin' Time in Georgia (Butch Thompson Trio , Peter Ostroushko , Becky Reimer Thompson , Cal Hand ) The Trading Post ( Howard Mohr ) Silver threads among the gold ( Cal Hand , Thompson Brothers Band , Peter Ostroushko , Jeff Tordoff ) Scottish Bagpipe Tune ( Butch Thompson , Frank Farrell ) Pan Handle Swing ( Butch Thompson , Frank Farrell ) All Through the Night (Rhos Male Voice Chior ) Wynan Boy Blues (Butch Thompson Trio ) Gone, Gone, Gone (Butch Thompson Trio , Becky Reimer Thompson , Jeff Tordoff , Cal Hand ) A Fool Such As I ( Becky Reimer Thompson ) Marvin & Mavis Smiley for Do-Tel Records (Robin and Linda Williams ) The Jazz Band Ball ( Butch Thompson ) Hillbilly Hell (Robin and Linda Williams , Butch Thompson Trio , Peter Ostroushko ) The Train Come Down (Robin and Linda Williams , Butch Thompson Trio , Peter Ostroushko ) Welsh National Anthem (Rhos Male Voice Chior )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique (A cat conditioner will save on air conditioning.) Cal Hand Enterprises (The Steel necktie) Powdermilk Biscuits (Salutes the Twins and the Whippets who have both lost 8 in a row!) Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery (Robin and Linda Williams sing the Ralph's Theme Song.) The Trading Post (The hijacker tries to trade a plane full of hostages for a Phantom jet.)
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown, up there in central Minnesota, been a hot week. All week, too hot enough so that Yom er inkevis took his jacket off in church on Sunday was how hot it was. And it doesn't get any hotter than that, either. Not up there for Yom er to take off his jacket right in church and sit there in his shirt sleeves is quite an occasion. Long sleeves, of course, I don't believe he has a short sleeve shirt. He wouldn't know where to put his arm bands if he had one. Wouldn't feel as if he got his money's worth. You know, he is.
I think of men who were born to wear a suit, it's yaw Marines. I think boyhood was just a long wait for him until he could make himself suitable. They did get some good rain there when the storm came through on Tuesday. So the gardens are booming along in town and out in the country too. People in Lake Wobegon always think big in the spring and about now, the garden is starting to unleash itself on them, starting to look for people to give it away to my aunt Bea in particular, I'll tell you, in the spring, always feels that a person just can't have too many tomatoes.
About this time of the summer, she starts having dreams about them at night, which vines are reaching out and grabbing her by the ankles, getting her down, and a big mountain of tomatoes is moving towards her, kind of a tidal tomato wave. And in these dreams, she's always dreaming that she is just dreaming, until finally it's too late for her to get away. She's trapped, and these tomatoes are on top hour, and then she wakes up, sweating, flushed, red as a beat. You never could go over to Aunt Bea's house without having a whole bag of them pressed on you. She'd make you take them, even if you had a surplus at home, which we did. So I always used to just take the long way home Vermont B's with the bag under my arm. Wait until I got out of sight.
Start practicing my tomato ball. You get a nice curve on them. You know, when they're little lopsided, you just pick yourself out a tree, it's about 60 feet away, and just hum 'em in there. All strikes. The hog stutters. Dog Rex, the late Rex, I should say, used to love tomatoes. He was one of the few dogs ever to eat him. He'd eat a couple a day if they let him. Actually didn't eat them. He'd he'd go out there into the tomato patch, and he'd pick out the biggest ones hanging up there, and he'd just give him a little bite with his canine teeth, punch a little hole in him, and then he'd suck him.
There was something to see that dog stand there with his head up and just suck a couple tomatoes dry. During tomato season, he'd follow Dorothy around in the yard, just waiting for the signal that he could go out and have a couple she'd look down and say, okay, Rex, and out he'd go. They had a lot of tomatoes, and it seemed to mean a lot to Rex, so they let him do it. He only overstepped his. Bounds. Once it was one night, some sort of fit came on that dog, and the next morning, Dorothy got up and she counted 47 tomatoes that were hanging there, limp, lifeless, that had been rexed I a dog who crawled under the porch with severe abdominal pains, and the case of inflation that you could hear all the way into the house,
Raleigh had to pry up a couple boards in the porch, reached down to get that dog out of there. He was afraid the whole house might go up. Dog didn't want to come. He snapped at Raleigh. Raleigh had to get him by his hind legs and lift him up. And that sort of loosened up Rex's innards a little bit. He got rid of the bloat in two longs and two shorts. Raleigh said it sounded like lunchtime down at the mill yard. That is all right, that storm was a dramatic one that moved through on Tuesday night. I'll tell you, it got dark in the middle of the afternoon, kind of almost biblical, you know, see the sky turn dark like that. You kind of half expect a lake is going to part, you know, and walleye has come up, walking up into town or something.
Then the wind came up, and it got cold on Tuesday, and the wind kept coming up, so you knew something was going to let go, just a question of what, whether it be the water tower come down, or your roof, or somebody else's turned out to be the hock stutters barn roof. Wind just peeled it off like a wrapper, sent it out, flying out into the oats. It was the roof on the new barn. Of course, the one Raleigh just finished here a few weeks ago. The old one, the one he's been meaning to tear down, wasn't damaged in the least quiet. So all the alfalfa that he'd hauled from the old barn up to the new one, what wasn't ruined by the rain he had to haul back down again on Wednesday, Darryl tolute came to help him, and Raleigh said, Yeah. He said, You just never know how it's going to turn out. Do you? He said, I believe I'll stay married. He said I were to run off with another woman, I'd be hit by a truck within a week. I know my luck, and he probably will stay married too, because he and Dorothy are a fine old couple. And for another thing, the farm is in her name, something not a lot of people know, but it was her dad's farms. The old man Bauer, he had it. He had just the four daughters. Three of them went off. Two of them married men who could no more farm than they go to the moon, so I was pretty much up to Dorothy and Raleigh. They were already living there with the old man and farming it for him.
But you know, just before he died, he was in and out of his mind. The old man was up in his bedroom, and one day he came into his mind long enough to look out and see that Raleigh had cut down the windbreak out at the end of the West 80, the spruce trees that the old man had planted himself, and not just as a windbreak, but to bring the horizon closer, you Know. And it was all gone. Raleigh cut it down to get three more acres that he could cultivate. And the old man came back to his mind, and he was lucid, and he called jalmer interest, and had him come out and had the will changed to make Dorothy the sole owner of it, and not to be transferred to anybody in her lifetime except by cash transaction. It's in her name. She owns it. They watched that roof fly off the barn, and it was about 10 seconds later they were down in the cellar with the vegetables. And it wasn't long after that, she turned to Raleigh, Dorothy did, and she said, you know? She said, I always thought we should have gotten somebody else build that, which was true. She had thought that, but it wasn't the right time to mention it, you know.
So Raleigh told her a couple things that had been on his mind for a while, and then she sort of gave him the benefit of her thinking on noise. And she said, you know, Dad always said, and it wasn't the time to bring up the subject of wind breaks either, and Raleigh decided he was going to go out and check on some things. He marched out. He didn't even bother to take a jacket with him. It was raining hard. It was storming, but you know, you don't want to mess up an exit like that with a lot of wasted motions. He went straight for the door and out across the yard and the thunder and the lightning was coming down, and it just suited his mood Exactly. It was like music to him hear the thunder crashing, and he thought, Yeah, another big one.
Went out to the old barn. Was in there for a while, and then one hit right in the yard. It was like a bomb went off and a flash of light. And he thrown head over heel, fell on the barn floor, got up and ran for the House. He said to Darryl the next day, he said, Yeah, you know, he says, Daryl, you want to go right where lightning is just struck. It's always the safest place. But that wasn't what was on his mind. She'd been in the kitchen. She was fixing sandwiches for some reason, tuna fish, and then all of a sudden, she was sitting on the floor, and the crash had deafened her so she couldn't hear anything. It was all quiet, and all she could see was bright light in circles in her eyeballs.
The radio was off. She'd been listening to it for some reason, people do that when disaster is just maybe minutes away and you may have only minutes left, people tune in the radio. Like to hear somebody explain it to him, I guess. And there she was when he burst in through the door, he found her. She was sitting there holding two halves of a tuna fish sandwich. He said, is that you? Then? She said, Yeah, I guess it is. And he said, I thought it might have killed you. She said, Yeah, I thought it might have too till I saw you come in. Didn't know what she meant. By then, she laid down for a while, felt better barn roof didn't matter so much after that, got up, fixed some coffee that perked him up a little bit. About end of the storm stopped raining. They went outside, spec for damage, went out, looked at their tomatoes.
Wind had blown them all down. They're on poles. Their tomatoes are but that was all right, because they need to get longer poles. Anyway, those tomatoes have been growing so fast, up towards the sky. So Raleigh went and cut some tall poles. They got the tomatoes put back in shape, then he picked a couple, and he threw them out in the field, in memory of wrecks, threw him as high as he could up against the sky. They fell way out in the weeds.
He said, Let's go in. She said, you want to do something about that alfalfa today? He said, No, still be there tomorrow. He said, Let's go in play. Crabbage saw the dead and so one of Lake Wobegon's most resilient marriages chugs on through its fourth decade. Quite a couple. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, where all the men are good looking. All the children are above average.
George Reid wrote a letter about the Rhos Male Voice Choir from Scotland which he had heard 15 years ago while traveling with a choir.
1984-07-14 1987-07-18 1990-07-14
Dunn County News Jul 20 1983
1983.07.22 Star Tribune