Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Chicago Rhythm Band, Ted Deplonk, John Hartford, Garrison Keillor, Manhattan Transfer. Peter Ostroushko, Butch Thompson,
Jug Harris ( John Hartford ) Gum Tree Canoe ( John Hartford ) Goodbye My Lover Goodbye ( John Hartford ) Since I Met You ( Greg Brown , Butch Thompson Trio ) Not Fade Away ( Greg Brown , Butch Thompson Trio ) Never gonna run for president again ( Garrison Keillor ) Ah solas ( Butch Thompson ) Nobody's sweetheart now (Chicago Rhythm Band ) I'm more than satisfied (Chicago Rhythm Band ) Chicago rhythm (Chicago Rhythm Band ) The Duke of Dubuque (Manhattan Transfer ) I Love Java (Manhattan Transfer ) Route 66 (Manhattan Transfer ) Presbyterian Guitar ( John Hartford ) New York house dog blues ( Ted Deplonk ) Storms are on the ocean ( Garrison Keillor , Peter Ostroushko )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique Bird Dog Brand Turkey Wieners Chatterbox Cafe Manhattan Fabrics National Turkey Institute Powdermilk Biscuits Sidetrack Tap
This transcription may have been auto-created from the audio. Can you help improve the text? Email us!
Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, my hometown. It's been kind of warm this last week. I mean, sort of warm. Warm for here. Warm for now, this time of year. Not today or yesterday, but I mean recently. Don't want to mislead you. Don't want people down in Iowa to say, let's go up to the city. Warm up there. Well, it's not that warm. Sort of warm. 40s. Pretty good for early November. It was warm enough so that coming out the front door of the house the other morning, you could still smell fall smells. That sweet decay of autumn grass dying and wet leaves and plants rotting on the grass. It's a wonderful smell. Winter brings you kind of a purity, you know, of smell. But it was just warm enough so that the vegetation was breathing a little bit. And you could smell its breath. And if you are awake and standing up and if you are a mature person who's done one or two things in your life, smells like that smell, bring things back to you. You remember things that you did and people that you were with on other autumns years ago. It's a magical thing, the sense of smell. I think that memory is tied to smell. I think I read that in a book somewhere. I don't remember. I guess the book didn't have any particular order, so I didn't remember it. But I believe that's true. That your memory is really tied to your sense of smell and you catch a smell. And suddenly you remember, and memory is always sudden in this case. I walked out the front door of the house and smelled the grass and remembered a football game that I played in when I was a little kid with a bunch of big kids. And we all wore leather helmets that a guy's dad had. And it was tackle football. And so I got to smell the grass a lot. I remember that sweet smell of autumn grass just as it's starting to turn brown with big kids lying on top of me in my face down there in it. So a mysterious thing smell is everything has its own particular aroma that we can remember, I think. And yet we have so few words for smell in our language. Things smell sweet and clean, we say, or they smell putrid and dank, sour. Things basically, as we describe smell good, they smell bad. Do you smell like a rose? You smell like a pig? But we don't describe it very well. And yet every smell, I think, is attached to some recollection deep down in our heads. And when we smell it, it may suddenly come to us. Smell a chalk dust, for example. I was up in a classroom in Moorhead at Concordia on Wednesday morning talking to a speech class and turned toward the blackboard, I don't know why, and caught a whiff of chalk dust, and it terrified me. It's been so long since I smelled chalk dust, and to me it's the smell of death. Because I guess it recalls all those times when I sat in class and was daydreaming on a stuffy, hot day, and suddenly heard a voice coming from high above me, saying, Mr. Keeler, would you go to the board and show the class how the third law of thermodynamic supplies to this problem. Third, I didn't know there was a first-door sack. That's chalk dust. That's standing in front of a blackboard trying to remember something you never knew because it... The third law of thermodynamics has no aroma whatsoever. It just smells like chalk dust. Chlorine, the smell of chlorine, scares me, and my skin goes clammy because I remember swimming lessons at the YMCA, and it brings back the fear of water. The other smells that are powerful for me, maybe for you too, smell of bread baking. That's my grandma and bread rising, but especially bread baking. Some people, the aroma of some people who smell bad in a certain way is reassuring to me because one of my favorite uncles smelled bad in just that way. And so when I smell them, I want to put my arms around them. It's not a bad smell to me. It's a good smell. Smell is a powerful and mysterious thing that's hooked to all of these memories. I've had an uneasy feeling in this theater for a long time, not here on stage, but when I leave after a show. As I go out through the lobby and come out through the glass doors, and I think it's a smell out there that reminds me of the first theater I ever went to see a movie in when I was 18 years old. Because we weren't supposed to go to movies. See, that was forbidden. So I snuck away when I was 18 and I enjoyed this part in here in the seats. Real good. But it was when I went out through the door and maybe it's the smell of hot light bulbs in a marquee. Makes me nervous that as I go out the door, someone is going to see me come out. Maybe my Sunday school teacher. Though why he would be coming in, I have no idea. Unless to see the late feature. There was something in the air that I smelled this last week that amazed me because it brought back an evening 24 years ago that I have not thought of in years and years and years. I think not since I ever knew you. And it was the smell of a cornfield in autumn in which the corn has been picked but the stalks are left standing. Which you don't see as often now as you did 24 years ago. And it brought back a night in late September of 1960. I was going into college at the University of Minnesota. And on this night, a Sunday night, I got on a Greyhound bus and I rode north to go up to my uncle's house. Not the one who smells bad but a different one. To pick up a car that I had bought from him. I got on the Greyhound bus and was riding north and it was dark. I was sitting about half way back on the left-hand side of the bus next to the window. And I had the reading light on and I was reading a book entitled How to Study Effectively. Which I thought I might need because I wasn't a very good student in high school. And I had a feeling of doom about college that I would only last a few days. Not even until Christmas. And so I had bought this book How to Study Effectively back in June but had not gotten around to reading it. Until I was riding on the Greyhound bus on the Sunday night up north to get my car. And I believe that the first pointer in the book was don't put things off. As the bus cruised along north up to Lane Highway, pastas heading south was a steady stream of traffic. It was the first weekend of duck hunting season, I believe. And as we cruised along, suddenly our bus collided head on with one of those cars. Which I knew at first only as a screech of metal and a flash of light up in front of the driver. And then the impact of this collision brought me to my feet and up against the seat in front of me. And I was holding on with both hands in about one half second. As the bus tipped to the right, as we went down in a very deep ditch, it tipped like a boat and then it tipped back to the left. And I thought it was going to roll over but then it stopped. It stopped and everything was so quiet. And everything that happened after was like a dream, like it took place under water. Everybody was quiet and then we smelled fuel oil and a few people got up out of their seats. There was a woman was crying. And we walked forward down the aisle, some of us, the bus driver was sitting stock still in his seat. The front of the bus had been mashed in a little bit but we leaned hard against the door and we forced it open. And that was the first smell that I smelled, was that sweet dry smell of the cornfield. As we stepped out the door of the bus, alive. It was a cold night in late September and it was a clear sky, billions of stars. And everything was so quiet. I walked around front of the bus, the headlights were still on and there was a deep dent in the front of it, several feet deep. And saw out on the highway a long line of cars stopped that were heading south and a long line stopped that were heading north. And there in between them in the ditch was a station wagon that we had collided with. We walked up towards it, it was illumined by the headlights from the car. There was glass on the highway and there were bodies of people. There were two women lying on the highway. There was a man who was still alive, who was trying to raise his head. And someone from a car was already kneeling by him and trying to make him lie down flat. Someone said that the two women were dead. Inside the station wagon was the body of another man, a young man, who was naked to the waist and who was dead. It was so quiet, so quiet in the light of the headlights. A few people walking around, murmuring, whispering to each other, bystanders, survivors, people saying how lucky they were. A highway patrol car arrived and then a priest came and then an ambulance came and took away the man who was injured. And then as we waited for the coroner to come, the highway patrol started to direct traffic around at first one line of cars and then another line of cars. And some of us went and helped direct traffic. Something men do when they are in shock. They feel a natural leading to direct other cars. So I walked down the line about 50 feet and started directing cars. I suppose we do it so we feel that we're in charge of this scene. And I remember a car going by with the window rolled down and the driver saying, I would think they'd be able to take care of it better than this. And then he was gone. And then another bus came and picked us up and I got up to my uncles and they had gone to bed. But the car was there with a key in it and I got in it and I drove 80 miles home very slowly, about 40 miles an hour. And arrived home in the early morning, feeling, don't you know, like I had seen something like the end of the world. I had seen death and death so close that it was almost like my own. And I had to talk to somebody about this. So I called up a girl whom I knew whose father answered the phone who told me that it was two o'clock in the morning. Well two o'clock in the morning, what do I care about that? I wanted to talk to her. So I did. She came to the phone. She was kind of sleepy. And I said that I had been in an accident but that I was all right. But that some people had been killed. She said, but you're all right. I said, yes, I'm all right. Well, that's good. She said. I said, but she said, why don't you go to bed? Which was what my mother had told me. Go to bed. So I went to bed. But just as I was about to go to sleep, I thought to myself, how can you sleep at a time like this? So I made myself get up. I got the paper in the morning and I was amazed at what a small notice it got. Front page but only about five paragraphs. And all of it written at a distance and none of it had any of the feeling of that highway and the glass and the headlights and what I saw. It made me kind of angry. I called up the University of Minnesota and to tell them that I might not come to class. That I had been in an accident. That I was all right. Some people had been killed, but I was kind of shaken up and I might not come. I called the admissions office. And I got a woman on the phone and, well, she had 38,000 other students coming that day, so... But I wanted her to know I wasn't going to be there. And I was kind of angry at how calm she was on the phone. She said, well, if you can't come today, you come on Tuesday. It made me kind of upset. So I went. I went to school and the campus was packed with crowd streams of faces coming in toward campus and walking up and down the mall. And I had seen something. Something had happened to me and I wanted to tell somebody about it in the biggest way. I wanted to just take anybody aside so that somebody would acknowledge that I had been in a collision. That I was all right, but that some people had been killed and that I had seen this. And that you couldn't walk around under a bright September sky and pretend that everything was the same because it wasn't the same, not for me. I just wanted to grab somebody and say, I don't know you, but I was in this accident last night. I didn't. About a week later, the freshman composition instructor assigned us to write an essay on a personal experience. He didn't have any idea what he was getting from me. Three pages, it was supposed to be, I wrote twelve and I was just getting started. And it wasn't just about the accident that I had seen. It was about everything. It was about Christian existentialism. It was about life and death, which I knew now, something about. I wanted to stand up in front of the whole university and tell them, have everybody be there, have a microphone, and have the president of the university introduce me and say, this guy was in a collision about three weeks ago. He's all right, but some people were killed. He saw this and he has an important message for all of you. And I would talk, I suppose, about living each day as if it might be your last. I got the paper back from the instructor. I got a C on it. It was marked, wordy, poor organization. I thought he was a cold, heartless man. And I was going to drop his class. And then I thought, no, that's exactly what he wants me to do. I'm going to stay in his class. So I stayed in it. I think I finally got over it on Christmas vacation. I was still in college somehow. And one night I borrowed my dad's station wagon because my car was low on gas and went out skating with some people. I was a friend of mine and we were heading home back to this girl's house about midnight. Her parents were out of town, so it was the natural place to go. And we're heading down a county road which was very slick and very icy. And we were getting close to her house, but I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention. I was driving, but I was also lighting a cigarette. And I was heisting myself up in my seat to see in the rear view mirror how it looked when I exhaled through my nose. Which I had just learned how to do when you let the smoke fall out of your nose and draw it in your mouth. And I thought this was something that might come in handy later. And as I was watching myself perform this feat, she said, right here. And so I turned right. I said, all right. I turned right and the car skidded slightly right. And it went into a deep ditch, nose first, a ditch that was full of snow and we sank gently in the snow. Like you lie down in a bed. And we paused and we took a deep breath. And then I went to open my door. But I couldn't open it because there was a telephone pole three inches away on that side. The tow truck cost $35. We never went to her house. The car drove all right, so I didn't tell anyone about this. It wasn't the sort of experience that I felt I needed to share with other people. I wasn't going to write any essays about this. I haven't thought about it often since, but when I do, I'm very grateful that I did not die when I was 18 years old on account of watching myself exhale smoke out of my nose. I'm grateful for that. I drive carefully. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. For all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, all the children are a bad athlete.
Losing the election gracefully.
Star Tribune Nov 16 1984
1984.11.16 Star Tribune / 1984.11.11 Star Tribune / 1984.11.17 St Cloud Times: "Chicago Rhythm Band"
Archival contributors: Ken Kuhl