Brave Combo, Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Bill Caswell, Willie Humphrey, Prudence Johnson, George Mushamp. Peter Ostroushko,
Jazz at our house tonight ( Greg Brown ) Stealing ( Greg Brown ) China boy ( Willie Humphrey ) Buy my cabbage ( Willie Humphrey ) Miss New Orleans ( Willie Humphrey , Butch Thompson Trio ) Rusty old shovel ( Bill Caswell ) Bring all your heartaches to me ( Bill Caswell ) Oklahoma backroads ( Bill Caswell ) The preacher and the bear ( Bill Caswell ) Nuclear polka (Brave Combo ) Over the waves (Brave Combo ) Blue Danube ( Bill Caswell ) Little Lisa Jane ( Bill Caswell ) Jump Back ( Bill Caswell ) Old Grey Horse ( Bill Caswell ) Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White (Brave Combo ) Cabbage Song ( Willie Humphrey ) B.T. Polka ( Peter Ostroushko ) When a Man Loves a Woman ( Greg Brown , Prudence Johnson )
American Academy of Domestic Drama Beautiful Heritage Corporation Bertha's Kitty Boutique Bunsen, Clint Chatterbox Cafe Krebsbach, Florian Krebsbach, Lyle Krebsbach, Myrtle Powdermilk Biscuits Sidetrack Tap St Paul Water Utility
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Well sir, it's been a quiet week. I've been like Wobagon, Minnesota, my hometown. Be even quieter in a few weeks on to get more snow. It's beginning of the real quiet season up there. First snow fell on Tuesday of this week. People woke up early Tuesday morning and looked out and there was big white flakes falling down through the air. You see a big difference in people right at that point. Some people jump right out of bed, run to the window and jump up and down and kind of feel like they'd like to sing. And other people lie in bed and wish that they wouldn't. People who lie in bed figure they have four, maybe five months, which to admire the snow, they don't need to do it all at once. The first time that it appears. It was a wet snow, big wet snowflakes. Not real snow, not cold snow, but wet flakes. Kind of actually more like rain, like rain that had just graduated. Too snow and was looking for its first job as snow. Snow job. And out the chatterbox, Dorothy looked out the window and she said, well, this isn't going to stay on the ground. It's going to melt because the ground is too warm this time of year for it to stay. But it didn't. Whether the ground was too warm or not, the snow has stayed so far and it appears as if there is a trend out there. Not saying it's irreversible, but if things go the way that they seem to be headed as of now, it would appear that we will have winter this year. You never know. Winter is a time of experimentation and research up here in Minnesota. Every year at this time of year in the latter part of November, hundreds of Minnesotans go out walking and they see the ice forming on lakes and ponds and they walk out on it. And they walk out a little ways and they fall through and they have to be rescued. I was reading about it in the paper. This week, last weekend, 14 persons in Hennepin County alone went through the ice and had to be rescued by sheriff's deputies. And that's Hennepin County, which is the most sophisticated county in Minnesota. That's where Minneapolis is. That's the University of Minnesota is over there. The Guthrie Theatre, the Institute of Arts, that was in Hennepin County, 14, went through. Sheriff's deputy said in the paper he said, I don't believe these people are thinking. But they were thinking, they were thinking maybe they could walk on water. I hadn't been able to do it before, but maybe this would be the year. And as it turns out, it wasn't. But they'll try again next year. You see, when we move into winter in Minnesota, we move into another branch of physics. And so we have to test these old principles, these old laws of physics to see if they still apply. People have told us for years to dress warmly. Why? Let's find out. Maybe the laws about heat transfer have changed. Since last year, go out in the light jacket, t-shirt, tennis shoes, see how it works. People say, drive slowly. Why? Maybe when you put on your brakes, it will melt the ice underneath. And you'll stop maybe even faster. We have to explore these things and find them out for ourselves. Probably sometime real soon, this month, probably out on Interstate 94, one car will hit its brakes, and behind it, 14 more cars in succession will hit their brakes, not quite in time, all pile up like dominoes. And as they hit and interact with each other, each driver will think, yeah, it works, it's still true. It's research. Research is what we're doing. We do research every year to find out if those things that we said three months ago we had to do before the snow flies, we really do. Afternoon, like put on your snow tires. Carl Krebsbach always has his on on Armistice Day. But most other people wait for a while. It would be easier to put them on when it is warm, but when it is warm, there is no need for them. And so they're out doing that this weekend. Up there, a lot of them kneeling in the snow and putting on their snow tire. Storm windows. The Lumbergs were the last this year to get theirs on. They put them on Tuesday evening. Mrs. Halbertson next door heard footsteps across the fence. She heard low voices. She heard screams being pried off. And she naturally called up Gary and Leroy the constables. And they came cruising by in neutral with lights turned off. It turned on the spotlight, swung it around there towards the back of the Lumbergs house. And there were large shapes of Lumbergs out back. Putting on their storm windows in the dark, in the snow. They hate to think of a Lumberg handling that amount of glass in the dark. They could be sleepwalking, as they've done so often before. But Gary and Leroy just coasted on by. Because it's a private moment. Being the last. The last one in a town that sighs to get your storm windows on. I'm doing it in the dark, out in the snow. It's a time when a person wants to be by themselves. It's like arriving at church in time for the closing prayer. You don't walk down sit in front of you. Sit in the back row and look as devout as you can under the circumstances. Carl Krebsbach's brother-in-law Lyle discovered here just on Tuesday that he was out of firewood and needed to get some in a big hurry. They heat with fuel oil there at Lyle's house. But they bought a small wood-burning stove for the downstairs hallway about two years ago because the upstairs bedroom has been so cold on account of the radiator leaked and had to be turned off in 1982. It doesn't have storm windows on that bedroom because he dropped them and broke them about three years ago. Which his wife said he was going to. She said don't try and carry them two at a time Lyle. Are you going to drop them? And he said no, he said I've got them. And he did have them until he dropped them. And she gave him a hard time about it, but he didn't drop them for the reason that she thought he was going to. He dropped them because he tripped on his shoelace. So they had kind of an argument about that. And he's got new glass to put in the storm windows. All he has to do is just get it in. But I think he's waiting for an apology from her before he does this. So they've got the small wood-burning stove in the downstairs hall. And the heat goes up to the upstairs bedroom so they can jump into bed and not die, you know. Carl, who lives next door, has a great big pile of firewood and he offered to let Lyle have some. But Lyle said no, that's all right. I just got out and get my own. And was waiting for Carl to offer a second time. Planning to accept the offer on the third time. But he didn't hear the second one. So on Wednesday he had to go out to his in-laws out to Florian and Myrtle. Crap's box, they live out south of town. They have all 10, 15, 20 acres of wood out there. And in fact on Wednesday when Lyle arrived, Florian and Myrtle were out there cutting some of it themselves, trying to clean up some wood that had blown down in a storm last spring. Two little tiny old people in their parkas, snow suits actually. Florian had the chainsaw, Myrtle had the axe, she was splitting wood. Lyle picked up an axe, he started to split. It was cold out there on Wednesday. After about half an hour he got pretty warm. He took off his car coat and his scarf just in the sweater, gloves. Sweating pretty hard, splitting wood. And he started to breathe real hard and he was getting kind of worn out. He was starting to exhale cigarettes, he smoked a long time ago. Kind of wanted to quit. But there they were, his in-laws, 73, 71 years old, going great blazes. Split wood and cutting it off. Lyle sat down for a while, experimented with splitting from a sitting position. Myrtle was splitting logs about three to his one. But he was being more careful about it, of course. Lyle was, he was studying each log, studying which way the grain ran, so as to be able to hit it in exactly the right place. Precision splitting. And then after a while he walked around and kind of studied the trees a little bit. Said to Florian, what kind of tree is that over there? Florian said, birch. Lyle said, yeah, I thought it was birch. Shape of the branches threw me off a little bit. He teaches science at the high school. But it's general science that he teaches. More about the relationships between living things, not so much about the living things themselves. Myrtle said, yeah, you know, she says, you know what they say about firewood? It warms you twice. When you cut it and when you burn it, yeah, Lyle. He thought maybe it'd go home and fix those storm windows. It was hard on him and he only got about a trunkload of wood. Wednesday was the day that Mayor Clint Bunsen decided he would finally going to put his television antenna upon the roof of his house, which Irene had been telling him to do ever since last September. When one afternoon she wandered down to Ella Anderson's house, Irene did, and she kind of got interested in this show called, For Whom the Sun Rises, which is on Channel 8, which they've never been able to receive very well. They get Channel 7, which is the National Football League channel, but they never did get Channel 8 very well. And so she'd been going down to Ella Anderson's to watch For Whom the Sun Rises every weekday afternoon at 1.30. And things between Todd and Jennifer have been getting hot and heavy on that show. Neither of them are married to each other, so of course it's wrong that Todd should go over to Jennifer's house and drink as much coffee as he does and say the things that he says to her. But on the other hand, they really love each other and the person can't ignore the wisdom of the heart. So she'd been after Clint to put up that antenna, which he's been reluctant to do because he's been fighting so hard for years to get a community antenna on the water tower, which if he put up his own antenna on the roof, would seem to be an admission of defeat. So he's had this antenna for several years leaning against the garage in such a way that it picks up Channel 7. But it doesn't get Channel 8. And finally, on Tuesday, things were coming to a point on For Whom the Sun Rises and it appeared as if Todd and Jennifer were about to jump into bed any minute. And it got to the point where Ella was talking about getting up and turning off the TV. She said, I'm not sure we ought to be watching a show like this. She said it several times. And so Irene came home from watching that episode and she told Clint if he didn't have the antenna up that day, she was going to think about leaving him. So he got the wires all strung up there to the roof and he put up the ladder and he climbed up with the antenna, which is a huge, tall thing. It comes in several parts. And he got it stuck in the bracket there and fastened next to the chimney up on the roof. And then he had to kind of fine tune it, you know, to be able to bring in Channel 7 and Channel 8 about equally, which is not easy living out there on the edge of the known TV world. It takes a lot of fiddling and turning this thing ever so slightly to get a good picture. So he was up on the roof, Clint was turning it, and then he'd lean over the chimney and he'd yell down and say, how is it? How am I doing? Irene go look in the kitchen and she'd run back and yell up the fireplace. And she'd yell, no, it's not there yet. It's jumping a little bit. Yeah, I think you've got it now. No, you don't. It's all snowy. Do what you did just a couple minutes ago. Do that again, whatever it was. Well, he got it to where she said it was just fine, and then he went down and it was fine on Channel 8, but you couldn't see a thing on Channel 7. Picture was real good on Channel 5, but there's nothing on Channel 5. So he did the only thing he could do. He got two, three lengths of extension cords, strung them together, put the TV under his arm, climbed up on the roof, plugged it in. Set up there adjusting the TV set, crouched down on the roof, sitting in the snow, watching the TV screen. Make sure he got the picture just right. And as he did this, he kind of got engrossed in a TV show, which as it happened was on Channel 3, which he didn't know that they had. He didn't know there was such thing that there was. And it was a TV show called Kavanaugh. And the host, Don Kavanaugh, is a guy with a good head of hair and runs up and down the aisles of the studio audience with a microphone, so that the people in the audience, mainly women, can ask questions of the guests sitting up on stage, who are men. Clint got kind of interested in it. As it turned out, these men were all men who had been experimenting with an alternative form of marriage, in which the guy lives by himself in a little apartment and just comes home on the weekends. It sort of combines friendship and marriage, so they referred to it as friendage. And one of the men had written a book called The Freedom of Love, which coincidentally had just been published in hardcover. And so they were talking about this alternate form of marriage, and each of the men was saying in turn that he and his wife had never really been so close before until they split up, that you could achieve tremendous closeness by granting each other independence and living in a tiny apartment during the week by yourself, that their marriages had been wonderfully rich since they had stopped living under the same roof together. It really had been a breakthrough for them. It was a wonderful thing. One of the women in the audience asked, who did the housework? And one of the men said that once you get your marriage centered under this new arrangement, that these little housekeeping details kind of worked themselves out. You do work around the house, not out of obligation, but out of love for each other. He said that he, just a few days before, had fixed breakfast, and it had been a wonderful spiritual experience for him. Clint had never heard people talk like this before. It seemed kind of far-fetched to him in a way. Kind of like someone saying, we're bound to get some warm weather here pretty soon. But they all seemed to believe in it. One of the men said it was just a matter of adjusting your perceptions. So he sat up there hunched on a roof in the snow with his parka around him, listening to them talk about alternate forms of marriage. Until he heard someone yelling at him, looked up it was his brother Clarence across the street. He didn't hear exactly what he said, but he could guess. He yelled back. He said, I'm adjusting the antenna. He picked up the TV, climbed down the ladder, and went inside. Channel 8 comes in pretty good. And channel 7 is not so bad. And channel 3, you kind of have to use your imagination. 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.
Diary with joke punch lines. Old musical instruments, ukelin, mandolin guitar, bell harp, & the mouth bow.
1985-09-21 1989-11-11
1984.11.30 Star Tribune
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl