Stan Boreson, Philip Brunelle, Garrison Keillor, Howard Mohr, Peter Ostroushko, Paul Winter Consort, Vern Sutton, Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus. Ukranian Bandura, Paul Winter,
Swedish meat balls ( Stan Boreson ) Roll out the barrel ( Stan Boreson ) Yust a little lefsa ( Stan Boreson ) Ballad Of Jessie James (in Danish) ( Stan Boreson ) Yohnny Yohnson's Wedding ( Stan Boreson , Garrison Keillor ) Lament of the captives (Ukranian Bandura , Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus ) Cossack dance (Ukranian Bandura , Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus ) Take me out to the ball game ( Vern Sutton ) Did you see Jimmy marching ( Vern Sutton ) Picture of a boy in blue ( Vern Sutton ) International fiddle medley ( Peter Ostroushko ) Sun singer ( Paul Winter , Paul Winter Consort ) The Lullaby From The Great Mother Whale For The Baby Seal Pups ( Paul Winter , Paul Winter Consort ) Air On The G String (Paul Winter Consort , Paul Winter ) KING TV Show Theme ( Stan Boreson ) Jimmy Crack Corn (in Swedish) ( Stan Boreson )
Ask Butch Questions (Butch Thompson answers questions.) Bertha's Kitty Boutique (Garrison Keillor - Invest in the cat market) Bunsen, Clarence Chatterbox Cafe Minnesota Language Systems (Minnesota phrase cap... GK and Howard Mohr - Minnesota phrase cap - Over 100 handy phrases) Powdermilk Biscuits (Speaking to college graduation: 7 year old computer users/Norwegian self defense/Dreams of winning) Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Raw Bits (Relief bowler/Condo owner/Church organist) Sidetrack Tap Tollefsen, Marlis TV vs. Radio Baseball Broadcast (Jim Ed Poole, Howard Mohr, and Butch Thompson demonstrate the difference in color commentary between TV and Radio. Ballpark food. Vern Sutton does Take Me Out to the Ballgame!)
This transcription may have been auto-created from the audio. Can you help improve the text? Email us!
Oh, Monday is opening day for the baseball season up at Lake Wobegon in the Wally Old Hard Hands Bunsen Memorial Park. Yes, sir, the exciting 1985 Lake Wobegon Whippets begin their season on Monday. That's at 1.30. The pregame starts at 1.25. Remind you that the Boosters Club needs volunteers to come mow the lawn on Monday morning. Bring your own mowers. Looking forward to it. Season starting at last. Monday is Memorial Day in my hometown of Lake Wobegon with the ceremony up the hill at the cemetery at 10.30 in the morning. Everybody will hike up the hill except for about two carloads of people who will be driven up there, hauled up there, and the rest of us hike for that wonderful ceremony that we do every year. That's Monday morning at 10.30 up in Lake Wobegon, rain or shine. I march up the hill for Memorial Day service up around the G.A.R. Obelisk up there with the little low iron fence around it. About the same ceremony they've held up there every year for Memorial Day since I was a small child. Well, it used to be a lot of fun to go up there for Memorial Day. Now that I know more of the people who are buried up there, it is a sad occasion, but still a lot of fun at the same time. Hard to understand, isn't it? But that's true. I especially like the march up the hill. few hundred people from Lake Wobegon, all in civilian marching formation going up the street. Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. It's been a little chilly, a couple of chilly nights this last week. Cut down on the porch business a little bit and also struck fear into the hearts of the big-time tomato planters in town. particularly Clarence Bunsen, who had already sent in his second string of plants after the varsity got frosted out. this last week and stepped out on his back stoop and could see his breath in the air and realized it was going to get chilly that night. He looked out across the rows, felt kind of like General Grant at the Battle of Shiloh, sending those big boys in crimson delights into the cold night. he thought to himself, stay together boys, keep your heads down. And they did, and they all came back in the morning. That was Wednesday morning, the morning after the chilly night. Wednesday morning when about 8.30 in the morning people who were looking across the street towards the Waldorf's home saw Mrs. Waldorf dash out of the front door, slamming the door behind her and marching in a pretty forcible manner down the walk carrying her pink overnight case heading straight for the Plymouth and behind her about a few steps trotting along was Mr. Waldorf who was reaching out to tug at her sleeve and who stood beside her at the Plymouth engaged in serious conversation. It was a sight you don't often get to see in town, and so a number of people took the opportunity to watch this. He seemed to be saying to her to calm down, to quiet down, to hold your horses, don't get excited, and tried to talk her into coming back into the house with him. But she has been holding her horses now for, what, 37 years of marriage, and she seemed to want to give her horses their head. see what they would do. And so she jumped into the Plymouth and he ran around to the passenger side and jumped in and they drove off. Though he had been trying to get her to come back into the house with him, he decided it was the better part of valor to go along. Which is a luxury of married people with grown-up children that You can both walk away from the marriage together. You don't have to leave somebody at home. You can both run away. Mrs. Tollefson was watching this from due east across the street, and a couple hours later she walked over to the Waldorf's house to close the door, which he had left open. which ordinarily you wouldn't worry about in Lake Wobegon, an open front door, except that she had seen the Krebs box big black dog Bruno go in. So she went to check on it and walked up to the door and felt a blast of heat come out and walked in and it was 85 degrees in there. She walked in and she could hear the furnace throbbing in the basement and she knew immediately, Mrs. Tollefson did, what had bothered Mrs. Waldorf and made her walk out because Mrs. Waldorf has told Mrs. Tollefson a great deal of stuff over the years. It was the fact that the old man turns off the thermostat every year on April the 15th, not to be turned on again no matter what until Halloween. This is a fixed principle of life not to be changed no matter how chilly it may get any evening. And after putting up with it for 30-some years, she decided she was tired of being chilly and walked out. And he, evidently, on his way out the door after her, had reached over and thrown the furnace into high throttle. Because this thing was vibrating in the basement as if it was just about to take off. probably the most passionate thing he'd done in a week. Turn that up. Or so Mrs. Tollefson thought. But then she's heard a lot from Mrs. Waldorf and may suffer from having too much information about him. The dog was in the kitchen. He had pretty well cleaned off the breakfast table and... was working on their last night's supper, which he had gotten out of the garbage pail and spread across the floor so that he could make a selection from the menu. She got him out of there. She got the kitchen cleaned up. She opened up the doors so that the house cooled down a little bit, turned down the thermostat, and just about then she heard two car doors slam out front. It was the Waldorf's. Ms. Tollefson went out the back door, walked around the block, went to her house, prepared to receive information But Mr. Waldorf, after he went off to work at the locker plant, Mrs. Waldorf just planted some plants, some bedding plants, and did not come across the street to explain what had gone on. So Mrs. Tolleson was left to try and figure it out for herself. I suppose she may strike you as being a nosy neighbor, but there are a couple of ways of looking at that. One is that a person ought to mind their own business. But another is that we shouldn't form opinions of people based on appearances, but ought to dig for the facts and get to know them better, even if they don't want us to. And over the years, Mrs. Tollefson has found out a lot about him, Mr. Waldorf. She has found out that he goes to bed at 10 o'clock every night within about a minute of 10 o'clock. Even if he has fallen asleep earlier in his recliner chair, he wakes up at 10 o'clock and goes up and goes to bed. She knows that he wears nothing but white jockey shorts as the only underwear that he will wear. Believes that if we were meant to wear anything with color on it, it certainly would have been invented long before now. She knows that every July, the second week of July, the Waldorfs get into their car and drive about 60 miles north to spend a week at a resort 60 miles away that they have been going to that same week every year for 25 years and staying every year in cabin number three which now is even more familiar to them than their own home, part of which has been redecorated within the last five years anyway. He's a creature of habit, absolutely tied to habit, which is what upsets his wife. That's what Mrs. Tolleson knows about him. She knows all the reasons why the two of them might have trouble. It's what keeps them together that is a mystery to her. But then that always is the mystery, isn't it? There was another marriage like Wobegon marriage that suffered a little excitement this week. I thought I'd read you this letter. Mrs. Tolleson knows about it because this letter was written to her. Don't ask me how I got my hands on it. I'm not going to tell you. It's from her youngest sister, Marlis, who went out west with her husband. Marlis is the youngest of the seven children and was born about 12 years after the sixth, which tells you something. Dear Signy, she writes. This is being written Monday night outside of Bakersfield somewhere, a nice motel but right on the highway, and the truck traffic sounds like the Russian army. Ron, that's her husband, says to say hello. Tomorrow down to San Diego to Francine's, and Sunday we come home, which I wouldn't mind doing right now, though I suppose we are having a pretty good time considering what has happened to us We have spent practically the whole trip looking up Ron's old buddies, who he hasn't seen for ten years. And when we meet one of them, I suddenly remember why it's been that long. But by then it's too late. We've already agreed to go along with them someplace. We went to a boxing match with some of them. I had no idea what I was doing. It was like another world. I didn't want to look. His friends, they invite you to spend the night at their place and they just don't stop to think that you might like a room with a door or a bed. They say, oh, we've got plenty of room, it's no trouble. And you don't know what they mean until you get there and then all the trouble is yours. We went to his friend Dave's in Rapid City and they, Dave and Sharon, I mean, gave us some cushions and two army blankets. Slept on the living room floor and a clock ringing every hour and woke up at six and her two kids were sitting two inches away with messy pants watching cartoons on TV. They are her kids, and Dave has some of his own someplace, and he and she are not married, but I guess none of that bothers them. Dave says, I've been meaning to go see my little girl for weeks now as if she was a suitcase that he left somewhere. I said to Ron, I can't stay two nights here. But he said it had been ten years since he'd seen Dave, and this was his only chance. Well, those are the ten years since we were married, so it's not like he's been without any company. But these are people I wouldn't have around my house, so I guess you've got to travel if you want to see them. And you sure do see a lot of them out here. The country in the West is so empty for miles, and you drive forever without seeing anything. I guess it takes a different type of person to live here, and most of them, I'm glad they're here and not back there. We saw Ron's cousins, Danny and Donnie. They live outside Las Vegas, where they race cars on weekends at a racetrack, and the rest of the time, I think, they drink beer and say, hey, all right. We had to drive like crazy to get there on Friday night in time for their race and then Ron went down in the pits and left me up in the bleachers with some people whose names I didn't get and afterward we had dinner at a drive-in with Denny and Donnie and these people and they talked two hours without saying anything I was interested in and never asked how I was or who I was either. I tell you, women out here are supposed to just sit outside in the dark and wait to go home, I guess. Denny's girlfriend Lou Anne sat and looked at him like he was the world's most wonderful man, which you didn't have to know him very well to see that he isn't. I was glad they lost the race. And it's a terrible thing to say, but I was hoping they would crash and maybe knock some sense into themselves. They are almost 40 and still in their teens, and I doubt that they will know much more until the day they die, though the day after that they may find out a lot of things. After dinner, it was midnight, and Ron and I went to go look at Las Vegas, which, just as they say, it never stops. And 4 a.m. is the same to them as 4 p.m., which I know because we stayed up until 4 a.m. Farmers are milking cows right now, I thought to myself, and here I am playing cards and winning money. In fact, I am winning more money than they earn in a week. I played blackjack, which was the only game I knew how to play. They didn't play hearts at the casino or a rook. And I went along pretty well, and then about 3.30 I had this great feeling and put everything down on the table and won $1,864. Ron wasn't doing so well, and so when I quit, then he wanted some of that to play with, and I said no. I said I had promised myself that it was going to the missions. He didn't believe me, but I was telling the truth. But he said it was his money to start with. He said, you don't earn no salary. It was the wrong thing to say to me at that time of the morning. I went straight out the front door of the casino and down the street and didn't look back. He said he didn't care if I left because he knew I wouldn't dare go because I didn't know where I was going. But he was walking along behind me as he said it. And when I got on the bus, he got on too. And we rode to the end of the line out in a regular neighborhood with churches and to school and houses with gardens there in Las Vegas and walked all the way back together as the sun came up and had breakfast at a nice place and slept all day and drove last night. And here we are. San Diego will be nice, and only a few days, and then back home to our own house. I hope the kids are behaving themselves. Love, Marlis. That's the news from Lake Wobegon. Well, the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
GK will give a college commencement address. Describing his early dates in his dad's 1957 Fairlane station wagon. Good luck is in getting what you have. The 1985 Whippets are opening their season. TV versus radio broadcasts of baseball. Monday is Memorial Day.
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl/Michael Owen