Daryl Adams, Chet Atkins, Roy Blount Jr, First Presbyterian Church Choir, Johnny Gimble, Garrison Keillor, Peter Ostroushko, Vern Sutton, Butch Thompson.
I'm going away for a while ( Garrison Keillor ) Down Yonder ( Peter Ostroushko ) My Window Faces South ( Johnny Gimble ) Milk Cow Blues ( Johnny Gimble ) Dear Old Georgia Moon Keep on Shining ( Vern Sutton ) Georgia Cabin Door Swing Wide Open ( Vern Sutton ) Underneath the Georgia Moon (First Presbyterian Church Choir ) When you're smiling ( Johnny Gimble ) Fiddle Tunes ( Johnny Gimble , Peter Ostroushko ) Lake Wobegon Merchants Song ( Garrison Keillor , Peter Ostroushko ) This World Is Not My Home ( Daryl Adams , Garrison Keillor ) Chaplin in new shoes ( Chet Atkins ) Vincent ( Chet Atkins ) A Handful of Keys ( Butch Thompson ) Lorena ( Vern Sutton , First Presbyterian Church Choir ) Storms are on the ocean ( Garrison Keillor ) Wait Until The Sunshines Nellie ( Vern Sutton , First Presbyterian Church Choir ) Trouble In The Amen Corner ( Roy Blount Jr ) The Atlanta Blues ( Vern Sutton ) Georgia Moon (First Presbyterian Church Choir )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique Bulk Books For Big Readers Chatterbox Cafe Ingqvist, Yalmer Lake Wobegon Leonards Minnesota Language Systems (Proper way to gift in Minnesota) Pork Brand Shoes Powdermilk Biscuits Praire Roast Soy Bean Coffee Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Slow Decay Snack Cakes Ted's Song Salvage Tidy Creek
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. I love listening to that song. It makes me think about home, because whenever I leave home, I become like a man in love. I become sick, and I miss it, and I think about nothing, nothing else but where I'm from. It's a lovely town at this time of year, when it starts to get cool, particularly in the evening. I was talking last week about... People in that sweet moment of marriage when they lie together in the dark with just a crack of light under the bedroom door. They lie together in the dark not talking. It's now during these cool fall months that you realize why you like to lie in a bed, you see. In the summertime, in the heat, it doesn't make much sense. You could lie on a bed in the heat. But you don't want to lie down in a bed in the heat. But now you do when it's cool, when cold air comes down. That's when two people really need each other. When you need those old double beds of Lake Wobegon with the little trough that runs down the meadow. Where the people roll in until they find each other. It was cool a couple of nights this week, and some of the light sleepers had to get up and go find an extra blanket. There is a light sleeper in every marriage, one light, one heavy sleeper. Even if two heavy sleepers married each other, they would work it out over the years so that one of them would become a light sleeper, and then the other one would become an even heavier sleeper. They sort of enable each other that way. Heavy sleepers can sleep that slow, deep sleep because they know that the other person is a light sleeper and if anything happened, the light sleeper would wake up and take care of him. Such as elephants coming in the house, for example. Something a heavy sleeper might sleep through, the light sleeper would wake up and take care of him. And then a lot of people become light sleepers because the heavy sleepers in their dreams are taking care of the elephants and herding them away from the bed and the bison and the water buffalo. But the light sleepers got up, it was cold early in the week, in Lake Wobegon, got up for extra blankets. Some of them finding that where the blankets had been kept, they'd been moved to make room for more towels. So some of them just brought a towel back to bed. The others tried to think of where the extra blankets had been put. which is the sort of serious thought that will wake a person up. And some of them got up for good, such as Arlene Bunsen, who is the light sleeper of the Arlene and Clarence marriage. Got up looking for a quilt that had been on the top shelf of the linen closet and was not there and looked around until she was wide awake and went to write a letter to her daughter Barbara Ann down in the cities who Arlene believes is expecting a baby but just doesn't know it yet. And Arlene wrote to her about the weather and about the leaves turning and about the garden and the last of the squash and pumpkins and about beautiful roses, white and pink and yellow roses in the garden. And then there were ladies in long white dresses walking down the garden paths on crushed stone with gentlemen in black frock coats walking alongside them, and soft music playing, and long-legged birds, great blue herons, marching two by two behind them down the garden path. And then Arlene woke up, and it was seven o'clock in the morning. The light was in her eyes, and Clarence was next to her. who seemed to be trying to loosen a hair in his nose by snorting it out. But she's in love, she's in love, she's in love with him. It doesn't matter anymore. She's in love because it's the season for love in autumn when the nights are cool and when the leaves change as they have changed. My mother used to try and show us the magnificence of this time of year when we were little children. I didn't really appreciate it when the leaves turned as they have now. There was a photograph in the Lake Wobegon. Harold Starr ran this last week. Same one that ran when I was a kid. He's used it now for 30 years. Photographs of the leaves changing and underneath he wrote the same thing he's written for 30 years. Once again, the hand of the master has touched these hills with hues and tints to uplift our hearts and fill our minds with love for him. The photograph is in black and white. It always has been. So my mother would always think we ought to get in the car and go out and look at the leaves changing, the maples and the birches and the oak trees out on the hills, hoping to uplift the hearts of her children. But we were not so interested in magnificent things like leaves changing as we were in each other and what we could do to each other in the back seat of a car. when the adults were studying the magnificence of nature. Three of us rode in the back seat, and later four and five in the back seat, and one child, the good child, got to ride in the front seat of the car in between my parents. It was in a two-door sedan, which meant that both of the front seats folded forward, leaving a crack, a crevice, between the two seats, so that a child in the back seat could put a hand down... in between the two seat cushions and get it down underneath the good child. And then with a motion of the thumb and the forefinger you could uplift that good child sometimes by two or three inches. Was what we used to do. But now I'm older. And now it's not the season for low comedy like that. It's the season, it's the season for love in autumn. The Lake Wobegon-Leonards, the football team, has been not doing well, but it's love, it's love that's been their problem. They looked good for about the first half of the first game of the season. And then during halftime, Wayne, the quarterback number 10, looked up in the bleachers and saw there was a girl sitting in the bleachers who he was hoping would come to see him play. And he talked to her about it several times the week before in study hall, and she said yes, she thought she might come. but she wasn't sure because she didn't have anybody to go with and he'd been hoping all week that she would come and there she was sitting in the stands and he went out for the second half with love in his heart. Oh, she looked so beautiful he couldn't take his eyes off her sitting up there in the bleachers. He looked up from the huddle after every play as she sat there trembling in his eyes with an aura around her. She looked like whispering hope on hot buttered toast. Sitting up there in the bleachers and Wayne played like he was in the movies. He threw long, beautiful passes, incomplete, but they looked magnificent as he went back and threw them 22 yards beyond the receiver's outstretched hands. Until finally with third and long yardage on a quarterback option going wide around the right end, he elected to go into the line and into three guys much bigger than himself who liked to hit people hard. And down there with his nose in the dirt, Wayne wound up his season as the Leonard's quarterback and became a young man with an interesting limp. But it was love. It was love and it's the season for it. Everywhere you look in that town, I just feel romance. Everywhere. Maybe you wouldn't feel it if you looked at it, but I do. It rained a couple of days Tuesday and Wednesday rained a little bit, so Carl Krepsbach was a little bit late getting around to painting the Inkvist's big house up on the hill, his big project for the month of October. And a major item of interest in Lake Wobegon, Hjalmar and Virginia Inkvist's house being repainted. It's a big house, two and a half story old Victorian house. It's up there on McKinley Street at the corner of McKinley and Elm. People pay a lot of attention to the banker anyway. Yalmer is the president of the first Inquist State Bank. When the banker looks unhappy and depressed, makes people uneasy. And when this last week Carl had done all of the scraping and sanding, on the house and then it rained and he couldn't get around to the painting, so a person coming down McKinley there under the maple trees and turning onto Elm looked up and saw the banker's house with great big raw ugly bare blotches on the side of it as if maybe the bank itself had scraped bottom and Yalmer had gone to Leavenworth. It made people a little uneasy and made him feel better when on Thursday morning Carl came in his old green Chevy pickup pulled up front full of ladders and paint cans and his brother-in-law Lyle came to help him having the day off from school where he's a teacher Lyle was overdressed for the job wore new khaki pants and a sweater had to go home and change And later in the afternoon, Carl's oldest boy, Greg, came to help paint too. And everybody went to watch. Men painting a house makes it such an attraction in my town. Slow work, not all that dramatic. People just couldn't stay away. people found any excuse to walk up to that part of town and watch. It was a house that was built back in the early 1890s, a two and a half story Victorian frame house with a big full porch running across the front and halfway down one side. Majestic house built by a family named Dempster who lived in it but only a few months before A long series of illnesses and disasters and tragedy overtook them and unhappiness and misery which culminated one October evening when their oldest boy who had been betrothed to a young woman and who no longer loved her so to spare herself the shame and himself the shame of being a faithless lover, went up to the attic and hung himself from a rafter. The next year, the Ingvists bought the house and took it over and moved in. And in later years, Hjalmar, as a boy, earned a lot of nickels taking little children on tours of the house. A tour that always began in the basement and wound around up to the attic where the children stood and looked up at a rafter up there in the shadows. That's where he'd done it, up there. The house was white at one time. But as the years went by, they found it easier to let it get dark and to paint it darker colors. At first the trim and then the whole house. Dark paint covered up a lot of sins, including the sin of not scraping off the old paint before you repainted it. So the house wound up dark green until this year. when Yalmer and Virginia decided they would paint parts of it around the windows and maybe the pillars on the porch, they would paint it a different color, a lighter color. White? No, it would be too dramatic. It shows gray. Gray and dark green. Gray pillars and then gray railings. And then gray on the eaves. And gray the decorative carvings underneath the eaves. And gray around the bay windows. And gray on the window frames and the door frames. So that it wound up a pretty dramatic piece of work for where I come from. People stopped by to watch three men painting a house on Thursday and Friday and then this morning. Yalmer came up from the bank two, three times a day just to look at them. Virginia was inside playing the piano. It was a sunny day on Thursday. The windows opened for the first time in weeks. Playing an old waltz at the piano. Yalmer tried to think of advice he could offer Carl. He couldn't think of anything. He just said, how's it going? Carl said, pretty good. That's what all the men said who came up to inspect the work. They said, how's it going? Pretty good. They said to Yalmer, I see you're painting your house. Yes, I'm painting. I have my house painted. See, you're going with some new colors. Yes, I'm going with some new colors this year. We thought we'd try gray along with the green. Something romantic about this to me. A house being repainted. Painters moving slowly around, doing the trim, doing the hard parts, bickering with each other, pointing out spots that they missed. Carl pointing out where Lyle skipped the place. Lyle said, I'm going to go back and get that. I'm just about to go back. I just moved over here to paint over here. If it's all right, I'll go back and get that. Fine, good. I just thought I'd show you where you missed that point there. I didn't miss it. I skipped it. I'll go back to that place. Fine, good. I just didn't want you to forget it. Well, I haven't forgotten it. I'll go back and do it right now, okay? You want me to do it right now? I'll do it right now. men bickering and her playing the piano in the living room. Oh, it's romantic. Why else would people paint a house and try and put a little more color into life if not because they love each other? Oh, it's starting to look like a castle, that house being repainted. It's starting to look like a castle. And Yalmer and Virginia, no matter what you may think of them, no matter how you may have seen them before, are the two lovers who've come thousands of miles to live in this magnificent house together. Because it's a season for love. Her at the piano playing a waltz, playing a waltz, and the men painting in three strokes at a time, playing a waltz. It's the season for it in the autumn. When the air smells of smoke and smells of apples and of leather and smells of horses. When the trees are ablaze with color. when the nights are cold and when strong women and good-looking men look at each other in a way they've never looked at each other before. Oh, I miss my home when I travel far away. I'm going away to leave you, love. This is the song she played at the piano. I'm going away for a while, but I'll return to you someday if I go 10,000 miles. The storms are on the ocean The heavens may cease to be This earth may lose its motion, love If I prove false to Thee Oh, have you seen those mournful doves Flying from pine to pine They're longing for their own true love Just like I long for mine My own true love is far away Ten thousand miles from here I think about her every day, my darling and my dear. My love is like a red, red rose That's newly sprung in June My love is like a melody That's sweetly played in tune And yet I know of no red rose I know no melody my heart as when your face I see so fare thee well my own true love so fare thee well a while and I'll come back to you someday if I go ten thousand miles under the sun the moon the stars Love is all that's true. Love has brought us safe those far. And love will take us through. That's the song she played on the piano. That's the news from Lake Wobegon. For all the women of song, all the men are good looking. And all the children are bugged out.
Grueselle Grits - A song from Atlanta's Golden Age, "On the Corner of Peachtree and Peachtree" Roy Blount Jr talks about the sights of Atlanta such as the Varsity and Perimeter Malls. He recalls a New York Times article claiming Southerners eat raw dirt... His response was "Hell yes, we eat dirt but I hear you eat raw fish"! Garrison announces the PHC frequent listener program! Closes with Keep your feet on the ground, your hopes up high, pray for rain, keep the humor dry and eat those Powdermilk Bisquits!!
Atlanta Constitution Oct 24 1985
1985.10.24 Atlanta Constitution
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl