Chet Atkins, Beausoleil, Michael Doucet, Frank Fields, Johnny Gimble, Randy Hauser, Willie Humphrey, Mark and Ann Savoy, Dennis McGee, Peter Ostroushko, Henry Strzelecki. Butch Thompson,
Jole Blon (Beausoleil ) Sue (Beausoleil ) I Found a New Baby ( Willie Humphrey ) Mood indigo ( Willie Humphrey ) Marie (Mark and Ann Savoy ) EasterLita ( Johnny Gimble , Chet Atkins ) Cajun Song ( Willie Humphrey , Beausoleil ) A Medley of Cajun Music (Beausoleil , Dennis McGee , Mark and Ann Savoy ) How I Love the South ( Johnny Gimble ) Les flammes d'enfer (Beausoleil ) Allons à Lafayette (Beausoleil ) My Cher Bebe Creole ( Dennis McGee , Beausoleil ) The Bosco Stomp (Mark and Ann Savoy , Michael Doucet ) Windy and Warm ( Chet Atkins ) Estrellita ( Chet Atkins , Johnny Gimble ) Fiddle Medley ( Peter Ostroushko , Johnny Gimble , Chet Atkins ) Tits yeux noirs (Beausoleil , Peter Ostroushko ) Fais pas ça (Beausoleil , Willie Humphrey ) J'ai Passe Devant Ta Porte ( Dennis McGee , Mark and Ann Savoy , Michael Doucet )
Powdermilk Biscuits ((cajun style with Beausoleil and Willie Humphrey)) Raw Bits (Cajun Style) Swanson's Supper Club (Featuring Lutheran Cajun Food) The Glacier Passenger Car (The O-X model for Minnesota drivers)
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It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. That waltz sure puts me in the mood to talk about it too. Because the leaves have been turning, leaves falling, sun setting earlier and earlier. There's a sweet smoky smell up where I come from at this time of year in the sweet fall, the season of love. As I've been telling you now on this show for weeks, And who better to tell you than me, myself, somebody who was a little bit crazy to begin with and who has been improving on that steadily. It's Tuesday night up at the Lutheran Church in Lake Wobegon. The couples club held their sweetheart supper. They have three of them every year. This was the October potluck. Bring your own. Bring your own sweetheart and your own hot dish, salad, rolls, or salad, or dessert. They have the fish fry in June that the men do with the beer batter. And they... I also have the big Sweethearts Banquet in February for Valentine's Day with actual tablecloths on the tables and a dinner that is cooked by women and an orchestra of at least three musicians, a couple's club. It was started all the way back years ago. Back when it was started, it was intended to be for young couples in the church, but that was a long time ago. And as the years have gone by, people have not had the heart to tell the older members that they no longer qualified, especially when those older members were not so much older than yourself. So everybody goes, there are about fifty couples in it, and they go up and they sit down and have a dinner at the long tables down in the church basement, long tables covered with long white sheets of paper, eating off paper plates, except in February. Then they usually have a presentation This last Tuesday night they had the girls' triple trio from high school come up and sing the Green Cathedral and I walk in the garden alone and people will think we're in love. Sang and then there's the fellowship hour afterward and everybody Sits around and drinks weak coffee for a couple hours and talks about lower back pain and diets and gas mileage. But it's not those things that all those couples go up to the church for the sweetheart supper for. It's really none of those things that they go for so much as it is the group sing before the supper. Sitting there at those long tables in dim light with candles in the red polka dot cut glass. globes on the table as the song leader gets up and stands up at the end of the table and the couples hold hands and he leads them in song even though they don't need to be led because they know all these songs they've sung them for 50 years even though they can't even see him because the light is dim nonetheless the song leader stands up and he leads them and they all sing in their ruined old voices these sweet old love songs like let me call you sweetheart I'm in love with you oh you sound great Let me hear you whisper that you love me. You don't need to sway back and forth, but you can. Let the love lighten. In your eyes so blue Big notes now. Let me call you sweetheart I'm in love with you Oh, they sing with all their hearts just like you did. These old couples holding hands in the dark. And meanwhile, back in the kitchen, the Luther Leaguers who are serving dinner tonight look at each other in amazement, listening to these bare ruined sopranos out there singing. These old guys with the deep voices who look down at their feet and they sing one note for a while and then they sing another note for a while. The Luther Leaguers look at each other and then they put their hands over their mouths and they gasp and they wheeze and laugh. They laugh back there. It's so funny to them hearing these people out there at the long tables with the white papers sing about love and romance, why those people are old enough to be their parents and in many cases are. Oh, it's just ridiculous. Poor children, poor children, so embarrassed. They don't even want to go out there and be around their parents when they're singing. Not like that. The Tollefson boy, young Jim Tollefson, looks down into the relish trays that he's getting ready. He's so embarrassed because his father, Byron, is the song leader at the Sweetheart Supper tonight. That's his dad's voice, that horrible baritone that is sailing up over other people's like a one-winged albatross around the room. That's his dad out there singing those songs. And now they're getting ready to sing another one, and the Luther Leaguers put their hands over their eyes, so embarrassed. With someone like you, a pal good and true, I'd like to leave it all behind and go and find Some place that's known to God alone. To God alone. Big notes now. Just a spot. To call our own... Milk them now. We'll find perfect peace Where joys never cease Somewhere beneath a starry sky We'll build a sweet little nest Somewhere in the West and let the rest of the world go by. What a sweet song. Poor Tollefson boy. How humiliating to listen to those people sing. He is reading his way through the Flambeau Family Mystery Series, his favorite books right now. He's 14 years old. The story of the adventures of the Nobel Prize winning scientist, Emile Flambeau, and his wife, the Broadway actress, Eileen, who solved crimes around the world with the help of their talented son, Tony. working out of their penthouse high above Park Avenue in Manhattan. Now there is a married couple who know something about the elegance and the romance of love. He's been reading their latest book where they both come back from the Arctic where they have just cracked a plot by a ring of Texas financiers to implant a strange virus in the Arctic, in the ice cap, which, if it were allowed to remain, would have caused everyone in the snow belt to be flat on their back in beds for two months. They have solved this crime and are now back in New York, Emil and Eileen, as Jim reads through page 131 and 132, and she turns to Emil and she says, Darling, it's been so long since we've been together. Why don't we go out to Michael's for dinner tonight, just the two of us? It would be so nice just to sit and be with you and just talk about nothing in particular. On second thought, Why don't you open that bottle of Beaujolais and I'll just throw together some ratatouille and we'll stay here. Oh, oh, Amy, oh, darling. His parents never talked like that to each other. Never. His mother is always just in there cooking, and when it's time to eat, she just says, supper, and everybody comes and eats. There's nothing romantic about it in his house. Why can't we be more like the flambeaus, he thinks, as the couple's club at the sweetheart's dinner sings on and on their sweet songs. Mmm, sweet love. Senator K. Torvaldsen was not there at the couples club because he is a bachelor, one of the oldest bachelors in Lake Wobegon, but he's hoping to go next year. He is hoping to become part of a couple as soon as he possibly can. He's 72, but he's in love. Senator K. Torvaldsen, a man who was named senator by his mother because she liked the sound of the name. Yet one more surprise in his life. He's so in love, so in love with a woman far away. Everyone can tell. Either he's in love or else he doesn't have long to live. It's one or the other. He was sitting suffering silently in the sidetrack tap this last week, sitting by himself, just looking at the mirror. Finally Wally said, well, he said it could be worse. He said you could be twins and both of you be in love with her. The old man walked out, he walked up past the school, up into the woods, stood and studied a tree for a while and he walked down through the main street and down by the lake and along the highway and down to the grain elevators and stood and looked out at the soybeans for a while and walked as people who are in love will do, walked and walked. walked up to the statue of the unknown Norwegian and studied him for a while as if he had some advice to offer. The woman he is in love with is a woman who lives far away in Maine. Her name is Lara. She, like him, is 73. She has beautiful almond eyes and magnificent gray hair. He met her in Florida last winter. at a church supper at a Methodist church and saw her for walks and spent as much time with her as he could and has been corresponding with her ever since and has called her as often as he dared, though he doesn't want to make a fool of himself. He took a picture of her in Florida last winter, which he put in a gold frame and put on top of his television set, and there it sits. He sits and listens to television and looks at her sitting there, magnificent woman. His sister-in-law, Mary, came into the room and said, Who is that? She's pretty. Is she a friend of yours? Do you know her? Pretty? She's not pretty. She is magnificent. She is appareled in angelic splendor and enveloped in ethereal light and her face is the face of love itself and around her neck are the planets and the stars on a silver chain. She's not pretty. But who is she? Is she only his friend? Is she something more? How does she feel about him? So last week the old man sat down to try to write her a letter. He tried dozens of times to write just the right sort of letter. Dear Laura, it's been a quiet week. The leaves are turning and the sun is setting earlier and earlier. And it's been dry, which is good because we don't have all our soybeans and corn in yet. How are you? My dear Lara, The leaves are turning, which leads me to think about my age in life, which makes me think I will go to Florida again this winter, perhaps in a few weeks. Will you be there too? And if you will be, may I see you again? Let me know when you know your address. My dear love, this may seem the most ridiculous thing you have ever heard, but my darling Laura, I hope you will not mind if I call you darling, for I have been calling you darling to myself for many months now, and it is time that I let you know how I feel in my heart. Dear Laura, The leaves have turned and it looks like I'll be heading to Florida soon." He tried over and over again and finally wrote a sensible letter but didn't like it very much and so wrote a foolish letter which he loved writing. but he was afraid to send. It included the words sweetheart and darling and my love more than 15 times. So he took the sensible letter and the foolish letter and he put them in envelopes and addressed each of them and put a stamp on each of them and put them in his pocket and put on his jacket and walked down to the post office and walked up to the mailbox and looked at it and walked on and walked around the block and came back and stopped and thought and went a little farther down the street and turned around and came back and walked up to the mailbox and opened it and put the dumb letter right straight down it. and went home and began to wait. The people at the couples club I think could have understood how he felt, being so in love. They surely must remember. Clarence and Arlene Bunsen were at the couples club singing those sweet old love songs. It was only about thirty years ago that Clarence was stationed in the Navy in Chicago, and when he got his first twenty-four hour leave he got on a bus for Minneapolis where Arlene was in nurses training at Swedish Hospital. Twenty-four hours was all he had, but he got on the bus even though the bus ride was ten hours. And even though it got him there at nine o'clock in the evening, one hour before curfew at the nurse's dormitory, he spent ten hours on the bus going up and ten hours on the bus going back just so that he could spend one hour with her that night. I'm sure he must remember. If she reminded him, I'm sure he would remember it. It was about 15 years ago that Daryl and Marilyn Tallarude moved back to his dad's farm after they had moved away for a while to Fargo, North Dakota, where Daryl thought he'd like to get out of the farming business for a while and got a job in sales, but it didn't work out and he didn't know exactly what he wanted to do. So they came back to the farm and came back to live in that little house. and to go back in partnership with his dad. And he felt sad about it to bring his wife back, Marilyn. She'd liked it in a bigger town. And she was expecting their third child. This was after the first two, after Eric was born and before Michelle. And they came back, and it was in the spring. And his dad was sick, so that Daryl was doing work for the both of them. And he was just finishing up cultivating the 80-acre field just south of the little house. And he was making the last pass with the discs and the harrow. And he had made the turn at the far end and was coming back up toward the house. When something happened, the front wheels hit a rock or he fell asleep or something, but he pitched over backward. and he didn't know what happened until he hit the ground and his arm fell across the drawbar and it hung on and he rode along, dragged along on the ground behind the tractor knowing that just behind his feet were twelve steel discs rolling along on the ground and behind that was the harrow dragging along with all of its teeth. He hung on with both arms as well as he could, looking up forward between the wheels up to where the tree line seemed so far away, miles away. He tried to heist himself up so that he could haul himself up and maybe reach the throttle, but he couldn't. And as it moved along, he knew that he couldn't roll away from the tractor and he knew that he could not hang on. He knew that his arm would lose its grip and he would fall back and go under the discs and be dragged along by the arrow. But he held on as long as he could and as the trees got closer and closer he thought he might be able to make it until finally the front wheels of the tractor went down in a little ditch and went up and into the weeds and he was dragged through the weeds and was dragged up and over a log and was about to lose his grip when the front of the tractor came up against a tree and the tractor stopped and the wheels spun and he let go. And he lay there in the dirt and could not move for several minutes until he rolled to the side and finally managed to stand up. And by taking great thought, he managed to reach over and turn the key off on the tractor. And it was silent. And he heard the sound of wind in the trees and a cow far away and a car honking. It was only about a hundred yards to his house. As he walked through the woods, he could barely walk. He fell a couple of times. He was shaking. He was shaking so hard. And he did not know, he did not know if he was alive or dead. He could see everything, but it looked strange. It looked as if it was not real. Nothing looked real to him and he did not feel real. His body felt numb and cold as if his whole body was empty as he walked along towards the house. And it was not until she looked out the window and saw him coming and ran out to meet him and threw her arms around him. when he felt her touch him, that he knew that he was alive, when he felt her hands on him, her hands against his face, that he knew he was alive, and they walked into the house together. It was Thursday, Thursday about noon. Senator K. Torvaldsen was fixing himself some lunch, tomato soup and a hot dog sandwich when the phone rang and without thinking he reached over and picked it up and said hello and heard her voice as she said, oh my darling, He felt weak in the knees and he started to sit down but managed to reach over for the chair and put it under him so he would have something to sit down on as he said, oh you sweet lady, oh you sweet woman, it's so good to hear your voice. That's the news from Lake Wobegon. For all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, all the children are above average.
Garrison announces the death of Merle Watson, Doc Watson's son who was killed in a tractor accident. A discussion of raising mildew in your house for profit.
1987-10-24 1988-10-24
Times Oct 24 1985
1985.10.24 Shreveport Times
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl
John L (2025-10-12): At one point, Micheal Doucet was talking to Dennis McGee, trying to get his attention before they played a song, not being sure he was ready. Monsieur McGee? Mr McGee replied, Go 'head! He was on top of the situation and ready to go. A funny, tender moment, one of those special moments in radio and on PHC that is still fun to listen to all these years later.