Chet Atkins, Butch Thompson Trio, Johnny Gimble, Randy Hauser, Garrison Keillor, Rose Maddocks, Glenn Ohrlin, Peter Ostroushko, Henry Strzelecki.
Faded love ( Johnny Gimble ) Riding down the canyon ( Johnny Gimble ) Gardenia waltz ( Johnny Gimble ) San Antonio rose ( Johnny Gimble ) Wahoo ( Johnny Gimble ) Daddy, Can't We Spend the Night in Laramie? ( Garrison Keillor ) OK for a cowboy to cry ( Garrison Keillor ) I Ride An Old Paint ( Garrison Keillor ) Going down down ( Rose Maddocks ) Lonely streets ( Rose Maddocks ) Alone with you ( Rose Maddocks ) Farther Along ( Rose Maddocks ) Silver threads ( Rose Maddocks ) Back in the saddle ( Chet Atkins ) Wagon wheels ( Chet Atkins ) Ragtime cowboy ( Chet Atkins ) Boomer Johnson ( Glenn Ohrlin ) My Pony and I ( Glenn Ohrlin ) High tone dance ( Glenn Ohrlin ) Dill pickle rag ( Peter Ostroushko )
American Family Leasing (PHC Cast) Barfnicht, Michelle Bigger Hammer Enterprises (PHC Cast) Chatterbox Cafe Lake Wobegon Leonards Magandanz, Mike Minnesota Language Systems (Wyoming edition) Powdermilk Biscuits (The reason people came to Wyoming: Avoid responsibility, also. GK on the Cover of Time) Prairie Dog Granola Bars (PHC Cast) Pumpkin Institute (PHC Cast) Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Raw Bits (New clothes/Ho hos/Pickup) Sidetrack Tap Thorvaldson, Senator K
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Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. I guess it has. I have not been there for a while. I went out walking when I got to Laramie last night. Gosh, it really is different out here, and Laramie's so different from at home. It is the big sky country, and you feel that even at night. It's a long way between places here, even in town. Made me feel like when I was a kid and used to be able to scare myself very easily. Walking around town at night, Laramie is a place where I think I could frighten myself anytime I wanted to. There's a lot of space, a lot of space out here. And if something were to come after you, you would have a lot of time to watch it and contemplate what it was going to do to you. is how I look at that. But then I felt the same way back in Lake Wobegon, where the sky is not nearly so big as here, though it got bigger at this time of year when the leaves fell off the trees. And when a little boy walking around up and down the streets, say on Halloween, when your vision is obscured by a mask, A little boy walking around and looking up at the shadows of bare limbs against that dark autumn sky could see shapes and forms moving up there of creatures, perhaps, about to drop on you, about to kill you at any moment. Cougars, probably. Wild cougars up there in the trees in Lake Wobegon. Cougars whose, well, one of the big items in their diet is little kids. Little kids with bags full of candy. Those would be the first ones they'd go after. Yes, sir. And even though I tried to calm myself down by thinking that those cougars were more afraid of me than I was of them, it was hard to imagine any animal being that afraid. And maybe they were a different kind of cougar that wouldn't know it was supposed to be afraid. Maybe it was some sick old cougar with nothing to live for, nothing to lose. Cougar just want to make one last move, grab a kid, take off. I thought about it often. It was Halloween Thursday night in Lake Wobegon, which also was prayer meeting night at the Lutheran Church. A little scheduling conflict there. They had not anticipated. Pastor Inkvist has a series of five Thursday night prayer meetings to lead up to Thanksgiving. So they had to schedule the prayer meeting for 6.30 to 7.15, and Halloween was 7.30 to 9 o'clock. was how they resolved that. And the kids went out, as usual, walking around town, doing what you don't get to do in that town at any other time of year except that one night, go around and openly beg from people and not be ashamed of it. A great privilege for a kid, though I remember there was a time, I believe I was 10 years old, when it was taken away from us. And it was a great shock to me when it happened. It was the work of a woman named Miss Norgaard who worked up at the bank. She was a teller and was active in various things such as thanatopsis and the Dorcas Circle. And one year was elected president of the PTA, even though she was neither a parent nor a teacher. I don't know why. Maybe she was an association. I guess they figured she didn't have any kids so she would have more time to devote herself to her job, which unfortunately was true. She was a woman who set out to do us good in ways that we could not even imagine. A good woman. as Mark Twain said, a good person in the worst sense of the word. She wore navy blue, as I remember, Miss Nargard. She was a serious person, and she wore a dead fox around her neck on a coat, which should have been a tip-off. She was extremely thin, so that when you looked at her, you couldn't see how there was room in that body for her to breathe. But evidently she did. She came around school quite often after she became president of the PTA. And whenever she came to us children, came around children, she'd always come up to us and try and talk to us, figuring, I suppose, that she ought to. And she would smile or try to. But when Miss Norgaard smiled, you always wished that she wouldn't do it because it never looked right on her. It looked like there was something wrong with her mouth, that it was screwed on too tight or something. She instituted a number of reforms. She instituted a music appreciation course in school which forced little children to sit and listen to Brahms and Beethoven and draw pictures on construction paper that illustrated what they felt at the time. They also passed a rule against comic books, I believe, during her term in office. But the worst thing that she ever did was when she decided that Halloween served no educational purpose. And so she changed it around so that we would dress up in costume. There'd be a costume contest and we would dress up as our favorite character in literature. And the best one would win a rather small prize. And then we children would go out with tin cans. And instead of collecting candy, we would go out and collect coins for UNICEF. It was one of those absolutely wonderful, terrible ideas that when somebody broaches it, nobody knows what to say. And so it got in to our amazement. Halloween was changed just like that. And there was nothing that we children could do about it. We took it up with our parents. But this was back in a day when parents supported everything that was done in school. Authority was without seam in our town. There was no way you could penetrate or get around it. They all backed each other up. We went home and we said, why? Why UNICEF? Why do we have to do this? What did we do? We didn't do nothing. Why do we have to do this? And my mother said, because. Just do it. Just do what they tell you to do. Dad, why do we have to do this? He said, do what your mother says. But why? Why? Because. Because. The great foundation stone of parental philosophy when I was a child. The one word that explained the reasons for things being. Because. They could have chiseled that word in stone over the doorway to the school and we never would have had to get an education, you see. We just would have had to walk up there and look at it. And that would have done us for life, you see. You ask why? Because it would have. That's why. So that's what we had to do. And I remember on our tour, that dismal, dismal Halloween when I was 10. The only high spot was Mr. Torvaldsen's house when Mr. Senator K. Torvaldsen, who evidently had not received the news, came out on his porch with his usual immense bag of salted nut goodies, my favorite candy, the candy that combined sweetness and saltiness in a mysterious formula that seemed to differ from one nut roll to the next. Rather like the bouquet of fine wines will be different from one bottle to another so that a person can spend years of their life trying out different nut goodies. and nut rolls. There he was on the steps, Senator K. Torvaldsen, who almost saved Halloween for me years ago when I was ten. Ten years old. I've often fought back on that Halloween and regretted it and resented it. Because ten, you know, is the year when you can really clean up at Halloween. When a person is small enough to be appealing, but big enough to cover a lot of ground. After that, it goes downhill just a little bit. Miss Norgaard retired from the bank years ago. She went down to Florida to live somewhere. I don't know. I've lost track of her. I never wanted to know more about her. But when I heard a few weeks ago that Senator Kay Torvaldson had fallen in love with a woman that he met at the Methodist Church Supper in the basement down in Tampa, Florida this last winter, I had a momentary fear that it might be Miss Norgaard. But it wasn't. It wasn't, thank goodness. It was a woman, as I told you last week, a woman who lives out in the state of Maine that he met there, that fine old bachelor. met this beautiful woman, his own age, handsome woman with silver hair at the Methodist church supper. He's been writing to her all summer and last week finally got up the nerve to write her a letter declaring his love. And she answered it with a phone call a few days later. A wonderful phone call. He picked up the phone and heard her say, Oh, you sweet man. Oh, you sweet thing. And sat down stricken in love at the age of 72. Who would have thought it possible? Oh my gosh, he talked with her for the longest time and it did turn out to be the longest time too. He looked up at the clock and there 15 minutes had gone by. 15 minutes. He had never made or talked on a long distance phone conversation for more than three minutes in his life. romantic man that he is. He'd never gone over three minutes, the limit voted by Congress. But he went on. It was so exciting talking to this sweet woman, the woman of his dreams, the woman whom he loved so far, far away. She said, she said, what are you doing for Thanksgiving? He almost swallowed his teeth. In fact, his upper bridge did slip just a little bit. He said, excuse me, the water's boiling and had to go away and get a little adhesive and put it back in place and came back and now looked at the clock and 25 minutes had gone by. He said, Laura, he said, why don't you come out here for Thanksgiving? Not stopping to think of the consequences. An unmarried woman, even one of 72, visiting an unmarried man for Thanksgiving? For purposes of giving thanks? And Lake Wobegon had it ever been done before, he doubted it. So that was why Thursday evening on prayer meeting night he was up at his nephew's house, Byron Tollefson's house, Byron and Betty's house, for supper. He planned to go to their house for Thanksgiving and was hoping to find a way to ask them would it be possible for his true love to come to and be their guest. Their boy Jim was at dinner on Thursday evening after Johnny Tollefson went off to college. Why, Jim is the oldest boy left at home. He's a junior and is in the junior class play, which opens in a couple weeks at the high school. And he also is in love, though he did not tell his great uncle about it, nor did his great uncle tell him. Jimmy sat and ate supper in silence, meatloaf and green beans and mashed potatoes, and thought about the junior class play. The Glory of Her Love is the title of it, in which Jim plays the leading role of Lieutenant Brad Wingate, and Michelle Barfnacht plays the role of Sylvia. Michelle Barfnacht. Beautiful Michelle with her jet black hair and those long black lashes and her delicate thin waist and her magnificent bone structure and her tremendous lung capacity, Michelle. who twice in the course of the play, he puts his hands on her hips, Lieutenant Brad Wingate does, and looks deep into her eyes and professes his love. Sweet Michelle, the only unfortunate thing about her is her last name, and he could change that. He could change that someday. But his glorious moment is in act two when they're at the train station and Lieutenant Wingate is about to go off to rejoin his unit and he looks Sylvia deep in the eyes and placing his hands carefully on her hips says, my darling I know now what I never knew before and that is that this world is cold and senseless and without joy. and that love, oh my darling, my darling, love is the only thing that makes any sense at all, yes. Oh Sylvia, love is all that can save us now. Love is the most important thing in life. Love is life itself. He never thought, Jim never thought he ever stood a chance. with Michelle. She was kind of friendly with Mike Magandance, who was a halfback and is a halfback this year on the Lake Wobegon-Leonards football team. And Jim never knew he'd stand a chance against an athlete as good as Mike. But the Leonards have been losing this year. Every Friday night have been getting the cookies beat out of them. Michelle sitting up in the stands and watching everything. as Mike gets the ball on play after play and goes off tackle and winds up on his back, back in the backfield, farther back than where he started out from. And meanwhile, Lieutenant Brad Wingate, day after day in rehearsal, is saying, Oh, Sylvia, I know now what I never knew before. And things are looking better and better and better. He wasn't going up to prayer meeting, Jim wasn't, on Thursday. He and Michelle were going to get together early before rehearsal and go over a few lines. Though his mother wanted him to come up to prayer meeting, Jim said no. He said, somebody told him once that you shouldn't do something unless you wanted to really do it well. And he wants to really do this well. So he didn't go up to church with them. Besides, for what he wants, I don't believe that they have prayers. But when Senator Kay Torvaldson was sitting up with the others up in the Lutheran Church on Thursday, he found it hard to think of words to He couldn't think of words except just, thanks Lord, I don't know, thanks, keep up the work. He's so in love, he's so in love, that fine old bachelor man. Oh, it seems incredible to him that only a few weeks ago he was feeling old and sick and thinking about death. thinking about death, and in fact had already ordered his tombstone, wanted to take care of it early, and was thinking about the inscription and wanted on his tombstone, he wanted it to read, Takk for alt in Norwegian, thanks for everything. And then, just a week ago, discovered that he had more to be thankful for than he had been aware of before, that there was more on the way. Well, I remember thinking about death myself back on those Halloween nights. Thinking about cougars about to jump out of the sky, land on me, and end my life right there. And I thought about things jumping on me for many nights, for many years. But the only thing that jumped on me in all that time was my aunt's. I had wonderful big swooping aunts who when they saw me would come down on me out of the sky and hoist me up in the air and say, you sweet thing, you sweet little thing, it's so good to see you. Where have you been all my life? Though I live just up the street and I'd seen them probably twice already that day and been hoisted by them already once. That was the only thing that ever jumped on me, was love swooping down. Nowadays, I've grown quite a bit taller. And the only woman who swoops on me is a little bit shorter than I am, so she has to swoop up. But it's all the same thing, love coming at us and surprising us. Sounded to Torvalds and walked home from prayer meeting with Betty and finally got a chance alone with her and said, Would it be permissible on Thanksgiving to have a woman of my acquaintance be our guest for Thanksgiving? A woman who is coming all the way from Maine to visit me. Betty looked at him and smiled and took his arm in hers and squeezed it. She said, you sweet dear man. He looked down at his feet and turned a becoming dark shade of pink in gratitude. Thanksgiving, four weeks away. It can't come too soon. You wonder why? Because, that's why. That's the news from Lake Wobegon. Where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above all else.
History of Laramie. People went west to avoid shame and disgrace. GO poems - "Reincarnation" "Real cowboy life." The Old Radio Bunkhouse: A magazine salesman calls by the bunkhouse
St Cloud Times Nov 1 1985 Daily Sentinel Nov 3 1985
1985.11.02 Star Tribune / 1985.11.03 Grand Junction Daily Sentinel
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl