Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Richard Dworsky, Prudence Johnson, Garrison Keillor, Howard Mohr, Dave Moore, Peter Ostroushko.
Adelita ( Dave Moore ) La paloma ( Dave Moore ) La cucaracha ( Dave Moore ) Soul of a man ( Dave Moore ) Boll weevil ( Dave Moore ) Ain't that news ( Garrison Keillor , Greg Brown ) Gypsy love song ( Garrison Keillor , Greg Brown ) There were bells ( Garrison Keillor , Greg Brown ) One life ( Garrison Keillor , Greg Brown ) Chains of love ( Prudence Johnson , Greg Brown ) Seems like old times ( Prudence Johnson , Greg Brown ) Who knows ( Prudence Johnson , Greg Brown ) Lately ( Greg Brown , Prudence Johnson ) You Don't Know Me ( Prudence Johnson , Greg Brown ) Grand Junction ( Greg Brown ) Every new love ( Greg Brown ) I've just seen a face ( Richard Dworsky ) Freight train ( Richard Dworsky )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique Bunsen, Clarence Central Standard Association Father Emil Minnesota Language Systems Pork Brand Shoes Powdermilk Biscuits Raw Bits Sidetrack Tap Smart Light Electronic Instrument Panels
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. It was awfully quiet when the news got out. It was Tuesday when the news got out that Father Emil has decided to step down or step out, pastor there after 40-some years at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. The news came out on Tuesday, though he didn't mean to announce it until much farther on into Lent. He was afraid people might slack off if they had a lame duck priest, but the... Some of the boys from the Demolais were going around selling garden seeds on Tuesday to put themselves to summer camp so they could go to camp, not have to weed gardens, and came up to Father Emil at the rectory, who has always been a great customer of theirs, and he said, boys, I'm not going to be planting a garden this spring. He said, somebody else will be planting it, and I don't know what he wants. strange, coming from a priest, kind of got their interest. So they said, oh, okay, and went home and told their parents. In Lake Wobegon, the assumption is if a person does not plant a garden in the spring, they are planning to be planted themselves.
So Margaret Krepsbach called up Father Emil and said, you're not putting in a garden? What is wrong? He said, I'm retiring. I'm retiring on the 31st of March, the day after Easter. She said, oh, she said. You're just tired. You're just feeling bad. You just need a vacation. You can't leave us. He said, you know, he said, this last January, I baptized the child of a couple who are the children of a couple I married. He said, that's three generations. He said, that's about enough. He said, when I come to where I'm burying people who I baptized, I don't know, but when I get so confused, I'll mix them up. He said, people here need somebody who can get up and get around and who's got all his marbles, because God knows a lot of them don't. So it's time to retire. Well, Margaret Krepsbach told her mother-in-law Myrtle, and then the news was all over town. Within an hour, Myrtle is one of the mass media.
Then everybody, everybody, everybody knew about it. Father Emil, retiring. What amazing news. A man been there so long, so long. Been a fixture, be like part of the landscape, piece of architecture, like a tree in that town where history and tradition are so important and sometimes are all that we have, don't you know? To think of him being gone, it's hard to imagine, even if you're not Catholic. And that is a town where if you're not Catholic, you're absolutely not Catholic. This is a town where we don't fool around with a lot of tolerance, you understand. People read their Bibles, they don't see the word maybe in there a lot, you know, they don't... In the Bible, you don't hear God saying, on the other hand, I could be wrong about this. People don't go for tolerance. They stick to the truth and let the other guy worry about his mistakes.
And even if you're not Catholic, in a town like Lake Wobegon, the priest, the priest, when the priest clears his throat, the dogs stop barking. When the priest walks down the street, everybody's quiet. Everybody's quiet. Clarence Bunsen stopped up there to visit Father Emil to find out if it was true. Clarence had been down to the cities, been down to a banquet of Ford dealers over in Minneapolis where Bunsen Motors once again had received a plaque for being one of the oldest Ford agencies in the area. Which, because once you are one of the oldest, you continue being one of the oldest. So long as you stay in business, they've got a lot of these plaques. Honoring them as one of the oldest forward agencies, he had this plaque with him. It was about 14 pounds of bronze. And... And big, great big thing, about big enough to put on your step, use it as a boot scraper, except it wasn't quite that useful. He was showing it to Father Emil. He was saying, you know, this is the 10th or 12th, I forget what, plaque that we've gotten from the Ford Motor Company, and I imagine we'll get some more. I'll have to throw the whole bunch of them out, he said, because I know that when I die... My kids and Clint's kids, when he dies, are going to have a problem with all these old souvenirs. They'll want to throw them in the nearest hole, but they won't dare. They'll feel guilty.
They'll feel like they ought to keep them. So they'll keep them in a box someplace and pass them on to their kids. He says these souvenirs, they're like Mercury in the bloodstream, except it's hereditary, too. You pass it on to your kids. I ought to just throw this thing away, and yet I can't. Ugliest darn thing, a concrete block is handsomer than this. Father Emo looked at it. He said, well, tastes change, he said. Your kids might like it. He knew that wasn't true. He just said it in his pastoral capacity. He said, I hope they don't give me one of those when I step down.
No, Clarence said, we'll give you a trip to Florida. He said, why not a trip to Jamaica? Clarence said, I don't think old priests are supposed to go beyond Florida, unless they're missionaries and they can go wherever they like to, of course. Father Emil said, well, he said, maybe the parish send me down to Florida and then you Lutherans could pay the freight to the rest of the way to Jamaica. I could be a Lutheran missionary. Clarence said, well, you know, you'd make a good one. He said, you've got the intelligence to be a Lutheran.
He said, with your background, we could train you in just a couple years. It wouldn't be that hard. Father Emil smiled, sweet, sweet smile at him. He said, Clarence, he said, Being Lutheran is my idea of a vacation. He said, I can't imagine anything more relaxing than that. He said, just to think that you could take all of the truths that are too hard for you and just change them. Anything that bothered you in doctrine, you could just change it to something more comfortable for yourself, almost like taking the law of gravity and softening it a little bit so you wouldn't fall so hard. I tell you, he said, it's just amazing. Martin Luther was a great man to figure out how to do that. Clarence said, well, he said, well, he said, you know what they say. Got up and went for his coat. Still trying to think of a good exit line to walk out on.
Well, he said, you know what they say. Put on his robbers. Well, put on his mittens. You know what they say, he said. Father Emil said, what? What do they say? You know, he said. walked out the door, went down to the sidetrack tap. It's a place where people go when they're troubled. And Clarence was awfully troubled by the idea that this great old man, Father, he will be leaving after all these years, 40, 40 some years. Walked down to the sidetrack tap. It was Tuesday evening about 5.30, 6 o'clock. Walked in, sat down at the bar. Just walked in to see if Wally was there. Which, of course, Wally was. Wally's the proprietor. If Wally wasn't there, it'd be locked. He sat down. Wally said, Clarence, he said, where can I get you? Clarence said, nothing. I just came in to see if you were here. He said, of course I'm here. This is my place. Where would I be if I wasn't here?
Well, that's right, Clarence said. I hadn't thought of it that way. Well, as long as I'm here, maybe I'll have a beer. You want a Wendy's? Wally said, of course I want a Wendy's, he said. That's my beer. What else would I have if I didn't have a Wendy's? St. Wendell's Brewery. It's the big brewery. I don't know if I ever told you about this. Up near Lake Wobegon. Give me a Wendy's. That's what the guys all say in those dim little taverns. Up there all around, all around Mist County, Lake Wobegon, that whole area up central Minnesota. Give me a Wendy's, they say. It's the greatest beer in the world.
And it's made not far away, which is a good deal. It's convenient. It's convenient. Give me a Wendy's. Some places, some bars, they don't even ask you what they want. They just bring you a Wendy's. And if you asked for something else, they'd say, where'd you say you were from then? You say, I don't believe I did say. They say, good, because I don't want to know. St. Wendell's Brewery, founded by the Demers family over a hundred years ago, one of the oldest breweries still operating in the state of Minnesota and one of the few still family-owned and operated, going back more than a hundred years to when the original Dimmers, Mr. Dimmers, old Mr. Dimmers they called him, especially when they couldn't remember his first name, he left Germany to come over to this country in order to evade the draft of the Prince of Prussia and to skip out on some of his debts in the process, and also to evade about three women whom he had led to believe would be the next Mrs. Demmers as soon as he paid his debts and finished up his military service. He came over to this country to avoid all of this responsibility and came to central Minnesota and became a rich and distinguished man, founding a brewery and making his own beer, which at first he was going to call Dimmer's Beer, but brother-in-law of his who knew English told him, no, that wouldn't be a good name for a beer in this country, so he called it St. Wendell's Beer. A person thinks of this, a guy thinks of all this history when you sit in a dim bar on a Tuesday evening and have a bottle of Wendy. You think about all this history of the Demers family, and you think about that St. Wendell's brewery out there in St. Wendell's, meant to look like a beautiful castle, a Bavarian castle they intended it to look like. And it is sort of a beautiful brick castle about the first two stories. But then the bricklayers got a little dizzy and nauseous when they got up about 20 feet. This was back in the 1880s. These were Swedish bricklayers.
And this was back at a time when if you built a brewery, there was a lot of drinking on the job because the workers had beer rights. But these were Swedish bricklayers and they weren't quite used to German beer. They got a little dizzy and a little nauseous when they got up to about the second floor and that's about where it quits being a castle and it becomes just a factory. And all the bricks that were supposed to go into making those great towers in St. Wendell's Brewery, they used them instead to make a road. The bricklayers laid it because they kind of felt more like being down on their hands and knees on the ground. So they built this road, and it starts out being about 50 feet wide, and it goes like that for 100 feet, and then it's about 100 feet wide for about 50 feet.
And the pattern of the bricks they've laid to make the road, when you look at it at some height, it kind of makes you feel like they must have felt when they did it. But this is the world's greatest beer, Wendy's beer, St. Wendell's beer, made from that good drinking water up in the little town of St. Wendell's. The people come from miles around to get this stuff. They drive in. There's a municipal faucet there on the main street. People drive up in their cars, open up the trunks. They got plastic jugs in there. They go away with a whole month's supply of it. A man came from France once. came from France, and he got two gallons of St. Wendell's water, and he took it back to France with him, and it got through customs. French customs said, you can't bring that in here, that's water. But then they had a taste of it, and they said, ha! And they were French, and the French make good water. Ha!
St. Wendell's beer, you think of this as you sit and drink St. Wendell's beer. You think about back during Prohibition. When the beer trucks kept on rolling up there in St. Wendell's, the beer trucks kept on rolling, they just trained the horses to run the beer routes themselves without a driver. So when the sheriff came up to see, he just saw a horse and a wagon going down the road. Those horses were smart. They memorized the whole beer route. Stop here, skip two, take a left, get the one on the right. Horses didn't make a change, but they would pull up in front of the house.
Somebody come out from the house, grab a bucket of beer, run inside. They did this all through prohibition. Except sometimes if the horses got into the hops, They got confused a little bit on the route. Skipped the beer drinkers' houses, stopped by the tea-dollers. But as long as it was there, they had some, they enjoyed it too. Sheriff came, all he saw was a wagon going by with a horse, pulling it. Just an old horse, red eyes, bad breath. This is part of central Minnesota beer drinking history is what I'm trying to pass on to you. A guy thinks about this when he sits down and has a Wendy's up in the sidetrack tap as Clarence did on Tuesday evening. A guy thinks about this. He thinks about old Mr. Demers, that first Mr. Demers who came over to this country to avoid responsibility including his duty to his country to avoid paying debts and to avoid three women whom he had seduced. Nobody's perfect.
Three of the sins that a lot of guys sitting in dark bars drinking beer think about anyway. A man thinks about this. sitting in the sidetrack tap, the sidetrack tap with a beautiful back bar, the beautiful cabinet with figures, dim figures brooding up at the top of it. Angels or trolls or something sitting up there looking down, brooding, the neon around the mirror and all the old beer signs, the Minnesota Twins scoreboard there on the back bar. Maybe that's what they're brooding about, the old radio. old glasses on the back bar glasses for drinks that nobody even knows how to make sitting there in this majestic old bar where men have sat thinking about their griefs and their loves and their troubles going way back since God was a boy they've been sitting in that old bar That's some of what you lose when the priest leaves town. Just one brick comes out and everything sags a little bit in the whole town. All this tradition that we live by and our history.
What keeps us going. It's hard. It's hard. Wally said, well, he said, maybe we should get him an award or something. What's the word I'm trying to think of? Plaque, Clarence said. Plaque, you mean I've given him a plaque. Yeah, give him a plaque. We could put the Father Emil glass on it. The Father Emil glass. There's a little bit of history. 27 years ago, Father Emo went into the sidetracked tap, his one and only visit to the tavern. He walked in because it was Wally and Evelyn's 20th anniversary. He walked in, he had a shot of brandy, he wished him well, he said goodbye, and he walked out.
And Wally took the glass that he drank out of. because it was such an historic occasion and he wrote Father Emil on the side of it put it up in the back bar along with all those glasses that he never uses and he had it down on the counter one day he was washing glasses and he turned his back for a minute and a half he left that glass on the counter and somebody saw Father Emil written on the side of it and they put in two quarters so it become a collection glass And they left it there on the counter now for 27 years. It has sat there. It says, Father Emil. They dust it off once in a while, take out the change, of which there's quite a bit at the end of every business day. Because, you see, every time somebody had some change they didn't want to put in their pocket, they put it in the Father Emil glass. And then every time somebody told a priest joke, they put in a quarter. Then every time somebody told any kind of a bad joke, any kind of a Norsky joke or anything, they put it in the Father Emil glass. And thus, over the years, comedy has supported the church. Week after week. As people have paid the price for their humor. Well, well, Wally said we could put the father emo glass on it. No, Clarence said we still need it. We'll leave it there. Leave it there on the counter.
We'll give him a trip instead. Where would you send them? Well, Clarence said, we send them to Jamaica. How much would that cost, says Wally? Oh, I would think about $2,000. Gosh, that's a lot. You'd have to tell some real rank ones to raise $2,000. Well, Clarence said, I believe we could do it. You care for another one, Clarence? Wally says, No, no, Clarence said, I believe I've got to be going. It's getting late. And so it is. And so I do. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
How barber shops have changed. One Minute Romance: Couple meet in a hardware store.
Charlotte Observer Feb 7 1986 Star Tribune Feb 11 1986
1986.02.02 Star Tribune / rebroadcast on February 27, 1988.
Archival contributors: Frank Berto