Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1 - Studio B
CHAPTER 2 - Ray
CHAPTER 3 - 1926
CHAPTER 4 - Lunch with Lottie
CHAPTER 5 - CBS
CHAPTER 6 - Boom
CHAPTER 7 - The Hotel Ogden,
CHAPTER 8 - Patsy
CHAPTER 9 - Dad
CHAPTER 10 - Real People
CHAPTER 11 - Mindren
CHAPTER 12 - Daddy
CHAPTER 13 - Uncle Art
CHAPTER 14 - Poor Children
CHAPTER 15 - Showman
CHAPTER 16 - Radio Sex
CHAPTER 17 - Minneapolis
CHAPTER 18 - Søren Blak
CHAPTER 19 - Bryan
CHAPTER 20 - Slim
CHAPTER 21 - Frank
CHAPTER 22 - The Antwerp
CHAPTER 23 - Hired
CHAPTER 24 - Friend of the Soderbjergs
CHAPTER 25 - Hero
CHAPTER 26 - Maria
CHAPTER 27 - Be There
CHAPTER 28 - Lily
CHAPTER 29 - Ballpark
CHAPTER 30 - Debut
CHAPTER 31 - Gospel
CHAPTER 32 - Tour
CHAPTER 33 - Big Chance
CHAPTER 34 - Drunks
CHAPTER 35 - The Long Night
CHAPTER 36 - Monday Morning
CHAPTER 37 - Monday Afternoon
CHAPTER 38 - Touching Bottom
CHAPTER 39 - Chicago
CHAPTER 40 - Gone
CHAPTER 41 - The End
CHAPTER 42 - Epilogue
Praise for Garrison Keillor and WLT: A Radio Romance
“Keillor recreates the warmth, charm and hilarity of the best of his Lake Wobegon monologues. . . . It makes for bittersweet, lovely storytelling. . . . WLT is laugh-out-loud funny: somehow Keillor manages to hold the thin balance between innocent charm and burlesque.”
—Detroit Free Press
“This is ranting excess of the finest quality, and a case could be made that its author is the most gifted and prodigious humorist the U.S. has heard from since the old steamboat pilot ran aground.”
—Time
“Meshing wicked satire and loving nostalgia he has transmuted them into something folkloric—pure, Keillor-style Americana.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“WLT is far and away Mr. Keillor’s saltiest book. . . . It is funny—wildly, hysterically, boisterously funny—but acute in its observation of human frailties and cruelties. Above all, it is wonderfully accepting and forgiving.”
—Atlanta Journal & Constitution
“Keillor’s irresistibly delicious novel, WLT: A Radio Romance . . . is vivid and hilarious and sometimes, when it slyly alludes to the false values the media has sold us, it is downright subversive. . . . A satisfying romp with a shrewd yarnmaster who can make you howl. The Midwest sensibility, compassionate and knowing, yet unsentimental, is also worth the price of admission.”
—The Los Angeles Times Book Review
“This is one of the funniest books to hit the shelves in a long, long time. . . . The humor builds to such crescendos that most readers will laugh out loud—frequently and at times uncontrollably.”
—The Denver Post
“Garrison Keillor’s new novel tunes in to his most sizzlingly funny material yet. The jokes that zip out almost non-stop are generally blacker and bluer than those in the Lake Wobegon tales. But although the patter is raunchier, the pattern stays the same. Through expertly delivered anecdotes, loaded with bizarre odds and ends, Keillor accumulates a detailed reconstruction of a small community and its swarming population of idiosyncratic folk . . . a mordantly hilarious little masterpiece.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“Garrison Keillor, he of the gently lunatic yarn, the languid delivery and the marshmallow heart, has learned to talk dirty. This is the Minnesota bard’s first novel, and he uses the extra length to discuss parts a good Lutheran prefers to keep private. Breasts, in particular, nudge, wink and tumble incessantly through the narrative: more naughty postcard than Story of 0 maybe, but still enough to make a clean-living Wobegonerblush.”
—Independent on Sunday (London)
“He is the great poet of American mediocrity of hollow lives bloated with determined piety, and this wry tale of failure masquerading as success is a fitting showcase for his sardonic talents.
—Sunday Telegraph (London)
“This satire includes everything Mr. Keillor ever yearned to broadcast on his own Lake Wobegon show—and discreetly omitted. The result is very amusing indeed.”
—The Atlantic
“Keillor’s novel evokes the romance as well as the silliness of early radio. It charms and touches you while you are laughing out loud.”
—Digby Diehl, Playboy
“WLT is a romance in the Hawthornean sense: It’s fantastical and extravagant . . . a complex book, with thickets of funny details. There is some of Keillor’s best stuff in it, which is saying quite a bit.”
—The Kansas City Star
The Lake Wobegon novels
WOBEGON BOY
ISBN 0-14-027478-2
“[It] had me spraying Diet Coke from my nostrils and scattering popcorn across the carpet in great gusts of mirth. . . . As sharp and funny a comic novel as any I’ve read in the ’90s.”
—Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times
LAKE WOBEGON DAYS
ISBN 0-14-013161-2
“A comic anatomy of what is small and ordinary and therefore potentially profound and universal in American life.”
—Chicago Tribune
LEAVING HOME
ISBN 0-14-013160-4
“These monologues hold up as a string of lovely vignettes and memorable portraits... and slowly climb to peaks of quiet hilarity.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Also by Garrison Keillor
THE BOOK OF GUYS
ISBN 0-14-023372-5
“Marvelous stuff from the funniest American writer still open for business.”
—Time
HAPPY TO BE HERE
ISBN 0-14-013182-5
“Cerebral and complex, a blend of romance and nostalgia; it sparklingly parodies the American (and human) condition. . . . His stories and satires glow with a sense of time and place.”
—The Washington Post
WE ARE STILL MARRIED
ISBN 0-14-013156-6
“The shock, for a radio fan leafing through this collection, is to discover, perhaps not for the first or fifth time, that his hero is even more gifted as writer than as entertainer.”
—Time
WLT: A RADIO ROMANCE
ISBN 0-14-010380-5
“A praise-song to old-time radio. . . . It’s the wicked brother of A Prairie Home Companion. A real lollapalooza.”
—Studs Terkel, Chicago Sun-Times
PENGUIN BOOKS
WLT: A RADIO ROMANCE
Garrison Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, in 1942, and attended Anoka High School and the University of Minnesota. He has worked in radio since 1963, and is the host and writer of “A Prairie Home Companion.” Keillor is the author of nine books, including Happy to Be Here, Lake Wobegon Days, Leaving Home, We Are Still Married, The Book of Guys, and Wobegon Boy. He lives in St. Paul and New York City.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R OR
L, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
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Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1991
Published in Penguin Books 1992
Copyright © Garrison Keillor, 1991
All rights reserved
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Parts of this book first appeared in The New Yorker and The Gettysburg Review. Some early traces of it appeared in three New Yorker stories entitled “WLT (The Edgar Era),” “Friendly Neighbor,” and “The Slim Graves Show,” and I stole a few lines from “The Tip-Top Club,” which was first published in The Atlantic Monthly. All four stories later appeared in the Penguin edition of Happy to Be Here. I am grateful to Peter Stitt for his invaluable help with the manuscript and to Kathryn Court, who edited it, and to Caroline White, who assisted her. For the Ole and Lena jokes, I am indebted to the Ole and Lena jokebooks by Red Strangland (Norse Press, Sioux Falls, S.D.).—G.K.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN : 978-1-101-57270-2
http://us.penguingroup.com
to Bill and Judy and Russ and
all the musicians on
the bus
I learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live that life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
—HENRY THOREAU, WALDEN
CHAPTER 1
Studio B
Studio B was the snakebite studio at WLT, the tomb of the radio mummy, and bad things happened to people who went in there. It was a big triangular room on the second floor of the Hotel Ogden, where WLT was located, at 12th and LaSalle in downtown Minneapolis. Dad Benson said it felt like a vacuum chamber—once, he gasped for breath during Friendly Neighbor and two huge flies dove into his throat and almost choked him. The Rev. Irving James Knox claimed he couldn’t hear himself talk in there when he did Hope for Tomorrow. He was used to sanctuaries where his words rolled off the walls like ocean surf; in Studio B, the waves hit a big sponge. Reed Seymour once got the hiccups so bad in there his partial plate came off and he had to gum the news. And a week later, three of the Shepherd Boys, a gospel quartet, slipped in and quietly de-pantsed him during a long account of a tragic house fire leaving 6 Persons Dead in St. Paul. He kept reading but he yipped twice when they pulled off his shorts. Every other day or so, the Shepherds snuck in during The Noontime News to play their little tricks: they put spit in his water glass and pelted him with food and poured mucilage in his shoes and one day they lit the script on fire and he had to read very fast—it was an obituary and he never got to the Survived by part—so the next day, Reed locked the studio door. Then, after the newscast was safely delivered, the door wouldn’t unlock, and they kept him in there, frantic, whanging on the walls, until the pee ran down his legs. That was the sort of thing that happened in Studio B.
So none of the announcers liked to use B, they would rather go in A, the big studio, even with the musicians lounging around and smirking and smoking, or sit in C, a room covered with green acoustic tile and known as the Gas Chamber because Leo LaValley did Reflections in there and left it full of sour green farts. Once he had to go in B to record a couple dozen Minnesota Dairy Council commercials and he ducked out to see a man about a dog and when he returned, the remaining scripts were for Murray’s Meats in Minneapolis. “Oh well,” he thought, and recorded them, including a line that the copywriter swore wasn’t his, “Yes, folks, nobody beats Murray’s meat,” a line that almost got Leo fired. “How could you read that and not see what it says?” said his boss Ray Soderbjerg. Leo hadn’t spotted it because he was busy trying not to laugh at an announcer named Phil Sax standing in the door with his finger poking out of his fly, waggling. A typical Studio B story.
A red and green neon WLT sign hung over the hotel marquee, flashing, “W ... L ... T ... WLT ... WLT ... The. . . . Friendly. . . . Neighbor. . . . Station. . . .” Then the “Friendly” turned bright red, and a cartoon man’s face appeared, in blue, with a red derby hat, and his mouth line suddenly flashed a big toothsome grin and his eyes became sparkly white and the hat tipped, and when the eyes sparkled, the lights in Studio B dimmed. Only in B. Nowhere else. Gene the Chief Engineer checked the wiring. Nothing. It was a snakepit, that was all.
The curse of Studio B began in 1936, during a January blizzard, when a young disc jockey named Price Waterman, who emceed Afternoon Ballroom in Studio B, had to read school closings and road reports for two hours and ran out of water. His mouth got dry and his big meaty voice became a whisper and he couldn’t get his breath. He talked without breathing for as long as possible and blacked out and when he came to, his voice was gone. He gargled and rinsed, he tried hot packs and cold, he rubbed his throat with goose grease, he dosed himself with hot gin and Moxie, with chili peppers, with birchbark tea, but his voice didn’t come back. He could only hum or make a soft strangling sound like a pigeon. So he had to get a job. Through an uncle in the potato business, he found employment as a sorter in a warehouse in Minot, culling wounded spuds from a conveyor chute, and was killed in August, crushed in a massive potato slide when a truck gate opened and he was unable to cry out and warn the driver.
It was felt by his old colleagues that the ghost of Price stood behind the drapes of Studio B, restless, shifting from foot to foot, clearing its ghostly throat, waiting for The Last Sign-off. Shadows moved in the velvet folds when Price was stirring. Newscasts troubled him, so did drama shows, but he seemed calmer when musicians were around. On Saturday nights, the Old WLT Barn Dance broadcast from the Star of the North Ballroom one floor below, on a stage festooned with pine log posts and a big red barn backdrop anchored with hay bales, and the Barn Dance announcer, George Akers (Old Iron Pants), liked to slip up to B with a couple of the Buckle Busters and enjoy a bump of bourbon and a few hands of Between the Sheets during the gospel portion of the program.
He and the boys would play for ten minutes, jump up and leave the cards on the table and run down for a station break (“Thank you so much, Shepherd Boys! More Barn Dance coming up—this is WLT, your Friendly Neighbor Station, seven-seventy ay-em, studios at the Hotel Ogden, Minneapolis”) and then return to the game upstairs.
One Saturday night, George returned to find his handful of aces gone—disappeared!—and in its place a variety of less meaningful cards. “Boys,” he said, “the days of radio are numbered. Old Price is trying to tell us.”
The boys laughed. Radio? In decline? This was 1937. When you were in radio, you owned the world. Men moved aside for you, beautiful women smiled up at you, doors opened, and as you slipped through, you heard people whisper your name.
“We’re on the way out,” said George. “We’re going to go the way of the Ubangis. We�
��re going to walk in the moccasins of the Sioux Indians. It’s the last roundup, boys. We’re sitting pretty now but it’ll soon be over.”
The boys gathered up the cards and redealt. Old Iron Pants got a pair of twos, a jack, a six, and a three.
“Yes, the handwriting is on the wall, boys. Fate has us in its cross-hairs. The iceberg is dead ahead. It won’t be long now. The little bastard has our name in his hand.”
“What’s gonna take the place of radio, you figure?” asked Doc, the banjo player, playing his royal flush.
Old Iron Pants laid down his cards. “They will invent something,” he said. “It’ll have the same effect as bourbon but it won’t give you headaches or upset the stomach, so it’ll be used even by the kiddos. It’ll earn gazillions. And boys, they are not going to deal us in on that hand.”
Doc picked up the dimes. “Where’d you ever get such a load of B.S.?”
“Doc, I got it from old Price himself, and it’s the level truth. Ain’t that right, Price?” The boys looked up, and the drapes trembled.
In the salad days of the Ogden, before WLT moved in, B had been the Longue des Artistes, a ritzy little bar where, in 1910, the insurance playboy Howell Helmsdorf drank gin fizzes with his mistress Donna Donaldson. One night her husband strode in, a derringer in his trembling hand, and shot Howell in the ear and hauled the weeping woman home. She went on to found the Poets League of Minneapolis and the Well Baby Clinic and the Finding Society, and Howell, his ear shot off, went to Texas and was never seen again, except perhaps by people in Texas. The Longue featured luxurious frescoes of naked goddesses twined in misty wreaths of celestial bombazine—the walls later were covered over with green wallpaper, until one day an announcer peeled off a swipe of paper and revealed a woman’s face, and other announcers in their spare time undressed her of wallpaper down to her waist and then to her golden thighs. They named her Donna LaDonna. She was serenely beautiful, on the west wall, behind the announcer chair. Turn around and there she lay, eyes averted, smiling faintly, inviting you to dip down into life’s beautiful essence. It was considered good luck to pat her on the privates.
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