WLT

by Garrison Keillor

We’ve all got a plate with beans and slaw,

  Ja!

  It’s time for singin’ so grab a seat,

  Lots of songs and plenty to eat.

  The boys are ready and the fun’s begun—

  And there’s plenty of beans for everyone.

  Today’s Good Citizen was brought to you by Munsing-wear Wool Work Socks (“One size for all makes a comfortable fit, / Three nice colors and they’re hand-knit”) and there was The Excelsior Bread Show with sweet Alma Melting and her Bakery Boys singing “Excelsior! Excelsior! It rises ever higher! It’s white, you see, for pur-i-ty, so join the Excelsior Choir.” There was Edina Chewing Tobacco (“It never offends”) and DuraTop Desks and VentriloTone (“Ever wish you could throw your voice like this man here?” Help. Let me out of this box. “Amaze and amuse your friends with VentriloTone!”) and The Minneapolis Institute of Graphology and The Donna Marie College of Charm and Ramon’s Warm Cafe.

  As for rates, Ray told Roy Jr. to charge what other stations charged. So he did. The advertisers bought every minute offered to them and begged for more. To discourage them, Ray raised the rates in the fall, and again in the spring, and six more times in the next three years, and nobody complained. “A fool and his money are soon parted,” said Ray. “If they didn’t give it to us, I guess they’d throw it in a ditch.”

  But the plain fact was: if you were in retail sales and you advertised on radio, you got rich, and if you didn’t, you went broke. There were ten big department stores in Minneapolis and five of them turned up their noses at radio and began their long steady decline toward extinction. Newspapers were all well and good if the reader had his eye out for an ad, but for planting the seeds of customer loyalty, nothing beat friendly broadcasting. By 1931, WLT was netting a profit of about $10,000 a week.

  The spring of 1931 was cold. There was a false thaw in March and then the blizzard hit. It dumped snow for three days and after that the thermometer froze. On March 15, Ray got his dividend check, and the next week he boarded the Super Chief to Los Angeles. Alma went with him. They stayed at the Gardens of Allah Hotel, gambled at the S.S. Rex in Santa Monica, ate dinner in a restaurant shaped like a hat, rode rickshaws around downtown, and snuck into the Paramount Studio and became extras, standing at the rail of a fake ocean liner and waving and waving as the Marx Brothers darted past, ducking behind them. Ray told Roy Jr. it was the heavenliest two weeks he ever spent in his life. It cost almost a thousand dollars and when he got home, on a cold wet April afternoon, and recalled California, he knew he was in radio to stay. It was the money. He wanted to earn that kind of dough. And it was nice to think that Stanford McAfee, the big man from Manhattan, wasn’t earning a fraction of that.

  That wasn’t McAfee who took the beautiful Alma west on the Chief and made love to her in a cozy roomette as they rocketed through the night, no, and it wasn’t McAfee plunking down C-notes and scooping up the chips at the roulette table, with the lady on his arm, and it wasn’t McAfee who squired her to snazzy dives and bought her oysters and bootleg French champagne at fifty bucks a pop. It was Ray Soderbjerg, the iceman. “Good for me!” he thought.

  He had founded a land-office business and he had firm control of it with Lottie on his side. She had put her twenty-percent in his hands. She told him to run the company and to consider her a silent partner. She said she hoped that she and Roy would reconcile someday, the big stoopnagel, but that she was with Ray when it came to WLT. He was the business head in the family and always had been. So that was that.

  Lottie wasn’t as bad a singer as a lot of people thought, he decided, and she was sure to improve with experience. So now she had her own show, as “Miss Lily Dale, the Lady With A Smile,” and every morning at 10:45 a voice with a carnation in its lapel said, “And now . . . Gruco brings you Miss Lily Dale with more of your favorite songs—to bring a smile or a tear, but always . . . to lift the heart!” Gruco was a sort of plaster that made wet basements dry. “My basement was dark, damp, a place where I kept potatoes,” said Lottie, who now was ensconced in an apartment at the Antwerp, a stately old pile next door to the Ogden, “but now, thanks to Gruco, it’s as elegant as the rest of the home, light and dry and sweet-smelling, a place where one can entertain guests.” She sang three songs, a big horse-faced lady in a wheelchair, and chirped “Goodbye everybody! See you tomorrow!” and then the voice said, “WLT, Your Home in the Air, originating from studios in downtown Minneapolis,” pronouncing “Minneapolis” as if Minneapolis were Paris. The next time you’re downtown at the lunch hour, may we suggest a visit to the famous Soderberg’s Court restaurant—home of Soderberg’s delicious and handsomely prepared sandwich plates—he went on, while underneath a piano softly played the “Meditation” from Thaïs. Then came The Classroom of the Air, when Ray lay down and took a deep snooze.

  CHAPTER 6

  Boom

  The money kept rolling in. Dutch Brand Coffee wanted a show in which coffee-drinking would be prominently featured, so Dad Benson came up with Friendly Neighbor, in which he and his radio family would sit down and eat lunch.

  “And do what?” asked Ray.

  “Converse,” said Dad.

  “Converse?”

  “We’ll sit and talk and say things back and forth, like families do.”

  “Who’s going to pay to hear that?”

  But it was a beautiful idea, so simple. The show opened as daughter Jo (played by Faith Snelling) was fixing lunch. Her husband Frank (played by various actors: Frank didn’t say much, just “Uh-huh” and “Well that’s for sure” and some chuckling) was drinking coffee, and Jo told the latest news in Elmville—about Mr. Lind the grocer and his spendthrift wife Hazel, Pastor Tuomy who was new in town and something of a slow learner, the town drunk Walt, the next-door neighbor Bernadine Biggs and her helpless husband Lester, the mailman Mr. Tummler, and Florence Roney, Jo’s girlhood chum, engaged for twenty years to the banker’s son, Rupert Lemmon. Then Jo said, “There he is now!” and the door opened and in came Dad, to sit and reminisce about old times and quote a few adages and recite a poem and talk to the listeners in a voice as natural and homey as if they were right there, and of course to keep asking for another cup of that good coffee. The show thrived from the first instant, thanks to Dad’s voice: that warm dry Minnesota voice with a slight burr, a little catch in it, a little hesitation that got the listener leaning forward. Mail poured in. It was the first WLT program to attract tourist traffic, people hoping to see what the performers looked like. They stood outside on the sidewalk, and when they spotted Dad, they whispered, “That’s him.”

  Oddly, as its audience grew, Dutch Brand Coffee went downhill, a victim of the success of the similarly named Dutch Toilet Cleanser. Briefly, Dutch became Scotch Brand Coffee, but that name raised thoughts of glue in the customer’s mind, so they changed the name to Mama’s and the company collapsed six months later. The coffee was replaced by Miles Lumber, then by Anne-Marie Cream-Filled Candies, and finally by The Milton, King Seed Company, and every spring the Bensons put in a big garden, which always yielded tons of produce. Jo served very little meat for lunch, they were mostly vegetarians from then on. And Milton, King became a giant in the Midwest. When you thought about flowers and vegetables, you just naturally thought about Milton, King. Thanks to radio and Dad Benson, when Minnesota children read the Song of Solomon, they assumed that all those plants were Milton, King products.

  It had happened so fast! A few months! In the beginning, people gave speeches, played songs, told jokes, and then suddenly there were radio shows, like Up in a Balloon with Vince Upton and his wife, Sheridan Thomas, playing the parts of Bud and Bessie, a wealthy Minnetonka couple who, weary of the coal business, decide to sail with the wind in a helium balloon, The Minnesota Clipper, and together they drift in the stratosphere, describing the lands far below as Homer Jessie the sound effects man cranks the wind machine and makes geese cries and dribbles popcorn (popped) onto a newspaper for the sound of rain. Homer was a true magician.
The brave couple descended to the coast of Greenland to see a glacier break up (a cookie tin loaded with rock salt), landed in the Sahara Desert (a boxful of crushed corn flakes), plunged into the Amazon rain forest (a deck of cards, birdseed, and a C-clamp), and in Hawaii were almost struck by a wave of molten lava (mayonnaise, balsa sticks, and a box of gravel). With a teacup, an ice-cream stick, and a twopenny nail, he could make the firebell ring and the horses dash from the barn and the burning house slowly collapse as the pumpers throbbed and the neighbors screamed—nobody knew how he did it.

  There was Avis Burnette, recommending good books to the ladies of town and fending off the men, and there was Sunnyvale, starring the dour young Dale Snelling as an auto mechanic named Al and various women as his wife Esther, including his real wife Faith (Jo on Friendly Neighbor, a real looker). Every day, Al handled a different problem, a tough clutch job or faulty plugs, and the dialogue was mostly Al talking to himself. In addition to the car problem, each owner had some personal problem that Al had to deal with: Doc Winters drank too much, and Lulu Strand couldn’t get along with her mother, and Rufus Zeeveld lost his temper, and so, as Al bent over the engine block, he’d offer a word of advice. “When angry, count to ten,” he said. “When very angry, go fishing.” And the car started right up, and Rufus gulped and said, “Thanks, Al,” and Al said, “The advice is for free, Ruf. But that fuel pump is going to cost you.” That was it. Theme and out.

  Sunnyvale and Friendly Neighbor were the shows Ray cited to Vesta when she told him WLT needed a program of great ideas, called Philosophers Forum. “More people have heard more great ideas on Friendly Neighbor than in all the philosophy courses taught at the University. It’s a fact!” he said. “People have been helped by that show! There isn’t a word said on that show that isn’t in some way educational!”

  “Yes, there is,” she said. “The commercials.” She despised them. Commercials were aimed at women, to tie them down in the hopeless quest for better bread and cleaner kitchens, to distract them from their real work, which was to change the world. She wouldn’t allow a commercial near any of her shows.

  “How about a bank or an insurance company? something dignified?” asked Ray. “Your philanthropy is burning a hole in my pocket.”

  She said, “If you put a commercial on those shows, then I’m leaving.”

  Well, it was a thought, he thought.

  The non-commercial nature of those shows was, to her mind, a measure of their worth. Classroom of the Air and Current Events were an alternative; their job was to challenge and inform, so if listeners complained about them, that was fine with Vesta. She wasn’t there to please everybody, she was there to do the right thing—spend a week on the subject of municipal charter reform, devote a couple hours to “Challenge and Change in New Zealand,” give Poetry Corner over for a look at unjustly neglected poets of England. If someone complained that charter reform was almost as tedious as real estate law, and that New Zealand was a nation in which nothing of importance had happened since the invention of the sheep, and as for unjustly neglected English poets, well, sheer oblivion would be too good for most of them—the more complaints, the more Vesta felt she was doing her job. Programs of quality will always draw fire from Philistines, and if she got a postcard that said, “You can take your Current Events and sit on it and spin,” it brightened her day. At least she had challenged that person and given his tiny squalid mind a few rays of information. Otherwise, why would he be so upset? Why—if not because she had helped change him and change is painful?

  She told Ray, “Why couldn’t we teach Spanish? It’s a beautiful language! We could sign up students and send out lesson books and they could listen during dinner—people could use their mealtimes to learn, instead of just feeding their faces.”

  She stood, poised, waiting for a rebuttal so she could pounce on it and whip it to death. The way to fight her was to throw her off-balance with statistics, but Ray couldn’t think of any about Spanish.

  “People don’t want to learn Spanish during dinnertime,” he murmured.

  “Ha! People don’t know what they want until you offer them a choice! If all you give them is pap and pablum, then that’s all they’ll want. Whatever happened to the ideals you professed when I married you?”

  She wheeled and marched to the door and as she went, she said, “This discussion is not ended.”

  Out she went and in came Roy, with an idea that radio transmission might be useful in assisting plant growth, particularly flowers, and would he care to invest in a radio agronomy research project at the University?

  “Sure,” said Ray. “Might as well do some good in the world.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The Hotel Ogden,

  The fifth anniversary of WLT passed, and the sixth and seventh. The stock market crashed but it didn’t fall on radio. Radio was golden. Roy bought a 400-acre farm in Clay County, near Moorhead, where Dad Soderbjerg had spent a miserable three years as a farmhand, and Roy turned his mind toward the invention of a more perfect plow. He was gone for months at a time. When Roy showed up in Minneapolis, Ray bitched about radio. He complained to his lady friends. He harangued Dad Benson. Radio was a gold mine, and it was a plague. Over thousands of years, man had won a measure of privacy, graduating from tent to hut to a home with a lock, and now, with the purchase of a radio, man could return to cave-dwelling days when you were easy prey to every bore in the tribe, every toothless jojo who wanted to deposit his life story all over you. Ray tried not to listen to radio. And then he would forget and tune in and listen, and get miserable again. He fired off memos to Roy Jr.

  Tell Sheridan to speak up. I can’t understand a word she says. Is she sick or what? There’s no reason to whisper. She is supposed to be heard, for heaven’s sake, this is radio, not eurythmics.

  Today Dad commented that Jo’s crocuses aren’t blooming. Yesterday it was hyacinths. Be consistent. Have somebody keep notes on these things so you don’t contradict yourself.

  This morning I woke up at 6 a.m. and heard somebody talking about fishing. He talked for ten minutes and nothing he said was of any interest whatsoever. He had two or three fellows in the studio who sat and guffawed though it was not humorous. Don’t let these people do that sort of thing. I am not paying for that and I won’t put up with it.

  The sheer trashiness of radio! the tedium and garbage and fruity pomposity and Mr. Hennesy’s maundering about the Emerald Isle in that warbly voice (“O sweet Mary, me proud beauty—lying there in the green hills of heaven, dear Galway!”), the false bonhomie of fatheads like Leo (“Hey, have we got a barn-burner for you tonight, folks, and here’s a little girl you’re gonna love—”), the pompous balloon-like baritone of Phil Sax drifting moon-like through the news, the fake warmth of radio stars. Evenin’, folks, and welcome to The Best Is Yet to Be and I just want to say how much it means to us to know that you’re there. Bullshit. But that’s what radio was all about! False friendship . That was radio in a nutshell. Announcers laying on the charm to sell you hair tonic.

  “Why can’t we have a little more humor around here?” he told Roy Jr. “Is there a law against jokes?”

  And an hour later: “I want shows that are useful shows, not just a poof of glamor, shows that leave you with something.”

  Then: “Why does everything have to sound so earnest? What’s wrong with a little piss and vinegar?”

  Radio had destroyed the world of his youth, beautiful Minnesota hail to thee—who cared about that now with radio coming in from everywhere? No local pride, no hometown heroes except crooners and comedians and all-around numbskulls. Radio gave so much power to advertising and now advertising was everything. The businesses that poured money into radio got rich and the ones that didn’t went nowhere, it was as simple as that. All those wonderful little dairies and meat markets on the North Side were gone, Ehrenreich’s and Mahovlich’s and Kaetterhenry’s, and all their business went to the big boys, all because a cheery voice on radio could sell more wieners
than quality could, so now the Scottish Rite was run by big shots and blowhards, the solid element was fading, the old fellows who told stories about their adventures in the North Woods in logging days and how they shipped out on an ore boat when they were seventeen and went to Brazil, the guys who had lived were fading away, gone broke, replaced by the big shirts created by advertising. Simple as that. Al’s Breakfast was a hole in the wall when it was opened by Al, a Swedish novelist who emigrated in 1921 and never got the hang of English but could scramble eggs and make pancakes, then it boomed when Al bought time on The Hubba Hooley Show and every night after the Ten O’Clock News, drowsy listeners heard the Hooligans sing: I’ll pick you up in a taxi, honey.

  Try to be ready ’bout half past eight.

  Now honey don’t be late,

  We’re going to go to Al’s and have some breakfast.

  Our romance bloomed at late-night dances;

  It’s time our love saw the light of day.

  You’ll see how sweet I am

  Over scrambled eggs and ham.

  We’ll be true pals at Al’s Breakfast Cafe.

  And six months later, the Cafe moved to a building half a block long, with turrets and stained-glass windows, packed day and night. It was bigger than Soderberg’s Court, which was packed with radio folks and throngs of fans. “Time to move,” said Ray. “We’ll drop the restaurant. I’m sick of hamburger grease. Let Al sell burgers, and we’ll sell Al.”

  Driving north of Minneapolis, cruising the back roads through the orchards and truck farms along the Mississippi, Roy found a potato farm for sale in Brooklyn Park, and took a sixty-day option and worked up a blueprint and made a small perfect scale model out of balsa wood, with sponge trees and a glass pond and an American flag on a pin and a blue paper-maché river splashing over the rapids. On a hill above the pond, reflected in it, stood the WLT building (“The Air Castle of the North”), a Gothic pile with a bell tower, patterned after the Chatfield College chapel, set in a park of perfectly conical pines surrounded by a hundred tiny white houses. Radio Acres. They’d borrow the money and build the station, wait a few years for land values to rise, then build the houses and sell them —at wonderful prices, thanks to the magic of radio. Radio Acres. The stars would have homes there, and for $6000, anybody could become their neighbor. Who wouldn’t pay a little extra to be a neighbor of the Benson Family or Bud and Bessie? Five hundred homes, at $6000, yielding $2000 pure profit apiece, would make them rich men.