Homegrown Democrat

by Garrison Keillor

  The first time she shot him he staggered.

  The second time she shot him he fell.

  The third time there was a southwest wind

  From the northeast corner of hell.

  There we are in the class photograph, Benson School, 1952: the girls in corduroy jumpers and the boys in plaid shirts, our hair slicked down and combed, our clean hands folded on the desks, the map of the United States of America in the back of the room. We aren’t handsome or stylish children, as children today are, and we didn’t bathe every day, just on Saturday night, and in between we washed our faces, no deodorant for us, we smelled like kids, but we were extremely anxious to please and most of us, thanks to Mrs. Shaver and Mrs. Moehlenbrock, loved school. I’m in the second row from the left, fifth desk from the front, the boy in steel-rim glasses, the good speller, competing with Billy Pedersen for Champion Reader honors. My mother made sure I had clean clothes, some from the Sears, Roebuck catalog and some handed down from older cousins and one pair of jeans from my sister that zipped up the side. Mother reminded me to say, “Please” and “Excuse me” and “May I—” (not “Can I—”) and to pay attention in school and not daydream. A report card with poor marks in deportment was not taken lightly. Grandma Keillor had been a schoolteacher and her grandchildren were not going to be scofflaws and scapegraces and illiterate ne’er-do-wells. A mark of Satisfactory in arithmetic demanded a promise to reform and earn an Excellent. It wasn’t enough to say you weren’t interested in arithmetic. Maybe you weren’t but you should pay attention and learn something and not waste the teacher’s time.

  For 7th grade, I got on the yellow schoolbus and rode it ten miles north to Anoka where I spent six years in Anoka High School, where my dad had graduated and all my Keillor aunts and uncles. Anoka was a river town, on the Rum and Mississippi, with a bustling Main Street and a handsome old red-brick county courthouse with a steeple sitting high and proud in the courthouse square. A quiet town where the front-page news in the Anoka Herald tended toward community events and nothing bad was said about anybody.

  In Anoka High School you found yourself among farm kids smelling of hay, the haberdasher’s kid in his yellow cardigan sweater, and greasers in black slacks and pink shirts and hair like Elvis’s, their customized cars blasting into the parking lot in the morning, and the debate team crowd who were earnest and ambitious, and the brainy kids (innocent, socially inept) and the fraternity of jocks who had to be careful not to appear brainy. Then there were the oddballs like me, outsiders, starved for approval, doinking around writing poems or drawing cartoons or doing Bob & Ray comedy routines or thinking about space travel. We were celibates, unkissed by anybody, our dignity was too brittle to risk rejection. I read self-help books, such as we had in 1958, and they said, “Just be yourself,” which, in my case, did not seem to me a good idea.

  I wasn’t very bright but I disguised my ordinariness by being extremely quiet so some teachers imagined I was an introspective genius. Others wondered if I were deaf. A person almost always burnishes his reputation by shutting up: I learned that as a boy. I practiced the art of invisibility, the gift of the middle child in a large family, a sort of vacancy or blankness, and teachers looked right through me and asked the person behind me to come to the blackboard and work out the math problem, and girls looked through me as if I were foliage. I didn’t mind.

  I was six-foot-three, 136 pounds with my shoes on, I looked like a folded ironing board with hair, I didn’t go around mirrors. I was so near-sighted that without my glasses I lived in an impressionist world. I was in the Young Democrats Club and the girls I knew were Democrats and sympathetic to needy cases. The club took a ski trip to Theodore Wirth Park, my first time on skis. These were the wooden kind with the single leather strap across your shoes. I got in the back of the line at the top of the hill. I didn’t use poles because I had no idea what to do with them. I pushed off from the top of the hill when nobody was looking and suddenly I was a physics experiment, trying to stay vertical, hands over my head, trees racing by, the law of gravity all over me, and a small spruce zoomed toward me, three feet high, and I leaned to one side and the ground came up and whacked me and I slid on my face for a hundred feet or so and collected a few pounds of snow under my shirt and pants, and hiked down the hill and never tried skiing again. I still remember every moment of that run. People ski for years trying to attain an intensity of experience that I got the first time. I went to the ski lodge and there was my crowd, the doinks, the gimps, the losers, hanging around the lobby fireplace and pretending to have a very very good time waiting to go home. I took a cup of spiced tea and sat down on the couch and glimpsed myself in an old cracked mirror across the room, a small dark cloud with a lizard face, inept, impoverished, faintly ludicrous, a person I wouldn’t have wanted to know.

  There were some lovely moments with girls, lounging in swimsuits in a dark green gazebo on a long sloping lawn by the river, and talking and smoking, trying to get the hang of cigarette inhalation and be intellectual, arguing with terrible certainty that the world had taken a fatal turn and was about to end in nuclear conflagration—a dark imagination was a sure way to be taken seriously. I longed to have a girlfriend to whisper affection to in the dark, and neck with, the little ballet of tenderness, the electricity, the delicacy of touch and countertouch—I wondered if something terrible was wrong with me that I hadn’t kissed a girl yet—16, 17, 18—when did normal people start doing this? I sent away for a nudist magazine with black and white photos of naked people playing volleyball, which I read secretly in the basement and one day, hearing footsteps on the stairs, stuffed it into a bookshelf full of old Sugar Creek Gang and Nancy Drew books and fled, and never found it again. Somebody took it and threw it away, but nothing was said to me about it. We were good at silence in our family.

  Altogether the Class of 1960, Anoka High School, formed a picture of democracy that I will carry for the rest of my life. We went through it all together—the embarrassment, walking to the front of speech class and turning and facing them, or standing in gym shorts and fermented socks in a line of boys waiting to do a flying somersault and thinking to myself, “Someday I won’t have to do this,” the dull misery of indifferent teachers (coaches were the worst), a lingering sense of dread about the future, the gathering sense of inevitable failure and disgrace. All of us odd ducks lined up in our graduation gowns and paraded onto the football field that June evening with no idea what life would deal out to us. Not a clue.

  But it was there at Anoka High School, that big, bland beige-tiled building, that Mr. Hochstetter encouraged my literary pretensions. He was a brilliant man who paced his classroom declaiming about Twain and Mencken and George Ade and how Luther’s Reformation had paved the way for social criticism like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street while the boys in the back of the room dozed or read comics. He liked me, and said I had talent to write, and a kind word or two is all a boy needs. The heart almost bursts with pleasure. He directed me to the Minneapolis Public Library where I climbed the stairs past the Egyptian mummy in its stone coffin and entered into the stacks and there was pure heaven. I hadn’t thought about college, not considering myself slick or bright enough to make a go of it, being from Podunkville, but I was at home in a library, utterly in my element, and the University of Minnesota had an enormous library, so I would give that a try.

  Chapter 5

  1960

  They taught about sex at the Academy,

  Genetics, biology, anatomy—

  Which I never learned

  Because my head was turned

  By the girl who sat just ahademy.

  IN THE FALL of 1960, I was a freshman at the University of Minnesota when John F. Kennedy came to Minneapolis to give a speech in his campaign for President. I was a tall kid, 18, close-cropped, with horn-rim glasses, in blue jeans and white shirt and corduroy jacket, and I sat in the balcony of the auditorium, to Kennedy’s right, high above his head, watching him and the crowd enthralled
by him, his hands in his jacket pockets, rocking forward on his toes, that brilliant grin as he stood doused in applause, glowing in the light, everyone standing and cheering for that handsome man, the way he modestly ducked his head and shook hands with the dignitaries on the dais, grinned at the audience, gripped the podium, gave a little wave to the balcony, and the applause went on and on.

  In the spring, we of the Young Democrats of Anoka High School had followed our senator, Hubert H. Humphrey, in his losing battle with Kennedy in the primaries, and some of the idealists felt that Hubert got robbed in West Virginia, that Kennedy had bought the nomination and the machine politicians had him in their pocket. (“Machine” was our term for people who were very very good at coaxing out the vote.) My classmate Barbara read somewhere that Kennedy’s father was a rum runner during Prohibition and this incensed her. We sat in our bathing suits on the grass by the beach on the Mississippi, both of us pale, shade seekers, and she poured out her bitterness that Hubert, a true Democrat who fought the good fight for equal rights for Negroes had been passed over in favor of the son of a crook. It just wasn’t right. I didn’t understand why anyone who possessed such a fabulous body as hers should be bitter, ever. She wore a one-piece white swimsuit, the top clamped on to her breasts, the bottom she kept tugging down and adjusting. She was such an idealist that I never even held hands with her. Never considered it. She was crazy about Hubert, who was a giant in Minnesota, a shining presence at the Aquatennial parade every summer, perched on the back of a white convertible, grinning, waving, always charged up in the presence of a crowd. Everyone got a kick out of seeing Hubert. But he did not travel well. In Minnesota, he seemed lively and ebullient and on the road he sounded shrill, slightly hysterical compared to Kennedy, who was the coolest politician ever, a handsome war hero with the Irish gift of spontaneous wit. Hubert was an evangelist and Kennedy was a hero, a man who looked great just saying “good morning.”

  Barbara went to St. Olaf College and I got a summer job as a dishwasher at the Evangeline Hotel for Women on Loring Park in Minneapolis. I started wearing a Kennedy button on my T-shirt at work, perspiring in my white apron, lugging the trays of steaming hot plates off the conveyer. Dishwashing brings out the romantic in a man. You come out of the steam and heat of the scullery with the smell of detergent in your nose, and the beauty of the world overwhelms you, an ordinary park with grass and trees is like the gardens of Versailles, and by September, when classes started, I was writing big thoughts in my journal. Death is the admission price we pay at the end of the most wonderful show there is. There are no free tickets. Being fully alive is the only true success; to not love is a form of destruction. I walked onto campus for the first day of classes and up the mall to Northrup Auditorium and looked up at its great pillars and the Jeffersonian inscription on the facade above, FOUNDED IN THE FAITH THAT MEN ARE ENNOBLED BY UNDERSTANDING, DEDICATED TO THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH, DEVOTED TO THE INSTRUCTION OF YOUTH AND THE WELFARE OF THE STATE. Along the mall, a stately parade of utilitarian brick buildings with pillars pasted to their fronts, a river of humanity flowing under the canopy of majestic elms, a lot of lost freshmen lolling on the steps studying campus maps and planning their route from one class to the next, and a steady procession of Africans and Indians and Pakistanis and Koreans come to study plant agronomy and engineering, Africans blacker than midnight who spoke with British accents like John Gielgud’s, black Africans speaking beautiful French (I turned and followed them, eavesdropping, so astonishing this was to hear), bearded Sikhs in turbans, women in saris with red dots painted on their foreheads, Korean War vets in fatigues and GI sunglasses, old bearded lefties in turtlenecks clutching their I. F. Stone Weekly and The Realist, cigarette-smoking women playing the role of beat princess or troubled intellect or Audrey Hepburn heroine, cool people who wore dark glasses even in the dark, people who might possibly have been poets. Some obvious jocks, crewcuts, jerseys, bow-legged, but a small number compared to the crowd of anxious, bookish people en route to serious encounters with history and literature. Ambition everywhere you looked, electrical currents of it jazzing the air.

  I walked over to Dinkytown to buy my books at Perrine’s, down the street from Al’s Breakfast Nook, near Vescio’s and a rats’ nest of a bookstore called Heddon’s whose snowy-haired proprietor, after pondering a moment, could reach into the third orange crate from the bottom and pull out the very book you asked for, and Virg ‘N’ Don’s Grocery, the name of which appealed to me, and a coin laundry called The Tub, and McCosh’s Bookstore with the grave bearded McCosh who liked to tack up anarchist aphorisms and pictures of Orwell and Kerouac and Paul Krassner, and the Gray’s Drugstore lunch counter (a grilled cheese sandwich, chili, and a vanilla shake, please) and a fine little coffeehouse called the Ten O’Clock Scholar where a beaky kid with brushy hair played a battered guitar and sang “O Fair and Tender Ladies” and It’s dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew, Where the dangers are many and the pleasures are few. The stage was in front, before the big double plate-glass window, and sometimes a passerby stopped on the sidewalk, peered in the window, into the dark room, and then realized he was part of a show and fled.

  I walked over to Folwell Hall, home of the English Department and the divine Miss Sarah Youngblood and craggy old Huntington Brown and Samuel Monk the 18th Century man and Toni McNaron who propounded Milton and Archibald Leyasmeyer the Chaucerian and other noble and learned friends of literature, and I felt grateful that this institution had opened its doors to a dreamer like me who had no clear vocation whatsoever. I was operating on a wistful urge to sit in libraries and be a writer and that was all. I wasn’t like the anxious bookish people who, I assumed, were proceeding on a well-plotted course, boys climbing the slopes toward law school, smart girls in chemistry lab who would march on to distinction developing polymers. Myself, I just hoped to be lucky.

  I paid $71 for a quarter’s tuition and another $10 or so for my books, a political science text, a volume of Horace and a Latin dictionary, and Strunk & White’s Elements of Style for my composition course—and notebooks with the university seal on the cover (Omnibus Artibus, Commune Vinculum) and I went and took a seat in the long reading room in Walter Library. Around me, men and women bent to the hard work of scholarship, folks for whom attending college was not an assumed privilege. The vets on the GI Bill and the African and Asian exchange students and all the ones who were the first in their family to attend college, whose parents’ own hopes had been deferred by the Depression and the War—these students approached the U with a great chins-up pencils-sharpened sense of purpose. They sat at the long oak library tables, heads bowed, rows and rows of them, reading, reading, reading—sons of garage mechanics on their way to medical school, daughters of dairy farmers out to become professors of Romance languages—a great American migration as inspiring as anything that took place on the Oregon Trail. These pioneers craved a life in which beauty and delight and intellectual challenge are staples; they wanted to travel, read novels, go to the theater, be smart about the world and not reflexively pessimistic like their parents, have farflung experiences. The craving for experiences was powerful. Love and adventure and interesting work—a great many of us, fearing the regimentation of corporate life, would head for the burgeoning non-profit world. Such a purposeful bunch—who looked like me, were dressed like me, had no money either—who plowed through the texts and took notes and shushed up the goofballs in their midst. Boys and girls who came to the library to sit and giggle were glared at and told to be still—this never happened in high school! These were people with a sense of vocation. It was a Thomas Hart Benton mural come to life—”The Children of the Great Plains Claiming Their Birthright.” Their once-in-a-lifetime chance to realize their God-given talent, as medical technicians or scholars of medieval painting or the operas of Verdi or the breeding rituals of the Arctic ptarmigan. No guarantee of success, or even of gainful employment. Pure free enterprise.

  Dad had made
it clear that he couldn’t contribute to pay for my education, which I hadn’t asked him to and I was relieved not to have to consider an offer. A nice clean break. I got a job working the 6 to 10 A.M. shift in the big parking lot on the river flats for $1.48 an hour. Nine hundred cars, and it filled up by 7:30 so there you were with a couple hours of paid study time. You learned to ignore your fellow parking lot attendant who liked to tell about students he had seen having sex in parked cars and you applied yourself to the U.S. Constitution and the separation of powers.

  I got another job at the student radio station, WMMR, in October and a tall good-looking guy named Barry Halper showed me how to piece together a newscast from the Associated Press teletype. They needed someone to do the 12:15 newscast. “Today?” I said. “Today,” he said. He showed me how to switch on the microphone, read the VU meter, adjust the headphone volume, showed me the cough switch, and an hour later I sat down in a tiny room with green acoustic-tile walls at a table covered with green felt and switched on the mike and a red bulb lit up and I read the news under a gooseneck lamp, one eye on the big clock on the wall in front of my face. I was nervous of course, but it was a delicious feeling. I felt sequestered, safe in the studio, a little fortress. I did the newscast and said, “That’s the news, reported by Garrison Keillor. This is WMMR, from studios in Coffman Memorial Union, broadcasting at 730 kilocycles.” And pressed a Play button and the tape deck clunked and a recorded voice talked about Campus Pizza and I got up and the next announcer slipped in and played something by Johnny Mathis and I walked out to the hall and Barry Halper nodded at me. “That was not bad,” he said.