WLT Read online

  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)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

  Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pry Ltd)

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  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads,

  Albany, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  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.