Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - A Summer Night

  Chapter 2 - Mr. Tree Toad

  Chapter 3 - Ricky

  Chapter 4 - Paradise

  Chapter 5 - Precious

  Chapter 6 - What Foul Blast Is This?

  Chapter 7 - My Literary Career

  Chapter 8 - Kissing

  Chapter 9 - Eleanor of Aquitaine

  Chapter 10 - In the Boys’ Toilet

  Chapter 11 - Underwood

  Chapter 12 - At Joe’s Bar

  Chapter 13 - A Quiet Pond

  Chapter 14 - Sportswriter

  Chapter 15 - Ravine

  Chapter 16 - Human Events

  Chapter 17 - Flo

  Chapter 18 - In the Press Box

  Chapter 19 - The Freshman Fireballer

  Chapter 20 - Tomatoes

  Chapter 21 - The Glorious Fourth

  Chapter 22 - The Del Ray

  Chapter 23 - My Girl

  Chapter 24 - The English Language

  Chapter 25 - Poison

  Chapter 26 - Stole Your Undies

  Chapter 27 - The New Day Dawns

  Chapter 28 - The Principle of Separation

  Chapter 29 - Sickness and Health

  Praise for The New York Times Bestseller

  Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

  “[Keillor is] a storytelling genius . . . where others might see dysfunction, Garrison Keillor discovers founts of deep affection and humor.... [Lake Wobegon Summer] is a sweet, sweet book . . . and a wonderful evocation of an American childhood, complete with Nehi, Schwinn bikes, playground bullies, drive-ins, the Hardy Boys, booger jokes, John Foster Dulles, necking down by the lakeside, mixers, Ed Sullivan, rhubarb pie, beatnik poetry, Jack Benny and homegrown tomatoes. Sit a spell with it. You’ll enjoy the visit.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Brilliant ... [and] very funny! . . . As in many of Keillor’s previous books, Lake Wobegon emerges not only as the product of Keillor’s sprawling and essentially caustic imagination, but as a place that seems more three-dimensional all the time. It’s a town steeped in universal foibles, pettiness and hypocrisy yet is full of examples of quiet integrity.”

  —The Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Keillor’s Lake Wobegon is not just funny: it can be sad too, and poignant, and very real . . . at least as real as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Twain’s Hannibal, and some of the Chicago neighborhoods, in Dreiser, Wright, or Bellow.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A delightful comic romp featuring characters who deserve to become legends . . . Think Huckleberry Finn in hormonal overdrive . . . Irresistible.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “No one tells a story better.... In his inimitable style Keillor takes us from point A to B, C, D, etc., never directly, but always with a graceful little dance, a soft-shoe with an occasional tap. . . . He’s Will Rogers with grammar lessons, Aesop without the ax to grind, the common man’s Molière.”

  —The Houston Chronicle

  “Many of us remember that it was awful to be fourteen years old. Garrison Keillor remembers why. . . . Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 gives Keillor fans full value in laughs and knowing nods . . . the detail is superb.”

  —New York Daily News

  “A celebration of the ordinary and his role as the observer . . . Of course, this is the genesis of Keillor’s genius, a love for quirky detail, an ear for the comedy of self-righteousness, and an eye for the foibles that make us human. A bit of every summer should be spent in Lake Wobegon.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  Praise for Garrison Keillor and his work

  Wobegon Boy . . .

  “A masterful portrait of the sort of small-town world that many of us Americans believe we grew up in, or would have liked to . . . A wonderfully readable tale.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “[Wobegon Boy is] expansive, big-hearted and can stand proudly alongside the most enduring American humor.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Wobegon Boy 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.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “This dark night of the happy Lutheran soul, spun out in Keillor’s clean, elegant prose, makes Wobegon Boy a midlife crisis well worth living.”

  —Daily News

  Lake Wobegon Days…

  “A comic anatomy of what is small and ordinary and therefore potentially profound and universal in American life . . . Keillor’s great strength as a writer is to make the ordinary extraordinary.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Keillor’s laughs come dear, not cheap, emerging from shared virtue and good character, from reassuring us of our neighborliness and strength.... His true subject is how daily life is shot through with grace. Keillor writes a prose that can be turned to laughter, to tears . . . to compassion or satire, to a hundred effects. He is a brilliant parodist.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  Leaving Home . . .

  “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

  The Book of Guys ...

  “Marvelous stuff from the funniest American writer still open for business.”

  —Time

  “Endearingly acerbic . . . In the most autobiographically revealing stories and the most wildly imaginative ones Keillor is at his subversive best.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Brilliant and imaginative . . . recommended for anyone who’s a guy, who knows a guy, or enjoys good writing and a laugh.”

  —The Houston Post

  “Keillor [gets] at the heart of guydom. . . . His splendid command of the lingo of modern pretension is fine stuff.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “There aren’t too many guys I’m interested in reading on the subject of guys. But Garrison Keillor is one of them.... He unburdens himself beautifully, poignantly, on the sad, sorry plight of the modern American domesticated man.”

  —The Philadelphia Enquirer

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  LAKE WOBEGON SUMMER 1956

  Garrison Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, and is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion. He is the author of nine books, all published by Penguin, including the bestselling Lake Wobegon Days and Wobegon Boy. A teacher at the University of Minnesota and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he lives in St. Paul with his wife and daughter.

  AUTHOR OF

  Happy to Be Here

  Lake Wobegon Days

  Leaving Home

  We Are Still Married

  WLT: A Radio Romance

  The Book of Guys

  Wobegon Boy

  Me: The Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente Story

  COMING SOON

  Suspicious Behavior: How to Recognize It, How to Deal With It

  Are You Too Nice for Your Own Good? Changing the Type C

  Personality to Double D

  What You May Not Know About Glutens

  Appraising Your Hedgehog Collectibles

  The Case of the Hideous Guest (A Mrs. Whistler Mystery)

  More You Can Do with Mangoes

  The Fifteen-Minute Parent

  Using What We Know About Plants to Deepen Our

  Relationships at Home and Work

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin G
roup

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre,

  Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110017, India

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads,

  Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

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

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2001

  Published in Penguin Books 2002

  Copyright © Garrison Keillor, 2001 All rights reserved

  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, business establishments,

  events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-49569-8

  1. Lake Wobegon (Minn. : Imaginary place)—Fiction.

  2. Minnesota—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3561.E3755 L35 2001

  813’.54—dc21 2001026312

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To my darlings—winter was so long

  And soon will come again, meanwhile

  This story from when I was young

  I hope will elicit a summer smile.

  O my Lord God almighty and everlasting, grant me a prayerful heart. Even in the tumult of prosperity and all ordinary distress, give me words to address to Thee, O great Attender to misfortune, and when my spirit is defeated and my faith is an ash pit, yet grant me a silent prayer, O Merciful, O Giver of Life and Creator of this day, this piece of wood.

  —ST. JOSEPH THE WOODCARVER

  1

  A Summer Night

  Saturday night, June 1956, now the sun going down at 7:50 P.M. and the sprinkler swishing in the front yard of our big green house on Green Street, big drops whapping the begonias and lilacs in front of the screened porch where Daddy and I lie reading. A beautiful lawn, new-mown, extends to our borders with the Stenstroms and Andersons. The dog under the porch scootches down, pressing his groin into the cool dirt. A ball of orange behind the Stenstroms’ house, flaming orange shining in the windows, as if the Mr. and Mrs. had spontaneously combusted because of a faulty fuse, a frayed electrical cord, or a box of oily rags in the basement. The shadow of their elm reaches to our porch, a wavery branch flickers across my right arm in gray shade. I wish my cousin Kate would come by. She said she would but it doesn’t look like she will. I wrote her a poem: Kate, Kate,

  She’s so great

  I would wait eight hours straight

  To attend a fete

  For Kate.

  Daddy lies on the white wicker daybed in his blue suit pants and sleeveless undershirt and black-stockinged feet, exhausted from a long week at the bank. He is the head cashier. Daddy doesn’t like dealing with people. They wear him out. Their ridiculous demands. Their utter ignorance of sound fiscal practices. He pretends to be reading C. H. McIntosh’s Commentary on the Ephesians, but really he’s listening to the Minneapolis Millers on the radio. Mother is upstairs lying down with a headache, and the big sister is on the telephone complaining about boys and how dumb they are, and the big brother is at the University, studying math, the big brain of the family. I am taking it easy. Reclining on the porch swing, nestled in four pillows, a bottle of Nesbitt orange pop within easy reach. I am fourteen. In 1958 I will obtain my driver’s license and in 1960 graduate from Lake Wobegon High School. In 1963 I can vote. In 1982 I’ll be forty. In 1992, fifty. One day, a date that only God knows, I will perish from the earth and no longer be present for roll call, my mail will be returned, my library card canceled, and some other family will occupy this house, this very porch, and not be aware that I ever existed, and if you told them, they wouldn’t particularly care. Oh well. What can you do? I hope they appreciate the work I did on the lawn. Here’s a little-known fact: Saturday contains the world turd. How many of you knew that? Librarian has a bra in it. Words are so interesting. Breastworks, for example. Peccary. Pistachio. Cockatoo. Titular. Interred. Poop deck.

  I lie on the white wicker swing, Foxx’s Book of Martyrs before me, reading about the pesky papists piling huge jagged rocks on the faithful French Huguenots and crushing them, while listening to the Minneapolis Millers on the radio lose to Toledo thanks to atrocious umpiring that killed a rally in the third inning. Eruptions of laughter from the Jackie Gleason Show at the Andersons’ to the east of us, the Great One glaring at Audrey Meadows. One of these days, Alice—pow! Right in the kisser! At the Stenstroms’, Perry Como sings about the tables down at Morey’s, at the place where Louie dwells. We are Sanctified Brethren and do not own a television, because it does not glorify Christ. I know about these shows only from timely visits to the home of my so-called best friend, Leonard Larsen. Tucked inside my Martyrs book is a magazine called High School Orgies, lent to me by Leonard, opened to an ad for a cologne made from “love chemicals” that will turn any girl to putty in your hands. You dab some behind your ears and hold her in your arms and suddenly all resistance in gone, she is whispering for you to thrill her, fulfill her, do what you like. Plus a book of surefire pickup lines with a bonus chapter, “Techniques of Effective Kissing.” Daddy is also worn out from killing chickens today at Grandma’s farm. He and Aunt Eva dispatched forty of them, forty swift downstrokes of the bloody hatchet, forty astonished heads flopping into the dirt, the scalding, the ripping of feathers. The evisceration, the cleaning and wrapping. Usually, my job is to chase the birds and grab them by the ankles with a long wire hook and carry them to the killing block, but I didn’t go today, because I wanted to mow the lawn and besides Eva is mad at me. Daddy grew up on that farm. He doesn’t like to visit, because Aunt Eva has weepy spells and Daddy can’t bear to be around anyone crying, but he has to kill chickens for Grandma, because the ones sold in stores carry deadly bacteria. The bacteria doesn’t seem to bother us, but it would kill her.

  Ten eye-popping mouth-watering stories in every issue of High School Orgies, and the first is the story of Jack and Laura, tenth-grade teachers at Central City High who have the hots for each other. She is blonde, him too, and common sense is no match for spring fever, no match at all. She felt his eyes devour her resplendent globes as she bent to squirt mustard on her ham sandwich in the faculty lunchroom—why had she worn this blouse with the plunging neckline??? What was she thinking of ??? Whatever it was, he was thinking of the same exact thing, and in no time flat they find themselves in an empty classroom tearing the clothes off each other with trembling fingers.

  “There is a hole in a screen somewhere,” Daddy says. “Mosquitoes are coming in all over the place.” I listen and hear no mosquitoes. “You run around with bare legs and arms and you never use bug repellent, for crying out loud. I keep telling you and it’s in one ear and out the other.” He lies looking up at the ceiling, talking to himself as the announcer Bob Motley says, “We’ll be right back after this important message,” and a male quartet sings, “From the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s, the beer refreshing.” Daddy: “You ever hear of encephalitis? Know what that is? It’s an inflammation of the brain. They have to drill a hole in the top of your skull and stick a tube in and drain it. And if you get an infection—pffffffffffffft. You’re a goner. You’d be a vegetable. You couldn’t use a knife and fork. I saw this over and over in the Army. But don’t listen to me. What do I know? If you want to be a cripple for the rest of your life, go right ahead
.”

  This is pure Daddy. He is a woofer. He’s only happy when he can get upset over something. If a toilet is running, if he walks into a room and finds a light on and nobody there, he barks from one end of the house to the other. What are you people thinking? Do you think I am made of money? After Elvis sang on the Tommy Dorsey show—even though we have no television—Daddy woofed about that for weeks, the corrupting effect of it on the youth of our nation.

  From one mail-order house, you can purchase nifty magic tricks, a correspondence course in ju-jitsu, novelty underwear, and powerful binoculars that can see through clothing. A cartoon man aimed his binocs at a high-stepping mama and his eyes bugged out and his jaw dropped and drops of sweat flew off his brow.

  The cologne makes girls “eager to respond to your every wish, as if in a hypnotic trance,” which sounds like a good deal, but what if someone like Miss Lewis came under your spell? You’d have a scrawny horse-faced old-lady English teacher in your arms. Maybe a guy should settle for the binoculars. And learn ju-jitsu in case somebody tries to steal them.

  “Where does the word Saturday come from?”

  Daddy grunts. He thinks it comes from the Roman god Saturn.

  “But it’s not Saturnay. It’s SaTURDay.”