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  Praise for Garrison Keillor and The Keillor Reader

  “Keillor is very clearly a genius. His range and stamina alone are incredible. . . . And he’s a masterful storyteller.”

  —Sam Anderson, Slate

  “Keillor spin[s] his entire life experience into tales that may be fantastical but are always . . . true to life . . . honoring it, in all its wild permutations and possibilities. . . . This gem of a book will resuscitate you.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Heir to Mark Twain, James Thurber, and E. B. White, Keillor offers more than laconic, sometimes-rueful, reports from the fictional Midwestern town of Lake Wobegon. Besides selected Prairie Home Companion monologues—written in an adrenaline rush on the morning of each show—this collection contains poetry, fiction, and assorted essays, each introduced by autobiographical musings. . . . Lovely.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Unaffectedly good-natured, entirely accessible, and informed on every page by [the] shrewd and tolerant observation that ‘there’s a lot of human nature in everybody.’”

  —Howard Frank Mosher, The Washington Post

  “Wry, wistful, nostalgic . . . By turns cheerful and fatalistic, homespun and outrageous.”

  —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 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

  “Keillor’s Lake Wobegon books have become a set of synoptic gospels, full of wistfulness and futility and yet somehow spangled with hope.”

  —Thomas Mallon, The New York Times Book Review

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE KEILLOR READER

  Garrison Keillor is the founder and host of A Prairie Home Companion, which observed its fortieth anniversary in 2014, and The Writer’s Almanac. He is the author of nineteen books of fiction and humor, the editor of the Good Poems collections, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A Minnesota native, he lives in St. Paul and New York City.

  ALSO BY GARRISON KEILLOR

  Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny

  A Christmas Blizzard

  Pilgrims: A Lake Wobegon Romance

  77 Love Sonnets

  Liberty

  Pontoon

  Love Me

  Daddy’s Girl

  Homegrown Democrat

  Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

  Me: The Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente Story

  The Old Man Who Loved Cheese

  Wobegon Boy

  Cat, You Better Come Home

  The Book of Guys

  WLT: A Radio Romance

  We Are Still Married

  Leaving Home

  Lake Wobegon Days

  Happy to Be Here

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Published in Penguin Books 2015

  Copyright © 2014 by Garrison Keillor

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Keillor, Garrison.

  [Works. Selections]

  The Keillor reader / Garrison Keillor.

  pages cm

  Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-101-51777-2

  I. Title.

  PS3561.E3755A6 2014

  813'.54—dc23 2013047835

  Cover design: Brianna Harden

  Cover photograph: © Prairie Home Productions (staff photographer—Theresa Burgess)

  Version_2

  To my editors, Roger Angell, Kathryn Court, Charles McGrath, William Whitworth, Corby Kummer, Molly Stern, Beena Kamlani, and all the copy editors and fact-checkers

  CONTENTS

  Praise for Garrison Keillor and The Keillor Reader

  About the Author

  Also by Garrison Keillor

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  I

  THE NEWS FROM LAKE WOBEGON

  1. Bus Children

  2. Growing up with the Flambeaus

  3. My Cousin Kate

  4. June

  5. Gospel Birds

  6. Pontoon Boat

  7. What Have We Learned So Far?

  8. Chickens

  9. The Death of Byron

  10. Truckstop

  11. Faith

  II

  ICONIC PAJAMAS

  1. Henry

  2. Little House on the Desert

  3. Billy the Kid

  4. Lonesome Shorty

  5. The Babe

  6. 1951

  7. Little Becky

  8. Casey at the Bat

  9. Marooned

  10. Mother’s Day

  III

  GUYS I HAVE KNOWN

  1. Earl Grey

  2. Don Giovanni

  3. Taking a Meeting with Mr. Roast Beef

  4. Your Book Saved My Life, Mister

  5. Zeus the Lutheran

  6. Al Denny

  7. Jimmy Seeks His Fortune in Fairbanks

  8. At The New Yorker: My Own Memoir

  9. Snowman

  IV

  LIFE’S LITTLE DAY

  1. Rules of Orchestra

  2. Five Columns

  3. A Speech to the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner

  4. Chet

  5. Mark

  6. What a Luxury

  7. My Life in Prison

  8. Drowning 1954

  9. College Days

  10. My Stroke (I’m Over It)

  11. Home

  12. Anglicans

  13. The Owl and the Pussycat

  14. Cheerfulness

  Acknowledgments

  This is a letter that changed my life and rescued me from despair, and beyond that, it’s a classic Roger Angell letter to an author—the faint embarrassment that they rejected a story and maybe they were wrong (“I don’t know”), the booming praise of the story they accepted (“just about perfect in every way”), the modest suggestion (“If it’s all right with you”) of a few minor changes, and the hope that this is only the beginning. I sat down on the front step of our rented house at 222 30th Avenue North and thought, “Now my life is not entirely wasted.” Roger was a generous letter writer, and I think of him sitting at a typewriter and banging out long, elegant, encouraging letters to far-flung authors. It gave yo
u a big charge to get one.

  A Sunday afternoon in July 1933, my mother, eighteen, perched on the bench in her father's backyard on Longfellow Avenue in Minneapolis, looks at the camera held by her younger sister Elsie as my father, twenty, writes his name on an entry form for a contest (Name A Lake Home) that he did not win. But they got each other, and also six children, including me.

  INTRODUCTION

  I come from the prairie, I’ve been to New York,

  A tall lonesome fellow and slightly historic,

  But I am a rider, I ride every day

  On a big Underwood cross the wide open page.

  I ride in the sun and the snow and the rain,

  I’ve ridden with Thurber, Benchley, Mark Twain.

  They mostly wrote better than I and I mean it

  But I am still living and that is convenient.

  When I was twenty and something of a romantic, I thought about dying young and becoming immortal like Buddy Holly or James Dean or Janis Joplin and people leaving bouquets on my grave and grieving for my enormous complicated talent lost to the world. But I didn’t have a complicated talent, nor was it enormous. Some people thought I did because I wrote poems and was shy, didn’t make eye contact, kept to myself. (Nowadays they’d say “high-functioning end of the autism spectrum,” but back then oddity was interpreted in a kindlier fashion.) Anyway, death didn’t occur. I never needed to charter a plane in a snowstorm as Buddy did, and a car like James Dean’s Porsche 550 Spyder was way beyond my means, and heroin was not readily available in Anoka, Minnesota, so onward I went. An angelic being assigned to read through the mounds of unsolicited stories in a backroom at The New Yorker plucked out one of mine, and the magazine printed a string of them, and that led to a fact piece about Nashville, which inspired a radio show called A Prairie Home Companion, and then I was forty, which is too old to die young, so I headed down the long dirt road of longevity, and thus arrived at seventy, when I took time to sit down and put this collection together.

  • • •

  I was the third of six children of John and Grace, a young Sanctified Brethren couple in Anoka, Minnesota, on the Mississippi, a farm boy and a city girl who fell in love and married secretly in an air of scandal. There was a Model T involved, a moonlit pasture, a startling realization, a justice of the peace. I was born in Anoka in 1942, in a house on Ferry Street, and grew up along the river in Brooklyn Park township, north of Minneapolis, where we moved in 1947 into a house Dad built on an acre lot with room for a big garden. All around us were vegetable farms, fields of potatoes, peas, sweet corn. My friends and I rode our bikes with cardboard strips clipped to the rear fender brace to whap against the spokes to make a motor sound, racing on dirt roads to an abandoned grass airstrip with rusting carcasses of Piper Cubs to sit in and reenact the war, fighting off the deadly Messerschmidts and Jap Zeroes. My brother and sister and I attended Benson School, a handsome three-room country school, where I had Estelle Shaver and Fern Moehlenbrock for teachers. In first grade, I was slow to read, and Miss Shaver kept me after school to read aloud to her, which she made me believe was not for my sake, but for hers, to keep her company as she graded papers. She made disability feel like talent. She said to Bill the janitor, “Listen to him, doesn’t he have a lovely voice.” In time, I turned into a bookworm and a good speller. And around the time I was eleven, I began to be a writer. That was the summer Grandpa Denham died and I was allowed to attend the funeral and look at his body. My only previous encounter with death was the Egyptian mummy in the Minneapolis Public Library. Grandpa’s body, the preacher talking about death and how it may be imminent and so those who are unsaved should come to the Lord and do it now, don’t wait until later—my aunts weeping, the solemn faces of the men, the motorcade to Lakewood Cemetery, the lunch afterward at the Gospel Hall—it was all very grand. And then in August Mother made my dad take me with him to New York City. A family friend was an Army captain stationed in Germany and wanted his brand-new Pontiac shipped over. Dad had agreed to drive it to Brooklyn to be loaded aboard a freighter. He had been stationed in the city during the war, sorting mail for the Army in the Main Post Office with its famous inscription about snow and rain and heat and gloom of night, and he had wartime friends he wanted to see. I think Mother made him take me along because she felt that the father of six children should not go waltzing off to Manhattan scot-free. The friends he wanted to see were two sisters, Nancy and Betty, both of them married now, but still.

  It was the trip of all trips—the two-lane highways through Indiana and Ohio, the country inn in Pennsylvania with the high poster bed, Valley Forge, the whine of traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, the towers of Manhattan silvery in the afternoon sun, streets jammed with pushcart peddlers shouting in strange languages. We stayed with Don and Betty in their Brooklyn apartment, one bedroom, a kitchen alcove, a small living room with a round clawfoot dining table where we sat down for supper. They reminisced about the war years and I almost fell asleep—it was a hot night in Brooklyn—and hours later, when they went to bed, it was too hot to sleep, so Dad and I took a walk to a candy store and bought cream sodas and perched on the curb and drank them. Across the street was a park where hundreds of people lay sleeping on blankets spread out on the grass, families, little kids nestled against their mothers, and on the benches around the perimeter men sat smoking and talking in the dark. We walked back to Dad’s friends’ apartment and he spread a mattress on the fire escape and we slept there, five stories in the air, headlights passing below us, the elevated train rumbling by, a block away. I lay on the mattress and thought, A person could fall asleep and fall to his death. Some criminal could come creeping up the fire escape and knife Dad and throttle me. The Russians could drop the A-bomb. Nonetheless, I went to sleep.

  I came back to Benson School as the only boy in the sixth grade ever to have laid eyes on New York City. Enormous status. A kind of nobility. A girl asked me if it was true that trains ran underground and went fast and I said yes, it was true and I had ridden them. It was the first time I had amazing firsthand experience to offer an audience. I wrote a report and read it aloud to the class and they soaked it all up: Coney Island, the Empire State Building, Ebbets Field, subways, Jones Beach, the Staten Island Ferry, Times Square, all the wonders of the world. There is nothing like good material. You only had to say New York and there was an awestruck silence. You went, you saw, and now you tell the others. And that was my start as a writer, age eleven, some yellow No. 2 pencils and Big Red Indian Chief tablets. Later I was presented with Uncle Louie’s Underwood manual typewriter with a faint f and a misshapen O. You had to poke the keys hard to make an impression. I set it on a maple desk in my bedroom, which looked out onto a cornfield across the road, and I wrote stories about lonesome loners who kept their distance from the mindless crowd and observed them with contempt tinged with envy. My parents did not encourage this. The Brethren did not favor fiction or poetry, nor did they care much for history aside from what was in Scripture.

  That fall I flunked the eye test and got wire-rim glasses, and one fine day, playing softball, I was out in right field, the sissy position where there was plenty of leisure time, and I dropped an easy pop fly—took a few steps back and settled under it and it came in chest-high and caromed off the heels of my hands and the other team hooted and whooped and my teammates wouldn’t look at me. I was humiliated. I got permission to spend recess periods in the school library. I got absorbed in history books. I sought out my uncles and asked about the War and the Depression. Instead of scrapping for the respect of peers, I basked in the company of old people. Why had Grandpa Denham come over from Glasgow in 1911? Why did Grandpa Keillor come down from New Brunswick in 1880? The old uncles were grateful for a boy’s interest. They lavished stories about Anoka back when the North Coast Limited stopped there, when quarter horses raced at the fairgrounds and the Wild Man from Borneo was exhibited in a tent and bit the head off a live chicken. And t
he terrible tornado of 1938 that blew Florence Hunt and her baby girl into a tree. It was so much easier to sit and listen to them than to hold my own on the playground. My peers thought I was strange. I didn’t mind. I was a writer and writers only compete against themselves.

  • • •

  I tried to go out for football in eighth grade but failed the physical due to a clicky mitral valve and was disappointed but only briefly. A couple days later I walked into the office of the Anoka Herald, a down-at-the-heels weekly around the corner from the junior high, and asked the editor, Warren Feist, if I could write sports for him, an act of reckless bravery by a fearful young man, and Mr. Feist smiled and said, “Sure.” So I got to sit in the press box at football games, high above Goodrich Field, and look reporterly as I took extensive notes, listening to the play-by-play of the KANO announcers next to me. Back at the office—thirteen years old, I had an office—Whitey and Russ sat at the keyboards of their monster Linotype machines, wheels turning, arms pumping, a little flame in back keeping the melted lead hot. Line by line, they clattered away, pulling the lever that poured the hot lead into the mold to make a slug, the slug slapped into the galley, which was set into the chase, which lay on the turtle. Russ and Whitey were pasty-faced with purple noses and they reeked of drink, but they were kind to me and I was honored to be there. Mr. Feist edited my stories gently, removing paragraphs of crowd description, drawing out the action on the field. The Herald was printed on Wednesday afternoon and I made a point to be there to watch. Whitey stood on a platform over the flatbed press and, though drunk, he could riffle a giant sheet of paper loose from the stack and flip it up and onto the flatbed, where the roller rolled over it with a whump and a shwoosh and the folder cut and trimmed and folded it, and a copy of the Herald slid down the chute with the sports page and my byline with my story about the Anoka Tornadoes ready to be read by dozens, if not hundreds, of subscribers, men and women in kitchens all over Anoka eager for my account of the game. A person never gets over this, the pleasure of seeing his own words in print. Unless there’s a tipo. Never.