Saturdays with Garrison Keillor

"Oh, hear that old piano from down the Avenue. I smell the rain, I look around for you. My sweet old someone, coming through that door. It's Saturday and the band is playing. Honey, could we ask for more?" * I'd like to take you on a journey to a place that time forgot and that the decades cannot improve, a place where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and the children are above average, a place where all tracks lead to Jacks, a place called Lake Wobegon.

For more than thirty years, I spent each Saturday evening between five and seven p.m. glued to MPR radio to listen to Garrison Keillor’s weekly Prairie Home Companion Show. I first heard it back in 1979, a few years after it had begun airing from St. Paul. At the time, I was living in a residential treatment center for mentally ill adults called Wellspring where one of the other residents told me about it.

It was “love at first listen.” And when I got back on my own again, I continued to tune my radio to 91.1 FM every Saturdays evening. There were several things about this live radio show that drew me in. For one thing, it was the wide variety and eclectic mix of exciting music which included folk songs, old jazz standards, hymns and gospel numbers, country and bluegrass, and classical selections from Bach to Puccini. I loved hearing the many top notch performers such as the Butch Thompson Trio, Peter Ostroushko, Robin and Linda Williams, Beau Soleil, Phillip Brunelle, and Greg Brown. Eventually, I began recording the shows on cassette tapes so I could play them again and learn some of my favorite songs.

However, it wasn’t just the music that attracted me to the show. There was something about Garrison’s deep, soothing bass voice which I found very soothing. I loved it when he sang some of the hymns he had grown up with. In fact, he reminded me a lot of a mellow Sunday morning preacher whose his stories resembled sermons. Thus, the Prairie Home Show soon

became my Saturday evening church service of choice before I found a real church to attend. I also loved the many unforgettable characters and places he wove into in his weekly Lake Wobegon monologs such as Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, Bertha’s Kitty Boutique, Jack’s Auto Repair, and Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Church. Garrison’s monologs often wandered off into all kinds of meandering directions, but he was always able to bring his listeners back to the here and now.

Besides the music and Lake Wobegon monologs, the show also featured a wide variety of amusing radio plays which were usually performed by the musicians themselves. One of my favorites included the ongoing misadventures of Dusty and Lefty, that clumsy cowboy duo who invariably got themselves in a quandary. To further enhance the radio dramas, Jim Ed Poole added all kinds of inventive sound effects like whistles, honks, moans, and cries. On a little table in front of him he put a wild assortment of gadgets with which to create his many effects. One of my favorites was an old pair of leather shoes which he used to simulate someone walking down a street.

Of course, no radio show could be successful without its sponsors. Garrison was always very inventive in coming up with all kinds of quirky ones. My favorite sponsor and one of the earliest ones was Powdermilk Biscuits. You could find them in the big blue box with the dark brown stains to indicate freshness. They gave shy persons the strength to do what needed to be done. That's why I liked them so much.

I didn’t just content myself to listening to the show on the radio. Eventually, I began attending live performances at the old World Theater in downtown St. Paul. During those early performances, I can remember the plaster falling down from the ceiling. Eventually, after the PHCS went national, it became popular, and there was more money to

be had, The World Theater was renamed The Fitzgerald Theater and went through a major million-dollar renovation. In fact, around this time I started ushering at the Fitz whenever the show was in town. I remember sitting on stage one time, not twenty feet away from where Garrison was doing his monolog. I had this insane fantasy of suddenly grabbing his mike and saying something outrageous. But I’m glad I didn’t. I’m sure it would have caused a scandal!

It turns out that I had a very personal connection to the show since one of its producers – Stevie Beck – taught me how to play the autoharp around the time I first started tuning in. In fact, she also taught Garrison to play the autoharp, which he sometimes did in the early days of the show. He called her the Queen of the Autoharp, and often featured her beautiful music.

Therefore, I was very saddened when the PHC Show was suddenly yanked off the air a few years ago after Garrison was accused of sexual harassment. It had something to do with someone claiming that he touched a woman inappropriately, but I don’t remember the details. Still, I was very sorry to see it disappear. I sure miss the show and don’t think there will ever be anything like it again.

* The opening song segment from the weekly Saturday evening Prairie Home Companion Show.