Volume 45 - No. 05
January 29, 2015
by lyle e davis
I don’t remember when, where, or why I first heard Garrison Keillor on the radio. But I remember I liked him.
Somehow, I had stumbled across this radio program called, “A Prairie Home Companion,” and here was this voice . . . a pleasant baritone voice, down-home voice . . . kinda like people I had known in my home state of Minnesota and my adopted state of Nebraska. Except he didn’t have the singsong cadence of an AmericanNorwegian that my Minnesota cousins have to this day. (They swear they don’t have a Norwegian or Minnesota accent. They do.) “Yeah, well I’m gonna go inta town and get me some groceries, ya shure you betcha.”
(It’s hard to write a Norwegian accent; even more difficult to write a Minnesota accent, or one from North or South Dakota. You kinda had to be there to hear it to know just what it sounds like. If you saw the movie “Fargo,” that’s how folks really talk in Minnesota and the Dakotas.)
Still, the program intrigued me. This fella who talked on the program, the narrator, clearly understood the psyche of the midwesterner . . . and, in particular, those folks who either intentionally or by accident of birth, wound up living in Minnesota. Turns out there’s a good reason for that. He’s one of them.
I found out his birth name Gary Edward Keillor and that he was born on August 7, 1942, in Anoka, Minnesota. We don’t really know where the name “Garrison” came from . . . but, somehow, it has stuck
I’ve been to Anoka. I think, if memory serves me correctly, I did some fishing there. Fishing is big in Minnesota and usually halfway decent. It is a given, for example, that if you get skunked on walleye or northern pike (some Minnesotans, like my grandma, called them “Norderns”) The Paper - 760.747.7119
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you’d always catch fish, provided you were willing to settle for bullheads. I’ve run out of worms and used a piece of red handkerchief for bait. And I caught plenty of bullheads. Bullheads are not the smartest of fish.
I don’t know if Garrison Keillor was, or is, a fisherman. He doesn’t seem to talk about it all that much. I suspect he’s more of a people watcher. An observer. Someone who takes great delight in noticing the mannerisms of others and storing that information in his mind for later retrieval when telling a
story and constructing characters for that story.
In 1969, he somehow wangled a job on Minnesota Public Radio. It was here, apparently, where his idea for what was to become “A Prairie Home Companion” was born. That was, in fact, the name of his morning radio program. Five years later, he transformed the show into a live broadcast, borrowing the name from his earlier program. It is still going strong today after a brief hiatus from 1987 to 1989. Those of you who have listened know that a popular part of A
Prairie Home Companion is Keillor's weekly monologue set in the quiet, fictional Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon, "where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." The show also features musical guests, imaginary commercials and skits.
When Keillor describes the townfolk of Lake Wobegone, those of us who lived at one time or another in Minnesota immediately recall the lovely little old ladies at the local Lutheran Church who would gather and gossip and discuss the sinful ways of their sisters
The Many Faces of . . . Garrison Keillor Continued on Page 2