Word: keillor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Keillor was leaving not just home, but us. He had made the announcement on the Valentine's Day show, a few months ago, that APHC would shut down after 13 years on the air. He said he would quit, and on June 13, in the World Theater in downtown St. Paul, he did, after wandering without notes or road map through one more gentle monologue about Lake Wobegon, where the week, as usual, had been quiet, though rainy; after singing every goodbye song he could think of, after taking out a pocket handkerchief and wiping a tear, or perhaps only...
...left home long before, choking on prudence and rectitude, clawing at his collar for air. Exile was the bittersweet point of those fond and misty monologues about Lake Wobegon, the tiny, imaginary Minnesota town "that time forgot, that the decades cannot improve." The wry truth was that Garrison Keillor, celebrated shy person, uncorkable parlor baritone, world's tallest radio humorist, could abide the rural Midwest only in memory. Much of his audience had made the same journey, or nearly, and we loved to be persuaded, as we listened on public radio each Saturday to the extraordinary two-hour variety show...
...quit, of course. It was time; some of us had begun to miss broadcasts now and then, though always with a good reason and a note from our mothers ("Jack was in a holding pattern above Logan Airport; please excuse his absence"). Still, it felt funny to know that Keillor was quitting cold, that he was going to live in an apartment in Copenhagen with his Danish wife Ulla. It was as if a tall, shock-haired boy we had all thought especially promising were heading off to the big city with a private smile on his face, leaving...
...Keillor, who is 44, looked owlish a couple of hours before the last performance. In his dressing room he slapped shaving cream on his jaw and said without bitterness, but also without any trace of regret, that he and Ulla were selling their house in St. Paul and did not expect to live in the Midwest again. This was a realization, he said, "that came to me with stunning finality." There was no unfinished business here; renovation of the World Theater had been completed. A brave man named Noah Adams, lately of the public-radio news show All Things Considered...
Lake Wobegone Chronicler Garrison Keillor at Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pa.: Being a parent is not something that people ever feel confident or secure about. When you were tiny children, we started to read about tremendous advances in prenatal education. And when you got a little bit older, we started reading great books about early childhood and fantastic things that parents can do. We've always been a step behind in bringing you up . . . We wanted to bring you up with information about sex that we never had. Our parents only told us that if we listened to rock 'n' roll...