What's Up at Lake Wobegon

Public radio's surprise hit features a town found on no maps

Lake Wobegon, Minn., is not on a map and is not listed in any atlas, but that does not bother the folks at the Chatterbox Cafe, who are munching an ethereal strawberry cream pie "that makes grown men cry and lose all ambition in life." Nor does it make much nevermind to the people waiting in line at Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery. And obviously they are not overly concerned at Bob's Bank, whose slogan--"Neither a borrower nor a lender be"--would cause terminal heartburn in the boardroom of Chase Manhattan. In fact, the only people feeling the strain are those innocents who tune in National Public Radio's A Prairie Home Companion for the first time and lack directions to visit all their new-heard friends in Lake Wobegon.

"The town that time forgot and that decades cannot improve," Lake Wobegon was founded only seven years ago by Garrison Keillor, a Minnesota writer and disc jockey. When he was a boy, Keillor, 39, loved the Grand Ole Opry. Now he frets that the Opry has become too much like a big industry and he believes that, despite TV, there is still an audience for a radio variety show, which is what the Opry and dozens of other shows of the '30s and '40s used to be. The producers of Minnesota Public Radio agreed. A Prairie Home Companion and Lake Wobegon (pop. 500) were the result.

At first, things moved rather slowly, as might be expected in a place where winters are so tough that graves have to be dug with dynamite. When Keillor and his guest musicians--a guitar duo, a jazz piano player and a male singer--first walked out onto the stage in St. Paul's Ja net Wallace Concert Hall, there was an audience of 15 and exactly 385 empty seats. But the program's brand of whimsy gradually attracted listeners.

As befits a variety show, A Prairie Home Companion has a little bit of everything, or everything that interests Keillor. There is a lot of music: bluegrass, folk, opera, jazz, blues, and visitors like Bill Staines, a yodeler, or Dr. Tom Weaver, who taps out the William Tell overture on his teeth. There are also letters from listeners and mock commercials. (The main "sponsor," Powdermilk Biscuits, promises to give shy people "the power to get up and do what needs to be done.") But the backbone of the program is Keillor's gravelly narration of the goings-on in Lake Wobegon.

Over the years, the shy, slow-speaking Keillor, who has written all the scripts, has peopled Lake Wobegon with enough walk-on eccentrics to fill an English garden party. Father Emil, the priest at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Church, for instance, who has not paid much attention to Vatican II, figuring there is only one Vatican and that is enough for him. And Jack, who runs Jack's Head Stop Center, which teaches intellectuals things like bowling. There is also the fellow who runs the Fearmonger Shop, which caters to paranoids of all persuasions. The shop offers a safety toilet seat elevated 36 in. so as to be "out of reach of deadly snakes, even those that stand on each other's shoulders."

Such goings-on could not be contained in Minnesota, and in May 1980, Keillor's two-hour Prairie Home Companion, aired live from an auditorium with 1,000 seats, became an almost instantaneous hit on National Public Radio. Now heard in most parts of the country on Saturday night, it has acquired a devoted band of a million or so fans. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun is one. Says he, urging a dose of Home Companion for the power brokers: "Washington, I suspect, could use a good bit of Lake Wobegon." Like Brigadoon or Camelot--Lake Wobegon has become a symbolic landmark, existing only on the map of the imagination. "Not everything that is real is on paper," says Keillor. "And if everything that is on paper were real, this would be a sorry world to live in."

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