Read Online WLT by Garrison Keillor - Free Book Online

spin,” it brightened her day. At least she had challenged that person and given his tiny squalid mind a few rays of information. Otherwise, why would he be so upset? Why—if not because she had helped change him and change is painful?
    She told Ray, “Why couldn’t we teach Spanish? It’s a beautiful language! We could sign up students and send out lesson books and they could listen during dinner—people could use their mealtimes to learn , instead of just feeding their faces.”
    She stood, poised, waiting for a rebuttal so she could pounce on it and whip it to death. The way to fight her was to throw her off-balance with statistics, but Ray couldn’t think of any about Spanish.
    â€œPeople don’t want to learn Spanish during dinnertime,” he murmured.
    â€œHa! People don’t know what they want until you offer them a choice! If all you give them is pap and pablum, then that’s all they’ll want. Whatever happened to the ideals you professed when I married you?”
    She wheeled and marched to the door and as she went, she said, “This discussion is not ended.”
    Out she went and in came Roy, with an idea that radio transmission might be useful in assisting plant growth, particularly flowers, and would he care to invest in a radio agronomy research project at the University?
    â€œSure,” said Ray. “Might as well do some good in the world.”

CHAPTER 7
    The Hotel Ogden,
    T he fifth anniversary of WLT passed, and the sixth and seventh. The stock market crashed but it didn’t fall on radio. Radio was golden. Roy bought a 400-acre farm in Clay County, near Moorhead, where Dad Soderbjerg had spent a miserable three years as a farmhand, and Roy turned his mind toward the invention of a more perfect plow. He was gone for months at a time. When Roy showed up in Minneapolis, Ray bitched about radio. He complained to his lady friends. He harangued Dad Benson. Radio was a gold mine, and it was a plague. Over thousands of years, man had won a measure of privacy, graduating from tent to hut to a home with a lock, and now, with the purchase of a radio, man could return to cave-dwelling days when you were easy prey to every bore in the tribe, every toothless jojo who wanted to deposit his life story all over you. Ray tried not to listen to radio. And then he would forget and tune in and listen, and get miserable again. He fired off memos to Roy Jr.
    Tell Sheridan to speak up. I can’t understand a word she says. Is she sick or what? There’s no reason to whisper. She is supposed to be heard, for heaven’s sake, this is radio, not eurythmics.
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    Today Dad commented that Jo’s crocuses aren’t blooming. Yesterday it was hyacinths. Be consistent. Have somebody keep notes on these things so you don’t contradict yourself.
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    This morning I woke up at 6 a.m. and heard somebody talking about fishing. He talked for ten minutes and nothing he said was of any interest whatsoever. He had two or three fellows in the studio who sat and guffawed though it was not humorous. Don’t let these people do that sort of thing. I am not paying for that and I won’t put up with it.
    The sheer trashiness of radio! the tedium and garbage and fruity pomposity and Mr. Hennesy’s maundering about the Emerald Isle in that warbly voice (“O sweet Mary, me proud beauty—lying there in the green hills of heaven, dear Galway!”), the false bonhomie of fatheads like Leo (“Hey, have we got a barn-burner for you tonight, folks, and here’s a little girl you’re gonna love—”), the pompous balloon-like baritone of Phil Sax drifting moon-like through the news, the fake warmth of radio stars. Evenin ’, folks, and welcome to The Best Is Yet to Be and I just want to say how much it means to us to know that you’re there. Bullshit. But that’s what radio was all about! False friendship . That was radio in a