Read Online WLT by Garrison Keillor - Free Book Online Page A

nutshell. Announcers laying on the charm to sell you hair tonic.

    â€œWhy can’t we have a little more humor around here?” he told Roy Jr. “Is there a law against jokes?”
    And an hour later: “I want shows that are useful shows, not just a poof of glamor, shows that leave you with something.”
    Then: “Why does everything have to sound so earnest? What’s wrong with a little piss and vinegar?”

    Radio had destroyed the world of his youth, beautiful Minnesota hail to thee—who cared about that now with radio coming in from everywhere? No local pride, no hometown heroes except crooners and comedians and all-around numbskulls. Radio gave so much power to advertising and now advertising was everything. The businesses that poured money into radio got rich and the ones that didn’t went nowhere, it was as simple as that. All those wonderful little dairies and meat markets on the North Side were gone, Ehrenreich’s and Mahovlich’s and Kaetterhenry’s, and all their business went to the big boys, all because a cheery voice on radio could sell more wieners than quality could, so now the Scottish Rite was run by big shots and blowhards, the solid element was fading, the old fellows who told stories about their adventures in the North Woods in logging days and how they shipped out on an ore boat when they were seventeen and went to Brazil, the guys who had lived were fading away, gone broke, replaced by the big shirts created by advertising. Simple as that. Al’s Breakfast was a hole in the wall when it was opened by Al, a Swedish novelist who emigrated in 1921 and never got the hang of English but could scramble eggs and make pancakes, then it boomed when Al bought time on The Hubba Hooley Show and every night after the Ten O’Clock News , drowsy listeners heard the Hooligans sing:
    I’ll pick you up in a taxi, honey.
Try to be ready ’bout half past eight.
Now honey don’t be late,
We’re going to go to Al’s and have some breakfast.
Our romance bloomed at late-night dances;
It’s time our love saw the light of day.
You’ll see how sweet I am
Over scrambled eggs and ham.
We’ll be true pals at Al’s Breakfast Cafe.
    And six months later, the Cafe moved to a building half a block long, with turrets and stained-glass windows, packed day and night. It was bigger than Soderberg’s Court, which was packed with radio folks and throngs of fans. “Time to move,” said Ray. “We’ll drop the restaurant. I’m sick of hamburger grease. Let Al sell burgers, and we’ll sell Al.”
    Driving north of Minneapolis, cruising the back roads through the orchards and truck farms along the Mississippi, Roy found a potato farm for sale in Brooklyn Park, and took a sixty-day option and worked up a blueprint and made a small perfect scale model out of balsa wood, with sponge trees and a glass pond and an American flag on a pin and a blue paper-maché river splashing over the rapids. On a hill above the pond, reflected in it, stood the WLT building (“The Air Castle of the North”), a Gothic pile with a bell tower, patterned after the Chatfield College chapel, set in a park of perfectly conical pines surrounded by a hundred tiny white houses. Radio Acres . They’d borrow the money and build the station, wait a few years for land values to rise, then build the houses and sell them —at wonderful prices, thanks to the magic of radio. Radio Acres . The stars would have homes there, and for $6000, anybody could become their neighbor. Who wouldn’t pay a little extra to be a neighbor of the Benson Family or Bud and Bessie? Five hundred homes, at $6000, yielding $2000 pure profit apiece, would make them rich men.
    â€œWould make us paupers for life, and our children,” said Ray. “We’d be sitting in doorways on Skid Row in our old overcoats, and people’d drive by and say, Look . It’s