Celebrating Garrison Keillor
The Minnesota radio humorist brought a 50-year anniversary tour, based on his show “A Prairie Home Companion,” back to where he started it. He left me in tears of happiness.
ST. PAUL, Minnesota – For nearly three hours late Sunday afternoon, life calmed down here and it was wonderful.
In the historic Fitzgerald Theater, Garrison Keillor – singer, writer, poet, philosopher and a favorite American entertainer – led a “50-year anniversary tour” celebration, based on his long-running public radio show “A Prairie Home Companion.”
If you don’t remember that show, it aired from 1974 to 2016. It had a cult following of more than 2 million people who would tune-in from across the nation and around the world from 5 to 7 p.m. Saturday evenings. It had spinoffs in other radio shows, occasional TV shows, a movie and a bunch of books by Keillor.
And he brought the show back to life this past weekend in the city and in the theater where he started it.
Garrison Keillor sauntered out on stage of the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, picked up a microphone and started the show.
Our weekend trip to the Twin Cities and our tickets to the anniversary show were birthday gifts to me from my wife Mary Riche, and it was one of the best presents I’ve ever received. We were in a crowd of more than 1,000 for the Sunday matinee. My goodness, U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and her husband slid into the row of seats right in front of us!
Keillor, backed by an incredibly talented cast, most of them past stars on his shows, did new takes on old stories they’d performed. There were singers Heather Masse and Christine DiGiallonardo. There was the tremendous “Radio Acting Company” of voice artists Sue Scott and Tim Russell, and sound effects specialist Fred Newman. And music director Rich Dworsky led a band of seven all-stars playing a dozen instruments.
Keillor did delightful mini-homilies about the pleasures of life now in his early 80s. He led the singing of ballads, old hymns and patriotic numbers – sometimes with the audience. There was great comedy. He recited limericks, some of which he’s written himself and some of which were a little bawdy.
Like he did for so long when his show was on the air, he wound it all up with “The News from Lake Wobegon,” a monologue about the mythical Minnesota prairie town he created, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average.”
The Fitzgerald Theater in downtown St. Paul.
We Offenburgers and RicheBurgers have a long history with Keillor. mostly as fans, occasionally with closer contact because of my long career as the Iowa Boy columnist with the Des Moines Register.
In the late 1970s, 980s and ’90s, when Keillor was going to be bringing his show to Iowa for performances, I’d usually write columns before or after the shows. My wife Mary Riche recalls organizing a trip long ago by members of the Des Moines professional women’s breakfast club Consortium for a weekend in the Twin Cities, and a Keillor show at the Fitzgerald Theater.
A very memorable Keiller experience for me came in February, 1992, when he was bringing the show to the legendary Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake in north central Iowa.
Five years earlier, he’d stunned everybody by suddenly ending “Prairie Home Companion.” And the iconic Minnesotan moved away “in a huff,” I wrote – first to New York City, then to Denmark, then back to New York. He was upset with the ways some of the Twin Cities media had covered upsets in his personal life. In 1989, he’d re-started the show, briefly renaming it “American Radio Company,” headquartering it in New York.
As he was preparing the early ’92 Surf Ballroom show, I was able to schedule a phone interview with him a week before it. We exchanged hellos and a few memories of his earlier Iowa shows. He told me who’d be performing with him in Clear Lake and some of what the show would be like.
Then I mentioned that I hadn’t read much about him lately in the Midwest. And without knowing what was coming in the interview, I asked him what was new in his life.
“I think I’m on my way back” to the heartland, he said. “I’ve bought land and am building a house. It’s actually east (of St. Paul), just across the St. Croix River in Wisconsin. But I’ll be able to see Minnesota from there, and maybe that’s a good place for me to be. I’ll be spending more time (there), but I’ll still be living in New York City, too.”
And he said he’d soon be restoring the show’s original name, “A Prairie Home Companion.”
I was drop-jawed.
“I haven’t heard anything about this,” I said, “Have you told anybody in the media?”
He paused, chuckled lightly and said, “I decided to tell you first.”
So I broke the news in my Register column, and the Twin Cities media scrambled for days catching up on it.
Inside the Fitzgerald Theater, early-on, as the crowd was beginning arriving. The Sunday afternoon crowd of more than 1,000 filled the house.
In early 1995, Andrew Offenburger – then a sophomore at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa – applied for an internship on “Prairie Home” for the “January term” break between semesters. Born in 1975, the year after Keillor started the show, Andrew had been listening to the Saturday evening broadcasts nearly his whole life.
He recalls now that “in the office (in St. Paul), I mostly listened to old shows and categorized them in a database, so they could later look up what bits were done when.”
He also observed the comings & goings of the show’s stars, including Keillor. When he completed his internship, he had a great line about the famous entertainer.
“Everyone over 30 years old thinks Garrison Keillor is great,” Andrew said. “And nobody under 30 has ever heard of him.”
About that same time, as the co-host of the Des Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI), I asked Keillor if he’d consider riding his bike across the state with us – and perhaps do a “Prairie Home” show from the route.
“Ride a bicycle across Iowa?” he wrote back, with some exasperation showing. “Why would anyone do that? Don’t you realize what a wide state Iowa is?”
A year or so later, when I was sensing it was time for me to be moving on from writing my “Iowa Boy” columns for the Register, I was in touch with Keillor, asking if he might have room for me as a writer on the show. He sent me a kind, hand-written rejection. “No,” he wrote, approximately, “you need to keep writing your columns down there in Iowa, and I need to keep writing these shows up here.”
In the 25-plus years since then, I listened on radio and watched his occasional TV appearances, as well as attending a couple of his shows – most recently in early November, 2017, at Hoyt Sherman Place in Des Moines.
That was right before Keillor was fired from Minnesota Public Radio, which had been home base for “Prairie Home” for decades, as a result of him being accused of sexually inappropriate behavior by a female colleague. He said it was a misunderstanding in a “culture that has changed,” expressed regrets, and he has been able to move on in a nice recovery.
In the 50-year anniversary show in St. Paul, he said that at 81 years old, “almost 82,” he’s “been able to forget most of the mistakes I made” throughout his life and career.
As a longtime fan, I’ve managed to forgive him and am now enjoying the excerpts I hear from his tour, as well as the “Garrison Keillor and Friends” columns he writes at least weekly on the Substack platform on the internet.
There he writes a lot about the relatively quiet life that he and his wife of 29 years Jenny Lind Nilsson have in New York City. Both of them are natives of Anoka, Minn., now a town of about 17,000 a half hour’s drive north of the Twin Cities. Lind is a classical strings player, a regular with symphonies and other ensembles.
Keillor now often writes of the “cheerfulness” he is experiencing (and recommending), of “acceptance,” of a rediscovery of church life, and an appreciation for all the cultural attractions the city offers. He mentions politics only occasionally, saying that should be more the concern of younger people.
The consummate storyteller.
One other favorite story about Keillor is how he came to start “A Prairie Home Companion” back in ’74.
From the late ’60s, he’d become an increasingly popular morning show host on Minnesota Public Radio. But his first love then and now is writing. By ’74, he was writing regularly for the highly-respected New Yorker magazine. The editors there noticed that the Grand Ole Opry was preparing its last show in old Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville, before moving to the brand new Opryland complex in the suburbs. They commissioned young Keillor to go spend several days there and write a story for the magazine.
He did, and it changed his life.
He not only came up with a good story for the New Yorker, but he came away with an inspiration to start his own radio show that would mix music with storytelling. It would feature great stars and some promising newcomers. It would be done each week, before a live audience. It would have “sponsors” whose commercial messages would be performed on stage by the singers and storytellers.
Where the Opry was supported by “Martha White Self-Rising Flour,” which was a real business, “A Prairie Home Companion’s” flour company was “Powdermilk Biscuits.” Keillor created additional spoofs with “Lutheran Airlines,” “The Catchup Advisory Board,” “Bertha’s Kittie Boutique,” “Professional Association of English Majors,” “Guy’s Shoes,” and “Beebopareebop Rhubarb Pie.”
It has been a long, good run for Garrison Keillor. Americana at its best.
We’ll let him take his final bow here with these additional photographs from the Sunday matinee show.
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A NOTE TO MY READERS: I write my “Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger” columns here as a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, which is led by Julie Gammack, of Des Moines. In less than two years, our group has grown to more than 50 professional journalists. We are spread across Iowa and write on a wide variety of topics, but all share a deep interest in life in this state. You can become free subscribers on Substack and read us without cost, but if you enjoy our work, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber at whatever level you’re comfortable.
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Wonderful memories
Thanks!
I listened to his show religiously! I saw him perform several times in person, including the Hoyt Sherman show before he was forced out. I had the opportunity to meet him in the “green room” at an Iowa State Fair performance. So I asked him to autograph one of his books for my father-in-law. I said, “He’s a huge fan.” Garrison looked at me, and said, “HE’S a huge fan?” I hastily added, “I am, too, of course!’ Thanks for this update – I miss listening to him!