"When I was a boy," says the yarn-spinning champion of St. Paul, Minn., "the storyteller in our family was uncle Lew Powell, who was my great uncle, my grandma's brother, who died only a couple of years ago, at the age of 93. In a family that tended to be a little withdrawn, taciturn, my uncle Lew was the friendliest. He had been a salesman, and he liked to drive around and drop in on people. He would converse, ask how we were doing in school, but there would be a point when he would get launched, and we would try to launch him. There were two different house-burning stories. I worked in a little bit of one in the book, the one where Great Grandpa came back from the Colorado gold flelds, is the legend, and the gold dust was all lost in the blaze.
"My parents would be in the living room, and my aunt Ada and my brothers and sisters. We would be eating popcorn. As it got later, I remember lying on the floor so my mother wouldn't see me. Uncle Lew would stop for a while, and then someone else would spell him, my dad or my aunt Ruth. And then Uncle Lew would come back. The period he talked about so well was about ten years on either side of the turn of the century. A beautiful time, I still think so. And I just wanted him to tell more and more and more. I wanted to know everything. What it looked and smelled like, what they ate and what they wore.
"I remember Uncle Lew's stories not as coming to a point, really, but to a point of rest, a point of contemplation. As I got older, of course, life was becoming strange. I just looked to those stories of his, and to the history of the family, as giving a person some sense of place, that we were not just chips floating on the waves, that in some way we were meant to be here, and had a history. That we had standing."
Just standing there in front of the microphone, Garrison Keillor has standing. Boy, does he. He is a big, weedy fellow, 6 ft. 4 in. tall, with horn-rims and a big shock of dark brown hair, snazzy in black tie and tails, red socks and galluses, and black sneakers with white stripes. When he is feeling rueful and self-mocking, which is fairly often because he is a shy man, he calls himself "America's tallest radio humorist." This, the listener is meant to understand, is the kind of hick distinction that small-town Midwesterners cherish, and Keillor is splendidly and defiantly a small-town Minnesot'n. (The a missing here, Easterners and Westerners, is not pronounced, and neither, of course, is the apostrophe.)
As everyone here in the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee is aware, this singular citizen--unprecedented and unlikely to be repeated--is the inventor, host, chief writer and principal song-and-dance man of an astonishing radio show called A Prairie Home Companion, broadcast by Minnesota Public Radio each Saturday at 5 p.m. Midwestern time. Usually it originates from the World Theater in St. Paul, but during renovations there, the program is on the road, tonight in Milwaukee. It is now 4:57½, and Keillor is cranking up to do his first live broadcast in five weeks. He flaps about looking distracted, claiming that he has forgotten the words to his theme song, the Hank Snow tune Hello Love. People in the audience call out the words. He waves an extravagant thanks, grins a froggy grin and rumbles into "Well, look who's comin' through that door,/ I think we've met somewhere before,/ hello love."