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Keillor clearly has touched people with something more than a deft comedian's cleverness. Maybe they are transplanted Midwesterners, hoping sentimentally that the small towns are still there. Maybe they think that even if the nation is curling up and turning brown at the edges, the great Heartland still endures and is strong. Whatever the case, to be a Midwesterner, or to know someone who is, suddenly is almost fashionable.
When Keillor appeared at the Boston University bookstore last month, a long line wound through the foreign-language and dictionary sections, and each soul in it carried one or two or half a dozen copies of Lake Wobegon Days. (Half the book's royalties, says Keillor, go to Minnesota Public Radio.) The old joke about the Midwest in Boston, the Hub of the Universe, used to go "Ohio? Here we pronounce it Iowa." No more. A small woman at the head of the line, wearing an ALL THIS & BRAINS, TOO! T shirt, held her book up for Keillor to sign. He was standing bent over because he is nearsighted and because he was 14 inches taller than she. He chatted amiably as he wrote something on the title page, asking where the woman was from in a way that made it sound as if her answer would be very important to him. "Well, uh, Beacon Hill," she said humbly. Then she brightened. "But my aunt lives in Minneapolis!" Keillor gave the disadvantaged woman a reassuring pat on the shoulder, conferring honorary Midwestern citizenship.
Keillor was raised in Anoka, Minn., a town of about 15,000 that is now a suburb of Minneapolis but was not then. As far as he knows, Anoka people do not see caricatures of themselves in Lake Wobegon's sound burghers, possibly, he thinks, because they do not listen to his show, which suggests that they are like Lake Wobegonians, who would be the last people in the world to listen to A Prairie Home Companion. So he says. The small town of Isle, Minn., on a lake called Mille Lacs, suggested some of the physical characteristics of Lake Wobegon, but he says that except for his aunt Eleanor Johnson, who is Aunt Flo in the book, he did not really know the people who lived there. Lake Wobegon is elusive. The early surveyors mapped Minnesota in quadrants, he explains in his book, beginning at the edges of the state and working toward the center, where it turned out there was some overlap. The state legislature dealt with this by canceling the overlap, which happened to include Lake Wobegon.
His family, descended from Scots on both sides, belonged to a tiny, strict Fundamentalist sect called Plymouth Brethren, or simply Brethren. They abhorred dancing, disapproved of clergymen and so did not have any, and went to church twice on Sundays. The Keillors did not shun the world rigidly, however, as some Brethren do, and their children were allowed to play with neighborhood children outside the faith. Gary was a quiet boy, recalls his father John, a retired postal worker. The elder Keillors, who now live in Orlando, listen to the program, recognize the germs of a few stories and think that "some of it's good and some of it isn't."