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Movies and television were not part of the family's lives, although radio was allowed. But Gary says that no, he never heard the great Sunday-evening radio comedies: "We were at prayer meeting." He has rebelled against the narrow sectarianism of his upbringing, but although he has no church affiliation, religion is serious and real to him. As his friend Roy Blount says, "He's been off to college, gotten divorced, learned to drink. But he hasn't severed his roots." Keillor likes the old hymns, he says, because "they express faith, which I lean towards as the basis of the good life."
There is a long pause after he says this. The gaps in his discourse are so chasmodic that even friends who are accustomed to them are unsettled. An interviewer wonders, "Have I just said something that sets the North American record for stupidity?" No, Keillor is just doing a monologue, only this one is going on silently, in his head. Eventually he returns to the here and now and speaks. In this case it is to say, without explanation, "If you believe in the existence of a loving and merciful God, then life is a comedy."
Keillor was not a natural performer as a boy, says his older brother Philip, 48, an engineer whose field is shoreline erosion and flooding. At the University of Minnesota, Gary edited the literary magazine and wrote a noisy, satirical column called "Broadsides," in which he slashed at student radicals, the college president and any other targets that seemed pompous or pretentious. But the storytelling gifts did not immediately appear. In 1966, after he finished college, Keillor "felt a slight urge to head out" from the Midwest, and on a job-hunting swing through the East he applied at half a dozen publications. No takers.
Transplanted Midwesterners do much of the heavy lifting for the big Eastern magazines and newspapers, but Keillor was not to be one of them. Back he went to Minnesota, where, among other things, he began a five-day-a-week early morning classical-music show for a public radio station at St. John's University in Collegeville. The Prairie Home Morning Show, as it came to be called, moved to the Twin Cities, where it broadened and loosened to include jazz, country music, fake commercials and references to an obscure place called Lake Wobegon. (He stopped doing that show only three years ago.) "I think he started the show--well, who knows," says his brother. "He has said he was scared. A lot of people deliberately do things that they are afraid of." He had always written a lot ("Writing is so dignified," he says, rolling his eyes and dragging out the so like a saxophonist playing Blue Moon). In 1970 The New Yorker printed one piece out of a batch he had sent in, a small, eerily funny sketch, "Local Family Keeps Son Happy." It was written in the plonking style of a country newspaper, and it reported that two householders, hoping to shield their teenage son from the dangers of fast driving and foolish companions, had acquired a live-in prostitute for him.