The News from Lake Wobegon 12/18/2019 

You should be a writer. Your post is wonderfully written and thoughtful. I am now enjoying the same life style in our sweet little home built in 1930 7000 ft elevation in Nevada. God bless America

Great piece ! But the editor in me must point out it would be " newly wed"..not newlywed.

I love hearing your story! I said goodbye to a fellow student from junior college who was moving to Wyoming to finish getting his pharmaceutical degree. I remember his wife said, 'Yeah, there's a about 157 people out there and twice as many dogs.' Amusing.

@@sealyonesssounds heavenly.❤

@@HughGard-rc7cc AHA! Another Grammar NAZI! (Me too, and I try to control it IRL)

Me too. I would listen on Sunday afternoons as I drove between Rockford and Glendale Heights (working in Rockford at the time, my late husband lived in the burbs) It was edifying.

Garrison has a face MADE for the radio.❤

I don’t care about the harassment allegations against Keillor. I do, however, care about hypocrisy. I began listening to APHC in the nineties when you actually had to listen to it on the radio on Saturday evenings. I used to make a point of tuning in before he started the News from Lake Wobegon. I loved it. I would marvel as he seamlessly shifted from entertaining people to preaching a gospel message. He was truly gifted. Fast forward fifteen years. Obama came along, and eventually Trump came along and Garrison began to show his true colors. It’s like he couldn’t control his rage toward conservatives anymore, conservatives who, unbeknownst to him, made up the majority of his audience! And so I went from really enjoying the show to clenching my teeth and shouting at the radio for Garrison to JUST SHUT UP and go back to entertaining! Garrison’s rage toward the right increased week by week, yet I still tuned in, painful as it was. He took subtle shots at my midwestern conservative values, he took subtle shots at anyone on the right, he took subtle shots at whoever was in the news that week, telling me how stupid I was to vote for them and how much smarter he was for supporting Clinton, Obama and the other progressives on the left. He did one monologue where he talked about a bizarre dance troupe who was popular “in the midwest and in the south.” The audience laughed uproariously. Message received, Garrison. We’re lowbrow and stupid. We just don’t get it. Then one day he just came out and said it live on the air, and I wish I had it on tape. “I’m a communist” said Keillor offhandedly. The audience didn’t react and the show went on. I was in utter disbelief, but now it made sense. I continued to listen to A Prairie Home Companion but I wasn’t enjoying it as much anymore. About a year later, Garrison AGAIN proclaimed he was a communist. That broke it for me. I started listening less and less often as Garrison continued to take shots at Donald Trump and all the deplorable idiots who voted for him. Finally I wished that Garrison would lose his platform, and a few months later he did. His replacement was just as much of a liberal progressive as Garrison was. He had to be to get the gig. I never listened to APHC again. Now I only listen to the older recordings of the News from Lake Wobegon, from the time before Garrison lost his way.

@@jakester455 I think your reply is infinitely closer to rage than anything that ever came out of GK's mouth on the radio. Right? I understand your disappointment when you found out he doesn't share your political conservatism but can't understand why you would think it's some kind of change -or that he ever did in the first place considering the fact that only a minority of Americans are politically conservative and literally nothing you ever hear on American public radio is or ever has been politically conservative.

@@d.lafollette You need to get outside your bubble once in a while. The majority of Americans are still conservative (yes, the Communists have taken over the colleges and the numbers are changing because of that). Garrison Keillor made bank on portraying himself as a down home midwesterner but it was all a facade... He's a New York liberal Communist. My "rage" is based on being lied to for years, and at least I'm being up front with who I really am, unlike Garrison Keillor.

@@jakester455 Bubble? Hardly. I live in a city with 10,000,000 other people. I was born in the south/midwest and visit there several times a year. The people there are as "down home" as it gets and the majority are not remotely conservative. The amount of politically conservative people there -and everywhere else, is shrinking by the day. If you'd step out of your bubble you might even begin to notice that now yourself. Sorry but no one has lied to you. Didn't you ever notice PHC was on public radio? Didn't you ever listen to any of those stations when PHC wasn't on? (You had 40 years to do that). If you had you would've noticed that nothing else on that - or any other public radio station was politically conservative. So why didn't you? See? Your problem isn't that someone lied to you, it's that you weren't paying attention. If you want to step out of your bubble & start paying attention now, you'll find it easy to notice that most Americans are definitely not politically conservative. After that you might even evolve into being someone able to understand that all those people aren't Communists either. That's just a conservative media scare word. It used to be socialism: "Hugo Chavez..., Venezuela..., blah, blah, blah." Remember? When did conservative media change their scare word from socialism to communism?

I don't care about artists political leanings. I just enjoy the art. He's a true artist of words. I'm 100% capitalist and I don't care if he's a communist. I do however care very much if my politicians are communist. Communism is evil and causes worse suffering than capitalism. Anyone who says they're a communist needs to visit Cuba.

Amen!!!

I loved that too. Remember, the experts say that only mammals with a high intellect know how to laugh. Example: a lady elephant in a Wisconsin zoo threw a rock at my then husband and me. And a zoo employee scolded me and said I couldn't toss it back. I swear that elephant was laughing at me!

I was also listening to this on WSIU, in 1981 (from a small town an hour from Carbondale).

Hope you have them! Cheers.

LOL!

Where?

By now you must realize, you get what you give. Hostility is anger, maybe at yourself because you don’t understand why you’re being hostile? Please seek therapy to help ease your feelings; the world needs the best of you.

Not for you of course. I am from India. My sojourn in MN gave opportunity to listen to this legend. I just love him.

Utuber2019 it’s humor. It’s meant to be funny and not dividing

No, it's cherishing America, and the ways of small quaint America. It's a gem.

He’s talking about what it is to be a human being and finding humour in it - he’s not mocking America. If you want to know who he is you don’t need to make a public appeal for information: Google it - once you’ve worked out how to spell his name.

Not mocking America. It's a gentle look at small town Midwest people, much like the people Garrison Keillor grew up with. This, to me, is funny as hell.

Mocking America? Garrison Keillor grew up in small towns full of narrow-minded religious, salt-of-the-earth people. He's just having his funny moments with the hypocrisy of some of these people.

So called allegations are due to a photo done in jest. People need to calm down

I miss this show I used to listen to it for years

@@WickedPluto the facts seem to suggest otherwise. www.mpr.org/stories/2018/01/23/a-note-from-jon-mctaggart

You don’t know how you feel? Why not have a little think about it and make an announcement when you have decided - if you must.

Not sure how I feel about this comment by Sean Coppinger after speculating that he may be a kiddy fiddler. Will ponder a little longer. ..and ponder why the thumbs down button doesn't give a number..