That Time of Year

Radio

ON THE SUNDAY NIGHT BEFORE classes started at the U, I boarded a Greyhound to Isle to pick up a car from my uncle’s Ford dealership. I was sitting on the bus, halfway back on the left side, window seat, a stream of southbound headlights passing, people heading back to the city from their lake cabins. I was reading Thoreau’s Walden and suddenly there was an explosion of light up ahead and I was pitched forward and into a standing position as the bus went careening into a deep ditch and up onto a hayfield. There was some screaming, then silence. A few men and I stepped out past the driver who sat in shock, the windshield shattered, the dashboard crunched in, the steering wheel in his lap. I walked across a hayfield freshly mown, back to the highway, long lines of headlights, cars stopped north and south, and I saw the station wagon we’d hit, the hood in a sharp upward V, and the bodies, a man and a woman lying on the road, the man convulsively raising his head, the woman dead, her skirt up over her head. The body of a young man in the back of the car, shirtless, another man’s body in the ditch. A Catholic priest bent over the woman, praying. The driver was the man raising his head. We onlookers treading on broken glass, talking in whispers, the smell of oil and gas in the air. A man said, “He passed me going eighty and I made room for him and he kept going. I thought he was out of his mind.” Flashing red lights, a sheriff’s car, an ambulance. Greyhound sent a spare bus to take us onward. I got to Isle, found my Uncle Aldridge up and awake though it was almost midnight. I told him the whole story, and he, a small-town doctor who’d seen drownings, gunshot wounds, suicides, car crashes, sat and patiently listened. I picked up the Ford and drove back home and slept on the couch for a couple hours and drove to campus to report for work.

I pulled into the parking lot at 5, put on a white smock, sat in the shack with my co-workers. I didn’t know how to say that I’d been in a crash, seen the dead on the highway, and in the split second they were killed, I was thrown to my feet and I was happy to be on the bus and not in the car, profoundly grateful to be where I was, a parking attendant, eighteen, starting college. Thoreau said that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation but I was not one of them, I was happy and grateful. But they were strangers and one of them was grousing about summer having ended and they all seemed to be in agreement on that, so I said nothing.

The parking lot was on the river bluff, twelve acres of open gravel. My job was to direct incoming cars to the exact right parking spot, creating straight double rows, though there were no painted lines on the gravel, keeping fifteen-foot lanes, no easy task, especially when the big rush came at 7:30 (classes began at 8). Three ticket-sellers stood in the street and sold tickets (15 cents), and all the drivers were running late and nobody had correct change. One man, the infielder, stood mid-lot and directed traffic toward the two outfielders (me and another guy), whose job it was to look each car straight in the windshield, no waffling, and signal authoritatively so the driver knew that no deviation is allowed here, sir, and do not test me even for a moment—No sir, not there, back that up, right there, you, right there. Each car had to go to its one true and correct space in a parallel double row. Some people tried to park ironically or close to the bridgehead for personal convenience. NO. Not today. It was instructive, confronting the headlights of freethinkers. If individualism were to rear its head, chaos would ensue, lines go cockeyed, lanes get blocked, people be late for class, and we’d face frustration and rage—I had to fix my gaze on the driver and bark, HEY, back that up, sir, and they obeyed me. Thank you, sir. The exercise of power for the common good. As an eighteen-year-old I was in favor of freedom, and as a parking attendant I cracked down hard on it. Someone said the test of a great mind is the ability to embrace opposite ideas at one time. I became a genius.

The lot was full by 8 and we six attendants sat in the shack and listened to Steve Cannon on KSTP. My colleagues were a rough lot; you couldn’t imagine women loving them at all, but it felt very chummy, listening to Cannon talk to his sidekicks Ma Linger and Morgan Mundane, who were Cannon himself. He was cool. He played against the Minnesota Nice model, doing Sarcastic Cantankerous. He was brilliant. Having just bullied hundreds of cars, I loved Steve-O, a guy from the Iron Range, married to Nanook of the North, no pushover. I imitated him, dealing with difficult drivers trying to cut a better deal for themselves, and when I yelled at them, they did as directed. I was an invisible middle child, I’d never been in command before. I enjoyed it.

And at 9 a.m. I crossed over the old iron-truss bridge to campus, looking down on the junky yards and shacks called Bohemian Flats on the flood plain below, a place you might wind up in if you failed to apply yourself, and over to the U on the east bank, the majesty of the Mall, the arched footbridges over Washington Avenue, the stately Library, the pillars of Northrop Auditorium and the inscription above, Founded in the Faith That Men Are Ennobled by Understanding, Dedicated to the Advancement of Learning and the Search for Truth, Devoted to the Instruction of Youth and the Welfare of the State. Passing under the canopy of elms, Sikhs in turbans, more black faces than ever I had seen before, Africans from Africa, the sound of Hindi and Chinese, women in saris with red dots on their foreheads, Korean War vets in fatigues, lovely intellectual girls in tweed skirts and horn-rimmed glasses descending the front steps of the library, books in satchels, a mathematician with wild Einstein hair. And a bunch of very black men speaking perfect French: it astonished me. And fraternity boys in three-piece plaid suits, boys my age impersonating downtown clothing salesmen. My uniform was blue jeans, leather boots, blue work shirt with a pack of Luckies in the pocket, corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches. This was how a writer should look, down at the heels but distinguished. I had little money but I splurged on a season ticket to the concerts in Northrop and saw Isaac Stern, Arthur Rubinstein, Andrés Segovia, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Swedish tenor Jussi Björling, the Cleveland Orchestra, Glenn Gould, a balcony seat, ten concerts, fifteen bucks. I was from artless Anoka where the only culture was agriculture. I wanted to see it all.

Northrop Auditorium, U of M.

Most of my classes were in Folwell Hall, an Elizabethan castle with balustrades and parapets, porches and gables, high chimneys, and classrooms full of loose talk and tobacco smoke. James Wright chain-smoked through his elegant lectures on Oliver Twist and Little Dorrit in his Dickens class. In Richard Cody’s Composition: The Essay class, elbow to elbow at sidearm desks, we studied prose architecture in the work of Addison, Chesterton, Emerson, and Mencken, smoking, using tuna fish cans for ashtrays. Asher Christensen smoked a pipe through his American Government course. He was a slim man with a beautiful voice who spoke in whole paragraphs without notes; his great theme was the Constitution as a device of checks and balances to force antagonists to deal with each other civilly. One day that fall, he went to the faculty club for lunch, lay down for a nap, and died of a heart attack. He was 57.

Maggie Forbes’s Latin translation class was the big challenge, despite my two years of high school Latin, I was a bona fide tabula rasa, tried to be incognito, committed many errata, had no alibi, only mea culpas. English was my terra firma, my sine qua non. Maggie gave me a B-minus, which was more than generous. Pax vobiscum.

Across University Avenue from Folwell was Dinkytown, a neighborhood squashed in between the Como freight yards and the main line of the Burlington Northern on which, four times a day, the Silver Zephyr raced to or from Chicago, a few feet behind McCosh’s bookstore, owned by the anarchist Melvin McCosh, with radical slogans on index cards pinned to the shelves (“The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope”) and Al’s Breakfast, a hole-in-the-wall joint with fourteen stools at the counter, where you ate your eggs and sausage with mathematicians, med students, maybe a medievalist. A coffeehouse, the Ten O’Clock Scholar, where in the evening someone sat on a stool in the front window, singing about the plight of miners, sailors, sharecroppers, hoboes, people in short supply in Minnesota. Bob Zimmerman, who had lived around the corner in a rented room with a mattress and a hotplate, had recently left for New York to become Bob Dylan, and I heard people complain about the money he owed them. Across the street was a grocery, Virg ’N Don’s, where people shopped for the sound of the name. Around the corner on Fourth Street was the Varsity Theater where I saw Godard’s Breathless. A rats’ nest of a bookstore called Heddon’s whose snowy-haired proprietor, after pondering a moment, could reach into the third orange crate from the bottom and pull out the very book you asked for. In Perine’s Books, a few years later, I invested in a copy of John Updike’s brand-new The Centaur and got swallowed up in it and realized that I would not become a novelist. Updike, only ten years older than I, was a genius. I was not and there was no point in pretending. A novelist is a boatbuilder, and what I do is make model airplanes. So radio comedy would have to be enough.

I got into radio two weeks after arrival. I was in Westbrook Hall taking a written psychological test, required of incoming students, with questions like Do you sense that people whom you do not know are conspiring to cause you harm? and Do you sometimes feel there are insects crawling all over your body?—I glanced out a window and saw, fifty feet away, in a dressing room at Northrop Auditorium, a young naked woman looking at herself in a long mirror. She was tall and lean, black hair tied in a bun, delicate breasts, long exquisite fingers, extending a leg, lifting an arm, as she struck dancerly poses. She was a dancer with the Royal Danish ballet performing that night at Northrop, and I wanted to meet her. I had had a crush on Ulla, the Danish exchange student at Anoka, my unattainable date. Now, looking at the dancer, I got the bright idea of finding a tape recorder and meeting the dancer and doing a radio documentary about a Dane’s impressions of America—yes!—and sending the tape to Ulla, so I hiked down the Mall to Coffman Union and the WMMR studio and walked into a crowded room, a staff meeting in progress, and a tall guy in a trench coat shook my hand, the program director Barry Halper, who showed me around the studios, and told me I had the voice of a newscaster. He was very friendly. I did not mention the naked dancer. That idea petered out.

Barry was very enthused about radio. We walked into the control room. Three big felt-covered turntables, a mixing board, a glass window looking into the announce studio beyond. He needed a newscaster, he said. He showed me an Associated Press teletype clattering in a closet, continuous yellow paper spilling out the front, and he ripped off about forty feet of it, and asked me to put together a newscast. So I assembled a stack of stories and the engineer, a kid named Harvey, pointed me toward the studio, a tiny room with green acoustic tile walls and a felt-covered table, an RCA microphone suspended over it, a gooseneck lamp, a clock on the wall, and a small metal box with a cough switch. A red light came on, and I said, “This is Garrison Keillor with the news.” And I was in radio. I got in by wanting to interview a naked ballet dancer and thereby impress someone I wished would be my girlfriend, and I became a newscaster because Brethren sermons had taught me how to speak with solemn authority. I read the news in the voice of Brother Rogers talking about the Tribulation.

The next day Barry called to ask if I could do a noon newscast, daily. No pay, but it’d be fun. I said yes. I had a job as a parking lot attendant, 5 to 8 a.m., and four classes to attend, but sure, of course, why not?

The next Saturday, there was a WMMR beer party on the riverbank. It was a football Saturday and the U of M Marching Band came parading down University Avenue past Folwell toward the stadium, the drum major Mr. Dicky Johnson of Anoka in his blazing white uniform and grenadier’s hat strutting ahead of them, pumping his baton as they burst into the Minnesota Rouser and you could feel the pride for blocks around, old alumni in their thirties and forties standing and singing, Minnesota, hats off to thee. I went to the library and studied that day and saw the Danish ballet that night—the dark-haired dancer was prominent on stage and fully clothed—and around ten o’clock I went down to the river to the party. I met three girls, one of them passing a pint of rum around, all of them jazzed at having pledged a good sorority. Barry wasn’t there, but some engineers were, one of whom said I was a good newscaster. One of the girls said, “We ought to go skinny-dipping!” and the other two squealed. A couple boys heard this and joined us. The girls dared us to go in the water and said if we did, they would too. We declined, but they pleaded, and they said, “We’ll follow you in. Promise.” I didn’t want to be taken for a prude. So I stepped forward and took off my jacket and shirt, shoes and socks, and dropped my trousers and shorts, and slid down the bank and jumped in the river. It was a steep drop-off and I tried to stay upright, but the current swept me off my feet and I floated, arms thrashing, and thought, “This would be a ridiculous time to drown.” I wasn’t a good swimmer, having skipped swim class years ago at the Y, but I stayed afloat for a couple hundred yards and passed under the Franklin Avenue Bridge and grabbed hold of a branch on shore and climbed up the steep slope. Little paths wound through the trees, and as I followed one up the bank, I was aware of several older men wandering around in a furtive way. I had stumbled on an old cruising area for homosexuals, I who did not even know the word. A man asked me what I was looking for, and I said, “My clothes.” I walked naked along the East River Road back to the parking lot and found the girls guarding my clothing. The party had broken up. They were terrified that I might’ve drowned and they ran to meet me, holding out my jeans. One of them was crying. She had dark hair cut very short, white blouse hanging loose, bare arms. She put her arms around me and noticed I was shivering. She led me to her car and we got in. As soon as the door closed, she kissed me, tears on her cheek. We drove to White Castle and bought a sack of burgers and fries. She took my hand and kissed it. She was trembling. She told me that if I had drowned, she would never be able to forgive herself. She drove me across the bridge to the big parking lot where my car was parked. We sat in her car and talked. Her name was Lynne and I thought of a limerick, I once met a woman named Lynne with whom I was tempted to sin. I opened her shirt, thought “What can it hurt?” and carefully put my hand in. She laughed in a way that suggested anticipation. So I did. I was nineteen and had never touched a girl there. She had big eyebrows and a chain around her neck with not one but two crosses, so I guessed she was Catholic. I had heard things about Catholic girls and was curious to know if they might be true. I thought of my cousin Roger. Probably this was exactly what he wanted. He risked death to be able to touch that girl’s breast, he knew he couldn’t swim and he dove into the water after Susan expecting her to throw her arms around him and hold him up, he dove in anticipation of her embrace, he never imagined the violence of panic, he only wanted to hold her. I thought of this, my hair wet, having floated down the river. Now he lay in a grave in Lakewood Cemetery and I was a year older than he. She kissed me. She said, “You’re so different.” She said, “I hope I see you again.” I wrote the limerick on a slip of paper and she wrote down her phone number, but the paper was gone when I got home. Still, I went naked into the river and might’ve drowned but climbed out through a motley band of forlorn men and found tenderness in a woman’s arms in a White Castle parking lot. No wonder they are still my favorite hamburgers.

I did my daily newscast in hopes of meeting Lynne again. Barry said she was the sister of a DJ who’d dropped out of school. He promised he’d find her for me, but he left WMMR and was busy looking for a job. To my amazement, he had become my friend. He was twenty, he’d already been to Los Angeles and Las Vegas, had personally met Buddy Hackett, Shelley Berman, Shecky Greene, Joey Bishop. He collected Playboy magazines, he was a man of the world, he invited me to his house in St. Louis Park, took me to Lincoln Del and bought me a Reuben, taught me the words mishegoss and schlock, explained the difference between a schlemiel, a schmendrick, and a schlimazel.

WMMR was a closed-circuit radio signal transmitted by cables strung through steam tunnels to transmitters in the basements of student dormitories. Out the studio window as I did my newscast I saw Comstock Hall, a women’s dorm, and I imagined young women listening to me and it was inspiring. Other WMMR boys aimed to be DJs at Top Forty stations and practiced the growling, gulping jacked-up style of rock ’n’ roll radio, which was too Holy Roller for me. I aimed for a mature dignified sound. Barry said I sounded good.

I did the newscast daily from October through May, when I was informed that due to a dreadful mistake, the WMMR circuitry had failed the summer before. Nobody had realized it, but 730 AM had gone dead. I’d been reading the news for seven months to myself. Nobody knew why. It meant nothing to me, though, because a few days earlier Barry Halper had died, driving his white convertible on Highway 12, heading home from his newscaster job at KDWB around 3 p.m. He must’ve looked away for an instant, maybe to light a smoke, and drove into the rear of a school bus stopped to pick up kids and was killed instantly. The next day’s Tribune ran a picture of the wreck on the front page. I bought a yarmulke and went to his funeral at Mikro Kodesh Synagogue and sat next to his mother, Ida. He was her only child, she was frozen in shock. I held her hand. She leaned on me, weeping. Her husband sat on the other side of her, he looked furious, wanting it to end, the whole bad joke, and life to resume. The casket was closed. “You wouldn’t want to see,” she said. “I saw, I can never forget.” There was nothing to say, no comfort to give. The rabbi chanted the Kaddish and people around me chanted along from memory. Barry was the coolest guy I knew, generous with praise, a fan of comedians, and he had befriended me, an evangelical kid, out of the goodness of his heart. I visited the Halpers twice that summer and once the year after, and she wept and hugged me and his dad, Paul, sat stone-faced and silent, inconsolable, wishing I’d go away, wondering Why Barry? Why my son? Why not this schlemiel? I put WMMR on my résumé—no mention of my newscast having been a private one—and it got me another radio job two years later. I thought of Barry often: a young guy starting out in radio, distracted for a moment, and crashing into the high rear bumper of the bus, the hood of his car shoved into his face, dead of a crushed chest and a broken neck, I saw this in my mind a hundred times. I owed it to him to stay in the business. And after seven months of practice, imitating Edward R. Murrow, I didn’t sound bad, even if nobody else knew it.