Famous radio personality to broadcast live from Purdue

By Megan Finnerty
Features Editor

When Garrison Keillor was a boy, he was the quiet one with glasses, high-water pants and skinny arms. He was the odd little person in the corner who was content to just sit and watch.

Now, he is a grown man with a successful National Public Radio show that airs internationally every Saturday night. He has a sharpness in his bespectacled gaze, honed by years of watching and scribbling in an ever-present notebook.

At 6 p.m. Saturday in the Elliott Hall of Music, Keillor will bring his characters out of his notebook and into the homes of listeners from around the world during a live broadcast. Audience members must arrive by 4:45.

The Purdue Glee Club will sing and members of the Bell Choir will play the Shaker Chimes.

Millions know Keillor's voice and feel as though they know him through his segment "The News from Lake Woebegone," but few outside of his friends and family could pick his broad frame out of a crowd. He is anonymously famous.

And Keillor prefers his life to be one still lived in the corners and shadows of observance. In a way, he still thinks of himself as that little boy.

"Writers are not people who make a big impression in person," he said. "People write because there's something wrong with them, but it doesn't seem to requite therapy or medication, but there's something incomplete, so you have to work it out in writing."

Keillor describes what he does as trying to make sense of something in the dark, but he also acknowledges that his job is to entertain his audience, a group of deeply loyal fans that has grown steadily since his first tiny show 25 years ago.

The show is based on relatives, neighbors and people Keillor knew in Stearns County, Minn., around the early '50s. Alan Frechtman, Keillor's publicist, attributes the show's success, in part, to each character who seems at first to lead a simple life, but upon further listening, leads one full of first kisses, deaths, summer parades, harvest times and small-town gossip.

"I'm a Jewish kid from the asphalt streets of Brooklyn, NY, who grew up next to the Cohens, the Sienis, the Garcias," Frechtman said, "and yet when I hear him talk about … Clarence Bunsen, Pastor Ingquist and the Krebsbachs, I find a connection that allows me to laugh with and cry for those characters."

But Dan Skinner, the manager of Purdue's WBAA, which broadcasts the show, attributes its success to Keillor's skill. "Garrison Keillor is a real storyteller," he said. "It really gets back to the magic of being told a story."

Keillor said the strength of his show is not in his craft, but in that it's on the radio.

"People sort of go into this meditative state, you say church festivals, lilacs, rhubarb, and suddenly they make a story out of it and you try not to interrupt them in their dreams," he said. "It's a very low-skill work somewhere above parking cars and below small motor repair."

This man who moves millions of fans by crafting a tale of familiar humanity still feels as though, after all these years, he still hasn't done the show he knows he can.

"I've stuck with it because I can't get the hang of it and it's very frustrating, and there's a lack of other possibilities, I suppose," he joked. "I know that I'd know it if I did a really great show, and then of course, I'd never want to do it again. And I'm not really that ambitious of a person. I have a talent for indolence. There's a lot of dignity in indolence.

"I think the definition of a civilized person is to be alone and to be able to entertain yourself for a long period of time. Indolence and mediocrity, that's what I'm advocating. All of us are part of a whole and we all stand on the shoulders of other people and we'd be nothing without them, and people that are mediocre know this better than anyone."

FEATURES DESK PHONE:
(765) 743-1111 ext. 256

Features editor:
Megan Finnerty

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