Garrison Keillor's Podcast

My bio in 100 words is as follows: My parents were in love with each other, had six kids, I was third, an invisible child. I had no interest in crashing into people so didn’t play football or hockey and avoided brain damage. I dabbled in poetry and when I was 14, I read A.J. Liebling and decided to be a writer. I went into radio, which requires no special skill, and took the sunrise shift, which turned me toward comedy, listeners don’t want grievous introspective reflections at 5 a.m. I told stories for forty years and still do. I married well on the third try. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I accept the fact that I am a back issue, a relic, and that younger people have taken over. Eight years ago I played the Hollywood Bowl; a few weeks ago I played a 200-seater in Menomonie, Wisconsin. It was fun. People in the seats talked back to me. We hung out in the lobby afterward. I caught influenza from one of them. Do Taylor’s fans get to share their germs with her? I doubt it very much. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I come from pot roast people and the past two months have been rough on me, when, doing penance for the holidays, we’ve been on a bunny rabbit diet, grazing on bowls of greenery. My mother made pot roast for Sunday dinner, which made me think of it as sacred food. She put chuck roast in a covered pan in the oven at low heat when we left for church and when we returned four hours later, the kitchen was redolent with goodness. I don’t recall that she ever tossed a salad. Cows ate salads so whatever good was in them came to us by way of beef. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I loved my five days there. I encountered keen politeness. The truck stop guy who said, “I appreciate your business” when I paid for my two Butterfingers. The hotel clerk. I walked a long hall to my room and three cleaning ladies looked up and said, “Good morning.” When I left Austin on Monday, a man walked up to me in the airport and said quietly, “I want to thank you for all the pleasure you’ve given people over the years.”Nobody ever said that to me before in just that graceful way. I was touched. At my age, you should’ve given some pleasure to people and he was thanking me for it, not as a fan but on behalf of people in general. Now I wish I had thrown my arms around him. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

And then around midnight a woman walked in, a civilian, no blue on her except her eyes. She was a Unitarian minister, making rounds, saw my name and remembered a column I wrote back in the Bush era saying what a terrible mistake the Iraq War was. My one good protest column and she remembered it all these years later. I told her I’m Episcopalian and that I’ve read Emerson and decided not to come forward. “We never give up hope,” she said. “This building, the George F. Baker Pavilion — he went to my church, so you’re one of us,” She was very funny. She said, “We think of Episcopalians as people who write thank-you notes after orgies.”“That’s high church; I’m low church.” This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I’m a historic guy. They could put me in a museum. I went to college when tuition was $71/quarter so we didn’t have to ask our parents for money so we got to go into the arts. There were no laptops, no iPhones, no Airplane Mode. I regaled the Lovelanders with stories about the Fifties, back when Minnesota winters were ferocious. I lived through the bitter winter of 1948 when the temp got down to minus 70 and many of us Minnesotans became comatose, our metabolism stopped, there was no neurological response, and a month later I awoke in a narrow wooden box wearing makeup, which I’d never worn before. It was interesting. I should’ve dressed more warmly but as someone said, “Good judgment comes from experience and much experience comes from bad judgment.” And thanks to my mistake I have experienced the afterlife and I told them about it in Loveland. Someday I’ll come to your town and tell you. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

It’s an amazing feat, turning the party of rectitude and personal liberty into a unified body of citizens totally devoted to one man, obedient to his self-absorption. He is down on the country, has never praised his wife or intentionally said anything funny, has never hugged a small child in public. But it was so good of these young people to give their old great-uncle a big burst of faith in America’s future. I can’t wait to see them again. If we lowered the voting age to 12 and required voters over 60 to pass a history exam, I believe it’d be a big step forward. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

George Latimer, the chatty New York lawyer who moved to St. Paul in the 1960s and went on to rejuvenate and transform the capital city in 13-1/2 years as its charismatic and visionary mayor. Latimer died on Aug. 18 at 89. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Some of these kids at the Met will wind up in law school and get a serious education in civil procedure and come away with due respect for our system of justice: trial by a jury of one’s peers, the rules of evidence, witnesses testifying under oath aware of the penalty for perjury. The lawyers defending the Famous Man were so taught and they stand silently by his side as he bellows his contempt to the TV cameras……Teen Night at the Met was a holiday from all that. The young people there wouldn’t have elected the Scowler to be a municipal sewage inspector. There are dark days ahead but eventually the young and curious and lighthearted are going to inherit the country and make it great and an artist will make a sculpture of Trump naked with a sword, his bare butt and belly hanging out, and that will be that. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

We live in an Age of Disgruntlement and when I dine with grumpy people, I listen to their gripes and when they stop to take a breath I talk about the great progress made in my lifetime, which of course irks them no end. For one thing, the cash card. We used to go into the bank and hand a check for cash to Mildred the teller with her pert hairstyle and starched blouse, her specs hanging on a chain around her neck, and she’d wrinkle her mouth and peruse the check, questioning the wisdom of handing you money, and eventually she’d count out your thirty dollars and say, “Now don’t go spending it all in one place.” And now there are ATMs everywhere you look and you slide in the card and get $300, no look of disapproval. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

This is one of the happiest summers of my very long life. My wife installed WhatsApp on my phone and it dings and I pick up and she talks to me from the wine country of Portugal where she’s hiking with her brother and his wife, on their way to a baptism and pig roast. Sometimes my daughter comes on and says, “Make me laugh,” so I tell her about the woman at Yellowstone Park who was chased by a bear and the park rangers arrested her for running with a bear behind. She laughs.I’m an old man, I have no ambition whatsoever but I love my work. I do 90 minutes of stand-up, I go back to the hotel and work on my novel, and in the morning I repeat it. The audience laughs a lot and then I have hours of pure silence occasionally interrupted by the voice of the woman I love lying in her hotel room in a heat wave in Portugal and recounting her days’ adventures. Or my little girl needing a joke. So a woman was hit by a car and lay in the street bleeding and someone yelled, “Call a priest!” The woman said, “No, I’m Unitarian.” Someone yelled, “Then call a math teacher.” This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

What remains powerful is love. My parents loved each other dearly and I witnessed this and it remains large in my life. When I was six, I was a slow reader — when you’ve grown up trying to read Hezekiah and Jeremiah, it does crimp your style — and my teacher Estelle Shaver noticed and kept me after school to read aloud to her from Dick and Jane. When Bill the janitor came in to empty the wastebaskets, she said, “Listen to this boy, Bill. Doesn’t he have a wonderful voice? He’s entertaining me while I’m correcting workbooks.” It was remedial reading but she made it feel like a privilege and this act of kindness sticks with me. Call me naïve but I think marvelous feats can be accomplished by small acts of kindness.The country is moving toward electing a woman president and I am touched by how presidential she looks, her warmth, her gracefulness, how she can converse with a crowd, how she ignores the insults and the bellowing of walruses, and speaks in clipped sentences about the future of the country. This will be a first in my life and I’m looking forward. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

History is a complicated business. There are high plateaus and also a good deal of swamp. The Little Bighorn battlefield in Montana was preserved in honor of General Custer who there gave his life along with his men of the Seventh Cavalry, a sacrifice that no longer strikes anybody as noble. What is the good of preserving an enormous site of military stupidity in an unjust cause? The granite monument on Last Stand Hill was put up in 1881, five years after the debacle. In 2003, a monument was erected to the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne who wiped out the arrogant jerk and his poor soldiers. Tourists still come to look at this, but why? It’s a dishonest historical site: the reason for its existence is a piece of trivia, a few hundred white guys on horseback thought they could spook a few thousand Native men and they were dead wrong about that. But the larger context of the story is lost. The real enemy wasn’t the Seventh Cavalry but the smallpox and other diseases that Europeans brought to the Great Plains that decimated the tribes. The whole wretched mess should be torn down and the land set aside for the instruction and practice of Native religion, the sweat lodge, the Sun Dance, the quest for visions and dreams, the worship of the Creator. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

like hamburgers. I went into a McDonald’s the other day and ordered a Double Quarter Pounder and thought it was good. At McDonald’s you do not have the carcass of the cow on a spit by the drive-up window, the eyes glazed, the tail hanging down, and the workers don’t gouge the meat from the cow’s rib cage. The hamburger is handed to you wrapped in paper. So after my night in Maine, I believe I will stop my quest for sophistication and be myself, an old man of the prairie. If I hadn’t read A.J. Liebling in the eighth grade and set out to write like him, I could’ve become a small-town teacher and coach like Tim Walz and been quite satisfied with my life.Governor Walz is a straight shooter. A mob of armed right-wingers gathered at the governor’s mansion once in 2020 and Mr. Walz called up President Trump at the White House and asked him to talk to the governor’s daughter who was frightened and Mr. Trump, to his credit, did. When Mr. Walz takes office in Washington and the Walz family moves into the mansion at the Naval Observatory, I believe that even as he sits in meetings regarding national security and Ukraine and Gaza and the warming of the planet, he will remember his days as a high school teacher when he had to supervise the lunchroom. Speaking of which, I recommend a tuna salad sandwich and a tomato and cucumber salad and a Fudgsicle for dessert. It’s good. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I was brought up by Midwestern stoics who drummed the lesson into us: Don’t think you’re somebody because you’re not. You’re not so smart as you think. You’re the same as everybody else. So buckle down and get your work done and don’t fall behind. So I turned into a hard worker. But sitting on this terrace at night with my daughter, and then my wife comes out with her glass of wine, this sandwich putting my friends within easy reach, it is clear to this old Episcopalian, God’s great generosity, how much He loves us, to give us this summer night. In this ugly election year, let us be good for each other. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Thank goodness the Americans won men’s basketball over the French. It’s our game, Americans invented it. To lose would be like English Sauvignon Blanc beating out French. Some English wines have beaten out French in blind tests but who says vision-impaired persons are experts on wine?My event is the old man’s 90-minute stand-up storytelling with some poems tossed in and my routine had an intelligent dog, a girl challenging a boy to wrestle, Babe Ruth, a funeral, and the audience singing “America,” “In My Life,” and “My Girl.” It kept the crowd’s attention pretty well. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I spent a couple hours on the phone the other night with a man I haven’t seen since high school, he in Northern California, I in New York City, two old men recalling our youth in Minnesota. I love the telephone; it can be so intimate — like radio, which is the business I was in for years — the voice carries so much humanity, even the silences speak……And then, on the phone the other night, it was 1959, I was 17, a sportswriter for the local paper, standing at the 20-yard line as Pete took a handoff from Gary the quarterback and came leaping over his left tackle, grinning as he hip-faked the deep secondary and galloped along the sideline and into the end zone as the crowd cheered and we spelled out A-N-O-K-A and sang the fight song as his teammates carried him around on their shoulders and that’s where he is right now, in glory. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I don’t require luxury accommodations. I’m fine with economy hotels. I prefer not to be put up in the home of a family with small children. A Holiday Inn Express is fine; they serve a nice scrambled-egg breakfast buffet. A coffeemaker in the room would be nice and I’d prefer a shower whose Hot and Cold knobs are not directly under the showerhead so that one must stand naked while figuring out which knob is which, dreading the possibility of being scalded and having to call 911 and moaning in pain as EMTs haul me to their van, and I know that I will now become their anecdote (“You won’t believe the call we got this morning …”) and they will google me and find out that I hosted “Pie Aroma in Microphone” and am in the Academy of Arts and Letters and yet I didn’t know to Stand Outside The Shower While Turning On Water. I don’t want to become a joke, okay? This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I don’t talk to many young people — so many of them wear headphones or earbuds and they look stressed out. I’m guessing the music they’re listening to is narcissist pop about Me, Myself and I, my need for more Me time, my exorbitant rent, boring job, bad boss, crowded bike paths, long wait times at climbing walls, the fear of arterial plaque caused by foods containing GMI and DMU, and if I smile at them, they’ll take me for a privileged white male and give me the middle finger. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Mostly I live in a comfortable bubble, enjoying my morning coffee, avoiding bad news that’s beyond my power to affect, bloody wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, brutal civil wars in Myanmar and Africa, waves of migrants trying to escape violence and poverty — I am mostly oblivious. The Christian missionaries who set out to save souls in Africa and South America saw the world much more clearly than I do. The Ecuadorean moms selling candy bars in subway stations know more about real life than I do. A person could walk along the little shops in low-rent neighborhoods and talk to immigrant entrepreneurs and learn more about the world than if you went to grad school for a Ph.D., but nobody I know does.I ignore my relatives who are loyal to Mr. Presidefendant who is as removed from reality as I am. I went to high school with a Jim Jordan, a Matt Gaetz, a Mike Johnson, but my classmates don’t hold public office, they just hold a mug of beer in the corner saloon while they grouse about the unfairness of life. A nap would do them good. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe