Chicago, Illinois
Welcome to the historic Auditorium Theater and to this week's live broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion" which I never intended to become historic but time flies when you're having fun and now I keep running into beautiful young people who tell me they grew up listening to the show. Some of them confess that, as children, they fell asleep to the New from Lake Wobegon and that, during their tempestuous teen years, on family car trips they sat sullenly listening to Guns 'N Roses and Bon Jovi on their Walkmans as the parents played old monologues about throwing a tomato at your sister. And now here they are, in their mid-twenties, sitting in the fourth row.
Chicago is the home of WLS which was the home of the "National Barn Dance" back in my childhood, and we listened to it in Lake Wobegon when the wind was out of the southeast. Homer & Jethro played on the show, and the Hoosier Hot Shots, and Pat Buttram, the Sage of the Airwaves, and it was corny and fun and full of hijinks. Chicago gave us Jim and Marian Jordan (Fibber McGee and Molly) and the famous closet that cascaded junk every week and the saying, "Tain't funny, McGee." And The Breakfast Club with Don McNeill. And it gave us Studs Terkel, of course, a patron saint of public radio. Studs was in business in radio when I was born, doing a record show "The Wax Museum" on WENR, playing records by his friends Big Bill Broonzy, Woody Guthrie, and Mahalia Jackson, and he is still chugging along at WBEZ.
It is so inspiring for an old guy of 60 to see a young guy of 90 going strong, and Studs is the soul of the city. He describes himself as looking like "a minor mob figure the day after he died" but he's a scrapper, a union guy, a White Sox fan, an old progressive, an admirer of Fighting Bob LaFollette and Clarence Darrow because they were their own men and didn't take orders from anybody.
Cool good taste and elegant irony don't interest him
so much as a good argument, the good fight. Chicago is a city with a heart,
and he's a Chicago guy, a free man, an artist, a gentle soul of great
humor and kindness, and our show this week is FOR
STUDS.
~Garrison Keillor