National Geographic: In Search of Lake Wobegon - Garrison Keillor | Garrison Keillor National Geographic: In Search of Lake Wobegon Original Publish Date: December 2000 Originally published in National Geographic, with photographs by Richard Olsenius from the book In Search of Lake Wobegon Twenty-five years ago, for amusement, I invented a small town where the women are strong and the men good-looking and all the children above average and started telling stories about it on the radio, and ever since then people have asked me if it’s a real town, and if it is, then where is it exactly? I used to say it’s fiction. “Oh,” they said. “Sure.” But they were disappointed. People want stories to be true. They don’t care so much about your gifts of invention as the fact that your story reminded them of people they knew when growing up. They want you to say, “The character of Darlene is based about 95 percent on my cousin Charlotte in Dubuque.

I only changed the hair from auburn to blonde and made her more chesty.” So I started telling people that the town is in central Minnesota, near Stearns County, up around Holdingford, not far from St. Rosa and Albany and Freeport, northwest of St. Cloud, which is sort of the truth, I guess. Thirty years ago I lived in Stearns County with my wife and little boy in a rented brick farmhouse south of Freeport, an area full of nose-to-the-grindstone German Catholics devoted to their Holy Mother the Church and proud of their redneck reputation. We moved there for the cheap rent—$80 a month for a house and half-acre vegetable garden, a great boon to a struggling writer. Beyond the windbreak was a couple hundred acres of corn, Cows stood in the pasture and studied us. The Sauk River was nearby to canoe on, and Watab Lake to swim in.

It was a land of rolling, well-tended hog and dairy farms punctuated by tidy little towns, each with a ballpark, two or three taverns, and an imposing Catholic church with a cemetery behind it where people named Schrupp, Wendelschafer, Frauendienst, Schoppenhorst, and Stuedernann lay shoulder to shoulder. There were no Smiths to speak of. When I invented Lake Wobegon, I stuck it in central Minnesota for the simple reason that I knew a little bit about it, and most people, if they know Minnesota at all, know the scenic parts—the North Shore, the Boundary Waters, the Mississippi Valley—and nothing about Stearns County. This gave me a fairly free hand. I said that Lake Wobegon (pop.

942) took its name from the Ojibwa word that means “the place where we waited all day for you in the rain,” and if anyone asked why the town appeared on no maps, I explained that when the state map was drawn after the Civil War, teams of surveyors worked their way in from the four outer corners and, arriving at the center, found they had surveyed more of Minnesota than there was room for between Wisconsin and the Dakotas, and so the corners had to be overlapped in the middle, and Lake Wobegon wound up on the bottom flap. (In fact, the geographic center of the state is north of there, in Crow Wing County, but never mind.) To the German Catholics I added, for dramatic interest, an equal number of Norwegian Lutherans. The Norwegians, ever status conscious, vote Republican, and the Germans vote Democratic because the Norwegians don’t. The Catholics worship at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility and the Lutherans at Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church (David Ingqvist, pastor), home of the National Lutheran Ushering Champions, the Herdsmen. “Gateway to Central Minnesota” is the town slogan.

And through the gateway over the years came a procession of characters. The three boys who drive to Iowa one February morning when they hear of Buddy Holly’s plane crash and discover his blue guitar in the snowy field. The stolid Father Emil who says, in regard to abortion (and much else), “If you didn’t want to go to Minneapolis, why did you get on the train?” and the town handyman Carl Krebsbach who repairs the repairs of the amateurs, and Bruno the fishing dog, and the irascible Art of Art’s Bait & Night O’Rest Motel, its premises studded with warnings (“Don’t clean fish here. Use your brains. This means you!!!”), and Dorothy of the Chatterbox Cafe and her softball-size caramel rolls (“Coffee 25¢, All Morning 85¢, All Day $1.25, Ask About Our Weekly Rates”), and Wally of the Sidetrack Tap, where old men sit and self-medicate. It was Wally’s pontoon boat, the Agnes D., on which 22 Lutheran pastors once crowded for a twilight cruise and weenie roast, and when the grill fell over and the crowd bolted and Agnes D.

pitched to starboard, they were plunged into five feet of water and stood quietly, heads uplifted, waiting for help to arrive. It’s a town where the Lutherans all drive Fords bought from Clarence at Bunsen Motors and the Catholics all drive Chevies from Florian at Krebsbach Chevrolet. Florian is the guy who once forgot his wife at a truck stop. Her name is Myrtle. She is a hoot. The stories I tell on the radio always start with the line, “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon,” and then a glimpse of the weather.

It’s a fall day, geese flying south across a high blue sky, the air sweet and smoky, the woods in gorgeous van Gogh colors, or it’s winter, snowflakes falling like little jewels from heaven, trees glittering, the bare limbs of trees penciled in gray against the sky, or it’s spring, the tomato plants sprouting in trays of dirt on the kitchen counter, tulips and crocuses poking out of the ground, yellow goldfinches arriving from Mexico, or it’s summer, the gardens booming along, the corn knee-high, and a mountain range of black thunderclouds piling up in the western sky. And then I go on to talk about Norwegian bachelor farmers sitting on the bench in front of Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery or the Chatterbox, where large phlegmatic people sit at the counter talking in their singsong accent. So how you been then? Oh, you know, not so bad, how’s yourself, you keeping busy then? Oh yeah, no rest for the wicked. You been fishing at all? I was meaning to but I got too busy. How about yourself? Nope. The wife’s got me busy around the house, you know.

Yeah, I know how that goes—and so forth. And I slip into the story, and take it around the turns and bring it to a point of rest, and say, “And that’s the news from Lake Wobegon,” and that’s all there is to it. Two years ago, after my telling people for years that Lake Wobegon was near Stearns County, the county made a section of Great Northern railbed into a bike trail and named it the Lake Wobegon Trail, thus putting my imaginary town on the map, and last spring I decided I had better spend a few days driving around the area, to see if it was there or not. Minnesota is a state of decent hardworking rural people, most of whom live in cities and don’t care for them much and prefer the outskirts where you can own two or three or five or ten acres—what real estate agents call a hobby farm, with room for a garden, an immense yard, a dog kennel, a shed, a snowmobile, and a satellite dish, and so Minneapolis and St. Paul sprawl far out into farm country, the outer citizens commuting an hour or more each way so as to enjoy the illusion of rural life.

There are trace elements of hobby farms almost all the way to St. Cloud, the Stearns County seat. The eastern approach to Lake Wobegon is Division Street, St. Cloud, a four-mile strip of free enterprise in full riot, the fast-food discount multiplex warehouse cosmos adrift in its asphalt sea, the no-man’s-land of 24-hour gas stations that sell groceries and photocopies, and the shiny plastic restaurants where, if you ate lunch there for the rest of your life, you would never meet anybody you know or get to know anybody you meet, a tumult of architecture so cheap and gaudy and chaotic you wonder how many motorists in search of a drugstore and a bottle of aspirin wound up piling into a light pole, disoriented by flashing lights and signage and access road signs. And then the cosmos peters out and you emerge from hell and come into paradise, rural Minnesota. You drive past the rolling fields, the valleys of little rivers, and every farmstead is different, some more formal, with white painted fences and all the buildings at right angles; others seem to have grown without much supervision and are strewn with old vehicles and historical artifacts of an appliance nature.

Some are exposed, nearly treeless, and others are barely visible from the road, deep in their woodlots. Some have a limber and attentive dog who will take a run at you if you slow down. There are major poultry operations in the county, vast prison tamps of chickens, and a big mail-order outfit, and some big granite quarries near Rockville, blasting out millions of cubic feet of rock every year. (West of St. Cloud is a sign, “Buy Direct/ Monuments,” and an outdoor display of dozens of gravestones arranged as if in a cemetery, but the faces are blank.) At the Rockville quarry stand stacks of 24-ton blocks of granite with striated grooves down the sides, including Rockville Beige and Diamond Pink, two local granites, and also Mesabi Black, and Lake Superior Green, and black granite from Africa. There never was a Minnesota Granite Rush back when the rock was first discovered; it’s too much work getting the stuff out of the ground. And I never mention quarrying in the Wobegon saga because I don’t know the first thing about it. I only talk about abandoned quarries where teenagers go to swim and drink beer and neck.

The county appears to be prospering: population up 35 percent since 1970, new prefab industrial buildings cropping up along the main routes, trucks at the loading docks, forests of billboards as you approach Freeport and Avon and Albany. Avon (pop. 1,144) even has what looks to be a suburb on the east side of town, with suburban street names like Angelfish Avenue, Barracuda, Char. The dairy farms are as trim as ever: new silos in evidence, the big hip-roof barns well kept, the cows themselves look professional, courteous, goal oriented. Corn prices are low, but farmers here raise corn only to feed cows, and milk prices are still good enough, barely, to live on. (One farmer told me that barns start falling apart if the cattle are evacuated; cows keep the temperature and humidity up, and if they are sold off, the barn goes to pieces fairly quickly. A symbiotic relationship.) Holdingford (pop. 638) is the town that looks most Wobegonic to me.

It has a fine little downtown of elderly brick buildings and a big thriving grocery and a classic four-legged, cone-topped water tower (torn down after my visit, I was sorry to hear), a graveyard full of big stones, and down by the river the Holdingford Mill, a jewel-like assembly of galvanized-metal cylinders and boxes and sloped roofs, and a faded old red boxcar on an abandoned siding that would have been headquarters for a gang of boys except it is smack in town, too close to enemy lines. I dropped into Mary’s Family Restaurant, formerly the Rainbow Cafe, for coffee and oatmeal raisin cookies and eavesdropped on a fellow reminiscing about the great Armistice Day blizzard of 1940. He was 14 at the time, and it made a big impression on him. He and his brothers walked out of a second-story window onto the snow and dug a tunnel to the barn. He talked about logging up north and picking potatoes in North Dakota and earning a buck twenty-five a day. “Today everybody wants to make 20 bucks an hour and not do any work,” he said. There were four of us at the counter, and none of us disagreed with him.

I myself would prefer to not do any work for much more than twenty bucks an hour but didn’t wish to discuss it. New Munich is the town closest to the farm my family and I lived on. You drive past the sign (“Welcome to New Munich, Home of Munichfest,” which shows a dancing couple smiling, holding beers in their free hands), past Spinners Bar and Grill, New Munich Meats, the Munich Hofbrau, and come to the church, a big dramatic brick church trimmed in carved sandstone, with a bell tower, clock-faces on all four sides, and magnificent heavy doors with big black hinges, a veritable cathedral in a town of only 335. Nothing about this modest village prepares you for the grandeur within—the inlaid tile floor and the high columns with figured capitals, the rose windows in the transepts, the lovely statues with the compassionate faces. I thought I had based Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility on this church, but I could see that I didn’t get the baroque feel at all.

Such a huge sanctuary, leaping arches, big organ and choir loft in the back, organ pipes, all illuminated by tall stained-glass windows: If I’d put it in Lake Wobegon, nobody would’ve believed it. It’s a county of many grand churches: St. Benedict’s in Avon, with its red roof and bell tower, and St. Rose of Lima at the end of two rows of tall cedars in St. Rosa, and Seven Dolors in Albany, an orange-brick beauty that glows in the setting sun, and Sacred Heart in Freeport, a fine tall yellow-brick edifice with a high steep roof. But the church in New Munich stands out as a mighty architectural shout, an exuberant brick crescendo meant to astonish farmers and shopkeepers for all time and bring doubters to their knees. Freeport calls itself the Dairy Center of the World, and in Charlie’s Cafe the cook does not stint on dairy products: The banana cream pies are big enough to be bowling trophies. I had a grilled-cheese sandwich, a bowl of chili, and a slab of pie, and felt my belt and collar tightening. I got up and walked along the main drag.

I saw an old man walk out of the post office who reminded me of Florian Krebsbach, a man in a brown porkpie hat and pale blue polyester suit and green plaid shirt with a string tie with an agate on the clasp and wearing white shoes. When I lived here 30 years ago, Freeport was my post office, my supply station, and once I went into the bank and asked a loan officer if I could borrow money, offering my fiction as collateral as a farmer might borrow against his corn crop. The officer said he didn’t think so. Freeport was a railroad town, and the tracks ran along the south side of Main Street, and now the tracks are gone, and the one-sided Main Street remains, like an architect’s rendering. Down the street is the Pioneer Inn. The Sidetrack Tap in Lake Wobegon was modeled after it, a gloomy smoke-filled sour-smelling tavern, cluttered with neon beer signs and deer heads and mottoes (“Don’t Sleep In Our Bar, We Don’t Drink in Your Bed”), except the Pioneer Inn has been cleaned up and remodeled, the sourness expunged.

A few guys at the bar were talking about fishing and the lottery, neither of which was paying off for them lately. One of them said that Big Watab Lake, southeast of there, is 120 feet deep and home to some mighty pugnacious fish, none of which he had caught lately. The Central Minnesota Arts Board lists two dozen theater companies and music groups in the county, but it doesn’t mention the dozens of taverns and cafés that are the actual centers of culture here. Like Fisher’s, an old screen porch of a supper club in Avon, open only in the summer, where you bring your own whiskey and they supply the glass, the ice, the baked walleye dinner with salad. Places with names like the Corner Bar, Sportsman’s Bar, Tip Top, or the Buckhorn, where gentlemen congregate for the purpose of enjoying a cold one and solving the problems of the world.

They plant themselves in a booth, or lean against the bar, and they enact a classic four-character play: There’s the Reader, who has come across an interesting item in the paper (“I read that within five years they’ll have figured out how to throw a bunch of genetically engineered enzymes into a steel tank full of wet silage and turn it into milk”), and there’s the Grouch, who maintains a dark view of human nature (“the big corporations are behind it because they want to clear out the little guys and put in 10,000-acre farms”), the Worrier, always a little nervous about something (“genetic engineering or not, I just can’t see things getting better anytime in the foreseeable future, I’ll tell you that”), and the Big Fella, the guy who holds back until the topic is exhausted and then gives the final word (“people are not going to buy artificial milk. That’s been proven. You can bet on it”).

They sit and hold forth on politics (corrupt, on both sides, always has been), global warming (hogwash), golf (a huge waste of time), the Internet (ditto), education (not what it used to be), women (creatures of superstition and pointless ritual), the benefits of physical exercise (when it’s your time to die, you die, whether you walk two miles a day or not), and they take turns buying rounds, and if you happen to believe that mankind is on the verge of a new age of enlightenment and progress, these gentlemen will have a fine time pulling your chain. Being there, drinking a beer, looking down the bar toward the others standing 15 feet away brought back a sudden clear memory of 1970 and sitting in the very same spot near the door and overhearing men talk and wishing I knew how to join in that conversation. A sudden jolting memory I had put away for 30 years. Nobody ever welcomed us to town when we came in 1970. No minister visited to encourage us to worship on Sunday, no neighbor dropped in with a plate of brownies.

Several times I stopped at neighboring farms to say hello and announce our presence and was met in the yard by the farmer, and we spent an uncomfortable few minutes standing beside my car, making small talk about the weather, studying the ground, me waiting to be invited into the house, him waiting for me to go away, until finally I went away. In town the shopkeepers and the man at the garage were cordial, of course, but if I said hello to someone on the street, he glanced down at the sidewalk and passed in silence. I lived south of Freeport for three years and never managed to have a conversation with anyone in the town. I didn’t have long hair or a beard, didn’t dress oddly or do wild things, and it troubled me. I felt like a criminal. This fear of outsiders was explained to me years later by a Stearns exile who said that the German population was so traumatized, first by the anti-Teutonic fevers of World War I that forbade the use of their language in schools, then by Prohibition that made outlaws of decent upstanding beer drinkers, that they never could trust auslanders again. A strange face is, to them, a cruel face.

My German neighbors were a closed community, and I wasn’t in it and had no part of it. Proximity does not bestow membership. I accepted this because I come from similar people. Mine were Protestant fundamentalists, who lived by the Word and not by the opinion of others, and were wary of strangers, and didn’t go in for small talk, period. We were taciturn people to start with who could sit in silence for long stretches and not feel uncomfortable. If strangers came to the door, they were dealt with and sent on their way. They were not people of the Word, and their friendship meant nothing to us. As I sat in the Pioneer Inn and recalled the years I spent in Stearns County, it dawned on me where Lake Wobegon had come from. All those omniscient narrator stories about small-town people came from a guy sitting alone at the end of a bar, drinking a beer, who didn’t know anything about anything going on around him. Stories about prodigals welcomed home, outcasts brought into the circle, rebels forgiven: all from the guy at the end of the bar.

In three years only one man ever walked the 15 feet to find out who I was—he walked over and said, “You live out on the Hoppe place, don’t you:’ I said that I did, and he nodded, satisfied that now he had me placed, and turned and moseyed back to the herd. There was nothing more to say. So I invented a town with a bar in which, if a stranger enters, he is, by God, without fail, intriguing to the regulars, and conversation ensues and he turns out to be someone’s long-lost cousin. In order to be accepted, I had to invent a town like the imaginary friend I had in second grade, David, who walked to school with me. The loner nursing his beer at the end of the bar is starved for company. He and his wife have little to say to each other these days, and in the long shadows of a winter night, in extreme need of society, he drives to town and sits at the bar, where his pride and social ineptitude get in the way.

He has no idea how to traverse those 15 feet without feeling like a beggar, so he goes back home to his typewriter and invents characters who look like the guys in the bar but who talk a blue streak, whose inner life he is privy to, and soon he has replaced the entire town of Freeport with an invented town of which he is the mayor, the fire chief, the priest, the physician, and the Creator himself, and he gets a radio show, and through perseverance and dumb luck and a certain facility the fictional town becomes more famous than the real town, and now when he goes to Freeport, some people come up and say, “You’re Garrison Keillor, aren’t you.” A person could write a story about this. I respect Stearns County for its egalitarianism. It may look down on strangers, but it looks down on all of them equally, and it doesn’t look down on people because they have less money or do dirty work. And it has a real culture. It doesn’t draw its identity from the media, it draws it up out of the past, like well water.

The media world is a small town of its own, and information is the currency—who’s up, who’s down, what’s new, what’s newer—but here the currency is character, as expressed in stories. So I made up stories about its character, morphing some of my old fundamentalist relatives into German Catholics. I had a train pull up on a sidetrack in 1938 and an aging Babe Ruth step down and wave to the crowd. He was with the Sorbasol barnstorming team that played the local nine that afternoon, and the Babe hit one so far it was never found again. The ballpark is still there. The Whippets play there, and in the spring middle-aged men who have smelled the April air come with a glove and toss a ball around. Here beside the tracks is the foundation of an old grain elevator that, one Saturday night in the summer of 1942, as various couples sat and smoked and drank beer and necked in their cars along the train tracks, went up in a pillar of flame 500 feet high, and people leaped from those cars and tore for cover and the churches were full the following Sunday.

Most of those couples married soon afterward, and most of the marriages lasted. Not a true story, but when the thing blew up, it seemed real enough. The cemetery in Freeport is behind the church, but in Lake Wobegon I put it on a hill, which Freeport doesn’t have. It was there that Clarence Bunsen gave his famous Memorial Day address. The VFW honor guard stood at parade rest in front of the monument to the Grand Army of the Republic. Their feet hurt, their jackets pinched, they needed a drink. The crowd stood waiting on the grass. A boy recited: Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, “This is my own, my native land!” Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d As home his footsteps he hath turn’d From wandering on a foreign strand? There was a tremendous long silence, and then Pastor Ingqvist gave a nod and Clarence stepped forward and said, “If there were one time when words truly seemed inadequate, one occasion when silence seemed so appropriate, it would be here and now.

It would be more fitting if we were silent for two minutes and looked around us and thought of our people here and their gifts to this country.” He stepped back. Everyone looked around at the markers and the little flags fluttering and listened to the breeze in the leaves. An oriole sang. And then someone blew his nose. The whole honor guard was crying. Old men with rifles to their shoulders dug down in their pockets and got out their big red hankies and blew. And afterward they pressed around Clarence and shook his hand and said it was perfect, they’d be grateful to him for the rest of their lives. He didn’t tell them that when Pastor Ingqvist nodded to him, he suddenly remembered that he was supposed to speak, and a wave of guilt washed over him that he had forgotten Memorial Day, the day of remembrance, and he wanted to cry out, “I am not worthy!” And then he felt steady again. “It’s not about you,” he thought. “You’re not the reason they’re here.” And he stepped forward and said his piece. I feel the same way about Stearns County and Lake Wobegon. It isn’t up to me. I can’t re-create it.

I find that if I leave out enough details in my stories, the listener will fill in the blanks with her own hometown, and if a Freeport girl exiled in Manhattan hears the story about Memorial Day, she’ll put it right smack there in that cemetery with those names on the stones, and she may think of her uncle Alcuin who went to France and didn’t return, and get out her hanky and blow. I’m not the reason she’s moved, he is. All I do is say the words: cornfield and Mother and algebra and Chevy pickup and cold beer and Sunday morning and rhubarb and loneliness, and other people put pictures to them. Writing Garrison Keillor Retirement: Time to Say Goodbye to Lake Wobegon Garrison Keillor, the creator and host of A Prairie Home Companion, says he is retiring next year . Keillor has hinted at retirement before, but this time he’s serious, the Associated Press reports. He has set up sometime-guest host Chris Thile to take over as host after Keillor’s last show in July 2016. Thile, who is a member of the bands Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek, will carry on the show’s musical heritage.

Keillor has hosted A Prairie Home Companion since 1974, with 4 million listeners tuning in every week. He will start a farewell tour, “America the Beautiful,” next week. This may not in fact be his last encounter with the fictional Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon; he says he’s working on a screenplay about a young man returning to the town after his father’s death. He previously brought Wobegon in a slightly different format to the silver screen in 2006’s A Prairie Home Companion , which focused on the last day of a radio show. In Keillor’s words, “That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.” Are ALL Minnesotans Above Average? - Science Friday Science Friday Are ALL Minnesotans Above Average? 12:22 minutes More from this episode This week, Science Friday took the stage at one of public radio’s most revered venues: The Fitzgerald Theater, in St.

Paul, Minnesota, home to Garrison Keillor’s “ A Prairie Home Companion .” From the Fitz’s stage, Keillor regularly shares the news from Lake Wobegon, the fictional Minnesota town where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” But it’s not just in Lake Wobegon where people believe they’re a step above the average Joe. In fact, social psychologist Jessica Salvatore says the scientific phenomenon known as the “Lake Wobegon Effect” is universal—and she gave our live audience a survey to prove it. Salvatore joined Ira Flatow onstage at the Fitz to analyze more than 400 survey responses from our audience members and reveal whether Minnesotans really do believe they’re above average. We asked more than 400 members of our Fitzgerald Theater audience to evaluate their driving abilities. See the results below: Segment Guests Jessica Salvatore Jessica Salvatore is a visiting professor of psychology at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and an assistant professor of psychology at Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Virginia. More From Guest Segment Transcript IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday.

I’m Ira Flatow coming to you from the Fitzgerald Theater in downtown Saint Paul. Now here at the Fitz we are really treading on Public Radio sacred ground. This theater is home to one of your favorite radio shows. It’s home to the Chatterbox Cafe. We have the gloom-filled office of Guy Noir. And in the green room, you’ll find a heaping plate of powder milk biscuits. If you need another hint, how about this. That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average. Yeah. That’s right. Tonight we’re in the home theater of Prairie Home Companion, where each week Garrison Keillor gives us the news from the little town that time forgot. But if you’re a science geek like me, there’s something that bothers you about all of Lake Wobegon. I mean, how could all the children be above average? You ever wonder about that? Yeah? Well, you know what, it’s not just Lake Wobegon where they feel that way, where they believe that their kids are a step above average.

In fact, the scientific phenomenon is known as the Lake Wobegon effect. And it’s universal. And it’s alive and well right here in Saint Paul. Jessica Salvatore is a visiting professor at Macalester. And she’s an assistant professor of psychology at Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Virginia. And tonight she will rally the power of data, your data, to tell us if we are as super and above average as we think. Welcome. Welcome to Science Friday. JESSICA SALVATORE: Thanks, Ira. [APPLAUSE] IRA FLATOW: I know that besides being a psychologist, you’re also a Prairie Home Companion groupie, right? JESSICA SALVATORE: Yeah. That’s a fair statement. It’s part of my family culture to listen to it. We literally listen to it religiously in the sense that we listen to it on the way home from Mass on Saturday night. IRA FLATOW: Wow. So what is the Lake Wobegon effect? And is it real? What is it? JESSICA SALVATORE: Yeah.

So it’s a bias and inaccuracy of social comparison where we think about the self, we think about other people, and we think wrongly about the relationship between the two. So for example, if I asked all of you and thought about for myself, am I more kind than the average person? Well, that’s a fuzzy concept right? Kindness. Right. Like, what’s kind? I have a lot of students. I mean, sometimes I give them an extension. Right? But then sometimes I walk by people in the street who are asking for money. So I’m just going to think about that first one, because I feel better about thinking about that first one. And then I won’t look for much more evidence about the rest of you. And then I’ll go, yes. I am definitely kinder than average. So that would be an example of it. IRA FLATOW: And you can trace this idea called– the term the Lake Wobegon effect back to one man. JESSICA SALVATORE: Yeah. The man is David Myers. And he is a just really critical author of textbooks of both intro and social psychology.

In fact, I use his textbook when I took AP psychology in 1997, ’98. And he coined this term. It is also known by other terms. But I think this is the most evocative. IRA FLATOW: In fact, he’s still around. And we were very curious to find out about the first use of this. So we spoke with him about his Eureka moment when he first made the connection between the above average effect and Lake Wobegon. DAVID MYERS [RECORDING]: I’m reading and reporting on study after study that shows that most people think they’re better than average on just about any dimension that’s both subjective and socially desirable. And then I hear the introduction to Prairie Home Companion where all the children are above average. And I think, that’s it. Prairie Home Companion captured the world. IRA FLATOW: And so he was thinking and researching this idea, heard the show, instant term. JESSICA SALVATORE: A classic. IRA FLATOW: A classic. Where would that show up in other kinds of actions that we take? JESSICA SALVATORE: It’s pretty common, to tell you the truth.

Right. IRA FLATOW: I’m looking at the audience. They’re all shaking their heads. JESSICA SALVATORE: We think of ourselves as more ethical, more competent, more attractive. For example, if I took a photo of each one of you and I morphed it into photos of more attractive people and less attractive people, and then I said, which one is actually the photo of you? It turns out most people would pick one that’s just slightly above their actual photo in attractiveness. And I can really see that with myself. IRA FLATOW: Yeah. And is it true that even violent criminals think that they’re kinder and more trustworthy? JESSICA SALVATORE: Yes. IRA FLATOW: Than most people. JESSICA SALVATORE: It is. Isn’t that shocking? So if we find populations of people who we think have already proved themselves through their actions to be on the low end of this dimension, they nonetheless still think of themselves as above average. It’s astounding. It’s so robust in effect. IRA FLATOW: And we all think of ourselves according to this factor– we think that we are less biased than other people.

The other person has to be the one that’s the biased one, right? JESSICA SALVATORE: Yeah. I call this meta bias. It’s a bias about bias. Right? In the United States, being independent from social influence is such a strong cultural value, that we all think of ourselves as more independent, less biased, than other people. IRA FLATOW: And in this political season this must be really playing out. Oh, I’m less biased than you are about this sort of thing. And just in case you our Saint Paul audience thinks– maybe you think you’re immune to this. That’s why we gave you a little quiz at the beginning, at the top of the show. We asked you to rate your driving compared to other drivers. Jessica, explain what the quiz was really about. What was going? JESSICA SALVATORE: Yeah. So somewhat similarly to what we just talked about men who had committed violent crimes. There was a study 30, 40 years ago of someone who compared people who had found themselves in the hospital after accidents– driving accidents, some of which they had themselves caused– versus people who had no accident history.

And it turned out that both groups thought of themselves as above average drivers. So that sparks one of the most interesting and easy to remember and notable demonstrations of the better than average effect. And we decided to try to replicate it. So I have here your data. I love the big reveal. It’s just like class. So you all voted on the cellphone before. JESSICA SALVATORE: So 400 of you responded to our question. IRA FLATOW: 400? IRA FLATOW: 400? You can’t get 400 people– Wow. JESSICA SALVATORE: I know. I’m jealous. IRA FLATOW: Congratulations. Give some applause for yourself. [APPLAUSE] JESSICA SALVATORE: It’s exceedingly rare for me to have sample sizes that large. So that’s fantastic. I feel very comfortable with that sample size. And it turns out that we asked you all, are you a safer driver than the average driver? And 77% of you said yes. So assuming driving ability is normally distributed, then that simply cannot be true. Right? And also, whether you’re more alert than the average driver.

75%. Not any better. IRA FLATOW: It’s like Wobegon. You’re above average, right. JESSICA SALVATORE: No. It might be true for some of you, right? So for 50% of you, that should, in fact, not be incorrect. So last week when I was talking about this with one of my colleagues, he looked me dead in the eyes, no hint of a smile. I am above average, right? And he could well be completely correct. So that’s why this illusion of superiority is only an illusion. It’s only a bias at the population level. It’s only because the number overall is over 50% that we know that there’s a bias at work. IRA FLATOW: So what do we think average means? Why do we all think we have to be above average? What do we think average means? JESSICA SALVATORE: I mean, average is kind of a dirty word. Average is like mediocrity. So I think we get that in our socialization. There are a couple of things going on in the above average effect– the Lake Wobegon effect.

And one of them is absolutely the idea of motivated reasoning, that we would like to see ourselves in positive terms of slight rose-colored tint to the glasses we have on. So for example, we do this more so with traits or dimensions that we are invested in. So faculty say that they’re above average teachers more so than people who have no interest in teaching per se. There’s a lot of motivated reasoning and the desire to self-enhance going on here, and in a host of related biases, self-serving bias for example. IRA FLATOW: Now we’ve all learned this. 77% of the audience thinks they’re above average. The Lake Wobegon effect is working very well in this audience here. But let’s say that some people in the audience say I want to reform myself. Can I change? Anything I can do about that? JESSICA SALVATORE: Can you do de-bias yourself? So people who have tried to de-bias participants in lab studies have found that that is temporarily possible. So by educating people, by showing them what the distribution of what other people do is, you can get people to recognize that overall, they’re not going to be all above average, right?

But it turns out it’s a very, very temporary effect. So six weeks later, you bring them back in. And you show them what they said they were like before. And now they go, I’m better than that person. It’s themselves. IRA FLATOW: You also asked our audience– this is a good question, because I took the test also. Are you better at parallel parking than the average driver? Why did you ask that question? JESSICA SALVATORE: Our hope was that we could identify a question that has to do with driving skills that would be hard enough that we would see that the bias eliminates itself. And so there’s definitely some data showing that in certain domains systematically, you can see a below average effect. So things that are very, very hard in absolute terms like juggling– like I can’t juggle at all. Right. Or dealing with irritating people, being patient with irritating people, right? Things that are just really hard. They take a lot of skill, or they just take a lot of saintliness that people sometimes will systematically rate themselves as below average.

And our hope was that by asking you about parallel parking, that we would be able to see an elimination, if not a reversal, of the above average effect. But I am sort of disappointed to say that you all still think of yourself as above average in parallel parking. There is a slight attenuation of the effect. So instead of 75% or 77%, you’re down to only 66%. IRA FLATOW: There you go! Progress! There you go. One last question, because in Lake Wobegon, it’s the children who are above average. Do we see that effect when parents talk about their kids? JESSICA SALVATORE: We absolutely do. Yeah. And what’s really interesting is parents do show this with regard to talking about their children. But what’s interesting is it’s correlated with their own individual ratings of above averageness. So parents who see themselves as, you know, special snowflakes, also see their children as particularly special snowflakes. I think it’s really helpful to be superheroes in our own minds. But those people are annoying. Right? They’re taking it too far. IRA FLATOW: Can’t add to that.

Thank you very much, Jessica. Now you all know. Jessica Salvatore is an assistant professor of psychology at Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, and a visiting professor at Macalester here in Saint Paul. Coming up, wearables that make superhuman spider sense a reality. But first, Minnesota’s very own brass messengers. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING] Copyright © 2015 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of ScienceFriday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our polices pages at Annie Minoff is a producer for Science Friday. She’s visited Olympic ski jumps and a nuclear reactor, all in the name of science. MyTwoCents If 100% of people were polled it could be proven incorrect.

However, the addition of another question for each above, such as “have you been in an accident in the last 10 years” could show a contrast between what people believe and what fact shows for the group polled. BTW, I’m in the 34% for parallel parking. PoliticsWatcher 50% of people ARE above the median, and it’s possible much more than that are above the mean. So this isn’t quite as bad as it looks. Brandon I (over) compensate for this affect by thinking of my self as far below average on everything. Bill_Woods What’s the justification for assuming a normal distribution? Maybe 20% of drivers are chronically accident-prone, and the rest are above average. Anthony O’Connor Your special snowflake example assumes a normal representative population. So is Ira’s audience a normal cross section of the population? If you asked “Are you above average IQ?” At a Mensa meeting you should expect a high population of yes, since the entry criteria is to be in the 98th or higher percentile. In almost all ORSA texts the example of WWII armor plating of bombers is used.

The question of where to put the limited amount of armor on a bomber was analyzed and the probability of hits was used, the area of the bomber that received the highest hit count was suggested as the location. The ORSA team rejected that solution since they were analyzing the bombers that came back. Essentially the data set was eliminating the hits that were most catastrophic. Lynn Plachetzki White I loved this segment today, “The Lake Wobegon Effect”, but talk to me about “where all the women are strong”! Enjoy Prairie Home Companion. Pieter Smith Someone once pointed out to me that it could be true that ~66% of Minnesotans are “above average” at parallel parking. Say for instance, you gave drivers a parallel parking test that can be scored in one of two ways, (1) the car was successfully parallel parked, yielding a score of 100%, and (2) the car was not sucessfully parallel parked, yielding a score of 0%. Then if 66% of drivers managed to park a car, 66% of drivers would receive a score of 100% which is above the average score of all drivers (the average score is 66%).

Also, it could be true that all the children of Lake Wobegon are “above average” in that all the children have two arms, which is slightly above the average number of arms (less than two). Pieter Smith I pointed out that this also depends on which measure of central tendency you use. If you use medians and percentiles, it’s a different story. GeB I agree w/ watcher. If there are 10 people in a room, can 7 of them be above the average height of that group ? If you agree with this, then 7 of them also maybe above the average in driving. Jimi & D. Lynn What if they were all blind? Davy Crocket As others have pointed out, if you really are considering average (and not median), then it is possible that more than 50% are above average – the distribution just needs to be skewed to the right. The interesting question is how accurate is the above average percentage reported by a group? From this piece, it is indicated to be inaccurate. But, if you move beyond the social dimension, maybe it is not.

Safe driving: it is quite likely that 77% of the audience have never caused an accident, and therefore, on a scale that determined safe driving by number of accidents, 77% above average may be accurate. As Prof Salvatore herself suggested, for a difficult skill set, the distribution may be skewed the other way. Rather than parallel parking, how about asking something like “Are you better than average at Quantum Physics?” Ryan McTighe How many drove here tonight? How many of you saw a near-collision? How many times did you avoid a near-collision? What percentage of the near-accidents were your fault… suggested answer: All of them. Ryan McTighe It’s documented in psychology that while driving despite all good intentions and self-awareness, other drivers can become objectified (not people in cars, but cars in the way). I’m from Boston, but you don’t treat people like a car, you don’t cut people off in the supermarket, you follow the rules of the road or the check-out line first. Asleep at the wheel?

Garrison Keillor on Humor - Blank on Blank Blank on Blank “Humor has to surprise us, otherwise it isn’t funny.” Garrison Keillor on Humor “Humor has to surprise us, otherwise it isn’t funny.” More Episodes Carl Sagan on Extraterrestrials Interview by George Plimpton This conversation between George Plimpton and Garrison Keillor was recored on stage at the 92Y in New York City on November 28, 1994. It’s part of a collaboration between 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center and The Paris Review . Read More The Animated Transcript George Plimpton was the editor of The Paris Review from its founding in 1953 until his death in 2003. There was a man sitting on his front porch and the pastor came by and they sat and talked about theology for a little while and the pastor asked the man if he believed in infant baptism and the man said, “Believe in it hell, I’ve seen it done.” A humorist has to what, what was I about to say? [Crowd laughs] I was distracted someone was moving back and forth in the hall there.

If everyone be perfectly still When did you decide to become a writer and why? I grew up in a fundamentalist protestant family that stressed that we were a select people and so we were to avoid contact with others who did not share our faith. We were isolated and perhaps growing up in this world, first of all one has a reverence for the word and for language. God spoke to us through the word and in our family this was the King James Bible. It also I think gave books, fiction great power because they were proscribed. We were not to touch them and my family was shocked when I came home with a volume of Hemingway when I was a boy and I wanted to read it. So there was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family. It’s a decision however that continually seems temporary but you are never quite sure you’ve made it absolutely. I’m only 52. So I made a tentative choice that has lasted this long but I could still fall back on retail sales. Being considered a humorist are you constantly aware that it is time to come up with something as clever as you’ve just described or to be comic in some way?

I think that you are only obliged to be a humorist from the age of 18 until you turn 30. Past the age of 30 I don’t think there is any obligation to be clever at all. After that you I think you are supposed to settle down be a good person, raise your children, and be good to your friends which you may not have been when you were very clever, and try to atone for your cleverness. Humor has to surprise us otherwise it isn’t funny and it’s a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist. Because then of course it’s not a surprise anymore, it’s what’s expected of him. When you come to expect humor of people, you will never get it. Looking for it, demanding it, expecting it, what you do is to kill off every joke you ever come across. Humor in writing needs to come in under cover of darkness and be disguised, it has to surprise people. You don’t want to get that sort of sound in your writing that boing that gives you away. Humor is not about problems with airline luggage handlers.

It’s about our lives in America and it’s about the ends of our lives and it’s about everything that happens after that and everything that happened before. Well you paint this lovely picture of the piece going up and then immediately appearing in the magazine I was wondering if sometimes at the New Yorker they say well this is not quite up to snuff or however they would put it. Well you see though when the New Yorker turned down work, they turned it down in such an elaborately gentlemanly way making apologies for their own shortsightedness. Undoubtedly it was their fault but somehow for some reason this fell short of the remarkably high standard that you by your own work have set for yourself. They had a way of rejecting my work that made me feel sorry for them somehow. Listen to the full conversation Garrison Keillor and Religion Growing up, Keillor’s family was part of the Plymouth Brethren, a conservative branch of the Evangelical Christian movement. “We were fundamentalist Christians – members of the Plymouth Brethren.” Garrison told The Guardian . “We believed in separation from the world and in the divine inspiration of the Bible ; every word and every comma.

So we read these texts very closely and memorised passages of scripture for recitation, which gives a person a love of language and especially the grand cadences of the King James rolling off your tongue.” Garrison Meets Homer Simpson Keillor has always been outspoken about his love for books – he even owns his own bookshop. Common Good Books opened in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2006. Big Screen Prairie Home Companion Garrison Keillor, Lily Tomlin, and Meryl Streep starred in A Prairie Home Companion, the 2006 film written by Keillor based on his weekly radio show. Robert Altman was the director. Director Robert Altman was 80 years old and in poor health during filming in the summer of 2005. In order to secure insurance for the shot, Altman had to hire a backup director in case he was unable to finish the film. He chose none other than Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master).

The Real Lake Wobegon “Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” Keillor’s fictional town of Lake Wobegon is actually a composite of the central Minnesota towns that Keillor lived in and around in his younger years. Credits Funny Odd Thing, Life....: The News from the real "Lake Wobegon" Friday, September 04, 2009 The News from the real "Lake Wobegon" Humorist and author Garrison Keillor, hosts the popular radio show "A Prairie Home Companion". During which he tells stories of his fictional hometown Lake Wobegon Minnesota. Keillor bases these monologues, (known as "the news from Lake Wobegon") on his memories of growing up in the very real town of Anoka, MN. A small town north of the Twin Cities. He traditionally ends the segment by saying; "that's the News from Lake Wobegon Minnesota. Where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above average." Yet I give Garrison Keillor a lot of credit. He doesn't sugar coat "his town".

The foibles and failings of the people, the fears, prejudices and often petty nature of life in Lake Wobegon is just as visible as the Norman Rockwell-esqe Americana of the place. So this past week I have found myself wondering what Keillor thinks of recent events at his hometown High School: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (From The Minneapolis Star-Tribune) The Anoka-Hennepin School District has agreed to pay a $25,000 settlement to the family of a high school junior after two teachers harassed the boy and subjected him to classroom jokes, comments and innuendos concerning his perceived sexual orientation The boy's "fence swings both ways," teacher Diane Cleveland commented during a class in the 2007-2008 school year, according to an investigation by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights.

When the boy wrote a report on Ben Franklin, Cleveland allegedly said before the entire class that the boy had a "thing for older men." Another teacher, Walter Filson, said in front of other students that the boy "enjoys wearing women's clothes." When the boy decided to report on Abraham Lincoln, Filson allegedly said, "Since you like your men older ..." the Human Rights report said. The school district, which has denied it violated the Minnesota Human Rights Act, agreed last month to pay the boy's family $25,000. The student, Alex Merritt, and his mother, Jodi, filed a complaint with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights in May 2008 on his behalf. He was a student at the district's Secondary Technical Education Program (STEP). His "fence swings both ways," teacher Diane Cleveland said during a class, according to the investigation by the Human Rights department. Another teacher, Walter Filson, said that Merritt "enjoys wearing women's clothes." Merritt said he had Cleveland's class before lunch, and Filson's class afterwards. If Cleveland made fun of him for something, he said, she told Filson about it at lunch.

Merritt would be teased for the same thing in a new class after lunch. "I told Ms. Cleveland that I wanted to do a report on Ben Franklin, and she said, 'Why? Do you have a thing for older men?' " he said. "Then I sat in Mr. Filson's class, and he called me 'Mr. Ben Franklin,' and said, 'What do you have for these older men that Ms. Cleveland told me about?' " "I'd come home from school and clam up," he said. "I got death threats from random kids, saying things like 'Shut up, you queer, and, I'm going to kill you, you queer.'" According to the investigation, Cleveland also covered the screen during a bathing suit scene in a movie the class was watching, and said "It's OK if [Alex] watches this because he isn't into that sort of thing anyway ... maybe if it was a guy." The Anoka-Hennepin district disciplined Cleveland, 39, a social studies teacher, after Merritt complained. She was briefly reassigned, and placed on two-day unpaid suspension.

Her reassignment included working on a "social studies curriculum development and reflecting on equality and diversity in the classroom," according to the investigation. But she completed only one day of the assignment and called in sick for the rest of the week. The strange part about his experiences, Alex pointed out, is that he is straight. He said he is speaking publicly now because "I'm not the first kid this has happened to. I feel bad for the kid who was homosexual in that class, seeing that I was belittled. ... If kids feel like this is what they're going through, at work, at school, at the house, you've got to tell somebody." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wow... So unlike in most High Schools were it's other students who usually are the ones who harass a peer who is perceived as "different", in Anoka Minnesota it's the teachers who tag team making a student's life miserable. That's the news from Anoka, Minnesota - the real Lake Wobegon, were the Women Social Studies Teachers are bitter insensitive cows, the Men Law Enforcement Teachers are emotionally retarded closet cases, and all the Children just want to graduate and get the hell out. .

With 'A Prairie Home Companion,' Garrison Keillor United America - The Atlantic The Atlantic See our Newsletters > How Garrison Keillor United America The host of A Prairie Home Companion used storytelling to bridge the gap between red and blue states. Ann Heisenfelt / Reuters Print Text Size On Saturday, Garrison Keillor will sign off as the host of A Prairie Home Companion for the final time, ending a four-decade run as the public radio show’s writer and voice. This fall, the program will return to its original format as a musical variety show, transitioning away from Keillor’s unique brand of radio sketch humor and his monologue of the news from the fictional town of Lake Wobegon where, he notes each week, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” Related Story A Prairie Home Replacement A Prairie Home Companion is named after a cemetery in Minnesota, a nod to both the show’s Midwestern heritage and its wry humor.

It’s telling that Keillor will wrap things at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, about as far from lutefisk and Norwegian bachelor farmers as anyone could be: The entire population of Anoka, Minnesota, Keillor’s hometown (or any of the several Midwestern towns that inspired Lake Woebegon), could comfortably fit in the 17,500-seat venue with room to spare. * So it’s hard not to feel like the fictional town is dying. Characters whom listeners have heard about over the radio for 42 years will give their final bow and shuffle off to a literary retirement home, never to be breathed to life again by the nasally baritone of America’s yarn-spinning grandfather, his delivery paced to the cadence of a rocking chair. But with Keillor’s retirement, Americans lose something else, equally valuable and increasingly rare: a cultural figure fluent in the worldviews of both progressives and conservatives. Raised as a fundamentalist Christian in a small Midwestern town, Keillor crossed a vast ideological chasm during his career, becoming a stalwart political leftist without forgetting his small-town roots.

Through his novels, his poetry, and his public-radio show, he’s served as a cultural liaison between red and blue states, interpreting each for the other, and offering a humorous, if not sympathetic, glance in both directions. His stories of life in rural America transport his listeners into a world where those of different beliefs and backgrounds exist in a surprisingly similar fashion to themselves. For all its political implications, A Prairie Home Companion has always been about nostalgia, first and foremost. The director Robert Altman’s final film of the same name describes it as “a live radio variety show, the kind that died 50 years ago, but somebody forgot to tell them.” Keillor—who remained in his home state as he made the leap from college radio to a professional broadcasting career in the late-’60s—is unabashed about his origins, his beliefs about manners, morality, and what makes America a good place to be from. He sings patriotic ballads loudly and unironically. While much of Keillor’s work draws on his family and childhood, the rest comes from his experience as a Minnesota writer seeking acceptance among New York’s literary elite. His life goals even as a young boy had much more to do with New York than Minnesota.

Indeed, it was a 1973 New Yorker assignment about the Grand Ole Opry that planted the seed for A Prairie Home Companion, which debuted a year later. Keillor could have easily stayed in New York and pursued literary greatness there, and during his brief hiatus from the radio show in the 1980s he tried to do exactly that. But when his daughter was born in 1997, he elected to move back to Minnesota to be close to family. Perhaps because of this sort of dual citizenship in two cultural spheres, Keillor has frequently veered far to the left of his conservative childhood on many political issues. In his 2004 memoir/manifesto/screed Homegrown Democrat, Keillor memorably described George W. Bush as an “Etch-a-Sketch president with a voice like a dial tone, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions in general, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.” On his radio show, Keillor generally leaves politics to mild satire of famous caricatures, typically offering equal time for barbs aimed at both parties.

When Al Gore won a Nobel Prize in 2007, Keillor wrote a skit in which the younger Bush sparred with Gore over the number of votes the Nobel committee actually awarded him. Keillor also regularly spends time talking about the political divisions between normal folks, as with a 2012 “Catsup Advisory Board” ad, in which a bleeding-heart liberal and a bitter bootstrapping conservative quietly bickered over politics. When Keillor travels to red states, he writes skits and songs that highlight their points of local pride (only to gently rib them when he leaves). In a recent op-ed for the Houston Chronicle he noted admiringly, When I stopped in Lubbock, I knew where I was. The city went 69 percent for Mitt Romney, 28 percent for Barack Obama. But I don't feel like an alien there. I admire old windmills, I’m curious about prairie dogs, and I’m a fan of Buddy Holly. To me, he does not fade away. And I feel enriched by biscuits and gravy.

The thing with politics, Keillor says, is that the “guy from Lubbock” has to live in this country, too. Such a compassionate view of one’s political opponents is rare. Left-leaning, politically active personalities are as ubiquitous in public radio as pledge drives, tote bags, and Hamilton aficionados. But Keillor has always stood apart with his bizarre blend of liberal tenacity and Midwestern aplomb. During a brief phone conversation with Obama in May 2008, Keillor told him, “Senator, the thing that’s going to happen to you after you’re elected is that you are going to feel greater and greater empathy for George W. Bush.” Obama was purportedly taken aback, and eventually responded, “I think you’re right.” Keillor, who in his endorsement message said that Obama would end the “long sour period of the current occupant,” wanted to remind him, in their only conversation, that Bush might one day soon appear more human to him. This is the true legacy of Keillor’s life in the public eye.

Having crossed, Sherpa-like, the icy, sharp-sided crevasse that separates the political right and left, he’s been able to shade the views of each to the other with finesse and a pinch of humor. What an inveterate progressive or conservative may fail to comprehend is that the opposing group acts in a way that makes sense in the light of their particular brand of jaundiced glasses. Having seen through both, Keillor can point out the foibles of each. His decision to lionize rather than lambast his conservative roots, to create and animate sympathetic characters from a culture he no longer agrees with politically, remaining civil instead of sarcastic—these are traits worth celebrating. If Keillor were purely a political figure with a facility for cutting turns of phrase, he likely wouldn’t have drawn in 3.5 million listeners a week. If he just had a musical radio variety show, not many would care. It’s the stories of Lake Wobegon that are the heart and soul of A Prairie Home Companion.

Tom Keith, the show’s long-time sound-effects man, explained that people wait for “Garrison’s Lake Woebegon stories, and when he gets to that point, you can just feel the audience settle in, and say, ‘Okay, here’s what we came for.’” It’s difficult to imagine the show surviving without Keillor and his commitment to storytelling. The beauty of Lake Wobegon is that it cuts beneath the veneer of red and blue, and exposes the good of American life. As much as politicians and pundits may square off and battle over electoral-college votes and Senate seats, A Prairie Home Companion argues, the things that actually make life worth living are the simple pleasures, like the memory of a childhood romp through the snow, or a long conversation with an old friend on Saturday night. Keillor reminds his listeners that regardless of political leanings, the people in the “other” world continue to exist, providing a check on the idealization of one’s own view and demonization of the other.

Women are strong and men are good looking the world over, and Lake Wobegon, for all its faults, reminds us that it is unlikely for one camp to hold all the answers to life’s persistent questions. * This article originally implied that Anoka, Minnesota, was the sole inspiration for Lake Woebegon. We regret the error.

Question: What are all the children in the town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota?
Answer: Above Average