August 7, 2012. Copyright 2012, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Hero of American Public Radio, Garrison Keillor turns 70
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, August 7, Graphic News:  It sounds an unlikely recipe for success in the modern world: a weekly variety show, broadcast live on national radio, featuring sketches, guest musicians and the latest news from a fictitious small town, that is nowhere and everywhere at once. The genial host of this 40-year-old phenomenon of the airwaves, with a voice as comfortable as his signature red sneakers, is Garrison Keillor, born Gary Edward Keillor 70 years ago in Anoka, Minnesota -- a place not unlike the Lake Wobegon of his celebrated monologues. Every Saturday night, in a scenario Ma and Pa Walton would have recognised, millions of listeners across America -- and, via syndication, in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand -- tune in to A Prairie Home Companion to hear Keillor and his regulars perform songs extolling the virtues of rhubarb and to catch up on recent developments in the imaginary community of Lake Wobegon, "the little town that time forgot, and the decades cannot improve". Keillor, who suffered a minor stroke three years ago and has talked about -- and then dismissed -- retiring next year, devised the format in the late 1960s, after taking over the early morning slot on his local public radio station. An English graduate of the University of Minnesota, he had harboured student ambitions to be a writer in the grand tradition of novelists such as John Updike and Philip Roth, but found his forte was humour after he submitted a tongue-in-cheek story, entitled Local Family Keeps Son Happy, to The New Yorker, a publication to which he still contributes regularly, four decades on.
 
Keillor was raised among Plymouth Brethren, a strict Christian sect where entertainment, of the kind he has made his life's work, was frowned upon. Yet it instilled in him quintessential values which, even in gentle parody, lie at the heart of his appeal. Whenever the radio show takes to the road, it sells out. Keillor is the star turn at any number of state fairs and music festivals, and can fill the most prestigious of venues from the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles to Wolf Trap, near Washington DC. He has become a kind of Norman Rockwell of the wireless, but without the piety; embodying a mentality and morality as familiar to his audiences as the slogans of the show's spoof sponsors -- like Powdermilk Biscuits, which "give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done." Politically, he is more acerbic and takes an anti-Republican stance. Referring to the role of public radio in keeping motorists from dozing off at the wheel, he jokes: "Conservatives become incensed enough...that it keeps them awake so they don't drive into a fire hydrant. That's what we do: we save the lives of thousands of right-wingers every year." Married to the violinist Jenny Lind Nilsson, the couple live in St Paul, Minnesota, and have a teenage daughter. Keillor also has a son, Jason, from an earlier marriage, who works alongside him. In addition to his weekly broadcasts, Keillor presents a daily poetry reading and author biography spot in The Writer's Almanac, each edition of which is made available online by subscription.
/ENDS