Frank Carlson Library

John Tollefson, a son of Lake Wobegon, has moved East to manage a radio station at a college for academically challenged children of financially gifted parents in upstate New York. Having achieved this pleasant perch, John has a brilliant idea for a restaurant specializing in fresh sweet corn. And he falls in love with an historian named Alida Freeman, hard at work on a book about a nineteenth-century Norwegian naturopath, an acquaintance of Lincoln,...

In order to save their floundering restaurant, Roy and Ray Soderbjerg found WLT radio, with an eccentric cast of characters--including Dad Benson, Wingo Beals, Slim Graves, and the chain-smoking child star LIttle Becky.

Skits, songs, stories, and more from A Prairie Home Companion reveal the secret world of a stalwart people. When you fly Lutheran Air, there's no first class, meals are potluck with assignments by rows (rows 1-6, bring rolls; rows, 7-15, salad), all fares are by freewill offering, and the plane doesn't land until the budget is met. Welcome to the Land of Lutherans, where people drive Fords, wear cardigans, go to church at Third Lutheran (which used...

Wobegon goes abroad in this rousing and moving story of a group trip to Rome in which the warm circle of kinship invites stories of astonishing frankness and self-revelation--and of course, humor.

"It's 1956 and it's summertime in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. The Doo Dads are singing "My Girl" on the radio and on the porch of the big green house on Green Street, fourteen-year-old Gary is studying pictures of naked women, aware that Grandpa is looking down from the window of heaven and wondering how a Sanctified Brethren boy could turn out so badly. He has never so much as kissed a girl, except his rebellious cousin Kate, a sophisticate of seventeen...