The Great Depression, prayer and the frozen Minnesota climate are all democratic experiences in the mind of Garrison Keillor.

The famed author of the ‘Lake Wobegon Days’ stories and National Public Radio personality spoke last night to an over-capacity crowd in Goldstein Auditorium.

‘Winter is one of the great democratic experiences,’ he said. ‘My mother used to remind me often, don’t complain about being cold, you are not the only one. Winter is not a personal experience; we’re all in it together.’

Keillor said that he worries about the current state of the nation.

‘We live in an age of cheese merchants and aluminum siding salesmen and anarchists in golf pants in charge of things, running the country into debt up to the hubcaps,’ he said. ‘(They) are engaged in a war for which we are still trying to find a reason. A war against a small country that apparently poses no real danger to us. A pre-emptive war, one of the first in our history. I can’t offhand think of another.’

‘I was a man with a book that was No. 1 on the New York Times best seller list for fiction,’ he said. ‘But it’s true what Mark Twain said: clothes do make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.’

The experience taught Keillor not to go to the wealthy for charity. Instead, he offered another target.

‘You want to go to those who have less to lose and can take a chance on you when you are walking around with a piece of blue plastic on and are capable of anything,’ he said.

Keillor also spoke of his college job as a camp counselor and gave the audience the same advice that he had once given his campers.

‘Life is a gift,’ he said. ‘We always hope for more, but at least we should be grateful for this little bit that we have. Every day, something happens that is absolutely, absolutely amazing.’

Despite Keillor’s fame, many of those in the audience were in attendance based on word-of-mouth.

‘I’d never heard of him before,’ said Tinyan Li, a freshman in The College of Arts and Sciences. ‘It was a good experience, though. He was hilarious.’

Those who had heard of him were equally pleased with the lecture.

‘I really enjoyed it,’ said Marian Seat, a freshman in The College of Arts and Sciences. ‘I’d heard him a couple of times from back home, and it brought back memories. He’s an amazing man with amazing stories.’

After the finishing his speech, Keillor answered questions from the audience concerning his techniques as a writer and the possibility of future television appearances.

‘You won’t be seeing me on television anytime soon,’ he said. ‘If you took one look at me, you’d see why. This boy was made for radio.’

Keillor also offered his advice for the youth of Syracuse University.

‘What unites us is the obligation every mature person feels to hand our children a society, a culture, a community that’s at least as good as what was given to us,’ he said. ‘I don’t see that my generation, which is so self-obsessed, has done a very good job of this. But there is always time.’

One man from the audience asked Keillor his closing question: What’s the news from Lake Wobegon?

‘It is what it always is,’ he said. ‘The men are all good-looking, the women are all strong, and the all children are above-average.’

This is a different country than the one Keillor grew up in, he said. He went on to claim that no republic has ever survived such a concentration of wealth and power, with one percent of the households in the country controlling almost fifty percent of the financial wealth.

However, he appreciates his Midwest heritage and the fact that it allows him to avoid association with the stigma of wealth.

‘The Midwest is an invisible place in America, and we don’t mind that,’ he said.

Keillor said he appreciated the simplicity of his childhood, especially how his parents didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.

One of the few adults who had an impact on Keillor’s childhood was his Aunt Eva.

‘(She knew that) I was meant not to live her life, but my own life, the life she would have wanted for me,’ he said.

He then described his humbling rise to fame, which involved an embarrassing incident with a hot tub.

While staying at a friend’s home in Utah, he found himself locked outside of the house naked. He was forced to wrap himself in a blue sheet of plastic and roam the neighborhood, looking for someone to help him get back inside. It took eight tries before he found someone who would open the door for him.

Published on February 17, 2004 at 12:00 pm