Lake Wobegon

When Garrison Keillor chatted, via satellite from Minneapolis, with reporters at last weekend's Disney Channel news conference, the purpose was to promote Keillor's July 4 special, A Prairie Home Companion: Lake Wobegon Comes to Disney. Instead, the major news to emerge from that conference was the very strong indication that Keillor, and his A Prairie Home Companion radio show, would not be around much longer. Keillor said he had become tired of his fame, and he spoke of the strain of putting out a show every week.

A national institution will be put to rest this weekend; a modest institution perhaps, but a national one nevertheless and there aren't many of those around anymore. When Garrison Keillor boards up the windows of his mythical hometown of Lake Wobegone Saturday (at 6 p.m. on WHYY, 91-FM) it will mark not merely the end of an era but the end of the resurrection of an era. Old-time radio, the kind that the middle-aged among us knew as children, will once again be dead. Oh, there'll still be "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition" and the fine weekend shows on public radio, there'll still be Larry King, but they're not old-time radio.

Life is different in Medford Lakes from a month ago, no question about it. Just take a look at what used to be Upper and Lower Lake Aetna, the crown jewels among the 22 man-made lakes that helped give birth to the town when they were dug in the 1920s and now form its identity. Just ask Judy and John Ferry, who had the sale of their lakefront home on Comanche Trail washed away by the flood. Or Jim and Christine Fretz, who will have to take out a loan to pay for repairs to their Chippewa Trail home.

The way Garrison Keillor tells it, "it was so much fun leaving that we're coming back to say goodbye again. " That's goodbye again as in A Prairie Home Companion: The Second Annual Farewell Performance, which will air live from 8 to 10 tonight on WHYY-FM (90.9) and cable TV's Disney Channel. Can it be almost a year since Keillor, who rode a low-budget regional radio show to national fame, abruptly ended the program after 13 years to devote his total energy to his first love, writing?

The electronic message board in the window of the Vanguard Group's office at 1528 Walnut St. yesterday morning reflected an optimistic, if outdated, view of the stock market's prospects. "The Vanguard Index Trust offers the personal investor a way to match the performance of the Standard & Poor's 500 composite stock price index," the message read. On that particular morning, any investor wanting to match the S&P's performance of the previous day could have done so by throwing 20 percent of his money away.

Look who's coming through that door. I think we've met somewhere before. Hello, Garrison. Again. Two years ago, public radio's Garrison Keillor abruptly left the bright lights of St. Paul and his long-running "A Prairie Home Companion" to move to Denmark with his wife and complain about how all the Danes spoke Danish. Only the naive believed his exile from our Saturday nights was permanent. There are, after all, few opportunities for performers who tell softly funny stories about mythical Minnesota towns . . . and few opportunities to schedule a Bulgarian men's chorus, a Klezmer band and bluegrass whistler all in one evening.

Randy Smith is leaving as general manager of Channel 29 to become executive vice president of Dudley Taft Communications. DTC is a new company that formed out of Taft Communications, 29's former owner. Smith's last official day is July 31, but he's promised to stick around long enough to assist TVX Broadcasting (29's new owner) in choosing a successor. A bonus: In his new position, Smith will be part owner of Dudley Taft's first purchase: WGHB-TV in High Point, N.C., a station also once owned by Taft Communications.

Tomorrow's the big night, Garrison Keillor fans. American Radio Company of the Air, the new weekly variety show by the erstwhile sage of Lake Wobegon, will hit the PBS airwaves, premiering on WHYY-FM (90.9) from 6 to 8 p.m. The new show, with a 20-week season, will be broadcast live from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, just across the East River from Keillor's adopted home of Manhattan. Only Keillor knows exactly how the show will differ from his old A Prairie Home Companion, but the word is that American Radio will be more New Yorkish, more urbane, with big-band standards from the '30s and '40s.

It figures that the book is going to be called Leaving Home and you know it's by Garrison Keillor (Penguin, $4.95) and, as the cover promises, it's a collection of Lake Wobegon stories. "Back in Minnesota where I come from, a good many people look on New York City as a dinkhole of degradation and squalor, so if you leave there and come here, they view the move as a moral collapse. They say, 'Well, we always knew he was headed that way. He showed a lot of New York-type tendencies.

MINNEAPOLIS - On a late Saturday afternoon in May, when people in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul were beginning to feel the first flush of spring in the air - which, to a Philly boy, meant real chilly - they took to the streets without coats and headed into a new season. In downtown Minneapolis, people rode bikes or breezed along streets with buildings both modern and not, forgoing the enclosed second-floor skyways that connect to just about everything so that no one need go outside.

It was a disquieting week in New York as 2006 prepared to cede the stage to a spry, smooth-cheeked new year. The weather was mild for late December. Some folks - the kind who read bleak nonfiction hardcovers by former vice presidents - weren't happy about the balmy evening. They worried about polar bears scrambling for ice-cap chips, and cataclysmic floods swallowing small third-world nations. And, almost as disturbing, they worried that global warming might result in diminishing grist for stories about stoic Lutheran bachelors shoveling snow off pitched roofs in Minnesota.

Life is different in Medford Lakes from a month ago, no question about it. Just take a look at what used to be Upper and Lower Lake Aetna, the crown jewels among the 22 man-made lakes that helped give birth to the town when they were dug in the 1920s and now form its identity. Just ask Judy and John Ferry, who had the sale of their lakefront home on Comanche Trail washed away by the flood. Or Jim and Christine Fretz, who will have to take out a loan to pay for repairs to their Chippewa Trail home.

"Everybody Loves Garrison Keillor," read the mass e-mail from Joseph Fox Books, announcing a forthcoming event. Well, no, they don't. Keillor's reading on Tuesday at the Free Library of Philadelphia was canceled after the day's tragic events. The program will be rescheduled for the fall, followed by a $250 meet-and-greet benefit. Fans will be thrilled, but public-radio listeners can be squarely divided into two factions: those gaga over the grand pooh-bah of Lake Wobegon, and those who find his small-town ramblings as grating as . . . Garrison Keillor.

Writing about storyteller/singer Garrison Keillor is rather like making love with gloves on. A lot of sensitivity and personality is invariably masked in the translation. Going over my notes of a recent chat with Keillor, I missed the laid-back yet expressive intonation in his Minnesota-bred voice - his dry, soft-spoken gentility, his ironic comic accents, his folksy earnestness that seems so rare and rewarding to an Easterner's ears. We schmoozed some about the comedy and music show this raconteur is doing here in Philadelphia at the Mann Music Center tonight, with support from Leo Kottke and Richard and Linda Williams and Kate McKenzie.

After three earlier deals fell through, WEAZ-AM (560), formerly the famous WFIL, has finally been sold, and indications are that it will eventually become the area's seventh religious- or inspirational-oriented radio station. "They haven't told us officially what they're going to do with it," owner Jerry Lee said last week. But, he noted, the buyer is California-based Salem Communications Corp., which owns 13 other religious or inspirational stations in such cities as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston.

Look who's coming through that door. I think we've met somewhere before. Hello, Garrison. Again. Two years ago, public radio's Garrison Keillor abruptly left the bright lights of St. Paul and his long-running "A Prairie Home Companion" to move to Denmark with his wife and complain about how all the Danes spoke Danish. Only the naive believed his exile from our Saturday nights was permanent. There are, after all, few opportunities for performers who tell softly funny stories about mythical Minnesota towns . . . and few opportunities to schedule a Bulgarian men's chorus, a Klezmer band and bluegrass whistler all in one evening.

Tomorrow's the big night, Garrison Keillor fans. American Radio Company of the Air, the new weekly variety show by the erstwhile sage of Lake Wobegon, will hit the PBS airwaves, premiering on WHYY-FM (90.9) from 6 to 8 p.m. The new show, with a 20-week season, will be broadcast live from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, just across the East River from Keillor's adopted home of Manhattan. Only Keillor knows exactly how the show will differ from his old A Prairie Home Companion, but the word is that American Radio will be more New Yorkish, more urbane, with big-band standards from the '30s and '40s.

Some people live charmed lives and WMMR-FM (93.3) Morning Zooman John DeBella seems to be one of them. Not only does the station pay him about $600,000 a year, now it's gone and named him operations manager. With last Tuesday's departure of OM Ted Utz to run New York's WNEW-FM, DeBella's the No. 2 man at 'MMR, possessing the authority to boss people around. His partner in management crime will be 2-to-6 p.m. jock Joe Bonadonna, who was just named program director. "Yeah, it's like the inmates are running the asylum," DeBella chuckled fiendishly on Friday, noting that both jocks will keep their on-air shifts.

Jailed soul singer James Brown would be transferred from South Carolina to Georgia if a prisoner swap that lawyer George Hill is trying to arrange goes through. "There are more people here who are willing to support him," Hill said in Augusta, Ga. "I think his chances (of a pardon) are extremely good here. " Hill wants Brown to be pardoned rather than paroled because parole could bring restrictions that would hinder his entertainment career. Although South Carolina Department of Corrections spokesman Francis Archibald said South Carolina authorities would be agreeable to the swap if Georgia agreed, the exchange seems unlikely at this point because Georgia opposes it. "We don't do it. We've never done it," said Georgia corrections spokesman John Siler.