Thirty-five years into his role as host of "Prairie Home Companion" Garrison Keillor is a national emblem of Minnesota humor. He is also an extreme self-doubter.
"It's really dissatisfaction with my own work that keeps me going," he said in a recent interview, "and this profound sense of failure that I feel after almost every show I do."
As "Prairie Home" launches a new season, Keillor's associates in a sprawling radio empire might feel even more trepidation than the man himself.
Keillor, 67, suffered a minor stroke on Labor Day and told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he is "not counting on (hosting the show) more than a couple more years."
The ripple effects of Keillor retiring or scaling back would be enormous.
"Prairie Home" might have debuted before an audience of 12 at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., in 1974, but it now is a linchpin of the American Public Media Group (APMG). The Group, with an annual budget of $104 million, has holdings that include American Public Media, which distributes the show to almost 600 public radio stations nationwide.
Longtime fans will recall the six-year period when Keillor gave up "Prairie Home" after moving to New York in 1987. Desperate to find a fill-in, Minnesota Public Radio started another live variety show, "Good Evening," with Noah Adams as host. It lasted less than a year.
Since returning to the air in 1993, "Prairie Home" has established itself as a "defining program" for MPR, said Howard Liszt, a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism.
"The impact (of losing the show) would be substantial. For many people who listen to MPR, it's a magnet," Liszt said. "It's kind of the equivalent of if NBC no longer had the 'Tonight Show,' or CBS losing '60 Minutes,' one of those shows that's indelibly associated with a network."
Leaders at APMG and MPR would not comment for this story.
Beyond the intangibles, there's a lot of money involved, especially in an era in which public radio gets most of its revenue from, well, the public -- via events and membership drives -- rather than the government: Minnesota Public Radio's tax returns for 2007 listed $54,815,216 in "direct public support," plus almost $7 million in government grants.
For a popular national program like "Prairie Home," which reaches about 4 million listeners each Saturday, franchise fees add up quickly. Amounts paid vary by market size. WPLN in Nashville, Tenn., the nation's 29th-ranked media market, pays American Public Media $29,600 a year for the show, plus an affiliation fee of about $10,000 a year, said station President Rob Gordon.
It's an amount Gordon is happy to pay. "The show is extremely important in terms of its vitality as an anchor on the weekend," Gordon said. And when Keillor brought "Prairie Home" to Nashville in May, he tacked on a second show to benefit the station, which netted more than $50,000. "These are numbers that are very unusual in our business," he added.
A live appearance by Keillor is almost always a draw. Crowds of between 7,000 and 11,000 have shown up during the last six years when "Prairie Home" has been booked at the Minnesota State Fair grandstand.
When Keillor talked about the possibility of giving up his host duties and perhaps being a producer for a "successor show," he downplayed his own importance. "Prairie Home," he said, "is essentially a live acoustic music-variety show. I think that in its essence, it has very little to do with Lake Wobegon, very little to do with Guy Noir."
Some listeners expressed doubts about a "Home" without Keillor.
"What he has created is pretty unbelievable," said avid fan Andy Larson, 36, of Minneapolis. "I don't know if someone else could create that environment. Plus, he's clearly an intelligent person, and it's really cool that in our community we have that resource."
"He has wonderful ideas, and it would be interesting to see what road he would take with it (as producer)," said Suzanne Weil, who met Keillor in 1968 when she ran the performing-arts program at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. "But I can't imagine him keeping himself out of it. He's in the program's DNA."
Weil is among those who aren't sure that Keillor could walk away from the stage, noting that he "could think a lot differently once he's a few months removed (from the stroke)."
Even before the health scare, Keillor had been ruminating about aging, and he talked about it at length during the interview, at one point poignantly asking, "How do you want to live your life now that mortality has tapped you on your shoulder?"
He then brought up fond memories of a trip to Great Britain last month. "It was just a wonderful time ... walking around without a schedule, in sunshine and rain, just walking around and looking at whatever I wanted to look at," he said. "I had no work to do and was hanging out with my daughter and her husband, people in their 20s, and I was feeling sort of like 37.
"So that's my goal, to have another glimpse of youth and beauty and put this behind me for a while."
Keillor's workload would exhaust most 27-year-olds. Besides steering "Prairie Home," he edits and narrates the five-minute "Writer's Almanac" that airs daily on many public radio stations, writes a weekly syndicated column and owns a St. Paul bookstore, Common Good Books.
That's a good place to find the four -- count 'em -- books that he is releasing this year: "77 Love Sonnets," "Life Among the Lutherans," "Pilgrims: A Wobegon Romance" and the comic novel "A Christmas Blizzard," due Nov. 3.
Three days after being released from the hospital, Keillor was back at work.
"I'd call him a person who really enjoys his work, and works harder at it than just about anyone I've ever met," said Twin Cities soprano Maria Jette, a semi-regular "PHC" performer. "But he doesn't look like he's working hard. He clearly is not an ordinary human being."
In the end, the love of performing might keep Keillor on stage indefinitely -- along with that whole insecurity thing, which he called "kind of an engine that keeps pushing you."
As he looks forward to a new season, Keillor said, "I think like I'm Charlie Brown, and Lucy's got the football on the ground, and I think, 'Now, this time I'm gonna nail that sucker. This time I'm really gonna do that show that I always thought I could do.' "
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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