Pontoon (Keillor)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 7, 1942
• Where—Anoka, Minnesota, USA
• Education—B. A., University of Minnesota
• Awards—Radio Hall of Fame; Grammy Award for Best
   Spoken-Word Album; National Humanities Medal
• Currently—lives in St. Paul, Minnesota

Garrison Keillor is an American author, storyteller, humorist, columnist, musician, satirist, and radio personality. He is known as host of the Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companion (also known as Garrison Keillor's Radio Show on United Kingdom's BBC 7, as well as on RTE in Ireland and Australia's ABC).

Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, the son of Grace Ruth (nee Denham) and John Philip Keillor, who was a carpenter and postal worker. He was raised in a family belonging to the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian denomination he has since left. He is six feet, three inches (1.9 m) tall and has Scottish ancestry. Keillor is a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. He is currently an Episcopalian, but has been a Lutheran. His religious roots are frequently worked into his material: he often remarks that most Minnesotans, being of Scandinavian descent, are Lutherans. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor's degree in English in 1966. While there, he began his broadcasting career on the student-operated radio station known today as Radio K.

Garrison Keillor started his radio career in November 1969 with Minnesota Educational Radio (MER), now Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), and distributing programs under the American Public Media (APM) brand. He hosted The Morning Program in the weekday drive time-slot of eclectic music (a major divergence from the station's classical music format), 6 am to 9 am, on KSJR 90.1 FM at St. John's University in Collegeville, which the station called A Prairie Home Entertainment. During this time he also began submitting fiction to The New Yorker, where his first story, "Local Family Keeps Son Happy," appeared September 19, 1970.

Keillor resigned from The Morning Program in February 1971 to protest what he considered an attempt to interfere with his musical programming. The show became A Prairie Home Companion when he returned in October. Keillor has attributed the idea for the live Saturday night radio program to his 1973 assignment to write about the Grand Ole Opry for The New Yorker, but he had already begun showcasing local musicians on the morning show, despite limited studio space for them, and in August 1973 the Minneapolis Tribune reported MER's plans for a Saturday night version of A Prairie Home Companion with live musicians.

A Prairie Home Companion debuted as an old-style variety show before a live audience on July 6, 1974, featuring guest musicians and a cadre cast doing musical numbers and comic skits replete with elaborate live sound effects. The show was punctuated by spoof commercial spots from such fictitious sponsors as Jack's Auto Repair ("All tracks lead to Jack's where the bright shining lights lead the way to complete satisfaction") and Powdermilk Biscuits, which "give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done." Later imaginary sponsors have included Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery ("If you can't find it at Ralph's, you can probably get along Pretty Good without it"), Bertha's Kitty Boutique, the Catchup Advisory Board (which touted "the natural mellowing agents of ketchup"), the American Duct Tape Council, and Bebop-A-Reebop Rhubarb Pie ("sweetening the sour taste of failure through the generations"). The show also contains parodic serial melodramas, such as The Adventures of Guy Noir, Private Eye and The Lives of the Cowboys. After the show's intermission, Keillor reads clever and often humorous greetings to friends and family at home submitted by members of the theater audience, in exchange for an honorarium.

Also in the second half of the show, the broadcasts showcase a weekly monologue by Keillor entitled News from Lake Wobegon. The town is based in part on Keillor's own hometown of Anoka, Minnesota, and in part on small towns near Holdingford, Minnesota where he lived in the early 1970s. Lake Wobegon is a quintessential but fictional Midwestern small town "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." A Prairie Home Companion ran until 1987, when Keillor decided to end it; he worked on other projects, including another live radio program, The American Radio Company of the Air— which was virtually identical in format to A Prairie Home Companion—for several years.

In 1993 he began producing A Prairie Home Companion again, with nearly identically formatted programs, and has done so since. On A Prairie Home Companion, Keillor receives no billing or credit (except "written by Sarah Bellum," a joking reference to his own brain); his name is not mentioned unless a guest addresses him by his first name or the initials "G. K." However, some sketches do feature Keillor as his alter ego, Carson Wyler, which is a play on his name. At some point Keillor took A Prairie Home Companion on the road; today, the show is broadcast live or taped for broadcast at popular venues around the United States, often featuring local celebrities and skits slanted at local color.

Keillor is also the host of The Writer's Almanac which, like A Prairie Home Companion, is produced and distributed by American Public Media. The Writer's Almanac is also available online and via daily e-mail installments by subscription. Keillor has written many magazine and newspaper articles, and nearly a dozen books for adults as well as children. In addition to his time as a writer for The New Yorker, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly and Salon.com.

He also authored an advice column at Salon.com under the name "Mr. Blue." Following a heart operation, he resigned on September 4, 2001. In 2004 Keillor published a collection of political essays called Homegrown Democrat, and in June 2005 he began a syndicated newspaper column called "The Old Scout," which often addresses political issues. That column also runs at Salon.com. Keillor wrote the screenplay for the 2006 movie A Prairie Home Companion, directed by Robert Altman. (Keillor also appears in the movie.)

Keillor splits his time between his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, and an apartment in New York City. He has been married three times. (From Wikipedia.)