As far as we know, no one in the Prairie Home Companion cast or crew actually got stopped by Colfax police during their drive down to Pullman.
Garrison Keillor’s reference to the infamous speed trap—which got a big laugh from the sold-out crowd at Beasley Coliseum Saturday afternoon—came courtesy of assistant professor Marie Glynn who sent the PHC staff a 2,000-word dossier on Pullman just days before the live broadcast.
At least Glynn thinks that’s the origin of Keillor’s story about the speed trap. Julie Hungate, who coordinated transportation for the cast and crew during their Pullman visit, isn’t sure.
“The way he talked about it when they rehearsed it on Friday was just like it’d be if you got a ticket,” said Hungate, a regular on the Pullman-Spokane commute. “He talked about the lights flashing and everything. It was funny. We were all wondering if they’d gotten a ticket.”
For whatever reason, the version Keillor told on Saturday night, which Hungate heard from a seat at the back of the stage, was less detailed, but still hit a chord with the audience.
Which made it particularly fun for Glynn, who tried to give Keillor information that went beyond a textbook description of the community, and got to the heart of how people in Pullman see themselves and their community.
“Doing a show in San Francisco is different from doing a show in Pullman,” Glynn said. “San Francisco already exists in the collective imagination of the United States. Pullman didn’t exist in the collective imagination.” So Glynn had to help put it there.
Her directions were to give “lots of detail” but not the Chamber of Commerce version of Pullman. Glynn said she wrote a paragraph about Pullman’s early history, a couple paragraphs about WSU and two paragraphs about the relationship between Pullman and Moscow. She chuckled to hear that reduced to Keillor’s comment that “Pullman has a benevolent attitude toward Moscow.”
She, and most everyone else in Beasley, laughed when Keillor asked guest performer Charlie Sutton, a
But, Glynn, a photographer for 40 years, particularly enjoyed hearing Keillor use a variation of her description of light and shadow on the Palouse hills.
“I loved it when he used my description of wheat stubble under a storm-darkened sky appearing lit from within,” she said. He also mentioned several times how beautiful the hills appeared as he drove down to
“I like to think that my description prepared him for the beauty of the drive,” she said.
Glynn, a 15-year resident of Pullman, said she was approached less than two weeks ago do to research for the show. Glynn was a part-time board operator at Northwest Public Radio from 1997 to 2003, she said, and that may have been why her name surfaced when the call for a researcher went out.
She agreed to the job on a Friday and emailed her “research” on Monday, but Keillor didn’t look at it until the following Tuesday, four days before the show. “We work close to deadline,” he told her.
That was two days after the first crew members showed up with equipment. Station manager Roger Johnson said he was just leaving Simpson United Methodist Church Sunday morning when he got a call from the driver, saying he needed directions to Beasley. In less than a minute, Johnson had found the truck on Grand Avenue near the library and, using his cell phone, could tell the driver that he was the driver in the red Subaru and he led the truck up to campus.
For the most part, he said, the event “was fairly routine, “which was good.”
One of the things the crew especially appreciated, he said, was the food in Pullman. They had dinner Friday night at Swilly’s and were catered by Memorable Events.
“You feed people well and they are generally going to be happy,” he said.
Band leader Rich Dworsky and guitarist Pat Donohue even dedicated a song, “Greens and Vinaigrette,” to Swilly’s.
Tom Hungate, head of corporate sponsors and business support for Northwest Public Radio, said he is a huge fan of Dworsky’ and was at the Beasley Saturday morning when Dworsky came in saying he had a song “hot off the presses.”
Hungate, who is Julie Hungate’s husband, said he’s not sure if Dworsky really composed the song that morning, but he did get to hear them practicing it and was thoroughly impressed at the way they handled complex vocal phrasing and instrumentation.
“That was the hardest song they did in the whole show,” he said.
Hungate, his wife and others who worked with the PHC cast and crew said it was a wonderful experience. “All the people I met, bar none, were delightful,” he said. “Unprentious, down-to-earth.”
After hearing about
“Now the national audience may think we care more about lentils than we in fact do,” she said and laughed.
If you’d like to listen to a recording of the Prairie Home Companion show, go to https://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2006/10/07/
