A Golden Age (05-14-07)

Occasionally, on Saturday afternoons, I am able to catch a bit of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, an old-style radio variety show that features a lot of humor, a lot of good music, and a little drama all in front of a live audience. The program travels the country, and last year Prairie Home Companion was broadcast live from the Kansas State Fair, but that is another story for another day.

The show is two hours with an intermission half way, and Keillor always returns from the break with a long monologue about the goings-on in a fictitious Minnesota town, “Lake Wobegon.” The town is modeled after Keillor’s own home of Anoka, Minnesota, and while the stories of small town Wobegon life may be embellished for their humor or their pathos, each tale contains a pearl of rural wisdom. Listening to Lake Wobegon stories has as much to do with my love of small town life as any other influence, and while I don’t get to listen to the show on a regular basis, I still consider myself a big fan. One of these days, I want to rent the movie Keillor made about his radio program. Yes, he made a movie featuring a radio program, but that is really another story for another day.

I digress. It’s been that kind of a week. What brought me to think about the quaint and eccentric Lake Wobegon is that I got to hear the end of that segment on A Prairie Home Companion while driving to various graduation receptions this Saturday afternoon. I got to hear Keillor’s famous end-line, the sentence that ends each segment of “The News From Lake Wobegon,” a sentence so well known by fans that it brings about applause before Keillor gets even past the third word. The sentence goes like this: “Well, that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”

And it occurred to me, as I heard these words for the thousandth time that we in Hill City can make the very same claim.

Of course, what small town principal would think otherwise? “The women are weak, the men of homely, and all the children are mediocre” is not a slogan you would be likely to hear in any town. However, as I had just experienced my first Hill City graduation, Keillor’s slogan truly struck a chord with me.

Because, I truly believe that here is Hill City, we are living in a golden age. Now, when many try to identify the “golden age” of education, most think back to the 1950’s. But I think we are right smack-dab in the middle of a golden age of education, here and now. I see it every day, and graduation just emphasized the point.

The Hill City High School graduation was an amazing and powerful event. Yes, the gym was hot, but at only forty minutes, the ceremony was short enough to enjoy without being overbearing. This fact alone more than proves that they best education happens in small schools. In a 6A school, it would take more than an hour just to watch all the kids file in. Of all the kids that would graduate a large school, you might know a handful. The speaker would be from outside the school and would be tuned out by most of the tired and impatient crowd.

Our speaker, former teacher, Fred McAllister, made us laugh, made us think, and ultimately made many of us choke back our tears. Why? Because Mr. Mac knows every single graduate, and has formed a bond mutual respect with the students and with their families. When he instructed the each senior to turn to the person on either side and to give that person a hug, because, as a class, they would never all be together ever again, well, needless to say, there weren’t many dry eyes in the house.

And it just got better. The song sung so beautifully by Cassie and Janette moved us not just because it was so well sung, it moved us because we all know Cassie and Janette, we have all marveled at their talent, and we realized that we were being treated for probably the last time to their musical gift.

What made the greatest impression on me was the part of the ceremony where the graduates streamed into the aisles, packed so tightly with friends and family, gave a rose to their parents, and then began to hug the ones they loved.

I have seen this done before at graduations, and it never fails to put a lump in my throat. But our seniors took the ceremony one step further. They not only hugged their parents, they not only hugged their brothers and sisters, and they not only hugged their friends, these incredible young men and women took the time to go through the crowd to find and embrace their teachers.

That image, of teacher and student locked in each other’s arms, will stay with me forever. While it is time for this group of students to take the next step, it became almost painfully clear just how much they will be missed, and just how much they will miss us.

I hope you are able to appreciate the good kids attending our high school and the wise and caring staff who have dedicated their lives to helping them grow into the outstanding young men and women we graduated this week. Public education, when it works, is a wonderful thing, and we in Hill City are very blessed to have a school system that excels in producing people of whom we can be very proud.

Yes this is a golden age, folks. Here in Hill City, we live in an age where teachers love their students and students love their teachers, where education is still seen as something of value, and where the men are good looking, the women are strong, and our graduating seniors really are all above average.