Apparently, Garrison Keillor Is the Strangest Person Some People Know

After more than four decades of hosting this homespun Americana musical variety program, which he created and which, in turn, created him, Garrison Keillor is retiring. At his home, Mr. Keillor looms, a melancholy presence, and doesn’t make much eye contact, keeping his bespectacled eyes averted under scraggly eyebrows. Rather than savor the conversation, he seems to cordially endure it. His mellifluous voice, likened to a down comforter or “a slow drip of Midwestern molasses,” feels warmly familiar to any public radio listener who has heard him sing “Tishomingo Blues,” which opens his show each Saturday evening. Everything about “Prairie Home” — the Guy Noir and Lives of the Cowboys sketches, the spots for Powdermilk Biscuits and the Ketchup Advisory Board, the monologues about the fictional Lake Wobegon — sprang from Mr. Keillor’s imagination. But the man spinning the plates at the center of it all managed to stay a mystery, even to people who know him well. “Garrison in person is quite different,” said his longtime friend, the writer Mark Singer. “Garrison does not express emotion in interpersonal conversations the way the rest of us do.” Performers often cultivate alternate personas, but with Mr. Keillor the difference is startling. “His gaze is often floating and takes you in from a strange distance,” said the writer and editor Roger Angell, who in 1970 edited Mr. Keillor’s first piece for The New Yorker. “He is certainly the strangest person I know.”

From "The Garrison Keillor You Never Knew" by Cara Buckley for The New York Times, 2016; Photo by Ackerman + Gruber

Garrison Keillor in the 1970s. Photo from Prairie Home Productions/American Public Media

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