Anoka, Minnesota, straddles the tannin-brown Rum River just as it meets the Mississippi, 20 miles north of Minneapolis. Like any place that has traveled the long arc from lumber boomtown to bedroom community, the 17,000-person town exists in layers. It includes stately Victorian frame houses and stolid 19th-century brick storefronts, an abandoned civic amphitheater and a dreary postwar courthouse, downtown antique malls and sprawl-scale convenience stores.
In 1960, Anoka's most famous son graduated from the local high school. Garrison Keillor's fictional Lake Wobegon is smaller and more isolated than his real-life hometown, but Anoka bears traces of the world of A Prairie Home Companion. The network of local institutions and unspoken compacts that Keillor once called "small-town socialism" is still at work, inspiring people to shop at Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery rather than seeking out the lower prices, bigger selections and wider aisles of the stores in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
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