By Charlie Warner
Argus News Editor
In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.
-Andy Warhol, 1968
Because she followed her instincts, Aggie Tippery of rural Hokah had her 15 minutes of fame and much more. On Nov. 12, 2006 Tippery, who authored a book about Hokah folklore and is a columnist for The Caledonia Argus and The Houston County News, was the featured guest on National Public Radio’s weekly show “What Do You Know with Michael Feldman.”
The show, which dedicated a full 30 minutes to Tippery’s home-spun writings and wit, was broadcast nation-wide in 2006 and was re-broadcast earlier this month on Jan. 19.
“I’d been listening to Michael Feldman’s show for years and heard he was coming to La Crosse to do a live show,” Tippery recalled last week. “I sent in for tickets right away and my son Tom and I got front row seats. Feldman claims his show is nothing but ‘intellectual nonsense,’ but I love it and I wanted to see it live.”
Tippery said she was so excited about the prospects of seeing Michael Feldman live, she decided to contact him and tell him about the book she had authored about the sleepy little Houston County town, including the listing of more than 160 nicknames of local residents.
“I also told him I could hypnotize chickens,” Tippery said with a laugh. “About two weeks later, I got a call from the show’s producer who asked me if I would like to be one of the featured guests on the show. There wouldn’t be anything rehearsed, I was just supposed to show up and talk to Michael Feldman.”
Tippery had the studio audience, Feldman, and the entire production staff on their knees, according to son Tom. “The guy running the applause sign just sat there in stitches,” Tom Tippery noted. “He never had to turn the sign on when Mom was being interviewed and read from her book.”
Feldman referred to Tippery as a “senior citizen biker chick,” as he had read the chapter in Tippery’s book about how she met her husband Ivan in 1947 and they rode off on a motorcycle. Feldman also likened the Hokah area to Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, but added the Houston County community was a real place.
Tippery had been interested in writing for many years, and enrolled in a creative writing class in the early 1990s. Several years later, she started writing a column for The Houston County News in La Crescent, and in The Argus.
“I never like grammar classes in school. But I figured if it sounded good to me, that was good enough. I guess I write the way I talk,” Tippery noted.
As “Aggie’s View” column grew in popularity, friends and relatives sent her short essays and snippets that she incorporated into her columns.
She decided to put the book together in 2001, after receiving considerable encouragement from Hokah Librarian Barb Bissen. It is a compilation of columns and essays she had penned over the years, many of which had appeared in the weekly newspapers in Caledonia and La Crescent. The book also included a listing of over 160 nicknames of folks living in the Hokah area.
Hokah’s sesquicentennial (150th birthday) was celebrated in 2001, and Tippery worked feverishly to complete the book before the big celebration.
“I figured I’d have a lot better chance of selling books during the celebration. I had the columns all written and just had to do some editing. I did everything on my computer, which took about a month. The book included columns I had written, plus short stories from 18 other persons who had sent me articles over the years.”
When she saw the finished product, Tippery remembers, “I was pretty proud of it. It had been a dream of mine for a long time to publish a book.”
The first printing of the book was 500 copies. She sold several hundred copies during Hokah’s big celebration, and continued selling her book at various venues in the area.
Following the 2006 broadcast, that was heard all over the United States, and parts of Canada, Tippery’s book “Stories of Hokah from Aggie’s View,” sold like hot cakes.
“We had to print another 500 books to keep up with the demand,” she noted. “I received calls and letters from all over the United States. People really enjoyed that radio program and they wanted to read more.”
Last week, following the rebroadcast of Michael Feldman’s interview with Tippery, the requests for more books “got all stirred up again. I found 66 books left from the second printing and Tom took most of them down to the Pearl Street Book Store in La Crosse. They were having folks coming in and asking for the book.”
More to come
Tippery’s creative juices are continuing to flow. She’s working on two more books. One she’s writing as the historic account of Jens Thompson, who murdered three persons, and left a fourth for dead, in Austin, MN. in 1937. Thompson then fled to Houston County, where he hid in the back woods near Hokah before being caught south of Houston. Tippery is hoping to send the finished product to one of the TV programs dealing with historic murders and the ensuing manhunts.
The second book, which she has almost completed, is a look back at all the comical happenings and exploits that occurred on the Tippery farm tucked back in Butterfield Valley just south of Hokah.
“The name of that book is ‘The Bathtub is in the Attic.’ We’ll just leave it at that,” Tippery said smiling.
You can contact Charlie Warner at
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