The Coonridge Digest
For roughly two decades Ken Bradbury kept up a tradition all his own: The Coonridge Digest. It began as a newspaper column and grew into a beloved readers-theatre show, returning year after year — folders of scripts survive from the late 1990s through 2018 — with new monologues written for each season. The pieces were short, plainspoken, and unmistakably Ken: little stories about ordinary people that turned, gently, toward grace.
The setting was Coonridge, a fictional small town on the Illinois prairie, narrated most often by Frieda, a tart-tongued, big-hearted churchgoing woman who knows everyone's business and means them no harm. Around her moved a whole cast of locals — her husband Herb who hates visiting other congregations because "everybody there knows when to stand up and sit but him," and neighbors like Hooley the perpetual hitchhiker, Sonny the joke-telling "fetcher & finder," and Frank the old farmer who memorized poetry while he plowed. Coonridge had leash laws that, "like talkative uncles, no one pays much attention to."
The genius of the Digest was its blend. Most pieces are funny — a broken church copy machine becomes "a crisis of legendary proportions" — and then they quietly land somewhere true, usually closing with a short prayer. Across the years the monologues kept the same warm, devotional-and-comic rhythm that made the show a fixture of Ken's writing life. Two short samples in his own voice:
Years later I chaperoned a girls' basketball team on a very long bus ride. Thirty teenage girls can make the shortest jaunt an expedition. I finally asked her. I said, "Becky, I went to the funerals of your father, your mother, and your brother. Every time, it was you who were trying to comfort the rest of us. How'd you do it?"
She looked at me with a pair of blue eyes that would melt a leaden heart and said, "Freida, I knew at those times that if I thought about myself, I'd never make it. I had to get more concerned with other people than with myself. That's the gift God gave me."
"But Frank," I said, "Where'd you put your tools?"
"Oh back in the shed," he said. "Wouldn't done any good to carry the tools. I never could fix anything."
Lord, make Your words a part of me. Let them become so much of me that I become more of You.