The Selling of Karen Sorbo

Sorbo’s late father, Kermit Anderson, was a brilliant mechanical engineer with a degree from the University of Chicago. He invented one of the first microfiche machines, but when another company won the patent, the Andersons lost everything. All three of Kermit’s kids—two older boys and little Karen—had to work. His wife, Adella, worked as a private duty nurse for a family that traveled south for the winter, and she went with them. Kermit did anything he could to excavate the family from his financial miscalculation. He installed artificial fireplaces for Montgomery Ward. He did odd jobs on farms around the family home in Delano. And he bought antiques at auctions and restored them for resale. 

Kermit, his family says, was tough on his kids. Mean, even. Goddamn never going to make it goddamn don’t work hard enough goddamnit. He seemingly knew everything—but he was too impatient, too much of a perfectionist, to teach.

One of Karen’s few positive memories of her father was tagging along with him to farm auctions. She was enthralled by the auctioneer’s chant. “He took me to my first auction when I was three,” she says. “I would sit there and watch this guy with a cowboy hat and a big belt buckle, big enough that you could serve a turkey dinner on it. He would do the ‘Herewegonowgonnagetfiveandahalfsevenandahalf,’ and I just loved it. Many, many years later, and I’ve always had it in my blood.”

Watching Sorbo at the podium, with the poise of a beauty queen, it’s hard to believe that she was ever self-conscious about being the hick from the sticks with a belt on which you could serve a turkey dinner. She says it took a lot of work to transform herself into the woman she is now—well, into a woman at all, really.

When she talks about herself, her voice drops into a conspiratorial tone, as though she’s gossiping about someone else. Almost as if she doesn’t believe any of this happened; as if it were preposterous. Her story nearly is. She grew up, she says, as a tomboy—a big, square-shouldered girl who worked and played with the boys. She never wore makeup. Never wore a bra. Never dated. Never smoked or drank, for that matter. But  she could clean and jerk her weight, 160 pounds. She could build a tree house. She rode Brahma bulls. She mud wrestled. Her one feminine concession was being a waitress at Perkins, but that was just to save enough money to buy a 444-barrel ’68 Mustang. After school, she says, she would swap engine tips and change oil when she wasn’t whipping 360s in the school parking lot or cruising down Mainstreet in Hopkins. Sometimes, she would go to the Shakopee Speedway and race her brother’s Delta ’88 on the figure-eight circuit.

Karen’s mother says that at the time she regretted being away from her kids when they were growing up. She says she knew how hard her husband was on her children, but she ignored it out of loyalty to a man whose pride had been wounded. “But at the same time,” she says, “I always thought Karen would be fine. She was so capable.”

Despite what her mother refers to as Karen’s “Amazon woman” persona, Karen was shy growing up, extremely insecure, and lonely. “Karen always wanted to help people,” her mother remembers. Her first charitable interest was rescuing prostitutes on Hennepin Avenue. Karen’s family was Lutheran, but in high school she started getting “really churchy,” perhaps in response to serious health problems she had in middle school, when she suffered from a debilitating kidney disease (her medical records at the University of Minnesota read “miraculous recovery”). Out of her wheelchair, she started attending services by herself at Soul’s Harbor, a Pentecostal–Evangelical church located in an old hotel on the corner of Washington and Hennepin. It was during the 1970s, and downtown was teeming with prostitutes, often lost young girls from the Iron Range. Sorbo would help try to get the girls off the street, cleaned up, and back on the right track. “My father would always tell me, ‘You can’t save the world, Karen.’ ”          

The only other place she found fulfillment was in music: She was the first-chair horn player at Minnehaha Academy, which she attended on a scholarship, and on the weekends she played with her brothers in the church band and sang in the choir at Soul’s Harbor. When she wasn’t making music herself, she would listen to the gospel choir at a Southern Methodist church on the North Side. “I’ve always had music in my heart,” she says. At one point, she believed she would devote her life to it—she studied music in college and supported herself immediately after graduation by giving private lessons.