Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier

If any of you who were born before 1950 want to do yourself a disservice, go to Youtube and play one of the versions of the “Ballad of Davy Crockett”. Without a doubt, you will find yourself singing this infectious song to yourself for weeks afterward! Three Disneyland “Davy Crockett” episodes were broadcast on television in early 1955. According to historians Randy Roberts and James Olson, "by the end of the three shows, Fess Parker would be very well known, the power of television would be fully recognized, and Davy Crockett would be the most famous frontiersman in American history."

We didn’t have a television of our own until 1956, when Mother and Dad rented one so they could watch the national political conventions of that year. But we watched Disneyland at our neighbors. After the third episode, in which Davy Crockett is among the defenders of the Alamo, my 9-year-old self wrote “The kids [in school] said Davy was killed today, but he wasn’t.” His death wasn’t shown in the episode, of course.

The hyperbolic speeches and sayings attributed to Davy Crockett assured his place in legend as well as history. In Congress, he opposed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which resulted in most of the Native Americans from southeastern states following the “trail of tears and death” to lands in the west. He could not have been a bigger hero to us, and was effectively played by the great Fess Parker. “Raised in the woods so he knew every tree, Kil’t him a ba’r when he was only three.”

Every age group of kids has their heroes. The “Star Wars” characters were to my nephew Peter and niece Tara, and Harry Potter was to my stepson Jesse, what Davy Crockett was to us. His story fueled by the sales of coonskin caps, buckskins and toy rifles, as well as that insidious ballad, Davy Crockett was the first of the universally known mega-heroes. As much hype went into his creation as goes into any of them, but I am glad that he was a real person with some fact that can be found at the bottom of the fiction.

Writing Clothes

This week I was recalling a conversation I had with Don when I first met him twenty years ago (yes, it has been that long). I was going to lots of writers’ workshops at the time and working on a novel, and I said “I’m only going to buy writer clothes, from now on.” I meant that I didn’t want to think of my day job as important enough to buy clothes for any longer. Don laughed and said, “Writers wear any old dirty tee-shirt and don’t worry about it!” He was thinking of the writers of screenplays that he knew.

In the intervening years, I did have other jobs I dressed up for. Working in architecture firms made me more sophisticated in many ways. But by the time I got to Marin County and worked for a wine brokerage, we were all wearing jeans to work anyway. It was partly because some of the brokers went out to the vineyards every day, but also that we were far from the city, from banks and schools and other places where people interact with others daily in formal situations.

These days many people work from home, at least part of the day. And many of us are writing, in one form or another. I suspect there are quite a few dirty tee-shirts and pajamas out there where everyone lives and writes. As the Peter Steiner New Yorker cartoon says, “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” For me, daily life is an integral part of writing. Perhaps because I am writing narrative fiction, I want it to be full of the sensuality of smells and sights and sounds. If I go downstairs for one of the red-fleshed cara cara oranges we bought at the market yesterday, its sweetness and tang may get into what I am writing. If the air is wet with the possibility of showers, and I start to smell the rain on the concrete sidewalks, it might too.

It’s the same with clothes. Life and writing touch each other. In fact the point I am most interested in is that exact point where the physical and mental life of a person is enriched by the heart and is felt by him to be important, to be part of his flowering, to be worth the tale. The clothes you are wearing, the external aspect of how you feel about your haircut, may absolutely affect the story you are telling. “The body is the unconscious” may be the central understanding of my generation, leading to all the mind-body awareness which has followed in many areas of life. And so, having become a person whose major activity is writing, I would just like to say, I may be wearing a tee-shirt, but at least it is clean!

Social Capital

The diary I kept intermittently in 1955 states on May 9, “We are getting a new car (truly). We are trying to pick out the color. It is a stationwagon.” At the time my parents had six kids. Mother and Dad ordered a beautiful new Studebaker Conestoga, grey and maroon around the windows, with a hinged back door on which the top flipped up and the tailgate flipped down. My Dad honked the horn for the last half mile he drove it home! And we used it, thoroughly. My parents had partly bought it to drive across country to San Francisco, to a Luther League convention, carrying several teenagers. (Not us. We kids were stashed with my aunt and grandmother.)

As a kid I never knew the economics of our family, but I suspect that there must have been some social capital involved in the purchase of that first new car. Either the churches he served helped Dad purchase it, or the car dealer was related to one of our parishioners, or both. This was a good thing. In North Dakota, people stuck together, helping each other through blizzards, illness, and tough times. Times were good in post-war America and we all thrived.

Robert Putnam, in his book “Bowling Alone”, dates the decline of ‘social capital’ in America, that is the decline of civic, social and fraternal organizations, from a high point in the mid 1950’s. The premise of his work is that social networks have value, and that “inclinations arise from these networks to do things for each other.” I do find that my protagonists in the 1950’s were deeply embedded in their church, in school, in organizations such as Young Citizens League, choir, band and much group play which cut across all social divisions. Of course, family, a deeply social network, both immediate and extended, trumped everything.

I recall one year in which we spent our Halloween trick or treating for UNICEF, the United Nations organization which tries to help the world’s children. Instead of candy, we asked people for dimes for UNICEF. At the end of the evening, we all gathered at the church for a wonderful party, with games and bobbing for apples, and treats of all kinds. I was about 10, and it certainly seemed to me at the time more wonderful than going home with your loot to enjoy it by yourself.

Northern Lights

The Non-Partisan League was started in North Dakota in the early part of the 20^th Century as a cooperative effort to help farmers resist the power of out-of-state corporate interests. I’ve always had a dim notion of it, and have always wanted to see the movie which was made about its beginnings, called “Northern Lights”. Studying the NPL now, I am surprised to find how far reaching some of its reforms were. According to Wikipedia, laws enacted while the Non-Partisan League held sway, “still in force today, after having been upheld by both State and Federal courts, make it almost impossible to foreclose on farmland, as even after foreclosure, the property title cannot be held by a bank or mortgage company. Thus, virtually every farm in existence today in North Dakota is still a ‘family-owned’ farm.”

Never mind that the entire population of the state of North Dakota is less than the city of San Francisco by 150,000 people! It grows many of the cereal grains, oil seeds such as sunflowers and flax, and sugar beets. The weather is typical for the middle of a continent, very cold winters and hot summers with four pronounced seasons. I lived there from age 5 until age 12, and, as I knew nothing else, don’t remember that weather was a big problem. Our houses were well-insulated and big furnaces in our basements kept us warm with coal, shipped in by rail. Railway trains ran so close to our house they shivered the cups off their hooks and broke them!

As a Lutheran pastor, my Dad loved the people of his North Dakota parishes. The cultures of the little towns revolved around their churches, and because farmers didn’t keep a lot of livestock, they were available all winter for active participation! One of the people in our church was a North Dakota state senator. I know there was a lot of political talk that went on around him and his delightful wife [who lived to be 100 years old, I recently learned: Obituary of Lena Sorlie], but I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention.

I do remember that there was some difference between the town kids and the farm kids in school, probably mostly due to the availability of cash in those years. I found out another difference when my teacher for the fifth and sixth grades introduced us to square dancing, as mentioned previously. The town boys had soft hands, while the farm boys’ hands were strong, calloused and hard. It was probably never in the cards for me to end up on a North Dakota farm, but the idea does have a certain romance.