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.

Down the Rabbit Hole

During the time I was working full time, I didn’t even try to concentrate on writing, as I couldn’t get to the place I wanted to write from. These days, spending most of my time thinking about my kids and their lives mid 20th-Century, as I have heard the 1950’s called, I am surprised to find that I cannot keep the rest of my life straight! In other words, I knew that it was hard to get down into the real locus of a book if you had much else to think about. I did not know that, once you had gone there, you might have a hard time getting back!

It is a little like deep sea diving. If you go down, you have to come back slowly, so you don’t get the bends. Don laughs at me, seeing that I can’t remember what day it is, or what daily tasks I had hoped to accomplish. “Welcome to my world,” he says. He is always in the present, using calendars and emails to remind himself of what he wants to do. Only with effort, and lots of lists, do I keep the two parts of my concentration flowing smoothly. I have no wish to let writing replace my blessed, active daily life.

This week, with guests in the house and some work for others, I didn’t do any original writing. There was time for editing and research, however. For example:

When would Mother have been reading Adele Davis? She was often interested in food and cooking, and her handwriting is all over many cookbooks and recipe files which are still to be found scattered among her children. “Let’s Cook It Right” was first published in 1947, and Mother certainly could have been reading it ten years later in North Dakota. Later, in the 1960’s, she had copies of “Food Is Your Best Medicine,” by Henry Bieler. I remember her standing over a pot of Bieler broth, happy when she went on to something else! I am never sure how Mother and Dad got their hands on things, but they did manage to be quite current, mostly due to the large number of magazines which arrived in the mail.

During the time Adele Davis (pictured above) was writing, she was living in southern California with complete access to fresh vegetables, something we didn’t have in the winter. The most lasting part of Davis’ influence was probably in the lovely breads we often made, whole wheat, sometimes using brewers’ yeast or milk powder to intensify the protein and vitamins. I really don’t remember eating much Wonder bread. “Mattress stuffing” Dad called it. Towards the end of his life, Dad was grinding the grains to put into his breads.

At my desk this morning it is very quiet. The sky is dark, the wind is strong and it is raining heavily, raining sideways. Reminding me to let myself down, down the rabbit hole to see what adventures await my brave young protagonists.

Paper Avatars

Before the vast array of video games and Farmvilles that people spend their time on today, there were paper dolls. As you can see in the photograph (probably posed, as these girls are wearing their school dresses), kids in the 1950’s, if they didn’t have anything else, had plenty of paper, pencils, colored pencils and crayons. Kids could trace anything they wanted by taping a page to the window, putting a sheet of paper over it and tracing the outlines of what you wanted to make a copy. The copy could then have a different color of hair, a different smile, whatever you liked. And most especially, new dresses!

Of course you could play house with even less, using hollyhock flowers stuck with toothpicks to make dolls with long dresses, or piles of leaves raked into “houses” which resembled house plans out of the magazines. “This is the door, and here is the bedroom, and this is the kitchen,” one child explains to another. And it is absolutely so.

Imagination runs rife in kids. If you were the Brontes, stuck in a gloomy manse with paper and pencil on the moors of England in the 1820’s after the deaths of two older sisters, you might write dark romances about people in imaginary kingdoms. If you are the kids in the photograph, enduring long North Dakota winters with books, magazines, and the Sears catalog coming to your post office box, you have plenty to feed your thoughts, in the optimism of the post-war period. Plenty of ideas about what people should look like and how to make poodle skirts and princess dresses for your paper dolls.

Every kid imagines what his future will be like, basing it on the stories of the people he sees around him. And every kid makes up stories about himself. [I use the masculine English pronouns to stand for humans, as we all are.] I suspect growing up in a high-rise apartment, as kids all over the world now do, must give rise to a need for avatars as strong as those of kids in isolated towns once did. The stories of celebrities, sports figures, musicians and actors fill our kids’ heads these days. With luck and parental help, they have room for the stories they make up themselves, for their own stories.

19th Century Schoolhouse

From first through sixth grade I attended school in this schoolhouse. Occupying a full block, with playground in front, softball diamond in back and ringed in cottonwoods, the school was a focal point of its tiny North Dakota town. The basement had a big furnace in it and a hot lunch room. We played marbles around the furnace and one of my teachers loved square dancing so much, she gave up teaching us in favor of taking us down to the furnace room, where we learned “Put Your Little Foot,” “Take a Little Peek,” and the “Virginia Reel” to 78 records.

On the first floor were four large rooms, two grades to a room, and upstairs, in one large room was the high school. There were usually about ten kids in my class, not so many kids in high school, probably 30-40 at the most. What is hard to believe though, was that all of us, all ages, sometimes played together. The high school kids probably instigated these games of Red Rover, Pom Pom Pullaway, or Tackle Tag. This would be in the middle of winter, kids in their snow clothes flailing about on the ice-covered yard in front of the school. On February 22, the year I was nine, I wrote in my diary, “We had an awful lot of fun at recess. The boys kept us down.”

It was a pretty homogenous, egalitarian bunch, of course, all of us of northern European origins. Most of the farm kids looked a little more poverty-stricken, and definitely worked harder than the town kids. Kids looked after each other. It would have been considered unsporting for a bigger kid to pick on a little kid. Perhaps there was also that Northern need for people to pull together against the often serious threats from the weather, especially in a sparsely populated place.

The cultural net of family, church, small town and this school nourished and encouraged my small budding self, leaving me without much fear and a great desire to take on the world. Our Dick and Jane readers portrayed a suburban world of newspapers being delivered and Father coming home after a day at the office. It was not what I saw around me. Our world was no less worthy of being in books. I have wanted ever since to celebrate it.