THE SIMPLE LIFE II

By William Urban

Reminiscing about growing up in the 1950s took more words than I could get into one column, but the increasing insistence by intellectual elites on demanding more technology while consuming only local products .suggests that it might be useful to reflect so more on that distant era when even Detroit was an attractive, booming city. Occupy Wall Street would be easy to do in Detroit today, where 78,000 stores and homes stand empty, representing a population collapse worse than much of rural America experienced between 1960 and today.
Every small town in Kansas has an extra-wide main street that once led down to the railroad depot and to the stockyard farther down the tracks. I grew up in the last days of that era. Cattlemen no longer drove herds through town, but the stockyard remained about a hundred yards from my grandparents’ home. In my great-aunt’s town the main street was filled Saturday nights by cars angle-parked on the curbs and parallel-parked in two lines down the middle. Farmers talked about crops till midnight, while their wives stocked up in our general store and gossiped, and the kids packed the theater for a double feature of cowboy movies.
Nobody went to bed before midnight. Small electric fans only circulated the hot air, so after the theater closed we listened to the Cards or White Sox, then played cards until I had supplemented my meager allowance. For what I can’t remember. Pop maybe. There wasn’t else much to buy, and I earned plenty of pocket money by collecting discarded pop bottles for two cents each. Even then we were on a sustainable basis, but only the die-hards continued to save the silver wrapping from chewing gum. We had been told this had been needed for the war effort, but nobody would buy it now. The war was long over. The same for balls of string.
Patriotism was big. Decoration Day brought out all the WWI veterans and families, and when my parents were there, we visited all the cemeteries where relatives were buried. Nobody’s family went too far back — the area hadn’t been settled until the Indian wars were over.
One of my great-aunt’s older friends told me that Comanches had killed three of her uncles. She was very dependable on her sources and was originally from Texas.
My great-uncle had once driven to Texas with his brother right after getting out of the service in 1919. They looked at the Rio Grande Valley, liked its prospects, but needed to talk it over with the women they were thinking of marrying. They made the entire trip on dirt roads, and their Model T didn’t break down until they were within sight of home.
My great-aunt believed in staying put and working hard. When her husband began to play too much golf — I’d never heard of a course closer than forty miles away — she burned his clubs (which in those days were made of wood). She had him slow down once so that she could show me where she had ended up in a ditch, or perhaps against a telephone pole. That was her only time behind the wheel.
That was shortly after they married and rented a place on the south side of town — always a bad sign — near the stockyard and ballpark. She said that they lived on Tough Street. The farther down the street you went, the tougher it got. They lived in the last house.
Everybody had a car, but with the garages only big enough for a Model T, in the summer they just parked them on the street. There were several filling stations, all busy because vehicles tended to break down often, and a flat tire was common. Nobody owned anything but Ford and GM products, and the pick-ups of that day could almost be put in the bed of modern ones.
There were multiple grocery stores, but all provided the same stuff. As soon as I was old enough to work in the general store, I was assigned to sweeping and stocking. Later, when people phoned in their orders, I would put everything in a wire basket and deliver in the ancient panel truck with no brakes; usually I just went in the kitchen door and unloaded everything on the table. I’m not sure I knew everyone’s house from the front, but I had the backs down pat.
The towns were full of soft-wood trees that grew fast, but only the cottonwoods grew large enough for us to clamber higher than was safe. Parents let their sons wander around when they weren’t working or playing on one of the baseball teams. It was a Tom Sawyer existence. But no steamboats, no Blacks, no Asians, no Jews. If we were really bored, we’d watch the cars race by on the east-west highway through town.
I heard the final word on the good old days about 1955. My great-aunt, born about 1896, had a group of contemporaries in her large kitchen for coffee and conversation, with the emphasis on conversation. I could never figure out how they could always find something or someone to talk about. The town wasn’t that large. How many scandals could there be?
Summers were hot, so I took refuge in the new TV room which also provided an indoor entrance to the basement where my great-uncle retired every time a storm neared. I would sit near the noisy air conditioner and read, but I could sill hear what they were saying. Once I heard my great-aunt interrupt the conversation to make a phone call (I believe that it was no longer necessary to ask Central to make a connection), “Blanche, this is Stella. A group of us were talking about you, and one said that you had an illegitimate child, but I didn’t think so, so I called to ask.” After a minute she reported, “She laughed and said, ‘Stella, I thought everyone knew that!’”
It was one of those towns where any girl who made a long visit with an aunt, well, you know what that meant. Or a trip to Tulsa.
But I digress from that 1955 conversation. My great-aunt opened it up by saying, “We’ve all seen a lot in our lifetimes — the first automobile, the first airplane, refrigerators, talking pictures, and so forth. What do you think was the greatest improvement we’ve seen?”
The answer was unanimous — Kotex.

Monmouth Review Atlas (August 29, 2013), 4.

THE SIMPLE LIFE

By William Urban

I recently read a column about the sad decline of a once thriving small town in Texas. It was a very good essay. So much nostalgia wafted from it that I was almost ready to read one of Larry McMurtry ’s novels that describe how capitalism and modern technology destroy the Last Movie Show and his family’s hard-scrabble farm. Whenever I read McMurtry, I half-wish he had remained a dirt farmer. Out-of-sight, out of mind, out of his role as a darling of the eastern establishment that can’t tell a stallion from a gelding, much less cinch up either one..

I have similar memories of the depopulation of once flourishing towns where I grew up in Central Kansas. But I wouldn’t want to return to those days, even if that were possible.
I remember them as places with lots of people, lots of stores. Of course, 600-800 people was a lot then, and the county seat had only 2500. There were few trees to get in the way of town lights twenty miles away, and hardly any rural lights at all. Each town had a real main street lined with a variety of stores offering everything the simple life required. Social life centered on the community, the school and the churches. There was no television to distract anyone, and the radio offered only sports, the Lone Ranger and soap operas for after school and summer time. A fairness doctrine guaranteed that no radio station would host a talk show except about sports (where partisan opinions were tolerated), so we got to hear the top 100 (or twenty) hits of the day, Lawrence Welk, and plenty of country music (but no Elvis Pressley).

The first big blow to these small communities came in 1958 when the mail delivery was changed from rail to truck. The mail bags had been picked up on a Jitney (half mail, half passenger) that ran from Salina to Plainville, about 100 miles along Paradise Creek. I seem to remember going one way on it in the morning, back in the afternoon, but that is probably a quirk of memory. It is unlikely that it made more than one trip each way every day.

Still, it wasn’t a Big Auto that killed Light Rail — as Who Killed Roger Rabbit implied — but people wanting to go other places. Or go when they wanted to go. It was nice to meet people on the Jitney, but they were only women who could spend the day waiting in the depot and then watching the fields go by at thirty miles an hour. Everything in Salina was near the depot, and as long as the temperature was not too hot or cold, or the purchases too heavy, that was just perfect. Even the rails are gone now.

Similarly, the stockyards. For decades cattlemen trucked their livestock to the one down the block from my grandparents, but eventually they figured out that if they had to put the animals on a truck anyway, they might as well drive them straight to the packing house. It was the same for wheat, which once had to be weighed and stored at the elevators; when farmers built storage facilities right on their farms, why not cut out the middleman?

The second blow to these communities was the Land Bank, which returned marginal land to prairie grass. That was a good way to deal with dust storms, but it hit renters hard. My family ran a general store and a movie theater — and we lost good customers who didn’t pay their debts when they left. I can’t blame them. They just didn’t have the money, which was why they bought on credit. Many of their ramshackle homes had no indoor toilets, and they could not afford television or new cars. No wonder movies about the Kettle family were so popular that we allowed customers to sit in the aisles. No safety inspector, either.

The schools were basic firetraps, but as the number of pupils declined, consolidation eliminated the worst of them. I’ve written elsewhere about my positive experience with the combined 1-3 class, but I didn’t describe the depressing room upstairs that served as cafeteria, assembly room and community center, or the rough games we played. No grass on the play ground, but no concrete, either. I later became pretty good at marbles, with a circle in the dust indicating where we had to kneel, but I got my start here. Allergies were bad, but I didn’t know it. I just thought that nobody could breathe through his nose.

The schools were good enough for many students to go to college. Of course , after graduation, there was no work for them at in their home towns, so they found jobs in cities..
A dentist came through once a month, and an eye doctor, too. There was a hospital twenty-five miles away, but I never heard of anyone getting out of it alive. That was probably because nobody went in until far too late. Everything that is discouraged today was done then. Everyone smoked and drank except strict Protestants (and some of them did on the sly). Lonely farmers hanged themselves.

We drove forty miles to swim, not today’s ten minutes to the big dam. My grandparents lived in a town was about half Catholic, but the nearest Catholic church was twenty-miles away. I lived more often with my great-aunt, where the Baptists had so few members that she went across the street to worship with them. Once she was very discouraged by a fiery sermon about the evils of movies, drinking and dancing. Since her husband ran the movie theater, she sold tickets and got to know everywhere in the three county area; they also drank and danced, but not nearly as much as they did before the First World War or even during the Depression. Church members consoled her, “Stella, don’t. take it to heart. You were here before he came, and you’ll be here long after he’s gone.”

It was a nice life in many ways — especially the cook outs with fifteen or twenty guests, homemade buns, homemade pies and homemade ice cream. But few of those I hear extoll sustainable living should want those days to come back. A few winter visits to the outhouse or using the thunder pot takes the romantic glow off the simple life.

Review Atlas (August 22, 2013), 4.

DAN BROWN’S INFERNO

By William Urban

I am not a fan of Dan Brown, the worst novelist to ever make a fortune banging out thrillers, but this, his latest offering, is better written than the Da Vinci Code and its sequels. Sure, there are passages that probably make Mark Twain want to rise out of his crypt — the only melodramatic device not employed in this tale — but there are fewer bad sentences.

To mention one of Twain’s cautionary points, the unnecessary adjective, Brown would say (and I quote from memory of an audio-book or I would look up the exact wording), “the fading sun illuminated her pretty face.” Twain would ask, “Does she have another face?”

Brown likes “tall”, “handsome”, “famous” to describe the Harvard professor of Symbolism who likes to pause in the middle of a flight from a mysterious assassin to deliver a lecture on some obscure point of art or philosophy, but he does this less than before. Also, Professor Robert Langdon makes fewer claims that Symbolism can explain almost everything. Good for him here, since one of the female characters has an IQ considerably higher than his. Previous female leads couldn’t figure Langdon out until after the story was over. When they did, they dropped him.

This allowed Brown to start each book with a new love story, one that the principals never have time to consummate (or perhaps no ability to do — Langdon’s principal interest is himself, which he illustrates by constantly thinking back on what he said in some lecture to presumably packed audiences in Haavad or Florence or Istanbul). In any case, everybody knows him, and in this book they are trying to arrest him, kill him, or whatever. (We don’t know why because nobody will tell him or us what is really going on).

The real plot isn’t about the end of the world, though at several points that seemed to be what was happening, but the museums, churches, and other historic sites that Langdon dashes through in an effort to understand the Dante-inspired puzzle left behind by the madman who started the whole business. But not to worry. Inferno is really only a screen play for a forthcoming movie starring some tall, handsome, slightly ageing Indiana Jones without martial arts knowledge and whose physical training consists of swimming (where he presumably prepares his lectures in his photographic memory). Brown makes his customary jabs at the Roman Catholic Church, at Capitalism, and other safe targets; he never mentions Islamic thoughts or practices, which is good because jihadists might identify him with Langdon more than he already does himself, and he might not be able to talk his way out of trouble or find a hidden door to escape the way his fictional hero does.

The reader of the audio book is first-rate most of the time. He manages to get through entire passages of Italian very well, then stumbles over simple words. When Langdon and his (insert adjective here) female friend are fleeing through the Boboli Gardens above the Pitti Palace, the reader repeatedly says Bubbly Gardens. Since Bo-bo-li is easily checked on Google, I was put off as much as by the reader of a spy thriller who could not pronounce Trastevere, a suburb of Rome where one can find reasonably priced restaurants and interesting bars. No menus in English, which is tells the experienced eater that authentic Italian food is served there.

As it happened, I have been at every place mentioned in the novel, whether Florence, Venice or Istanbul, so I listened to the descriptions much as Brown intended — as a tourist recalling what he has seen or hoped to see some day. He gives just enough information to jog the memory or to occasion a smile, but not so much as to bore (unless you happen to be one of Langdon’s ex-girl-friends). Whenever he makes a witty comment, he grins. He grins a lot.

In contrast to the travelers who have been hustled past a great monument, I lived in Florence and have taken multiple student groups around Italy, where we often stood in front of a church, or statue, or painting, and reviewed what our art historians had already covered in class. This made me a bit impatient with Langdon saying that he did not know Italian, yet being able to understand it or speak it whenever the plot required. At times I wanted to shout, “If you are going to be a specialist in symbols in Renaissance art and in Dante, you jolly well better be able to speak Italian!”

Translations don’t always hack it. I remember one conference where I had a disagreement with a professor from the University of Chicago about what Machiavelli meant by a certain passage. At lunchtime I walked down to a local used book store, found several copies of il Principe for next to nothing and brought them back for the participants who could read the text in question. We persuaded the professor to reluctantly admit that he could be wrong. (I did not get a thank you note, which may explain why when I visualize Langdon, I get a mental picture of that guy.) It’s the same for reading Dante, which is why about half of any good Dante text is footnotes to explain what the words and ideas meant in 1300.

Reviewers of this novel have been merciless. Much tougher than I have been. But Dan Brown doesn’t worry. The reviewers may be well-paid, but he is rich.

On the good side, there is nothing in the book that is revolting or shocking. No sex, either. Brown cheats with the plot, but if you’ve read him before, you’ll be expecting that. With O’Henry it was a twist at the end. With Brown, it’s every time he runs out of ideas.

As escapist literature, it’s okay. A reader might even be provoked to think a bit. Or to book a trip to Florence. One tip: it’s hotter in Florence in August than in Monmouth, and no hotel I can afford has air conditioning. Go in March or April, or September. Take Brown’s Inferno with you, and when you go home, leave it behind.

Review Atlas (August 15, 2013)