WYATT EARP: A VIGILANTE LIFE

By William Urban

Andrew Isenberg’s new biography is advertised as revisionist, and it is. But that has been true of every biography since it was proven that the 1931 classic by Stuart Lake, Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal, was more fiction than fact.
The first reaction to the debunking of Lake (who was an advisor for the “Frontier Marshal” TV show of 1956-61 with its catchy theme song) was to believe that Wyatt was essentially a criminal. After all, policemen and criminals tended to come from the same lower class, and Wyatt’s career had gone from horse thief to policeman to professional gambler to racing horses and fixing fights. It was even suggested that he held up a Wells Fargo stage, or planned to.
Later it became popular to portray Wyatt Earp as a gunslinger for capitalism. However, the laugh factor set in. Who, exactly were these capitalists he was working for? Wells Fargo? The miner owners in Tombstone? They don’t seem to have paid him well! At last it was discovered that he really hadn’t shot that many folks. His specialty in his law-enforcement careers in Kansas and Arizona was to knock drunken troublemakers over the head with his revolver. He was, in fact, a fairly respectable physical specimen, and few sober men would want to take him on. Or perhaps have a cause to.
When a reader of old Peoria papers discovered how many times Wyatt had been arrested there for consorting with prostitutes (most likely he was a bouncer), it did not take long to connect his first “wife” with the daughter of a local madam. Then later his “wife” in Wichita with a girl working in his sister-in-law’s whorehouse. (James, who had lost the use of an arm in the Civil War, married a woman working in the horizontal profession, then helped move her into a management position; as a bartender, he could direct customers her way.) His “wife” in Tombstone did not work in that city until Wyatt abandoned her for Sadie (whom he also never married); afterward she drifted back to Arizona, resumed her profession and died of a drug overdose.
Isenberg covers most of this very well. He was unfortunate in publishing too soon to get the real scoop on Sadie, who had persuaded everyone that her first visit to Arizona was as an actress performing in H.M.S. Pinafore. We now know that she was a fourteen-year-old prostitute who had run away from her family in San Francisco and at the time of the excitement in Tombstone was the live-in girlfriend of Sheriff Behan. She was, in fact, the reason that Behan’s wife divorced him, but unfortunately for conspiracy theorists, she did not seem to have been the reason for Behan hating Wyatt.
Isenberg gets Wyatt’s early life better than most previous biographers, but that is because he used my articles on Nicholas Earp in Monmouth and Iowa, most importantly the semi-legal judicial scam that Wyatt’s grandfather and father and one uncle pulled on citizens who had failed to pay their debts — arresting them, collecting the court costs, then confiscating property to pay the IOUs that they had bought at a discount.
Wyatt and his brothers were driven, Isenberg posits, by an Honor Code. That, not money or politics or personal advantage, is why the Earps and the cowboys faced off at the OK corral in late 1881. There is obviously something to this, but it seems that he rides this horse a bit too hard. The world is too complicated to fit into nice categories, even one as attractive as this one.
Moreover, even Isenberg’s Wyatt is not sufficiently one-dimensional to make it work. His description of Doc Holliday is such that Val Kilmer and Dennis Quaid just might come after him — Doc was too short and too thin to be a fighter, and not much of a gunslinger, either. Why he hit it off with Wyatt has always been a mystery. Isenberg comes awfully close to suggesting that it was a romantic relationship. (I told you this was a revisionist book.)
Wyatt read at least one book in his old age. Owen Wister’s The Virginian inspired him to remake his past into a noble image of a defender of right and justice. This fit the bill for biographers, including Lake, who wanted a two-fisted tale that even respectable women could read, and were willing to believe that Wyatt’s private life was as pristine as the television show later portrayed him — no drinking, no interest in women or gambling. The not drinking part was correct, and after Wyatt met Sadie, he stopped running after other women. Or, maybe, he couldn’t afford them. (She was quite a spendthrift and a bad gambler.)
Isenberg tells us much about the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey fight, saying that the fix was in, and that Sharkey had been beaten to a pulp before Fitzsimmons struck his signature blow to the solar plexus that gave Wyatt an opportunity to rule it a low blow. This gave the match to Sharkey and the gamblers. There was a great public outcry, which Isenberg said was the critical moment in Wyatt’s concern over his reputation. Until then he had been forgotten, but once Tombstone residents began to say what scum he was and those who had lost bets on the fight spread it around that he had been crooked from the beginning, Wyatt decided to tell his side of the story his way. Previous biographers fingered Sadie for the cover-up; Isenberg blames Wyatt.
Wyatt left out the times he sold gold bricks to suckers who thought they could get stolen property cheap, or his managing saloons; and he exaggerated his family’s status in Monmouth society. The Earps who stayed in Monmouth were hard-working, honest, and religious. Wyatt’s family didn’t fit into any of those categories.
This said, one can still argue that there was something heroic about the Earps taking on the cowboy faction, and tragic in what it cost them. Isenberg doesn’t agree, which almost guarantees that the next Wyatt Earp biography will spend more time arguing with Isenberg than we really care about. Above all, Wyatt and his brothers, his parents and his wives, were not dull. They were, once biographers took their stories in hand and made them fit what the public wanted, the stuff of legend.

Review Atlas (Nov. 29, 2013), 4.

ARMISTICE DAY

By William Urban

This holiday has been known as Veterans Day since 1954, but when I was young the men who served in the Great War were still around — fit enough for a small parade, a speech and an honor guard salute. The great-uncle I lived with summers had no exciting war stories. He was on a naval supply vessel that sailed from Quebec to Boston and back, and the closest he came to a life-changing experience was meeting a young woman in Boston whose father was in banking. Since he was exceptionally good at math and met people easily, he would probably have become rich had he wed her, but he chose to return to Kansas to marry my grandmother’s sister, Stella. His brother was on a destroyer that sank a U-Boat.
German U-Boats torpedoing American ships got America into the war. The German excuse was that these vessels were delivering food and other supplies to Britain and France, but the Kaiser had backed away from “unrestricted” submarine warfare until 1917, when he decided that President Wilson’s not preparing for war indicated that the United States would not fight, and that if the United States did declare war, its ninety million people would not make a difference — a mongrel population such as America’s could not fight, and almost no troops would get to France before Paris fell. Lastly, there were so many Irish who hated Britain (like Pat Buchanan today) and so many German immigrants (still the largest ethnic group in America) that Congress would hesitate to vote for war.
It was not a good period for people with names like my grandmother’s family (Osterfund). Speaking German was punished by vigilantes, so German language churches switched to English and German language newspapers went out of business. But it was not Germans alone who were affected. President Wilson nationalized all major industries and transportation systems, making the mobilization the closest to National Socialism we have ever experienced. This was not National Socialism as it later developed in the Third Reich, but it was pretty much like what Germans had expected when Hitler came to power. Later Wilson’s abuses were directed at pacifists and left-wing radicals, many of whom were recent immigrants from Russia.
Russia was not affected by the end of the war in the West (11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, in 1918). The tsar had abdicated in March of 1917 and Russia had become a republic with a Social Democrat government. Then in November Lenin led a handful of Communists to overthrow that government. The result was a long civil war that the Communists won, allowing them to shoot any opponents they could get their hands on and to confiscate the property of those who got away.
Compared to the dead in Europe, America did not suffer much. But the families of the 110,000 who did die in battle or from disease had reason to ask what it was all for; and those who came home with limbs blown off or lungs ruined by gas couldn’t get them much of an answer.
The basic reasons had been to prevent Germany from dominating Europe and German militarism from spreading over the world. Since many German immigrants had come to America to escape service in the Prussian army, they knew what this meant, so they supported the war effort. Also, Americans were familiar with German arrogance before the war, and recently the Kaiser had made a secret proposal to the revolutionary government in Mexico that if it would provoke a war with the United States, it would get back the territories lost in the war of 1846-47 (basically the entire Southwest, including Texas). The telegram was intercepted by the British and decoded, then given to the press.
For all these reasons the veterans were proud of what they had achieved. A very small regular army had expanded quickly to a formidable fighting force that only lacked training, weapons and experience. They got the latter very quickly. The first Doughboys disembarked with the stirring declaration, “Lafayette, we are here.” Soon they were arriving at 10,000 a day, with no troop transports lost to U-Boats. By summer they were ready to blunt the last great German offensive (by divisions brought from the Russian front), then to push the “Boche” back to the point the German generals asked for an armistice (a cease fire) that would be followed by laying down the weapons and the negotiation of peace terms (the Versailles Treaty).
America was never the same afterward. Just as in the Eddie Cantor song, “How ’ya gonna keep ’em, down on the farm, After they’ve seen Pa-ree?” many left the farming life, and those who stayed began using tractors. Grain prices, high during the war, crashed, leaving the farm economy in a near permanent crisis. Prohibition had come in as a war measure, but drinking resumed. Corsets disappeared, replaced by jazz, Freud, and pre-marital sex.
Pacifism became so important politically that by the mid-Thirties, when Hitler and the Japanese militarists were more obviously looking for a war than the Kaiser ever had been, Franklin Roosevelt found it difficult to rally Americans to resist them. No one wanted another war, and many were willing to believe that if they just ignored the world, the world would leave them alone.
There is a lot of that attitude around today. But Barack Obama’s hurried pull-out of Iraq has not worked well, Afghanistan could become another Iraq, and Iran could acquire the nuclear weapons it needs to wipe out “the Little Satan” (Israel) and take on “the Great Satan” (us). We were almost at war in Syria, without allies, without a clear purpose, and without the American people understanding what was going on. Now our allies are as dismayed by our administration’s erratic policies as our enemies are encouraged. A hands-off president leading from behind has a reduced military, an underperforming economy, and a debt crisis that gives China tremendous leverage over what we can do. He is not enthusiastic about patriotic holidays. He is skipping the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.
In 1915 Wilson said, “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” Within two years we were at war.
Review Atlas (Nov 7, 2013), 4.

MORE ON DAN BROWN

By William Urban

Readers know that I consider Dan Brown is a terrible writer. Terrible, but a crowd pleaser. This opinion was recently shared by Robert Pogue Harrison in the October 24 New York Review of Books, commenting on The Inferno.
Pogue writes about Professor Langdon’s opening lecture on Dante, “Like everything else in this astonishingly bad novel, Langdon’s lectures lacks verisimilitude. Delivered in a great hall to over two thousand people who gasp, sigh, or murmur at every commonplace remark, it serves as a narrative ploy to convey rudimentary information about Dante to the uninformed reader.”
I’ve taught the Inferno often enough to both recognize its incredible richness and my limitations in understanding it. The language isn’t the problem, since there are many very good translations. As for nuances that are difficult to translate, anyone who knows Italian can read a well-footnoted edition that explains the obsolete words and obscure references. The problem in reading the text in any form is the combination of social norms in a medieval society, the Catholic theology of the late 13th century, and the tumultuous politics as described by an intensely partisan poetic genius.
Let it be noted: seldom do poetic geniuses stand back dispassionately and observe the contemporary scene. Brown’s hero, Robert Langdon, does. Or thinks he does. However, he is only a pseudo-genius that represents Dan Brown’s view of himself as intellectual superman. Alas, Brown only writes as well as he thinks, and he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
As Pogue says, “Brown’s novel has a cast of characters, to be sure, yet it has no interest in tracking the inner motivations of the souls or probing the muddled sources of their motivation. His characters are so thoroughly vapid and cartoonish that one suspects that Brown deliberately refrained from giving them any psychological density for fear that this would merely create friction on the high-speed rails on which his thriller races along.” Then the killer line, “The good news, for readers who go along for the ride, is that the novel reaches its destination quickly.”
None too quickly for me, though I will probably plow through his next novel. There is something about a terrible accident that makes people crowd in to look. The Warren County library aids and abets in this by buying the most popular audio books.
Now, why do I care? Because literature is the heart of a liberal education, and one must read bad literature to know what good literature is. If there were no hell, could we properly appreciate heaven?
Well, Dan Brown has more hell for us. He is now reissuing his earlier novels — the ones that were good enough to print fifteen years ago, but not exciting enough to attract the public. It is easy to see why. His 1998 Digital Fortress begins thus: “It is said that in death, all things become clear; Ensei Tankado now knew it was true. As he clutched his chest and fell to the ground in pain, he realized the horror of his mistake. People appeared, hovering over him, trying to help. But Tankado did not want help – it was too late for that. Trembling, he raised his left hand and held his fingers outward. Look at my hand!”
Where is Mark Twain when we need him? Or even an editor with a blue pencil? I think that Tankado probably clutched his chest in pain and that he realized his mistake with horror. Two awkward statements in only six lines, but pretty typical of Dan Brown’s style.
There were comments about his bad writing back when Digital Fortress first appeared, but he didn’t take them to heart. He filled The Da Vinci Code and The Inferno with crappy sentences, and there is nothing in The Lost Symbol to make anyone care about Masons.
Clearly, Brown doesn’t care what the critics think. As he said a few years ago, “I do something very intentional and specific in these books. And that is to blend fact and fiction in a very modern and efficient style, to tell a story. There are some people who understand what I do, and they sort of get on the train and go for a ride and have a great time, and there are other people who should probably just read somebody else.” Good advice.
Why was Digital Fortress reprinted? First, his publisher knew that Brown’s name would attract buyers. This had its down side. One reader who liked the Da Vinci Code wrote, “I wanted to jump into the book and slap the characters around because they were so annoying. Everything about this book is annoying. The coincidences are just too many; the characters are predictable. I knew exactly how it will end three chapters into the book!”  Another wrote, “This book is painful to read. Most of the facts, much of which are crucial to the plot, are just flat out wrong. Dan Brown does not know very much about computers, cryptography, guns, or intelligence work, and it shows. His research was pathetic. This alone will turn off many technically-savvy folks.” He then added, “The climax was one of the worst I have ever read in any techno-thriller novel, and that is saying a lot considering how crowded this field became after Tom Clancy made it big.”
One reader from 2004 summarized the problems, “Wow, where to begin. This is the second Dan Brown book I’ve read and I’m guessing it’ll likely be the last. To begin, if you plan on reading this book, forget suspending your disbelief, rather tie up your disbelief, take it out back and shoot it lest it resurface while you’re reading the book.”
That prediction, of course, was wide of the mark. It seems that the worse Brown writes, the larger the number of satisfied readers. Many reviewers give Digital Fortress one star (the lowest possible rating), but others give it five-stars.
The second reason for the reprint is the increased public awareness of computer hacking and the NSA’s collecting data on just about everyone. Digital Fortress is suddenly relevant at the same time that Dan Brown’s name is well-known. We can count on huge sales, and more exposure on the History Channel (right up there with UFOs, crop circles and documentaries on Hitler).
Are the positive reader reactions another proof that our public schools have been a failure? Or that people read thrillers so fast that they don’t notice the writing at all?

Review Atlas (Oct 24, 2013), 4.

Readers of my columns in the Review Atlas will be familiar with my opinion that Dan Brown is a terrible writer. Terrible, but a crowd pleaser.

This opinion is shared by Robert Pogue Harrison in the latest New York Review of Books (Oct 24, 2013). [Don’t ask me why they mailed their issue so far ahead of the delivery date.]

Pogue writes about Professor Langdon’s opening lecture on Dante, “Like everything else in this astonishingly bad novel, Langdon’s lectures lacks verisimilitude. Delivered in a great hall to over two thousand people who gasp, sigh, or murmur at every commonplace remark, it serves as a narrative ploy to convey rudimentary information about Dante to the uninformed reader.”

I’ve taught the Inferno often enough to both recognize its incredible richness and my limitations in understanding it. The language isn’t the problem, since anyone who knows Italian can read a well-footnoted edition that explains the obsolete words and obscure references, but the combination of social norms in a changing society, Catholic theology in an era of stress, and tumultuous politics as expressed by an intensely partisan poetic genius.

Let it be noted: seldom do poetic geniuses stand back dispassionately and observe the contemporary scene.

Langdon does. Or thinks he does. This paper cutout that represents Dan Brown’s view of himself, alas, doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

As Pogue says, “Brown’s novel has a case of characters, to be sure, yet it has no interest in tracking the inner motivations of the souls or probing the muddled sources of their motivation. His characters are so thoroughly vapid and cartoonish that one suspects that Brown deliberately refrained from giving them any psychological density for fear that this would merely create friction on the high-speed rails on which his thriller races along.” Then the killer line, “The good news, for readers who go along for the ride, is that the novel reaches its destination quickly.”

None too quickly for me, though i will probably pick up his next novel. There is something about a terrible accident that makes people crowd in to look.

Literature is the heart of a liberal education, and one must read bad literature to know what good literature is.

If there were no hell, could we properly appreciate heaven?

THE SIMPLE LIFE III

By William Urban

The sustained call for sustainably makes me aware of how few people know anything about their families’ rural roots, back when sustainably was a fact of life so pervasive that everyone merely called it being frugal. Every family in the small Kansas towns of my youth had chickens in the back yard or neighbors who did. Kitchen scraps going over the wire fence was instant recycling that led to eggs and drumsticks appearing on the table.

If today we allowed free range chicken to roam fenced yards, we would use a lot less weed-killer and fertilizer. Of course, the dog problem would remain. My grandparents had to give my big dog — my father’s favorite — to a farmer because he chased chickens. Ginger had come with me when I was sent to Kansas for two years while my mother recuperated from an incredibly complicated gall bladder operation. (She had grown up drinking ultra-hard water that outsiders simply couldn’t swallow.)

There was much to praise in small town life then. I remember summer evenings watching the village elders playing horseshoes and competing in super-serious croquet matches. There were three clay croquet courts in my grandparents’ town of 800, each with a concrete border, stakes that were in to stay, and balls that could have been used by Civil War cannon. (My grandfather’s heavy mallet and ball, alas, were stolen by a renter who stayed in our house while we were overseas.)

There were downsides, too. My grandparents did not have hot water, and while My grandmother would heat water on the stove, a bath was still nothing for a dust-covered six-year-old to look forward to. No one who has ever had to pump water in winter or feed a wood fire would be likely to complain that electric power was bad.

Well, few people complain about electric power per se. Only that produced by coal, oil, nuclear fission, and more recently, natural gas. I grew up with windmills. No cattle rancher could do without them. But they didn’t fix themselves, and when they didn’t work, the cattle suffered.

I’m told we shouldn’t be eating beef anyway. That is a viable principle today, as long as we have the ability to bring in vegetables and fruits from a distance — another no-no in the sustainability theology. Back in the day — not so long ago, actually — everyone canned whatever was in season. Before air-conditioning this meant boiling the jars in a summer kitchen, and that was only the start.

Today many gardens produce only lettuce and tomatoes, which make for nice salads until it gets hot. In the past a salad wouldn’t have sustained any working man or woman. My family used to say someone ate like a harvest hand. Since few farmers could afford a thresher that would sit around unused for fifty weeks of the year, most hired crews that made an annual trip from Texas to Canada. (I remember my father’s frustration in trying to pass one line of threshers after another on hilly two-lane highways each time he took my younger brother and me from Oklahoma to spend the summer in Kansas.) Feeding a dozen hands required a crew of women and lots of chickens.

I never got to ride into town on a wagon, but my Bohemian great-uncle remembered coming to Kansas from Nebraska in a covered wagon. He spent more than half his life looking at the rear end of a horse. In town this meant that everyone had to smell the horse hockeys that were ground into the dirt streets. Women with long skirts hated getting their hems soiled, and women with short skirts hated the flies.

Paved streets and automobiles changed all that, but both relied on petroleum products. I visited some oil fields when I was just old enough to look around for post-high school employment. Crude oil everywhere, and the work was so hard the workers boasted about it. But it wasn’t that hard, I later learned. When I was laying pipe, unemployed oil workers would quit after a day or two. The improved wages ($1.25 an hour, less taxes) didn’t make up for the ten hour day.

By then I owned a VW bug that didn’t have a gas gauge. I was a little upset the day I started on a short trip right after work and ran out of fuel. I couldn’t understand it. I had filled up two days before and hadn’t driven it, and why was the emergency switch to use the last gallon turned over? The next day I learned that my little brother had practiced his driving without telling me. Without leaving that little town, he not avoided getting within my eyesight. I still can’t imagine how he burnt off that much gas.

Gas was pretty cheap, just over thirty cents a gallon, but that eight gallons was a big hit for my wallet. Cokes were a nickel and hamburgers a quarter, but they were free at my grandparents’ house and I needed to save everything I could for college. Scholarships were few in those days, and I was not about to make a division I football team. I read my grandfather’s two Kansas City papers every day, but never saw any mention of Division III colleges in any context. My mother had gone to Kansas Wesleyan on a combination piano scholarship and a job as a waitress — where she probably perfected the sharp tongue that was family folklore — but I had no talent in either area. Moreover, all my friends were going to big universities. The herd instinct is powerful, even when the choice is between different herds.

What every young person had in common was an intense desire to get out of the small towns. They were great places to grow up, but not for making a living. Even the sons of farmers, who knew that they would inherit a nice place in twenty or thirty years, did not hang around for the old man to push off. Besides, there were the brothers and sisters to consider. Each would get a share of the inheritance. Would there be enough left to make a go of it? In the meantime, would they end up among the ageing bachelors at the pool hall or the old maids tending their sustainable gardens?
.

Review Atlas (Sept 5, 2013), 4.

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)