Visit of the Wise Men, from an 1894 Sunday School lesson, by lithographers Harris, Jones & Co. of Providence. Public Domain.
Tomorrow will be Christmas Eve. On Thursday morning, as Santa’s sleighbells jingle away to the North, the Big Day itself will arrive.
This will be my eightieth Christmas on Earth.
The first few of those eighty are lost in the mists of time, permanently and perpetually outside my experience. But I recall clearly the next several after that. I remember times of gathering and feasts of togetherness.
After the workday—most folks used to put in a whole day on December 24—Mom and Dad piled us into the car and we drove in darkness over the hundred miles from the city of Streator to the little town of Knoxville on the Illinois prairie, to gather with family.
1936 Plymouth, from an old postcard. Fair use.
The car was a 1936 Plymouth or a 1939 Chevrolet—both of them relics from an old-time gangster movie—or, later, our first modern car, a 1954 Plymouth. I sat in the back seat with my sister Cynda. We all four sang Christmas carols all the way down the road. Over the river—both Illinois and Spoon—and near some woods but mostly through plateaus of snow-dusted corn stubble, to Grandmother’s house we went.
It was all about gathering. Being together.
The “-gether” part of “together” is really the same word as “gather.” From Old English gaderian, meaning to unite or join.
We gathered together with Grandma and Grandpa, with Uncle Dick and Aunt Jane and Cousin Rick, with Uncle Garrett and Aunt Edith and Cousins Steve and Betsy, with Aunt Jo and Uncle Earl, with Aunt Jean and her boyfriend Richard Henderson, with Aunt Sue and Aunt Linda; with Grandma’s sister Aunt Bertha and her husband Uncle Harry Young; with Dad’s parents, my Grandma and Grandpa Sommers, who had no other children left in the Midwest and so joined the LaFollette mélange; and sometimes we would even see Grandma LaFollette’s brother Uncle Roy Dredge and his wife, Aunt Eva.
Eighteen of us including the unpictured photographer, who is probably Aunt Bertha, plus General George C. Marshall on the cover of Life to prove it’s Christmas 1950. Your New Favorite Writer is the boy at lower left, chin on hands.
That made twenty to twenty-five of us all celebrating Christmas in Grandma’s house. Gathered. Together. And the best part was: we all knew each other. We knew one another very well. We were kin. There’s hardly a better way of understanding love than gathering at Christmas.
“Fear not,” says the prophet Isaiah, “for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth; even every one that is called by my name: for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him.”
It’s a grand vision of gathering together, members of one tribe, one kindred.
That’s what we did on those long-ago Christmases. Our tribe came together, at least those of us who could. We came from east and west and north and south and called one another by name.
I did not know this fact at the time, but I know it now: It was not the toys that mattered most, nor the turkey and dressing and pie and cake. It was the coming together of the people. The spindly tree, illuminated by strings of gaudy colored lights over which Uncle Dick and Uncle Garrett and Uncle Earl had slaved for hours on the living room floor getting all the bulbs to light up at once, was the totem pole, the magnet that gathered the kin.
Rice pudding with lingonberries. Fair use.
In my wife’s family it was much the same, only with a Swedish accent, because her mother’s folk were all Swedes, first- and second-generation Swedish Americans. So they had warm glögg with almonds and raisins in the bottoms of the cups; rice pudding with lingonberries; meatballs and gravy; limpa rye bread and dopp-i-gryta, the dipping of bread in fatty broth. But mostly with them, it was the people coming together, even if they were all Swedes except my wife’s father, who was Norsk.
The decades bring forth change. Families are smaller now. Folks tend to be more spread out, east and west, north and south. In our house this Christmas we will have Jo and me, my sister Cynda and her husband Steve, our daughter Katie and her children Elsie and Tristan (teenagers!). Plus Katie’s friend Valerie. Eight, all told. Still, it’s a coming together, a gathering.
Most of us will attend our church’s Christmas Eve service. It’s a Congregational church, meaning the local congregation governs itself autonomously. Such a church is said to be a gathered church, that is, one formed by a process of kindred souls simply gathering together. And indeed it’s more like a family than like a formal institution. We’ll read the Scriptures and sing the carols and burn up a few candles in the process. But the main thing is, we’ll gather together.
We have within us the seeds of hate and the seeds of love. When we gather together around the Christmas tree or the communion table, we nurture the seeds of love and starve the other ones.
Two greatly different realities are available to us in this world. I prefer the gathered one.
May you gather this season with whomever you have to gather with. And treasure the time, the place, and the gathering. It’s the best Christmas gift.
For decades, she flew flatwise across the vertical top of our yearly Christmas tree—be it pine, balsam, or spruce.
Some people place a star on their tree—to represent the Star of Bethlehem, I suppose. Others place an angel. Most of the angels, like the stars, are built in vertical format, the better to occupy the top of the tree, which is usually a single evergreen spear, jutting toward the ceiling.
But our poor little angel, I’ve never known her name, was made in such a way she could only lie horizontally. We hung her from the vertical top branch, but she lay sprawled across its middle, resisting all upward tendency.
There is something to be said for the horizontal. When Your New Favorite Writer studied the photographic arts, he learned that horizontal lines and shapes suggest calm, tranquility, rest, repose. If you want to show strength, go for the vertical. For drama, diagonal lines and swirly shapes are great. But horizontal composition speaks of peace.
We stopped buying cut trees at some point a few years ago—maybe the forty-dollar point. Instead, we trimmed our potted Norfolk Island pine for Christmas.
The Norfolk pine lives outdoors in spring, summer, and fall. At the end of all that warmth, we huff and puff and carry the big tub with its delicate little tree indoors. Originating on Norfolk Island, it would never survive a Wisconsin winter.
Norfolk Island, in case you’re wondering, is nowhere near the same-named city in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Rather, it’s an external territory of Australia, located in the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and New Caledonia. Its namesake pine, Araucaria heterophylla in case you’re interested, is not a true pine but a closer relative of the hoop pine and the monkey-puzzle tree. In other words, a subtropical specimen.
It’s a pretty, willowy plant with short-bristled branches that droop as they get longer. You can’t hang heavy ornaments on it, or the branches will droop more than they already do.
Our little angel, a real lightweight, qualifies for the top of the Norfolk pine. We used to hang her on the upward-pointing spear, just as we did with our cut trees in prior years.
This year, however, is different. The Norfolk pine grew too tall to be brought in through the door. My wife, anticipating this problem, cut off its top in the spring. The little tree, in a touching burst of cooperation, grew replacement branches horizontally. So now, instead of a vertical spike on top, we have a horizontal bed of interlocking branches.
Just the right place for our little angel’s true vocation, which rhymes with fiesta.
Something about that seems to fit the peace message of the season.
Sleep well, sweet angel; and flights of pine boughs loft thee to thy rest.
Detail from Rembrandt, The Night Watch, 1642. Public Domain.
. . . Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. . . .
—Shakespeare, “The Seven Ages of Man” from As You Like It
Young men with beards think they can fix everything for us.
Not long ago, clean-shaven young men thought they could fix everything for us.
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Well, STOP THE PRESSES, Dear Reader, because I’ve got a news bulletin: Everything is not fixed.
They’ve worked at it and worked at it and fought fiercely for their constituents and—guess what?—the only part they left out was the fixing of everything.
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Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be endured.
As to those things that can be fixed, we’ve mostly got to do it ourselves.
To imagine that politicians will fix everything—or would, if not thwarted by opposing, evil, politicians—is arrestingly naïve.
If politicians solved more problems than they create, we’d run out of problems.
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Of course we must have politicians, to divide the spoils among us and administer our public institutions. But Politics holds no key to a New Jerusalem where streets are paved in gold and teardrops never fall.
Here’s the fact of it: We are all in this together, Dear Friend: All broken, jumbled, confused creatures muddling our way through swamps of untoward circumstance.
Swamps of untoward circumstance . . . Paul Klee, The Man of Confusion, 1939. Public Domain.
Each of us gets one life, and it’s altogether imperfect. We are mixed creatures. Our lives are spotted, blotted, their meanings and messages obscure.
Perhaps God could have made us perfect—but at what cost to our souls?
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Beware the temper that looks to some hero to come along and straighten it all out.
Making idols of the prominent, or of the adamant, leads us to loathe our neighbors. Hatred and suspicion of those we live with is the worst form of hell on earth.
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It might be better just to relax.
Resolve to enjoy what life throws at you, pain and pleasure together, weal and woe alike. Do what good you can, when you can. Forgive others. Forgive yourself.
This—right here, right now—is your chance to witness the grand spectacle of human existence from a front-row seat, and it will be over before you know it.
. . . I would put this in verse. Or if I were Shakespeare, I would write it in blank verse and make it comical, tragical, or historical. But I’m not Robert Frost, and I’m certainly not William Shakespeare, so here it is, and you’ll just have to imagine it’s poetic and comical, tragical, or historical:
(Written in Late October)
My dog took me out for a walk around the block on a sunny, windy day with gold leaves flying through the bright blue sky.
The question was in some doubt, as our glorious summer has been hanging on irrationally long. But today, it’s football weather, gorgeous weather, and one feels the stirring of one’s blood as locust and birch betray their year’s-end destinies.
Every year it’s easier to see the autumn as a metaphor for my time of life.
This year I am eighty. It has only now dawned on me that when my time comes, there will be no protocol or ceremony. I’ll just leave. All that pertains to me will dry up and blow away in an instant. I may live on in memories for a few years or decades, but that’s all.
It means I’m radically free.
Suppose I were busy assembling an empire, and only Tierra del Fuego remained beyond my grasp. Should I die with that region unmastered, or should I manage to complete my world first—no matter. When you’re gone, everything and everyone else keeps going.
That’s how it is. Life is change.
Whatever is important, all I can do is enjoy it now.
My life is equal parts pleasure and delight. There is little of pain or even mild discomfort, so far. I am content, and Fooboo is pleased to drag me around the block.
Does a writer spring full-bodied from the brow of Zeus, like Athena? Does a writer rise painfully from the sawdust of the arena floor, like Eric Hoffer?
Are writers born, or made?
These things have been on my mind lately, perhaps because the Fall Conference of the Wisconsin Writers Association is about to convene in Stevens Point. I am on the program, offering a workshop modestly titled “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Page One.” I sure hope I know what I’m talking about.
But who are these people I’ll be meeting with? Folks a lot like me, only as different as different can be. You see, we all have our separate concerns and urgencies.
I write about Norwegians, Greg Renz writes about firefighters, Bob Allen writes about fish, and Deb Farris writes about the promptings of the Spirit in the workings of her life.
So you see, we are all the same.
All I know is, writers write.
Louisa May Alcott, the real-life model for Jo March. Public Domain.
We are those who write because we cannot not write.
Some, like Jo March and John-Boy Walton, scribble in notebooks from early childhood and sell their first work as teenagers. Others rumble quietly like dormant volcanoes, then erupt without warning in middle age.
John-Boy with pen in hand. Public Domain.
My friend Greg Renz waited till retirement to novelize the experiences he had been processing over twenty-eight years as a Milwaukee firefighter. In those years, he told some of his stories informally on more than one occasion.
I doubt anybody becomes a writer without a prelude of some kind. What warming-up exercises did Homer go through before composing twenty-seven thousand lines of dactyllic hexameter known as the Iliad and the Odyssey?
A Writer’s Odyssey
I, Your New Favorite Writer, set off on the yellow brick road of Literary Lionhood at age seventy. Notions long marinated in quaint bottles on the dusty shelves of my psyche spilled forth in written words, abruptly made manifest to all the world.
Like Jo, John-Boy, Homer, and Greg, I did not come to this calling completely cold. There was a detective story at the age of eight; a comic strip starring me as a cowboy, complete with sidekick, fighting bad guys; a seventh-grade essay on traffic safety, which won me a $25 savings bond—the first time I was paid for writing; plus news stories and feature articles for my high school paper.
In college, I became a radio thing. In the Air Force, I listened in on Chairman Mao’s flyboys and wrote down what they said—sometimes, even, wrote down what they meant to say.
Back in civilian life, after years of muddled career launches, I managed to burrow into the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs. This is the agency that oversees the state’s National Guard and its Emergency Management division. There, I served the adjutant general as a photographer, writer, and editor.
When it came time to retire—and I was all for retirement—I still wanted to write. Some guys settle down to a life of golf or fishing or public service. I settled down to a last desperate effort to say what was on my mind.
I realized the truths I wanted to tell could best be told by fiction. Some say truth is stranger than fiction, but I think truth is the subject matter of fiction. There is no point in making up a story if it does not express what’s at the heart of the human experience.
I found out it’s not all that easy. I’m still working on it.
I’ve been working on it full time for almost ten years now. In that time, what have I learned?
I have learned you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to make any real money as a novelist. John Steinbeck said, “The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.” This seems a considerable understatement.
I have learned the Protagonist must protag.
I have learned that no matter what it is you ought to be writing, what you will write is what you are damned well determined to write, and that’s all there is to it.
Along the way, I have assembled enough words in a sufficiently plausible order to get two novels published—with the backing of actual, professional publishers—and am well along on the initial assemblage of words for a third.
These marvels of modern literary science to not fly off the shelves and into the cash register of their own accord. Oh, no, Dear Reader: Each copy must be individually sold by the author in the flesh, at a bookstore or an arts and crafts fair. A few people might purchase them on the Internet, but those people are exceptions.
Go on, be an exception: Buy my books.
But whether you buy them or not, rest assured I will go on writing them.
Dear Reader: My apologies for postponing “Way Out West, Part V” for the second week in a row. It’s just that something came up. Next week, back to what passes for normal around here.
Charlie Kirk and former President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. 15 July 2023. Photo by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.
I came home from an appointment Wednesday afternoon, and my wife asked from the kitchen if I’d heard somebody had been shot—I didn’t quite catch the name.
“Who?”
“Charlie Kirk,” she said. “It’s been on TV.”
“Oh. Charlie Kirk was shot. I’m very sorry to hear that. Who is Charlie Kirk?”
She pointed toward the livingroom, where the television spewed forth the stew of messy details and somber speculation that it always serves up at times like these. It announced in due course that Mr. Kirk had died from the single bullet he received in his throat.
It turns out Charlie Kirk was a conservative political activist, a debater in the political arena, a Trump acolyte, the organizer and head of a huge student movement called Turning Point USA—in all, a Very Big Deal.
I suppose that’s why people, adrift in the rip currents of our era, have been treating his death as a Very Big Deal. The airwaves abound with post-mortem speculations and virtue-freighted posturings. The social media, too.
Charlie Kirk’s fans certainly knew who he was. His critics likewise were very much aware of him. Perhaps I was the only person in America to whom he was not a household name, but then, I’m often accused of not paying attention. It’s really just that I pay attention to other things.
My wife pointed out to me that Kirk’s death cannot be dismissed as unremarkable, having played out amid a crowd of thousands. Kirk was killed at a political event while delivering a political message. The assassin meant the slaying as a political statement.
Before the echoes of the gunshot faded, all sorts of people, speaking or writing in public media, began testifying that the central meaning of this event is political.
Some say, “A man speaking his mind peacefully has been silenced. This is a threat to our First Amendment right of free speech.”
Some say, “His views were reprehensible. He deserved what he got.”
Some say, “When will we learn? We must re-establish civility in our public life.”
Some, like the governor of Utah, see this moment as a possible inflection point—an opportunity to change course as our nation struggles with divisive ideologies.
All these diverse voices place the problem and the solution in the realm of politics.
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I think it goes deeper.
A man took a high-velocity bullet in his throat. His lifeblood poured out and his life was ended. His wife was widowed, his children left fatherless. The act was done by a man in the grip of powerful emotions he could not, or did not, control. His rage was murderous; he took it out in violence.
The ancient human drama of killer and killed is the primary meaning of this event. The beliefs and polemical effectiveness of the victim, the beliefs and operational effectiveness of the assassin, are secondary.
Our dogged insistence that the main meaning is political keeps us from seeing the real problem.
It leads our spokespeople to say fatuous things time and again, things that we know are not true, are meant only to assuage our sense of hopelessness. “We’ve got to understand the killer’s motive, so we can make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”
Really? How has that been working out?
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We in our oh-so-enlightened society are loath to admit the flawed nature of human beings. It used to be called Original Sin, back when we believed in sin. But to believe in sin, you have to believe in God, for sin is a crime not only against one’s fellow man but against God. And we have no room for God.
Instead, we assume we are naturally good, or at least neutral, beings. We do evil only because we are influenced by a negative environment. If only We—that is, Society—learned how to take the right approach, We could eliminate crime and violence. We need to educate people better.
If only Charlie Kirk had embraced a more enlightened political viewpoint, he would not have invited his own destruction.
If only the shooter had understood the First Amendment, he would not have sought to win his argument through violence.
If only we all took lessons in tact and diplomacy, this kind of existential conflict would be avoided.
What a mighty opinion we have of our human powers!
If any of us are grown-ups, we should know by now that none of these things are true; that our powers and our understanding are limited; that even our internal will to do good is apt to falter in the face of felt needs and fears.
Think of all the people you know. Surely you know someone who embodies, in one person, both saint and sinner: the best kind of person and the worst kind of person, inseparable and unaware.
Not many of us are prepared to take the thought further and examine ourselves for signs of this saint/sinner dichotomy. Maybe we’re afraid of what we’d find.
My point is, we are mixed beings, both good and evil in one sweet package. Education will take us only so far. We need firm guidelines, if only to protect society. And because even those boundaries will never completely rein in our waywardness, we also need forgiveness.
There is a Stoic in me who says, “Do not expect much of people. We are weak reeds, unreliable stanchions. When people deliver goodness, be agreeably surprised. When they deliver badness, do not condemn but look to yourself and straighten out your own inner being.”
There is also a Christian in me who says, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. I am only human.”
What Society needs is not some miraculous, altogether unattainable, political accommodation. People have been wrangling over divergent interests since the dawn of history. We haven’t got it all worked out yet, and we never will.
What Society needs is humility. We need, for starters, the simple recognition that Man is not perfectible. We need some firm guidelines enforced socially, and we need a spiritual basis for hope.
For me, it’s enough to trust that God has the answers, which must remain to me mysterious. I can live with that, but then I’m old.
Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy were the Big Three.
Supreme Pictures poster for 1936 Johnny Mack Brown film Desert Phantom. Public Domain.
But there were also Johnny Mack Brown, John Wayne, Jock Mahoney the Range Rider, and others. They rode across desert, plains, and mountains, chasing bad guys and protecting the innocent. That all happened in a hazy time frame that might have been the 19th century but sometimes looked like the 20th—when the moviemakers included automobiles, for example.
An endless series of cowboy films made in the 1940s—“B” pictures, made mostly by Republic or other “Poverty Row” studios—played endlessly on our TV sets in the 1950s.
Television was new. It was all black and white, with constant technical problems, despite which it swept the nation. “In 1948, 1 percent of U.S. households owned at least one television; in 1955, 75 percent did,” says Wikipedia.
Family watches TV in 1958. Photo by Evert F. Baumgardner. Public Domain.
That made my family late adopters; we got our first TV in 1957. Before that, I would drop by my friends’ houses after school to watch Midwest Matinee on WCIA-TV, Channel 3 out of Champaign, Illinois. Midwest Matinee, formerly Western Theater, was just like the afternoon show on every other TV station in the land. A genial host, in this case “Sheriff Sid,” entertained a gaggle of children in the studio but mainly introduced segments of old cowboy films.
Sheriff Sid and the kids. Fair use.
Local stations could rent these classics cheaply, and a large crowd of children would glue themselves to their sets. The films shown on afternoon kids’ shows seldom featured the Big Three—Roy, Gene, and Hoppy. They were superstars, still at the top of the box office. But we kids had an appetite for stars like Wild Bill Elliott, Lash LaRue, Rex Allen, and the Cisco Kid.
Rex Allen had his own comic book series. Public Domain.
All this late-afternoon western viewing was a result of local stations renting low-budget westerns. Prime Time, the domain of the Big Three networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—was dominated by situation comedies like I Love Lucy and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and by quiz shows like You Bet Your Life and The $64,000 Question.
But funny things can happen in Hollywood. The high-budget western film industry, which had given us pre-war epics like John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), starring John Wayne, and Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific (also 1939), with Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea, now invented a new product called “adult westerns.”
These were films with a western setting but with dramatic psychological undertones or social messages. Films like Stanley Kramer’s High Noon (1952), starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, and George Stevens’s Shane (1953), with Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, Brandon DeWilde, and Jack Palance, made network programmers sit up and take notice. Something new was going on.
Gary Cooper pleads for Grace Kelly’s understanding in High Noon. Public Domain.
In those days, the early 1950s, Radio was still a force, producing and airing a full variety of programs, including dramas acted out with convincing sound effects. It was only just dawning on America that everybody wanted to watch TV.
In 1952, CBS had launched a radio drama called Gunsmoke about a western marshal, Matt Dillon, played by popular voice actor William Conrad. It was meant to be a more adult kind of western than the kids’ cowboys who dominated the dial—The Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid, and the Big Three.
Matt Dillon, by contrast, would be a hard man disillusioned by constantly meeting the lowest scum of the frontier. He had a close, unspecified relationship with a dance-hall hostess, Miss Kitty, and provided steady business in the form of gunshot victims for the town physician, Doc Adams. He also had an assistant named Chester, who had little of the competence, and none of the comic relief, of traditional sidekicks like Gabby Hayes, Smiley Burnett, and Pat Buttram.
James Arness as Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke, 1956. Public Domain.
Gunsmoke episodes featured adult themes, and Marshal Dillon often found himself on the short end of the stick. The program ran for nine years during a time when radio drama was dying, the medium dissolving into a platform for disc jockeys and talk show hosts.
It was so popular that CBS made it over for TV. The manly-voiced yet pudgy actor William Conrad was replaced in the role of Matt Dillon by lanky and manly James Arness. The first television episodes of Gunsmoke ran in 1955. It played continuously in prime time, on a weekly basis, for twenty years.
Hugh O’Brian as Wyatt Earp, with Louise Fletcher, 1961. Public Domain.
In Hollywood, success breeds imitation. The imitation can be so instant that sometimes all the players seem to have the same idea at the same time. On ABC, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, starring Hugh O’Brian, premiered just four days before Gunsmoke on CBS. And Cheyenne, starring Clint Walker, came along, also on ABC, two weeks later.
It took a couple of years for the notion to sink in, but the floodgates were opened. We, the American people, simply couldn’t get enough TV westerns:
Broken Arrow, with John Lupton and Michael Ansara, ABC 1956-1960.
Have Gun—Will Travel, starring Richard Boone, CBS 1957-1963.
Sugarfoot, with Will Hutchins, ABC 1957-1961.
Wagon Train, with Ward Bond and Robert Horton, NBC 1957-1962 and ABC 1962-1965.
Maverick, starring James Garner and Jack Kelly, ABC 1957-1962.
Trackdown, with Robert Culp, CBS 1957-1959.
Wanted Dead or Alive, with Steve McQueen, CBS 1957-59.
Bronco, with Ty Hardin, ABC 1958-1962.
Steve McQueen as bounty hunter Josh Randall in Wanted Dead or Alive, 1958. Public Domain.
Bat Masterson, starring Gene Barry, NBC 1958-1961.
Lawman, starring John Russell and Peter Brown, ABC 1958-1962.
The Rifleman, with Chuck Connors, ABC 1958-1963.
Rawhide, with Eric Fleming and Clint Eastwood, CBS 1959-1965.
Bonanza, starring Lorne Greene, Pernell Roberts, Dan Blocker, and Michael Landon, NBC 1959-1973.
Laramie, with John Smith, Robert L. Crawford Jr., Robert Fuller, and Hoagy Carmichael, NBC 1959-1963.
The Virginian, starring James Drury and Doug McClure, NBC 1962-1971.
The Rebel, starring Nick Adams, ABC 1965-1961.
The Big Valley, starring Barbara Stanwyck, ABC 1965-1969.
The Wild Wild West, starring Robert Conrad and Ross Martin, CBS 1965-1969.
The High Chaparral, with Leif Erickson and Cameron Mitchell, NBC 1967-1971.
Alias Smith and Jones, with Pete Duel/Roger Davis and Ben Murphy, ABC 1971-1973.
I’ve probably left some out. They were all over the dial. Besides the newly-created westerns listed here, networks and local stations kept right on playing new installments and reruns of our old kiddie shows featuring the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and Gene Autry. Not to mentnion variants such as Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, a Canadian western, and Sky King, an aviation western.
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Your New Favorite Writer grew up on all this intellectual property, should you choose to call it that. Dear Reader, it was intensely romantic to me.
I listend on the radio three nights a week to The Lone Ranger, that daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains. And between movies and TV, I spent hundreds of hours in Monument Valley.
But living in Illinois, I had never been any place that was not flat. When I was twelve, we moved to Wisconsin, and I learned for the first time there were hills—gently rolling, rounded hills, with holsteins grazing peacefully by well over ten thousand picturesque lakes.
I had never seen an honest-to-God mountain.
In 1958, we set out in our 1953 Buick Special for a grand tour of the West. I was thirteen and my kid sister, Cynda, was eight. We were thrilled.
Dad laid a sheet of plywood across the transmission hump in the back seat so there would be a flat floor. Cynda and I thus had our own compartment, with two sleeping berths: back bench seat and plywood floor with a sleeping bag laid over the top. There was no question of seat belts. Cars did not have them, and we did not yet know we needed them. Luckily, [SPOILER ALERT:] we did not crash.
We drove down through Illinois and Missouri, following Route 66. Not much to see, only a few oil wells with rocking-horse-style pumpjacks at the wellheads.
In western Kansas, however, around Dodge City—Gunsmoke territory, Wyatt Earp territory— the landforms began to change. Undulating hills were covered with clump grass—not actual sagebrush yet, but something definitely western-looking.
Aapproaching Albuquerque, New Mexico, we saw our first mountains, the Sandia Range, from fifty miles away! Whoa. This was something.
Sandia Mountains at sunset. Photo by G. Thomas. Public Domain.
Aunt Jo, who lived in Albuquerque, took us to Old Town, where everything was heavily Spanish-influenced. We went to a nice Mexican restaurant and ate tamales and sopapillas. We shopped in a store that claimed to be a “trading post,” where I bought a pair of genuine Indian mocassins. They weren’t very comfortable, but I sure enjoyed wearing them.
North of Albuquerque, in Taos, we stayed in our first motel. It was the usual kind of 1950s motel: A row of little cabins. The motel office in the center cabin had postcards and matchbooks that bore the slogan “Best in the West.” It didn’t mean just this particular motel. There was a group of motels that advertised together. They, as a group, were “Best in the West.”
I don’t know whether that chain evolved into today’s Best Western or not. Local motels being part of a larger, regional group—that was novel. We had never heard the term “Holiday Inn” or “Motel 6.”
We drove on through New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, and back across Minnesota and Wisconsin to home.
We saw lots of mountains. And cowboys. And tumbleweeds. And Indians. And such like.
I thought it was great. I didn’t get enough of it. In the intervening years, I’ve spent little time in the great American West. But I’ve always enjoyed it.
Maybe the reason I enjoy it so much is all those shows I saw. Not the reality of the American West, but a fanciful version conjured by writers, producers, directors, actors, and others. Did you notice I listed “writers” first? Tune in next Tuesday.
My publisher’s KDP account has been reinstated, and all her books are now back up on Amazon, including my best-selling immigrant epic The Price of Passage and also the heartwarming coming-of-age story, Izzy Strikes Gold! But apparently, it took the credible threat of legal action to do it.
FORTUNATELY,
we do not rely on Amazon to get our books in people’s hands. You can purchase either or both of these books direct from the publisher by clicking these links: Izzy and Passage.
Thank you for your unwavering support of fine literature from small, independent presses.
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer
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Now for this week’s post:
By the time Your New Favorite Writer was a boy, in the 1950s, “the West” no longer applied to any place east of the Mississippi. The states of the old Northwest Territory were now called “the Midwest.” The term had expanded to include the first tier of trans-Mississippi states: Minnesota, Iowa, and perhaps Missouri.
An 1846 map of the realm we now think of as the West. Public Domain.
One of the so-called border states, Missouri had been a slave state from 1820 till the Civil War, and only by force of arms was it kept from joining the Secession. Still, Missourians talked and acted pretty much like us, so we reckoned they were Midwesterners. As for states below Missouri—Arkansas and Louisiana—those were still the Old South, my friend.
States west of that first tier, and extending all the way to the Coast, were what we now meant by “the West.” In our minds, it was the Old West, the Wild West. It was the domain of the cowboys.
Riders of the Plains
And we had plenty of cowboys. Besides actual cowpokes who did dusty and deadly jobs to bring us the beefsteaks we were starting to get attached to, there were also the Real Cowboys—that is to say, the heroes of the Silver Screen.
My dad grew up in the Depression days of the 1930s. Admission at the local cinema was a dime for a child, or two kids for fifteen cents. Dad would sell some old newspapers, rags, or scrap metal to rustle up a nickel. Then he’d wait till a pal came along with a whole dime of his own. Dad would add his nickel, and the two would enter for fifteen cents. Not much chance they were buying popcorn.
Tom Mix, c. 1925. Photo by Albert Witzel. Public Domain.
They followed the Wild West exploits of Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson, top guns of the second generation of movie cowboys. By the time Dad came along, the gritty realism of William S. Hart had given way to glamor. Tom Mix, a former ranch hand, parlayed his cowpunching skills, physique, and ready smile into gigantic stardom, appearing in 291 films—all but nine of them silent. Mix played the handsome hero in a dashing cowboy outfit. His transportation, Tony the Wonder Horse, became a star in his own right.
Hoot Gibson, Dad’s other favorite, was a rodeo champion who turned to film work in the 1920s. Like Mix, he did his own stunts, but his roles were more humorous and light-hearted. He led the first rank of cowboys-other-than-Tom-Mix, along with Ken Maynard and Bob Steele.
Hoot Gibson, right, with Charles K. French, in The Bearcat (1922). Public Domain.
The Big Three
By the time I came along in the 1950s, a third generation of cowboys rode the cinematic range: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy. These luminaries shone all the more brightly to me, since I approached them mainly through the non-visual medium of radio. They all had radio shows as well as films. I didn’t often go to the movies, but the radio was on every night in our house. Roy and Gene were singers, and their weekly programs featured a lot of western music.
The Sons of the Pioneers in 1944. Bob Nolan center, Roy Rogers second from right. Fair use.
Roy Rogers was often backed up by the Sons of the Pioneers, a stellar Western singing group he had co-founded in the 1930s, along with Bob Nolan and Tim Spencer. Their hits, written by Nolan, included “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Cool, Clear Water.” Roy, billed as “King of the Cowboys,” was also joined by his wife Dale Evans, “the Queen of the West.”
Roy and Dale on Trigger, at Placerita Canyon, California, late 1940s. Fair use.
Roy’s horse, Trigger, eclipsed Tom Mix’s Tony and all other movie cowboy horses. A large, gorgeous golden palomino stallion, Trigger learned 150 trick cues, could walk fifty feet on his hind legs, and was even housebroken—an unusual ability in a horse, but one which came in handy when he and his master appeared in hotels, theaters, and hospitals. After Trigger’s death in 1965, Rogers had his hide preserved and mounted by a taxidermist and put on display in the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum. Your New Favorite Author had the good fortune to see Trigger at the museum not long before it closed in 2009.
Roy’s wife, Dale, known for championing children born with disabilities and for her strong Christian faith, was also a songwriter of some note, author of the couple’s television sign-off song, “Happy Trails,” and the 1955 gospel hit “The Bible Tells Me So.”
Gene Autry came to be called the Singing Cowboy—a great pre-emptive advertising claim. There were a lot of singing cowboys, but Gene was The Singing Cowboy. He held first place in Motion Picture Herald’s “Top Ten Money-Making Western Stars” poll from 1937 to 1942, at which point he went into the Army Air Corps, because there was a war on. When he told Republic Pictures of his plans to enlist, they threatened to promote Roy Rogers as “King of the Cowboys” in his absence, and they followed through on that. When Autry returned from service, he was still a Republic property and needed promotion, so they billed him as “King of the Singing Cowboys.” But Rogers had already overtaken him at the box office.
Autry and his horse Champion left Republic for Columbia Pictures in 1947, and he chose a new sidekick, Pat Buttram, in place of his former sidekick Smiley Burnett. Both Rogers and Autry also benefited from the presence of George “Gabby” Hayes as sidekick in many of their earlier films.
Gene Autry and Smiley Burnette singing in In Old Santa Fe (1934). Public Domain.
The role of America’s Singing Cowboy fit Autry well, and he lived up to it. I listened to his radio progam, Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch, every Saturday night. Listening to the show was my reward for taking a bath! The show offered a variety of Gene’s western adventures with radio sound effects, with comic relief by Pat Buttram, and a few Gene Autry songs backed by the Cass County Boys. Gene had a friendly tenor voice, and in addition to his theme song, “Back in the Saddle Again,” and other western songs, he made a fortune in the holiday song business, starting with the original recording of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” He also laid down memorable tracks of “Frosty the Snowman,” “Here Comes Santa Claus,” and for Easter, “Here Comes Peter Cottontail (Hoppin’ Down the Bunny Trail).”
Wikipedia notes that Gene Autry “is the only person to be awarded stars in all five categories on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for film, television, music, radio, and live performance.”
Movie poster for the 1936 film Hopalong Cassidy Returns, starring William Boyd. Public Domain.
The third major cowboy of our era, Hopalong Cassidy, was in a class by himself. For one thing, he made no pretense of singing. But boy, did he have a nifty outfit! Hoppy dressed all in black, with a tall black hat that dwarfed Roy’s and Gene’s white ones. The black duds were set off nicely by a silver ox-skull neckerchief slide, silver-white hair, and the great white horse, Topper.
The original Cassidy, as depicted thirteen years earlier on the cover of Argosy All-Story Weekly, December 15, 1923. Public Domain.
It was all an effect orchestrated by producer Harry “Pop” Sherman and movie star William Boyd, who played the role of Hoppy. The character Hopalong Cassidy was transformed from the hard-drinking, rough-living, profane cowboy created by author Clarence Mulford in a series of pulp stories and dime novels and became the more polished, clean-living straight shooter portrayed by Boyd in the films.
Hopalong’s 54 feature films produced from 1935 to 1944 were better productions than typical cowboy films of the day, so they got favorable exposure by exhibitors. When producer Sherman tired of the franchise and moved on to other projects, Boyd produced twelve more Cassidy films on his own, on a much lower budget. In 1948, when the series was considered dead, Boyd purchased the rights to all 66 films for $350,000.
He brought one of the films to a Los Angeles NBC television station and offered it for showing at a nominal rental. It went over so well they asked for more, and Hopalong Cassidy began a burgeoning new career on TV.
TV! Wait a minute! Who said anything about TV?
Perhaps you noticed, Dear Reader, that I have mentioned movie cowboys and radio cowboys but have not whispered a word about a stunning new invention that was about to rework our lives.
ATTENTION: Owing to some kind of error in the huge, unresponsive bureaucracy of Kindle Direct Publishing, part of Amazon, many of my outstanding small-press publisher’s books are no longer listed on Amazon.com. This includes my Amazon Best-seller immigrant saga The Price of Passage and also the heartwarming coming-of-age story, Izzy Strikes Gold!
FORTUNATELY, we do not rely on Amazon to get our books in people’s hands. You can purchase either or both of these books direct from the publisher by clicking these links: Izzy and Passage.
Thank you for your unwavering support of fine literature from small, independent presses.
I left off other pursuits at age 70 to work seriously on becoming Your New Favorite Writer. By writing and publishing two great books (The Price of Passage and Izzy Strikes Gold!), a few short stories, and about 325 blog posts—weekly ruminations on the past, the present, and topics of literary and historical interest—I have established a late-life career as a minor, yet real, literary lion.
But a few weeks ago, at age 80, this literary lion discovered a serious condition—a lumbar stenosis—that required surgery if I wanted to spend the rest of my days upright and ambulatory. It’s a tough operation, involving a long dorsal incision, six hours on the table, and the placement of rods and screws inside my spine.
I solemnly vow, Gentle Reader: This is the last time I will lumber you with tales of Your New Favorite Writer’s surgical woes. As rumors, spread by me, of post-operative grief have turned out to be exaggerated, we will return next week to interesting stuff.
Suffice it to say: An octogenarian takes several months to recover from this kind of event. I am working on it.
Br’er Fox throws Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch. Walt Disney Productions. Fair Use.
NOW, HERE IS THE COMPENSATORY BLESSING that has been revealed: In the past weeks—just before the Big Health Scare, continuing through it, and afterwards as well—a more ambitious literary agenda has come into focus. It includes a way through the thicket of the current work-in-progress, a WWII-era historical novel; the impetus for a narrative nonfiction work on a “history-of-religion” topic; a Vietnam-era military memoir; a speculative fiction comic novella partly inspired by the Big Health Scare; several new short stories; and a more sustainable approach to marketing and selling these gorgeous hunks of intellectual property.
All this may keep me busy until I’m 100. We’ll see how it goes.
Gentle Reader, from this end of the telescope I suddenly see every bit of life—every difficulty, every failure, all the boredom and frustration experienced at tasks I didn’t want to be doing—or more precisely, tasks the preparatory value of which I did not grasp—every problem encountered and surmounted or endured: I now see all of that as simply a fair price paid for the marvelous vista gleaming just ahead.
Excuse me, but I’ve got to get to work. See you next week.
ATTENTION: Owing to some kind of error in the huge, unresponsive bureaucracy of Kindle Direct Publishing, part of Amazon, many of my outstanding small-press publisher’s books are no longer listed on Amazon.com. This includes my Amazon Best-seller immigrant saga The Price of Passage and also the heartwarming coming-of-age story, Izzy Strikes Gold!
FORTUNATELY, we do not rely on Amazon to get our books in people’s hands. You can purchase either or both of these books direct from the publisher by clicking these links: Izzy and Passage.Thank you for your unwavering support of fine literature from small, independent presses.
Not my lower back, but someone’s. Image by Jmarchn, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.
I am an aged writer now recovering from a major surgical project on my lumbar spine. They re-aligned and fused the L3 and L4 vertebrae through a seven-inch incision, in a six-hour operation.
Ouch.
Recovery is not so quick and easy.
I used to make my own breakfast, because I like it a certain way, and my wife does not get hungry as early as I do. Now, she cooks the oatmeal, and I just sit at the table and spoon on the berries.
After breakfast, it used to be: shower, shave, dress, and go about my day. Now, I totter from the table to the recliner and stretch out for my first rest period. Breakfast is tiring, you know.
In the recliner, blissful relaxation takes over. My whole body feels happy except for some minor discomfort in the back—you know, where they did the construction project. To relieve the boredom, I check the email on my cell phone, and maybe look at the day’s news headlines. But, you know, holding up the phone above my head wears me out, so I have to take it in stages.
Eventually, I make my way to the bathroom for the shower-shave-and-dress routine. It takes longer than it used to. By the time I present myself, fully dressed and smelling good, it’s time for lunch.
And lunch—well, you know—lunch can be exhausting. I need a time of rest after lunch.
On a good day, there may be an hour, or half an hour—between post-lunch rest and mid-afternoon nap—to sit at the laptop, focus, and achieve something. It may be only re-arranging medical appointments. Or puzzling out the meaning of a significant email. Or tending to something that needs advance planning, like marketing events several months in the future.
Maybe I can write a page or two on one of several works in progress. But not much progess. It goes by inches, not yards.
Then it’s time to rest again. You get the idea.
The thing is, Dear Reader, I have, at this moment, three or four good books in me—fun books, interesting books, useful books—but it’s hard work to get them out of my head and onto paper. It takes time. Your New Favorite Writer’s time at this point, like J. Alfred Prufrock’s, is being measured out with coffee spoons.
But one must endure.
I discovered I am not young anymore. Some wag long ago minted the lines:
“How do I know that my youth is all spent? Well, my get up and go has got up and went.”
And it’s true, Neighbor. It’s true.
Shakespeare portrait by John Taylor (1585-1651). Public Domain.
the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound.
Some old men move as if they were made of Waterford crystal. I fear I’m starting to walk that way.
At eighty, when you are blindsided by something your body has been saving up for decades, you can be forgiven for wondering what else might be in store. You can’t help turning a kind of mental corner.
Life will be different now, maybe wildly different. At the very least, adjustments must be made.
But it’s early in recovery yet. I’ll be back, Dear Reader.
I pray the good Lord will give me the time I need to get what’s in my head out onto paper.
