10.29.24
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Honor

Saturday, I will rise at zero-dark-thirty and fly to Washington, D.C., on Badger Honor Flight Mission #57.

Honor flights, in case  you don’t know, are group excursions by veterans to view the nation’s monuments and memorials in a context of pomp, circumstance, and profuse gratitude for their military service.

I never imagined I would take part in such a thing. 

My father, an infantryman in the Southwest Pacific during the Second World War, would have qualified for an honor flight, but it never occurred to me to sign him up; and then he died. 

I was only dimly aware that honor flights were a thing. If I knew of honor flights at all, I had heard of them only as a new thing, a phenomenon of the last twenty years. 

You probably know, Dear Reader, Your New Favorite Writer is suspicious of new things.

I’m also suspicious of events which, and people who, make a big deal of military service. During my time in the Air Force, 1965-1969, I was never an enthusiastic Zoomie. I have not been active in veterans’ affairs since then. 

Going on an honor flight would have been a bizarre thought for me. 

But my friend, the late Jerry Paulsen, went. He was an Army vet. His wife, Mary, also served in the Army, so the two were able to go together on the Badger Honor Flight. It turned out to be a life-changing experience for them. 

After the Paulsens returned from their honor flight, Jerry started hounding me to sign up for a flight myself. 

But I don’t do what people say just because they nag.

So, why did I sign up? I’ll try to explain.

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“Honor” is a conspicuous word. It is the first word in the phrase “honor flight.” Maybe it’s used in the verbal sense, meaning the event is intended to honor the veterans who take part.

But “honor” also has another sense, a noun sense. It’s an old-fashioned meaning we don’t hear much about these days. Honor is a traditional virtue that was thought to be indispensable to a man’s character. 

Honor was applied to women, too, but it accrued on different accounts in the reckoning of the two sexes.

For men, honor was tied to valor and to unswerving loyalty demonstrated in battle. Though honesty and integrity are at its heart, the virtue of honor speaks with a martial accent. War is what commonly delineates male virtue, and our nation has generally provided one war per generation. 

Some men get born too late for one war, too early for the next. But most men get the opportunity to fight for their country. Some live in times when they can hardly escape it. It is not only how they acquit themselves in battle, but even how they meet the routine challenges of military life, that brightens or stains their escutcheon of honor.

Honor used to be a powerful motivator. In the Civil War, men did not rush upon one another in thousands, bayonets fixed, and perish in blood and pain because they wanted to do so or because it was fun. Everyone, as Lincoln noted, would have preferred to avoid war. But when it overtook  them, most able-bodied men found they could not stay out of it and keep their honor intact.

Socrates. Bust by Victor Wager, photo by Greg O’Beirne.  CC BY-SA 3.0. 

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates took death by poison rather than forfeit his honor as an Athenian. Socrates the philosopher explained to his friend Crito that Socrates the Athenian must obey the rulings of the city-state. If he was no Athenian, he could be no Socrates. This, although he does not use the word, was a form of honor.

Portrait of Grant around 1843, from a daguerreotype by an unknown photographer. Public Domain.

The young lieutenant Ulysses Grant, convinced the 1846-1848 war with Mexico was an injustice done to a weaker neighbor to serve the political needs of the pro-slavery Democratic party, nevertheless followed orders and went. He was, after all, an officer in the U.S. Army. To withdraw on the eve of war would amount to dishonor. 

Winston Churchill—a chesty man, never known to back away from a fight—told the boys at Harrow School in 1941: “Never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.” (My emphasis.) Honor, Churchill seemed to say, would have you fight, fight, and never give in, except when honor itself happened to require the opposite.

Churchill in 1941. Photograph by Yousuf Karsh. Public Domain.

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Since Churchill’s time, honor has been steeply discounted. 

We no longer covet honor. We no longer talk about honor. We no longer predicate our acts on conceptions of honor.

Still, there is residue. In World War II, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Desert Storm, the U.S. forces were constituted of men who answered to the concept of honor, whether or not it was stated as such. 

By the time of the Vietnam involvement, Americans no longer uniformly believed our national honor depended on fighting a war—at least, not this war—or that it was worth the effort and risk of doing so. Thousands of young men fled to Canada or went into hiding in the United States. 

I had no wish to fight in a war, or even to serve in uniform, but events gave me little choice. I was soon to be drafted, which meant I would serve in the Army or the Marine Corps.

I chose to enlist in the Air Force. It seemed like a better deal. 

At the time, widespread public opposition to the Vietnam War was just starting to get organized.

But six months later, while I was still in training at the Presidio of Monterey, California, rejection of uniformed service had become a real thing. One guy I knew lodged a belated application to be treated as a conscientious objector. Another simply ran off—deserted. Antiwar activists hung around military bases, cultivating friendships with young enlisted men and offering options for clandestine flight. 

The opportunity to simply duck out of the war had become real. It could be done. It was an option we all had to address. 

I stayed the course. Not because I was brave. Not because I was patriotic. Because, rather, I could identify with Socrates, who chose to remain an Athenian in good standing. I wanted to keep on being an American. I would not have expressed that as honor, but looking back from sixty years on, perhaps it was.

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The young men who fought the Vietnam War sometimes endured taunts and jeers when they came home. I did not experience such things, but many did.

Previously, when Johnny came marching home, he had been received with honor, even with brass bands and parades. But combatants in the Vietnam War were made to feel like inferior life forms. That war and its consequences undermined the caliber and morale of the armed services. President Nixon reached an agreement with the North Vietnamese which amounted to surrender but was termed “peace with honor.” Everybody just wanted to get the hell out.

Then fifteen years passed—a mere eye-blink—and our nation again needed well-trained, capable, and loyal forces, for operations against Iraq. Our leaders resolved that this time around, the troops would be celebrated, would be given dignity and respect. And so, by and large, they were.

There came a general rise in patriotic feeling and a restored regard for military men. These trends were bolstered by our national response to the events of September 11, 2001. All veterans, not just those of Desert Storm, basked in the elevated profile of military service. 

In 2004, a National World War II Memorial was built in Washington, D.C. Living veterans of that war were getting older, reaching the end of life; so volunteer organizations sprang up to whisk World War II veterans to Washington so they could see their memorial. This project grew into a nationwide network, which is now active in forty-five states. 

As members of the Greatest Generation slipped off to their final rewards, the Honor Flight network began including younger veterans in the trips, Korean- and Vietnam-era vets. 

I was dimly aware of all these things. But then Jerry Paulsen came back from his honor flight and began harping at me to sign up. So one day, I idly went to the Badger Honor Flight web page to see how the whole thing worked. What I saw there transformed my attitude.

The honor flight protocol assigns each honored veteran a volunteer “guardian,” a younger person at his elbow throughout the trip. According to the website, “We do this for the safety and accountability of our Veterans. The most important reason is to ensure each Veteran can enjoy their ‘Trip of a Lifetime’ to its fullest.” Maybe they want to give needed assistance to aged and infirm veterans yet do not wish to create a distinction between those and the healthier vets.

The key fact to me was that the guardian, though he or she cannot be the veteran’s spouse, can be a family member. I thought of our only child—our daughter, Katie. 

Katie is a very bright young woman, now in her late forties, with children of her own and an important job with the State of Wisconsin. Through no fault of her own, she was born after the brouhaha surrounding the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam was all over. She had never lived  in a time of war. The Gulf War and the Global War on Terror had come along, of course, when she was an adult—but they had little effect on her personally. 

If I went on this trip and took Katie as my guardian—I knew she would do that for her old man—she would receive a precious opportunity to mingle for a day, a meaningful day, with a lot of old men all focused on key events of their young lives. These men might tell stories. They might reveal how things were in those old days. 

At the very least, she would experience a certain group reverence and team spirit among a body of men and women who may not all have been in battle, but all of whom have a DD Form 214 in their pockets and know how to use a P-38 government-issue can opener. I thought that when all these guys and gals pay hushed respects at monuments and memorials to their fallen brothers and sisters, Katie might sense that something important was involved. 

She might get a glimpse of honor cherished and salvaged, by being among folks grown old in body but still engaged in vexing moments that once occupied their young lives. “. . . made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

For that alone—to give her that opportunity—it will be worth the trip. 

Have no fear of missing out, Gentle Reader: I’ll bloviate my impressions of the actual thing next week in this spot, Lord willing.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

10.23.24
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A Momentous Occasion

In 1952 I spent the best part of the summer visiting my grandparents, Alvin and Berniece LaFollette, in the small village of Knoxville, Illinois.

1952 Chevy. Fair use.

Aunt Jean, third of the five LaFollette girls—young and lovely, a honey blonde—had just graduated from Knoxville High School. Her classmate Richard Henderson owned a 1952 Chevrolet sedan, maybe a two-door. It was his pride and joy, but Jean was his heart’s desire. 

Film poster: Red Skelton as The Fuller Brush Man (1948). Fair use.

Jean and Richard took me to the Galesburg Drive-in Theater, where we saw The Fuller Brush Man, starring Red Skelton. It was a cornball comedy about an aspiring yet inept door-to-door salesman. In my whole seven years, I had never seen anything so hilarious! Couldn’t wait to get home and tell Grandma and Grandpa the whole movie, from start to finish.

We took in other shows that summer, including Francis the Talking Mule, Ma and Pa Kettle, Bedtime for Bonzo, and Hold That Line, in which Huntz Hall of the Bowery Boys hurls a javelin through the dean’s window, shattering a priceless old vase; and does so again just as the dean finishes gluing the vase together. 

Film poster: Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbide as Ma and Pa Kettle (1949). Fair use.

Such films were wondrous good entertainment for a youngster innocent of any thought that he might be cramping anyone’s style, in the dark of a drive-in movie. Taking me along on dates with Aunt Jean was amiable and open-hearted of Richard—who in due time became my uncle.

The two lived a long life together, mostly in Houston, Texas. He was an engineer; she kept house and worked many years in the public schools. In retirement, they moved to Montgomery, fifty miles north of the city. Richard, a smart, capable, and funny man, died a few years ago. Jean still lives in Montgomery, surrounded by friends from her church and community. Three years ago she moved into a nice apartment or condo in a senior community.

Her ninetieth birthday approached. We knew it must be marked in some special way. With all but one of her brothers and sisters gone, she was now the matriarch of a nationwide family. 

Jean’s children, Kristin and Randy, planned a reception for Sunday, October 20, three days after her actual birthday. Cousins Renee, Sherri, and Darryl made arrangements to fly in from Virginia with their mother Lynda, Jean’s only surviving sibling.

At eighty-two, Lynda is just three years older than I. We played together as children. I led her across a fallen log that bridged the Stink Creek in the jungly river bottoms near my house. She slipped and fell in a slough of stagnant, black-scummed stink water. I pulled her out, led her up the hill, and drenched her down with cold water from our garden hose. That was seventy years ago, but nobody has forgotten.

Cousin Rick drove to Houston from his home in northern Illinois. Rick, Uncle Dick’s only child, has made something of himself in the world: He married a very smart woman, met the King of Sweden, and posed in his birthday suit for art students. He also earns pocket money by transporting corpses for a local undertaker. He has been urged to write a book.

Ronnie and Jimmy Seuntjens drove down from Las Vegas, New Mexico; their brother Brian flew in from some other Las Vegas up in Nevada. Returning to Montgomery,Texas, was bittersweet for the three Seuntjens boys. It was here their mother, my Aunt Sue, met her demise when a large truck crashed into the car she was riding in. Still, they could not miss the opportunity to honor Aunt Jean and mingle with cousins long unseen.

About 1944: Back row–Aunt JoAnne. Middle row–Mom, Grandpa LaFollette, Grandma LaFollette. Front row–Aunt Linda on Mom’s lap, Aunt Jean, Aunt Sue on Grandma’s lap. All gone now, but Lynda and Jean.

I flew down from Madison, Wisconsin, with my wife, Jo, and my sister, Cynda. We gathered with the other nine cousins in a wonderful resort called Sweetwater at Lake Conroe. Over snacks and beverages we caught up with one another’s doings, shared laughter and tears, and made trips to local eateries to dine with Aunt Jean and Aunt Lynda. 

Jean still drives around Montgomery, a small town. She uses a walker a bit at home, but seldom if ever does she use it in public. Her voice is wavery, but her eyes remain clear and bright.

Jo and I accompanied Aunt Jean on Sunday morning to the Montgomery United Methodist Church, where everyone gathered round to wish her well, for she is much loved. She remembered when the church’s present building was being constructed. “Richard watched every stick of it being put together,” she said. 

The gang’s all here: Two aunts, eleven cousins, and three spouses at the Montgomery Community Center.

On Sunday afternoon, all of us out-of-towners joined with many of Jean’s in-town friends for a tribute, at the Montgomery Community Center, on the occasion of her entering upon her ninety-first year of life. 

Aunt Lynda and Aunt Jean, the Honoree.

I told the story about going with her and Richard to see all those great movies when I was young. 

Rick brought along a book his father had made, with photos showing the removal of the old timber cabin from Grandma’s property and its relocation as a historic site on the other side of the town square. I explained all about that to anybody I could buttonhole and get to listen.

Jean’s grandchildren—Randy’s and Kris’s kids—were there for “Meemaw,” and they brought a couple of their own children as well.

When it was all over and all the group photos taken, we decamped to the Conroe Lake House, a swell restaurant recommended by Kris’s dughter Jordan. We all sat on the deck by the lake as the sun went down in a blaze of glory. We had small talk, beer, and some great fish and other entrees.

Dinner at the Conroe Lake House. Aunts Jean and Lynda at the far end.

Then it was truly all over, and we needed to leave early the next morning. As senior nephew, I drew the honor of driving Aunt Jean and Aunt Lynda back to Jean’s apartment. Both of them were tuckered out and needed sleep.

I helped them out of my rented van, and we stood there a few moments saying goodbye. We hugged and kissed. “This might be the last time we see each other,” Jean said. She gazed at me with those deep and penetrating eyes.

“Any time might be that,” I said. “You never can tell.”

“Love you,” she said. 

“And I love you. Be well, and I’ll see you back here in ten years.” 

They tottered in the door, clutching their styrofoam carryout boxes.

I got back in the van and strove to remember how the newfangled ignition works.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

10.15.24
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Return of the Pod People

Do you recall my blessing you, a couple of weeks ago, with about 1,300 words on podcasting and its relevance to the practice of struggling authorship? 

Tom Bodett. I don’t think he looks like he sounds. What do you think? Image from Brattleboro Community TV, licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Maybe not enough was said.

In that post I mentioned that podcasters are the Arthur Godfreys of today. I could have gone on to call them latter-day Tom Bodetts, as well. But for once, I exercised restraint. (Please count that in my favor, come the Final Tabulation.)

Ben Patterson, Motel 6 ad for Roswell, New Mexico. Fair use.

You may or may not know Tom Bodett as the guy from Motel 6 who says “we’ll leave the light on for ya.” The motel chain’s ad agency hired him because somebody heard his voice on NPR and thought he sounded like a guy who would stay at Motel 6. You know, a regular joe.

First edition cover of The Body Snatchers, illustrated by John McDermott. Fair use.

But I digress. What I was going to say is that podcasting makes me think of pod people, as in, you know, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Actually, the locus classicus of the species was just The Body Snatchers, a 1955 book by Jack Finney (one of Your New Favorite Writer’s favorite writers, by the way). When they made it into a movie in 1956, they added “Invasion of.” 

Kevin McCarthy prods a pod in the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Fair use.

Finney’s book was a sweet little story of spores or seeds or something that drift in from outer space, ripen into duplicate human beings inside large pods, and systematically replace the actual people they have emulated. Pretty soon the protagonist catches on, and then it’s a race to prevent all of Mill Valley, California, being replaced by a colony of soulless avatars. Once the premise is developed, Finney pretty much leaves off any pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo and just tells the thrills and spills of the human resistance movement fighting off the invaders. The book has been criticized for its want of Heinleinian (Asimovian? Clarkeian?) authenticity, but once Jack Finney starts spinning a yarn, it’s hard not to get tangled in its web . . . or pod, or whatever.

Which brought to mind the fact that podcasting is one of those arcane disciplines that rely on the development of modern, computer-based technology in order to have any basis at all. That’s only one of the things that makes it daunting to yours truly—a Twenty-first Century Man with the technical know-how of the Tooth Fairy. 

I am firmly convinced, for example, that when my telephone dims its screen to 90 percent darkness without my commanding it to do so, it is exercising a purblind, autonomous, malicious will of its own. 

A Rube Goldberg machine: “Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin (1931). Soup spoon (A) is raised to mouth, pulling string (B) and thereby jerking ladle (C), which throws cracker (D) past toucan (E). Toucan jumps after cracker and perch (F) tilts, upsetting seeds (G) into pail (H). Extra weight in pail pulls cord (I), which opens and ignites lighter (J), setting off skyrocket (K), which causes sickle (L) to cut string (M), allowing pendulum with attached napkin to swing back and forth, thereby wiping chin.” Public Domain.

And yet, Jack Finney stands as a shining example. A man with only a general liberal arts background, and some experience in the advertising business, he made a good living—as well as contributing to American mid-century culture—by writing stories that often fell under the science fiction rubric. He pulled it off by never letting pesky scientific details get in the way of a good story. His Time and Again stands as one of the great time-travel novels despite its resolute refusal to offer even a Rube Goldberg-style explanation of how time travel was supposed to have worked. He just massaged his protagonist’s psyche until he found himself in the 1890s.

Some chutzpah.

This is enough to give a techno-klutz renewed hope. If Jack Finney can do science fiction, surely Larry F. Sommers can wiggle cyberspace enough to snag a few guest shots on literary podcasts. 

Stay tuned for further developments, but don’t stop the presses. Yet.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

10.08.24
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Dwight

Red.

Green.

Orange.

Blue.

Smears of sticky color burn holes in the black sky, looping and whirling, riveting my five-year-old eyes. 

Two batons, tipped at both ends in fluorescent paint, flung high into the night spinning, caught on their fall by a svelte majorette standing tall in plumed hat and white boots—Marie Cumming, our downstairs neighbor.

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I barely remember Dwight. It dwells in a hazy time between active toddlerhood and full-fledged littleboyness.

Dwight. Photo by IvoShandor, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

My father had finished his chemistry degree at Knox, plus a few teaching courses at Normal. He was teaching chemistry, physics, and driver training at Dwight Township High School.

Dwight was a very small town in North Central Illinois. About 2,800 people then.

Memories flee, circle, and evade. What I mostly can recall is a small, warm klatsch of teachers and townspeople.

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We lived upstairs, above Rogers and Marie Cumming. 

Rogers Cumming—whom people called Roger Cummings, imagine that—was a music teacher and band master. Dapper and energetic, with a shiny bald dome, he was proably around thirty, only a little older than Dad.

Rogers’s wife, Marie, was a honey. She did not hold an official teaching position, as far as I know, but was very musical. She was also statuesque, blonde, and fair of face. She gave lessons to  young girls on baton-twirling, one of the social graces in mid-century, small-town Illinois. Occasionally she could be seen performing, herself, in the uniform of a drum majorette. She was a knockout! 

Louis Prima in 1947. Public Domain

Rogers and Marie had a Wurlitzer organ in their living room. Often, Marie, my sweetheart, sat at that organ and rolled out a rollicking version of my favorite song, “The Too-Fat Polka.” 

A year or two before, my favorite song had been “Bingo Bango Bongo, I Don’t Want to Leave the Congo,” a novelty song recorded in 1947 by Louis Prima and his band. 

But Marie and I were beyond all that. We were sophisticates.

. . . Good night, sweet princess,
And flights of angels sing thee to they rest.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Author

10.01.24
by

The Pod People Are Coming!

You know how sometimes a light bulb goes on in your head? 

Light bulb. Image by Lidija296, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.

You’ve been sweating over something for weeks or months, and all of a sudden you see it from a new angle. One thought breaks in and lights up a bevy of questions, the answers to which bounce off one another in ways you never suspected. It can be profound when that happens. 

It doesn’t happen to me much. But yesterday morning, it did.

I’d been thinking about podcasting. I don’t mean I had considered doing a podcast. In fact, I don’t even know what “doing” is, where podcasts are concerned. Rather, what I mean is, I’ve been pondering the whole subject of podcasting.

It’s a bugaboo for writers. We are told to become a guest on somebody’s podcast, because podcasts are the best avenue to increased book sales. You must pitch podcasters with . . . well, with whatever it is you do, or what you have to contribute to the conversation, or . . . something.

Did I mention, Dear Reader, I was born in the twentieth century? The year 1945, to be precise. Almost eighty years ago. So what do I know from podcasting?

Tens of millions of people make podcasts and listen to podcasts, often with great regularity and brand loyalty. According to Pew Research—which, as you know, researches every social trend worth researching—large portions of a podcast’s audience will buy something, read something, or take an  action because they heard it on their favorite podcast.

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Gutenberg. Public Domain.

But I don’t understand why someone would listen to podcasts in the first place. I am mostly a printed word guy. To me, Gutenberg invented the latest reliable technology. I watch very little TV, listen to very little radio, and take in nearly zero podcasts. 

Those things seem like giant time-wasters to me. You have to wait for someone to speak, or in the case of video, to act, before you can learn that which you could already have grasped by skimming a line or two of prose. And it’s inconvenient, sometimes even impossible, to go back and re-check something that was said a while back. Why would a person want to do this?

“Yes, but—” I hear you cry. “But you can ingest a podcast while doing something else—driving or jogging or washing dishes.” 

Maybe you can, but I am no multi-tasker. I have to pay attention to every single thing. I guess they call that a one-track mind. It leaves me no way to pay attention to something else.

That’s not absolute, Gentle Reader. I can, for example, talk with someone while driving a car. I won’t run over any pedestrians, but I’m almost certain to miss my turn-off. 

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So why do I need to pay attention to podcasting at all? Because podcasters are powerful influencers. The folks who subscribe and listen to podcasts become attached to the voices they hear repeatedly. They invest great authority in their pronouncements. That’s what makes podcasting a valuable vehicle for promoting a book.

Still, I—antedeluvian creature I am—bridle at the idea of pursuing podcast appearances. It is unseemly. It is very now. Therefore I hate it.

But I was mulling over the authority listeners invest in the podcaster, and suddenly—Fair Reader, you might recognize that this is where you came in—A LIGHT BULB WENT ON above my head, just like we used to see in the funny papers.

When I was a boy, in the 1950s, there was a man in whom listeners invested great authority. So much authority, in fact, that you could buy time from him at an expensive rate . . . but if you paid, oh, ten times that rate, the great man himself would deliver your message, in his own voice.

His name was Arthur Godfrey.

Arthur Godfrey at a CBS microphone in 1938. Public Domain.

He was a creation of radio, and by his own audacity, he became king of the medium. While recovering from a near-fatal car crash in 1931, Godfrey spent a lot of time listening to and analyzing commercial radio broadcasts. He noted, according to Wikipedia, “that the stiff, formal style then used by announcers could not connect with the average radio listener. The announcers spoke in stentorian tones, as if giving a formal speech to a crowd and not communicating on a personal level. Godfrey vowed that when he returned to the airwaves, he would affect a relaxed, informal style as if he were talking to just one person.”

That’s just what he did. Jim Ramsburg says: “In their 1963 book, It Sounds Impossible, former CBS executives Sam Slate and Joe Cook describe Godfrey’s return. ‘. . . Listeners heard for the first time the casual, unhurried speech . . . the ruminating, hesitant pace . . . the purring growl that has since opened the doors to millions of American homes.’ ” 

Godfrey’s informality extended even to adlibbing and joking while delivering on-air commercial scripts that sponsors had paid good money for. Godfrey sometimes appeared to be mocking the very product he was selling. But sales zoomed, and canny sponsors realized that having your commercial butchered by “the Old Redhead” was better than having it read meticulously by an ordinary announcer. 

He hit his stride on April 30, 1945, when CBS gave him a half-hour coast-to-coast slot at 9:15 a.m., Monday through Friday, under the title Arthur Godfrey Time. Eventually it expanded to ninety minutes. 

The Old Redhead delivered long, unscripted monologues; interviewed celebrities; introduced and sometimes interrupted or joined in with musical selections by his own in-house orchestra and regular vocalists. It was all spontaneous and informal. 

He got beyond the scripted sound of commercials by inserting adlibbed comments. I recall his reading a commercial for Bufferin that was filled with Madison Avenue catch-phrases. He stopped ten seconds in, paused, and said, “So forth and so on. To tell you the truth, folks, I don’t know what’s in this stuff, but I’ve used it myself and it works.”

He was the ultimate pitchman because it never seemed he was pitching—he was simply commenting, in a folksy, down-to-earth way, on the passing scene. According to Ramsburg, he realized that radio was a personal medium and he spoke directly to the individual listener.

People listened to Arthur Godfrey every day. They knew him, they trusted him, and they were loyal.

Aren’t these the same reasons podcasters are said to be so influential? 

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So when the light bulb went off over my head, it said: “Podcasters are the Arthur Godfreys of today.” Even an old wreck like me can understand that.

Few podcasters enjoy as big an audience as Godfrey commanded. That’s just as well, because anyone whose book is not yet on the New York Times Best Sellers list is unlikely to get a foot in the door of those giant podcasts.

The media scene today is fragmented. Many podcasters have only a few followers, or a few hundred, or a few thousand. That’s where I ought to start. 

And the first thing to do is to pick a few likely candidates and listen to their podcasts. When pitching somebody, it never hurts to know what they’re all about.

You can help me, Dear Reader. Do you subscribe, or listen regularly, to any podcasts that seem related to the theme of this blog—“Seeking new meanings in our common past”? If so, drop me a line at larryfsommers@gmail.com, or just add a comment to this post.  

Help me function in the present century.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

09.24.24
by

Fall Done Fell

Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100-170 AD), painted by Justus van Gent  (fl. 1460–1480) and Pedro Berruguete  (1450–1504). Public Domain.

For the first time in a very long memory, the meteorological season has coincided with the astronomical season. 

Our weather here in Madison, Wisconsin, does not often change on the dates fixed by Ptolemy and other stargazers. 

But this year we got our first fall chill smack dab on Sunday, September 22, the autumnal equinox. On the very day when the plane of Earth’s equator passed through the geometric center of the Sun’s disk, the temperature dropped twenty degrees, from 87 to 67. 

(We Americans still use Daniel Fahrenheit’s old-fashioned degrees. The Celsius scale, which we used to call Centigrade, is more logical. But what are the chances we’d do something that makes sense?)

Raspberries coming ripe.

Highs are expected to stay below 80 for the next ten days at least. Nighttime lows, for now, should remain well above 32 degrees, the freezing point of water. That’s good, because the fall raspberries are coming on strong. I’m picking two or three cups each day. I eat them on my breakfast oatmeal. My wife has already made some of them into freezer jam.

Accusatory wood.

I’d hate to see these raspberries cut short by Jack Frost, the silent assassin.

Other signs of fall are in the air. The geese, not yet in full flight southward, are assembling into fairly large vees and making test flights. They’ll be off soon. 

Pumpkins, still frost-free.

Some logs I acquired in midsummer now sit on our wood rack, uttering silent reproach for my not having split them yet. Time to hone the axe.

I think the fall is the finest season here. The weather may be warm, sparkling, and sunny; or it may be cool, misty, arboreal. In any case it’s always beautiful until the hammer comes down in late October or early November. Then the winds will pick up, slicing icily through everyone and everything. Winter will not be far behind. 

Kale, a real team player.

Soon, the frost will be on the pumpkins. It’s comforting to know the kale in our garden will still be producing fresh leaves when snow is on the ground. It’ll be good in soup.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

09.17.24
by

This Old House

The historic part of Grandma’s old house. Knoxville, Illinois.

I spent golden days of childhood at Grandma and Grandpa LaFollette’s house in Knoxville, Illinois. 

A bit of that old house has been saved as a historic site, but the place I knew in childhood is long gone. I don’t even have a photo of it. Only in memory is it preserved entire.

Let me try tell you why it was special.

#

It stood on a large lot fronting the town square in Knoxville, a town of about two thousand souls. Across the square, on the north side, stood the Old Courthouse, a two-story, white-pillared structure built in 1839. Beside the courthouse, a small brick building housed the village library. Between courthouse and library stood—and still stands—a brick wall, on which the names of local World War II servicemen stand in relief on twin bronze plaques. My father, who survived the war, and his brothers Stanley and Franklin, who did not, are listed there.

The lot my grandparents owned on the south side of the square, next to the Klink Mortuary, was dominated by a huge elm, said to be the largest in Knox County. That tree had a diameter of five or six feet, its trunk surrounded by a circular brick wall and its limbs overspreading the entire lot. The house stood on the left front corner of the lot, near the great tree.

It was a one-story house, with no basement—at least, not under the main part of the house. Its clapboard siding was painted light brown. It was an old house—of indeterminate age really, but old enough that everything sagged a little bit. 

A low porch ran across the front of the house. Wooden railings. A wooden porch swing suspended on chains from the porch ceiling. 

The front door opened into the living room, a large, square space. It was still a large room, even in winter, when a tall kerosene space heater on a metal pad occupied the center of the floor, its blue and yellow flames spreading warmth and cheer. There was room enough for a Christmas tree plus the whole family—twenty or thirty people with all the aunts and uncles and cousins—ripping the wraps off presents, experimenting with Slinkies and toy tractors and those little plastic woodpeckers made in Japan, the ones that climb the wall on rotating suction cups.

Some of the gang at Christmas, 1950. Uncle Dick and Aunt Jane stand in one of the doors to the girls’ room.

A long bedroom ran down the west wide of the living room. That was shared by the youngest of my aunts—Jean, Sue, and Linda—who still lived at home. The bedroom had two doors that opened to the living room, one at each end.

Behind the living room—on its south side—was a smaller dining room. You had to step down to enter it from the living room, a clue that the house had been built bit by bit, extra rooms added according to the dictates of convenience and necessity. 

In the dining room, Christmas 1952. Your New Favorite Author is in foreground, center.

Attached to the east side of the dining room, one step up again, were two additional bedrooms. The far one was Grandma and Grandpa’s bedroom; the other was a spare, a guest room. You had to go through the one room to get to the other. These two rooms could be made very dark, even on a sunny day, because Grandma never took down the blackout shades after the war was over. 

Behind the dining room, to its south, and on the lower level with it, was the kitchen, a small room with refrigerator, range, sink, and pantry on the south wall and just enough room left over for a kitchen table and chairs. 

The end of the kitchen had a door that led outside, to a sort of patio under a roof held up by a gnarled corner-post. Beyond the patio was the back yard, where stood an old iron hand pump— although in my earliest memories, the kitchen already had running water.

You may have noticed I mentioned no bathroom. The house originally had no indoor plumbing. An outhouse must have stood on the back of the lot, but I don’t remember it. One of my earliest memories is of watching a bulldozer dig out the earth right behind the kitchen. That hole was then roofed over and given walls and a floor. Water lines were installed. 

It was a fairly large, high-ceilinged space, with laundry tubs, a toilet, a shower, and an all-important gas-fired space heater. That became the house’s bathroom. In any weather, winter or summer, day or night, if you needed the bathroom you left the kitchen, walked to the rear of the roofed-over patio, then scampered under the sky to the bathroom door, which opened on a short flight of wooden stairs down into the bathroom.

Under those stairs were shelves, where Grandma stored Ball jars of home-canned pickles, tomatoes, jellies and jams.

The house’s only heat, besides that small heater in the bathroom, came from the kitchen stove, plus the large kerosene space heater in the living room, which was installed in the fall and taken out again in spring. You might surmise that peripheral areas—the bedrooms, for instance—would be cool or downright cold. Your surmise would be right. But that’s what blankets and quilts are for.

Another feature of the bedrooms, besides warm covers, was the continued presence of chamber pots under the beds, even after the outhouse was replaced by a “modern” plumbed bathroom. The residents of the house were accustomed to using “thunder mugs” in the middle of the night. And besides, trekking outdoors to the cellar bathroom at midnight in cold weather, barefoot or shod in slippers, was beyond the call of duty.

The lot was large enough, and the house small enough, that there was plenty of room for picnic suppers on warm summer evenings. We would dine at tables spread under the towering canopy of the big green elm, then chase lightning bugs in the dark and imprison them in peanut butter jars with air-holes punched in the lid.

On Saturday nights the town band performed in the old-fashioned bandstand in the park, just across the street from Grandma’s house. The program was always the same—Sousa marches—and it was always thrilling.

#

After Grandpa died, Grandma had to sell the property. Thy buyer wanted a clean lot, unencumbered by the rambling, ramshackle old house that had outlived its time. Grandma found a man who was willing to tear down the house in exchange for the materials he could salvage. 

It was a good deal, but when the man ripped the clapboard siding off the kitchen, he found square-hewn oak timbers, with mud chinking between them. All destuction halted while the members of the local historical society assessed the situation. It turned out that my grandparents’ house had been built upon the first log cabin erected by a white man in Knox County—John Sanburn’s trading post from the 1830s.

It was jacked up, placed on rollers, and moved to the north side of the square, in the empty space beside the Old Courthouse. There it was restored to something like its original condition, and ever since then (1957) it has been a historical exhibit for curious tourists.

I used to eat Thanksgiving dinner at the children’s table in that cabin, back when it was my grandma’s kitchen.

The children’s table in Grandma’s kitchen, 1952.

If you venture through Knoxville, Illinois, on a day when the Sanborn cabin is open for viewing, you can see something of what life on the prairie in the 1830s and 1840s must have been like. But there is no corresponding way for you to visualize what life was like in the middle of the twentieth century in my grandparents’ old house.

I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

09.10.24
by

Changeover

It’s headed back to the 80s now, but we had a cold snap a couple of days ago. Daytime highs in the 60s, down to the low 40s at night.

That was First Notice. This happens almost every year in late August or early September. 

My back-fence neighbor is firing up his grill again, so hardy is his hope. But summer will soon expire, and there is nothing you can do about it. Portents of autumn are everywhere. 

A cheeky squirrel. Photo by Charles J. Sharp, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Sparrows and starlings have begun to flock. Twenty or so turkeys marched down our block this morning. More than half were this year’s poults. 

Thousands of squirrels have jacked up their metabolisms. They’re getting cheeky. One ran right up to me this afternoon as I sat in my lawn chair reading. When he belatedly saw me for what I am, he retreated only a few feet and made a narrow circle around me.

This is no time for a squirrel to be faint of heart. The harvest is upon us.

Our raspberries—slim pickins back in June and July—now look like making a bumper crop of luscious red fruit in the September cycle. That’s assuming the weather holds. We could have highs in the 80s for a couple more weeks, maybe even three or four. And we’ll keep getting berries until there’s a hard frost at night. That could be sometime in October, if we’re lucky.

Football, to be kicked. Photo (cropped) by AleXXw, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0-AT.

What we’re experiencing now, by the way, is not Indian Summer. That comes later, in the fall, if there should happen to be a warm spell after the frost comes. Right now, we’re still in summer. 

But summer’s lease, as the Bard of Avon reminds us, hath all too short a date.

Those football guys are kicking their oblate spheroids again, so it’s only a matter of time before the hammer comes down for good.

Make sure you’ve got a good warm coat.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

09.03.24
by

Railroad Days

Travel
Edna St. Vincent Millay, circa 1920. Public Domain.

The railroad track is miles away, 

    And the day is loud with voices speaking, 

Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day 

    But I hear its whistle shrieking.

All night there isn’t a train goes by, 

     Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming, 

But I see its cinders red on the sky, 

    And hear its engine steaming.

My heart is warm with the friends I make, 

    And better friends I’ll not be knowing; 

Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, 

    No matter where it’s going.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950)

#

Trains roll through my years. . . .

1948

A black shiny engine flies along the Burlington main line, just across Cherry Street, pluming white smoke behind it, dazzling in December sun, nothing but delight and awe. 

Steam locomotive. Fair use.

At night, the rummmmmble-bang! of freight cars in the hump yard lulls me to sleep. I peer into Teddy’s beady black eye and conjure underground works and scrapyards, machinery grinding to the rhythm of switch engines. 

1952

I am seven. Mommy dresses me nice and puts me in a coach car, hands a dollar bill to the steward—brown-skinned, white-coated, rotund—to keep me safe. 

When you ride the train, the conductor, a white man in a dark blue coat, takes your ticket, punches it, puts it in his pocket, swaying in rhythm with the coach, and snaps a white slip into a slot above your seat. The slip shows where you are going, and you’d better get off there. 

Teddy and I make this epic journey all by myself, with pride. I learn the side-to-side sway of railcars, the clack-clack-clack as wheels run over jointed tracks.The conductor opens the loud door at the back of the car and walks through, calling “Chillicothe, next stop! Chillicothe.” Galesburg is after Chillicothe. It’s time to pay attention.

The brown man has watched me kindly for a hundred miles. He makes sure I get off at Broad Street in Galesburg, where Grandma waits in her big gray Hudson.

1958

North Shore cars. Don Ross photo, fair use.

On a certain Friday, I go with Mom and my little sister, Cynda, and we all ride the Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad from its station on 27th Avenue in Kenosha, to meet Dad in Waukegan. The inter-urban car runs from overhead electric wires, like a trolley, packed with commuting men. They dangle from straps one-handed, the Sun-Times, folded with cunning for an efficient read, held in their free hands.

The North Shore Line is on its last legs, its stations and cars dirty and unkempt. People still ride it because the fare is less than for the Chicago and Northwestern, which parallels its route a few miles closer to the lakeshore.

1960

Fifty thousand Boy Scouts assemble for the week-long jamboree in Colorado Springs. Hundreds of us depart from Milwaukee, on a special train. Sunset splashes us as we dine with silver and linens, hurtling across a bridge over the Mississippi. 

At dawn, we get boxes of cereal with half-pints of milk, sit at sawn-timber tables bolted to the baggage-car floor, and down our breakfast as chill, cow-scented air dashes in the open door. Swales, coolies, bunch grass, and incurious Nebraska cattle swoop by at eighty miles an hour.

1962

From Galesburg, we ride the Knox College Special to Chicago for Thanksgiving. We get off at Union Station—all color and bustle, shops and kiosks that sell everything known to man—and I slog two long city blocks at night to the Northwestern Station, for the North Shore Line is defunct, to catch my train to Kenosha. Chicago’s wintry wind, “the Hawk,” etches canyons in me as I struggle down Canal Street, lugging a suitcase, clad in a wool overcoat.

1966

Home on leave, I travel to my next Air force duty station at Monterey, California, by train rather than air. The Union Pacific’s City of San Francisco leaves from Union Station and heads west for two days. We stop briefly at Green River, Wyoming, under a scorching sun. At two a.m., we roll through Reno, “The Biggest Little City in the World,” its all-night neons flashing like competing rainbows as we slide by the main drag, swallowed up on the other side by dark desert.

Always: the side-to-side sway and the clack-clack-clack as the wheels rack up the miles. 

Before too long some folk singer will ride down the Mississippi Valley on the IC, noodling up a train-ride song, “The City of New Orleans,” for his fellow artists to record.

1960-something

We’re at the end of an era. We all sort of know it, because the service is not what it ought to be. To tell you the truth, it’s a lot nicer to ride airplanes, where you can sit in comfort while a pretty stewardess brings a great meal on a tray, with bright stainless cutlery, crystal glasses, china cups, and hotel-grade coffee. Airline service being so good, we may as well forget about trains.

#

But the memories . . . Ah, the memories. 

Those, you don’t forget so easily.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

08.27.24
by

Hot Enough For Ya?

We’re in the hot part of summer, when the glass jar of tea left to brew by sunshine gets so hot you might as well have boiled it up on the stove.

His Foobishness, under sentence.

Our big black dog, recovering from ear-flap surgery, lies cone-headed in the sun and doesn’t seem bothered. But for us humans here in Madison, Wisconsin, the temperatures—mid-90s by day, down to around 75 at night—feel extreme.

In fact, we know so, for the National Weather Service is issuing Excessive Heat Warnings, and if you can’t trust your government, who can you trust?

When I was a boy, we needed no heat warnings. We could tell it was hot, all by ourselves. 

You didn’t even have to go outside; it was hot everywhere. 

That was in north-central Illinois, in a little town called Streator. Summer temperatures ran about ten degrees hotter than they do here. Every summer, we’d get a pretty good string of hundred-plus days. 

A local entrepreneur, to get his picture in the paper, would fry an egg on the sidewalk in front of his gas station—at nine o’clock in the morning!

We kids, being kids, were not bothered by the heat. If we stopped and thought about it, we’d get to feeling kind of droopy and sweaty. But usually we didn’t stop and think about things. We were too busy running around the neighborhood, playing tag, or cowboys, or space cadets. Sometimes we armed ourselves with squirt guns, which provided a welcome spritz of coolish water.

If we got to feeling too hot, we’d find some shade or go inside. We’d stop running and sit still for a while. Let the sweat dry. 

Have I mentioned—there was no air-conditioning? There was no place you could go to escape the fervid ambience. Not unless you went to the movies.

Our town had two theaters—the Plumb and the Granada—and both were air-conditioned. A child’s admission at the one cost a quarter, the other fifteen cents. But you didn’t ordinarily take off in the middle of a day without your family and go to the pictures. 

Not when you could get cooled off for free by wandering through E. C. Van Loon’s Sporting Goods store on Main Street. That was the only other air-conditioned space in town. They kept the temperature cranked way down, and the lights off. I suppose the juice to run the A/C cost so much they couldn’t afford to turn on the lights, too.

Stepping into Van Loon’s on a blazing August day was like exploring an Egyptian tomb. The only light was what managed to slip past the dark green street awning and seep in the front windows, then bounce in ever-diminishing waves back to the rear of the store. You walked along narrow aisles full of balls and gloves, rifles and shotguns, and bright-colored fishing lures of every description—some of them designed to mimic bright-colored creatures never seen in any Illinois pond or stream.

It was all tantalizing. Intriguing. Great entertainment. But it was freezing. You could catch your death of cold.

Fleeing the store by the front door, you stepped into the vast sauna of a small-town summer and knew you were back where you belonged.

None of us had houses or cars that were air-conditioned. Such a thing was unheard of—like private citizens owning electronic computers.

We must have smelled terrible all summer long, but nobody noticed because we all did.

Sorry about that.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer