Following the Foibles of our Foes or Does There Ever Come a Time When the Water of Clear Thinking and Kind Heartedness Find Their Way to the Wicked Witch and She Dissolves in a Puddle?
And the title of this installment: Can Fact Emulate Fiction?
So now we can all feel entitled!
I’ve been thinking of items never enjoyed before our lifetimes . . . important items such as Toaster Waffles, Pop Tarts, Tater Tots, and Fruit Loops. We shouldn’t keep those wonderful names from having a wider use. Great names like that could well be used for a set of awards for the most inane, ill-thought-through, unnecessary, even stupid legislative bills. The bills could go by the name of their award, and the set of four (or make your own additions if four is not enough, such as wild wings or hula hoops) could be awarded however often they were needed…annually? every legislative session? every day of any session?
Here are my most immediate picks, and I share them with no fear that we won’t need to award more very soon. Okay…very, very soon.
The Fruit Loops Award
Just for the alliterative effect, my Fruit Loops Award goes to our state legislator who is riding the John Birch Fluoride Scare again, perhaps encouraged by Clarence Thomas’s Nebraska wife Ginny’s John Birch background. Under this bill, the children’s tooth saving use of fluoridated water mandates would be gone and a municipality would have to “opt in” to using fluoride. Will the American Dental Association (whose own financial interest would be advanced by this bill) come to the rescue?
The Pop Tarts Award
State Senator Tom Brewer, distinguished service veteran, manfully using his expertise to make trips to Ukraine (albeit that Ukraine is a bit out of the jurisdiction of the Nebraska Legislature), is also our state’s most persistent gun advocate—more bills to this effect each session. He argues that, as a Constitutional Right for every citizen, there can be no legal interference with everyone carrying guns, concealed or not, with no necessary training and no restrictions except possibly bazookas being out of the hands of Taylor Swift since they might find their way into her boyfriend’s hands, said boyfriend having displayed some anger issues recently. Brewer’s stated motive for more guns: to stop so many of our kids from being killed. Pop. Pop. Pop.
The Tater Tots Award
For nice mushiness on the inside and a crusty exterior, this award goes to Senator Linehan. She led the gallant fight to take public money for private schools, devised the shell game so that it would sound like a reasonable and constitutional thing, (all for the kids, you know!) and got her bill through the house.
That is through one house, the unicameral legislature. But it didn’t sit so well with the “other” house, the people’s vote through petition and referendum, where enough signatures were easily obtained to put the matter on the ballot. Pesky little things like the 57 of our 93 counties who have no private schools and, like other public schools across the state, would see their budgets eventually diminished by Linehan’s proposal. Foxed by the “second house” being clearly opposed to public funds for private schools, she then devised another shell game and declared that the people should have no voice in this, only her and her legislative majority. The award’s nickname could be the Marie Antoinette award.
The Toaster Waffle Award
Lest you think me entirely provincial, I will make one award out of state. I realize that leaves so many in-state shenanigans without an award, but that’s the way the toaster waffles. This award goes, as you probably guessed, to Alabama, where an egg is a person … yes, the same place that couldn’t wait to try a new death penalty so the person dying could experience his own death, has now valued life so highly and expressed that value in laws that in vitro fertilization clinic staff were afraid of being hauled into court on homicide or manslaughter charges. The solution: ixnay on the itro-vay. Do not be surprised when you order chicken dinner that it comes to you as eggs instead. No recourse, at least not in Alabama. You who drive in lanes reserved for cars with multiple passengers—get a half-carton of eggs to put in the passenger seat. It will truly be hard to find a worthy successor for this award.
Please forgive that last hyperbole. Unfortunately, it will not be hard at all. I’m lining up bills coming from our long-standing believers that government is the problem, not the answer, the defenders of local control, who are now filling the legislative agenda with bills that would override local decisions by legislative decree.
I have not decided yet whether the bills that would shift control of state boards into the hands of the governor fall into this category or deserve an award of their own.
And then, a candidate for an award already looming: the well-meant attempt to get state tax incentives to lure the film industry to Nebraska. Their mantra: there was no scene in the popular series Yellowstone, that couldn’t have been filmed here. Apparently, we have plenty of sad lives to portray locally. They are right, of course—it would be great to boost a film industry in Nebraska, which already boasts Marlon Brando and Henry Fonda and Alexander Payne and Jon Bokenkamp and Oscar Micheaux and Harold Lloyd and Marg Helgenberger. But the lobbyists didn’t stop to think of why our legislature would be unlikely to support their efforts…our award- winning legislators would not want to see – or want others to see – or want youth to see, the kind of films good writers, directors, casts, and crews would produce!
Although there will be plenty of other nominees, perhaps the most eligible if he were only to become a legislator somewhere, at some level, would be his most Reverend Rick Wile who believes vegetarianism is plot from the devil to change our DNA so we are no longer human and therefore can’t be saved. Believe me, there’s a lot that could be said about that, and I believe he would have the support, possibly already has the support, of our award winners.
I’m waiting on a better product name title for our Governor’s new outrage over NU’s AD leaving for Texas. There may be lots there to be outraged about, but no such outrage emerged when a) the Regents allowed former President Ted Carter to stay on months after he’d accepted the post of prexy at Ohio State, b) during which time he wreaked a lot of damage, the consequence of which he wouldn’t have to face, c) and then proceeded to let an interim system president make campus chancellor choices, who serve at the will of the President, d) knowing that the campus chancellors will actually end up working for his replacement who may not will their continuance. Nope, nothing in that to disturb the Governor, but let an AD leave and, oh my! It almost seems the Governor and the AD must have been dating, he is so forlorn over it. Help me think of a good title for an award! (And help me spread the little bit of good news—the PTB (powers that be), while not mitigating the damage Carter did, have decided on the sane course of putting an excellent candidate in as President of the NU system, so the Chancellor’s of each campus will be working for the fellow who hired them in the first place. Saints be praised, a moment of sanity!
And, I almost forgot, for Rev. Arin Hess, self-appointed Chaplain, who has been trying to sneak bible study around the rules about what can take place in the Senate chamber itself.
That’s Arin, not Aaron, who’s Erring
The Good Reverend Hess got himself into a mess
He missed the Ark and caught the showboat, I’d guess
Caught hiding the truth in his Bible,
It turns out he might just be liable,
Another case of a misconstrued gospel, no less.
Next blog: the quarterly In Memoriam—this one covering April Fool’s Day to Memorial Day at the end of May
I was, at the first, thinking of possibly crowd-sourcing the title, Following the Foibles of our Foes; but, so far, no suggestions have come my way regarding titling these three related monthly installments. Meanwhile, the political shenanigans in Nebraska have increased day-by-day, so a fourth installment may be necessary! Now, however, April: April brings the second installment–Can Fact Emulate Fiction?
I’m belatedly reporting that there were some little problems with the media coverage of the State of the Union. Oh, yes, there are some problems with the Media, one of them being it is hard to see why MAGA-thought thinks the Media is a villain when they are repeating now what they repeated constantly in the run up to 2016—an almost endless coverage of the former president balanced by an almost single-minded focus this round on Joe Biden’s age. What could be fairer than that? No chance of age-ism being involved, in the deprecation of experience! And come on, if Joe’s opponent pays all his fines, he won’t be able to afford much publicity so giving it him free publicity a la 2016 is the American way.
We watched the State of the Union a day later, taped from the night it was given, so we already had the advantage of tons of takes like, “the five take-aways from the State of the Union.” One of those five take aways was not that, aside from airing the address itself, most of the commentary was reducing it to a few Media-chosen talking points. I know—you have to keep talking heads employed or they quit talking, and then what would we ever do except listen to the talk and decide for ourselves what the take-aways might be?
But wouldn’t it be great if the Media were to stop telling us what we are going to hear and what we heard.
Having already heard that I would be seeing the Speaker of the House unable to contain his grimaces of disapproval, I watched his face carefully enough to get a rough count, enough to be pretty sure that in fact, he smiled or nodded in approval a lot more than he smirked, he stood twice (although how anyone would not stand in opposition to Putin I cannot fathom). But you can’t divide us into camps and so generate listeners/viewers by not joining in the current American pastime of looking only at what divides us. Apparently, never enough.
The so-called freedom caucus seems to think that being free means you are given a license to be rude and boorish, and their childish camera shots were certainly on display, even charging about the chamber to get in people’s faces or get the attention away from everyone else—well, they were not so amenable to bi-partisanship. A friend of mine claims that he/they are just behaving like oafs to “awaken” us dolts to reality. Well, their fact-less version of reality. Watching them reminded me of Jeremiah 7:24b: they walked in their own counsels and looked backward rather than forward.
Then the media pronounced the address as the most partisan speech ever given as the State of the Union Address. Somehow, I am pretty doubtful anyone did a rhetorical analysis of, say, any dozen or half-dozen such addresses to come to that unequivocal conclusion of the talking heads. The presidency has ever been a “bully pulpit,” and it was never more so than when it was in the hands of a bully as it was during Biden’s predecessor’s term.
Meanwhile, with the State of the Union as backdrop, MAGA’s true colors raced to catch up…making me wonder if we are prepared to trust them when they tell the truth about what they believe. Here’s what was said next, the real response to the State of the Union, not that little housewifely 5 minutes that came immediately after:
How religion and authoritarianism have come together in modern America was on display Thursday, when right-wing activist Jack Posobiec opened this weekend’s conference of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Washington, D.C., with the words: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.” He held up a cross necklace and continued: “After we burn that swamp to the ground, we will establish the new American republic on its ashes, and our first order of business will be righteous retribution for those who betrayed America.”
As the gamblers say, Read ‘em and weep!
Next blog: May, intended to be the last installment of Foibles—unless my cup runneth over and the gag writers, excuse me the State Senators have simply provided too much material.
David Francis, 11+ years as temporary (!) organist at St. Luke’s, who dubbed the acquisition of the current organ our “organ transplant” project, whose then wife Connie and their three children were all active at St. Luke’s when I was its Rector; a court reporter par excellence in his paying job. David was one of the four from St. Luke’s who braved stormy skies to fly to Louisville to see the organ they had for sale, which St. Luke’s eventually bought. Grounded to wait out a storm, taking to the air again just in time for the storm to turn around and bear down on us, beating it by just a moment or two, being glad to land safely in Louisville, the taxi taking us from the airport to our motel, and the driver pulling out a pint of whiskey for a drink. David led the laughter in the car. The pilot was Dr. Mark Meyer, the other two were Dr. Feese, our choir director at the time, and me. (see photo of the organ below)
Terry Grossman, in a house fire. Terry loved work and was employed several places, including UNK Facilities and CHI Good Samaritan Hospital; when we were new to recovery, Terry was of great help to us.
Monte Krabil, husband of faithful member of St. Luke’s, Lyn, herself of a long acquaintance with my dad, who presided at her wedding. Mostly saw Monte at the Harmon Park summer concerts sponsored by the Kearney Area Arts Guild, himself once a member of several bands.
John Wharton Lowe III, a very fine scholar of southern studies, including Faulkner, where we seemed to enjoy each other’s work and company, and he was just John.
Virginia Lund. For some years, Virgie was the director of the Frank House (now the Frank Museum) on the UNK campus, doing her part to follow those who preceded her and would follow her to bring out the old house and contents historic value.
Dan Mahalek, husband of Sandy in a second marriage, he a long-time history teacher at Kearney High and a presenter at Senior College on his favorite historic event, the Civil War, even as she taught seniors about plains Indians.
Peggy M. Wife of Dick M., who faithfully recorded speakers on Recovery for many years. Peggy celebrated 60 years before passing.
Don McKenzie, once part-owner of Kearney’s ABC Rexall; his late wife Roberta was a beloved journalism teacher at UNK and Don was a sports enthusiast, especially when it came to children and grandchildren; theirs was one of the first home in which I visited after moving to Kearney.
Cathy Parsons, great and good long-time friend, once part of Nancy’s bridge (and baby-sitting) group with Valerie Fetrow and Ruth Lampe, for many years a professional traveling to facilities for severely to moderately challenged people to create standards of care and see to compliance. Cathy always a host at so many feasts in the Parsons’s home; I officiated at both of their daughters’ weddings.
Bonnie Rasmussen—I do not recall meeting Bonnie, but she is the mother of good friend Kristi Salestrom and related to former parishioner Bud Rasmussen and photographer Jack Rasmussen, so I felt like I know from what they’ve said over the years.
Rick Sehnert, who after his father, Bob, ran the Sehnert’s Bakery in Kearney, a brother and brother-in-law to our good friends, Jan and Tom Paxson. Growing up in McCook, we enjoyed the other Sehnert’s Bakery, run by a cousin of the Kearney Sehnert’s, Walt, and later his son Matt. I’m pretty sure several of my pounds are owed to their baking!
Richard Walker, college fraternity brother, a senior when I was a first-year student, who had a passion for studying water and had stories of wading out into one river another on a plunge of discovery. Perhaps the first person I’d ever met with a single passion. And he overcame a lot to succeed.
Janice Wiebusch, sometime choir director at St. Luke’s, who began her adult life teaching music and ended her career as a successful real estate broker, and in the meantime played dueling piano-organ pieces with David Francis, then the organist (also recently deceased—see above) and, with her husband Jack was part of our Road Trip supper club.
Celebrities and in the news
Joan Acocella, who covered Dance for years for the New Yorker’s but is known to Cather fans for one of the finer pieces about Willa Cather—incisive, capturing the heart of Cather and her work.
Bob Beckwith, the New York retired fire fighter who came out of retirement to put his skills to use on 9/11 and was photographed with President Bush atop the rubble, becoming an icon of civic responsibility and the public good (something a lot of Americans forgot during COVID as they flaunted public health measures).
Ken Bowman, who snapped the ball and ran the interference for QB Bart Starr during the Green Bay Packers great seasons in the 1960’s…reportedly “de-centered” by natural causes.
Hydeia Broadbent, As the Associated Press reported: a prominent HIV/AIDS activist known for her inspirational talks in the 1990s as a young child to reduce the stigma surrounding the virus she was born with…She was 39. Having just finished John Irving’s The Last Chair Lift, with extensive chapters about the AIDS crisis, this report seemed to me especially poignant!
Lou Gossett Jr., who claimed God set him on earth for a purpose, then set down “Roots” and became the first black actor to receive the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and now, listen up soldiers, is producing and directing in another realm.
Shecky Green, one of the best of the standup comedians of the mid-to-late 20th Century, a regular in Las Vegas. We got to be present at a show where he included in his “act” a song from Fiddler on the Roof, whose lead part went to someone other than Sheky. He claimed he never had an act, that it was always improvised. Survivor of driving his car into the fountain at Caesar’s Palace and telling the police when they arrived: “No wax, please.” And survivor to of the attacks on him by the Rat Pack after he’d fallen out with Sinatra. His joke: “Frank Sinatra once saved my life (pause) A bunch of guys were beating on me and Frank said, ‘Okay that’s enough.’”
Norman Jewison, unafraid of controversy and able to make controversies clear to a mass audience, with the breadth of understanding and vision to be able to direct TV and film hits of amazing breadth, from Moonstruck to In theHeat of the Night, throw in Fiddler on the Roof and Jesus Christ, Superstar!
Jiang Ping, Chinese legal scholar who lost his position at China University of Political Science and Law (where he was both a longtime teacher and for two years its President), forced to resign after backing the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. Unlike many dissidents, he continued to be a public figure and an influential voice for the rights of citizens against the powers of the state.
Glynis Johns, 101, of which 80 were spent on stage and screen, being remembered in the pop ups for her role as the suffragette in Mary Poppins, but by me for The Sundowners (Winfred Banks) and Danny Kaye’s wonderful the Court Jester. Sondheim thought enough of her distinctive voice to arrange songs for her that played to her vocal strengths. South African-British-American.
Toby Keith, king of rowdy country music and patriotic songs.
Dexter Scott King, MLK’s second son, chosen by Coretta Scott King to take her place as head of the King Center, he resigned four months later over a dispute with her. His real ambition was embodied in his desire, born of his passion for human and animal rights, to see the King Center be what he called “a West Point of nonviolent training.” Sadly, it was not to be so, as so many of our campuses have military programs and so few have peace studies.
Richard Lewis, comedian whose humor had an argumentative edge, the expression of his own troubled sense of the world, but not before some light came his way, and now the greater light.
Joe Liberman, first Jewish person to run for Vice-President of the United States, sometimes a bridge-builder between political parties, sometimes contradictory in his allegiances.
Peter Magubane, artist and photographer, whose work shed light on the everyday struggles of those living under the Apartheid in South Africa.
Dan Marberger, Iowa Principal who was fatally struck by numerous bullets as he heroically stepped into protect children at his school, and shame on the votes the gun lobby has bought.
Anthony Messineo, think Tony, think Valentino’s, think his father’s Tony and Luigi’s, it would be hard to think of any greater impact over a period of three generations on Lincoln food; a relative was once secretary in the Philosophy Department at NU and helped run off my class materials.
M. Scott Momaday, who finally made his way to the House Made of Dawn! The novel of that name opened American literature to him and the great native writers who followed, the first foray into the sort of Native Renaissance, long overdue after Oliver La Farge’s groundbreaking Laughing Boy.
Alexy Novalny, becoming sadly the permanent victim of Putin’s Russia, by which he had been persecuted his whole adult life, and leading figure in the struggle from which he never flinched.
David Soul, Hutch of TV series Starsky and Hutch, whose “Don’t Give Up on Us” was a hit song.
Current Organist Marilyn Musick at the organ David Francis helped select and for some years played.
I’m crowd-sourcing the title. Instead of Following the Foibles of our Foes, how about Does There Ever Come a Time When the Waters of Clear Thinking and Kind Heartedness Find Their Way to the Wicked Witch and She Dissolves in a Puddle? Or, possibly, Can Fact Emulate Fiction? But feel free to send your suggested title for the series of three episodes in March, April, and May.
Beware: beyond this FIRST INSTALLMENT, the whole three-part series threatens daily to become an unending project: this month, my new guide to how MAGA-thought (something like Double-Speak) works barely scratches the surface. And yes, I grant that the very term MAGA-thought (sic) should be followed by that “sic” denoting in this case not only a mistake in the text but a whole passel of actual mistakes, just shy of 91 at last count even if only counting the mistakes with legal aspects.
We are all capable of error of course, but if I was that “sic” I think I’d try to claim some kind of immunity from prosecution. And you wouldn’t count on me to care if any others, doing my bidding or carrying my message, would not fall under that umbrella of immunity. Let them fare for themselves.
Here is the story of one such wayfarer in the legions of those who attend the rallies, send in the contributions, and have that telltale sign of a Kool Aid-like stain about them.
I’m in the men’s locker room at the gym, a guy rushes in and, as he begins getting out of his street clothes, puts in a rush call to someone on his cell phone. Let’s call him Gym Mate. His end of the conversation begins, “Hey, just calling to see if you’ve heard the latest news.” But he quickly amends, “…well, not exactly news because the media will never put this out.”
So here is an idea not included in MAGA-thought: Either the Media won’t put this out because it is not true or the Media did indeed put this out because, otherwise, you, Gym Mate, would not have heard about it.
And here is part one of the news Gym Mate is so excited to pass on. The January 6 committee tried to get rid of a lot of files they had been ordered to keep. Or maybe it was just Liz Cheney?
Yeah, the media would surely skip that one!
But here is part two of the news. By now half-undressed and the phone never leaving his ear, Gym goes on: “And it is very likely that those files contain exculpatory evidence.”
Yes, indeed, we don’t even know which files have supposedly gone missing, but we do know what is “very likely” in them! Elementary my dear Watson! We can deduce what’s in them by the fact that they are missing. And all this from a MAGA who no doubt thinks Nixon was framed.
But here is a kicker to the story. Gym Mate quickly asks his listener on the phone. “Do you know what exculpatory means?”
Do you suppose that there is a small chance that the word “exculpatory” was not only included in whatever fake news, possibly from Breitbart, revealed this criminal activity, but also that the purveyor of the fake news had enough foresight to provide a definition. Bannon would no doubt know it; not so likely Gym Mate.
“It means,” now naked Gym Mate reveals, the footage of photos or the files that were erased would prove that January 6 was not an insurrection and none of those poor blokes serving time for it was guilty of anything.
Yup, it is the January 6 committee in league with the Media hiding the truth, but the guardians of God and the American Way (one and the same thing to them) are outing those dastardly villains, Praise the Lord.
And, oh yes, one other kicker. The super patriots saving us from these villains have actually “recovered the files the committee tried to get rid of, but they can’t open them because they don’t have the passwords and the committee won’t reveal them.”
Imagine that, the committee won’t reveal the passwords on its files!
He closes the conversation, puts down his phone, gets dressed, and look puzzled when I say to him, “You do know, don’t you, that that is all bull shit?”
But being bull shit didn’t stop it from airing a couple weeks later on the Fox and Fox-Alike stations that specialize in this kind of clear thinking and straight news.
End of lesson…thanks, Gym Mate, for the demonstration.
Next blog: the quarterly In Memoriam will appear about Easter, then the April blog will be Installment 2 of Foibles of our Foes.
Having become a wildly successful writer, I thought I owed it to struggling writers today to share a bit of advice about how to start out on the road to success. I truly believe that, if you pay close attention, I can get you close to the number of my readership—my last blog was read by 34 people! Well, who can tell how much of the blog they actually read? It doesn’t matter. They looked at the blog, which these days counts the same as reading. (The bar is now very low for anything to count as “reading.”)
There’s no use trying to cram in all the good advice I can give you, so we’ll just start with one very important idea, indeed a key to future success. If you find it useful (and I’m sure you will), I’ll follow up with more gems to guarantee you at least a portion of the wide readership I enjoy.
Don’t dismiss this first advice too quickly. It may sound like just common sense. That doesn’t disqualify it as not simply good but in fact vital advice. Here it is: Start Early in Life.
One advantage of starting when you are very young is that you are not burdened by so much knowledge that you can’t get right to the point. And, if you are at all influenced at a young age by comic books, you will not hesitate to illustrate your own work. And, most importantly, you will not have lost the confidence you had up until puberty. You will tackle things large and small with equal gusto.
[Here’s a little side advice—keep your early writing samples. When puberty has disturbed your self-assuredness or longer life has sapped your memory, these examples will stir you to screw up your courage and go at it again. By that point you should be fairly adept at screwing up.]
Rather than deal with this in the abstract, best I give you some examples so you can see for yourself how real potential as a writer reveals itself early in life.
This first sample, from somewhere around the age, oh say 5-7, received a 100, from my teacher at the time, I suspect one of the fine teachers I had at Orrington in Evanston. I’m only sorry looking back that I never conceived of writing something with the title “Orrington in Evanston.” Radio was still very popular in those days and that sounds like a sure bet for a radio series title. If a light and sardonic story, possibly the voice of Dick Powell? Or if dark with intrigue, maybe Orson Welles. Just hear them speaking it: “Orrington in Evanston.” (I invite brief sketches of who or what both Orrington and Evanston might refer to in such a series! Maybe it is not too late!)
But, as writers say and my uncle Ken’s stories demonstrated, I digress. Here is sample number one, to be followed by a profound truth about writers [with some marginal gloss as we go].
Nancy’s balloon can’t fly high
because the string is to short
[do not worry to much about spelling at the start]
John went to get some string.
The string went with a bird.
She thought that the string
Flew away itself.
a bird fle waway with the
[capitalization or even spacing are not of concern until much later]
String.
he thinks the bird should
have done it
[Or perhaps just “should have it”—there is some erasure here in the mss.]
There is no reason, at this point, to comment on the obvious depths of character motivation—you will have registered that immediately as you read. But you would have no way of knowing that “John” was to be the name of a close friend in high school and “Nancy” was to be the name of the girl I married in college. This is what I mean by saying that writing can be prophetic. Although, admittedly, the prophecy could only be detected in retrospect, that is upon not only knowing a “John” and a “Nancy,” but in seeing how closely the imagined John and Nancy foreshadowed the actual way the later real John and Nancy thought about things.
You will not be far afield at this point, if you are thinking there is something Proustian, possibly mixed a bit with Thurber, in the world-view the early writer exhibits, way before he ever heard of Proust or Thurber, indeed long before he’d even read Walter Brooks’s Freddie the Pig series, or had come to know poets such as Ted Kooser or Bill Kloefkorn. Still, it stares us in the face and is unavoidable to come to grips with one way or another.
A bit later example shows how, even at a young age, a writer morphs into a more mature style. This sample is from my writing at about age 9-10. (At least, if we can read the details of the writing as reliably autobiographic, and in this case I can attest to that personally. Take my word for it.)
Life and Death
I am a fourth Grade Umpire, the kids that play baseball hate me at least I think they do. Every time we play baseball I’m umpire. Now for example lets take yesterday! The boys and I were having a nice peaceful ball game until the boy up didn’t strike at a good ball and I called strike out. Well then they all got mad well guess what I came in with a black eye. Now for another example the boys and I were having another good ball game until I called 3 outs. Well: results another black eye even before the other eye was normal. Now for another example yesterday I came inside. Now I didn’t know anything had happened but it had. I had a bloody nose. Now yesterday the boys and I were playing another game I called: out. Well, results: no not the same thing but they did call out; kill the umpire. So I say it’s a matter of life and death. The End.
(This piece is signed Chuck Peek but that early version of Chuck Peek hadn’t left enough space, so the last name curls up on the right edge of the paper toward “the end.”)
Now, you will notice right away the Joycean experimentation with punctuation, enhancing a rather stream-of-consciousness narrative—again interesting because I had only about then met the first of several girls I would come to know named “Joyce,” one of them who would marry a very close friend of mine. As I look back on this, however, I see the first forays into the existential contemplation of being and not-being—and even of just plain hard luck in life. As you will see before I finish, this could even possibly count as a forerunner of fantasy baseball, at the time not yet invented. (And I’d recommend not underlining…your reader should be able to register the appropriate emotion from the words themselves.)
If memory served, I could probably produce many examples like these…I don’t know because memory no longer serves and the samples here are the only one’s I’ve been able to find, these found in a box with the old report cards that seemed to cause so many unpleasant moments at our dinner table. At any rate, I’ll just add one more example.
This one is dated (and, a 3rd piece of advice free of charge, always sign and date your writing. But feel free to experiment with how you register a date—another much-missed opportunity to show your originality. The date on this reads “Wed., 2, 1952.”
Dear Pres. Truman,
I think I have got in this letter a piece of machinery that will let us win the war and have peace.
The machine guns will be on something like this.
[here follows an illustration of a mount for the machine guns…the mount looks like a capital H with a “Mystery Science Theater” sort of neck and head rising from its cross bar—again way before there was a Mystery Science Theater!]
I think and hope very much that will be the answer to our American problem
[Oh, blessed times when America had only one problem!]
I also hope very much that you will youse this
Yours very truly
Charles A. Peek
There is a P.S. with arrows pointing to an attached page subtitled Plans to win the war and illustrating the placement of guns to shoot at people running one way, shoot overhead (at people in trees or at planes in the sky), shoot just planes, and shoot people running the other direction!
Just incidentally, this can illustrate one of the great values of underlining! And I’m still proud of the experimental effort to enhance merely pragmatic “use” with ethnicity or “local color” in the last line’s “youse.” Young writers are full of surprising innovations!
P.S. I do not believe I ever umpired a baseball game in my life—proving, as so many writers do, that you don’t have to write about anything you know something about.
At any rate, I hope these examples encourage you to start off your writing career early in life. If it is too late for that, I’m afraid that I have no further advice.
Kearney, Nebraska
February 2024
Charles A. Peek
I have no idea when I can summon the audacity to write concerning the enormous examples of stupidity emerging from the state legislature, let alone contemplate the national scene…but I suppose I should try before my April cataract surgery gives me even clearer sight! I guess that leaves March.
In Memoriam All Saints 2023 to New Years 2024 by Charles Peek
Friends and Acquaintances
Bart Bredenkamp, Acacia Senior when I was a pledge, the very image of a tall, good-looking, had-it-all-together soon-to-graduate senior. The last I saw of him was at his wedding in western Nebraska, to which I took Judy Bishop, then nurse in Dr. Leininger’s office. My friend Freddie Hummer ended up marrying Judy, I lost track of Bart, and the notice in the alumni obituaries brought so much back to mind.
Aaron Broweleit, son of a Seneca couple; I zoom almost weekly with his mother, another of that generation caught between her son’s illness and her mother’s assisted living, but possessed through it all of good sense and good humor.
Marilyn Dorf, originally from Albion where I interned under Bishop Rauscher, later of Lincoln, parishioner at Holy Trinity, and member of the Lincoln Chaparral Poets, well known among the Lincoln writers. Rex Walton let me know.
David Glover, to quote from the Kearney Hub: Dave made a lasting mark as a long-time hospital administrator for Good Samaritan Hospital in Kearney, NE. He went on to work as the Clinic Administrator at Family Practice Associates until his retirement in 2019. During his career, his leadership would play a pivotal role in establishing the Flight for Life program, and later the Nebraska Telehealth Network. Dave also served on the Kearney Public Schools Board for 28 years.
Robert Nefsky, 30-year veteran of the Humanities Nebraska, many years also on the Nebraska Cultural Endowment, and all their good work a rich reward for his stalwart efforts.
Rich Oehlerking, Acacia fraternity brother with whom I was able to re-connect not so long ago. I came out of McCook in 1960, joined Acacia, and Rich Oehlerking was the first Democrat of my age I’d ever lived around! Our arguments about the Kennedy-Nixon race stuck with me and we laughed about it many years later when our thoughts were more closely aligned!
Pat Schneider, whom I met in 2008 and whose story was, for me, very edifying. She later wrote a memoir of her childhood near Inavale, very near Cather’s Red Cloud, and when I suggested I’d be happy to see if the bookstore at the Willa Cathe National Center would like to carry a few copies, she generously sent me a box of copies of what is a charming memoir, and indeed the bookstore has been glad to have it on their shelves.
Rae Whitney, beloved widow of the late Fr. Clyde Whitney and herself a noted hymn writer, whose setting to the Nunc Dimittis is my favorite and whose simple small group songs were so clever and singable. Oh Eve, Oh Adam!
Notables in the News
Kenneth Bloomer, sculptor; his Winged Horse and the trellis that is an abstract image of the Platte River atop the Archway Monument that “bridges” over I-80 at Kearney may have been seen by more people than most other sculptures (see photo below)
Rosalynn Carter, who married Jimmy Carter in 1946 when I was 4 years old, went on to be his best advisor and a champion of women’s rights and mental health care in her own right, as well as a presence at cabinet meetings.
Henry Kissinger. If you favor nuclear disarmament and peaceful relations with China, Henry is your man. Unless you remember how he held up the peace process to end the Vietnam War or used his prestige to divide rather than unite the country.
Bobby Knight, the irascible but indisputably talented Indiana basketball coach…hard not to like unless you are a folding chair!
Shane MacGowan, for years lead song-writer for The Pogues, then fired for his no-shows due to his addictions, of whom the Irish president, said “his songs capture within them, as Shane would put it, the measure of our dreams.” My favorite Pogue song: If I Should Fall from the Grace of God.”
Charlie Munger, the other member of the Comedy Team Buffet and Munger, Warren doing the warning of what was to come, Charlie providing the punch line, Charlie regularly donating shares of Berkshire Hathaway to his favorite charities, but not fast enough to slip out of the billionaire class.
Sandra Day O’Connor, who leaves, as did Henry Kissinger, a very mixed legacy—out of hundreds of “tie-breaker” votes on our nation’s highest court, the notorious decision that made George W. our president, and on the other hand, the defense of Roe v. Wade from the earlier assaults made on good sense. And, to my chagrin, we have to credit Reagan with her nomination to be the first woman on the court, a role she lived out with dignity.
Ryan O’Neal, Tatum’s dad, Farrah’s lover, now flown over the Paper Moon.
Jim Salestrom, last in Kearney at the Merryman Performing Art Center for the 50th anniversary and final tour of Timberline with his brother, son, and a couple of gifted replacements for some of the original band members, and who made Kearney proud whether with gigs at KSC’s Campus Lutheran or on stage with John Denver or Dolly Parton. Jim’s last gig was covered by local (Gibbon) Bill Ganz. Jim’s brother Chuck and his wife Kristi are long-time friends.
Tommy Smothers, who, with his brother, made beautiful music and created pointed and clever comedy routines that helped a lot of us move through a sometimes beautiful, sometimes tumultuous time. Perhaps your PBS station uses their Legends of Folk Music video for its annual fundraising…their madrigal on that video is a prime example of their wit and talent and the joy it brought a generation.
Postscript
Over much of the United States, and no less true of the University of Nebraska at Kearney, this school year and going back some years, supposedly under what is euphemistically dubbed “the business model,” weak or ignorant administrations and clubs of perks for the well-off called Boards of Regents, have been whacking away at the heart (root?) of education—the Humanities (Liberal Arts, Fine Arts, and any field that help us understand what forms and informs our humanity). Using metrics, i.e, only what can be concretely measured, and the military surgical strike of what are called “vertical” cuts, and sadly probably thinking they are saving the very education they are killing off, they have narrowed the range of possibilities for their graduates and demeaned the role of critical intelligence, creative imagination, and whatever wisdom challenges our worse natures.
For some years, James Silver, Hodding Carter, and William Faulkner drove around rural northern Mississippi, trying to think of ways to help the Negro that didn’t actually end up further endangering them. Out of that came Silver’s magnificent book, Mississippi: the Closed Society. Discussing how, in a closed society, education is expendable, and pointing the finger at those who ran Ole Miss, Silver quipped, “After all, Geneal Ulysses S. Grant has been the only man in history to make a positive decision not to destroy the University” (110).
Like many places, Nebraska will one day rue the day it turned over the institutions for which generations sacrificed to benighted bean-counters.
Next blog; January…something new for the New Year.
Pilgrims they were, from unknown countries, searching for one who knows the world; lost are their names and strange their journeys, famed is their zeal to find the child: Jesus, in you the lost are claimed, aliens are found and known and named.
— Christopher Idle (b. 1938)
Dear Family and Friends,
I am wondering what you remember most at that time of year when Christians are preparing to celebrate Christmas and so many other religions are celebrating their own “lights”—all of us expressing hope for light just as the northern world is at the time of its darkest days…as is our own world just now, with Fascism creating such havoc here and abroad, and the princes of revenge holding sway. And, we too, sometimes our own hearts, our own outlooks, grow darker as well. Here are some of the things that over the years I’ve found I remember—my Christmas memories, each a little light that dispels the darkness.
If you don’t want to wade through the chronicle of memories, know we wish you light in the darkness and hope for the new year. Chuck and Nancy.
Memories
My Baptism at Trinity, Greeley, December 24, 1942—well, I don’t remember it, but my family memory of it made it real in the stories that were told me when I was little…an extra burden on dear Fr. Chuck Young, but how it got retold Christmas after Christmas in our home!
The unveiling of the tree at the Urie home: Papa would rope off a corner and hang a blanket over the rope saying “no prying eyes”—so that Christmas Eve would be the unveiling of the tree…rather magical to a toddler.
The pageant I had not rehearsed for at Trinity Greeley: we came back from one of dad’s terms at seminary (1947), and joined the family at Trinity for the last Sunday of Advent, featuring the various Sunday School classes performing, and when what had been my old class went forward, all rehearsed for their song, I jumped up and joined them, only to arrive up front and realize I had no idea of what they were singing. I opened my mouth and moved my lips and uttered nary a sound.
Marshall Fields Santa—new husband for mom: While we were in Evanston, Illinois, Mother and I made an annual trip to Marshal Fields for a visit with Santa. One year, while my dad was sub rosa working two jobs while being a full-time student, tensions rose in our little garret apartment, resolved by my mom and dad simply not speaking, the parting shot being my mother (jokingly or not, I probably didn’t know even then) saying she wished she had a new husband. When Santa asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I told him nothing for me but my mother would like a new husband. Despite her being mortified, when the story reached home, it broke the ice.
The blue tree in Salida: Our second year in Salida, Colorado, my dad decided we could fudge on not decorating for Christmas during Advent by having a tree with only blue lights. Only years later did the Church begin to adopt “blue” as the color of Advent, and I recall staring at ours thinking it was quite beautiful.
Drunk woman on porch in McCook: Christmas Eve, I’d been an acolyte for the Midnight Mass. My Aunt Sis and Uncle Art were visiting for the holidays. We’d gone to bed late, but in the middle of the night, Dad heard a great clunk on the front porch and went to see what could be the matter, and found the clunk was from a very drunk woman having been dumped there. As the story unfolded, she had gotten drunk on Christmas Eve and, perhaps in some disgust, her sons had taken her to the only place (they later told someone) they knew she’d be taken care of. Which we did—took her in, got her a pillow and blanket, let her sleep on a sofa, fed her breakfast with us, and while Dad took Christmas communion to the shut ins of our parish, my uncle drove her home. We knew who she was, but Dad and Mom never mentioned her name while we lived in McCook.
Silent Night in Lincoln bar: At the start of St. Mark’s on the Campus, Christmas Eve was celebrated early—an elderly local congregation and the sizeable student part of it already on break. On occasion, Dad would even be called on to celebrate a Midnight Mass somewhere nearby after the earlier service at SMOC. Following that earlier service one year, Nancy and I went to a downtown bar for a pitcher of beer. We talked to some friends and to some strangers, and then suddenly some of the lights went out and someone started singing Silent Night and before the end of the first verse, everyone had joined in. Whoever was leading would be just a beat enough ahead that everybody could recall the words. And after the last verse, there was just silence…not even the tinkle of glasses… and then someone stood and raised a glass and said, Merry Christmas Everybody! Such a dear and indelible memory.
Oyster Stew! Nancy and I married in June of 1965 and as the year on, she asked me, what Christmas customs do you hope we will continue. Mostly I wanted a crèche…what did she want. Well, she said, our family always had oyster stew on Christmas Eve. As the time approached, I found a recipe, bought the ingredients, and made my first pot of oyster stew. That night we sat down to a little supper with oyster stew and, at some point, I looked over and she hadn’t eaten any of the stew. Maybe I’d made it poorly or made the wrong thing. Maybe there was more than one thing called oyster stew? I finally asked. Well, she said, I’ve just been thinking—we always had oyster stew, but I don’t think I ever ate any of it. Very funny moment…but she tried it that night, ended up liking it, and we’ve done that ever since, some nights with friends.
The Jensens singing at SMOC: My friend Dewey had a fine voice. He’d been tabbed to be the tenor in NU’s production of the Messiah, but sadly caught pneumonia shortly before and couldn’t sing in the performance. But we’d had him and his wife Peggy sing a duet once at St. Mark’s on the Campus…from a great loft that sent sound out over architect Burket Graf’s famed three-domed space. They’d sung From the Font of Every Blessing. So, as we approached a Christmas Eve, Dad asked if I thought Dewey and Peggy would be willing to lead the music and sing the Offertory Anthem for the Christmas Eve service. Dewey sang one of the pieces from the Messiah, and knowing it was my dad’s favorite, they sang a duet to The Snow Lay on the Ground. And as we left that night, so it did.
Holidays at the Link’s in McCook: When my Uncle Art (from whom I got my middle name) suffered a massive heart attack, he had to retire from the Bureau of Reclamation where he’d been a civil engineer on many of the projects in southwest Nebraska as well as on the tunnels through the Rocky Mountains. The Link’s moved back to McCook and became the “greeters” for the Herrmann Mortuary. Before they purchased a home a block away, they lived in an apartment in the mortuary. When we visited, we’d be lodged downstairs near the display and embalming rooms. Very peaceful! One Christmas, Uncle Art asked Dad and me to go with him on a call. Art Herrmann was out on another call and he needed some help with a fellow had died while using the restroom, and fallen so as to be caught between the facilities and the wall. Yet, over the years, as Mom and her sister Margaret, their spouses, and my two cousins and their families came to McCook, I recall most not that scene with the dead body but all the times telling stories, playing cribbage, helping with meals, and enjoying the Christmas tree, where I was sometimes the “santa” who distributed the wrapped packages if none of the second cousins felt up to it.
Harvesting our own tree with Nancy Carmichael in Flagstaff: Moving to Flagstaff from Nebraska, to the mountains from the plains, I taught at Northern Arizona University, was in charge of the mission church, St. John’s, in Williams, and assisted at Epiphany in Flagstaff. There we became friends with a young parishioner recently moved from California, and somehow it became a Christmas ritual for our new friend Nancy and my Nancy and I and our kids to go cut down our own Christmas tree. It was cheaper than buying one, more fun, and the kids loved the snow. The first year, still in our little second story apartment, we chose a tree as wide as it was tall that could sit in front of the plate glass window that looked out over the apartment complex courtyard. Due to fire hazard in the great Coconino Forest that surrounded Flagstaff, the fire department had a huge tank in which you could dip your tree in fire retardant. We dipped it into the icy sludge. And the whole, nearly round tree sank. We had to get help to pull it out, get it back in our car trunk, and then let it sit in the apartment complex’s laundry room to thaw out. But, once up and decorated, it was a glorious tree, taking up half the little living room.
Dashing through the snow: Our son had been born in 1969 at the Lincoln, Nebraska, hospital named for William Jennings Bryan; our daughter was born in Flagstaff, December 11, 1972, just after we’d bought our home there. Flagstaff often measures its winter snowfall in feet, not inches, and true to that, I had to carry her from the hospital door, where the nurse handed over her responsibility to a young father, to our car, the way there being ice-impacted walks, and then back to get Nancy to the car. We wanted very much for the folks at St. John’s, Williams, to see the new baby on Christmas Eve, so up we drove through the falling snow for the Christmas Eve celebration, 13 days after she was born. When we arrived, we found that the furnace had gone out sometime that day…nobody was warming up there. I shortened my homily and what I could of the service. The warmth was that everybody was so happy to see the new baby…and everybody counselled us not to bring a two-week old baby out in a snowstorm again.
Tom Donohoe’s Advent High Tea: Through friendship with Glenn and Gail Reed, my colleagues at Northern Arizona University after some years together as graduate students in Lincoln, we became friends with a stalwart of the English Department (Victorian Literature if I recall) named Tom Donohoe. Tom was a man of many parts—organist, maker of vestments, host, along with teacher. One year, Tom included us among the guests at his Advent Hight Tea, along with the Reeds and other faculty, from whom Nancy would be taking classes as she began work on her Masters. I can’t begin to describe the fare Tom put out—so many different foods and each perfectly prepared. Glenn and I taught in a separate experimental college from where the English Department was housed, and there had been quite a lot of bad feeling and suspicion when our college was created, but you would never have known it that night, as Tom’s feast made us all feel as though we were meant to be together.
Midnight mass at St. Luke’s, Kearney: According to the theology of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, Easter is, as the hymn proclaims, the “queen of seasons.” No doubt so, but the build-up to Christmas in the Christian Calendar—commemorations that punctuate the better part of the calendar year—perhaps explains why Episcopalians love most their “midnight mass.” It is really Christmas that seems to most touch our hearts. Our first year in Kearney marked my 33rd Christmas Eve, and I was blessed to be celebrating in a church with a long history in which the Midnight Mass was the highpoint. We were still in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer that I hadn’t used for half a dozen years, but it had lent itself to many years of Christmas Eve from my childhood on. There was no bell, smell, or whistle overlooked and the celebration often drew a number of townsfolk, so the church was always packed. Times are different now, and I truly wouldn’t time-travel back, but I still harbor great memories of the first Christmas Eve in Kearney when, as it turned out, we felt Dame Julien was right; all would be well and all would be well and all manner of things would be well.
Gifts and the year we forgot our daughter’s: Our kids, most PK’s (preachers’ kids) I suppose from the stories I’ve heard, found holidays one of those times when they didn’t have their parent’s full attention. Our usual routine for Christmas day was to rise early, share one small gift over breakfast, then pack up the car and take off for Grand Island, where both Nancy and my parents lived, two doors away from each other, and on the way stopping at Art and Florence Christensen’s in Gibbon to take them their Christmas Communion, the communion calls in Kearney taking place while Nancy was getting the family ready to be on the move. There’d be lunch at my folks, then an afternoon stop for a bit of Christmas with the Peterson and Boosalis families, then a prime rib dinner at Nancy’s folks, and then—after the kids had waited since breakfast, the sharing of gifts. (One year, with a different routine: we took off late in the day in a storm, the car began to slide on the slick road just where an exit from Highway 30 takes you to Stolley Park Road, and it looked like we were going to end up in the little pond there. Both kids were shrieking “save the presents, save the presents”! But the skid stopped before we were off the road, alleluia.) One of those years we saw George’s eyes light up when he got the Atari we’d tried to indicate we couldn’t afford. But another year, when we were distributing gifts, we discovered that we’d left our daughter’s box of gifts back in Kearney. It was entirely my fault and I felt horrible. Even more so, so did Noelle! But she took it as bravely as a child could ever manage. Grace Under Pressure! Small addendum: she’s never let us forget it!
Traveling home from Hyannis: After St. Luke’s and I parted ways and I began teaching at then Kearney State College, I also began serving St. Joseph’s, Mullen, and Calvary, Hyannis, both in the heart of the sandhills ranching country. For a year every Sunday, and then for two more years every other Sunday, I’d be first in early morning at Mullen, then later morning at Hyannis, never once bothered by the State Patrol for speeding to get there on time…the time made possible by passing from one to another time zone. But at Christmas, after the Midnight Mass at Calvary, Hyannis, we’d emerge from church past midnight mountain time and begin the four-hour drive to Kearney, arriving at about 4:00 a.m. central time. That gave Nancy and me about three hours of sleep before George and Noelle were up and ready for Christmas day. Often snow would be falling as we drove home, the two of them would curl up in the back seat, and we’d play carols or possibly George Winston quietly as they slept. And I’d hum to myself, “O Holy Night.”
Christmas trip to Oxford: Nancy and I had a rough patch in our marriage that took some time to heal, but the year in which our rough places had been made plain, we decided on a lark to make our Christmas present to each other a trip to Oxford, Mississippi. We arrived as an ice-storm was just beginning, with rare freezing temperatures that made us relish the warmth of our room at the Oliver Britt House Bed and Breakfast. Dinner at the Downtown Grill, out on the balcony overlooking the decorated Courthouse Square. On one side of us was a large company surrounding writer Willie Morris, on the other was a young couple on their honeymoon. We could tell from their conversation that this honeymoon was a bit of a splurge. I’d met and enjoyed Willie’s company before in Oxford, so was prepared for “when Willie drank everybody drank,” prepared because unlike the me Willie had met, I was not longer drinking. Sure enough, Willie would order drinks for his table and include us. The drinks would be passed over to our table, and we would pass them on over to the newlyweds—whom we’d had the foresight to ask what they’d like to drink. We left the grand company of both tables, drove back to our lodging by way of the Ole Miss Campus where we watched the holly glisten in a sheen of ice, welcomed again the warmth of our room, and watched the St. Olaf Christmas program on the television. We had coffee the next morning with Evans Harrington, then the director of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference, and headed home via Memphis and B.B. King’s.
Lessons and Carols at Washington National Cathedral: When Nancy’s dad was dying, he reversed his burial plans. He’d always wanted me to rent a plane and pilot and drop his ashes over Ash Hollow, but decided instead to be buried at Arlington. A distinguished military career won the day. So, we all boarded a plane to Virginia, stayed with Nancy’s brother and his family, and joined them in laying Barkley to rest. There were family plans for that evening, but meanwhile, the afternoon was for us travelers to see something of DC. We all split up, going several places, and Nancy and I decided we’d just make our way to see Washington National Cathedral. We didn’t know the calendar but it was an Advent Sunday and chanced to be the one in which they celebrated a Festival of Lessons and Carols. No one was in the nave proper, all of us seated in the chancel just near the choir and lectors, and what a wonderful celebration to take part in, totally unexpectedly able on the day we’d buried my beloved father-in-law to hear the promise that those who walk in darkness would see a great light.
In sum:
Faulkner’s summary—we’re born, we suffer, and we die—was meant I suppose to remind us that every being ever born will know suffering but not all will ever know joy. In my more cynical youth, I thought that Faulkner might well be right. My life, though, has brought me near not only the suffering of people dear to me, but the suffering of many others. In all that, I’ve never run onto someone who never knew any joy. And for most, it was a moment or moments of joy that took up residence in their memory banks and, except for a few persistently bitter people, joy diminished memories of much or most of the suffering. It seems that, though the world is often no help at all, we are made for joy.
Perhaps some of our moments of joy or of pain redeemed will put your mind to recalling how joy has touched your heart and soul, and whatever you celebrate at this solstice time, you will feel blessed. Joy to the World!
Chuck and Nancy
Our news:
I’ve celebrated and preached quite a lot this year, mostly for places with no priest, at least for that Sunday. Our big travel was in June to have dinner with Linda Clark in McCook, see again the charming city of Salida, Colorado, drive across the four corners and Navajoland, have dinner with Gail Reed and Cheryl Gibson in Flagstaff, and then spend 3 days in Las Vegas visiting Steve and Joyce Schneider. Praying this Advent for Steve—my longest running continuous friendship.
Nancy continues to be part of St. Luke’s weekly prayer group and has stayed active in Kearney Action Network. We both hang around Senior College a lot, and I have a full year of posting entries about Keaney’s arts on our kearneycreates.com website. I’m still in Torch Club, recently joining Stan Dart to present a program of Coyote Legends and Stories, and in November I taught my last class at the Bishop Kemper School in Topeka…a mark of the progress of BKSM, that each year the classes have gotten better. The Kansas trip always includes a stop to see Jim and Bev Carothers for lunch at the Mad Greek in Lawrence, Kansas. They always send us off with a care package from Wheatfields bakery and news of their son Michael and his family in KC and daughter Cathleen and her work for the State Department in Bogota, Columbia.
While we were in Topeka, our Bishop was ordaining Pauline Machard to the Deaconate back at St. Luke’s, Kearney. Pauline graduated from BKSM, so some of her friends set up a watch party—but the broadcast of the ordination suffered a technical failure. The Machards are mainstays at Kearney’s St. Luke’s where we worship when I’m not supplying elsewhere.
Thanksgiving brought us to the Ptomey home in Cedar Bluffs, Nebraska, where Harlan is fighting the good fight for public schools—sadly, here, they are under siege on many fronts. Noelle and her former Rector, now retired Mark Selvey, are exploring how to take the Church to the un-churched, and she continues to substitute teach a lot. It looks as though Rowan wants to go back to school and finish his education, finding ways to harness his unusual brightness with the routines of formal education, and his brother Brody, just now turned 21, is still a student at Nebraska Wesleyan, from time to time sharing one of his paper projects with us. Harlan and Noelle went on our Diocese’s Civil Rights Pilgrimage this past summer.
We will all be traveling together to Milwaukee for Christmas, the six of us in Nebraska joining the six Peeks there for the holidays, the first Christmas there in some years. George, now with a new law firm that thought enough of his work to lure him from his former firm, is enjoying his new practice. Laura Grace heads up the Mount Olive school board and is a docent at the Milwaukee Library. Last we knew, Will, 15 by the time you read this, was finishing reading the Odyssey and playing up a storm on his clarinet; Greta (aka Margaret, Marge) is making her way through “middle school” at Mount Olive, joined there by the adventurous “social chairman” Henry (Huck) and for the first time, Lou, growing up way too fast due to his older brothers and sister’s impact on his life.
Let’s see: Rowan’s Chevy is back to being roadworthy, Harlan’s pickup keeps on running, George replaced a way beyond age and grade Jeep with an Audi, and the Bonneville we got from Brody has developed a mysterious ailment—plenty of power and it still won’t start. Nancy and I may take this as an opportunity to return to being a one-car family. Very strange for me, who thought I’d long ago be rich and own a sports car Scuderia!
With Nancy’s help, I’m in the final stages of editing a memoir, mostly focused on how a boy who grew up in the racist and sexist world of his childhood, came to change his heart and mind from the values of his youth to the dreams of his older (and better?) self. Whether it finds a publisher or not, I’m glad to have gotten it all down, and thankful for three very bright and knowledgeable readers who’ve advised me on the Mss. (There names will be public should a publisher decide to take on the book.) Still writing poems, too, but no publications to show this year. The Prairie Art Brothers, Kearney Public Library, and Kearney Creates put on a vigorous Poetry Month here last April, featuring the State Poet Matt Mason and his crowd-sourced poem celebrating Kearney’s Sesquicentennial.
Nancy has been reading out of my old library on African American Studies and Civil Rights, the books soon to deck the shelves of the library at Church of the Resurrection, Omaha, and interracial parish, where it will be open to anyone wanting the background to African American’s struggle with the racism kept alive by racists and abetted by the ignorance of the rest of us. I’m (huff, puff) just through the nearly 900 pages of John Irving’s The Last Chair Lift, the book loaned to me by my friend Art Hanson. I performed Art and Janey’s wedding over 40 years ago…they, too, are mainstays at St. Luke’s. At my daughter’s suggestion, I’m rereading A Separate Peace…I’d forgotten what a sensitive and well-wrought story it tells. On deck: to follow our son’s suggestion to watch Ted Lasso.
Nancy and I are intent on slowing down a bit this year, leaving behind much we love doing but don’t need to be doing anymore, eliminating some things so we have more time for things that have had to take a back seat for too long. I’m going to restrict my clergy-supply work to my nearby geography, do more writing and listening—listening to music, to good conversation, to the sounds around me when we walk at Cottonmill. I’ll be teaching a short series on the Holy Spirit during Eastertide this coming year, and later in the year a course on Baldwin and Faulkner short stories for our Senior College. With a paper accepted and an invitation to read some poems, we hope we are headed to Bilbao and San Sebastian this summer. And this spring, we’ll enjoy a short reunion of those of us who hung around St. Mark’s on the Campus during the ‘60s.
Love hearing from family and friends. Our contact information remains the same:
Next Blog: About New Year’s Day–a quarterly edition of our In Memoriam.
Pictured below, from summer before last, our wearying but still triumphant hike at the end of the Hemingway Conference near Cooke City, Montana…we are the very done-in looking couple to the viewers’ left.
“When you truly get to know people right where they are, you find they are more like you than you thought.” Lory Janelle Dance, Activist
I was prompted to writing this blog by reading a review about “American Gothic,” possibly the most iconic piece of American Art. Here’s a short excerpt from it:
Few things evoke the American heartland as indelibly as Grant Wood’s painting “American Gothic,” from 1930, which appears to show a stolid and plain-living couple standing in front of their farmhouse in Eldon, Iowa. Yet, as Daniel Immerwahr explores in a fascinating essay in this week’s issue, the image’s projection of rural authenticity belies its stage-managed creation. “The Eldon house that Wood depicted, built in 1881, wasn’t the ancestral home of sturdy agrarians,” Immerwahr writes. “The first owner lost it because of overdue taxes, the next tried unsuccessfully to turn it into a candy-and-novelty store, and the property changed hands many more times before Wood’s 1930 visit.” The “couple” in the painting were modelled by Wood’s sister and his dentist. Their clothes came new, courtesy of Sears, Roebuck & Co., in Chicago. And the famous window in the background came from Sears, too.
The myths and realities of “American Gothic,” which a director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art called a “Rorschach test for the character of the nation,” mirror the fictions and truths about country life in America more generally. And, Immerwahr writes, as the United States has divided itself politically between urban and rural demographics—with the contested suburbs in between—the work of untangling these stories is more urgent than ever.
It was that last sentence that struck me…untangling the stories that portray two Americas, one rural, one urban. That was enough to hook me. The author continued, “The Eldon house that Wood depicted, built in 1881, wasn’t the ancestral home of sturdy agrarians,” Immerwahr writes. “The first owner lost it because of overdue taxes, the next tried unsuccessfully to turn it into a candy-and-novelty store, and the property changed hands many more times before Wood’s 1930 visit. The ‘couple’ in the painting were modelled by Wood’s sister and his dentist. Their clothes came new, courtesy of Sears, Roebuck & Co., in Chicago. And the famous window in the background came from Sears, too.”
Here is the idea that sparked my interest: “The myths and realities of ‘American Gothic’, which a director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art called a ‘Rorschach test for the character of the nation,’ mirror the fictions and truths about country life in America more generally. And, Immerwahr writes, as the United States has divided itself politically between urban and rural demographics—with the contested suburbs in between—the work of untangling these stories is more urgent than ever.”
How do we untangle the stereotypes that have created an antagonism between urban and rural, real enough in some particulars, but blown way out of proportion in general. Are we really that different? For instance, how many of the “urban” are young people moving out of the farms and villages, possibly for jobs or opportunities or pleasures? And how many of the farmers/villagers are actually large-scale corporate farmers, the result of the industrialization of agriculture? Or, again, take a majority of our legislators making pronouncements on issues of international affairs (when they can’t even manage the business of the legislature fairly)—is that because they are urban or rural?
Although I live in one of the larger Nebraska towns outside the Omaha-Lincoln area, I’ve had occasion to know the heads of some of our larger commercial interests and my fair share of farmers and ranchers. I don’t see the “binary” in those I know. Yes, if I were a farmer, I’d probably like to see my property taxes go down, and if I were from Omaha, I wouldn’t want them to come down by increasing my income tax. And in either case, I wouldn’t count on a partisan legislature to seek a real solution, not one that pits us against one another.
I know there are different interests at stake. It’s the fact that low prices for corn may mean a better market for beef and that fact divides the interests of ranchers from those of farmers. From the number of coalitions representing both farmers and ranchers, that one divide does not divide the over everything. Similarly, I doubt urbanites in general hold different values from citizens in rural areas.
I’m getting very suspicious of our supposed divisions, divisions that now seem to hover over almost every aspect of life these days. They merit the spirit of a good detective, asking who benefits from the division. In the south, who benefits from pitting struggling white share-croppers against struggling black share-croppers? Someone, you can bet, someone who doesn’t want the two to find any common ground.
It is easy in Nebraska to suggest that those enamored with the letter R beside a candidate’s name are not limited to rural or urban populations. It isn’t even hard to show that such a bewitching letter has led both urban and rural voters to end up voting against their own interests. The rural “R” folks voted R and then saw that vote close down a lot of their local health facilities; urban “R” folks voted R and then saw that vote limit the workers available for their plants. I wonder who benefited from either of those outcomes?
Let me offer two stories, one rural, one urban, and ask if you think there is a real divide between rural and urban values…or from someone or some group wanting to exploit what real differences there may be on some issues. (Or you could dig up old episodes of “Green Acres” to see if, in its satire of stereotypes, the differences amount to very much,)
Story one—urban: a metropolitan church decided its usual celebration of Maundy Thursday—a commemoration of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet—was only a ritual unless it led, literally or figuratively, to washing the feet around them. So Maundy Thursday became the occasion for a major “foot clinic” for those who do not regularly get foot care. Experts are on hand, as are supplies of foot-wear and foot-care products, to “wash” the feet of their urban neighbors, among them the homeless.
Story two—rural: a small sandhills town’s restaurant was the gathering place for lots of people not regularly getting nourishing meals—for instance, people (regardless of their former marital history) now living alone and just not able to get out much or willing to cook much for a table of one. And then, the current problems for small rural villages being what they are, the restaurant faces closing—and its owner are seeking how their patrons could still get a nourishing meal on a regular basis. “I was hungry and you gave me to eat.”
Sorry, but I can’t see how those two stories emerge from very different senses of value. The particulars of what is possible or is needed may indeed different, but the kind of caring is the same one place or the other.
Maybe some understanding of real, lived, values is the place to begin untangling the divides among us—divides from someone, not us!, profits. And some of those profiting most, are those funding our politics!
And maybe discovering and sharing the stories of our discoveries and our sharing is the best way we can give thanks, even in these times fraught with troubles fabricated from our fears and governed not by the grace we receive but by the grievances we can provoke.
When we sit down for Thanksgiving dinner, how about instead of or along with a table grace, we tell a story or two of people caring for what, deep down, we all care for—for hearts more grateful and the finding of more common ground.
Happy Thanksgiving – no matter whether you are urban or rural, in between or uncertain!
Kearney Nebraska
November 2023
Next blog: the annual Christmastide Reflections, followed shortly thereafter by the New Years In Memoriam.
A quarterly occasion to remember the friends and the famous who are no longer with us–
Friends and acquaintances
Anne Burke, whom we knew from both Christ Church, Central City, and from the Recovery Community; Anne and her late husband Ed would often host us at various events or when they’d come to Kearney. Much of her life was spent either as a registered nurse and children’s and veteran’s hospitals or as a “hand” on the farm she grew up on or the farm/ranch she and Ed owned.
Doris Envick, whom I last saw, as at our age we so often do, in the waiting room at a doctor’s office; her husband Don was a department chair at UNK, and the chance meeting renewed a friendship from the years we chaired together.
Gus Katrouzos, “Mr. Coney Island,” Grand Island’s go to place on 3rd Street, who could (and would) stop and tell you family history, city history, history of the Orthodox Church, even as getting the crowd seated was on pause for a moment, son George now behind the counter, a little shrine to his mother by the wall across from the till…soon to be joined.
Donna Livingston, whom I did not know personally except as a friend of her son Dave, whose concern for her was constant even when he, himself, was hospitalized.
Doug Lund, of the lab named for him at UNK, of the Doug Lund DNA Day, of a long-standing career in the UNK Biology Department, and of a long-standing (well sitting) poker group.
Virginia McKinney, longtime and faithful parishioners at St. Luke’s. She and her late husband Wayne took us out to dinner and gave us a drive-around Kearney when we first came here…our first meal at the sadly now gone but historic Bico’s Café. Her parents, the Bodinsons, ran a hardware store downtown, and the McKinney’s gave St. Luke’s a memorial to them. We join Mary Kommers and her family in mourning the loss.
Robert Snow, Deacon, Diocese of Nebraska, who served for a decade alongside his wife Ellen in the Dominican Republic; among many fine DIONEB deacons, none so much exemplified the order as did Bob Snow. For many years, he channeled my honoraria from weddings and funerals into scholarships for the DR school at his mission.
Ellie Thober, priest in the Diocese of Nebraska serving Columbus and North Platte, her sister Elaine the long-time secretary at St. Stephen’s, Grand Island, and her brother Mel, also a priest (Iowa) and our friend as undergraduates at UNL, married to another Ellie.
Names in the News
Dick Butkus, Illinois, the Bears, they were mourning at the fighting Illini’s game this fall with Nebraska; Russell Morris tells the story of our former School Superintendent telling about his student days, playing against Dick Butkus…not a position to which you wanted to be called!
Diane Feinstein, feisty Senator from California and longest serving woman senator in history, who led several major committees and wrote lots of significant legislation to protect children, nature, and technology; a long illness sadly made it hard for her always to be present for a vote, her death welcomed only because it meant her successor in her Senate seat would be there to vote when needed.
Michael Gambon, Sir Michael at that; who played Albus Dumbledore in six of the eight Harry Potter movies, and countless rolls in everything from Othello to the Singing Detective. He eventually had to retire for the same reason many of us don’t strut the stage anymore—his memory wasn’t sure enough not to stumble over the lines.
Louise Gluck, former Poet Laureate, who despite her audience-drawing position, felt that all poetry is read or heard by one person at a time; and I’d add that in reading and hearing, we are changed and so, if we read or hear a poem a second time, it is no longer the same poem to us because we are not the same reader.
Illya Kuryakin, sorry I meant Donald Mallard, well one and the same as actor David McCallum; does it seem ironic that, although a Scot, he was once married to Jill Ireland? He also cut several musical and spoken-word albums, including a reading of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind and the Willows. This time it really was a Great Escape from what was coming after 90.
Matthew Perry, a.k.a. Chandler Bing, who lived to make people laugh and didn’t live long enough, and with his friends made our generation wonder, in Nancy’s words, “why we didn’t live like that.” A hit show among our students in China in 2005.
Raymond Redington, a.k.a. James Spader—from the moment he knelt in the nation’s capital, like a cleric before his ordination, and on to the tender scenes leading up to his matador-like goring by a bull, in a peaceful field near Seville, where a barber was well-known for having helped the authorities solve a crime—Jon Bokenkamp’s hero, in good seasons and bad, witnessed script writers who had imagination and had fueled it by wide-spread reading. In the Blacklist as in Boston Legal, by a mere expression, Bader could be villain or saint.
Brooks Robinson, who came out of Arkansas in the 1950’s, was picked up by the Baltimore Orioles, and just now left for good. If you divided players into the sour and the sweet, Brooks Robinson would have been at the top of the sweet list.
Richard Roundtree, let shrill voices shout “Shaft,” but in my mind most associated with “Roots.” One of the breakthrough Black actors of his times.
Suzanne Somers, of “Three’s Company,” now finds herself in even better company and where there is healing for what could not be healed on earth.
Things Faulkner, starring Robert Hamblin: An Appreciation
By Chuck Peek
Outside the world of teaching scholars, both the public and the upper echelons of administration show little understanding that, whatever your discipline, your professional circles are probably your greatest source of encouragement, the place where you learn most, some of the other people in your discipline becoming your closest friends. I’ve been blessed to be a close part of both the Cather and the Faulkner societies, as well as a small part in conference on composition, Western Lit, and Hemingway.
As you will see if you follow to the end, something special has drawn me right now to the Faulkner world, where I was first drawn by Lee Lemon, who chaired my dissertation, and the late Jim Roberts, the “Faulkner Guy” at Nebraska University when I was there (1960-197). That’s where Jerry Parsons once saw me coming out of my office and, knowing I was working on Faulkner said, “Well, if it isn’t Lump Snopes.” We became friends anyway!
My relationship with Jim Roberts was never lukewarm. He could be very generous—Nancy and I were invited to parties at his home and, after I’d graduated, he bailed me out of financial woes one summer by commissioning me to write the Cliffs Notes for Catch-22. But he could be vindictive, too—scuttling the University of Mississippi Press’s intention to publish my first work on Faulkner, the heart of which he’d heartily approved when he served on my thesis committee but wasn’t chosen as its chair.
What tipped the balance in favor of remembering his more generous self, however, was that in the late winter of 1973-74, he tipped me off that Ole Miss was going to have a conference on Faulkner the summer of 1974…he thought I might like to go. A forever “thank you,” Jim!
That first conference, Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, overbooked—they had to offer it twice in back-to-back weeks, and unlike most conferences on single authors, they are still offering it every summer yet. It may be the longest-running single author conference in America. I went the first three of its fledgling years, 1974, 1975, 1976. There were still lots of folks around who had known Faulkner who came to the conference to tell stories, among them Faulkner’s cousins Jimmy and Chooky, his supposed bootlegger Mottee Daniels, and Faulkner’s doctor, Chester McLarty.
Jimmy Faulkner and Chuck Peek at Rowan Oak
Jimmy and I tried for years to connect so he could come up to Nebraska and go pheasant hunting, and the good doctor was later embroiled in the controversy between him and Jimmy over the Faulkner-on-the-bench sculpture on the square and whether it was worth the loss of a good tree or even “looked like Brother Will.” The good Doctor Chester McLarty even chaired a panel entitled Oxford Women Remember, until in later days the women grew older, their hair bluer, and no matter how Chester prompted them, recall seemed more and more to fail them, until one day Jim Carothers whispered to me, they’ll have to retitle the panel.
Universities like Texas and Virginia had run a quarterback sneak on Ole Miss in terms of their libraries and faculty, so Ole Miss turned to its unique offering—the place where Faulkner lived and wrote. There were picnics on the lawn of the Howorth family, just across from Rowan Oak, or at Rowan Oak itself, sometimes after a walk from campus through Baily Woods, as well and grand tours or the town or nearby Faulkner haunts or a trip to the Delta, but there was always a cast of stellar speakers those years, including his first biographer Joe Blotner and the editor of The Portable Faulkner that had helped him win the Nobel Prize, Malcolm Cowley. They’d be joined subsequently by historians such as Shelby Foote and literary notables like Cleanth Brooks, Carvell Collins, Kenneth Holditch, Elizabeth Kerr, Thadious Davis, Philip Weinstein, Joe Urgo, and Louis Rubin.
Over the years, this conference, centered on Faulkner, nevertheless invited contemporary writers to read and give their own homage to Faulkner’s influence. Mississippi and Southern Writers, like Eudora Welty, Willie Morris, Elizabeth Spencer, Joan Williams, Barry Hanna, Larry Brown, P. J. O’Rourke, and Clyde Edgerton, joined others like William Styron and John Barth, and their readings voiced the spirit of conference.
So did readings at Kullman’s “Fringe Faulkner,” where the poetry of L.D. Brodsky and Bob Hamblin, along with some of mine, was read, and it usually fell to Jim to eulogize those who had passed, including Betty Harrington, who often gave dramatic readings of Faulkner’s work. She and Evans hosted the “faculty” at their home each conference.
Often, we’d meet after the evening sessions for a few drinks at one of the local watering holes or before the sessions for dinner with other participants or one of the speakers. It was grand. And that first year, I got to interview Malcolm Cowley. Sadly, the video of that was accidentally disposed of, but my own tape recording of it yielded an article for The Faulkner Journal, after Jim Carothers had run it through a recording analysis at the police station to pick up some of the names Cowley spoke of through the hum of the recording.
Malcolm Cowley 1974 F&Y Ole Miss
One of those years, Mottee led me around the square in Oxford on election night—every little shop a campaign headquarters for someone, and a huge chalk board set up on the east side of the courthouse where men climbed up and down ladders chalking in the most recent vote count for every office in Lafayette County. Another year, he invited Nancy and me to bring our young son out to his place to fish in his lake.
Then, I left Northern Arizona University where I had been teaching Philosophy and American Studies, came to Kearney, Nebraska, and assumed the role of Rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. Late summers, with the Diocesan church camp and the preparations for “back to school” time, didn’t allow me to be gone, so I missed the conferences 1976-1985.
Oxford had been one of my favorite watering holes. After I’d been to rehab for alcoholism in 1986, I decided to test how sober I intended to stay by going back to F&Y. A drive straight through from Kearney to Oxford, a conference highlighted by the whole passel of scholars who had taken up the leadership of Faulkner Studies, and I had a wonderful time with them all—sober.
One of the speakers, an up-and-coming Black scholar from Yale, James Snead, had given a provocative talk, and even after 9 years on hiatus, I’d dared to make a few comments on his talk at its close, and that’s how I first met Noel Polk, who was sometimes called “the Dean of Faulkner Studies,” by some affectionately, by some sneeringly. Noel had taken to some of my remarks and wanted to meet and have a chat about them with me. He never failed to respond to my Christmas and Easter blogs, and years later one of my saddest times was when Noel was dying and Nancy and I drove down from Oxford to see him one last time.
**
Even though I’d been to the first three conferences, it was clear after my hiatus as Faulkner studies took shape, that I was like a newcomer. But the conference chair, Evans Harrington, urged all of us “newcomers” not to be shy—everyone is welcome in the conversation, he said. So, one breakfast time, I got my tray, looked over at three fellows sitting at a table for four, their noses deep in the sports pages of the newspaper, and, though they were not looking like they were going to welcome a fourth, I sat down anyway and told them Evans had sent me.
They turned out to be Tod Oliver, Jim Hinkle, and Jim Carothers, all three also Hemingway scholars, Oliver and Hinkler the more so, Tod a founding member of the Hemingway Society and an editor of the Hemingway Review, Hinkle whose name graces a scholarship offered by the Hemingway Society. Both are gone now.
Jim Carothers became and remains one of my best friends, along with his wife Bev and daughter Cathleen. Together, we’ve eaten our way across Oxford and on into northern Mississippi, and into “furren” places, as well as taken in worship at St. Peter’s (where Faulkner and his wife nominally belonged and Joe Blotner’s biography has him taking notes in his Book of Common Prayer during sermons), sometimes with Terrell Tebbetts, Grayson Schick (more later), and Charles Reagan Wilson, with breakfast afterwards sometimes enjoying the Abadie’s hospitality, sometimes at the Bottle Tree and the best blueberry muffins anywhere. If you wanted to know anything about Faulkner’s short stories—which is where I like to start students—you go to Jim and his student Teresa Towner’s book.
By 1987-88 I was back in academe, teaching at then Kearney State College, now the University of Nebraska at Kearney (at least until the present system administration guts its arts and humanities, but that’s for another blog), which meant I could go to the conference every year, 1988-2019 (and two by zoom after that), sometimes alone but most often with Nancy and sometimes with the family…39 in all, at least 30 assisting with Teaching Faulkner for the conference not counting other times for the SAKS Institute, and a couple of times as chair of a panel I’d put together or as speaker on the “main stage.”
So began my enjoyment of so many participants, among them Bill Shaver and Jim Campbell, to whom Bob Hamblin and I dedicated our book on schools of Faulkner criticism, and that same inimitable Dr. Grayson Schick, a psychoanalyst who is known to take no prisoners, including those responsible when the pool is not functioning properly. Early in my coming back to F&Y and on Grayson’s first trip back to the south where she’d been raised, we drove together to the Memphis airport, bonding over the emotions of our experience, the bonding become a life-long friendship.
Too, there was Greg Perkins, whose interest was so sparked he often footed the bill for a conference cocktail hour in addition to the one Colby Kullman and Professor Noyes hosted. Theresa Kelly, from Selma, a fine teacher in her own right, invited me to tag along to post-parties at Jimmy Faulkner’s. Groups of us would get to one of the Phillips Grocery Store sites for cheeseburgers, or out to an old inn along the river that gave Yoknapatawpha its name, or later on to the Ravine, or down to Old Taylor for catfish, the years of accumulated grease the deep frier had popped up on its walls no doubt grandfathered in, almost always an hour wait to get in. Almost always, those of us from Kansas and Nebraska would get together, one of us treating the others to dinner—we called ourselves the Kansas-Nebraska act!
Among the outstanding speakers those days, Tatiana Morosova, who came with the delegation from the Gorky Institute, shepherded by Sergei. Sergei, after much discussion (Glasnost had begun), allowed me to take her off campus to the Downtown Grill for lunch. We passed a large home on the way and she asked me how many families would live in a house that large. She was amazed when I said “just one—and possibly just one person, likely a widowed woman.” The Down Town Grill’s “praline surprise” desert covered a whole plate—as the ice cream began to melt, she just stared at it. I could hear her thinking, ‘decadence’! but she didn’t wait too long to enjoy her whole plate.
There was Arthur Kinney (teaching a graduate seminar in Shakespeare at NYU and one in Faulkner at Johns Hopkins, where John Irwin also taught), Carl Rolyson, author of the most recent and excellent biography; and Caroline Carville, teaching literature at Rose-Hulman, an engineering school! Or later, newer scholars, the Elvis-sounding Taylor Hagood, the fine blues player and scholar Adam Gussow, Jim’s students Theresa Towner and Jennie Joiner, and one of Noel’s students, come into her own, Lori Watkins Massey.
There had been no African Americans welcome at the first F&Ys—the Faulkner nephews didn’t want to be part of that— “we didn’t always see eye to eye with Brother Will”! But Blyden Jackson soon broke that barrier. Similarly, there was not much mention of homosexuality in Faulkner’s work or among his friends until the later work of John Duvall and others. Recent conferences included the topics Faulkner and Richard Wright and Queer Faulkner, and fairly recently Ole Miss joined a number of other universities exploring how, all too often, their heritage was built on slave labor, slaves coming to campus with both the faculty and students, and workers laying the actual foundations for the buildings they also constructed. This has been one of the most interesting features of recent conferences, and prompted me toward the end of my appearing there to put together a panel in which my part was to address Faulkner and Black Nationalism. (The panel was lauded, my other presenters ending up in the publication of the conference—absent mine!)
Southern Register photo of the speakers for the 25th F&Y Conference
The attractions were not just the notable speakers from here and abroad; there were locals as well: Colby again, who was a drama and a Tennessee Williams scholar in his own right, and his friends from Sweden via Spain, Helge and Marianne Steinsvik—of an evening, we used to take coffee out on the balcony of Richard Howorth’s Square Books where we could, before it came to an end everywhere, enjoy a smoke. Local Joan Wylie Hall ran the SAKS program for area teachers and twice asked me to speak to them, and it was Joan who kept the Carothers and the rest of us apprised of Colby’s death and the accolades it evoked.
When Bill Ferris was head of the Center for Southern Studies (before his able successor Charles Reagan Wilson), he used to host the speakers on the night before the conference opened. One year, I got in too late for the van to Ferris’s house out by the cemetery. I arrived after quite a walk by foot, my polo drenched from the Mississippi humidity, so I had to put back on the sport jacket I’d carried with me. It was at one such dinner party that Francis Patterson confused me with Bob Hamblin…after all, he’s only about 6 inches taller than I. She was a lively and dedicated woman, who annually announced the Eudora Welty writing awards to young writers.
We are at the point in life where we are sorting through our memorabilia and disposing of stuff that our kids won’t want to sort or keep, but among the things we are hanging onto are the mementos of our “Faulkner Years”—the letter from Carvill Collins responding to a question about a book inscription, and apologizing for not being able to stop to visit in Flagstaff; a note from Evans Harrington to be sure to let him know when we’d be in Oxford on a special trip we were making over the Christmas holidays; a note from Joan Williams; and all the photos from China where I taught Cather, Faulkner, and Hemingway short stories (as well as American Film and Drama), two of my talks appearing in the journal published by Sichuan International Studies University, where Lan Renzhe, Faulkner translator, and I spent a day poring over how best to translate details in Faulkner’s work that still puzzled him.
The late Lan Renzhe, one of our great hosts during lecture tours in China
On the winter trip to Oxford, not only coffee with Evans, but a dinner on the balcony overlooking the square with Willie Morris on one side of us and a newlywed couple on the other. Wherever Willie was, there was a gathering and the spirits flowed. Every once in a while, a round of drinks would come to our table compliments of Willie. We’d raise a glass to him, he’d smile, and then, since I’d stopped drinking by then, we’d pass the drinks over to the couple. After an evening of that, the couple finally said enough was enough—they had some other plans for the evening!
In contrast, the next night, we went upstairs at the grill, only to find there was no admittance…there was a “big party” that had booked the whole balcony. The waiter who had stopped us went on to other duties, I looked into the area and saw it was seemingly empty, peeked around the corner to see what was up—and saw there the “party”—John Grisham and his wife, eating alone. This was not the only time this happened. At the conference, we planned a party one night, only to find the balcony was again “closed”—the Grisham’s again. Oh, the price of celebrity! But we had memorable moments at the Downtown Grill, where we often celebrated big achievements in our small circle of the Faulkner world.
True, we had our, well, wackier participants, often coming repeatedly. There was the couple who couldn’t keep their hands off each other, who explained they’d just been married, and who later confessed they’d never been married at all. Or the woman whose father accompanied her until they were both asked not to return. Or the speaker who got carried away describing her menstrual periods. Or the clinical psychologist, part of the medical staff at a New York Hospital using Faulkner to teach Abnormal Psychology, who brought his mother who came to events or went on tours in her slip.
One of those great wacky (in the best sense) moments occurred when Jim Hinkle arrived without a jacket—all the main speakers dressed up in those days—and Jim and Bev helped him buy the only one they could find—bright yellow. So, when Evan’s introduced Hinkle, he concluded: Jesus loves him for a sunbeam! Or when Carothers spoke, after his third by-pass, one valve from a cow, one from a pig, and one mechanical, and was called Professor moo, oink, click.
Perhaps others thought Jim and I floating in the pool at what was the Alumni House and became the Inn at Ole Miss belonged in the category of the wacky! Or perhaps they were just amused by Helge in his speedo. Or relieved that Grayson had found the pool open.
**
Finally, I get to the title and point of this blog entry. Nowhere in the early conference programs was there a session on Teaching Faulkner. There, also, were never any of the T-shirts that participants buy at many conferences. No one would be interested in a Teaching Faulkner session. This is not a summer camp, it’s an academic conference. But all that was about to change.
One summer, Bob Hamblin led a Humanities program on campus, the participants finishing their weeks together with a final week at the F&Y conference. One of those participants, Betty Kort, of Hastings, Nebraska, designed and produced a tee-shirt, and most of them came to that final week wearing them. This set up a hue and cry: academics asking why can’t we have T-shirts? And they have ever since, each becoming something of a collector’s item…several of mine sewn into a bed quilt by my daughter. (We haven’t gotten all the grandchildren to Oxford, but both our children and our daughter Noelle’s oldest son, and both her husband and our son and his wife have all been to F&Y and Oxford…and of course nearby Memphis, to B. B. Kings or baseball or Graceland.)
But Bob also knew the leaders of the conference. He’d received his Ph.D. from Ole Miss, did his dissertation under John Pilkington, and knew his way around. In the National Guard under Maury Cuthbert “Chooky” Faulkner’s command, he stood with other guardsmen as the thin line between James Meredith and the riotous protestors of Meredith’s enrollment, buttressed only by Evans Harrington and Duncan Gray, the Rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, who also stood in the midst and succeeded in not letting the crowd move on to mob violence.
Bob kept pressing the question: can’t we have a session on Teaching Faulkner.
So, one year, they gave in. Late one afternoon, in the small moot court room at the law college, they gave Bob a “teaching Faulkner” slot, the title itself taken from a talk Sister Thea Bowman had given some years before, up on the third floor of the Court House if I recall rightly. Who would come to the late afternoon session allotted to Bob? Well, so many came that it overflowed the moot court room and spilled out into the halls.
F&Y began offering one teaching Faulkner session, and then added another. And Bob brought on others of us, at first one session being favored by high school teachers and the other by college professors, although anyone could go to either. I loved working with the high school teachers until we brought on Brian McDonald, himself a high school teacher, but I felt rewarded as well when prominent scholars like Arthur Kinney or Noel Polk or Virginia Hlavsa, or our beloved Ann Abadie would sit in on the session. And, as one of those drafted to lead these sessions would always announce, “Maybe you don’t have a teaching position, but if you love and read Faulkner, someone is bound to ask you why, and instantly you become teacher.” These sessions were often the ones participants noted as their favorite things about the conference.
Teaching Faulkner folks joined by L.D. Brodsky, poet and collector
They remained a constant favorite under subsequent conference directors Don Kartiganer and Jay Watson, the conference being always blessed with fine directors who tried to balance its appeal to cutting edge scholars and to general readers, each a good scholar in his own right, and Don singing and strumming a ‘mean’ Barbara Allen, all of them shepherded by assistant director in perpetuity, Ann Abadie.
One of my favorite sessions on Teaching Faulkner occurred when Arlie Herron and I were teaching together. Arlie had played major roles in southern literary conferences, had a voice and bearing that stamped him as southern, and added so much to our sessions. But one year, the session began with a question, and Arlie said, that reminds me of a story by Eudora Welty, whereupon he opened his satchel, withdrew a book of her stories, found the line he’d been reminded of, and then decided we might need reminded of its context and, after flipping some pages—where to begin?—he began reading. He read the whole story. It was beautiful. And as he finished, I saw that we were out of time and thanked everyone for coming to another Teaching Faulkner session.
Bob Hamblin had invited me to join him in editing A William Faulkner Encyclopedia, and we celebrated its publication on his campus at Southeastern Missouri State University. I invited him to speak on my campus as a part of a Black Studies program, for which he gave a wonderful talk on Intruder in the Dust; he and I appeared together at a conference at Arkansas State (co-directed by a friend who had been a graduate student with me at NU), and I helped him edit a journal called, you guessed it, Teaching Faulkner. We met at his university’s conference on Faulkner and selected other writers, one year both of us and lots of our friends giving papers on Faulkner and Twain. Sadly, the run of the conference stopped just when the next year was to be Faulkner and Cather—who read each other extensively.
Bob and I, photos in the Southern Register announcement of our A William Faulkner Encyclopedia
We’ve both followed each other’s efforts as poets, writing blurbs for one another, and looking forward to new work, which is how I came to be following his most recent effort—a challenging task of producing a work about Faulkner in verse, Bob from time to time posting one of the poems on Facebook. As I wrote this in early October, I had just received from Bob an email that the project was finished and in publication.
I’m delighted, of course, to see it, with Bob’s poems running the whole gamut of Faulkner’s stories and characters, a unique way of summing up and honoring what is possibly the most extensive body of literary work to be found by a single author. Bob has also written biographies of many of the FY crowd, Faulkner included but also Evans Harrington and others.
But what especially endeared me to this project, even before I saw it finished, was the following from its opening pages:
Bob’s spot on about Ann…she was the heart of the conference for all its years, and she and Dale were wonderful hosts.
But Bob, you don’t have to wait to join your beloved Kaye in the hereafter to hear the words Well Done…well done my mentor and friend, my colleague in the Faulkner world we have so richly enjoyed, one of the rewards of which is our friendship, another being this commentary on Faulkner in verse.
Kearney, Nebraska
October 16, 2023
Next blog: Quarterly “In Memoriam” out around All Saints Day.
capeek 